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About This Googler's Manifesto

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Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#141

Post by interpol_p »

trevyn wrote: post #128
interpol_p wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not "lowering standards" for diversity candidates. It is giving them more opportunities to be measured up to Google's high standards.

It is lowering the standard for a certain kind of treatment. Whether or not that is justified or relevant to the hiring decision is a separate discussion. A standard is lowered. Full stop.

You are changing the argument.

The original use of the phrase "lowering standards" implied that Google would forgo hiring someone of high skill to hire a lower skilled but more diverse candidate. This is not happening.

Diverse candidates are given more opportunities to have their skill tested, but they must meet the same requirements as anyone else.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#142

Post by MichaelGG »

notjack wrote: post #116
TheCoreh wrote: post #82

I'd seriously like to know if the author meant this literally: > a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face If that's indeed the case, isn't that on itself a huge problem we should deal with? If someone is risking being a victim of physical violence on the workplace over disagreements on political positions we should be seriously concerned.

This is not a disagreement on political positions, this is a belief that women are inherently less capable than men at software engineering. It's a direct attack on the legitimacy and humanity of his coworkers. A disagreement over political positions would be if the author wrote a manifesto about the efficacy of sin taxes or nuclear treaties, not that his teammate Sandra is biologically inferior at her job and undese…

It's no different than a guy in the NBA wondering out loud if the bias towards men might have a biological component, so that even if the systemic barriers are removed, we might expect far different than 50/50 female/male in the NBA. But no one thinks that - it's obviously silly because physical attributes are so obvious.

So we'll use Wikipedia as a perfect summary of all the research on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...

"significantly higher variance in male scores, resulting in more than twice as many men as women scoring in the top 2%."

But certainly that study and all the others are just wrong, or they're measuring the wrong thing and it's not applicable to software.

I dunno, perhaps the ratio should be 45/55 once the systemic bias is removed. Or maybe it's 55/45 - maybe the systemic bias is beyond terrible and males are worse at software and we've got it all backwards. Doesn't seem like there's anything supporting 50/50 other than some weird notion that everyone's not physically equal at all, but somehow our brains are.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#143

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

MichaelGG wrote: post #107
interpol_p wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and I are not reading the same manifesto. This guy clearly thinks less of the women he works with. There is no way he sees his female co-workers as equal while publishing rubbish like this. And I doubt women engineers at Google would read that and feel very pleased about it. Yeah I understand Gaussian distributions. I also understand the emotional tone of the original manifesto and the discriminatory thinking beh…

I think Asians are generally shorter than me. But if a 6'2 Asian is standing next to me, I don't think that particular person is shorter than me. It's perfectly reasonable for him to say the 50/50 ratio might not be ideal, and maybe biology plays a role, while still believing his colleagues are competent.

The trouble is that, whilst it's easy to determine whether or not the person stood next to you is shorter than you, competence is something far harder to assess. If your opinion is 'women are, on average, less competant', it would seem more likely than not that your default position would assume the woman stood next to you is less competent.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#144

Post by tibiapejagala »

I might partially or totally disagree with the original manifest, but this reply is repulsive. I would never want to have a "senior" like this.

So much emphasis on how senior he is, how junior you have to write something so wrong. How OP's career is over. The 3rd point reads like navy seals copypasta but with HR instead.

If you don't see any other way to deal with OP's views than described in this belittling rant, than you are no more senior than he is.

And a minor nitpick about this rant's top highlight:

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

This is a non-statement. Replace 'engineering' with science, medicine, finance, customer service, politics, retail, programming etc., and it will sound as correct.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#145

Post by bboreham »

to_bpr wrote: post #19

Is there any other professional industry as politically divided and toxic as tech has become? Is there any other industry in which private companies shove their "values" down the throats of their employees in the manner we experience in tech?

When I worked at a large bank we had mandatory classes in the company values, and adherence to the values was explicitly measured in annual appraisals.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#146

Post by ukj »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #143
MichaelGG wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Asians are generally shorter than me. But if a 6'2 Asian is standing next to me, I don't think that particular person is shorter than me. It's perfectly reasonable for him to say the 50/50 ratio might not be ideal, and maybe biology plays a role, while still believing his colleagues are competent.

The trouble is that, whilst it's easy to determine whether or not the person stood next to you is shorter than you, competence is something far harder to assess. If your opinion is 'women are, on average, less competant', it would seem more likely than not that your default position would assume the woman stood next to you is less competent.

It would also seem that if we actively prohibit this line of enquiry we will never actually learn to accurately measure "competence" or "empathy", let alone enable humans to recognize those traits in others.

Measurement is key to understanding!

About the only "lie" in this debate (in so far as I can tell) is that we are all the same!

Sure - at some very high level of abstraction it may be "true". But as engineers, surely we understand that failure stems from false assumptions?

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#147

Post by MichaelGG »

nl wrote: post #140
MichaelGG wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if Google was serious, they'd attempt to measure productivity or coding performance, then apply IQ (and other) tests. They can take rigorous approaches to find out the truth, rather than operating off of feelings.

So, to make it clear: you are arguing that discrimination would be ok if you can prove it is effective? (I'm sure I don't need to point out on this forum how difficult it is to measure productivity or coding performance . AFAIK there are no measures of this which are effective outside controlled conditions, and controlled conditions are close to irrelevant for actually being effective at a job)

Uh, yes? I'm saying if we somehow magically determined that group A had 10% benefit than group B at a task, then we should expect to see more of group A represented, even if their populations are equal.

Exactly like we expect to see certain phenotypes over-represented in basketball.

Despite the difficulty, saying it's hard but it just must be true that everyone's equal doesn't seem like a robust approach. Or is Google saying it just has zero way of evaluating a person's work? Perhaps they could do blinded code reviews or something.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#148

Post by koonsolo »

s_kilk wrote: post #123
zorpner wrote: post #4

Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering. This guy gets it. It's a deep temptation to abstract engineering away from humanism, but the idea that code can solve problems is an immature understanding of software. People have the problems; people provide the solutions. Code is a tool & intermediary, and hardly essential to the act of problem-solving.

Another choice quote from a little further down: > 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. This industry seems to have a problem with socially maladjusted young men who actually believe this. Then when the reality of their careers doesn't match the tech-shut-in fantasia, they lash ou…

I came across a lot of socially maladjusted geniuses. If you try to put them in the wrong environment with the wrong assignments, bad stuff happens.

If you are able to manage them well, and let them do low level technical stuff, you can get amazing things out of them.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#149

Post by Aunche »

notjack wrote: post #116
TheCoreh wrote: post #82

I'd seriously like to know if the author meant this literally: > a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face If that's indeed the case, isn't that on itself a huge problem we should deal with? If someone is risking being a victim of physical violence on the workplace over disagreements on political positions we should be seriously concerned.

This is not a disagreement on political positions, this is a belief that women are inherently less capable than men at software engineering. It's a direct attack on the legitimacy and humanity of his coworkers. A disagreement over political positions would be if the author wrote a manifesto about the efficacy of sin taxes or nuclear treaties, not that his teammate Sandra is biologically inferior at her job and undese…

It's completely unreasonable to take a critique on hiring practices or a broad statement about demographics personally. I'm not going to take offense to the statement that men tend to be more aggressive than women. Likewise, if someone claims that Google's policy of favoring elite schools leads to hiring underqualified candidates, would Googlers from MIT suddenly be offended? Of course not. However, that's precisely what you're suggesting with women.
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