Learning to Code in the Age of DOGE

Sandbagging federal employees publicly lament the reality of what regular people have dealt with since the dawn of human employment - and it is hilarious

One morning, 10 years ago this coming summer, I arrived to work on a beautiful, bright green morning in leafy Northwest Houston. I had recently returned from the moonscape of West Texas, where I would travel once quarterly to brief one of my company’s most important accounts, which I had managed since it came under our umbrella. The growth of this account, along with the rehabilitation of some others I had been given, got me past a rough start with my boss and allowed me to survive several rounds of layoffs pursuant to the 2014-15 oil commodity downturn, referred to as a glut.

I was a damn good bargain for my company. The spat with my boss came with the punishment of non-eligibility for a one-year pay raise for a single quarter; unfortunately for me, my quarter in the doghouse happened to be the quarter our company responded to the downturn with a company-wide pay freeze. This company, after being family owned and operated for more than three decades, had sold out to a French corporation shortly before my hiring and in doing so, sacrificed valuable autonomy and the ability to make its own decisions based on local knowledge and anticipated demand rather than worldwide financial concerns impacting a much larger organization.

There I was – making the league minimum nearly two years after leaving the Army but holding on to vital accounts that hadn’t yet cut us loose under the banner of discretionary services. To further add to my false sense of security, my boss had told me the week before about the plans he had for me at the end of July upon my return from missing two whopping workdays to be present for my son’s birth. Unlike others entering paternal leave, I had strategically declined a longer hiatus trying to make sure the company knew I gave a damn about its plight.

Even though the snack closet was shut down and my boss’s boss had a look of warmed-over death on his face as I passed him by the elevator bank that fateful morning, I went to my office as ready to roll as someone on a sinking ship could be. They needed me, after all, to manage those very important accounts that were keeping us afloat, and they had the benefit of paying me well under what my market value would have been working for some other oil firm in Houston under better economic circumstances. At least, that’s what I thought.

I checked my email and then looked over at my phone, which had a missed call from my boss’s line. I called him right back, and he asked me to meet him in the training room downstairs. Within the hour, I was walking out of the building with my own brown cardboard box and deliberately made no haste in doing so since I felt I had been deceived by my boss over his implied plans for my future with the company, expressed to me the week before. This was just five days before my only son was born. Feelings and circumstance didn’t matter, only the bottom line did.

That was layoff number one. It sucked, was deceptively carried out, and in my opinion, was a stupid decision since my accounts were happy with me and even expanding their scope of work with us while others were cutting us loose completely. Nevertheless, I had to find something else to do. This was never an issue in the military, where you’ll have at least a nine-month runway of limited duty to find work on the outside even if you get identified for dismissal due to some health issue or a reduction in force. In the private sector, it’s here’s your two weeks, and if you’re lucky, a few thousand dollars in severance. I responded to the sting of this layoff and my perceived desperation by latching on to the first job thrown at me, working as “Vice President of Operations” for a local private investigations firm. I’d never met a Vice President who had to inform his boss every time he wanted to get up and take a leak, or handled the phone lines and emailed the boss when he had a call (and informed him what the call was about), so in just seven weeks I turned in my resignation and went back on the job market, this time without being able to collect the meager unemployment my payroll deductions paid for.

I rebounded once again, having learned the art of unconventional job hunting, and got a job with a large hospital chain in Houston for less pay than I had been making in the energy industry several years before. This was in 2016, and I was working for this company when Trump was elected the first time. It was a brutal job, requiring me to drive 15 minutes to a bus station, ride a bus from the suburbs to the heart of downtown Houston for 45 minutes, then walk several blocks to a train that would take me down to the Texas Medical Center. Eight hours later, I would do it all in reverse. The issue here is that my hospital chain, like the Oil and Gas company I joined after leaving the military service, had also linked up with a larger organization only recently. This merger went upside down very quickly and led to losses of countless hundreds of millions of dollars. As a result, employees were tossed overboard for months at a time.

My boss, who had created the position to which I had been hired as a business analyst, got laid off in August 2016, 7 months after I had started. I was left stranded in the bureaucracy and pecked away at my keyboard in a dark room, creating reports no one read, for several months before I was sent over to another group, where I also languished in obscurity. My time eventually came in April 2017, when I would have laid myself off, too. That was layoff number two, and like the first, had nothing to do with poor performance. After many months of vying for positions commensurate with my Project Management Professional certification and MBA, which I received that year, I got tired of waiting and took a job delivering food orders for a local Mexican chain. I had had enough of loitering in candidate hell, finishing in the top two or three, only to lose out to an internal referral, so I took something the work keep myself moving while I considered the next path in life. I tested out for the Texas State Troopers and was at the top of the candidate pile by the time my next job opportunity came up.

