I got dinged on my latest review for not participating enough in the team channels, and I feel like I’m back in middle school. Apparently, shipping clean, bug-free code ahead of schedule takes a backseat to not dropping enough memes in the #random channel. My manager literally told me that social presence is a core metric for our remote culture this year. Is this normal? I’m so grumpy about it.

Has anyone else in Tech been laid off in the last 6 months and having trouble finding a new job? I have over 20 years with a telco company

I know of an employer that employs asian females almost exclusively in their production area. The job is mostly soldering through hole components. The pay isn't very high. There are about 40 people working in that production area and it's 95% asian females. The odd part is there are two leads and a supervisor in that area and they are all white. It really seems like race based hiring practices.

What is the most pointless thing you have to do on a week by week basis? For me, I just think about how much time I waste in some of my team meetings that I feel provide no value to the group. Sometimes it feels like the 30 minute meeting I have every thursday could just be an email

Our CIO is pushing us to learn a programming language that no one has heard of. He used it in his old job. One looked into it and found that no company or government agency in my state used it. It doesn't appear in TIOBE Index. It doesn't appear in Stack Overflow's to programming language. My colleagues and I see this as a huge career limitation. What can we do about this?