On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/06/on-managing-outrage-in-silicon-valley/

by jp_sc • 9 years ago

200 375 9 years ago

whipoodle• 9 years ago

Maybe it's okay for people to be outraged about some things.

Sure is! People can be offended all they want. Where things get really iffy is when they want 'justice'. It often means that they try to get that person fired or lambasted in front of their peers. I don't see how that's at all constructive, let alone 'justice'.

At the very least, it leads to even more divisiveness, instead of rational discussion.

As a thought experiment: have you ever seen someone change their mind or worldview as a result of being insulted & fired?

navait• 9 years ago

My manager threatened one of my co-workers with termination if they didn't take a more proactive approach towards making the code he wrote more robust. He took out specific examples of shit code he wrote, and had us criticize it and the mindset that created it. It changed how he programmed for the better and his outlook towards his job.

s73ver8• 9 years ago

As a thought experiment: have you ever seen a team work well together when one of the members has publically said that half of their team doesn't deserve to be there and shouldn't have been hired in the first place?

untog2• 9 years ago

As a thought experiment: have you ever seen someone change their mind or worldview as a result of being insulted & fired?

...but that's not why someone in this position would be fired. It would be because their publicly stated opinions about what people are and are not capable of makes their co-workers deeply uncomfortable.

We can debate endlessly (we already have, I'm sure we will again) whether firing is the right or wrong choice, but let's argue about it for the right reasons.

JoshTriplett4• 9 years ago

As a thought experiment: have you ever seen someone change their mind or worldview as a result of being insulted & fired?

It's fundamentally not about them; it's about their co-workers. Making it about them is the wrong approach.

dragonwriter5• 9 years ago

As a thought experiment: have you ever seen someone change their mind or worldview as a result of being insulted & fired?

I have see people limited in their ability to cause further harm by being fired; not all consequences are directed at reformation if he offender.

Quarrelsome• 9 years ago

But is it okay to campaign towards the goal of firing someone for expressing an opinion they feel outraged about?

Semiapies• 9 years ago

Sure!

Especially when it's so rare that it's a big kerfuffle every single time it happens in this industry.

snerbles• 9 years ago

To some, the mere expression of an outrageous opinion is a form of violence in and of itself.

Following this logic, any who express such ideas to others should be sanctioned as if they committed physical violence.

dragonwriter5• 9 years ago

But is it okay to campaign towards the goal of firing someone for expressing an opinion they feel outraged about?

It depends what the opinion is, and what job the person holds, and the relationship between those two things. The idea that the coercive power of government should not be deployed against expression doesn't mean all ideas or equal or that there are never conditions where expression should have negative consequences.

(In fact, any answer to your question implies that there are ideas that are unacceptable to express.)

s73ver8• 9 years ago

Let's be frank, here. This is not someone merely "expressing an opinion." This is someone rallying against diversity, using pseudoscience to back up claims that women and minorities are inferior, and thus shouldn't have been hired. On top of that, they ranted about how Google had not done enough to make conservatives feel they have a safe space, when the only thing Google has done on the subject is to make others feel safe at Google.

Danihan2• 9 years ago

Sure it is. Lots of people get outraged and offended by any number of things.

For instance, I'm outraged that anything related to Affirmative Action exists period -- as I believe codified, race-based laws are disgusting and an anathema to the construct of equality and equal-treatment under the law.

wehadfun• 9 years ago

White women are the biggest beneficiary of Affirmative Action. If you think that AA is a race only thing you are wrong.

sbierwagen2• 9 years ago

It's interesting to note that the only reason this is a news story is because "a Google engineer" wrote it. If the essay had been published entirely anonymously, then it would have attracted no attention at all, like a dozen similar essays.

The story is the source, not the content.

JoshTriplett4• 9 years ago

The story is not "a Google engineer wrote it". The story is "a large fraction of Google circulated and endorsed it". That's what makes this news.

jerrylives2• 9 years ago

Have there been any articles / pieces about it from women working at Google? I'd be interested in hearing that perspective.

tptacek3• 9 years ago

A large fraction of Google circulated it. Is there evidence that a large fraction endorsed it? That's not remotely the impression I get.

Danihan2• 9 years ago

Are you sure?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/1...

Justin Keller was a nobody.

sbierwagen2• 9 years ago

Read the titles: S.F. ‘tech bro’ writes open letter to mayor: ‘I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people’, ‘riff raff’ and Exclusive: Here's The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated]

A news story presents novel recent events, given context by a narrative. The title of a piece informs the reader of that narrative.

It is a given that when Breitbart posts an article about a shooting in Chicago, it's not about the shooting, it's about the narrative: Black people love doing murders. When people complain about right-wing media pushing crime stories, they're not saying that the crimes didn't happen, but that they object to the narrative being advanced.

Here, the narrative is that "tech bros" are sexists, and that SF companies are filled with tech bros, who make racist products.

(The Atlantic hot take explicitly states this: "The kind of computing systems that get made and used by people outside the industry, and with serious consequences, are a direct byproduct of the gross machismo of computing writ large. More women and minorities are needed in computing because the world would be better for their contributions—and because it might be much worse without them." Google has to have minority programmers, because otherwise Google will make sexist websites. This is something of an odd assertion-- you would figure that it would be much more important to change Google's management, but Brin, Page and Schmidt are important DNC donors, so the Atlantic can't suggest that their shares be seized.)

An anonymous essay, on the other hand, would be one where the author doesn't identify himself as a white male Google employee first, and instead just talks about the actual issue at hand. Just look at the thread here, and the one earlier, about the essay itself. Many people agreeing with the author, and yet none of them are being roasted alive on social media. Why? Because nobody's started their comment with "I'm a VP at Microsoft, and I think that..."

Without a hook for a narrative, the story would just be "sexists exist on the internet", which is very much not News.

dionidium2• 9 years ago

It's only interesting because it was said in a context where you're not allowed to say it. This is a mainstream debate that has been undertaken without much controversy by mainstream social scientists.

See, for example, this debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke:

Steven Pinker & Elizabeth Spelke | The Science of Gender & Science | Mind Brain Behavior Discussion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hb3oe7-PJ8

pnathan5• 9 years ago

What happens when the lone voice is in the right, and the mass of people are in the wrong, and all of the preponderance of current science and wisdom is against the lone voice?

It's no great stretch to find examples through history of this in different social contexts.

s73ver8• 9 years ago

If the preponderance of current science is against the lone voice, then it's highly likely that the lone voice is not in the right.

arnioxux2• 9 years ago

"Science" is often thrown around to justify things it shouldn't.

Sociology hasn't had as much success as "hard" sciences so we should distinguish between the two. (for example with the controversy around major psychology experiments being unreplicable etc)

glenstein• 9 years ago

In the history of science we are apt to celebrate singular voices that overturn conventional wisdom. What we don't see is the large number of cranks with TimeCube theories who imagine themselves to be geniuses.

The history of science has a kind of survivorship bias toward good ideas, and most people who think they're the next Galileo are almost definitely wrong.

wutbrodo6• 9 years ago

I have some pretty ironclad faith in the scientific method, but far less so in the scientific establishment. Don't get me wrong, I don't think scientists are doing a bad job and don't think I could do any better as an individual if I were a scientist. But most people's understanding of "science" goes through tons of filters that hurt its quality: statistical illiteracy among scientists, messed-up incentives in the publishing process, political pressure within research, skew in what the media is incentivized to cover, the obscene amount of dishonesty and incompetence in science reporting, etc etc.

I've yet to meet someone with such faith in science whose understanding of what "science" is goes beyond pop-science articles and things that all of their friends "know" are scientific fact.

pnathan5• 9 years ago

I think you're right. There are a lot of cranks out there. But history suggests a lot of lone voices who got ruthlessly suppressed while actually being right.

The important bit - to me, at least - is we don't run a witch hunt against the lone voices. If they are right, they should be heard out - if they are wrong, they can ignored. And, if dangerous, they can be no-platformed, etc.

naiveattack4• 9 years ago

Yes, but what happens when the voice of science is underrepresented?

Now read the grandparent comment again.

Perhaps it's just that the people who actually have the useful-science-shit to do aren't in stupid discussion threads like this one? ;)

eiriklv2• 9 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

jerrylives2• 9 years ago

These two instances are not at all remotely comparable lol

JoshTriplett4• 9 years ago

What happens when the lone voice is in the right, and the mass of people are in the wrong, and all of the preponderance of current science and wisdom is against the lone voice?

Unless you're trying to endorse that memo, perhaps you should save this comment for when that actually happens.

nostrademons• 9 years ago

It's possible to defend somebody's right to say something without defending what they're actually saying.

(Come to think of it, that's exactly what Google's official response did.)

pnathan5• 9 years ago

How would we know? In all likelihood, we'd be in the majority then too...

Are we actually right? is a good question.

Are we letting people ask the provocative questions to move forward is the bigger question that must be asked. Wherever we are on the political question.

Truth often is uncomfortable.

Now, if I say "I think the memo was wrong", could you trust me? Would I be conforming ideologically to avoid blow back... or would I really believe it? :) I leave it to those who know me or hunt comment histories to form an opinion...

wutbrodo6• 9 years ago

This is what's so insane to me about how willing people are to throw away the foundations of civilized society for short-term political victories. Especially for those who claim to be fighting for the marginalized, it should be obvious to anyone who's not a complete idiot that the marginalized are those who suffer in the long run when dissenting speech is punished.

Not to get nakedly political, but for someone who became old enough to start being aware of politics in the early 2000s, it was pretty easy to look at the GWB and Obama administrations and fall into the narrative of "oh, our side are clearly the good guys" as a kid and early in college (as I think most kids do). The last few years have made it clear to me that this amoral, either-with-me-or-my-enemy approach to politics is pretty independent of where you lie on the political spectrum. Every part of the spectrum has its shitty people and unfortunately we're in a cycle where those people are the ones dominating the discourse everywhere you look.

There's a reason wars of religion and ideology are always the bloodiest. If it's 1600s Europe and you're a soldier in a war of conquest, it's a lot easier to see the enemy soldiers and civilians as just trying to get by in the world buffeted by the same forces you are. On the other hand, if their entire existence and belief system are an affront to God, it was a hell of a lot easier for the worst and most bloodthirsty parts of the human psyche to kick in. The social technologies we've developed to handle pluralism nonviolently have been incredibly successful by the standards of most of human history. I guess all it takes is enough stupid, myopic, and/or amoral people to sacrifice the stability they engender for short-term political gain.

I see the same thing playing out (in much less dramatic fashion) among many of my nominally compassionate, kind-hearted friends. The other side isn't considered misguided, or to have a different understanding of the world (or heaven forbid, possibly more correct than you): they're just evil. Every dirty rhetorical trick to twist their words is fair game, and attempts from decent people to even point out that the other side is being misrepresented is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

It happened just this weekend: my friend mocked one of the points the essay author made, and when I pointed out that he was misrepresenting (or misunderstanding) it, his response was something like "I don't think men are the ones who need help in the world at this point in time". There's no such thing as truth or honesty to most people, just "how can I spin this to support what I already know the answer _should_ be"

pnathan5• 9 years ago

Every dirty rhetorical trick to twist their words is fair game, and attempts from decent people to even point out that the other side is being misrepresented is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

I avoid a lot of liberal "popular" sites because of this BS. It's not right.

