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'Tis the Season: Stockings Full of Coal, Layoffs and Lawsuits


The boys are deckin' the halls and wreckin' the pod with a slew of industry news. Turns out, the holidays are a great time to pass out pink slips and head to court. Feel the cheer! On this week's show, Chad & Cheese talk about the following:

  • DHI, Dice's parent company, is selling off it's albatross of a job board portfolio and going to court.

  • Woo.io, Param.ai and IBM's Watson keep the AI / chatbot train rollin'.

  • Valley companies are paying models to attend holiday parties (can you say 'tone deaf'?).

  • Layoffs hit two well-know TA tech solutions. Boom goes the dynamite!

It's a Sunday hangover edition of the show, as Chad dials in from sunny California. Egg nog, West Coast-style, baby! Enjoy, and as always, throw buckets of money at our sponsors, guaranteed to be coal-in-your-stocking free: Ratedly, America's Job Exchange and Sovren.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast.

Joel: Welcome to a Sunday hangover edition of Chad and Cheese.

Chad: Oh my God!

Joel: HR's most dangerous podcast, not so much today. I'm Joel Cheesman.

Chad: I'm Chad Sowash. The hungover one.

Joel: Looking at a mountain in California as we record this podcast apparently.

Chad: Amen.

Joel: Which we'll get to in shoutouts I'm sure. On this week's episode, the industry soap opera rolls on with layoffs and lawsuits, just in time for Christmas of course, models are invading Silicon Valley and yep, you guessed it, more AI. I may be a robot, would you really know the difference? Stay tuned, we'll be right back.

Announcer: Google, Lever, Intelo, Monster, Gibe: what do these companies and hundreds of others have in common? They all use Sovren technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job, while others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligence software since 1996, and we can help improve your hiring process too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit sovren.com; S-O-V-R-E-N.com, for a free demo.

Joel: All right. Let's get to the California reference with our first shoutout which I guess goes to your lovely wife, and lovely because she puts up with you.

Chad: Yeah. That's no shit. Yeah. Julie, it's her birthday. One of her big birthdays and we came out to Palm Springs for the week. It's beautiful out here, we've never been here before, and it's freaking gorgeous man.

Joel: What does "one of her big birthdays" mean?

Chad: It means one that I will not talk about other than saying it's a big birthday.

Joel: It's a milestone birthday, is that what we're saying?

Chad: Yeah. That's what I'm saying. It's a milestone.

Joel: All right. Well happy birthday Julie. We love you.

Chad: Yes we do.

Joel: More shoutouts. I'm going to do a shoutout real quick to Skill Scout. In last week's episode I totally brain farted who I was going to shoutout from my conference in San Francisco, so to Elena Valentine at Skill Scout. Big shoutout to you. A big fan of the show. We appreciate it.

Chad: Nice. Joe Stubblebine was in town from Nexxt. He was in Indianapolis before we came out to Palm Springs here, and had a chance to connect with him, have a great time, talk about the podcast, and have some cigars and bourbon. Big shoutout to Joey Stubbs. Appreciate you coming out man.

Joel: Joey is usually pretty bullish on the podcast. Is he still pretty positive?

Chad: Yeah. No, he loves him some podcast. He loves some Chad.

Joel: Well good. Good. Shoutout from me to Hung Lee, which sounds like a stage name for a certain industry, but anyway, Hung Lee, great fan of the show, probably listening. We love you Hung. Keep hanging in there.

Chad: You keep hanging in there Hung. Very nice.

Joel: Do you like that? That's good. Yeah, I did that.

Chad: Let's throw a little plug in there for workshape.io. That's his gig. He's the main man over at workshape.io. We have a couple of really cool announcements. Number one, go to chadcheese.com. We've got a new survey from Nexxt, and this is one that Joel will love. Will Generation Z Ruin the Workplace? That's a question.

Joel: Yes.

Chad: Yes.

