Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#411

Post by _justinfunk » Tue, Aug 08, 2017, 4:18 AM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #401

_justinfunk wrote: post #394

A hiring process is by nature a discriminatory event. Right? You have a pile of resumes and you discriminate between the candidates during the selection process. This happens on a number of different criteria. The criteria that we should not discriminate on are sex and race. Anyone that doesn't agree with this is out of the mainstream. The issue is that if you cannot discriminate on sex and race, and 90% (made up num…

You can address an unbalanced hiring pool of qualified candidates (i.e. your 90%) by expanding the hiring pool (through various methods) until its balance comes closer to the balance of the overall population. Doing this doesn't require discriminating against anyone. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-v... for example, there are other tech companies with race balance much closer to nationa…

I think we are circling the drain of the right approach to this problem.

If Google's pool of qualified candidates were a "proper" mix of diversity, then I don't think they would need to have the practices outlined in the manifesto.

So encouraging women to get into STEM and to facilitate pulling talent from around the globe to get them into the pool of candidates is 100% the right move to address the diversity issue.

BUT, if women don't come in the numbers you need them to and your international outreach yields mostly asians... what do you do?

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#412

Post by josteink » Tue, Aug 08, 2017, 4:18 AM UTC

wildmusings wrote: post #35

The author's arguments have been completely misrepresented. He pointed out widely-believed and sometimes scientifically-established differences in the DISTRIBUTION OF traits in men and women. He said that those differences make attempts to achieve numerical parity misguided, discriminatory, and harmful. What is his conclusion about how we should behave? "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of thei…

> A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma.

From the article:

> Google’s new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance

A brand of religion with its own sheriff no less.

Who seriously believe you have freedom of speech and thought in such a monocultural place?

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#413

Post by etchalon » Tue, Aug 08, 2017, 4:19 AM UTC

engi_nerd wrote: post #268

zorpner wrote: post #25

Good. I get that HN is not into this, but this employee stated, bluntly, that they don't believe many of their colleagues should be there because of their sex. Every peer review, every no-hire, every interaction , is and should be suspect. Happy where I am now, but future interviews will include me asking what management would do about this, and termination is the only correct answer. This is textbook hostile environ…

You're not giving that a remotely fair reading. He literally calls for people to be treated as individuals while acknowledging and calling attention to traits that populations (read: large numbers of people) exhibit. I'm really having trouble finding anything to be upset about in his "manifesto". He's literally being fired for trying to start a serious conversation about a delicate issue.

The problem with the argument that "people should be treated equally regardless of other factors" is that we have a long. deep history of that not being the case.

We have numerous studies which how simple biasing factors, such as a person's name, can dramatically decrease interview rates.

Arguing against diversity policies can be coached in the language of equality, but the objective results show that the outcomes would not be.

The outrage, fairly or unfairly (it is impossible to know what's in a person's heart) comes from many readers believing that the person is not arguing for equality, but coaching an argument against it's outcome in language that assumes that goal.

For many people, they see a cheap rhetorical trick made in bad faith.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#414

Post by fenomas » Tue, Aug 08, 2017, 4:19 AM UTC

mehwoot wrote: post #243

Reading the letter, what surprised me was how political it was, framing everything as a "left vs right" cultural fight. I think if it was up to me I'd probably fire anybody on either side of that debate who started circulating shit like this. As soon as you're on that level, nothing good is going to come of it and you're just going to make a lot of people angry, which is very bad for the business in a lot of differen…

I agree hugely with your first paragraph. Debates like this are fraught with toxicity anyway, but once factionalism ("the left claims that.." and so on) gets mixed in any hope of constructive debate goes out the window. The argument ceases to be about ideas, and becomes a my-team-vs-your-team conflict.

(Worse, this then attracts the worst kind of attention from the internet as culture warriors join the fray, regardless of whether they're interested in what the debate was ostensibly about.)

Whether this takes the screed into firing territory I have no opinion on, but I definitely think that the guy's left/right posturing served to preclude any productive debate that he might have inspired.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#415

Post by naiveattack » Tue, Aug 08, 2017, 4:21 AM UTC

Thank you internets and HN for participating in our extensive experiment.

In this experiment, we monitored how we could manipulate opinions and elicit reactions by posting content on different mediums.

