About This Googler's Manifesto

About This Googler's Manifesto
medium.com

> 1.I’m not going to spend any length of time on (1); if anyone wishes to provide details as to how nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect

"This is wrong, I don't have to tell you why" is a pitiful statement in and of itself, and perhaps more importantly, is not an argument. The author merely positions himself against the document with this, with no justification other than to reference fields that have shown themselves to have bias against reliable statistics relating to the subject matter in question.

> Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers.

Yes and no. Specialties exist for a reason, and fields like "ux designer", "customer success coach", etc. exist because there's a clear need for people with those skillsets. If engineers were adept at that - and yes, of course some are, but most don't seem to be - then those professions wouldn't have broken out into their own domains of knowledge as quickly and at as large of a scale as they have.

That aside, this entire line of thought isn't much of an argument, because:

> If someone told you that engineering was a field where you could get away with not dealing with people or feelings, then I’m very sorry to tell you that you have been lied to.

I don't think the manifesto author ever said that men were incapable of empathy, or that they should never use it. He does suggest that being able to separate oneself from emotion is useful in a technical argument; I'll concur that ego can get in the way of making the right choice (e.g. Not Invented Here syndrome). There's a clear difference between your own emotional state, and your ability to empathize with another's.

In an ideal state, we are calm and collected with our own emotions and avoid letting them make decisions for us, while considering the emotions of others. Neurotypical people of all genders are entirely capable of doing this; the approach may differ, but if the author is at all suggesting that we need women in order to be able to have empathy in an engineering context, he's essentially saying men are incapable of the same, which is palpably incorrect.

> It’s true that women are socialized to be better at paying attention to people’s emotional needs and so on — this is something that makes them better engineers, not worse ones.

An unfounded assumption. Women are not merely socialized to be better at this; they've evolved to be better at it. This is true across every civilization in history; the gender role is an outcome of the evolved behaviour, which has teleological value in terms of its benefit to interpersonal relationships and successful propagation of family lines. Suggesting that it's merely a "socialized" thing is part of a chain of argument that leads down the path of believing that all humans are blank slates oppressed into particular behaviours, which runs contrary to all the research. Stephen Pinker is a great resource if one wants to find out more about this.

> What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas.

Ad-hominems aside, the argument here is that people with different political ideas should simply stay quiet. The original manifesto author made it clear that he's on-side with the growing number of people in the Western world that are becoming increasingly tired of being told that they aren't allowed to present their opinions. The original essay was not mean, hurtful, hateful, or scathing; it may have been wrong, in one's view, but to call it harmful implies the exact kind of emotion-based reasoning that we need to be able to avoid when dealing with sensitive or ego-bound topics.

> I am no longer even at the company and I’ve had to spend half of the past day talking to people and cleaning up the mess you’ve made.

This isn't your job, and nobody made you do that; if anything, you've been part of the Streisand Effect, whereing more and more people talking about something in order to "clean up the mess" simply spreads the mess wider.

> Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you?

Do you think that the manifesto author is going to act like a Mad Men caricature and harass women or refuse to work with them? What evidence has made you think so? Is having a strict personal adherence to a corporate-approved philosophy a requirement at this workplace? How is that justifiable?

> good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face,

How is physical violence even remotely a reasonable thing to suggest in response to an essay? I have got to assume that Zunger was actually _angry_ at the time of typing this, because the emotion - bordering on hatred - is evident in this last segment.

> But our company is committed to maintaining a good environment for all of its people, and if one person is determined to thwart that, the solution is pretty clear.²

"All of its people" is a set that is known to contain a non-zero number of people that agree with this manifesto author. If the way that you maintain a good environment for your chosen group of people is to simply remove everyone that doesn't perfectly fit the mold, it may be dishonest to use language that makes you sound magnanimous or ecumenical when the true goal really is division and a lack of diversity.

All in all, a poor response, not much better than the official one from the company, that does nothing to address the legitimate concerns raised and rather seeks to sweep the problems back under the rug for the comfort of all involved. It might work this time, and the next time, but eventually if there's going to be any settled truth to this matter, we'll have to have open discussions about it instead of simply shutting it down.

That's clearly not an ad hominem -- it's not even close to the definition! And, the rest of what you said is even more incorrect. Fortunately, no one is obligated to spend their time to refute your bullshit.

Glad that a senior engineer speaks out about this. No company needs to tolerate troglodytes.

I work in finance and when something even fractionally as frivolous as this would have been published you would find yourself out of employment five minutes later. I consider the unprofessional startup culture that some companies like Google explicitly fostered to be at least partially responsible.

The author seems to assume this is obviously false, and neatly avoids the fact that in many companies, industries, and academic settings, there are indeed a large fraction of people who are not good enough to do their jobs, and are only kept in those jobs because of political ideas.