Joel: All right. I have a quick generational hater message or shoutout or side note real quick: we have a child and we're looking at babysitter options. On care.com, for whatever reason, babysitters in their teens and 20s want more money per hour than people in their 30s and 40s.

Chad: Why?

Joel: Now how you can explain that to me, it's got to be a generational entitlement, "I'm a millennial. I just walk through the door, I need to be CEO by the end of the week," kind of thing, but it doesn't just happen in the workforce, it happens in babysitter land. All these entitled brats want more money than people that have maybe actually had kids and actually have hands-on experience over a long period of time with children. Anyway, rant over.

Chad: Joel, automatically says Gen Z will ruin the workplace. We want to hear from you guys though, so go to chadcheese.com. Click on the banner, you'll see it. It's a big purple ... just take the damn survey people. Anyway, there's also a $25 gift drawing. If you get in there, throw your name in the hat, you might win 25 bucks. Joel, what would you spend that 25 bucks on? Would it be maybe an hour for a babysitter?

Joel: Well this is a Target gift card, right? It's not just a random $25 Visa card or something.

Chad: I don't know man. 25 bucks, I'd just hand it over to Julie and she'd take care of it.

Joel: That's nice, yeah. Well, Target, with an eight-month-old it'd be diapers or formula or something like that, because that stuff is expensive.

Chad: Now, that's very, very expensive. Last but not least, we want to give big thanks to Disability Solutions for sponsoring the transcriptions of all of our podcasts moving forward. We feel that hearing impaired deserve some Chad and Cheese love too, so we teamed up with Disability Solutions and it's a reality. If you go to all of our November podcasts on the website and everything moving forward, everything's going to be transcribed and we appreciate it from our friends over at Disability Solutions.

Joel: In addition to helping the disabled folks, it's great for SEO.

Chad: It's going to kick ass guys.

Joel: I'll just go ahead and say that as well as one of the benefits, but yeah, we really appreciate that sponsoring, getting that out there in text format. I would say let's be done with shoutouts and let's get to the news. What do you say?

Chad: Go.

Joel: All right. It's a Festivus miracle, not so much for people that are getting laid off and sued in the industry. Let's start off with the soap opera at Dice/DHI who owns a portfolio of sites, which most of our listeners would know. On the good news side for them I guess they unloaded a healthcare site-

Chad: $15 million.

Joel: ... called Health eCareers, which sounds very 2003 because it's Health eCareers and it sounds like healthy careers. Anyway, so they unloaded that for $15 million I believe.

Chad: Yeah, 15 million.

Joel: Which if you consider the fact that they bought some crappy energy job board for 50 million 10 years ago, or less than 10 years ago, these job board prices are going down and going down fast, especially for the healthcare industry, but-

Joel: The only three they are keeping are, refresh my memory, Dice, and what are the other two? Clearance? ClearanceJobs.

Chad: eFinancialCareers and ClearanceJobs.

Joel: Those three are untouchable, but everything-

Chad: Absolutely. There rest of them must go.

Joel: ... else if you guys ... anyone want a solid retirement plan out there, go buy yourself a job board from DHI. Then they were sued. Tell us about that.

Chad: Okay. This is ridiculous. We just talked about ... one of the turkeys that we gave out for Thanksgiving was the former founder and CEO of Oilpro. First, he sold Rigzone to DHI, which has all of obviously the database, the technology, whatever he had, he sold the company to DHI. They bought Rigzone, which was obviously an oil careers type of a job board. Well he leaves DHI, creates oilpro.com, and you can come up with some wonderful slogans for that one, Oilpro, and then he takes the Rigzone database with him, steals it, because he's already been paid for it. Then, he tries to sell Oilpro with all of this data that he stole back to DHI, who bought the shit originally in the first place for Rigzone. I know this sounds complex, and it's just stupid, but it's easy because the guy just kept selling the same data over and over, at least tried to, and now he's in jail. That's where we're at today. He's in jail. Now, Oilpro is suing DHI for their open source product, which they're saying was stealing their data.

