421–430 of 872 posts
I giggled when this article said "most of Google's work is people centric". It's data. It's an isolated intelligent person at a computer screen. At the center is a server. On one end, a programmer, the other end, a user. People don't enter into it.
There is plenty of people-centric work in big organizations. Less charitably, it can be described as "navigating the bureaucracy".
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I'm referring to a Hacker News thread not even 3 weeks old. In that specific paragraph I'm commenting on Hacker News, not the memo.
A random HN thread from possibly several weeks ago to which you don't provide a link. Are you surprised that some (most?) people couldn't make a connection?
I think it is a question of awareness and beliefs. If you firmly don't think there is an issue then you simply don't notice. I've been at the other side of the fence so I know what it is like ;-)
> That leaked internal memo from James Damore at Google? The one that says one shouldn’t expect employees in all professions to reflect the demographics of the whole population? I don't see how this is an unreasonable argument to make. There is a dearth of male kindergarten teachers, for instance. This doesn't mean the school is being "sexist". It might just mean that certain genders tend to be attracted to certain t…
There are gender disparities all over the place. There are racial disparities all over the place.
As long as these disparities aren't enforced intentionally by sexist/racist laws, I fail to see what the problem is.
If truly there is discrimination against talented women in the tech industry, then another company would hire all of these underpaid talented women and take over the tech industry.
Why did Larry Page, Jerry Yang, Bill Gate, Zuckerburg, etc all hire mostly males in their startups? Because they wanted to overpay underqualified males because they were sexist against women?
The argument doesn't make sense. If they did that, then another startup would have taken those underpaid overqualified women and destroyed their competitors.
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A pussy grabber won over Hilary Clinton. You don't have to be a Google employee with PhD to see how bad of a candidate she was. You see... two people can play that game. If anything, a pro-trump person could have used that same sentence of yours to demonstrate the opposite sentiment. Don't attribute biases to situations that are nothing other than complete and utter incompetence.
A former senator and secretary of state - complete and utter incompetence - sure whatever you say snowflake.
Her credentials worked against her. She was as establishment as you can be, with no perspective on any major change from the viewpoint of the average person, just continuing on down the existing path.
The reason Trump got elected is the same reason Obama got elected, and it is the same reason Bush Jr. got elected, and Clinton before him: people want change.
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I made the grave mistake of trying to express that point on Twitter. Twitter seems to be a poor vehicle for nuanced debate at the best of time, but it's a dumpster fire right now full of raging people who don't understand what you've just said. I was in SV last year for a couple of months during the election, and everyone I met were all paid up members of the church of political correctness up front, but when you spo…
You realize his paper was posted to a list at google called "pc-considered-harmful"?
- did he create the group?
- how long had the group existed before he posted the memo?
- was Google as an organisation ok with that group existing?
- is there anything wrong with there being discussion surrounding the value of PC viewpoints?
- What other sorts of lists exist at Google, and what sorts of viewpoints to they cover?
I hate to just turn a blind eye to the issue but, man, I'm glad I work at a place where only getting shit done, done right, and done on time matters. My team is about 60% men 40% women and pretty much evenly distributed across Asian, Russian, White American, and Central American races. No one cares in the least about diversity, only the project(s) matter. I feel very fortunate.
Companies can't come out with official taxonomies of diversity, so it's all vague and based on unspoken intuitions about which candidates count as more diverse.
It's not a system someone would design from scratch.
To me, it seems like hiring the first Mormon, albino, or Thai employee would be an obvious win from a diversity perspective, but it's not that simple.
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Nonsense. If you treat me with respect I will treat you with respect. We can have a civil disagreement and the next day I'll happily help you out. Being able to disagree is healthy. I disagree with my wife and with my children on some pretty important issues. On the other hand if you try and ruin my career, or if I think you will try and ruin my career, then I will knock you down at every opportunity.
Just because someone attacks you doesn't mean your hypothesis or arguments should change. If you believe what you say is reasonable then it is not rooted in a personal animus. That is all I am pointing out. Often, however, our arguments have a strong unacknowledged bias. When we're challenged the bias becomes more visible.
Here's the problem. These studies model the status quo, not the way things would be if women weren't subjected to different historical and social pressures. I would venture that the profile distribution of women in tech is perhaps different than the population wide distribution. Imagine a world where women weren't told they are naturally good/bad at things, now project that forward 50 years and redo the study.
This is my chief problem with the memo, and the fact that he launches into IQ, the talking point of the prejudiced everywhere.
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> I don't understand why people keep repeating that statement. He said that biological differences explain the different ratios of men and women, NOT that women are not suited for tech jobs. He explicitely did not say (nor mean) that a woman can't be a good software engineer. Just that on average, more men than women will show the features needed for software engineers. The problem is that his whole argument is based…
The term "neuroticism" stems from the five factor model of psychological traits. The memo author doesn't really mention this too much, but if you know about the model, he uses the other factors throughout his work, which means he has read and understood the model. There have been several studies showing that women scores higher in the agreeableness and neuroticism factors, on average (and with a quite large variance…
You bring up a lot of questions about what effects predispositions have in this case and that is exactly why it creates problems when people take findings on predispositions and run with them.
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He says women will benefit from making coding more social. Pair programming. Remember?
Whether we agree with the memo or not, there was a very good point that guy made and that we should keep in mind, it's the paragraph with the two overlapping distributions. Even if you admit that all genders, races, any way you want to segment the population, do not have the same distribution, that doesn't mean anything to a person as an individual. For instance I think it's fair to say that black people are better a…
Is it fair though? Is it supported by metrics of muscle strength and length etc? And does it take into account the differences between blacks (Africans?), west vs south vs central (pygmies!).
Also, there's the possibility that whites of equivalent athleticism find better options for their life than being a professional sportsmen, the bottom 80% [1] of whom end their career at 30 with little to show for it but lifelong injuries.
[1] made up statistic.