161–170 of 464 posts
I have to say, as an Asian male I found this comment by dirtyid in the article to be succinct and all too true: > "Pour one out for Asian males. Get screwed by affirmative action in education, media representation and now employment but can't get screwed on dating apps." Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity when it comes to tech and aren't considered an added element of diverseness within the industry…
People should check out the actual complaint [0]. It includes a lot of things the article doesn't including: A screenshot of an email from Allison Alogna to "Team" stating > Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically unrepresented groups. Another stating in part > And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups. It also tells us that thi…
This definitely changes the tone of things. That's pure discrimination. It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all. Sounds like someone above the manager is responsible for this and the manager is carrying out orders. You don't get a historic paper trail like that by not being told to continue on.
Both of those are illegal.
I work really hard, and I don't want to be given extra breaks, or have the bar lowered. I would rather fail an interview (and I have) than be given a boost in the process.
That being said, one thign that annoys me about the media scrutinizing tech companies like this, is that the MEDIA themselves is one of the most masogogynistic cultures out there, with the most widespread global impact on the perception of male and female roles in society, yet they have the audacity to scrutinize industries who have done far more for society, pumped far more into education programs for just females, both males and females, science fairs etc and provided more opportunities to open the playing field than anyone else.
I went to an engineering school as an Electrical Engineer with a minor in Computer Science and my department was 5% female is f that, despite my school bragging 30% of our school was female. Yeh right, 90% of those girls were management majors, the rest of us were sparsely strewn across the engineering majors.
I have worked in male dominated environments my entire career and at the age of 27, I am and almost always have been the youngest in upper level management meetings in addition to being the only girl.
What I can tell you is this, and i have talked to many female and male engineers working on east coast, west coast, multiple countries in Europe, India and Asia including Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and many other places in China.
The issue is this. Yes (disclaimer) everyone needs to take responsibility for their own success, companies included, but this is really about society, and the tech companies are at the end of the pipeline of a girls life before she hits her career, the end of a pipeline of 21 grueling years of social conditioning, and the tech companies inherit the results of our heavily biased society.
And I would also like to add, WOMEN DO ADD TO THIS PROBLEM. I've seen more MOTHERS steer their daughters away from STEM to engage in socialite activities and trophy wife conditioning and I've seen MORE WOMEN than men making fun of girls for being "weird" (weird in America means, oh my gosh that girl does all of her homework and prioritizes her school and career over boyfriend. O. M. G.)
to put it best, someone I know who has worked at 2/3 big three companies on both coasts and in Europe, as well as other people I know, men I respect, work with, men who have daughters they teach to code and want to raise to be strong independentm, smart respectable women, have said this "The western culture is very limiting to women. What women need to do to do more in STEM is stay at home, play with things on their computer and break things. Women are not encouraged to stay at home and be introverted and curious"
I agree, women are taught to waste their money and time being politically polite, politically correct and wasting money on clothes and makeup to seem desireable.
If you don't believe me just leave your home and go to any store, gas station, grocery store, clothing store, anywhere basically where other humans reside and you will see this conditioning all around you.
This is not the fault of tech companies, yet the media, the very people propogating this disgusting excuse for equality (spoken from the microphones of women who are airbrushed in pencil skirts with perfect hair) is asking tech companies to fix all of the root of societies problems with women and equality because they found a statistic the liberal media (I'm a liberal myself, but I'm also capable of scrutinizing my own party, you know why? Because I'm not in a cult.) and its just not going to happen.
Tech companies are an easy finger to point to.
YES, beleive me, I have lots of rants about the companies I have worked for, but I can tell you this issue did not start at these companies. They should take on more responsibility to stop it.
However, to believe that these issues begin and end with tech companies, and that tech companies can make their portfolios equal in 5 years with some stretch recruiting goals is unreasonable at best, but the media is pressuring them to do that.
I would LOVE to see this same scrutiny go to the finance industry, which is WORSE than tech and WAY worse when it comes to how they treat women, but finance and media are all snuggled up together in NYC so they are pointing at their biggest industry threat, which is tech.
Thats what really going on in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two ways to nullify a problem. 1. Solve it 2. Create another problem in equal magnitude and opposite direction. Unfortunately, most countries/organisations seem to prefer second one, because it's easier and shows effect earlier, although over long period of time, it's going to be the worse one.
> although over long period of time, it's going to be the worse one. Why do you believe that? Are there specific examples you're thinking of? How do you know it's too far?
Google has for a while been toxic to the technology ecosystem. I don't think their halo is deserved, certainly not on the basis of the "free" trinkets they release to the public (like, say, Kubernetes). More often than not they are corrosive to innovation, and I don't take them at their word when they swear that your/mine/everybody's data is safe in their hands.
It comes as no major surprise that their actual workplace is as toxic as their role in the market, even with all the creature comforts they dangle in front of their employee.
I work at Google. It is the most unpleasant place to work, largely because work evaluation is almost 80% politics (might be 100%). I am a senior engineer. You get stuck here because the pay you better than elsewhere, but I think it is a very bad and very sad place to work. My stomach curdles every morning before going to work and I wonder if it is worth it. Many of my peers talk in the same vein. Please consider not…
I feel the exact opposite. I love going to work everyday at Google. I get the way you describe at previous companies. Not at Google.
