Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral' • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#51

Post by alanfranzoni » Sat, Aug 05, 2017, 10:13 AM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #34

alanfranzoni wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be an issue. Of course, it depends on what you mean by "best". If "best" means "like me", you're at risk of creating a monoculture. Personally, I think that we should stop looking for "the best" at all times and enormously rewarding them, because this is creating a lot of disparity, and maybe "the best" sometimes carry with them some large drawback (possibly "the best" engineer spends 10 hour working, and 6…

Do you have any data that suggests that monoculture is bad? My anecdotal evidence suggests that monocultures are the most efficient and effective teams. An important note here is that culture != skin color. Being from the same culture expedites a lot of communication and results in easier/greater team cohesiveness. A study recently came out about diversity in communities (not workplaces). Diversity and civic engageme…

No, I don't have any data.

The problem with monoculture, by the way, is that you might end up discarding somebody for "wrong culture fit" rather than actual skills. And that's something I'd like to avoid.

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#52

Post by majkinetor » Sat, Aug 05, 2017, 10:13 AM UTC

xendo wrote: post #15

I like how some of the commenters try to force HR to take an action by threatening to leave. That's hell of a way to promote diversity, and freedom to express yourself. Diversity is a double edge sword: you need to be able to accept other people opinions if you expect them to accept you. P.S. I obviously haven't read the document, and all the comments really reference only short statement without any context, so it's…

Indeed. Honestly, I would let them leave. That atitude makes them IMO unfit for teamwork, if one such incident makes them abandon their jobs and blackmail entire department.

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#53

Post by crschmidt » Sat, Aug 05, 2017, 10:17 AM UTC

thriftwy wrote: post #9

She's quoting five Twitter authors, only one of whom appears male. Still no confirmations about the sexism of the manifesto, but the article rolls out their own.

The manifesto is sexist. The article is not.

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#54

Post by throwaway123441 » Sat, Aug 05, 2017, 10:20 AM UTC

gspetr wrote: post #49

> "If HR does nothing in this case, I will consider leaving this company for real for the first time in five years," she wrote in a threaded tweet. Maybe I'm missing something but since when did HR become the Thought Police? Do people actually believe that if you intimidate someone into silence they will stop having these thoughts? Last I checked the psychological research in this area suggested that people rebelled…

Welcome to Silicon Valley, where if you don't believe without evidence all the same things the others do, then you should be fired.

Republican? Fire them. Point out that turns out there are more men in tech than women, maybe for innate reasons? Burn them!

This is mainstream Silicon Valley opinion, and there will have to be lost discrimination law suits before it realizes just how discriminating and fascist this behavior is.

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#55

Post by gspetr » Sat, Aug 05, 2017, 10:22 AM UTC

chmike wrote: post #40

Ignoring or repressing that there are differences in women and men doesn't seam wise. However, there are a few important things to keep in mind about it. The difference is multivariate and some people may have some properties of the other gender. As a consequence, infering the capabilities of a person just from the gender written on the ID card is plain stupid. Another thing I want to say about this is that IT is a v…

> In France we have a similar issue with the porportion of black football players in the national team. People who complain about that don't understand that they just picked the best players. This gender debate is the same problem.

I'd argue that it's not the same problem. I'm not French, but I doubt that there are calls to make the Football team more representative of the population by forcefully limiting the number of black people in football teams starting at the junior level.

Which is what we effectively are seeing in the US - Harvard class of 2021 will be <50% white, while the country obviously isn't.

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#56

Post by chippy » Sat, Aug 05, 2017, 10:32 AM UTC

How can a journalist ever consider themselves to have self esteem in their work if they never read the primary documents that are central to the story?

She writes: "Motherboard has not viewed the full document, but a screenshot we reviewed."... That's all!

The article then follows is a kind of social media reaction recap. Possibly reactions by some people who also have not read the actual primary source, perhaps? (How can we tell?)

Shoddy journalism if that is the case. I mean the whole thing sure sounds like it's pretty bad, but sounds like is literally hearsay and not good journalism.

Edits - perhaps the author of the article has reasons for not publishing the screenshot they are basing their reporting on? Could it be copyright / permission from the document author, or the screenshot maker?

