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Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

reuters.com

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Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google infamously fired a male engineer for speculating on such things. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Ch...

Yup. And at the time I thought he was wrong. But even though he was an ass, studies have proved him absolutely right.

Studies have "proved him right" because he used studies in his memos! He wasn't really talking out of his ass, he referenced tons of studies irrc. Whether you agree with those studies or not is a different story. (not you personally)

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of blind programmers but don't know any personally. But I was actually talking about the reverse: dictation. I'm losing use of my arms, and even ergonomic keyboards aren't cutting it. Rehab set me up with a copy of Dragon so I can dictate, but even Microsoft Teams isn't really accessible with it, much less Visual Studio or any kind of terminal. I can see the code just fine, I just can't dictate it.

Can you dictate to plaintext (notepad?) and use an oral markup - if punctuation is the problem - like saying "bang" for "!". Then parse your input, cut-paste into the IDE. It seems very niche, which is why I'm not surprised not to see mention of it in the docs? Why did you see it as particularly curious that VS and Dragon weren't setup for interoperability?

I think my best option is to write Python scripts with Dragonfly [0] to make a Visual Studio or VS Code extension that gives me accessibility, and/or a neovim plugin to let me say vim commands efficiently.

Dictating plaintext and copy/pasting works for writing code, but navigating through VS menus and code files and e.g. running unit tests is still a nightmare. Maybe an accessible mouse would help.

It sounds niche, but Visual Studio is perhaps the most popular IDE, and Dragon is the only real option for voice access on PCs. Any programmer without use of her hands would need this. It suggests that none of the programmers on the Dragon team have really dogfooded their product, at least for accessibility.

What I find truly heinous though is the Chrome plugin. It has two stars and thousands of reviews, and either doesn't work at all or breaks minutes in. When it works it's great, but it almost never does.

0. https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#323
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sorry, but other companies and fields don't prevent this question I'm pretty certain that if I asked HR about this, they would say what Google said: Don't ask this question as it could be viewed as discriminatory. I don't think Google is an outlier here.

I don't go to HR and ask them what I'm allowed to do.

I see the problem now.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The ideology of individualism is dependent on a denial of the past as relevant to the present… Individualism denies the significance of race." -- Robin DeAngelo Robin DeAngelo, is a frontrunner of 'white guilt', CRT, and other strange sides of the woke movement. This quote pretty much sums it up, they want to put group identity first, above individualism.

I see this criticism of CRT/wokeism etc very often and I really want to address a point about people talking past each other. Proponents of CRT don't say they want to divide people based on group characteristics, they say people are divided based on group characteristics and they recognise that whilst individualists deny what is evidently true. Essentially it's the position that people are negatively impacted due to…

I'm not a fan of CRT, but you're 100% right.

The issue with CRT is that every other theory and research of this subject (eg. IQ differences) has been shut down or obscured due to allegations of racism or fear of how society would react to such knowledge. And that poses a problem. You can't even propose any alternative theory in the current climate.

Second, the same criticism applies to CRT. There is a double standard. For the sake of simplicity, let's see what Wikipedia has to say about it under the "Academic Criticism" section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory#Academic

> Farber and Sherry additionally posit that the anti-meritocratic tenets in critical race theory, critical feminism, and critical legal studies may unintentionally lead to antisemitic and anti-Asian implications.

I don't think I have to explain to anyone why this theory would have any antisemitic or anti-Asian implications, everyone has to know it on some level. You might not necessarily agree with it, but you should know why. But the most interesting and telling thing about everything surrounding the CRT is what this criticism doesn't say. Nowhere does it even mention anti-White implications. Imagine reading something explicitly focused on the overrepresantation of Jewish people in positions of power and saying "wow, this could hurt some innocent Europeans".

I agree that the divisions are already here (and pretty much always have been for that matter), and that individualists are wrong in just pretending like the problem doesn't exist. But forcing this down everyone's throats without any possibility of defending yourself will only end up in a disaster.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and what arguments are that this process is not fair? current approach challenges pure intellectual output, any other way implies bias which current system strongly avoids

If a standardized test said "what is the Yiddish word for rag?", is that test fair? It asks everyone the same question after all. But I'd bet you find that Jewish people were passing that test at a higher rate than anyone else. Obviously the biases in actual standardized tests are more subtle, but a lot of the question have an inherent cultural bias and assume some basic cultural knowledge in their test takers.

In my country exams are:

basic (mandatory):

math, country_lang, other_lang

advanced level (your choice): cs, math, physics, biology, chemistry, country_lang, other_lang, history, other...

I don't think there's wide room for questions like that.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a standardized test said "what is the Yiddish word for rag?", is that test fair? It asks everyone the same question after all. But I'd bet you find that Jewish people were passing that test at a higher rate than anyone else. Obviously the biases in actual standardized tests are more subtle, but a lot of the question have an inherent cultural bias and assume some basic cultural knowledge in their test takers.

In my country exams are: basic (mandatory): math, country_lang, other_lang advanced level (your choice): cs, math, physics, biology, chemistry, country_lang, other_lang, history, other... I don't think there's wide room for questions like that.

> I don't think there's wide room for questions like that.

You'd be surprised. There is ample research showing that even the most simple math and reading comprehension questions have cultural biases.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he needs help from someone who is disgusted by his manifesto google has a problem. This is mostly a cultural issue. Being professional is being able to work with people you fundamentally disagree with from a political perspective. But maybe Google shouldn't be a space where people discuss wedge issues to begin with, or write memos about anything on the matter.

Sure, but the fact still remains. There absolutely are people who would behave this way within google, so google's choices are fire hundreds or maybe thousands of people or fire him. It was an easy choice.

People who publicly talked about views far more extreme views than Damore are still working at Google. People can work with each other even if they don't like their views, the only reason Damore was fired was because he was dumb enough to write his thoughts in an easily shareable format rather than just a string of chat messages.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black people are currently less educated as a result of systemic racism than their Asain and white counterparts. That would make achieving 12% leadership particularly difficult, since black people are on average less qualified(on paper, at least) relative to applicants from other races.

Asians are proof the power of systemic racism to hold minorities down in this day and age is not very strong.

But Asians are being systemically held down by affirmative action and racial quotas. Proof that the power of systemic racism is very real no matter your income or class, or no matter if you're a minority or not. You are not safe as long as the cultural zeitgeist has decided so.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country exams are: basic (mandatory): math, country_lang, other_lang advanced level (your choice): cs, math, physics, biology, chemistry, country_lang, other_lang, history, other... I don't think there's wide room for questions like that.

> I don't think there's wide room for questions like that. You'd be surprised. There is ample research showing that even the most simple math and reading comprehension questions have cultural biases.

Ok, I agree that it is possible that question like that exists (e.g counting cards)

but on the other hand they appear on previous years questions as often as other (I think), thus you can easily prepare and learn how to count cards or stuff

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#330
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this[0] people can self-identify as "Black+" so if it's purely racial how could people self-identify as that? 0. https://developers.google.com/learn/certificates

You either let somebody tell you their race, or you assign them one. Which one would you be more comfortable doing?

Can you be punished for picking one that isn't assigned to you?
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