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On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

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Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#131

Post by blablabla123 »

cm2187 wrote: post #116
blablabla123 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As said before, every now and then I involuntary get sucked into this debate, most of the time the other person is drunk or feels safe enough "to speak up". (haha - of course when there are no women around) When I'm at work, I'm always surprised how they manage to hire 0 women for pure engineering jobs. (This is not my first job by the way.) Even more why there is no real discussion about that, rather: "yeah we found…

I studied engineering and there was very few women (<20%) in my class. You can't blame companies for having a similar hiring ratio. And the recruitment of the college I went through ("grandes ecoles" in France) is purely based on a math+physics competitive exam, so there is very little selection bias in the first place. So I am not convinced discrimination is the key to explain gender imbalance in engineering jobs.

What if the exams and job interviews are designed by people who are bad at team work? During my studies and also in my various jobs I observed that there is little team work, that many people even openly don't want to do it. (Managed to do it for some things, e.g. Functional Analysis) Maybe there are more ways to approach problems and at least for "real work" it seems that working in a team leads to better results. (Think all this agile thing with pair programming, retros etc etc...)

Don't forget Correlation isn't equivalent with Causation, actually there is neither a .

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#132

Post by nancye »

kristianc wrote: post #27

The major elephant in the room here, which the memo doesn't seem to address, is that as late as the 1960's, computer programming was seen as a natural career for young women. Has biology changed that much in the last fifty years?

The chart from this article is worth looking at:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

It wasn't just in the sixties - women's participation in computer science was growing until the mid eighties. As a woman who's helped other women learn to code, all I can say is that the interest is certainly still out there.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#133

Post by AlexCoventry »

dws wrote: post #107
JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

> He is one individual in a company that employs more than 72,000 people. Why has Silicon Valley spent the weekend talking about him Because we're not talking about a memo posted by one random engineer that got the reaction it deserved for declaring a large fraction of his co-workers sub-standard engineers (among the myriad broken things in that memo). That would have been a story for all of five minutes. Instead, we…

What's your source for "large fraction"?

It's claimed in internal documents excluded from the gizmodo story that in an anonymous survey approximately 36% of Googlers largely agreed with the essay. Without knowing the survey methodology it's basically impossible to interpret that result, though. E.g., how was the survey advertised within Google? how many respondents? what were the actual questions? was any effort taken to prevent repeat votes? to ensure that only people who'd actually read the document voted? The only info is a couple of pie charts.

Links to the leaked documents are available via Google.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#134

Post by kristianc »

thanatropism wrote: post #119
kristianc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a doubt the industry has changed - it has more men in it. The question at hand, I guess, is, have the tasks that one would be expected to perform as a computer programmer changed over the last fifty years? Or has the hiring process - which even most male programmers are happy to admit is "broken," adjusted to favour men over women? Two of the things that have been suggested as causes have been hiring tools fo…

I don't know how culture fit can be taken out of the equation. Work in modern workplaces (and in particular the office, knowledge-worker type we're talking about) is far from the conveyor-belt screw-tightening fully explicit work of our industrial past. Our whole output depends on shared mental context. You may say -- "aha, but culture fit is a proxy for racism". Fine, then people are racists -- in that very implicit…

> You may say -- "aha, but culture fit is a proxy for racism". Fine, then people are racists -- in that very implicit, system-wide way that's immune to sensitivity training and generic pressure in the wider culture. What to do then, shoot the racists?

You can say that while "shared mental context" is important, the research says that diverse teams are higher functioning teams [1] (one of the things myself and the author of the memo would agree on is that groupthink is a bad thing!), and that if culture fit is one of the blockers, find a way of retaining its good aspects while removing its potentially deleterious ones. Some of the world's smartest people work at Google. I'm sure they can have a role in figuring it out.

https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#135

Post by chrisco255 »

kristianc wrote: post #27

The major elephant in the room here, which the memo doesn't seem to address, is that as late as the 1960's, computer programming was seen as a natural career for young women. Has biology changed that much in the last fifty years?

Even in 1970 huge disparities existed: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_325.35.a... Shows that in 1970, women were 13.6% of computer science graduates. That rate increased over time, peaking in 1984 at 37% only to begin dropping off over time to its present 18% rate.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#136

Post by TallGuyShort »

kristianc wrote: post #105
TallGuyShort wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he's using a biological justification to openly discuss different ways to foster diversity. This is one of his points: the most common argument against him is just that you think he's a sexist, not because you don't think his ideas will actually foster any kind of diversity. And I don't understand that. The reaction here is the opposite of tolerance and diversity. edit: I'm going to give a personal example: I str…

But we're back to discussing the reaction again. Which is a neat way of avoiding the content of the article itself. I have no particular need to apply the label of "sexist" to this guy. I have no opinion, nor enough information, to say whether he should be fired or not. I do think he's profoundly wrong though, and think his arguments about biological differences bear at least a passing resemblance to some wholly disc…

>> he's trying to find a biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career.

>> avoiding the content of the article itself.