It's become a moral situation for many people. in fairness, some of the social politics are literal life and death for certain subcommunities, so that is as deeply moral a question as it gets.

I think a lot of the reason for this is there's been a strong drift into separate parties by certain communities. so there's no diverse viewpoint in each (US) party and a consensus in-party that they can present...

E.g., if you believe trans people shouldn't be able to choose a restroom, you're probably Republican or affiliated. And if you're trans, you're probably Democrat. That's kind of a big deal in terms of public health to the transperson! Very much a moral question to them!

And that should be considered in why it's so hardcore of an issue.

tripplethrendo• 9 years ago

Couldn't agree more. The polarization I've seen in the last two years is just insane to me. I've always been pretty firmly in the center, and I feel like it's a lot of work to stay there.

blablabla1235• 9 years ago

The thing is, the guy wrote what many people think - outside of tech. It just so happens that techies happen to be very open oftentimes.

I mean, what this person wrote, I heard it on various occasions in different formulations from various people. Even a woman (a Psychologist student at that time) once told me she'd rather have a male dentist and a male president.

I imagine tech industry to be brutal for woman, but so are probably a lot of other areas like construction works, virtually anything with hand-labour involved, not to speak about the military.

Anyways, it's great that people in the tech industry speak what they think. Maybe things change faster this way.

untog2• 9 years ago

The thing is, the guy wrote what many people think - outside of tech.

I agree, but that's also at the core of my (internal) confusion about it. His arguments are not new, at all. As far as I could tell he doesn't present any new evidence to back up his argument, either. So, to those who say "it is important that he spoke out, and that we have this debate": when does this debate end? Assuming we have the debate and reach a conclusion, what happens when I post a similar manifesto in six month's time asserting another conclusion without presenting any new evidence? Surely by that logic we need to have the same debate over again? It'll never end.

"We must debate!" feels very objective until you admit to yourself (as I freely will) that you're coming to this with a preconceived opinion, and won't be content until the debate is settled in the way you think it should be settled.

blablabla1235• 9 years ago

As said before, every now and then I involuntary get sucked into this debate, most of the time the other person is drunk or feels safe enough "to speak up". (haha - of course when there are no women around)

When I'm at work, I'm always surprised how they manage to hire 0 women for pure engineering jobs. (This is not my first job by the way.) Even more why there is no real discussion about that, rather: "yeah we found no woman who fits". On the other hand there is an occasional complaint about the gender inequality. Sorry, but you cannot make progress by not talking about the topics or by talking about it but not speaking your mind.

wutbrodo6• 9 years ago

As far as I could tell he doesn't present any new evidence to back up his argument, either. So, to those who say "it is important that he spoke out, and that we have this debate": when does this debate end?

The problem is that (inside Google and elsewhere) the debate ended by fiat, not because one side made their case better; and it didn't end in favor of a side with tons of science to back it (not even close). My money is on there not being much of an average difference between the population of each gender when it comes to technical talent. But much more importantly, I'm aware that the science is far from conclusive on the topic, since socialization can be pretty different to untangle. The argument at places like Google is that looking at demographic differences in a population and deciding that it must be caused by discrimination is just assuming that nothing else could possibly contribute.

"We must debate!" feels very objective until you admit to yourself (as I freely will) that you're coming to this with a preconceived opinion, and won't be content until the debate is settled in the way you think it should be settled.

The irony is thick in this sentence. How do you not understand that if both sides claim the other does this, _the one that's actively trying to shut down scrutiny of their claims_ is by far in the weaker position?

ladygagaga• 9 years ago

"Even a woman (a Psychologist student at that time) once told me she'd rather have a male dentist and a male president."

Just because "a woman" said it, does this make this statement true?

blablabla1235• 9 years ago

No, I think it's not true. But I find this very weird and in my opinion this proves that it's actually not a tech industry problem.

0xdeadbeefbabe5• 9 years ago

I don’t think it made much sense, and what I did understand of it seemed very poorly argued.

As someone who forms opinions, I care more about the argument than how poorly it was argued. Is it biased, or even racist or sexist, of me to have such a view?

Edit: I wish the author of this piece sounded less frightened.

jff• 9 years ago

I'd be frightened too if I was writing an article on Techcrunch that could potentially be seen as supporting the memo too much, since as we've seen that's the sort of thing that gets people fired once Twitter finds out about it.

JoshTriplett4• 9 years ago

He is one individual in a company that employs more than 72,000 people. Why has Silicon Valley spent the weekend talking about him

Because we're not talking about a memo posted by one random engineer that got the reaction it deserved for declaring a large fraction of his co-workers sub-standard engineers (among the myriad broken things in that memo). That would have been a story for all of five minutes.

Instead, we're talking about how a large fraction of a major tech company quickly and enthusiastically endorsed it and circulated it.

"Hey, finally someone says it ought to be OK for me to denigrate my co-workers, treat them as sub-standard engineers and sub-standard humans, and propagate junk science to prop up my prejudice! I feel validated!"

That this is even remotely a popular sentiment, rather than something that gets you treated like you just said "the earth is flat", is the story here.

Dude20182• 9 years ago

Well you cant have positive discrimination and claim it's meritocracy. It's a shame it casts a negative light on diversity people who actually joined Google through effort rather quotas.

jblow4• 9 years ago

Did you read the memo? It doesn't seem like it.

geofft5• 9 years ago

I have read the memo, and this seems like an accurate summary. It's phrased in words that sound reasonable, but the ideas aren't reasoned, and it's a particularly common trick to use reasonable words to express unreasoned ideas to fool those who only skim a text.

fireflash384• 9 years ago

If you have an environment where anything contrary to the prevailing viewpoint is either stifled or decried as sexist/racist, you drive people to the only people who accept them: the extreme fringe.

SamReidHughes2• 9 years ago

"for declaring a large fraction of his co-workers sub-standard engineers"

Are you blatantly lying about the content of the memo? Like, I wouldn't think so. I think you're hallucinating your own meaning to it. Would you mind explaining the thought process that lead you form this representation?

seppin• 9 years ago

I think you're hallucinating your own meaning to it.

Welcome to politics. A single event merely kicks off a discussion that people want to have, not actually debating what was said/done.

It's a boring game to play over and over.

toxiccwm2• 9 years ago

It seems pretty clear that you either didn't read the memo, or you had a preconceived reaction that prevented you from absorbing what it actually said. It's a shame, I normally enjoy your posts because you are conscientious and even-handed about technical matters.

It's very important to remember that statistics reify to probabilities, so that statistical statements about groups can be true while individuals don't match the statements perfectly. That's how the math works. IOW, saying that in general women have less interest in tech can be perfectly true, and it simultaneously offers zero denigration toward any individual woman's ability or interest.

I'm taken aback by how many obviously smart people miss this, particularly in computing, since it seems fair to assume lots of you took statistics classes at some point.

I also take heavy issue with your idea that saying women have less interest in developing technical abilities is equivalent to calling them sub-human. There is an entire world outside of tech, and in many facets, women have greater interest and ability than men. Why is it so completely impossible for people to accept this clear empirical imbalance in this one particular field?

peacetreefrog3• 9 years ago

Definitely, I think your 2nd paragraph is the thing most everyone is missing. He basically says exactly this in the memo.

dws• 9 years ago

What's your source for "large fraction"?

AlexCoventry3• 9 years ago

It's claimed in internal documents excluded from the gizmodo story that in an anonymous survey approximately 36% of Googlers largely agreed with the essay. Without knowing the survey methodology it's basically impossible to interpret that result, though. E.g., how was the survey advertised within Google? how many respondents? what were the actual questions? was any effort taken to prevent repeat votes? to ensure that only people who'd actually read the document voted? The only info is a couple of pie charts.

Links to the leaked documents are available via Google.

kristianc6• 9 years ago

The major elephant in the room here, which the memo doesn't seem to address, is that as late as the 1960's, computer programming was seen as a natural career for young women. Has biology changed that much in the last fifty years?

dudul4• 9 years ago

Maybe the industry has changed.

kristianc6• 9 years ago

Without a doubt the industry has changed - it has more men in it.

The question at hand, I guess, is, have the tasks that one would be expected to perform as a computer programmer changed over the last fifty years?

Or has the hiring process - which even most male programmers are happy to admit is "broken," adjusted to favour men over women?

Two of the things that have been suggested as causes have been hiring tools focusing on puzzle solving / whiteboarding, and job applications focusing on finding "culture fit" and an ideal "programming type"

It's not hard to find male programmers who, even when gender is taken out of the equation entirely both admit that a) whiteboard interviews and culture fit is a thing, and b) is a terrible way of choosing people, so perhaps Occam's razor suggests that this is the cause rather than an inherent biological difference with an obvious counterexample?

geofft5• 9 years ago

This is the one place where I actually do agree with the author of the essay: computer programming is now seen as a high-status field, so it's worth it for men who seek high-status careers to displace women and construct rationalizations. It wasn't high-status in the 1960s.

0xdeadbeefbabe5• 9 years ago

Ahem, lab coats. They wore lab coats in the 60s.

chrisco2555• 9 years ago

Operating a computer in the 1960s was arguably more high-status. Computers occupied entire rooms and were operated mainly by military, government, and academic institutions.

CalChris6• 9 years ago

My dad programmed computers in the 60s. He wore a coat and tie everyday. He worked for, among other places, NASA. He drove a Jag, several Jags. I wear a tie at funerals and only then when forced.

mnglkhn23• 9 years ago

In the sixties you would type punch cards and make sure you typed correctly so that you don't mess the batch run.

EDIT: it was more of a secretarial type of job. And women would socialize with other women on the job.

The point is that aside from the title, the IT industry then is in no way what we understand by IT industry now.

kristianc6• 9 years ago

Women clearly aren't cut out for the brave new world of statically typed languages.

geofft5• 9 years ago

And today you build CRUD apps and get paged to reboot servers.

(Also, uh, I feel like "make sure you typed correctly" is a special case of "detail-oriented," which we just had an article yesterday trying to claim that men are better at because autism is more prevalent in men.)

0xdeadbeefbabe5• 9 years ago

I'm wondering why this happened too. Have you already determined sexism caused it?

Edit: I just want to know the history, and I'm not looking for rhetorical weapons.

kristianc6• 9 years ago

A couple of the suggested theories are that the tools designed to select applicants changed to focus more on logical aptitude tests, and on finding the right "culture fit."

Another argument which I have seen is that the marketing changed to focus more on men and boys, and so the narrative changed to "personal computers are a thing for boys". Here's an Apple ad from 1985 often used to support that argument:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxNjx_VWJ8U

Personally, I find both of these arguments plausible. You don't have to look too hard to find engineers who don't think tech hiring works very well, and yes, that advert does exclusively talk about boys.

I don't think "sexism" caused the current imbalance any more than I think Google's algorithm is "racist" when it shows racially objectionable content.

I think it's a case of a rule being arbitrarily applied and having an unintended and unforeseen consequence over the far future. And if that's the case then its a legitimate and noble endeavour to try to fix "tech hiring" so that it does find the best person for the job irrespective of gender.

thanatropism4• 9 years ago

At one point calculators were rows of women performing rote calculations. Early programming was similarly dull/full of detailed work that went through successive waves of abstraction.