Unfortunately, due to the classified nature of this study, we can't really reveal more to you right now.

Also, we made a fuck tonne of money! You helped fund the whole thing, and then some!

No, you can't have the data. Really now, I'm surprised you even asked.

- The Man in the Shadows

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#416

Post by etchalon » Tue, Aug 08, 2017, 4:22 AM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #126

zorpner wrote: post #25

Good. I get that HN is not into this, but this employee stated, bluntly, that they don't believe many of their colleagues should be there because of their sex. Every peer review, every no-hire, every interaction , is and should be suspect. Happy where I am now, but future interviews will include me asking what management would do about this, and termination is the only correct answer. This is textbook hostile environ…

So should we also ask how they confront the people who feel free to pin all bad things on white males and white privilege whether relevant, provable or not? I've come across a few people from these companies and it's not that hard to come across people who have strong biases against whites and white men in particular. Sadly it's become a way to signal you're in the in-group. Diffusing hostilities isn't achieved by be…

The standard rule of thumb seems to be that it's okay to punch up, but not down.

A minority can complain about a majority, but the reverse is frowned upon. The amount of "frowned upon" is amplified by the degree to which the minority the majority impugns has been historically hurt by similar opinions.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#417

Post by trentnix » Tue, Aug 08, 2017, 4:22 AM UTC

akras14 wrote: post #408

trentnix wrote: post #339

They decided he was a witch, and he was burned at the stake. That's it in a nutshell. They won't much enjoy a world where these new rules they've created might apply to them.

While I don't agree with a lot of premises of the manifesto, I can't shake off a feeling that I just witnessed something very close to a real witch hunt.

While his premises regarding women in technology are certainly debatable, he was spot on talking about the organizational culture at a Google. He couldn't have proved that point any better than he did.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#418

Post by tunesmith » Tue, Aug 08, 2017, 4:23 AM UTC

bronz wrote: post #119

the author of the memo is completely correct and, as others have said, his memo is drastically misrepresented in the coverage it has received. he simply points out that women could have less desire to go into fields such as cs because of their biological makeup. he never says that women should leave google -- he only says that trying to reach a perfectly equal distribution is misguided. perhaps those who are red in t…

This is another maddening component - who actually argues that men and women are the same? Everyone courageously disagrees with this, but I seriously cannot find anyone actually advancing that viewpoint. It's this weird blind spot. I tried asking a few times in another thread, and the only replies I got were from people trying to debunk it.

Of course men and women are different, duh. The problem isn't that premise. The problem is the arguments people make from it.

You get the feeling that there are these legions of people that assume that liberals are in favor of diversity programs because liberals believe men and women are the same. And then these legions of people point to a study that shows men and women aren't the same, and then they feel, "A-ha! Take that, liberals!" It's completely mystifying to me.

We're not in favor of diversity programs because of a belief that men and women are the same. We're in favor of diversity programs because we know that people will use these differences as excuses to discriminate against women. This is not hard to understand!

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#419

Post by zzzzzzzza » Tue, Aug 08, 2017, 4:24 AM UTC

ViktorV wrote: post #315

What I don't get in many of the left-leaning comments is that they're basically saying that 'patriarchy'/society is the only reason why women are underrepresented in tech. In India/Russia, there are way more women represented in tech then in US. Do you think that these cultures are more welcoming/less sexist to women than US? It should be so in your world view. I suspect that the companies in these countries doesn't…

Your suspicion is basically correct, with regards to relative representation of women in tech in inda/eastern europe vs. the US. (and actually you might add some East Asian cultures e.g. China and Japan to the list of more patriarchal systems with better representation (and anecdotally, middle eastern countries)). Perhaps there is even a biological reason behind the political posturing: older males tend to have daughters. Engineers marry older.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#420

Post by tunesmith » Tue, Aug 08, 2017, 4:25 AM UTC

wyclif wrote: post #31

Fun fact: the author of the memo earned a PhD in Biology from Harvard. Google can fire him and get away with it, but it's going to be tough, very tough, for him to be falsely characterized as someone who is misinformed or unscientific. And the court of public opinion may well be more important in this controversy than any court of law.

He sure doesn't have a PhD in women's studies.