Joel: Basically Oilpro is suing DHI for scraping data-

Chad: Yes.

Joel: ... that they didn't have permission to scrape, which is ... okay. Stay with us here for a second. Oilpro stole DHI's data from Rigzone as their own and now ... so that dude's in jail. Literally the feds put him in the pokey and now they're suing DHI for scraping data that technically I guess was-

Chad: Theirs already.

Joel: ... DHI's in the first place because Oilpro sold it or stole it in the first place. They're also suing DHI for doing that to other companies that have nothing to do with Oilpro's business. It'd be like me suing Facebook because what they were doing was harming MySpace.

Chad: Yes.

Joel: I have nothing to do with MySpace but I'm just going to decide to sue them because, "Screw it. I'm just going to sue them for it." This is just bizarre. I hope the story doesn't end because it's so bizarre, but yeah, that lawsuit happened.

Chad: Well dude, it is so fantastical these days the kind of shit that we're hearing, not just from politics but it's like make up your own lawsuit day, "Yeah. Let's go ahead and make some shit up and then we're going to go ahead and fire it off in a press release." It is amazing. I'm just interested to see how DHI defends against all of this, because there's more than just this lawsuit that they should be looking at.

Joel: Well shockingly the judge didn't throw this out-

Chad: It makes no sense.

Joel: ... and you could say that there's some link between this stuff and what hiQ and LinkedIn is going through with scraping public data. The open web stuff is essentially taking social media profiles, creating a profile of someone, this is going on, but anyway, this is crazy stuff. Homeboy's in jail, suing Dice, Dice has to defend this, I guess it will be fun to watch or at least something to talk about, but yeah. Drama at Dice and let's get to layoffs-

Chad: Oh damn.

Joel: ... in the industry because no holiday season is complete without layoffs at job sites, or any company. The first one we have is Shiftgig, which is kind of like what it says, they help connect people with hourly kind of shifty-

Chad: Gigs.

Joel: ... restaurant type positions with companies. They just hired in August I think a new CEO who was from LinkedIn and he has come in and laid off about a third of folks according to Crain's Chicago Business, not the worst thing in the world I guess. He's sort of laying off people that aren't in Chicago, he's sort of condensing everyone in the Chi-Town area, but yeah, it's never fun to be laid off at Christmas and a third of your workforce is quite a few people. That's going to stir things up a little bit I think there at Shiftgig.

Chad: I tell you. It's not easy being a new CEO, that's for sure, but making a move like this, a third of the workforce around Christmas, obviously you're taking a look at the end of the year, you're trying to tighten everything up for 2018, there's never a great time to layoff people but probably the worst time ever is around the holidays. From my standpoint, leadership comes in and it is incredibly hard. I've been in those types of positions before, it's hard to restructure and if they are in dire, dire need in trouble, then this might be one of the reasons or he just didn't give a shit that it was around the holidays and said, "This shit's got to happen. It's never going to be good when we do it, why don't we just go ahead and throw a little lump of coal in their stock and tell them to get the hell out?"

Joel: Our hearts go out to anyone laid off particularly during the holiday season, however, if you're a recruiter, it does not look like these folks are being laid off for performance reasons. If you're looking to poach some folks going into next year, maybe go see who was at Shiftgig and might be looking for a new gig, particularly on the sales side or whatever those were. It is a recruiting opportunity as most layoff situations are.

Chad: Well, and this is great for ... again, when you're in a leadership position, those are things that you should already be thinking about and I know there are some really great people that are over at Shiftgig. I know them personally and I guarantee you that some of them are already thinking about that or have done that, but yeah, our hearts go out to anybody who has to deal with this kind of shit this time of the year. It more than sucks.

Joel: In fact, this probably won't happen, but if you are looking, put your resume out there on Twitter, #ChadCheese. We'll do what we can to connect you with recruiters or people or mention on the show. We'll do our best to spread some holiday cheer and get some folks jobs if they are listening to the podcast.