This is (also) a sexist stereotype, but maybe just maybe women are drawn to detailed work (say, needlepoint knitting, picking berries) while men are drawn to broad, imprecise work (such as selling insurance policies or chasing antelope). Maybe women are better at punching BCD numerical integrators for problems brought down from Feynman and Fermi, while men like coming up with a whole new language that compiles to PHP.

"Women" and "men" meant as generalities and not in the least implying that within-group variation can't be larger than between-groups variation.

kristianc6• 9 years ago

My issue with this is that the classifiers always seem to change, and that no-one can ever seem to agree on what the relevant biological classifiers are and how they apply.

If men are drawn to broad, imprecise work, why are more men not marketers (tech or otherwise)? Or, if women are more "creative" as the memo implies, then why wouldn't women be more suited to coming up with a whole new language that compiles to PHP?

And, centrally to it, if tech hiring is broken on so many levels, why does it get it right in terms of gender?

mcguire5• 9 years ago

"Early programming" was essentially systems and embedded programming.

nancye• 9 years ago

The chart from this article is worth looking at:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

It wasn't just in the sixties - women's participation in computer science was growing until the mid eighties. As a woman who's helped other women learn to code, all I can say is that the interest is certainly still out there.

toxiccwm2• 9 years ago

No one who is serious about this doubts that there are women who are interested in tech and able to acquire the skills. The key question is how many women have this interest, absent any worries about matching the number to men perfectly. Even asking that question apparently causes a very interesting reaction.

Houshalter• 9 years ago

I recall reading a study somewhere that showed by High School, there are about the same percentage of girls interested in computers as the percentage of women in the tech industry. This article seems to present the same hypothesis, that girls are less likely to have access to a computer and develop an interest in programming.

If this is the case, then the gender imbalance has nothing to do with sexism in the tech industry or hiring practices. Google's efforts to hire more women is doomed to failure if there aren't an equal percentage of women coming in the first place.

chrisco2555• 9 years ago

Even in 1970 huge disparities existed: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_325.35.a... Shows that in 1970, women were 13.6% of computer science graduates. That rate increased over time, peaking in 1984 at 37% only to begin dropping off over time to its present 18% rate.

bassman90002• 9 years ago

This is blatantly misleading. computer programming was mostly typewriting back then.

mcguire5• 9 years ago

Whereas now it's mostly moving a mouse around and clicking.

OoTheNigerian• 9 years ago

Silicon Valley controls a lot of the world's communication and we should be really worried if silencing of unpopular opinions is the order of the day.

As a "minority" I perhaps disagree with a lot of what this person has written but my reaction to it will be to counter his arguments with a better one rather than go on to silence him.

I have already written about this somewhat during the past elections.

https://medium.com/@oothenigerian/trump-v-clinton-silicon-va...

cm21874• 9 years ago

And calling "fake news" any opinion they disagree with. I find it pretty problematic that Facebook wants to police the political debate. Kind of like if gmail started blocking emails sent to a gmail account if it disagrees with its content.

yesbabyyes• 9 years ago

Kind of like if gmail started blocking emails sent to a gmail account if it disagrees with its content.

I'm pretty sure that gmail's superior spam filter was one of its big initial selling points?

steven777400• 9 years ago

This is basically a given/open intention.

There was an HN thread a week ago [0] wherein Google indicated they were using new metrics to identify and remove "terror content". The metrics include input from a variety of groups. One of the top HN comments said, "Those groups have very specific agendas. They shouldn't be allowed to block articles which disagree with their agenda." [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14903370 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14904016

Animats• 9 years ago

That was me. I want to hear from the other side.

My main beef with Google on news is that they're terrible at provenance. I want to see the original source, not the pundit echo chamber. But the pundits probably generate more ad clicks.

losteverything4• 9 years ago

< But this groupthink terrifies me when it’s used to bully people for exercising their right to free speech. How will we know what people are truly thinking if we rush to silence them?

This is called growing up.

We dont need to know how everyone thinks. We dont want to know either.

We tailor our words to our audience. We avoid saying or typing dumb things.

We only say what we really feel to our confidante.

These outwardly stupid writings are simply that: bad childish judgement.

caseysoftware• 9 years ago

Let's be honest. Many companies and people - such as yourself - don't want dissent. And that's fine. You'll have total agreement and get a lot done.. for a while.

But then the clueful people will leave and be replaced with yes (wo)men who know what productive work looks like but are incapable of actually doing useful things. A great organization that makes leaps and bounds will turn into an okay company that grows by a couple points a year.. and then get wiped out when the new thing/idea comes along.

losteverything4• 9 years ago

The author used the word "terrified" groupthink bullies. I say it is not a fear as being grown up means outlandish words are understandable ( ie not grown up)

Its not about dissent...

I put opinion texts in the same category as amazon reviews: the first few are not to be believed.

0xdeadbeefbabe5• 9 years ago

We dont need to know how everyone thinks. We dont want to know either.

So ignore it?

You must hate graffiti.

losteverything4• 9 years ago

I need to know how my relative thinks, not my neighbor's sister.

Yes. Tuning out people what i do.

walru2• 9 years ago

I tend to refer to Chistopher Hitchens on this topic. >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM

CalChris6• 9 years ago

That's nice but how does what Hitchens says apply here?

The Manifesto writer apparently still works at Google. No one is silencing him. A whole shit ton of people are disagreeing with what he says. The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. No one is enforcing his silence, though in CA, Google as a corporation could dispense with his employment at will.

Are you saying that we shouldn't disagree with him, that we should be silent, and that you'll cite Hitchens for that? Really?

chrisco2555• 9 years ago

Growing up is being able to hear an opposing viewpoint without automatically dismissing their intelligence or morality. Growing up is understanding that no one is immune from the influence of their peers, upbringing, or background. Growing up is engaging in a constructive conversation instead of shaming someone into silence or unfriending or firing someone in a knee jerk manner. Growing up is accepting and appreciating our differences in thought and understanding that the vast majority of people actually mean well.

Are there limits to this line of thinking? Sure, if someone is being a completely disrespectful asshole, that's when they deserve to be shut down. If someone puts forward a thoughtful essay...even a half thoughtful essay...even if that rocks you to your core...growing up is realizing that even your values are not absolutely correct.

Discussion is the only way we ever get to engage with other points of view. Discussion is an invitation and opportunity to be persuaded otherwise.

losteverything4• 9 years ago

The dude was fired. Bad judgement.... Not some significant philosophical issue here..

I bet a 45 aged techie would know better and still have a job

bkeroack• 9 years ago

Hacker culture used to trend towards libertarian ideals: free speech absolutism, cyberpunk freedom, etc. Now we have a huge mass of people at Google forming a rage mob to punish someone for expressing an unpopular idea. Should people lose their livelihoods and be blacklisted from the industry because you disagree with them? (see also Brendan Eich)

drewrv2• 9 years ago

Most people don't want to work with jerks, and in a libertarian ideal would be free to choose whether to do so.

Most companies choose to get rid of jerks for a ton of sensible reasons. In a libertarian ideal they'd be free to choose who to hire/fire.

Large groups calling for someone to lose their job is totally in line with libertarian ideals. Nobody is calling for government regulation, this is just the (employment) market at work.

shaftoe2• 9 years ago

That's all well and good, but one of the core instincts of libertarianism is a deep distrust of angry mobs.

I don't think the SV crowd gets how reasonable the author looks to everyone else and how unreasonable the angry rants on Twitter look.

Dude20182• 9 years ago

Who is the majority at Google though? You might be surprised that it is silent and the other kind of jerks would have to leave.

burntsushi• 9 years ago

Misunderstanding libertarianism to mean "whatever the market does is just" is a common straw man. Just because libertarianism says that large groups calling for someone to lose their job is legal doesn't mean that all libertarians must necessarily believe that such a thing is moral or even right in every single case.

sidlls2• 9 years ago

The software industry still trends toward libertarianism. A tiny slice of it in a specific area does not in some marginal ways on a small subset of social issues.

As a leftist, I find the notion that SV, northern California, or the likes of Google, Facebook, etc. have a left bias to be hilarious.

chrisco2555• 9 years ago

Anyone from outside of California would see SV as heavily left leaning. You have people protesting Google buses, Berkeley riots over conservative speakers, anti growth liberals preventing new construction, while simultaneously decrying the lack of affordable housing and gentrification, and plastic bags are the devil.

Meekro• 9 years ago

"If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking." -- Paul Graham, What You Can't Say [1]

"And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company, causing other people to get up and say “wait, is that right?”" -- senior Google guy, in condemnation of the essay [2]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html [2] https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

hncens0rship• 9 years ago

SV/YC culture is extremely toxic, and people hate having that pointed out to their faces.

edit: sv/yc are toxic for how they actively shame outsider opinions, then headhunt the individuals who put said opinions forward. from sama's what i heard from trump supporters, "Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried about getting “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him”. One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she’d lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter."

like for instance on this website, where flagged & downvoted comments lead to rate limiting. sorry guy i can't respond to, it's the mods' fault. minority opinions get to say 1, maybe 2 things, before being silenced. controversial threads are flagged or removed by dang and co from the front page within an hour. ever have a convo with a conservative on here, where they just stopped responding to you? was probably silenced by the moderation team.

this discussion is flagged to obscurity, while the stupid circle jerk post about "google engineer breaking his bubble through global travel!" is on the front still.

http://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-heard-from-trump-supporters

johan_larson• 9 years ago

Toxic how?

sillysaurus32• 9 years ago

I don't think it's fair to lump YC culture in with SV culture. YC is based in SV, but it seems to be an island of reasonableness.

gjjrfcbugxbhf• 9 years ago

It is interesting how the grandchild responses to the responses to this post have been flag killed...

CalChris6• 9 years ago

Neither YC (you probably meant HN) nor SV are toxic.

naiveattack4• 9 years ago

I really like the "What You Can't Say" essay. Interestingly, what it says is not that speaking out is bad. It says that you must weight the benefit of speaking out to society, to the cost to yourself. It says you know what, sometimes it's ok to pick your fights, to be a coward, or to turn a blind eye to the destruction of the good in society. I agree that sometimes it's important to be selfish.

This means that I can avoid the short term cost to me, but what about the long term cost?

Every time you stay silent, you are complicit in the foolishness and irrationality in society. Every time a mob silences an individual and you ignore it, you lend power to the mob, and power to the idea of a mob in the mind of society.

You lend power to the idea that the louder you shout, the more correct your idea is.

And it's the ideas that make our society.

Here's an example of where this is going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-nvNAcvUPE . The rabbit hole goes deep.

I am worried that even HN, a crowd that prizes itself on being intellectual, is so easily swayed by virtue signalling and shouting loudly (see comments here and on other similar threads). If these rational minds are so easily swayed, what about the larger crowd that thinks even less for itself? These centres must be held to a higher standard or we risk corruption of everything.

Your choices make a difference, choose wisely.

guelo• 9 years ago

So you like free speech except when people use their speech to call out speech they don't like?

Let's stop bullshitting, this isn't about any core principles, it's just another battleline in our ugly politics.

EddieRingle3• 9 years ago

One of my first exposures to this "manifesto" was on Twitter with someone starting a thread with "Google has a Nazi problem." The majority of the other responses I read either attacked the author, dismissed the entire text in whole, and/or refused to actually argue the paper's points because they saw them as so ridiculous or "obviously" wrong.

