Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#351

Post by cyanexttuesday » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 9:09 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #166

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and I suspect the attitude of cooler heads may act in Damore's favor when all is said and done. The number of leakers has to be quite the headache for Google's StopLeaks folks. Between people leaking Damore's memo because they were upset by it, and people talking to Breitbart because they were angry he was fired, there's been a LOT of leaks. How Google approaches handling this issue is going to be interestin…

It was fascinating to see how many Google managers operate their own "blacklists". That's got to be legally very dodgy.

Google will be sued for it. It will be too enticing for lawyers to pass up.

It'll be open season on Google now, and they deserve it if the blacklists and age blacklist is true.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#352

Post by CydeWeys » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 9:09 PM UTC

baitbiter wrote: post #135

Even more harm is done by Affirmative Action for women now being implemented in all companies. Feminism has given up on the aspect of competing and turned to shaming all men. There are several professions where women dominate with > 80%. Where's all this fucking outrage in those?

There are diversity efforts in the fields of teaching and nursing to hire more women, as the dominance of women in those fields in harmful in much the same way that the dominance of men in software engineering is harmful. Teaching especially needs more men, most especially at the elementary school level, as many children are not exposed to many positive male role models.

An important factor here is that software engineering is a highly desired and highly compensated field, which aren't true of nursing and teaching. Having an imbalance of gender in software engineering thus contributes to inequality in social status and compensation in a way that imbalances in female-dominated fields do not.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#353

Post by jjn2009 » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 9:10 PM UTC

notreallythough wrote: post #287

mizzack wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your quote: > When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have? Your perspective is that this is harmful because the memo caused self doubt, so the memo was the problem. From Damore's perspective, if there were no quota/diversity hiring programs at that place of…

The memo didn't cause self doubt, the memo was intended to inspire others to look for doubt (hence the "lowering the bar"). The memo specifically targeted diversity hires as a lower bar. Imagine if a memo started circulating that asked everyone to question whether or not you were hired for your skill. That's a terrible environment to create.

Lowering the bar for a cohort is going to create different distributions of skill in that cohort, this person wasn't the first and won't be the last to come to this conclusion. I think damaging organizational cohesion is never the right choice but both sides of this argument contribute to that damage.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#354

Post by msla » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 9:10 PM UTC

bjl wrote: post #338

msla wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept and term "cultural marxism" has been grabbed by such a huge swath of people, most of whom have absolutely no idea it is or could be anti-Semitic (because you have to be pretty out there to associate Marxism with Jews to begin with), that claiming all or most uses of it are anti-Semitic is wrong. There's just no way to paint that huge of a group with that brush unless you think it's so double-secret subcon…

Cultural Marxism has been explicitly anti-Semitic from the beginning, and early adherents argued that it was necessarily anti-Semitic. So people who believe in the conspiracy now are either anti-Semitic themselves, or profoundly ignorant. Neither one is a good look.

Or they've taken the term, misunderstanding it, perhaps, and redefined it to express ideas they actually have.

Whether those are good ideas is another topic.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#355

Post by compiler-guy » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 9:10 PM UTC

notreallythough wrote: post #212

nicolashahn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). Plenty of far more aggressive articles and essays have been writ…

I'd argue that it's objectively aggressive. His twitter handle "@fired4truth" makes the intention to be so rather obvious (the content he's promoting on that handle is an entire additional ball of wax)... A 10-page manifesto, regardless of the content, when circulated internally without management's consent is in itself hard to view as anything but an act of mutiny.

Without stating anything regarding the merit's of Damore's arguments either way:

There is a long tradition of this kind of memo inside Google. Many products you probably use every day are better because of one or another.

This genre is not exactly encouraged, but lots of good stuff comes out of them.

Whatever else that memo was, the genre is common, and the genre itself not considered mutinous within Google.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#356

Post by jdoliner » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 9:11 PM UTC

pj_mukh wrote: post #230

jdoliner wrote: post #149

> He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups. Such misrepresentation is harmful to those of us at Google who have to overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills. This to me is the most…

He specifically mentions in an interview that minority interviewees get assigned to a second interviewer if one interviewer doesn't like them in the first round. He saw this as a 'second chance' when the committee might just be controlling for interviewer biases. Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion.

> Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion.

Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind.

I'd ask a few questions about this interview practice though.

1) Is this the entirety of Google's diversity practices in hiring? I'd be surprised if it is. So even if this isn't lowering the bar it still doesn't prove conclusively that's not what they're doing. Again I'd like to see a more complete accounting of what exactly it is they do. However, I'm certainly not saying that you need to provide this in order to have a legitimate argument, you don't have access to this information any more than I do.

2) This practice seems to have a somewhat narrow view of what a interviewer bias looks like. In particular it only tries to eliminate bias in the case of a minority being rejected. What would happen if we were to instead attempt to detect interviewers who were prone to bias by randomly giving rejected candidates second interviews and seeing which interviewers wound up frequently disagreeing with their peers? If the assumption that bias only effects minority candidates is true this would have much the same effect.

3) What if it wasn't a second chance but 100 chances? I.e. if you're a minority you get to interview for Google 100 times and if any of those say yes your in. White people only get 1 shot. Unless you think Google's false positive rate is 0, this would have to lower the bar wouldn't it?

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#357

Post by AnimalMuppet » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 9:12 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #266

Blackthorn wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thoughts of one twenty-something engineer posted to an internal message board (for these kinds of discussions I might add) does not create a hostile workplace or harm Google in any way. Considering how all sixteen of my female teammates were pissed off about it, I'm going to go ahead and say you are demonstrably wrong.

Nope. Someone taking offense is not demonstration of anything, other than someone taking offense.

One person taking offense is not demonstration of anything. Sixteen out of sixteen taking offense comes a lot closer to demonstrating that it was offensive, though.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#358

Post by CydeWeys » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 9:12 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #125

rpiguy wrote: post #6

I really enjoyed the well reasoned discussion. I think a lot more constructive dialog is happening now that people have calmed down. Of all the sentiments expressed in the article, I mainly disagree with the comment that Damore did the company harm. He posted his thoughts on an internal discussion board and someone else leaked this internal document to the press. The leaker did harm to Google not Damore. In fact, I t…

The leaker did harm to Google not Damore I am 100% certain that the trackiest company in the world is perfectly capable of knowing exactly who leaked it. They have chosen to protect that person, for reasons unknown at this time.

How? Presumably tens of thousands of employees read it; how can you possibly know which needle in that haystack converted it to a different format and then sent it to a reporter? Especially if it was done over Tor or similar? How exactly do you track that? There are technologies that work that allow for anonymous means of communication.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#359

Post by jorgemf » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 9:12 PM UTC

Smaug123 wrote: post #217

jorgemf wrote: post #111

> I disagree with his use of science and data to convert opinions into facts. Funny. So if you backed your opinions with science that is not right? It was hard to keep reading after that statement.

It's a problem with phrasing, here. "Disagree with the specific methods he used", not "disagree with the fact that he used any methods at all". "Consider his particular use of science and data to be sketchy", rather than "consider that it was sketchy for him to use science and data".

> Consider his particular use of science and data to be sketchy

I can say this for any research paper I have read in my life as all of them are incomplete and doesn't include all the research done (because you fill the top limit pages only with the bibliography). Given that it is impossible to put all the references, I want to understand why his use of science was sketchy?

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#360

Post by CydeWeys » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 9:12 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #125

rpiguy wrote: post #6

I really enjoyed the well reasoned discussion. I think a lot more constructive dialog is happening now that people have calmed down. Of all the sentiments expressed in the article, I mainly disagree with the comment that Damore did the company harm. He posted his thoughts on an internal discussion board and someone else leaked this internal document to the press. The leaker did harm to Google not Damore. In fact, I t…

The leaker did harm to Google not Damore I am 100% certain that the trackiest company in the world is perfectly capable of knowing exactly who leaked it. They have chosen to protect that person, for reasons unknown at this time.

How? Presumably tens of thousands of employees read it; how can you possibly know which needle in that haystack converted it to a different format and then sent it to a reporter? Especially if it was done over Tor or similar? How exactly do you track that? There are technologies that work that allow for anonymous means of communication.