This, sadly, is another careening moment in our Republic.
Anecdote of an American:
"Sorry folks, but I need to vent...I quit my job as an Aerodynamicist at Boeing today.
Just a week short of ten years.
The path to today started back in summer 2021, when a new employee named Jamal (his real name, folks) was assigned to my aerodynamics engineering section. Before Jamal, everybody in aero possessed engineering & related science degrees (physics in my case), some of us had an MS, and our lead held a Ph.D.. Jamal held a degree in "Aerospace Science Engineering", which we ultimately learned was an extremely, extremely, extremely watered down version of an Engineering Technology program.
My department head was told by his leadership that Jamal was "going to be an aerodynamicist", despite having only indoctrination-level exposure to the discipline (basic aero, at Tuskeegee U, is given during the junior year). Totally not an affirmative action hire, right?
In the year the followed, we steadily kept Jamal from the critical work which he proved from day one complete lack of understanding. We had him doing only basic data entry in Excel. He was literally useless to us in every way.
Back in May, shortly after trying to get Jamal reassigned to a different section, our section lead was terminated by the company after serving 29 years. They told us that he "started his retirement early". While this is factually accurate, it was glaringly evident that for stating our collective concern for Jamal, our boss was painted as a racist, and forced out. Because diversity.
Not even a week later, we received our new boss, "Miss Shanika", as she wanted us to address her as. She wasn't even an engineer by education or trade. She was a redundant data archival specialist. You can't make this up.
For those tuned in, to give you a clue to her ethnicity, White, Asian and Hispanic women aren't named "Shanika", nor do we casually tell people to precede our first names with a salutation.
Within days, "Miss Shanika", looking out solely for her own kind, made 'Jamal the Useless' team lead of my project, demoting me. I was told that "he earned the opportunity". Four days later, approximately 724GB of MatLab-processed wind tunnel & CFD data was rendered unuseable. It took three of us to find out that the code script somehow got fucked up. The worst part was that Shanika threw the three of us under the bus for the data corruption, complete with written repremands, and given a timeline to fix it. Fortunately, we had a copy of the script and was able to reprocess the data, fully completing the sub-project two weeks ago.
But happened to Jamal? Well, just a week after we unfucked the mess, he was given commendation directly from Boeing corporate leadership for "Unparralleled Excellence in Leadership, for going above & beyond by finding a problem in data and fixing it, saving the company untold time and millions in the process!"
Here, as they say, is where it gets kinda interesting...
One of my colleagues found out why/how/when...and who, fucked it all up. It wasn't Jamal. Rather, it was Shanika who did it, from the comfort of her own home (according to IT).
Yeap, that's right, folks- gigabytes worth of data; company intellectual property worth tens of millions of dollars, was deliberately sabotaged in a blatant effort to promote an undereducated, totally incompetent token employee, and make us out to be the bad guys.
Last Thursday, after corroborating this, we tendered a full report to security, legal and senior leadership, complete with sworn statements and supporting evidence. We also knew what could happen, and prepared accordingly.
Shortly after lunch today, we (the three of us) were summoned by senior management. We were accused of multiple accounts of "demonstrating overt disrespect to both Jamal and our 'boss' by way of making verbal statements and displaying materials demeaning towards African-Americans", "attempted sabotage of company property", and, of course, "filing a false complaint". We three were given until close of business to submit our resignations. We immediately reached into our colleagues binder, and handed over the resignation letters we prepared over the weekend. We were escorted back to our desks to gather our belongings, turned in our badges, and walked out.
Less than two weeks after affirmative action was effectively shot down, Boeing, a multi-billion dollar business, doubled down. They literally chose two uneducated token negroids over an MIT grad, a Cal Poly grad, and a Stanford grad. Our former boss who was "retired" for the same thing we did, was a distinguished graduate of the University of Moscow, and before Boeing, was a noted and influential engineer at TsAGI (Central Aero & Hydrodynamics Institute) in Russia.
I know we will be vindicated in due course, but Boeing can't pay us enough to go back. Let them eat cake.
Not too sure what my next steps will be, but all I can say is Wow. Just Wow."