I read the paper. I don't see at all how it relates to fascism, Trumpism, or whatever you want to call it.

I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination.

If there were factual inaccuracies in what the author wrote, why not discuss them? Why not use high-quality sources to validate your argument? I wish it was the opposite, but I don't have the time to research the psychological/sociological perspectives on these issues. Human civilization has grown thanks to being able to specialize. I specialize and (hopefully) make contributions in one field, but I depend on others that have specialized elsewhere to provide knowledge and resources I can depend on.

bbctol• 9 years ago

Because you were on Twitter? The most annoying thing about this back-and-forth ping-ponging of increasing outrage is that everyone, on both sides, only reacts to the silliest arguments. Sturgeon's Law holds up pretty well for hot takes, and the majority of anything written on an issue is likely to be bad. If most of the responses you read struck you as irrational, that's a function of the infrastructure that sends you information more than the quality of either side.

EddieRingle3• 9 years ago

There were quite a few Medium posts as well. But no, I completely agree with you. I've discussed with others recently about how I'd love to have a tool or place where I can search for a given assertion and see the (scientific) evidence for and against it, as well as related assertions and opposing assertions.

And I'm not just talking about being able to "Google it". If I use Google or a general search engine then I have to wade through who knows how many links of ambiguous quality and/or bias.

abhi3• 9 years ago

Whether there exist biological/psychological differences between sexes that affect career choices is a discussion that needs to be had in an academic setting rather than a political setting as the author sought to do (read the first section).

Secondly, it does not belong in the work place where it is rightly perceived as an aggression by the female coworkers (Telling them the bar was lowered to recruit them, they are inherently inferior to men at the job etc etc.)

Edit: To all the downvoters - I'll be charitable and assume that you are just subconsciously biased and not outright sexists. To see your bias in this situation just try to imagine that 40 years back some employee working at the Google of the day wrote such a manifesto against positive discrimination in favor of African Americans, citing all sorts of statistics claiming how they are lazy, lack commitment etc. Would you guys have wanted to 'hey let's talk about it' as well?

rcoveson10• 9 years ago

Was the bar lowered to recruit female or minority candidates? That's not a rhetorical question and I don't presume to have an answer to it. It was, however, the subject of the original memo, which suggests that some policies or proposed policies exist that lower standards for diversity candidates in the author's opinion. One example is, in the author's words: "Setting org level OKRs for increased representation." If such policies do exist, is it not okay to acknowledge their existence and argue for or against their merit?

As to "aggressions", I would challenge anybody to find a quote from the memo that could be considered aggressive. There are likely scientific inaccuracies, as with any hastily written and/or poorly cited piece. But I think the author did, on the whole, as good a job as can be expected at staying academic in tone and content. Lampooning him as aggressive seems disingenuous.

grey-area2• 9 years ago

Since most of these threads are pretty content free, and you asked for it, here's a rebuttal, by a woman who's good at math.

https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slideshow/embed_code/key/3...

Of course men and women are different on average, but are they different enough to justify the massive disparity in tech? No.

EddieRingle3• 9 years ago

Thanks! However after looking through the slide deck, it seems that the author tries to argue that because mathematic ability isn't so important in CS, biological differences can't explain the disparity between the men and women in CS. That's a quite a leap, I think.

If CS doesn't involve a lot of math, what does it involve that might be impacted by biological or psychological causes?

(P.S. I went to a STEM high school and I know plenty of women who are absolutely stellar in mathematics and science, so I know that's not the issue here.)

AlexCoventry3• 9 years ago

That is a lazy slide deck. From the paper it cites (http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1990-14384-001):

It is important for us to know that females begin in high school to perform less well than males on mathematical problem-solving tasks. Problem solving is critical for success in many mathematics-related fields, such as engineering and physics. In this sense, mathematics skills may continue to be a critical filter.

It speculates that this may be because

the content of problem-solving items on those tests may have heavy representation of masculine-stereotyped content, which has been shown to produce better performance by males in some studies, although results on the issue are mixed

So the Figure 1 the slide uses from the paper has smeared the critical skill, from a software-development perspective, across a large set of other math-related skills. The results of the paper with respect to that skill are inconclusive, not surprising since it's a 27-year-old meta-analysis. Surely there are better results to cite by now?

arnioxux2• 9 years ago

Rather than looking at the math ability distribution as a proxy, why not look at coding competition ability? They are pretty objective since an autograder doesn't know your gender and they are predictive of whether you can pass a tech interview since it's the same format.

In that case, even at the IOI level (high school, so 14-18 year old kids) women are already severely underrepresented: https://www.quora.com/How-has-female-students-participation-...

You see the same thing at the college level too (for example topcoder where they isn't even any possibility for a sexist team selection bias since anyone can just register and compete).

In some sense, it makes it not tech industry's fault. It's a failure of our education/training pipeline where we are not training competitive women even from an early age.

naiveattack4• 9 years ago

Ugh. It doesn't matter how good your math is if your model is wrong.

Here's an outline of what I believe to be a useful model, and some useful questions to ask, and experiments to run in real life to change things.

                +-------------------+
                |                   |
                +                   |
          +---->X1+---+             |
          |           |             |
          |           +-->Q         |
  M+------+           |   +         |
          |           |   |         v
          |           |   +--------+W
          |           |             ^
          +---->X2+---+             |
                +                   |
                |                   |
                +-------------------+

M = male / female X1 = math ability X2, X3 ... Xn = other factors (analytical ability, ability to work in teams, ability to understand real problems, etc, also bias of interviewers against women) Q = performance on interview questions W = performance in real life work

The slides, and most peoples argument is based on the model where there is only one factor math ability, which is why people go 'oh but that doesn't account for it / the disparity is so small'.

The important question is how do all the factors ADD UP?

Now,

If Q does not correlate with W, fix your interview questions first.

Then, if you want more women to do well in the interview, well, ... -- the wrong approach is to compromise the integrity of the interview, which compromises the company's business, and which is demeaning to women, although you could use this as a proxy to make the interview more comprehensive -- the correct approach is to investigate X1, Xn factors and train to remove these discrepancies earlier on way before the interview itself, if we decide that we want to. biases in the interview processes are only biases when removing them improves the correlation between Q and W

Another thing to do is to change the nature of the work itself. In which case the factors and interview questions will change accordingly. Play to peoples' strengths!

The nature of the work must include the performance of the team including the individuals as there may be a benefit to representation when it comes to solving problems of a crowd with varied people.

Interestingly, the Google article covers a lot of this, and even suggests some changes that can be made.

A large number of factors can quickly add up even if the individual factors as small.

I welcome comments from the more knowledgable, but I feel that a lot of knee jerk reactions here are just taking individual statements from the argument and loudly saying NO, or saying well there's no difference here.

PyComfy• 9 years ago

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians. Edsger W.Dijkstra, EWD498

orangecat• 9 years ago

Of course men and women are different on average

Many people would disagree, and some would have you fired for saying that.

As far as the presentation, it accurately notes that as far as we can tell, the average difference in ability between men and women is very small or zero. But there is compelling evidence that men and women do naturally differ in interests (the "people vs things" thing), which if true would directly lead to unequal representation in various fields.

splintercell2• 9 years ago

I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination.

Because all positive discrimination is negative discrimination to someone else, so obviously when you are against discrimination you should be against positive discrimination too.

drngdds• 9 years ago

That's overly simplistic. If you know with good certainty that negative discrimination against a group is pervasive and manifests itself in a certain way (say, hiring bias (though I'm not arguing that this is the case in a particular instance; that's a separate debate)) it makes sense to have positive discrimination to counteract that.

RangerScience4• 9 years ago

I didn't see your sarcasm the first time.

blablabla1235• 9 years ago

It's great that the person stated his opinion. I regard him much higher than hypocrites who think and act the same, but pretend to be 1000% pc.

It's not necessary to tediously counter-argue every single argument the author made. I'm sure you don't expect people to counter-argue overly long badly written texts by various political ideologists from today or the past. I'm convinced it suffices to just argue why summary is wrong or rather the opposite is true.

As a matter of fact, other people have done this work for us, so instead of arguing it suffices to do a literature research. (I'm sure you know how to google feminism and that you might have an hour or two time to watch Youtube) But I'm happy to bring my own crude arguments:

- people, both male and female, oftentimes don't do things because they think they are not able to do them

- teachers have a bias towards encouraging certain stereotypes

- the whole environment pushes certain behaviours and interests on people

Speaking for myself (being male) my Physics teacher said nothing when I told him in class that I'm going to study Physics. He was encouraging the other people who planned to study that or an Engineering subject, not me. Even my father discouraged me from studying it because he thought my grades where not good enough and that I wouldn't be that kind of person. Still I managed to study very quickly and successfully. During my studies I also learned, that my thinking is different than other peoples'. I think more in pictures, whereas my peers in Theoretical Particle Physics rather thought in texts.

At work I often get overtalked and still deliver over-average results because I emphasise being polite, use proper argument and I look 10 years younger than I am. This really sucks and this proves to me that if you are female, you are basically screwed if you want to do something engineering like because even Engineers don't act analytically but emotionally based on prejudices.

blusterXY6• 9 years ago

tediously counter-argue every single argument

I haven't seen a single criticism of the paper that even recognizes the author is referencing large-scale incontrovertible research involving the Big-5 personality model (the giveaway is the use of terms "agreeability", "conscienciousness", "neuroticism"). Instead we get what you offer: off-hand casual assertions that there must exist research which runs against large-n and replicable science-driven studies using the only mainstream and empirically-supported model of personality that seems to work.

Basically, this makes criticisms like yours on-par with climate change denial in the sense that they either fail to grasp the point being made or offer personal observations on irrelevant points as rebuttal. It is bad news for Google either way, since the author is correct to point out among many other things that high levels of "agreeability" are demonstrably bad for anyone to have in corporate environments, and if this affects men in the same way it affects women then why are the solutions gender-excluding? Anyway, perhaps you should research the Big-5 model if you aren't familiar with it: very interesting new research coming out on it continually.

rhapsodic7• 9 years ago

This really sucks and this proves to me that if you are female, you are basically screwed if you want to do something engineering like because even Engineers don't act analytically but emotionally based on prejudices.

I think you should brush up on the meaning of the word "proves".

smsm423• 9 years ago

At work I often get overtalked and still deliver over-average results because I emphasise being polite, use proper argument and I look 10 years younger than I am.

That surely sucks and should not happen to you, or anybody. However, it happens - and it happens to many people that tend to be introverted, shy or just tend to be conflict-avoidant. You'd be surprised how many such people are among males. Not every male is a stereotypical hyper-aggressive alpha.

if you are female, you are basically screwed if you want to do something engineering like because even Engineers don't act analytically but emotionally based on prejudices.

I find it somewhat disappointing that you just made judgement about millions of people working in certain area because you've had some bad experiences in one place with a handful of people - most of which probably didn't even realize their behavior is counter-productive and would be ready to accommodate given proper tools - such as meeting setup with explicit way of ensuring everybody has an opportunity to participate and somebody who is more extroverted and verbal does not hog the scene. There are many known methods to do this and many people who are trained in doing it, one only needs to be willing to look it up and use it. I would think it's much more productive approach then rendering a wholesale judgement on the whole field and declaring it hopeless.