Chad: That's right.

Joel: They're probably not, but anyway if you are, ChadCheese your resume and we'll see what we can do for you. More layoffs at Cornerstone OnDemand as well. You might remember Cornerstone from a recent investment by a certain company called LinkedIn and Silver Chair, or Leaf, or Lake, or whatever it was, the bad band from the 90s. They put in $300 million into the company, and this is a public company. They announced their quarterly call, a 6% reduction in staff. They have about 2,000 employees from what I can tell, which puts them at about let's say 120 laid off. Word on Glassdoor and other anonymous sources point to a 40% decrease in sales staff. What do you make of that?

Chad: Wow. Okay. You get a large infusion of cash and much like a new leader coming in, you've got new leaders that are there that are looking at your bottom line, so you see organizations start to tighten up like this. It is interesting that it happened on the sales side, so you have to wonder are they switching models or are they actually using staff or trying to use staff from maybe some of their partners or something of that nature. Maybe their focus is going away from direct sales to more partnership types of sales, agency sales, who knows, but generally when something happens like this and the sales staff drops, it's not a performance thing. It's generally a restructuring of, or packaging, of the product and/or partnerships on how the money is going to be flowing in.

Joel: Or maybe LinkedIn is going to announce the acquisition of Cornerstone OnDemand at the 1st of the year, and all these folks will be gone and they'll just be duplicated by LinkedIn sales staff anyway. I'm just speculating but who knows, it could happen. It could happen.

Chad: That's a possibility. [inaudible 00:17:27] think that that would happen. Usually what happens is you see an acquisition and then you hear the, "Nothing's going to happen. Nothing's going to happen," and yes I'm doing air quotes, and then something happens. It doesn't happen in this manner, this is kind of backwards from what you would normally see, but you're right. It could be a symptom of what is to come.

Joel: If you consider the optics, it's not LinkedIn has to lay off people, which affects stock price or people asking questions and what's going on with the business model. It's Cornerstone lays them off and then LinkedIn acquires them and no one's asking questions because Cornerstone did the laying off and LinkedIn doesn't. It's kind of an optics thing I would think. Now, with most ATSs, they're sales heavy. Every ATS I know is like sweatshop salespeople, so this is sort of odd in that aspect. I can't imagine 40% of your sales staff. Again, this is allegedly. We know the 6% is confirmed but 40% of sales staff we don't exactly know for sure, but that's ... if 40% of your sales staff is underperforming and you're laying them off, to me there's a real problem with your either hiring or training or what, but that's crazy.

Chad: This is something different. This is something different. There's some type of restructuring that they're doing. I've seen companies do this before where they have staffed up for a certain type of model, sales model, and they see that it just doesn't work, so they have to switch. Whether it's going from more of the person-to-person kind of lower account executive who is smiling and dialing and just burning up the phones, versus somebody who's more connected, and you're going to be paying those individuals more but they're going to be doing more of the high-value target type of acquisition. It could be something like that but to me if it is, 40% of the sales staff, there's something that's going on from a structuring.

Joel: Yeah. I don't claim to be a Cornerstone expert, so I'm willing to roll with anything, but yeah, let's go with a different model and a total 180 of what you're doing. AI is in the news again.

Chad: Whoa! Real.

Joel: As it always is. We got three items. I guess we can start with Woo. You might remember LEAP Woo. LEAP got money in woo.io. They're all either IO or AO, or AI or OI these days. Tell us what Woo did this past week.

Chad: It's funny because we've been talking about AI for shit, almost a year now on this show.

Joel: The ship's not even a year old, but yeah, we've been talking about it for a year.

