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I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

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Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#71

> Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team. Eventually, we had to do the right thing for the company and let them go. This is one of the most disturbing thing's I've ever read in an article proclaiming to promote change in the tech gender gap.…

She clarifies in the comments. She says that she didn't mean to imply that this was because they were women. And I think she should have gone into more detail because this is the anecdote that defends the title of her post, and this snippet sounds terrible without context.

But my take is basically she says when she was confronted with an overwhelmingly male pipeline she tried increasing diversity by increasing the acceptance rate of female candidates. She then tells a story of how this backfired and increased negative stereotypes about female engineers. I don't think she believes women in general lack or drain energy, just the few she hired for her start up.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#72
post #2

Some of the reasoning in this post is very weak. It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year…

Even though what I say might sound a bit stupid, I think it's because of style. Everybody that I work with is a geek. If you always thought of yourself more of a guy who is a lawyer, serious, likes to dress well, you will probably want to run away from being a software dev. They generally like to geek out, look weird, look smart or whatever. Then you might have less geeky people and companies, but the overall sentime…

> They generally like to geek out, look weird, look smart or whatever.

Playing off this, I think pop culture deserves more blame than it gets for the lack of women in tech. A software engineer is more likely to enjoy ComicCon than than the average person, but actually working in software is pretty normal.

In the previous decade or two, some TV shows have been casting women as the "tech genius" quite a bit. That's good. But they are often weird, rude, or creepy (still 40 and shopping at Hot Topic?). They're usually taking orders rather than giving them. And they're often squirreled away in some lab instead of being part of the story itself. I'm concerned the message for women (and men for that matter) is "Tech is great... if you're into dressing up like a wizard and sitting in a cubical. You do you (over there)!"

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#73
The author's post is odd. She's sick of "our" approach to diversity, by which I assume from the headline she means "Google's", although that's not clearly laid out in the text.

Her specific advice is:

> Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech.

> Start a mentoring program.

> Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases.

These are all things Google tries to do. For instance, Google has a mandatory class for interviewers about correcting subliminal biases. You may recall its existence from the recent document suggesting that Google remove it.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#74
Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt, scars, bruises, etc. Believing that stuff was by far the worst mistake of my life. Strong advice: Don't do that. For all the attempts at gender diversity in STEM fields, f'get about it or, except in very rare cases as in the OP, suffer from pain to the agonies of the damned to serious harm to your life (I did) and worse, maybe death, literally, for the associated female.

I'll give details below, but, bluntly, bottom line, as essentially parents with any insight and objectivity at all with children of both genders learn quickly, in short, right from the crib, with rare exceptions, the girls are interested in people and the boys, in things. Sorry, that's just the way it is. They are BORN that way, and the difference does NOT go away with time. There is a small fraction of exceptions in both genders, but otherwise that's the fact, Jack. Sorry 'bout that. A really simple argument shows that the difference has held strongly for at least 40,000 years. Gads, from some recent research, the difference even holds for Rhesus monkeys which shows that it has held for some millions of years.

I tried that: As a college sophomore she told me "Women don't just have to be cared for. Women can do things, too. I want a career." Well, since she had been Valedictorian of her high school class, a year earlier in the freshman trigonometry course I was teaching, had been the best student in the class, with twice as many test points as the next best student, and was well on her way to Summa Cum Laude, PBK, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and NSF Fellow, all of which she got, I believed her. Wrong. Dumb.

Later I was on the team that did IBM's artificial intelligence language KnowledgeTool. Well I understood the language, and on our team we had some very bright and aggressive guys, young men, who had written some early sample programs. KnowledgeTool was a pre-processor to IBM's PL/I, a huge language.

From one of the world's best research universities, she got her Ph.D. in mathematical sociology, with lots of multi-variate statistics, with matrix theory, analysis of variance and experimental design, hypothesis testing, SPSS usage, etc. All of that was easy for her.

So, I showed her how to use our home PC to logon to my office VM/CMS account, use the editor XEDIT, use the scripting language Rexx, and right away she wrote a nice, useful Rexx program to report on disk space usage. Then I gave her a one hour tutorial in KnowledgeTool. A week later she had a nice, first sample program running. It did what she wanted. I gave her a 30 minute lecture explaining the intended role of rules as knowledge representation, and two weeks later she had fully in line with the idea of rules and knowledge representation by far the best early KnowledgeTool program I ever saw.

She was genuinely brilliant. She beat me like a rented mule in Scrabble. I kept asking her to play so that I could get better, and I did, but she got better faster than I did until the difference was absurd. The OP mentions GRE scores of 800 -- that's exactly the score I got on the Math GRE. So, I was bright enough, but she was brilliant, plenty good in math, and much better than me in verbal and essentially every other non-STEM subject.

She was brilliant and was a super fast, brilliant student at KnowledgeTool with essentially no instruction at all, no text, no notes, just did it.

A STEM field diversity success? Heck no. She hated the STEM fields, including computing. Her view of the STEM fields was "I'm not that kind of person.". What she wanted was "A career that helps people.", and that mostly meant volunteer work. The idea of working for money was an anathema to her -- so she had no future in business.