I would say approach of "if you're female and want to Engineering, you should be ready to overcome some challenges, and here are the tools for doing so and for those wanting to help in this" is a much more productive approach.

TimTheTinker• 9 years ago

Here's a blog post that provides some support for the OOP's viewpoint (esp. as it pertains to STEM careers).

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...

It seems there's good evidence that on average, biology affects career preferences to an extent. (Preference differences were even shown in 2-day old infants and (with a rather large standard deviation & n=41, iirc) primates.

The OOP's argument, to me, seemed to be primarily against institutionalized discrimination (e.g. affirmative action), which seems reasonable to me.

Not that status quo is OK. But there are probably better ways to help -- like programs aimed at introducing girls to computer programming, for example.

RangerScience4• 9 years ago

I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination.

I don't think it works that way. This version is problematically simplistic: I have +10 and you have -2; now add Affirmative Action and I've got +8 and you've got +2. I'm still not receiving negative discrimination. But, you're also missing the follow-on effects; specifically:

1) People who are not actually deserving on their own merits, but were getting in due to the privilege boost, are no longer present.

2) People who are actually deserving on their own merits, but were not getting due to other disadvantages, are now present. Overall merit of my coworkers goes up; I'm now working with better people and so get better/faster myself.

It didn't start as a zero-sum game; it's not going to end up as a zero-sum game.

Remember the myths of the meritocracy; success is not limited to the deserving, and the deserving are not limited from failure.

ameister144• 9 years ago

That's not how affirmative action works. Using your example, for most of the population, there is no detraction from their score. It only comes into effect if you have +1 and they have 0 or +1, and it becomes you with +1 and them with +2.

If you had +10 and they had 0, you would stay at +10 and they would go to +2, taking the place of someone else that only had +1 and leaving you alone. For you in this case it isn't a 0-sum because you never lose.

For the people on the edge, it is 0-sum because they are on the edge of not getting the position. Any advantage given to someone else removes them from contention.

PKop• 9 years ago

It relates to Trumpism because this is why Trump won:

People are sick to death of speech codes, wrong think, collective mob mentality enforcing what is and isn't ok to talk about and which opinions you have to hold to be in line with acceptable thought in media, corporations, silicon valley, education, etc.

As you stated, the facts of the matter don't have relevance here. And if he was wrong, why not discuss it rationally and unemotionally. Or even disagree and move on.

But no, now he's fired for having the wrong unspeakable points of view that do not fall in line with the state religion of mandatory gender quotas.

artursapek• 9 years ago

Why are people so outraged at this guy? I read what he wrote and it honestly sounds like he's trying to be helpful. It's at least polite. The knee-jerk "SEXIST!" reactions to him come off extremely self-righteous and immature.

There are a hundred other male-dominated careers and I never, ever hear women complain about not being equally represented in them. Why? Because they're not attractive careers.

dudul4• 9 years ago

In addition to career attractiveness, the thing is tech is an easy target for the modus operandi. Companies in tech deeply need to have a good image and reputation. When your business model is B2C and you're targeting growth at all cost you can't afford a boycott campaign on Twitter, or a few blog posts on medium about sexual harassment, etc.

Other mostly male-dominated industries do not have this characteristic. Do construction companies care about PR? Do financial companies care? Do oil exploitation companies care?

cm21874• 9 years ago

I am not sure Uber users really care about sexism at Uber when it's 2am, they are outside of a bar and need to find a cab. I don't think users will switch away from gmail or google.com en masse because of the male/female ratio in this company. In fact outside of the microcosm of the Silicon Valley and its satellites, I don't think these issues are drawing that much attention.

cm21874• 9 years ago

And hundreds of female dominated careers that no one seems to find problematic. In France, judges or doctors are predominantly female. These are high skills/high responsibility jobs. I don't see anyone claiming this is a discrimination.

mc32• 9 years ago

Another thing is people are outraged that the engineer seems to denigrate a whole group of people as not as good engineers, and the eng is doing groups a disservice but when people bash "whitemaleness" you don't see the same reaction of, well, please don't lump all while males into one group, don't denigrate a whole group.

A noticeable issue is in google and other tech cos it's totally okay for people to virtue signal against white males, even Asian males. Any other group and you're treading on very thin ice. You're likely to get summoned to see an HR rep.

InclinedPlane• 9 years ago

Right, he's just asking questions, what's so harmful about that?

He's "asking" whether or not an entire category of people deserve to be in his field. Which means he is actually questioning whether an entire gender deserves to be allowed to be engineers. That is on its face extremely offensive and damaging. Imagine showing up to work today in silicon valley as a female engineer. Imagine having spent years, decades, busting your ass to get a job in a field you've been passionate about since you were a child and here some asshat out of left field can dangle your entire career out over a precipice in front of the world like some circus act.

That's the real problem here, the problem of entrenched misogyny and tribalism in the industry so deep that it means everyone who isn't a white skinned techbro has to constantly validate and re-validate (and re-re-validate) their own existence on an ongoing basis. White dudes have the luxury to call into question the validity of the careers of hundreds of thousands of other people with just a few words, but they never seem to have to prove their own worth. That's the problem here.

The industry, the world, is on an un-level playing field, with those who are at a disadvantage at the edge of a cliff facing a steep slope to get further from the cliff. Those higher up sometimes ask "but do they really deserve to be here? what if we just push them off, look how close they are to the edge, it would be so easy". This is not ok.

kinkrtyavimoodh• 9 years ago

Which means he is actually questioning whether an entire gender deserves to be allowed to be engineers.

No, he is not, and your choice of words like 'deserve' and 'allowed' to add intent that wasn't present in the original is unfortunate.

It's NOT a question of 'permission', so it's not about who is allowed to be an engineer and who isn't. He is specifically questioning whether positive discrimination to ensure there are equal numbers of men and women engineers at Google makes sense, if there are innate differences in the degree to which men and women DESIRE to be engineers.

nyxtom• 9 years ago

Change is hard for everyone with any systemic bias in the game. Outrage is a byproduct of that systemic bias and comes from a primal level need to eliminate a percieved threat. It's quite natural of a reaction. But it only proves the authors point overall.

Nevertheless, someone can have a seemingly innocent and accurate observation such as: there appear to be less women in tech overall and we seem to be forcing policies which appear to reduce the overall quality of our performance. Some of this may be subjective, "quality" for instance.

His conclusions and assumptions may or may not be accurate and may not make a difference in moving the needle forward. Some might be accurate on some standard deviation level. But he doesn't deserve to be fired or harmed for putting out his opinion.

It is natural to want to be outraged by something that is interpreted as a threat and there is significant historical context for doing so. Hostility towards women working at all as one example. Or perhaps for instance, the "bro"/"frat" culture of silicon valley being pretty rampant. A side effect of hiring people straight out of college perhaps?

The only way to be constructive in this is to continue to challenge the status quo. Violent outrage does nothing but prove the point that we are incapable of getting past any systemic bias to make our case heard.

I appreciate the effort to try and question the effectiveness of a policy and question the bias of a percieved political echo chamber. If there is historical precendent (and I claim there is) that refutes the underlying argument, then state those clearly.

One such example is that women have repeatedly mentioned exiting the field because of how they are typically treated by their peers. It is a bit ironic that the author mentions tribalism as a problem at Google because exclusivity of women, bros promoting bros, and the overall bias is quite obvious in the industry. Another commenter mentioned this here, but the obvious historical context for programming and computer science being a natural fit for women in the early days. Social tribalism and the echo chamber indeed has everything to do with the problem, but not in the way I think many are implying. To wit, I actually think that also approaching diversity of thought would be beneficial to Google - perhaps even help eliminate the same homogenous bro culture; just as much as it might help reduce progressive bias or any other systemic bias that plagues the community from hiring diverse talent.

russelluresti• 9 years ago

Regarding the "is it okay to fire this engineer" argument the author is making - here's what I'd ask the author. If you were managing the team this person was on, would you feel comfortable placing a female engineer on the team to work with him knowing the he fundamentally believes women are inadequate engineers?

That answer should be "No."

By that alone, that engineer has created a toxic team environment.

You can't put a female engineer on his team, he can't work across teams with other female engineers, he shouldn't be interviewing potential female engineers given his obvious bias against them, etc.

If this isn't a reason to fire someone - what is?

SamReidHughes2• 9 years ago

"knowing the he fundamentally believes women are inadequate engineers?"

He doesn't believe that at all, and I'd like to hear why you think he does.

bassman90002• 9 years ago

You've clearly misrepresented his views, and probably haven't read the thing at all. His point is against positive discrimination trying to even what he perceives is an statistical reality: less women apply for the job for biological reasons.

The fact that there are less women applying doesn't mean you can't find one suitable for the job, and one that's better than any other candidate applying for it.

mnm17• 9 years ago

This idea that all opinions are equal and need to be respected is ridiculous and needs to stop. Politics is real and political opinions and actions have real consequences. Not all political opinions should be respected. In fact, it's our duty as citizens to evaluate and mock / scorn the opinions of others that we see as toxic. No one is protected from this and people that think they are, are feeling entitled to something that they do not deserve.

Protections of free speech apply to government actions only. This isn't a free speech case. Google can do whatever it wants, including firing the poster of the manifesto. If Google, for whatever reason or no reason, doesn't want such thinking in its organization, it should have no qualms about firing the poster. There is no safe space, except from the government, for political opinions. The poster should know that by know. People have been fired for way less. Many companies would not want a toxic person like that in their midst and that's perfectly fine. It creates a toxic workplace and brings everyone else down. That's a great reason to fire someone.

jblow4• 9 years ago

I find pretty unconscionable this line of rhetoric, which I see a lot lately from people on the left: "this isn't a free speech issue, because it's not the government doing the censoring".

I want to live in a society that embraces liberal values like freedom of expression. Preventing the government from encroaching on those values is a good idea. But if we then go and clamp down on those freedoms everywhere else, then it won't matter that the government doesn't do it -- nobody will be able to express themselves freely anyway.

This seems to be the society that the 'progressives' want and it disturbs me enough to have completely alienated me from that movement, and I am far from the only one, so I don't know why they aren't stopping and questioning the efficacy of this philosophy right about now.

If we are really a society that embraces liberal values, then we want those values to be upheld throughout the society, not just in the part explicitly controlled by laws.

mnm17• 9 years ago

So then the government should step in and provide protections against his firing? Should they tell Google, no you can't fire this guy even though you don't like him and he's bringing down the morale of your whole workforce? Should that apply to someone who might actually be a neo-Nazi or become one during an employment term? Should Google be forced to hire / unable to fire people tattooed with swastikas or ones that verbally support ISIS or any other number of despicable positions?

And how is the government going to choose the right side of enforcement here? Company A wants to fire an employee for X and now we have government intervention to the utmost degree. Yeah, that's exactly the kind of society that "embraces liberal values like freedom of expression." No one has a right to a job or to not have their opinions trashed because they're stupid, cruel, or whatever they may be. If you're complaining that corporations have too much power, I agree, but that's a completely different point.

rcoveson10• 9 years ago

Not implying that I agree with anything the author said, but could you give an example of a "toxic" quote from the original memo? I'm confused because your comment makes it sound like we're talking about some vitriolic diatribe, which isn't the case at all.

