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Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

nytimes.com

201–210 of 297 posts

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#201
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, exactly. With the work frequently being the dollhouse. At my various $dayjobs, I spent most of the time building various flavours of the same CRUD (web CRUD, desktop CRUD) in dumb mainstream languages. At home, I do everything from video games to data processing to AI, in actually productive languages. The difference I see is that with hobby projects, you're at least free to make something that's actually usefu…

This reminds of a situation I faced early in my career. We worked on a network alarm management tool, and some of us used to rewrite the tool or bulk of its features. To a point we finally arrived to invent our own tools to fill up the gaps in the feature set offered by the current tool. It used to be one of the biggest reasons why we learned so many thing in comparison to the rest of the team(which was fairly big),…

> Its one of those axioms of software development I've learned, in order to do good work you have to do mountains worth of waste work.

It suggests an obvious question though: can we do better? Can we avoid having to do "mountains worth of waste work" before getting to do the "good work", or is the former a necessary prerequisite for the latter?

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#202
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that the plaintiffs in this case didn't do side projects?

Well, majority of software developers don't do side projects, especially not those in high paid difficult positions. Those people put all strength they have into work itself. Employers don't even care all that much about side projects. So, it is safe bet. This whole thread is stupid red herring. It has nothing to do with reality of working in corporation. It has zero to do with skills required in those high positions…

>>Well, majority of software developers don't do side projects

Most do. The fact that bulk of the software infrastructure from tools to top notch production software is open source says something.

>>especially not those in high paid difficult positions.

If its really about money, then there are better ways to get paid in a software company.

>>Those people put all strength they have into work itself.

Which is often a placeholder for a side project.

>>Employers don't even care all that much about side projects. So, it is safe bet.

But doing these projects does make you a fairly good programmer, and you tend to gravitate towards valuable work and hence good pay.

>>just about only reusable from teenage years is linux internals.

Bad news. Starting early matters. Want to build a good retirement fund? Want to play big leagues sports? Want to be a concert musician? Want to be a doctor? In fact want to be big in anything? Most certainly you have to start early.

>>It is basically assumption that...

Nobody made such an assumption. We only said a particular group A(mostly nerds) starts early and works hard. What the other group is for them to decide.

Note, Nerds is a group of people irrespective of gender, race, or other identity(even nationality or religion).

It just comes down to one thing. You can't progress beyond a point without work. Reservations only take you that far.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#203
post #8

One of the women suing complained that a man was hired a level above her with the same years of experience. They both had four years experience. I joined one of the big 4 eight years into my career. Similar to her I was placed at an entry level position. When I started I saw that I had the same ability as people higher than me. I made sure that I displayed that ability to my peers and manager. And what do you know, I…

Everyone who worked at Google or a company like Google knows that 90% of people do a job well below their skills. That's how it is in those places. To sue them because you have back-end skills, but you were doing front end is laughable. There are so many PhDs in ML there writing SQL queries, or PhDs in CS changing the color of some text for an A/B test. That's how it works in the best companies in the world. You get…

this is very true.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#204

Flat salaries may fix this? You basically join at the same bracket publicly. No performance bonuses and all salaries increases are directly based on years put in. Everyone joins with the same options across the board. For each male hired there must be a female hired. No roles. Everyone has the same title: "Engineer". Off sites are strictly prohibited. Is this what the lawyers want?

Haha that'd be ridiculous! Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works half as much. That being said, salaries are not determined by how hard you work but rather how much the company needs you to stay.

> Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works half as much.

Isn't that the ideal?

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/28/435583328/episo...

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd expect a lot of pro-diversity people suddenly stop complaining that there's a problem. The fun thing about making a straw-man is you make yourself immune from criticism. I can't attack this point without having to completely define someone who is "pro-diversity" (what's that even mean?), and give evidence that no one in that group has the traits you claim of ("look at this feminist, see I was right!"). More imp…

> The fun thing about making a straw-man is you make yourself immune from criticism. I don't. You just criticized me at length :). Some of it I could even agree with :). My point is, the current narration coming from "opposite the aisle of me" is, on the one hand, "gender discrimination is bad", and on the other hand, "we need more discrimination to correct for existing one". Even if we leave out that I don't think t…

> we need more discrimination to correct for existing one

I like the following analogy. Your body has cancer. The cancer is bad, and you don't want it. Obviously killing your own cells is also a bad thing, but you choose chemotherapy because it's the best way to get rid of your cancer.

How do you quickly get rid of the cancer that is discrimination?

...

I know you're itching to say, "Make everything equal!". But hold on, how do you do that? Can you ever do that? In my opinion, the answer is no.

First let's suppose we do it through regulation. The logistics involved in such a thing would be astronomical and more importantly would involve massive governmental regulation of basically all employment.

The other option is that we deregulate everything and just let the free market handle it all - wait it out till all the racists and sexists are dead! It's so easy. But that doesn't work either - humans tend to cargo cult. We haven't had slavery in this country for a long time, yet the effects of it are widespread and evident everywhere you go here. It's in the way people talk, the movies they watch, and the music they listen to (or don't listen to). You can't just shut off the lights, pretend none of that bad stuff ever happened and move on. People still walk and talk with that knowledge in their head.

