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About This Googler's Manifesto

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Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#311

Post by pacala »

_qbjt wrote: post #310
pacala wrote: post #199

> And as for its impact on you: Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just…

Wow, I thought what the author said was hyperbolic until I read this response. Come on now. How many SF Bay Area tech workers would actually assault another employee over comments posted on the Internet? How many software engineers at Google have ever even been in a fight? This "punch you in the face" thing seems to be a sticking point for most of the comments here and I think people are misrepresenting what the auth…

> [...] raise into question the fundamental capability of every woman you work with [...]

Can you please substantiate? Link to the "manifesto", https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#312

Post by mrdodge »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #262

I'm deeply troubled by the response to this "manifesto". Pitchforks are out for this guy, and when they find him, it won't be pretty. I think that's wrong. He has expressed his opinion, and people are free to confront, and denounce him all they want. But this guy might lose his job. His career. All for voicing his opinion. I don't think it matters that he did this internally. Had he stood up at a discussion in Palo A…

It's going to get a lot worse, now that these people have been forced out of power in goverment, they will turn their eye to other things.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#313

Post by am1988 »

edison85 wrote: post #278

Having read the full manifesto, I find myself agreeing with the author's thought process for a bunch of his points and clearly disagreeing with others. He presented them well, not offensive at all, and if I had a discussion with him I'm sure he seems open to change certain beliefs if presented with ample evidence. I would generally love talking to this guy. Instead everyone shames him, tells him his mostly very valid…

I'm reading it now and it comes off as another (very well off) conservative complaining about how they are oppressed and discriminated against. It's no different than the narratives peddled about white genocide or christian oppression.

> I consider myself a classical liberal and strongly value individualism and reason

I am so very shocked by that.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#314

Post by am1988 »

tibiapejagala wrote: post #144

I might partially or totally disagree with the original manifest, but this reply is repulsive. I would never want to have a "senior" like this. So much emphasis on how senior he is, how junior you have to write something so wrong. How OP's career is over. The 3rd point reads like navy seals copypasta but with HR instead. If you don't see any other way to deal with OP's views than described in this belittling rant, th…

> If you don't see any other way to deal with OP's views than described in this belittling rant

If that's how you read it then I feel like you missed the entire point.

> This is a non-statement. Replace 'engineering' with science, medicine, finance, customer service, politics, retail, programming etc., and it will sound as correct.

Again, I'm feeling like you missed the point.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#315

Post by am1988 »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #262

I'm deeply troubled by the response to this "manifesto". Pitchforks are out for this guy, and when they find him, it won't be pretty. I think that's wrong. He has expressed his opinion, and people are free to confront, and denounce him all they want. But this guy might lose his job. His career. All for voicing his opinion. I don't think it matters that he did this internally. Had he stood up at a discussion in Palo A…

Maybe he should have thought about that before he posted it. The author of the medium article is right that the manifesto implies that a lot of coworkers are less capable.

It's a grey area though.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#316

Post by int_19h »

ue_ wrote: post #260
thehardsphere wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get individualism if individuals can't own anything, including themselves?

I take the distinction between private and personal property to be important, as Proudhon and later Marx described. >There are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. “Possession,” says Duranton, “is a matter of fact, not of right.” Toullier: “Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact.…

You don't even need to go for Marx to discover that distinction, or challenge the idea that property is a natural right. It was remarked upon by that renowned pinko commie, Thomas Jefferson:

"A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant."

"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."

(Note that these are slightly contradictory; I presented them in chronological order.)

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#317

Post by am1988 »

cropsieboss wrote: post #221
Goladus wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, it has 178 upvotes at the time of posting.