Honestly, this whole thread could use more quotes from the original text. It's disturbing to me how much meta-conversation is being had about the author and his email without real examples. One of the biggest failings of the memo was its lack of citation where it was most needed; can we not hold ourselves to a higher standard?

mnm17• 9 years ago

That's really up to Google to decide in this case. My personal opinion on whether his writings are toxic is irrelevant. It seems a lot of people are outraged by it, both in and out of Google. If Google does decide that this is toxic, even if just from a PR point of view, they should have no problem firing the guy. That's my point. Expressing opinions is not an action without consequences.

thescribe• 9 years ago

I agree as long as your ideas are equally mocked. Otherwise your position boils down to "No one should be able to disagree with me as long as I say the topic is sensitive"

mnm17• 9 years ago

It's up to others how much they mock my ideas. No one can guarantee equality in the mocking, but yes all people should be free to mock, disagree, or respond however they wish to my ideas.

fnovd• 9 years ago

I read the memo, and compared to the stuff I read from the real "deplorables" (on 4chan, The_Donald, etc.), it was pretty tame.

Yes, many of his ideas are backwards and unjustified. At the same time, many of his arguments were perfectly sane (e.g. silencing all dissenting opinions leads to an increasingly toxic and divided culture). If you want people like him to actually change their minds, you have to be willing to hear them out first. You can't show someone where they went wrong if they're too scared to tell you what they think in the first place.

Sexism in the workplace clearly exists. We've seen it manifest too many times for any rational person to deny it. At the same time, many of the initiatives that SV companies pursue to combat sexism are treating the symptoms rather than the cause. Googlers should try to make sure that they are consciously fighting their unconscious biases when hiring, but changing your hiring practices isn't going to eradicate sexism. Many of these diversity "action-plans" are more effective at improving a company's PR than they are at actually combating sex-related discrepancies. They become self-serving, even though their goal is noble. The author of the memo was trying to get at that, but that message was lost due to his problematic views on biological determinism, among other things.

warcher7• 9 years ago

This is increasingly my concern-- There really seems to be a prevailing opinion that racism and sexism are just fine when directed towards white men. You can drag a white guy for pretty much any societal ill you like on the internet these days, and while there are some pretty great points to be made with respect to blaming a lot of modern society's problems on its principal architects (old white dudes), this is no way to win hearts and minds.

We're currently suffering through four years of self-imposed punishment as a result of being a bunch of judgmental assholes in pursuit of a goal that any reasonable human would accept as self-evident-- that people deserve to be treated fairly and without prejudice, no matter their race, sex, gender identity, et cetera. That the American Dream is available equally to all Americans.

I spend a lot of time offering feedback to people in a professional capacity and I am frankly shocked at the level of discourse I see on the internet from progressives. If I pulled this kind of shit at work I'd be finished, because I don't see any way I could possibly be effective communicating an idea to anybody in this fashion.

Almost as if the media doesn't really give a shit about justice or equality, but rather generating rage-clicks and internet lynch mobs to move advertising inventory. :-\

generic_user7• 9 years ago

> We're currently suffering through four years of self-imposed punishment as a result of being a bunch of judgmental assholes in pursuit of a goal that any reasonable human would accept as self-evident-- that people deserve to be treated fairly and without prejudice, no matter their race, sex, gender identity, et cetera.

If leftists/liberals wanted everyone to be treated fairly without prejudice of their race or sex then they would not continually push for the expansion and entrenchment of race and sex based affirmative action programs which deliberately exclude people from employment opportunities, scholarships, networking opportunities and many other essential resources.

The goals and the means are contradictory. If you abandon the goal of equality of opportunity as the left has for the more dubious goal of equality of outcomes then your create a system that treats people unequally based on there race and sex. And furthermore, a system that artificially transfers burdens and hardships onto select races while giving others races 'privileges' and opportunity.

No 'reasonable human' will ever accept exclusion from employment because of there race or sex. And that is exactly what is happening to many qualified and ambitious people at this point. The pool of disaffected people is only going to grow until these polices are changed to reflect a meritocratic model based on objective qualifications.

sidlls2• 9 years ago

There really seems to be a prevailing opinion that racism and sexism are just fine when directed towards white men.

White men benefit immensely from our position of privilege. The notion that "racism" and "sexism" against white men exists in our society (the US) is just completely out of alignment with the facts as they are.

Your statement is roughly analogous to someone opining that restraining a prison guard from beating inmates is tantamount to imprisoning the guard.

This isn't to say that white men aren't victims of discrimination (race or gender-based), but only that this sort of victimization is highly context-dependent and not at all systemic. It's not on the same level as "racism" and "sexism" as it applies in this context, as these two things require a significant power imbalance. White men have no shortage of advantage on the balance of power.

mseebach• 9 years ago

A lot of these plans seem to fundamentally misdiagnose the issue. Investment banking has way better gender diversity numbers than Google, but (having worked neither at Google nor in an investment bank) it seems highly unlikely that it's because "bro-culture" or agressions, micro or macro, are somehow less prevalent there.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/wall-street-bank-diversity-201...

ubertaco2• 9 years ago

If you want people like him to actually change their minds, you have to be willing to hear them out first. You can't show someone where they went wrong if they're too scared to tell you what they think in the first place.

I agree with you that this minimum amount of maturity should be the standard (though, again, I think it should be the minimum standard).

However, this amounts to being the guy who will let you finish your sentence, but isn't actually listening, they're just waiting for you to stop talking so they can say "you're wrong because..." without having heard anything.

Maybe it's better not just to make people think they can speak up, but also to make an effort to actually listen when they do.

rhapsodic7• 9 years ago

No matter what side of this debate you're on, I don't think you can argue against the notion that there is only one side of it whose adherents can feel completely free to express their opinions or argue their case without fear of retaliation. Many stupid, unsupportable statements have been made by people on the left side, but I've yet to see much in the way of internet rage mobs formed against them.

I think if google tries to punish the manifesto's author, there needs to be a massive backlash. Perhaps a grassroots effort to lobby the federal government to bust them up as a monopoly. It doesn't matter what, just cause them pain and suffering through whatever legal means are available.

Suppose, for example, once Yonatan Zunger's current employer becomes public knowledge, that company was inundated with phone calls and nasty tweets until they decide that keeping on the payroll is not worth the trouble. Would that be fair? I don't think so, but it would no different than if the manifesto author is outed and fired for expressing his opinions.

rhapsodic7• 9 years ago

The parent of this post is getting a lot of upvotes, and a lot of downvotes.

jmull• 9 years ago

Fight angry outrage with threats of angry outrage?

It's hard to see how that makes sense.

Personally, I hope Google ignores the angry people on all sides and does the right thing. I think it's ok to have principles and standards and to stick by them when the situation is tough. (Otherwise, what's the point?)

rhapsodic7• 9 years ago

Fight angry outrage with threats of angry outrage?

It's hard to see how that makes sense.

Not threats of angry outrage, actual angry outrage. The left's tactics should be used against them, in greater degrees, until they cease using those tactics.

andkon8• 9 years ago

Let's be super clear: if this guy gets fired, it would not be because he expressed his opinions. It would be because he has abhorrent opinions that will forever affect his ability to work with women, whom he has decided are inherently incapable of working at Google.

Fang_• 9 years ago

women, whom he has decided are inherently incapable of working at Google.

But that's not at all what he wrote?

Moshe_Silnorin5• 9 years ago

It is tempting to reduce an argument to the most uncharitable caricature imaginable. To counteract this, image I transported you to a world where there was not a subconscious misogynistic pressure keeping women out of programming and women chose not to become programmers because of some combination of average differences in personality and variance in ability. What would this world look like? How would it differ from our own?

dionidium2• 9 years ago

The summary you've provided here leaves me with no confidence that you understand even the very basics of the topic at hand. Your apparent level of confidence and outrage, in light of that fact, is truly remarkable.

ameister144• 9 years ago

Exactly. It would be because he expressed the wrong opinions. If he expressed the correct opinions, he would face no backlash.

I do honestly get what you're saying - nobody is going to want to work with that guy. However, if he possessed the opinions and did not voice them, he would have been fine. So, it's not because he has these opinions that is the problem, simply that he expressed them.

schimmy_changa5• 9 years ago

This sounds true, but is actually incorrect. Whenever women speak out on social media, they get at the very least abuse, but also often rape threats and death threats against them. That is retaliation, plain and simple.

That's just the loud stuff. There's also the quiet "oh she's too much of a firebrand" or "oh she won't fit into the small team because she might call people out for their casual sexism" that happens all the time.

rhapsodic7• 9 years ago

This sounds true, but is actually incorrect. Whenever women speak out on social media, they get at the very least abuse, but also often rape threats and death threats against them. That is retaliation, plain and simple.

Rape threats and death threats are illegal. They should be reported, investigated and prosecuted. (As an aside, I've seen many instances where women claim to have received rape or death threats, with no mention that they reported them to the authorities. I find that perplexing.)

If by "abuse" you mean garden-variety insults and name-calling, well, that's been one of the left's go-to tactics for a long time. And women have certainly engaged in it plenty.

I'm referring to waging public campaigns to have a person fired or otherwise professionally, personally or economically harmed. The left has done this many times to people who have dared express wrongthoughts publicly. And it has had a chilling effect against others who might harbor similar wrongthoughts and are thinking of expressing them publicly.

So far, there's been no downside for the left for employing these tactics; only upside. That needs to be changed. They'll continue these bully tactics as long as they carry no risk.

I want to see this change. I want to see leftists who gin up rage mobs find themselves facing one themselves, more often than not. I want to see companies who capitulate to the demands of leftist rage mobs get besieged by an even more vocal and organized rage mob from the right.

In short, I don't like rage mob tactics, but the only way to fight against them effectively is with opposing rage mobs.

carnifexetal• 9 years ago

One side is free to express its views at an institutional, public level. Entire corporations can express support for ill-founded political views to much praise. The other side is condemned for doing the same.

s73ver8• 9 years ago

The guy has just alienated over a third of the company. Likely any of the women on his team don't trust him anymore.

tptacek3• 9 years ago

Why is it interesting to you that one side of this debate doesn't feel free to express itself? This debate has that in common with plenty of other debates, from the legitimacy of ISIS to the criminality of child pornography --- both of which are debates that have happened in some form on HN, if you think I'm just cherry picking. Sometimes these dynamics form simply because there's a clear right answer, and we're repulsed by the implication of the wrong answer.

existencebox• 9 years ago

I'd ask you to read some of my past posts that brush up against this subject matter. I consider myself aggressively moderate, but if you look at the "results" of what I considered rather unoffensive thoughts, you'll see that they were met with almost immediate silencing.

First; it's a bit disingenuous to paint it as a white vs black; since much of the substance of the debate to my eyes is the nature of the intervention you chose, not "is there necessarily a problem", but given that, I think it's very fair to say those on the spectrum of opinion short of "full unflinching support" have felt a chilling effect as of the last few years. Granted I can only speak for myself, but to suggest that differing opinions on the greys of implementation could be perceived as "repulsive" is an excellent and apt example of how far the discourse has already fallen. It's on both sides, frankly. Extremely polarized with dogma abounding. I don't know how to fix that problem, unfortunately.

x0x0• 9 years ago

Manifesto dude: Women/Blacks are too stupid to be engineers

Women/Blacks: Fuck this guy

You: Why are those women/blacks being so rude?