Chad: Yeah. I said almost a year. All of these other AI platforms are really focusing on trying to be human friendly, and they're saying, "No, this technology isn't looking to take the place of your recruiter. This is actually looking to enhance your recruiter, and it will help take some of these steps away," and so on and so forth, and some even say it's kind of like an Ironman suit for your recruiter, so it makes it really cool and the recruiters think, "Yeah. I'd love my Ironman suit." Well, Woo said, "Screw that. We're launching Helena," the AI headhunter, "And pretty much all of the AI machine learning companies out there that have been talking about assisting, yeah, we said no. Helena is ..." they're not going to sugarcoat this, "Helena is going to do recruiting better than your humans. Early results ..." and this is from Forbes, "Early results show that employers are accepting 52% of candidates for interview that have been put forward by Helena."

Chad: Now that's better than recruiters who are generally around 20% and far better than job boards where you're looking at about 2.5% of applicants suitable for interview. What they're saying, they're coming out here and being ballsy, not sugarcoating it at all saying, "Look, our AI headhunter is better than your human beings." Boom!

Joel: Helena is basically a Mount St. Helens on the recruiting industry, at least to be. For those of us old enough to remember what Mount St. Helens actually was, but yes, you're right. Most of these AI support kind of solutions, they don't tout themselves as the destroyer of all mankind in this certain profession. They sell it as, "We'll be your best friend. We'll be the one that does the dirty work. We'll be the one that filters through 4,000 resumes and puts four of them on a silver platter for you to then call and all of them are the perfect candidate, you just need to find one that can speak well and be a human." This one actually says, "You're all out of business. We're taking over. Adios amigos," and that's a scary message. Companies to buy that is sort of putting themselves out there. How many recruiters employment departments are going to buy solutions that are going to put them out of business? I think it's a fairly risky proposition for a company to say like, "Buy our product and we'll put you out of work." How does that sound?

Chad: Yeah. RPOs I think would gobble this up in a heartbeat: staffing companies, RPOs, because that is their business, and it's funny. We've talked about on the show before that RPO, they look at recruiting as a business. They look at the EBITDA, they look at the margins, they look at the actual cash flow. Talent acquisition they don't. It's more of like an art for them than it is really a real business. This I believe speaks directly to the RPOs, the staffing companies who have a shit ton of cash as it is, and they get those guys won over. I think being able to switch over into the talent acquisition side of the house, maybe soften your message who knows, it'll be easier, but dude, it's amazing. You hear so much on the AI machine learning side, whatever the hell we want to call it, of just kind of the sugarcoating, "No. This is not good. No, This is not here to hurt you recruiters. This is here to help," not Helena.

Joel: This is, "We come in peace."

Chad: Yeah. "Helena is going to come and she's going to burn your shit down."

Joel: By the way, why are all the bots mostly named women?

Chad: I don't know. That's a very good question.

Joel: Maya.

Chad: Olivia.

Joel: Olivia, Helena. We're going to talk about Watson for a second, which is a last name that we associate with Sherlock's counterpart-

Chad: Oh the voices.

Joel: ... but most of these ... yeah. In a world of harassment and what, let's give some equal opportunities to male names. I want to see Jeeves again, I want to see Bob, or Chip. Donald, or maybe not Donald. Let's equal this thing a little bit. All right. Let's go to Watson because I'm making no sense with the female bot argument, or rant. Watson is going nuts on their build a bot solution, advertising it everywhere, and we've sort of forgot about Watson, but a lot of these platforms are built on Watson, the [inaudible 00:25:15] Watson, but we just wanted to make a side note, give a little props unless you have something more to say, but Watson is still there. It's the backbone of some of these solutions and they want to build a bot for you. If you're looking to do that, check out IBM's Watson.

Chad: Yeah. That's a nice ad for Watson there Joel. Watson, seriously-

Joel: Better than an ad for iCIMS. No one thinks IBM's writing me a check.

Chad: That's better than an ad for iCIMS.