Because postmodernist and neomarxist ideas are appealing to idealists dreaming of utopia. It's quite weird that an article with 0 citations, 0 proper rebuttals of arguments in the original manifesto gets so much attention. It is pure leftist circlejerk. For example, show me a single study demonstrating proper effectiveness of unconscious bias training. HR departments in FB and Google have those. Studies of the effect…

HTe original was pure conservative (oh I'm sorry, "classical liberal") circle jerk about how poor (er... upper middle class) white males are being discriminated against and are such victims nowadays. Pepper in some dog-whistle sexism and little digs at the left and you have a nice manifesto.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#318

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

untog wrote: post #308
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More or less inhumane than forcing a gay employee to work alongside someone that has publicly stated he thinks gay people should be killed? Since the original manifesto author has advocated nothing remotely analogous to that, I would say that your attempted comparison is intellectually dishonest and places you on far more morally shaky ground than him. Moreover, if " ...someone has to bear a cost when opinions like…

> I would say that your attempted comparison is intellectually dishonest and places you on far more morally shaky ground than him. Maybe you should refer upthread where someone else threw out that comparison, not me? I was replying to them with the theoretical they outlined. I don't really know how to respond to the rest of your post. Public moods have always shifted, and people's public responses have changed. It's…

> Will my views become equally offensive some day? I don't see why I would assume they will. And if they do, and I don't adjust, maybe I will deserve to be called out for it.

It already happened before in the past and it was directed against the left. Do the names "Joe McCarthy" and the "Red Scare" of the 1950s ring a bell?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

If Senator McCarthy and the Committee for Unamerican Activities had knocked on your door and condemned you for being a leftist, would you have sheepishly smiled and said (to paraphrase you own words), "Gee, Senator, maybe I do deserve to be called out for it." and quietly accepted the destruction of your life for holding a politically unpopular view? Is that truly what you are saying?

I give up. I can only hope that your movement is discredited and expelled from the left before it does as much damage as McCarthy did before he was discredited.

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#319

Post by nopatternhere »

interpol_p wrote: post #191
josephg wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, I'll bite. But, I've never heard of any research suggesting women have a different cognitive capacity than men. I read some research a number of years ago suggesting cross-culturally women had better language skills than men, but I don't know if this is still considered to be true. I can't remember reading anything in the manifesto which suggested women are less capable as software engineers. The essay did s…

> I can't remember reading anything in the manifesto which suggested women are less capable as software engineers. It does suggest this: > “I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes,” Preferences and abilities. If men are in the majority of leadership, senior, and CEO roles, what is the author suggesting about the abilities of women?

> what is the author suggesting about the abilities of women?

And we get to the heart of all this - the belief that a comment on preferences is questioning some group's ability. I find that deeply misguided, and I believe it places measurable, tangible elements THAT DO NOT MATTER (i.e. money and status) over important things that can't be measured (i.e. LOVE).

The rich man who is without love - and yes, I mean man, see Ebenezer Scrooge - is a meme in literature that is well worn. We are told time and again that money isn't everything, that there are more important things in life than money, status and achievement...

And it is true - there are more important things! Money is everything if you are starving, but once money is no longer the only issue in your life, and you are choosing between spending your time in the pursuit of more money and other things, there are many things better than more money to spend time on. Health is better than money. MENTAL health is better than money. Love and connections with others is FAR better than more money.

The general principle here is achievement and working more vs connection with fellow humans. The best illustration of this is would you rather work 16 hour days in a law firm making a million a year but have no social life, or have friends, family and a life, but a lower paid job making above the median wage? And the evidence is in aggregate, more men choose the former, and more women choose the later.

The idea women that women are lesser if they have different preferences and choose connection over money/achievement... well it is absolutely misguided. That is the preference that differs between men and women IN THE AGGREGATE, i.e. out of all people, there are more men choose achievement over connection than there are women that make that choice.

How does that make women anything other than smarter than men, in aggregate? How is a life full of connections with humans worse than one with achievement and money? I'm a man, and I have run a mile from long hours my entire life - because I want a life defined by more than just work and money. I accept that comes with reduced pay, as I am sure I could squeeze in an extra 10-20 hours of paid work a week - but that is a choice I make knowingly, consciously, and actively.

To assume that women make the WRONG choices, or that honest assessments of womens' choices on aggregates implies they are less capable is, IMHO, patronising to women who make much more nuanced decisions than men about life beyond "what will pay me the most".

Re: About This Googler's Manifesto

#320

Post by retox »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #302
smb06 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying what the guy posted wasn't offensive and also that everyone is finding it offensive. That makes no sense unless everyone is stupid.

Maybe everyone is stupid. Not really -- some are malicious, for example, this medium post starts with a bald-faced lie.

You're correct, but this story is being buried on HN. The lie at the beginning;

>about, essentially, how women and men are intrinsically different and we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers, it’s just not worth it

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