To get a job, she kept trying the STEM fields, e.g., with IBM. She was miserable, desperately miserable. In a training class, she made the highest score in the class, but she was miserable. She went into a depression and clinical depression, was trying to recover with her mother at her family farm, and soon her body was found floating in a lake.

Diversity? A grand failure.

To believe her "women can do things, too" for anything like the world of work, business, technology, computing, or the STEM fields, she could do it, best in class, for a while but HATED it and too soon found it fatal. Instead she desperately wanted a career that "helped people".

Bluntly, she was interested in people and not in things, technology, applied math, etc.

Are we learning yet?

Can some small fraction of women, as in the OP, do well in the STEM fields? Yup. Did I mention a "small fraction"?

Generally for "diversity", do everyone, men, women, universities, companies, society, a huge favor -- f'get about it. Certainly don't push it, encourage it, urge women to get into fields with things instead of people. Don't do that. To do that is dumb de dumb dumb, dumb, harmful, and sometimes fatal.

Instead? Let women pick their own directions. Stop pushing women to be like a dog that walks on only two legs -- usually they can do it, but they nearly never do it well.

For this diversity stuff, to borrow from an Indiana Jones movie character Marcus Brody “You are meddling with forces you cannot possibly comprehend.”.

I tried, HARD. Biggest mistake of my life. Diversity good? Don't believe that stuff, not for your sisters, girlfriends, wife, or daughters. DON'T do that. The author of the OP? She's one of the rare exceptions. Leave it at that.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#75
The central idea at the core of all the diversity ideology is that everybody can do anything, they just have to try and people who fail to become Google engineers or sports stars only have themselves to blame, or even better, since people are loath to blame themselves, some other dominant group.

Naturally, the only way to solve this dillema is for the less successful group to seize power after which they will be able to achieve everything they ever dreamed of.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#76
post #32

Is diversity only defined as gender diversity?

I was having a conversation about this yesterday with my girlfriend. What minorities need protection and rebalancing?

We rarely talking about supporting the Jewish, for example, or Mexicans, or gays representation in engineering. What is the philosohpy at play here? And what if someday women became the majority, would you then fight to bring men back up to parity?

She didn't have answers, which to me just made me wonder if she was fighting for a vision of equality, or promoting her in-group.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#77
post #61
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the piece isn't very well written†, it's unclear whether the "infinite loop" of mediocrity she's referring to is something she actually observed, or something she surmises is possible. She is clear and specific, presenting numbers, when talking about things she was personally involved in. Since the cycle of increasing mediocrity has a prominent float in the parade of horribles conjured by the "anti-diversity"…

I think that her "infinite loop" theory was her perception of the anecdote around hiring at her own startup. It does seem conceivable, but yeah obviously data is light here. Good point on how the whole interview process is a crapshoot anyway. Hadn't really thought about that aspect, but obviously is a huge opportunity for subliminal bias since it is how it is.

Another weird attribute of her theory about setting the bar and paying premiums for talent is that her engineering team, according to LinkedIn, is in India --- which is a radically different market for software talent than SFBA. In particular, the gender distribution of CS grads and programmers in India is very different from what it is here.

One possible interpretation --- and there are probably equally credible others --- is that this founder found it difficult to compete in the (overheated) SFBA market for talent, irrespective of gender.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#78
post #2

Some of the reasoning in this post is very weak. It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year…

For a long time I did not comment on these types of stories. However, I have since been able to formalize one specific way in which posts that include some of the information that this post includes make the world a worse place in certain specific cases. You can read a formal deductive analysis here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967445

It is mathematical and hard to follow. It's very formal.

If you follow the program of study outlined in the above comment you will have an extra tool to decide which articles make the world a worse place. (I realize that not everyone will be able to follow my comment.)

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#79
post #19

And your contribution is.. Mansplaining?

Mansplaining is one of those words like libtard or freetard that indicates that the user is unlikely to say anything insightful or deep.

In this particular case I think it was used to a particular effect.

The irony here is tptacek (a man) is out to explain why this woman is wrong - in order to help women.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...I mean hiring junior level candidates, not trying to shove a more senior female developer into a lower level position... The word "shove" aside, I wish more companies would hire senior people for junior roles if they want them. One of the big problems with the American (and I presume Western) job market is the unwillingness to train people unless they're straight out of college. It seems that moms (and less ofte…

The preference for new grads is because it's a lot easier to convince them to work overtime with less pay than someone more experienced with a family.

I always figured that was part of some implicit contract.

"You'll hire me for a job I can't immediately do, and I'll treat growing into my job as the number one priority".

With the job market as it is, it's unrealistic to expect people to hire candidates who can't help lighten the load within a week or two of their start date.

I wish there was a less-risky way to 'try out' candidates. Someone I know works in boutique finance and whenever they bring on someone at a junior level, they're on a 60 day probation and the partners decide whether or not to retain them.

I think it's easier for them to do it because their applicant pool / candidates are predominantly young, white/asian, male, and high-achieving. They've never been sued by a candidate they've let go and they've found some real 'diamonds in the rough'.

I can't imagine that they could say the same if they let go of 40 mothers with children. But it does highlight a solution path - make it less risky for companies to evaluate candidates although I don't know how to do that without eroding worker protections.

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