That's what I'm talking about. I also think his ideas wouldn't be terribly effective, but I think villifying and dismissing him just for saying it does more harm than him saying it. That's why there are people focusing on the reaction. It doesn't really matter who the onus is on to justify his claims if you're not going to actually listen to anyone who disagrees with you anyway. And you can't claim you actually listened, because you explicitly said he was arguing in favor of excluding people based on class. That's what you heard from all of his suggestions to approach inclusion a different way.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#137

Post by EddieRingle »

grey-area wrote: post #130
EddieRingle wrote: post #43

One of my first exposures to this "manifesto" was on Twitter with someone starting a thread with "Google has a Nazi problem." The majority of the other responses I read either attacked the author, dismissed the entire text in whole, and/or refused to actually argue the paper's points because they saw them as so ridiculous or "obviously" wrong. I read the paper. I don't see at all how it relates to fascism, Trumpism,…

Since most of these threads are pretty content free, and you asked for it, here's a rebuttal, by a woman who's good at math. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slideshow/embed_code/key/3... Of course men and women are different on average, but are they different enough to justify the massive disparity in tech? No.

Thanks! However after looking through the slide deck, it seems that the author tries to argue that because mathematic ability isn't so important in CS, biological differences can't explain the disparity between the men and women in CS. That's a quite a leap, I think.

If CS doesn't involve a lot of math, what does it involve that might be impacted by biological or psychological causes?

(P.S. I went to a STEM high school and I know plenty of women who are absolutely stellar in mathematics and science, so I know that's not the issue here.)

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#138

Post by mnm1 »

This idea that all opinions are equal and need to be respected is ridiculous and needs to stop. Politics is real and political opinions and actions have real consequences. Not all political opinions should be respected. In fact, it's our duty as citizens to evaluate and mock / scorn the opinions of others that we see as toxic. No one is protected from this and people that think they are, are feeling entitled to something that they do not deserve.

Protections of free speech apply to government actions only. This isn't a free speech case. Google can do whatever it wants, including firing the poster of the manifesto. If Google, for whatever reason or no reason, doesn't want such thinking in its organization, it should have no qualms about firing the poster. There is no safe space, except from the government, for political opinions. The poster should know that by know. People have been fired for way less. Many companies would not want a toxic person like that in their midst and that's perfectly fine. It creates a toxic workplace and brings everyone else down. That's a great reason to fire someone.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#139

Post by grey-area »

EddieRingle wrote: post #137
grey-area wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since most of these threads are pretty content free, and you asked for it, here's a rebuttal, by a woman who's good at math. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slideshow/embed_code/key/3... Of course men and women are different on average, but are they different enough to justify the massive disparity in tech? No.

Thanks! However after looking through the slide deck, it seems that the author tries to argue that because mathematic ability isn't so important in CS, biological differences can't explain the disparity between the men and women in CS. That's a quite a leap, I think. If CS doesn't involve a lot of math, what does it involve that might be impacted by biological or psychological causes? (P.S. I went to a STEM high scho…

No, that's not the argument, perhaps read all the slides, in particular slides 20/21. It's true that cs doesn't involve a lot of math, but that's really just a side point and a little in joke for mathematicians. The argument is the disparity is so small that it could not account for the massive disparity we see in tech.

Re your question on biological or psychological causes, why limit your consideration to those areas? The evidence points to social or economic causes, given the large shifts in women over just a few decades:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#140

Post by wutbrodo »

untog wrote: post #66
blablabla123 wrote: post #15

The thing is, the guy wrote what many people think - outside of tech. It just so happens that techies happen to be very open oftentimes. I mean, what this person wrote, I heard it on various occasions in different formulations from various people. Even a woman (a Psychologist student at that time) once told me she'd rather have a male dentist and a male president. I imagine tech industry to be brutal for woman, but s…

> The thing is, the guy wrote what many people think - outside of tech. I agree, but that's also at the core of my (internal) confusion about it. His arguments are not new, at all. As far as I could tell he doesn't present any new evidence to back up his argument, either. So, to those who say "it is important that he spoke out, and that we have this debate": when does this debate end? Assuming we have the debate and…

> As far as I could tell he doesn't present any new evidence to back up his argument, either. So, to those who say "it is important that he spoke out, and that we have this debate": when does this debate end?

The problem is that (inside Google and elsewhere) the debate ended by fiat, not because one side made their case better; and it didn't end in favor of a side with tons of science to back it (not even close). My money is on there not being much of an average difference between the population of each gender when it comes to technical talent. But much more importantly, I'm aware that the science is far from conclusive on the topic, since socialization can be pretty different to untangle. The argument at places like Google is that looking at demographic differences in a population and deciding that it must be caused by discrimination is just assuming that nothing else could possibly contribute.

> "We must debate!" feels very objective until you admit to yourself (as I freely will) that you're coming to this with a preconceived opinion, and won't be content until the debate is settled in the way you think it should be settled.

The irony is thick in this sentence. How do you not understand that if both sides claim the other does this, _the one that's actively trying to shut down scrutiny of their claims_ is by far in the weaker position?

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