It turns out that the job delivering food became, and remains, one of my best life experiences. Long before I came to be known as “Captain K,” the bigmouthed election guru who dunked all over liberal election oracles, I had nothing to do but show up on time, in the right uniform, and with the right gear. I didn’t have to oversee anything, didn’t need to tell people my credentials. In doing so, I was exposed to a vast world of working people, many from third world countries, who even shared my political opinions, especially about merit-based immigration and handouts (I would have never known otherwise). God had a plan for me to see a world I otherwise would have never crossed paths with while I was looking for what I thought was a job commensurate with my skills, abilities, and credentials (and my own sense of entitlement).

My next job, selling transportation devices in the traffic control industry for a home-grown Houston company, turned out to be the one in which I was most successful. I had natural salesman skills, and enough field leadership ability to deal with the blue-collar types, those cynical people who installed the devices and had to maintain them in the field. I crushed my quota in my first year, 2018, and was rewarded with a territory that reached from the southern border to the northern one, covering the heart of the country. I had a unique skill for bringing in new customers for first-time sales and earned the nickname new logo king. Eventually, the company realized my best value was not in taking coffee and donuts to regular customers, but in jet-setting to distant locales and opening new doors. I was slated to take over all North America for 2020 to spread our product line.

We all know what happened that year. COVID hysteria destroyed lives and business everywhere, including my hard work. Rather than exploring Lewis and Clark style, I had to sneak around the country on buddy passes and chop up my expenses into small amounts that didn’t require receipts, since like everywhere I had worked previously, our company had also sold out to a global conglomerate. On the other side of 2020, once the political regime swapped out administrations, this new parent company cut all our company’s leadership loose and reorganized the best salesmen, including yours truly, under a new product line. I received entirely new territory, which was extremely tough turf, and after a couple months, jumped ship to a new competitor that nearly doubled my base salary and told me to simply “go hunt.” A couple months later, President Trump highlighted my work on the 2020 election and called my name publicly. I could no longer hide.

The man who hired me at this company that year (2021), knew of my budding infamy and supported it, but on January 4, 2022, the first Tuesday of that year, I was on a trip to South Florida to sell equipment and moonlight in elections analysis, when I got a call cutting me loose – straight up fired. I’d never been unceremoniously shitcanned from anything before, only laid off, so this was a shock to me. Of course, we were selling a new product from a foreign market trying to penetrate the American market in a tainted COVID landscape, and my termination could easily be blamed on lack of sales revenue, but I have my own opinions based on certain timelines. On the positive side, I got out before the company went full-on Draconian over vaccine enforcement, but that transaction is what launched me full-time into activism. I have remained busy ever since, and I support myself fully with my own work product. This is why many of those people you respect, or love to listen to or read, monetize their accounts. I wish I could give you all my intellectual capital for free; if I could, I would. Unfortunately, I’m not independently wealthy, am 40, and support a family. Those who stand up the loudest take the biggest clapbacks for stepping out of line.

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In summary, my periods of unemployment since 2013:

2 Layoffs

1 Termination

1 Resignation

I have been unemployed four times since I left the military, and each time, I rebounded and found something else to apply my skills to. That is why I scoff at the crap you literally couldn’t make up if you tried, like this shot Brian Cates sent over to me this morning:

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Followed immediately by this chaser:

What we have here is just one of what will likely end of being hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of federal employees who have finally been given a cardboard box and pink slip courtesy of the American people, who have been coerced into funding third world abortions, Latin American DEI initiatives, salamander research, African environmental studies as our own railroads rot from beneath us, and the distribution of glittering dildos. This woman, who has since locked down her X account, is so walled off from the voice of America she finds her own work critical, as she has spent years online mocking her political opponents, laughing at white men, and bragging about not having jack shit to do less than a week before the 2024 Election, which proved to be her undoing.

There’s a difference between us and them. We understand, through a basic understanding of economics, supply and demand, and life experience, that though the sun shines today, it may not shine tomorrow, and we must prepare ourselves for that. Nothing in life comes free, and most importantly, life isn’t fair. There will most certainly be good people, including people who voted for the Trump-Vance ticket, who get cut in these DOGE raids; however, the federal government exists to secure the freedoms of the American citizenry and provide a limited framework outlining the governance of the various states, not to bloat itself into an unending bureaucracy devoid of merit and kept afloat through the excessive taxation of the people. There are also those of us, now that the sun shines again for a season, who may lose followers, subscriptions, and relevance from people who once relied on us for information, but very few will criticize those who walk away, because we on the side of freedom do not (or should not) believe in compulsory funding or the rewarding of those who do not meet the benchmarks of merit that come with the support of the people (as long as I write, you can count on me for sincerity, honesty, and transparency).

These federal employees, who believe the people exist to give them privilege and security, are learning lessons they should have learned in pre-school, and will now be forced to learn skills they didn’t think they had. Perhaps they can…

Learn to code.

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Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.