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Changes at Basecamp

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Re: Changes at Basecamp

#741

Post by cutemonster »

reducesuffering wrote: post #483
amzn-throw wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goals != Quotas. This is frequently misunderstood by people outside these companies (and frequently by people inside them too without integrity). You're supposed to meet goals without compromising on integrity or quality. e.g. you can't ship buggy messes. And you can't hire substandard employees. There are mechanisms ("bar raisers") in place to do this, at least at Amazon. I suppose I can't speak for Google, Facebook…

You're suggesting I'm playing broken telephone game, yet you're the one extrapolating your company's experience to all the other hundreds. I can't speak for Amazon's policies. But there are companies that have headcount for N people, and N/X slots will be for Y identity. Then you have companies like Twitter that literally say on their hiring boards: "Our vision for the future is clear. 50%. At least half of our globa…

They write "Our vision for the future is clear ...",

But not "Our future is clear, there will be ...".

There is a big difference.

> How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota?

They explicitly say it's a vision (goal).

(Still, goals and monetary incentives can have the same effect, it seems, looking at what thu2111 wrote nearby, about Google.)

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#743

Post by [deleted] »

zimpenfish wrote: post #547
marbletiles wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an absolute wealth of connection between more diversity and better products: it’s not that a monoculture can’t make products for everyone, it’s that it’s easier for a team that has wider representation to do so: it’s a competitive advantage for them. Want examples beyond hand driers? Apple missed menstrual cycle tracking in the Health app. NASA offered to send 1,000 tampons with the first woman in space - an…

Another (potentially fatal!) example: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200812161318.h... > Women are more likely than men to suffer adverse side effects of medications because drug dosages have historically been based on clinical trials conducted on men, suggests new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.

[deleted]

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#744

Post by throwaway0xc »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #740
throwaway0xc wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No, its not, it avsolutely is not. Yes it is, it absolutely is, by definition, logically neutral. If it's across the board "no politics", then no one ideology gets pushed, which is by definition neutrality. QED. >Limiting the scope of activism The scope isn't being limited, you have unlimited scope, but just no activism on company time. >always serves to protect the status quo. Or limiting the scope of activism alwa…

There’s a long-standing company rule that anyone named Bob has to eat lunch sitting on the floor. Some people named Bob started to complain, but some other employees liked the rule. It was causing a stir, so I as CEO decided to prohibit any discussion on the matter. Then the Bobs told me that the discussion gag was unfair. I told them that it is, by definition, logically neutral, since no ideology is getting pushed —…

This strawman is so huge it experienced autoignition.

>There’s a long-standing company rule that anyone named Bob has to eat lunch sitting on the floor.

Your logic breaks down in your first sentence. No one is gagging company internal politics that pertains to their corporate charter and mission, rules, regulations, etc. Quite the contrary, they're actually opening that up and flattening the hierarchy.

If anything your example only proves my point further (if you actually bothered to real TFA).

>QED?

QED for me yes, thanks.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#745

Post by cutemonster »

educaysean wrote: post #723
ryandrake wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even understand what "privilege" means anymore. I used to, but it now just seems to be a word that gets thrown down to try to end the conversation, whenever someone's arguing with a white guy. How did we get to this point where you can't even have a valid opinion about something if you're coming from some position of privilege?

Your opinion is valid regardless of your privilege. When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face, however, you should defer to the experts in the area who have lived their entire lives being in the seat of discrimination. Hope that made sense.

It sounds to me as if you think someone who hasn't been discriminated against, cannot have any meaningful thoughts.

As if a social worker could only help out with problems s/he had experienced him/herself already.

> Hope that made sense.

A bit, not that much

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#746

Post by vfulco2 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #191

There's a great blog entry I just read about this, "On Politics At Work". I think the author effectively hits on a real problem with a lot of these discussions. https://json.blog/2021/04/26/on-politics-at.html To some folks, "politics at work" means "endless battle royale political debates among coworkers in a Slack all day long; why wouldn't you be against that? But to others, "politics at work" means "are we paying…

Well put...

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#747

Post by dragonwriter »

throwaway0xc wrote: post #725
dragonwriter wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes it is, it absolutely is. No, its not, it avsolutely is not. > You can be a big activist outside of work, no one is saying you can't be. Limiting the scope of activism always serves to protect the status quo. The fact that the imposed limit is itself limited does not make it neutral.

>No, its not, it avsolutely is not. Yes it is, it absolutely is, by definition, logically neutral. If it's across the board "no politics", then no one ideology gets pushed, which is by definition neutrality. QED. >Limiting the scope of activism The scope isn't being limited, you have unlimited scope, but just no activism on company time. >always serves to protect the status quo. Or limiting the scope of activism alwa…

> Yes it is, it absolutely is, by definition, logically neutral

No, its not. It, by definition, favors the status quo.

> If it's across the board "no politics", then no one ideology gets pushed, which is by definition neutrality.

No, prohibiting pushing isn’t neutrality, its favoring the current state.

> The scope isn't being limited.

Yes, the a particular scope is being excluded.

> [...] company time.

That’s the excluded scope.

> > always serves to protect the status quo.