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#57

Post by espadrine » Sat, Aug 05, 2017, 10:39 AM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #19

Why does US have these diversity problems? Is it such a huge deal that most women are not interested in technology? Is it such a huge deal that you have to work with a few women? Is it such a huge deal that as a technical woman, you have to work mostly with men? I can tell you, in Belgium, in my experience and what I hear, this is not an issue whatsoever. Most women I worked with actually preferred working in teams o…

> Most women I worked with actually preferred working in teams of mainly men.

Have you considered survival bias?

The women that were bothered would have left those conditions in greater numbers.

The problem in not caring about this statistical filtering is that it creates a blind spot for your company. It is harder to empathize with the unknown.

When you build products that extend the world's social experience, this becomes a severe competitive danger.

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#58

Post by koonsolo » Sat, Aug 05, 2017, 10:45 AM UTC

ryderm wrote: post #41

koonsolo wrote: post #19

Why does US have these diversity problems? Is it such a huge deal that most women are not interested in technology? Is it such a huge deal that you have to work with a few women? Is it such a huge deal that as a technical woman, you have to work mostly with men? I can tell you, in Belgium, in my experience and what I hear, this is not an issue whatsoever. Most women I worked with actually preferred working in teams o…

> Is it such a huge deal that most women are not interested in technology? If this is because they have been systematically discriminated against in tech and primed at a young age with BS like "cars are for boys and dolls are for girls" then yes, absolutely this is a huge deal. If it just so happened that they were not interested because they don't have the "technology gene" then this would not be a big deal, but tha…

> but that is nonsense and all the evidence points to the former.

First of all, what evidence? And secondly, does it? (Like the horrific experiment on David Reimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer)

I have 1 son and 2 daughters, and I have plenty of nieces and cousins. The personality of each child has a bigger impact on how they behave than I had imagined. And also, boys are way different than girls. They are equal, but they are different none the less.

So instead of trying to throw them all in one pile and expect to have a 50-50 men-women working in technology, accept the difference, and let any person decide what they want to do in their lives.

Boys are different than girls. They are equal, but different. If you can't accept this, then I can imagine you have all kinds of diversity problems where you expect that everyone is the same, likes to do the same things, etc.

I recall a funny answer when one of my computer science professors asked "What can we do so that more girls sign up of Master in Computer Science". One smart guy answered: "Make sure it has less to do with computers". (In US you would probably get kicked out of the university because someone felt offended, or that it's a sexist remark)

Women are very welcome in technology, I worked with a lot of very nice and smart women, and had one of the best managers that was a woman and mother of 2 kids. But why do you expect that the average woman will have as much interest in technology as the average man?

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#59

Post by knorker » Sat, Aug 05, 2017, 10:56 AM UTC

makarb wrote: post #28

ribfeast wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh-- work in tech in Norway and our female engineers definitely feel outnumbered and sometimes avoid outings unless another woman will be there. That's in egalitarian Scandinavia.

The fact that women prefer to be around women just highlights the simple fact that men and women are fundamentally different and that egalitarianism is a pipe dream.

Is that a "fact"?

http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2017/08/04/men-women-work-stud...

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#60

Post by koonsolo » Sat, Aug 05, 2017, 11:06 AM UTC

espadrine wrote: post #57

koonsolo wrote: post #19

Why does US have these diversity problems? Is it such a huge deal that most women are not interested in technology? Is it such a huge deal that you have to work with a few women? Is it such a huge deal that as a technical woman, you have to work mostly with men? I can tell you, in Belgium, in my experience and what I hear, this is not an issue whatsoever. Most women I worked with actually preferred working in teams o…

> Most women I worked with actually preferred working in teams of mainly men. Have you considered survival bias? The women that were bothered would have left those conditions in greater numbers. The problem in not caring about this statistical filtering is that it creates a blind spot for your company. It is harder to empathize with the unknown. When you build products that extend the world's social experience, this…

> When you build products that extend the world's social experience, this becomes a severe competitive danger.

Sorry, but that is just bullshit. I'm currently making a tool to create RPGs. I'm the sole male developer.

To my surprise, I have more women creating games in it than men. It seems that they really love the whole storytelling aspect of it.

So to say that you can only build something that is only useful to people similar to yourself, is just plain wrong. I'm a programmer building something for non-programmers.

If you want to make something for your customers, listen to them, see how they use your product, look at their interests etc. Is it really mandatory to hire the same demographic as a product manager???