More or less, we can't easily eliminate discrimination without drastic actions, and it definitely can't be done immediately. One of these drastic actions is to counteract the discrimination. In other words our chemo.

In my view, this is fine morally and not really hypocritical. It's also one of the things that's less difficult to actually implement in practice. Let me spin just one more analogy to illustrate:

Say a dude beats your face in at a bar. Completely wrecks you. Puts you in the hospital. The whole thing. Three years later you've finally regained your ability to walk. It still hurts every once in awhile but here you are. So you go back to that bar, and that guy is still there. He's gotten a lot weaker, doesn't have as many friends, but he's still there. Then he tries to mess with you again, so you punch him in the face and move on.

Are you a hypocrite if you think he shouldn't have beaten you to a pulp even though you punched him later on?

The point is that the thing we're counteracting with policies like this is so astronomically bad ("Black people are more suited to physical labor" "Women can only handle childbirth" "Women can't vote") that the policies that correct them ("favoring some black kids with equivalent records as the white ones because in theory they might have had a harder life" "favoring a woman for a position because she might have had a harder time getting there and you want to encourage more women") aren't nearly as bad in comparison.

Sure if you take the "any decision based on [race/sex/religion] is bad and always bad" then yeah, I guess it would be hypocrisy. But I'm not sure I believe that myself. Until we actually hit that mythical day of equality, we're always gonna have imbalances like that. In my eyes, it's better to try and correct them (while not actively hurting anyone of course - there's a big difference between Johnny getting into Yale but not Harvard and sending Johnny to a work camp for the summer).

These are of course debatable points. Any one could be argued about through an entire undergraduate course, but they're still arguments. I highly recommend you become more familiar with the points you are debating and the merits / downfalls of those arguments. It's much more productive than creating straw-men to argue against.

bell hooks' books on feminism are especially good for someone new to the field and interested in such topics.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#206
Google has put substantial effort into making the workplace "better" for women (at least in comparison with other companies) and somehow it is still not enough. I can't help but wonder if "enough" even exists - if a company makes an effort to hire the female workforce, promote women programmers and gets rid of anyone who can make women feel uncomfortable then what else still needs to be done? The lawsuit is not even about getting less money for the same amount of work, it's about statistics and averages!

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#207
A purely capitalist solution would be to fire all the men and keep only the women because they are doing comparable work for less pay. In a capitalist market why hasn't this happened already ? This is exactly what happened when much of manufacturing moved away from USA to china, but for some reason this has not happened in the male female salary disparity. A company can earn diversiy points and save money by not hiring expensive male engineers.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fun thing about making a straw-man is you make yourself immune from criticism. I don't. You just criticized me at length :). Some of it I could even agree with :). My point is, the current narration coming from "opposite the aisle of me" is, on the one hand, "gender discrimination is bad", and on the other hand, "we need more discrimination to correct for existing one". Even if we leave out that I don't think t…

> we need more discrimination to correct for existing one I like the following analogy. Your body has cancer. The cancer is bad, and you don't want it. Obviously killing your own cells is also a bad thing, but you choose chemotherapy because it's the best way to get rid of your cancer. How do you quickly get rid of the cancer that is discrimination? ... I know you're itching to say, "Make everything equal!". But hold…

How does class fit into your view of inequality? Is it a bigger predictor of a person's future than say race or gender? I'm curious.

> "...aren't nearly as bad in comparison."

Certainly from the perspective of rich whites, poor whites, on the other hand, are probably the least advantaged group we have today, but I could be wrong.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#209
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every single industry and craft, those with more work experience are typically paid more than whose with less. There is little difference between "experience programming during a job" and "experience programming for fun". It is the same activity. So of course those with more experience should be expected (on average) to better than those with less. Of course those who seek out more experience due to passion will (…

Tinkering in teenage years does not give you more professional experience 10 years later. It gives you a bit advantage around early 20ties. It is essentially irrelevant at 26. As technologies change and develop, that get lost and become useless. Also, imo, important predictor of how good you will be later on is more your willingness to learn tech you don't like in the beginning. If you don't have that, changes will l…

Agreed with the latter, don't agree with the former.

Tinkering gives you out-of-domain experience which subtly improves the decisions you take - both architecturally and organisationally. It gives you at least a bit of an insight of what the right tool for the job might be even if it is outside your domain.

If that tinkering is in hacking IT security, and you do CRUD app development (or project management) for a living, your app might just coincidentally avoid SQL injections or obvious buffer overflow errors. If that tinkering is in image recognition and machine learning and you are a business manager, you just might know the difference between "feasible" and "impossible" AI projects (avoiding this XKCD situation: https://xkcd.com/1425/).

Obviously you will also avoid these if you have actual professional experience in IT security or AI - but very few actually can get involved in a dozen fields professionally at once.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone who worked at Google or a company like Google knows that 90% of people do a job well below their skills. That's how it is in those places. To sue them because you have back-end skills, but you were doing front end is laughable. There are so many PhDs in ML there writing SQL queries, or PhDs in CS changing the color of some text for an A/B test. That's how it works in the best companies in the world. You get…

there is probably some kind of sweet spot where you get to do whatever really cool stuff you can think of and your company is just pretty good

Probably in R&D departments of tech companies.
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