11thEarlOfMar2• 9 years ago

Likewise, are they different enough to justify the massive disparity in nursing?

As of 2011, 90% of nurses in the US were women[0]. That's even more skewed than tech. Moreover, the average income of a nurse in Silicon Valley is $100k. To my knowledge, there is no outcry or movement to bring more men into the nursing profession.

[0] https://www.census.gov/people/io/files/Men_in_Nursing_Occupa...

GVIrish• 9 years ago

That's kinda whataboutism though. Yes there is a disparity in nursing, teaching, garbage collection, whatever. How is that relevant to tech?

The issue in question is that women (and minorities) are underrepresented and sometimes experience discrimination/unfair treatment in the IT industry. Why is that, and what are some solutions to that? Do we need solutions to that?

If the nursing profession addressed gender disparity in some way that can be applied to tech, then that is worthy of inclusion in this discussion. If not, it's not particularly relevant.

URSpider94• 9 years ago

There, in fact, is a movement to bring more men into nursing.

http://www.rwjf.org/en/library/articles-and-news/2011/09/mal...

Quotes from the article: "Through this initiative, called 20 x 20: Choose Nursing, it awards scholarships to undergraduate and graduate male nursing students; recognizes excellent nursing schools for men; and has created a poster advertising campaign designed to appeal to men."

“One day, men might actually make up 50 percent of the nursing workforce, in a similar way that women have been able to enroll and work in law, engineering and medicine,” Lecher says. “That would be true gender inclusion and balance.”

And, there are some really good reasons to have more men in nursing -- as nurses take over more and more primary care duties from physicians, it's a really good idea to have gender diversity in providers, especially for sensitive issues like prostate care and STD's.

mcguire5• 9 years ago

Slightly more up-to-date data: http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/human-capital-and-risk/...

There is, indeed, a movement to bring more men into the nursing profession.

"Although all of the benefits of becoming a nurse would plausibly outshine any kind of challenges nurses face...there are still reasons that prevent men from eagerly pursuing a career in nursing. Even today, despite the growth in healthcare, nursing is still perceived as a field that is less prestigious, and so requires less training and education. One male student, named Gillis, noted that a recent graduate of Stanford, who was interested in a nursing program, was told, “Stanford grads don’t become nurses.” There were also students, ones who excelled in school, but were also told something along the lines of, “You’re too smart to become a nurse.” Also, there’s that old sense that men still feel as if nursing is a female profession, and so men choose to pursue a field that’ll be viewed as more appropriate for men.

"Of the nearly five hundred [male nurses] who participated [in a survey] 73 percent claimed that negative stereotypes of men working as nurses realistically contributed to the shortage, 59 percent noted that what might deter men was that nursing has always, especially in previous generations, been seen as a female profession, and the rest, 42 percent felt that men lacked male models and mentors within the field."

http://everynurse.org/men-entering-predominantly-female-care...

https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2017/mar/01/w...

Even more, men have some advantages in the nursing profession.

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2015/03/124266/male-registered-nur...

https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/blog/2014/04/why-do-...

https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/blog/2014/08/women-i...

muninn_• 9 years ago

And nurses get paid well too. You can also point to well-paying construction jobs and the like. I think (and I'm sure I'll get obliterated for saying this) but it's easier to support getting women into "tech" because they are high paying, physically easy jobs and they are super cool. Nobody thinks being a dock worker or a plumber is a cool job, even though they are very accessible with minimum post-secondary education (also notice more women go to college than men?).

Impossible2• 9 years ago

This is constantly brought up as a counterpoint to women in tech on HN and it seems like no one that uses this argument ever does any research. Trying to get more men in nursing has been a thing for a very long time, in many ways its like the inverse of tech. A quick Google of "men in nursing" would show you a ton of resources and opinion pieces that look like a mirror of women in tech initiatives. Just because you aren't aware of the struggles of a given field because you aren't close to it doesn't mean they don't exist.

With nursing it's very clearly a social issue. Nursing is seen as a women's job even though having more male nurses would improve the quality of health care.

There are also other female heavy professions where there it is seen as important to bring more men in to increase diversity. Generally anything that has to do with working with children (childcare, especially teaching). In education getting more male teachers, especially minority male teachers is seen as important to provide young men with role models.

geggam• 9 years ago

Yet with constant and proactive pushes to increase women in tech and men in nursing it doesn't happen.

Ever think maybe men generally dont want to be a nurse and women generally dont want to be a nerd ?

sctb2• 9 years ago

Let's please not re-ignite this one again (and again): https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20nursing&sort=byPopul...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14950209 and marked it off-topic.

mcguire5• 9 years ago

I'm a little confused when he writes, "Yet a newer form of discrimination is starting to greatly alarm me, and that’s discrimination against anyone with a point of view that’s deemed offensive to the tech majority."

This has been the case for as long as I've been in the industry. Heck, it's probably older than the industry. Simply saying, "there’s still far too little diversity" has been enough to get you mocked, downvoted, shouted down, and generally dismissed for decades. There's nothing at all new about it.

asciicircum2• 9 years ago

Could someone opposed to the arguments the manifesto makes explain to me what quotes caused them to strongly dislike it?

Reading the reactions to the manifesto I'm left feeling like I'm taking crazy pills. I must have read a different manifesto.

AFAICT the main idea of the manifesto is that biological differences between men and women account for part of the representation gap. This seems to be perfectly logical and fair to me. Whether the explained part is significant or just a fraction of a percent should definitely be discussed. The available version of the manifesto not having its sources makes this a lot harder though.

The text of the post is reproduced in full below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.

If your offense is with the manifesto misrepresenting the amount of the gap explained by biological differences I can relate to your point of view and this post is not directed at you (which quotes of the manifesto lead to this impression would still be interesting to hear).

If not, I would really like to understand where you are coming from. The manifesto does not seem sexist (e.g. representing women in tech as inadequate) to me. Some quotes from the manifesto to support my claim:

I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes.
Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business
Many of these [biological] differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority.
I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

Please help me understand.

CalChris6• 9 years ago

Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

He's telling this to a $650B company. And then just to cover for himself, he says:

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.

And then:

My concrete suggestions are to: De-moralize diversity

But my favorite is:

Stop alienating conservatives.

asciicircum2• 9 years ago

I don't want to put words in your mouth and would be happy to hear more of what exactly you disagree with in these quotes. Nevertheless, here's my take:

> Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.
He's telling this to a $650B company.

I assume your reaction is towards the "bad for business" and I agree, without any supporting evidence he is not qualified to tell google what is right.

And then just to cover for himself, he says:
> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.

I assume you see a conflict between striving for diversity / equal representation and opposing positive discrimination ("Discrimination to reach equal representation").

Looking at the context of the quote I think his argument is consistent though: Assuming biological differences account for a part of the representation gap, it is unfair to use positive discrimination to reach 50/50 representation. At what ratio fair representation lies depends on how much the biological differences explain for and as long as we don't know that, we don't know how much positive discrimination is fair.

> Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

I don't think I understand your pov enough to answer quote 3 and 4 but would be happy to see you expand your opinion on them a little.

peacetreefrog3• 9 years ago

The problem is bringing up biological differences (even just in terms of groups and allowing for lots of individual overlap, and even in this case, when the differences aren't nec better or worse, just differences). It's a non-starter to many people, particularly on the left (see the Bell Curve).

One the one hand, I sort of get it, given historically people have used biology/similar arguments to justify a lot of awful things. If Hitler was around now, it'd be sort of disgusting to ask people to engage his argument on its merits (this is where some of the Nazi language re: this manifesto comes in I think).

But, when it's presented like it is here, making clear that individual variation is much greater than differences between groups (e.g., he's not talking about existing female engineers at google or anyone else in particular), stressing that diversity/human dignity/worth etc are all paramount even if there are group level biological differences/trends. Then I think the lynch mob/monoculture/not engaging reaction is in the wrong, and the reaction to this very much proves one of the guy's main points. But that's my two cents.

11thEarlOfMar2• 9 years ago

>...feeling like I'm taking crazy pills...

Include me as a fellow confused person. My read is a bit more succinct: "We value people who are different, but, we don't talk about what makes us different."

I am not good at hints, subtleties or reading between lines. Behaving properly in such a nuanced circumstance is really a non-starter for me and I'd rather disconnect completely than walk through that type of minefield.

jjirsa2• 9 years ago

I find this to be well written:

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

Notably:

1) The document makes a fundamentally flawed argument - that is, he's based his whole argument on a flawed premise that women just aren't interested in being engineers (and it's clearly wrong, because gender ratios were nearly identical until about the mid 80s; it's not a biological difference, it's a social and cultural difference, which means it has a social and cultural solution). Biological traits vary between genders, but the variance is TINY for most that aren't physical (strength, etc).

2) Even if he were right about men and women being biologically prone to certain traits, those he attributed to women tend to make them better engineers (and especially better engineering managers) anyway.

3) The document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, which makes it impossible for this person to be an effective member of the team. The next time a woman interviews for his team, and he votes against hiring, how does the hiring committee interpret that vote? The next time he's peer reviewed by a woman, how does that review get interpreted? The next time he peer reviews a woman, how does that review get interpreted? The next time a female candidate interviews with the author and is denied, how likely is it that the candidate will believe they had a fair interview, or is the organiation perpetually exposed to increased legal risk forever? Such a manifesto is toxic and shows a profound lack of awareness for any professional.

PrimalDual2• 9 years ago

1. I could not find the source stating that gender ratios were identical before the 80's in engineering. I do know that there used be a more even ratio of male/female programmers but I think the field has changed enough from those times that I would be wary of anyone claiming to make an apples to apples comparison.

2.His points about what makes a good engineering manager skips over the fact that to get good at engineering you have to practice it a lot. You have to spend a significant amount of time alone coding/engineering to grasp well enough that understanding the customer starts mattering a lot more. The guy that wrote the post seems to come from a perspective of so much experience and talent that he forgot or perhaps doesn't even know how hard it is go get started in the field.

3. I think the part about alienating women comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the manifesto and probability in general. Saying that women in general are less interested or less capable to be a google enginner says essentially nothing about the individuals before you. Trying to infer qualities of an individual from a distribution is racism but making statements about distributions shouldn't be. You can only talk about the whole distribution of google employees and perhaps justify(or fail to justify) the imbalance. Obviously, being a google employee is a much more informative prior than the gender of an individual.

Udik4• 9 years ago

Reading the reactions to the manifesto I'm left feeling like I'm taking crazy pills

I've discovered several years ago, debating very similar issues on usenet, that people (maybe some people, but a good proportion in any case) have the ability to make themselves perfectly blind to aspects of reality they decided to disregard. They'll be even ready to contradict themselves multiple times in the space of a few sentences, and never admit it, rather than allowing the possibility of a different view. I think it must be what allowed religious piety and bigotry to flourish for millennia: a natural disposition to stand with all your heart and soul to defend ideas that unite a community. Climate change (irrespective of its scientific validity) is another of those.

matt4077• 9 years ago

They'll be even ready to contradict themselves multiple times in the space of a few sentences
Climate change (irrespective of its scientific validity) is another of those.

schimmy_changa5• 9 years ago

The issue is that he is trying to solve an social problem via engineering, and in trying to simplify the problem, not spending enough time researching, and by "de emphasizing empathy" he takes a step backwards.