If this is true and the recruiter has emails to back up his case it should be a pretty easy case to win. According to the the rules: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which makes it illegal to discriminate against a person on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It should also be a massive fine.
I can't speak for this situation, but I was involved in situations with corporate crime at high levels. People were very cognizant of what was in email and what was verbal. When I considered whistleblowing -- what started as little spiraled out of control -- and looked over evidence, there was very little. One attorney at the company was fired for putting the wrong thing in writing.
The factual allegations in the lawsuit mention several times that management asked people to delete emails that related to the policies and targets. This might mean that there's no proof of these emails any more, or it might mean that the allegations are false. I think in these cases, the plaintiff has to prove things.
So just some general observations with an explicit disclaimer that I know nothing that directly relates to this case.
1. I'm personally a little skeptical about a flurry of lawsuits like this. Lawsuits can be a little... opportunistic. I mean this in the sense that they're somewhat predatory and there's a tendency to "pile on" when the other side has a vulnerability. This isn't to say that this or any other given case doesn't have merit. It's just that a flurry tends to raise the chance that any one case of spurious.
2. US CS graduates are still predominantly white males [1] [2]. Obviously there are also graduates outside the US. I'm not sure on numbers on those but it's hard to come up with a reasonable estimation given the fact that a) employment in tech is predominantly US-centric and b) visa quotas in the US artificially limit the number of non-US people you can hire.
3. The graduate figures are important for those who take the so-called pipeline view of workforce diversity, namely that if 20% of graduates in a given field are women then you can't really expect more than 20% of your workforce to be women. This is not a universally agreed principle where some argue you can and should do better than this;
4. Doing better than this seems like nothing more than local vs global optimization. For example, I've known different companies to mandate diversity targets from the executive level and some orgs will deal with this by simply hiring underrepresented groups from other parts of the same company in a classic "robbing Peter to pay Paul" type scenario. It's hard to argue that this does anything more than make some manager or director's numbers look good and nothing more.
5. Other commenters have argued that favouring underrepresented groups is illegal. IANAL but the case law on this in the US isn't so clear. Just look at SCOTUS's rulings on affirmative action eg [3].
6. While some hold the view that you can't discriminate in favour of one group you are by definition discriminating against others. This is both strictly true and too simplistic a view. Specifically, others will argue that you need such "positive discrimination" to correct against bias and historical imbalance.
7. Elements of the majority arguing that there is bias against them isn't of course limited to tech eg [4] [5].
8. One wonders, in situations like this one, that (if true) whether management's instructions (mentioned in the complaint) were a response to an executive edict to increase diversity numbers.
9. Pipeline issues aside, it's worth considering internal long-term diversity trends within a company and within different parts of the company. For example, let's say 25% new hires are women, after 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10 years how does that figure change? Does it stay constant or go up or down? If it goes down, why? This may hint at cultural issues worth addressing.
10. Being an engineer and having worked with lots of engineers I think I can fairly safely say that engineers (IME), as a group, are more socially awkward than the general population. This alone may well be a significant factor in long-term retention of a more diverse workforce.
[1] https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/upshot/dont-blame-recruit...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger
[4] https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/08/07...
[5] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-di...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
a much simpler explanation exists: their workplace sucks (ex-Googler, have yet to read anything genuinely surprising in the past few weeks)
True, but it's also a very biased view with events that take place in most of large companies (you can find these reports for Amazon, Apple, etc. etc.) And yet others seem to get a free pass while Google is targeted by wrath of HN. Why?
I work at Google. It is the most unpleasant place to work, largely because work evaluation is almost 80% politics (might be 100%). I am a senior engineer. You get stuck here because the pay you better than elsewhere, but I think it is a very bad and very sad place to work. My stomach curdles every morning before going to work and I wonder if it is worth it. Many of my peers talk in the same vein. Please consider not…
The process took a long time -- much longer than the first interview or any of my other friends. And every time I talked to the recruiter I could tell something was up. At the end the recruiter confessed there was issues at the hiring committee and a unusual event of a manager getting involved. They seemed to indicate there was a fight about me being accepted. I have a unique skill set and am very qualified to work at google. I have over 15 years working the full stack. I write drivers for Linux, and design big cloud deployments -- I have the history and the background, so I would not be a gamble on any front. So I thought it odd that there would be an issue at this level, it was only later that I figured I was not diverse enough when a intern I helped train -- who happens to be diverse did get into google.
Anyways, with all the politics going on I am wondering if it is even worth responding to a current recurrent request.
My questions for you xxcode are the folllowing --
It sucks, but are there teams I can try and get on that would not suck? Somebody at google has to be doing good things and just be excited about working on the project they are working on.
I have a good job in Texas. It pays me $150k a year. I sometimes get bonuses and have a fairly good thing going with stock (not options, but stock). Is the money good enough at google to make it worth while?
Will living in CA/MV negate any gains in pay and benefits?
Is there any way to work at this company and avoid the entire diversity thing? I just want to write code and build awesome software that people enjoy using. Diversity -- while I care about it -- is not something I want to actively take cycles out of my life to solve -- there are fare more passionate people who are better equipped to think about these issues, I would rather write software.
Please don't think I am a horrible person. We here on this planet once, and writing code what I want to do with my life -- not everybody has to be a warrior for social justice.