Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

911–920 of 1001 posts

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#911

Post by imron »

budde wrote: post #116
0xBA5ED wrote: post #23

fired from a tech company for "perpetuating gender stereotypes"... What in the world is happening right now? This is absurd beyond reason.

> fired from a tech company for "perpetuating gender stereotypes"... Fired from a tech company for publishing a company-wide memo insinuating that some of his coworkers are, on average, at a biological disadvantage for the type of work they do and suggesting that some subset of them haven't achieved their position based on merit.

> insinuating that some of his coworkers are, on average, at a biological disadvantage for the type of work they do

That's not what he actually said. In fact the memo had a chart and a paragraph or two specifically stating that taking average traits of a group of people and applying them to individuals was wrong and misleading due to large overlaps of traits between groups.

He was not implying anything about his colleagues that are already working for Google, rather he was pointing out potential biological differences in averages at the population level that possibly cause fewer women to enter tech (and hence making it difficult to get an even ratio of male/female employees).

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#914

Post by PaulHoule »

Note that the first function of a political system, democratic or not, is what Jurgen Habermas calls "The Suppression of Generalizable Interests". An alternative take on it is at

http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

What it comes down to is putting certain things on the agenda and removing other things.

Despite overflowing coffers, for instance, Google has been effectively silent about the problem of underinvestment in internet access. Every so often we get some "Willy Wonka" idea like Google Fiber or Loon, but it never amounts to anything -- in the case of Loon, Google destroyed a business that was already using the technology to deploy internet to people... for nothing.

When we look at what really matters to Google, note how quickly they mobilized when Trump tried his stupid "muslim ban". It is an ugly truth, but the overwhelming majority of immigrants who are coming to Google and similar companies are male. If anything were to move the needle on gender balance it would be gender balance for immigrant engineers, but you know that is off the table.

Or look at the housing and homelessness mess in the Bay Area. Google and Silicon Valley runs roughshod over 99% of the Earth, but in their local area they can't solve problems at all.

If we did not have a "winner take all society", it would not be such a big deal about who gets the opportunities at Google. Somebody else would be hiring all of the great engineers that Google overlooks. As it is, Google is hiring engineers just to keep them away from competitors such as Facebook.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#915

Post by pkilgore »

ImSkeptical wrote: post #903
jfasi wrote: post #896

One thing that bothers me as someone who works at Google (but is speaking purely his own opinion) is that this manifesto implies some pretty wrong things about our hiring process. In particular, it conflates diversity sourcing programs with a lower hiring bar. As an engineer who's done a fair bit of volunteer recruiting work as well as conducted interviews, my experience has been that race- and gender-specific progra…

>After years and years of working at the company I haven't heard even a whisper of complaint among anyone about the quality of people we're hiring That point is less persuasive after Google has demonstrated it will terminate people who complain - even if they do so in a reasoned manner.

"reasoned manner" != suggesting colleagues have inherent traits that make them less biologically suited to their work.

I get it. Some of the points in the memo were reasonable.

But just because the bread and cheese on your shit sandwich look delicious, doesn't mean it's not still a gross shit sandwich.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#916

Post by logicchains »

bjourne wrote: post #812
kromem wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're so concerned with the advantages of wealth and education inequality, why are we still using race (a bad proxy, given the spread and distribution around the averages - the whole point of the original document) as the determining factor instead of just asking for tax returns/education records for special programs? And regarding gender - let's consider the example of salary negotiation. Now, if you research, yo…

> And regarding gender - let's consider the example of salary negotiation. Now, if you research, you'll see that statistically women are less likely to negotiate as high a salary as men. It would make sense, given that research, to create a women-only program for teaching salary negotiation skills, right? No. It would make sense to implement other means of deciding fair compensation rather than through employer-emplo…

>Because it is not fair that compensation should be based on negotiation skills.

Negotiation skills are at least something anyone can learn, but nobody can learn to be of a different race or gender.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#917

Post by craigsmansion »

lngnmn wrote: post #842

So, Google's snowflakes are trying to place some naive pseudo-scientific and pseudo-philosophical but popular among other snowflakes compilation of current memes and fancy terminology upon objective reality by silencing a naive but not clueless attempt to remind others about some old truths.. Let's put it straight. There are obvious, hardwired evolutionary specialization among sexes of all species. Sexes are evolutio…

> There is not a single doubt that biology dominates and partially determines psychology

If it "dominates" it's inherent it (at least) "partially determines", reducing your assertion to "There is not a single doubt biology dominates psychology," which is basically untenable, scientifically.

> I am principal and scientific.

No. No you're not, unless you actually are a principal, but then it has no bearing the matter at hand. You approach is also not very scientific.

> There are evolutional and biological reasons why this or that aspect of sex differences emerged and what is for. Whatever is valid for all species applies to humans too, no matter what liberal arts graduates would say about man's superiority.

Let's cut your unsound and poorly constructed argument short here: I cede this proposition. That means, for the sake of argument, I will assume it as completely sound and correct.

Now,

explain to me, in detail, how this (now assumed true) inequality of the sexes leads to one of them being unable to code (or assume various complex technical tasks) as well as the other, purely from biological differences.

I'll save you the trouble. You can't, because if you could, you wouldn't be wildly speculating about it online. You'd be writing scientific papers about it.

Your larger argument boils down to:

-men and women are biologically different,

-there are difference between men and women

-therefore these difference must be biological

It's a fallacy. Scientifically rigorous arguments are not build around fallacies.

P.S. principled and scientific minds usually shy away from using laden and denigrating terms in their arguments.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#918

Post by slavik81 »

I'm not clear on the context it was delivered in, but that memo was pretty focused on measurable phenomena and fairness to individuals even when making generalizations. If that's what it takes to get fired from Google, there's clearly no room for discussion on this matter.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#919

Post by Corristowolf »

I believe the majority of people haven't actually READ the memo and just form their opinion based on what different websites tell them. It was actually hard to find the actual memo. Everyone is talking about it, but almost no article linked to it.

Here it is. Read it and form you own opinion. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#920

Post by lr4444lr »

postnihilism wrote: post #275

This feels like the blue and black (white and gold) dress. It boggles my mind that people don't see the fundamental and toxic misogyny in this 'manifesto'. Please have a woman you care about in your life, preferably one in tech, read this and then ask their opinion of the piece. The "treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group" sentiment of the author is fine except that we have hundreds of…

You're eloquent, but I'm sorry - you lose me at "institutionalized racism". That's a very testable thing: find the policy, directive, or law that is racist and cite it. Don't throw out the term as a kind of pervasive but subtly intangible miasm that we have to expunge from our midst like Satan's influence on 16th century New England.
Post reply on HN