I wish I could buy you a beer for that comment. Fucking love it.

True.

Usually this is also how a company becomes woke. It's a chicken and egg scenario, or a feedback loop situation, but I'm pretty sure overhiring/underfiring is how it starts.

My theory: company grows big enough to hire an HR department. HR departments now screen applicants based on degrees, weeding out truly brilliant coders who just aren't credentialed in favor of morons with degrees. HR tends to also make it incredibly difficult to fire anyone, forcing managers to show very objective criteria. In most companies, the only real way to get someone fired is hoping for a a streak of tardiness or no-call-no-shows, after multiple warnings.

This means that people who just aren't good coders (usually due to a lack of natural talent, not any fault of their own) get hired more easily, and cannot be fired. HR would never let you fire someone for a vague "he's just not good." And it's very, very difficult to objectively prove "he's just not good" because HR isn't technical, so even trying to explain instances the employee lacked is difficult.

You can code the same thing a million different ways. All of the ways can be acceptable in certain circumstances. And what is "right" is always incredibly subjective, even if it is truly obvious to a good programmer which method is superior and which are unacceptable given the circumstances. There will always be an argument for the other approach, though. So if an employee is just stupid and consistently takes bad approaches, how do you pitch that to HR? Answer: you can't. Even if you diligently track times the employee has taken poor approaches to programming puzzles over months, that will fall completely flat to HR.

So now you're stuck with employees who can't do shit. What do you do with them? You create new positions for them in hopes that you'll be allowed to hire someone else to fill his/her place, who may actually be good. Repeat the cycle forever. Even when you find a good person, eventually his work load (since he is doing the work of now 10s of people by himself) will overwhelm him and he will need help. So you get to repeat the process again, which repeats forever.

How does this lead companies to becoming woke? For one: the field of HR typically attracts liberals, so you have a huge bias in your hiring. But, even if they don't let that affect their hiring/firing, the people with degrees who HR tends to hire who also aren't good employees tend to be liberal, whereas people who actually get work done tend to be conservative.