Joel: I've also heard Watson blows. I don't program AI, I don't do this stuff. If you're doing AI I'm sure you've looked at Watson and you've made a decision whether to use it or not, but I think the fact that they don't want to be left behind, they want to be at the forefront of this stuff, because I'm sure Google's going to release some sort of AI, API stuff. I know Siri is available on iOS apps and things like that. Anyway, yeah. I don't know. I don't think there's a commercial, but they're out there- They're pimping man. This is like a race. This is an arms race for who's going to power the AI infrastructure of the 21st century.

Chad: From what I hear their chatbot, at least the chatbot platform that they have is pretty stout. I think they're finding hopefully their strong suit and they just nailed it, because I'd love to see more than just the Googles and the Facebooks and the normal names that we've heard. IBM's been out there forever, but you just don't see them as a big player anymore. To be quite frank from what I'm hearing they are.

Joel: Yeah. They just need to get back on Jeopardy again and destroy the humans-

Chad: I won't think much.

Joel: ... and then rethink Watson. All right. Back into our industry. A new AI solution out of India, got roughly a quarter million dollar seed money. The name is ... we'll probably talk more about the name and that'll get more interest by our listeners than the actual company, but tell us a little bit about what Param.ai, and that's P-A-R-A-M.ai. Imagine yourself being a salesperson pitching Param.ai, or Param, to a prospect. It would be a total pain in the ass, but anyway, tell us about a little bit what they're doing with their solution.

Chad: First off, the salesperson, I guarantee you, they have to spell that name, that URL, probably five times per phone call, because nobody knows what the hell Param is. We'll talk about that here in a minute, but it seems like they're trying to do kind of like what Howie and the guys over at Crowded are doing. They're trying to actually take the data from the ATS and they're trying to pull it back out because in most cases, the candidates that are in the applicant tracking systems go into a black hole, nobody sees them again, nobody uses them again, and usually there's not really good search technology to go in and match against current open recs.

Chad: Param.ai, that's P-A-R-A-M.ai, that's what they do, and that's exactly what Crowded is doing as well. We're starting to see companies do some very, very smart programming to be able to use that gold mine that is in the actual applicant tracking system, that black hole that's in there, and then start to match up with some of the social data that's out there, some of the social graph kind of data that's out there, pull in and refresh like Crowded does their profiles.

Joel: Well let's get back to the name, shall we. It's not as bad as O-hire, which we talked about a few weeks ago, which ... "I'm with O-hire."

Joel: "What?"

Joel: "O-hire."

Joel: O-hire, whatever it is, anyway. We were so interested or we had so much time on our hands this morning over hangover coffee, to actually look up in the Urban Dictionary what Param meant. Please share with our listeners what you found because I think it's very entertaining.

Chad: This is obviously from Indian descent, we saw some of their companies that they're actually working for and whatnot and they are Indian based. We thought I'd look on the web, just from a dictionary standpoint. I wanted to see what this actually meant. Didn't find anything except in the Urban Dictionary, so brace yourself guys.

Joel: Of course.

Chad: Param, definition number one: a teenage boy from India that enjoys wiggling his toes and making fun of people who eat toast. That's number one. I have no clue what the hell this even means. Definition number two, Param: a cool guy who likes to bang chicks all night because he is savage. That's number two. I've no clue what this shit even means. Number three, and I'm only going to do three. An adjective used to define a person who has breasts. You go to the website and then you take a look at some of the marketing that's on there. Let's take a look at it and let's use some of these definitions.

Joel: Sure.

Chad: Supercharge your applicant tracking system with a guy who likes to bang chicks all night. Start taking data back decision. It just makes no sense guys. It really doesn't.

Joel: I'm most enthralled by the first one.

Chad: The eating toes?

Joel: A teenage boy who wiggles his toes and makes fun of people who eat toast. What in the hell is that about?

Chad: No clue.

Joel: If you eat bread you're fine, but once you toast it boy, that teenage kid wiggling his toes is going to go after you. Anyway, all right. Let's hear from AJ and talk about models at Valley parties when we get back.

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Chad: Eating toast.