> Or limiting the scope of activism always serves to protect progressive politics, because you're not allowing conservative voices and ideas to be heard.

Sure, if the conservative position is not the status quo and the progressive one is; your preventing both (and others) from being heard, adversely impacting all that are not the status quo. To the extent your “alternative” is true, its not an alternative, just a specific case of what I initially described.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#748

Post by thu2111 »

marbletiles wrote: post #701
bingbingbong wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the implication here that Apple had no women working on the Health app, Google Photos has no black team members (and if they did, they would have explicitly checked this case?), Snapchat has no asians, etc? Or that some magic ratio would have caught these issues? There's some serious assumptions buried there that don't pass the smell test.

Yes, that is absolutely the implication. These mistakes are so egregious they're almost instantly obvious to people who know to look. For instance, the Health app tracked seemingly everything under the sun, including blood-alcohol levels. The reaction from women when it shipped was instant: where's the period tracker? If there was a woman on that team it says even less good things about Apple that they shipped withou…

If there was a woman on that team it says even less good things about Apple that they shipped without it.

So you admit it's nothing to do with diversity, then, just an ambient assumption that the needs of women should automatically trump the needs of men and women combined?

The simplest explanation for Apple's decision is not that they're all raging sexists who need to be forced to hire more women by activists, but rather that when adding features to an app they are ranked by how useful they'd be to the entire userbase. Feature development is a zero sum game - adding that means not adding a different feature. Any feature exclusively for women will have half utility by that obvious metric and lose automatically to features useful for everyone. So the real question is why would anyone expect a general purpose health app to have a period tracker? Isn't that a pretty grotesque sense of entitlement by a small handful of women?

As for the others, come on. That's exactly what I mean by ridiculous arguments. Any photo app should have a black team member who is tasked to spend all day taking selfies and not, say, fixing bugs or adding features? If some company was dumb enough to actually do that, they'd just get criticised in other ways, because such black-testing jobs would be menial low wage jobs, not highly paid and respected software engineering positions. Some of those examples aren't even oversights, like Apple's straightforward prioritization decisions or the fact that Google Translate uses gendered language when translating languages that use genders pervasively. They're just stuff a small minority of activists have chosen to get faux-offended over. And the few that remain are clearly not caused by lack of diversity awareness given you chose to cite Google Home (I'll take your word for it on the stat), a product from one of the companies most visibly committed to filling the ranks with women. They even hired a black female AI ethics researcher, so obviously it's not lack of diversity that caused the training set problems.

In other words none of the examples you cite have anything to do with "diversity" and cannot, because as you admit, you have no idea what the demographics of those teams is. You're just assuming that they must be all made up of un-caring men who never think about others, which is exactly the sexist assumption underlying all identity politics that I highlighted!

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#749

Post by thu2111 »

educaysean wrote: post #722
thu2111 wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly: who cares? The point of classical equal rights is the MLK, "my children won't be judged by the colour of their skin". The moment you ask a question like that, you are deliberately rolling back his vision by implying that a 100% male engineering group is a severe problem that needs a solution. It's not. It's an entirely expected statistical outcome given the demographics of people who study the profe…

If the status quo was that we were already living in a gender-blind, race-blind society, your comment would be correct. The truth is that we don't know if the 100% male engineering group is a result of perfectly executed meritocratic interview process or a result of systematic bias. It's probably wrong to make blind assumptions either way, but if we're going to make assumptions anyways then we should lean towards the…

I think we actually do know that.

Firstly, hiring is actually irrelevant to this because the gender ratios of most software companies are the same as the gender ratios of CS graduates, which is what you'd expect on average in a meritocratic process. A few firms like Google have higher numbers of women which they achieve by a variety of means both fair and foul, but the average company does match.

The 100% male group is a hypothetical - I've only rarely been in such teams myself and only when they were small. It's clearly possible if the team is, say, 10 people. If you get to 100 and there are no women I'd be wondering if there's something odd going on, but it's still explainable by chance, and it's very dependent on sub-field. For example if you're doing embedded programming for the oil or nuclear industries, then those industries are themselves mostly interesting to men, so you get "interest in software * interest in industry" and you can get lower numbers than pure software companies. This is often the case for industries that are hyper-competitive or risky, for instance, I've seen 100% male engineering teams a lot in the cryptocurrency space.

So if there's any debate or action to be had here at all, it's actually by universities, not companies, because company demographics follow CS program demographics.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#750

Post by cutemonster »

koonsolo wrote: post #546
motoxpro wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I think this is like saying it's O.K. to not care about climate change because we have done enough and it's not a problem anymore. i.e. It's way better than it was and it doesn't effect me so I can live my life however I want, I am not worried about the future generations that may have that problem because of my actions. In this situation, you are saying it doesn't effect you so you have the privelege of not…

You don't seem to get my point: everyone should care about the environment, and nobody should care about the color of your skin. Edit: let me be more specific. In a company, I don't want to hear "Are the women compensated the same as the men?", I want to hear "Is everyone fairly compensated?". There is a very big difference between the 2.

(Just FYI, I also actually didn't understand what you meant. Thanks for the follow up and explanation)
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