This whole thing to me is a great example of why the "Facts don't care about feels" crowd is so disingenuous. Supporters of the memo writer talk about how scientific and logical he was being, yet he draws lines that are not supported by science at all. We barely know what things contribute to success of software teams at all, let alone the implications of evopsych biotruths on them. And all this pseudo-scientific reaching is for the grand purpose of saying current employees who came to the company maybe from outreach programs shouldn't have been reached out to. Which, objectively and logically, is a dead-stupid thing to argue in an internal company-wide memo.
Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai
221–230 of 423 posts
Re: Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai
#222I am a black dude from an upper middle class family that went to private school his whole life and I am very, very familiar with how it's possible to have great ethnic diversity but a severe lack of diversity in other areas (and how negatively that can affect things). Because of this I've often wondered how a company or any group of people can include perspectives that many other people find to be morally reprehensib…
I thought Yonatan Zunger's essay Tolerance is not a moral precept [1] -- linked off his response to the "manifesto" -- did a good job of addressing this scenario.
[1] https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...
Re: Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai
#223What a bummer. This could have been "Kubernetes for organizations", how to manage diverse sets of containers-of-emotions/talents in a scalable fashion. There is so little nuance and quality thinking around this topic inside most organizations and Google could have done the community a great service by elevating and firmly grounding the discussion. And I think there are great discussions to be had that would lead to tech workers understanding and desiring diversity for actual reasons and not for PC/BS reasons.
But now no one will raise the topic.
Re: Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai
#224Keep politics/religion out of work. Its one thing to rant on reddit at end of day, its another to broadcast it to co workers. What did he expect would happen? His little write up would change everyones mind? Both left/right are extremists these days and will never change. All you will do is alienate and anger a bunch of co workers for a few pats on back from "your" side. While the smart people will put heads down and…
I agree, but it should start at the top:
"Eric Schmidt [and a sizeable team of Googlers]* played a crucial role in Team Hillary’s election tech".
https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-...
*from other sources
Re: Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a political rally in Google Campuses in Feb 2017. So, may be you vanilla comments are generally applicable, Google has sort of exempted itself. Now some people in Google are creating black-lists of colleagues. http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/07/revealed-inside-goo...
That is barely credible given the source is Breitbart.
An aside note: I have noticed that recently (starting about one year ago) there has been a meme of Breitbart not being a reliable source, while its opposite counterpart Huffington Post does not seem to have this reputation. I wonder if there is a better reason for that than just political disagreement, perhaps there are studies on the relative reliability of different sources (online and offline)? Thanks!
Re: Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moral of the story is something most adults figure out by their mid 20s: if you like your job, keep your mouth shut about your political/religious beliefs. And despite what any employer will tell you about their workplace being an open forum, they are full of shit. What they mean is, it's an open forum to agree with management.
> At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). Minority viewpoints in tech become silenced and their author(s) ostracized by the biases of a mob mentality. It doesn't even matter what you write because most people won't even read the original source, instead floating by on derivative tweets and ext…
Unfortunately, not everything has an objectively correct answer (aesthetics! ethics!) and so what you are saying kind of reinforces the point that diversity of viewpoints is vital to group problem solving. A group with the same blindspots will all make the same mistakes.
Re: Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moral of the story is something most adults figure out by their mid 20s: if you like your job, keep your mouth shut about your political/religious beliefs. And despite what any employer will tell you about their workplace being an open forum, they are full of shit. What they mean is, it's an open forum to agree with management.
> At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). Minority viewpoints in tech become silenced and their author(s) ostracized by the biases of a mob mentality. It doesn't even matter what you write because most people won't even read the original source, instead floating by on derivative tweets and ext…
It doesn't have to even be a politically charged opinion btw. Holding opinions like "let's not refactor this module right now" when everyone else thinks it's a great idea can quickly get you marginalized.
Re: Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
False equivalency. The left at least advocates for inclusion, and asking your workplace not to discriminate is not "just as bad as" saying women shouldn't be able to be engineers.
They advocate for inclusion but oftentimes want their kind of inclusion. For example they may want women to go out and vote, so long as they vote for their candidate. How dare they "vote against their self interest". Like when Hispanics get ostracized for voting republican as if they owe it to Democrats to vote for them.
I don't believe that's true. At least not in the overly generalized way you're presenting it. You can always find extremists and crackpots in any group, and opponents can always project those people as being representative of the group.
This is a human issue that is not confined to liberals and women, or liberals and hispanics. If you go out to rural locales and make a big show about being liberal in a conservative stronghold, people will invariably judge and mistreat you. If you're a conservative in a liberal stronghold and make a big show of it, invariably people will judge and mistreat you. Not everyone, but some. It's not right, I don't agree with it. And I feel like plenty people are moderate enough that they would agree.
But somehow we can't stop the inmates from running the asylum. And our system seems to give greater weight to people who scream the loudest. People are smart enough to know if they scream loud enough they'll get their way. And options like compromise and collaboration take actual work, and why bother with work if screaming and fussing is accessible to everyone without any effort?
Re: Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai
#229I am a black dude from an upper middle class family that went to private school his whole life and I am very, very familiar with how it's possible to have great ethnic diversity but a severe lack of diversity in other areas (and how negatively that can affect things). Because of this I've often wondered how a company or any group of people can include perspectives that many other people find to be morally reprehensib…
Did the author really say that women are too stupid? No. He used his words rather carefully. What might have angered some people is his statement that women are more interested in people/relations while men are more interested in things. regardless of whether it's true, and if it is, whether the reasons are inherent or cultural - how is that bad?
I can totally understand the author on this as I spent several years training both men and women. They do enjoy solving technical problems, but with time find them boring if left to solve them alone. But let them work in pairs or in groups, give some interaction, and the spark of interest is back. Most guys just didn't care or preferred to do it on their own. I was happy with the performance of both sexes, and to say one is better than the other is really sexist. But to state that they're different? I'm sorry, but we're born this way, there's nothing wrong with it!
Re: Note to Google Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai
#230There is just no winning in the following chain of arguments: - We can debate anything - However, some views are too harmful to be debated - Whoever is most vocally outraged decides the boundary between open to debate/too harmful
The memo itself was incoherent. Many of its statements made sense for debate, and the author himself pointed out that you can't tell much about any individual from the general data, which I think has not been focused on enough. He seemed to think he was doing everybody a service and that his views were not detrimental to anybody. But the actual choices in how to express the generalities showed really bad judgement an…
> The memo itself was incoherent.
That's funny. Compared to the response I've seen against it, it seems extremely coherent, tactfully presented and scientifically sourced.
It's an internal memo for crying out loud. Compared to anything I've seen in any company I've worked with, this sets the bar for extreme professionalism.