Joel: Model sweet toast. You and I have both done our fair share of trade shows, and will continue to do so. One of the phenomenons of the trade show industry are what are known as booth babes, which is essentially attractive women and men, in a booth, they have a basic sales pitch, but their role is to essentially attract people there and then get a basic lead generation thing, and then give it to a real sales person that actually works for the company. I understand how this works, I understand that people are attracted to attractive people, that's as old as civilization, that's not going to change. I understand the business proposition of that. I think it's a little slimy, but who am I to judge.

Joel: A story comes out this week that ... holiday parties are in full swing in the valley and a story came out that companies are hiring models, mostly women in the story anyway, to go to these parties and I guess just socialize with the geeks and the people that work at these Silicon Valley companies. Personally, I find this odd because there's no real business purpose for this aside from having attractive people talk to your employees, but I also find an incredibly sort of tone-deaf in the environment we live in right now with harassment and all the things that are in the news. This just sounds like valley bubble shit where they're immune from everything that's going on in the world and they're-

Chad: That's totally insane.

Joel: ... going to do their own thing, and the world misunderstands it but who cares, we're Silicon Valley.

Chad: It's total bullshit, and to be able to ... just take a look at the news today. You're taking a look at the news and you see exactly what's going on with MeToo, and we're trying to talk about equality right? But yet, we want to be able to play this Silicon Valley model game where you have a bunch of wallflowers, a bunch of geeky wallflowers who work at your company, and you want to have a fun holiday party, so instead of getting a bunch of those guys together, we're going to throw some hot chicks and maybe some hot dudes in there as well.

Joel: The other thing is any office that I've been in where the technology department resides, most of these cats are in headphones and with like three huge ass monitors coding all day. A holiday party should be an opportunity to actually talk to other people that you may not talk to very much during the work day, and actually get to know them as people and socialize with them. I don't understand how objectifying women and men and throwing them into an office setting for a holiday party serves any purpose whatsoever. I just find it totally tone-deaf and a total Silicon Valley thing and I hope going into the future that Silicon Valley catches up to the rest of the world and gets on board with sort of equalizing of the sexes and gets into the ... you know what I'm saying.

Chad: Yeah.

Joel: It's Sunday morning, a little slow, but yeah. This is just really bad optics on the valley and it needs to stop.

Chad: Well, I mean, you've got a Google developer who did ... he wrote an entire ... he wrote about how women are inferior to men.

Joel: Women are different, and the whole Uber thing, right?

Chad: Yeah. Now you may objectify them by pulling them in this models, I mean fuck guys! Seriously, this is the dumbest shit ever.

Joel: You summed it up perfectly. You have this Brogramming culture that on paper says women are different at this than we are. Then you're trying to change that but then you objectify women and bring them into your holiday parties, talk about mixed messages, get woke.

Chad: Get woke. Word.

Joel: Get woke. On that, I think we're done with the show.

Chad: Well, before we leave, we've got to wrap something up though, because we ... last week, we talked about Joe Shaker and his Wisconsin Badgers. I'm sure today as Joe's wrapping up this podcast after he listens, he's going to go ahead and pour himself another glass of eggnog and cry about it.

Joel: A glass of cheese curds for our favorite Wisconsin graduate.

Chad: Yeah. He's crying about that and we're crying because the Buckeyes won the Big Ten, and we're pissed off because we got left out of the football championship.

Joel: Apparently beating two top five ten teams and a top 12 team isn't good enough for the voters, even though Alabama only had two wins over ranked teams, not nearly as high as top five.

Chad: No.

Joel: But whatever. Whatever.

Chad: Buckeyes will beat little USC ass as I sit here in the valley. I'll be wearing my Ohio State gear the entire time I'm here.

Joel: Cheers. All right kids, have a good week. We out I guess.

Chad: Late! We out.

Announcer: This has been The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single show, and check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more, visit hiredaily.com, oh, and you're welcome.

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