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Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
601–610 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#602I really enjoyed the well reasoned discussion. I think a lot more constructive dialog is happening now that people have calmed down. Of all the sentiments expressed in the article, I mainly disagree with the comment that Damore did the company harm. He posted his thoughts on an internal discussion board and someone else leaked this internal document to the press. The leaker did harm to Google not Damore. In fact, I t…
The leaker did harm to Google not Damore I am 100% certain that the trackiest company in the world is perfectly capable of knowing exactly who leaked it. They have chosen to protect that person, for reasons unknown at this time.
Is there some positive net benefit of Google releasing the details of the person they fired for leaking the internal information? Companies rarely mention details about firing employees for misconduct.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#603Are ten-page screeds on any subject welcome and most companies? Google was this guy's only job after academia. I value his opinions on Google and corporate life in the same way that I value the opinions of unmarried people or people without kids on those respective subjects. I wince a smile and nod and think, "check back with me in ten years when you've been around the block a few times". This is not a person to take…
Are ten-page screeds on any subject welcome at most companies?
Probably not. I blogged just today about my opinion that if this 10 page screed had been about how Google was doing the office furniture all wrong, he likely still would have ended up fired, sooner or later, for being an egomaniac who cannot play nice with his corporate overlords, basically.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
The harm would have been done even if the memo was not leaked, due to the otherwise discussed effects on google employees.
Again, only if you believe a line was crossed, or whether he wrote a well-intentioned memo with the goal of supporting and increasing diversity that had some dubious conclusions based on controversial research. He is also young and just starting his career. If this had been addressed calmly maybe he could have learned from this situation. Zero tolerance for a young man's folly instead turned him into a sympathetic fi…
It's extremely charitable to assume that he is naive enough to not understand the implications of his associations with those alt-right sites. If he had been on techcrunch or some other media platform it would be one thing but he immediately started showing up on those websites with interviews.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be honest here -- do you _really_ think there's a way to present the argument that --gasp-- men and women might be different in their abilities that _wouldn't_ trigger a meltdown? I think this memo really highlights the fact that there are Some Things You Just Can't Talk About.
No, you can't, because there isn't evidence that biological differences cause people to choose different careers. Why would put forth a theory that is opposed to a company's values of equality if you don't have proof? Most evidence points to socialized factors, not biological ones. If Damore really cares about this issue, he should study biology and make his case there. He will do more to move the debate forward from…
"Most evidence points to socialized factors, not biological ones."
I'm loathe to post in discussions like this because it's so useless, but points like this make me wonder if I'm just living on a different planet. Do you have children? Of different genders? Because literally every parent I know who has both boys and girls has the simple, non-ideologically-biased experience that boys and girls are vastly different, even if you treat them just the same. My youngest is a boy who was surrounded by pink fairy castles and butterfly coloring books until he was 2 or 2,5. And yet the moment he got his hands on a stick, he'd use it as a play weapon.
And from that observation that boys and girls are different, I wouldn't call it a stretch to assume that men and women might not be exactly the same, either. Why is this not blindingly obvious? I mean, how is saying otherwise not the very essence of "post truthiness"?
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still.
This argument reminds me of the "waterboarding is not torture" argument, both suffer from slothful induction fallacy. If waterboarding is not torture then why would you apply it to detainees to confess information they otherwise wouldn't? Equally, if diverting more energy in to finding minority candidates is not lowering the bar for them then why would you need to divert more energy to find them?
>Equally, if diverting more energy in to finding minority candidates is not lowering the bar for them then why would you need to divert more energy to find them?
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The point is to find the ones that can pass at a higher rate than you normally would. No bar is lowered, and your representation increases.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though if you read the memo carefully, Damore doesn't actually make the claim that Google lowers the bar for women in the sense that they hire women who are less capable. His complaint is that Google lowers the bar in the sense of reducing the number of "false negative" rejections of diversity candidates by paying more attention to those applications. He was calling for an end to this practice not because it was allo…
The devil's in the details on this stuff, and unfortunately we don't have the details so it's hard to say exactly how much devil there is in them. How do they lower the false negative rate? A sibling comment mentioned Google's practice of giving diversity candidates a second interview if they fail the first. This would mean if you have a false negative rate of `n` your false negative rate would become `n^2` (which is…
There's a demonstrable, statistical bias against hiring minorities that creates a higher false negative rate for them: https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-can...
Having an extra interview would seem a logical way of preventing the loss of qualified candidates, wouldn't it?
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that case you have an off-line discussion with a group of friends to validate your idea. If there seems to be a consensus, you raise the point at the next TGIF (the internal Alphabet-wide gathering every Thursday), tactfully and without making generalizations about gender and without inflammatory arguments against your perceived political leanings of the company. I was there during the whole Nest reorg/culture dra…
> In that case you have an off-line discussion with a group of friends to validate your idea. He brought it to the Google Skeptics group for precisely that reason. > If there seems to be a consensus, you raise the point at the next TGIF (the internal Alphabet-wide gathering every Thursday), tactfully and without making generalizations about gender and without inflammatory arguments against your perceived political le…
> He brought it to the Google Skeptics group for precisely that reason
That's not an off-line resource. That's a public mailing list reachable by any employee. It's not even remotely what I am suggesting.
> What point would that be?
"I believe our current hiring practices might be affecting certain candidates because A, B and C mechanism stop/hinder/disproportionally-favor X, Y, Z groups" No need for building an argument about biological differences between men and women, no reason to build an antagonistic recount of what you think the motivations are, no need to call your peers and higher ups "Leftist." State the facts, ask the question, move on.
Assuming he really cared about hiring practices (which is purportedly the reason he wrote the memo), that would've gotten everyone's attention and I can guarantee that nobody would've gotten fired.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't you go ahead and read this: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2017/08/sloppy-scien... Simply put, unless you are mindful of someone's "subjective feelings" you will never be able to have a "factual discourse" with them. People are individuals and not statistics. You can quote statistics and average all day long, but if you offend, anger, or harm someone with your words, that person will not listen to…
The situation is more dire than that link suggests. It isn't just that some people are too emotionally reactive to be directly involved in a reasonable conversation. We are currently shutting down even the possibility of a conversation among any set of a large group of people, because some people in that group are uncomfortable with it. They aren't even willing to sit out the conversation that makes them uncomfortabl…
I think this interview with 4 female engineers gave a lot of ways how that discussion could have had. Have you read it yet?
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#610> For example, students and professors I met in college that grew up in the USSR thought engineering was stereotypically women’s work.
A few generations ago, programming was primarily a woman's job in the US.