Basically, he sets forward incorrect assertions about biological differences without the self-awareness about why he takes those differences as truth. For instance "Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things". This is true at least in a very large part because women are socialized from birth to do so. There are dozens of similar examples.

The people unhappy with him are frustrated by always having to make the same damn argument to the same people who somehow think behavioral evolution is the end-all-be-all, as if somehow the computer they're typing on was a natural result of that evolution.

Now, in this particular case I don't think the author had any bad intent, and I think people who disagree should argue straightforwardly and use this as a great, clear opportunity to address the many people who actually do agree with this person but don't speak out. I also think the author has some good feedback when it comes to how dissenting opinions are heard on the left, but it's overshadowed by his lack of understanding of the more serious problem of bias and discrimination of women in tech. (yes, it is a more serious problem than conservatives being unable to express their views - at least they can choose to talk or not, even if I'd rather everyone be able to freely share their views)

schimmy_changa5• 9 years ago

... and now I'm getting downvotes after answering the OP's question earnestly trying to provide the opposing viewpoint ...

thecupisblue• 9 years ago

but it's overshadowed by his lack of understanding of the more serious problem of bias and discrimination of women in tech.

Huh I didn't get that, I actually thought he understands there is a problem with bias and discrimination, but he also points out there are other reasons why there is not a balance and why there won't be a 50/50 balance and forcing it might be bad. Now, I don't agree with his writing completely and honestly haven't done the research to know if it's true or not, and personally feel like the problem is rooted in education of our young ones.

Still, I'm afraid to speak out on this issue and this is the first time I've voiced I even partially agree with him. Honestly, I just skipped discussing this issue.

The people unhappy with him are frustrated by always having to make the same damn argument to the same people who somehow think behavioral evolution is the end-all-be-all, as if somehow the computer they're typing on was a natural result of that evolution.

I don't get that feeling and that's why I don't want to comment on it. I get a feeling like he does, anyone with an opinion that doesn't fit the super-uber-equality narrative isn't countered with arguments, but attacked, shamed and "blacklisted". As people in tech, an industry that is supposed to build a better feature, I believe we should be better than this, we should be rational and use arguments, we shouldn't attack, shame or fire someone who doesn't agree with us but discuss it. Really makes me sad and I hope I get to cash out and leave tech as soon I can. Is it fair that I'm just 25 and don't want to work on what I love anymore because people have turned it into a toxic community where differing opinions are assaulted? Isn't equality to all people, views and opinions what diversity is about?

(Note: This isn't as much as an reply to your post as much as I wanted to reply but it lead me to a mini-rant. Just like, fuck this, I don't wanna be a part of this shithole anymore)

ubernostrum• 9 years ago

For one thing, it assumes that a small alleged "biological difference" is sufficient to explain a gigantic observed effect. If we were to suppose that this difference translated directly into a difference of precisely the same magnitude in programming competence, it still would not be enough to account for the amount of skew observed in actual gender ratios in programming.

The supposedly rational author and his supposedly rational fans apparently are happy to overlook this, however. Running the numbers and figuring out what the expected skew would be seemingly has not crossed their minds.

And a larger problem is that this is not the first time someone has made such an argument. It's been made before, many times, in other fields, and was eventually demonstrated to be false: massive disparity turned out to be more a function of bias in hiring and performance evaluations than anything else. The classic example, once again, is classical music, where the very same "women just are naturally less inclined" and "biological differences mean men are just on average better" arguments used to be trotted out to explain gender disparity. Then the classical-music world started using blind auditions (where evaluators could hear a candidate's performance, but not see the candidate or know the candidate's gender until after completing their evaluation). And suddenly... the gender ratio shifted significantly.

Music was one of the first fields to undergo this shift, but wasn't the last. And yet the author of this manifesto seems blissfully unaware of the precedent from other fields where similar arguments were trotted out. Or, to be as charitable as possible, fails to explain why programming deserves to be a special singular exception to the trend of fields arguing "biological differences" and getting served with proof that it was actually bias all along.

And largest of all is the problem that this alleged biological difference, if it were an explanation, would earn a Nobel prize for anyone who could prove it, because within living memory programming had a very different gender ratio (both for programming jobs, and university computer-science enrollment). So this biological difference would have had to have evolved extremely recently, and spread through the human population with incredible rapidity, including likely being CRISPR'd into women who already were working as programmers or studying CS, in order to un-qualify them for it.

In other words, it falls apart on even the most superficial examination of its claims. There is no "taboo" or "facts nobody's allowed to talk about" or "politically incorrect but everybody knows it's true" here. There's just an incredibly shoddy argument which has been debunked more times than anyone cares to count, and yet somehow is still accepted blindly by people who desperately want a justification for tech's gender ratio that doesn't include "this industry discriminates against women".

ben_jones• 9 years ago

Can we also acknowledge that a lot of groups are profiting from outrage?

PrimalDual2• 9 years ago

When I first read the manifesto, It sounded like a regurgitation of Jordan Peterson's content. After being immersed in his lectures I found it very hard to contradict his points not just because of his eloquence but also because of his method for vetting ideas. I am very glad that his stuff has gained so much popularity because I may finally find counterpoints stick against his arguments.

merdreubu• 9 years ago

There's also a fair amount of Jonathan Haidt influence.

mempko• 9 years ago

Just as he has a right to say it, I have a right to argue, complain, ridicule, etc. Why should his view be given a platform while mine is denounced. Seems people want to silence his critics. Controversial views are not safe from criticism just as any other views.

mcappleton2• 9 years ago

Women don't go into tech because they don't like it. Boys like legos, girls like dolls. Sure there are occasional tomboys but the fact is most girls just don't like engineering.

Moshe_Silnorin5• 9 years ago

Don't try to gaslight people. Posting terrible arguments for sides you disagree with is lame epistemic pollution.

mcappleton2• 9 years ago

Lol denying reality to support your fantasy is pretty lame too

sctb2• 9 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952141 and marked it off-topic.

thowaway26539• 9 years ago

I think that it would not be a bad thing to have more diversity of thought in the tech community, or at least to have some basic level of considerate behavior toward people with different opinions.

I grew up in Red America; while I'm politically neutral/apathetic at this point, most of my friends/family are still varying shades of red. It was a drag to have all of my colleagues constantly and casually make insulting remarks about people that I care about.

Once, during an oncall shift, I pulled an all-nighter dealing with PagerDutys trying to keep our team's systems up; came in the next day and had to sit through a presentation where an assortment of republican party figures (no, not just Trump) were used as examples of "low IQ people" as part of some contrived metaphor that speaker was trying to make. Everyone laughed. No one made any comment about how this was unprofessional/inappropriate. Felt pretty angry.

This kind of environment is unhelpful to everyone. Obviously for folks on the right it is unpleasant, but for folks on the left it contributes to a culture of excessive contempt and hatred, increasingly detached from any actual contact with the people that they hate. This is not helpful for building winning coalitions.

dudul4• 9 years ago

It makes me think of one of our Slack channel at work that is full of jokes about Trump, the GOP, stupid republican voters, etc.

To make it clear, I personally don't give a damn F about politics, I don't vote, don't follow any political "drama". But the fact that people feel that it is appropriate to do that at work is pretty mind blowing to me.

int_19h5• 9 years ago

It's the ongoing increase in partisanship. It makes it easier to form ideological bubbles even where they didn't exist before, because the ratio is so skewed to begin with, it's entirely possible to end up in a group of people selected by some unrelated criteria (e.g. a work team), and find out that there's a significant overlap ideologically. So issues that were not okay because of the potential to offend someone etc, gradually become acceptable, because (at one particular point) there was no-one in particular to be offended. Of course, once established as part of the culture, this becomes self-reinforcing...

Shank2• 9 years ago

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

No matter how you read the original manifesto or the responses to it, I think there's a level of separation one must achieve before they pass judgement on it. If you let yourself live in the binary black-and-white world that the manifesto author created, where views are either left _or_ right, you're bound to get fired up. This is a natural reaction to the fact that party identification and attacking identity tend to trigger much more primal responses than if party was removed. In my humble opinion, Google is a very good example of a company with a mixed culture. They're a hugely conservative company in how they manage their finances, pay taxes, hire employees, and operate their company to the normal world. At the same time, they attempt to create "Googley" spaces where thinking and diversity are promoted. Are these necessarily right wing and left wing ideologies? Maybe. But it's definitely a mix -- you don't see Google spending 100% of its money on social programs, nor do you see it spending 0% of its money on social programs.

Does the manifesto author have a reason to write? Yes. He's clearly scared, and clearly feels attacked, perhaps on a regular basis, in the workplace. Like many an engineer before him, he attempted to identify the problem and presented several solutions that may or may not work.

Now, were the solutions he presented the correct ones? I personally am inclined to say no. Just as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article was eloquent and well pointed at specific "problem areas" the author presumed to be at fault. The author did not provide anything to corroborate his hypothesis that things like removal of empathy would do any good to help the situation at Google. Similarly, the author's attack on outreach programs aimed at minorities did not make any effort to show how these programs were exclusively harming non-minority participants.

Now, obviously, there are questions on the other side of the plane too -- specifically on whether or not diversity initiatives help or whether or not empathy helps either. I haven't done this research -- but the author hasn't done his research, so I feel this is fair. I'm just pointing out that Google is a for-profit company. They tend to make decisions that are economically viable, and they may or may not have done research on these types of things in the past -- though I would assume they have. Again, this is a company infamous for A/B testing shades of blue for engagement. It would be silly if they were burning their cash pile on programs known to be detrimental or non-working.

To summarize: if you write a manifesto, I expect you to pull some figures and prove some points before you start pulling the political party card and getting everyone riled up about your thoughts and opinions. If you read a manifesto, don't conflate perceptions as fact without examining and thinking about them closely for a long period of time. It will ONLY lead to pointless arguing and senseless fighting, while the real issue gets ignored.

elihu2• 9 years ago

But this groupthink terrifies me when it’s used to bully people for exercising their right to free speech. How will we know what people are truly thinking if we rush to silence them?

I think "right to free speech" is a weak and kind of scary argument to be making here. Inside a corporation, you don't have the same right to free speech you would have on the outside. HR can fire employees for things that wouldn't get you arrested for saying in public.

To quote the alt-text for https://xkcd.com/1357/

I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.

I think a better argument would be that the "manifesto" wasn't actually saying anything particularly controversial, it was just a statement of opinion that many reasonable people would agree with. Perhaps it contains some assumptions that aren't backed up by recent research, but unknowingly saying something that's not true shouldn't ordinarily be a fireable offense.

I would rather work at an employer where employees feel free to discuss hard problems that are relevant to the work environment for which there aren't any easy answers than one where minority opinions (or even majority opinions that contradict the leadership) are silenced. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to work at an employer where people felt free to say deliberately offensive things without repercussion.

int_19h5• 9 years ago

I think "right to free speech" is a weak and kind of scary argument to be making here. Inside a corporation, you don't have the same right to free speech you would have on the outside. HR can fire employees for things that wouldn't get you arrested for saying in public.

It's an argument that certainly makes a lot of sense from a libertarian perspective. But those of us on the left have already dismissed similar arguments - we know that when private commercial entities are sufficiently powerful, the limitations that they impose on their employees, customers etc can be so strong that they cannot be unchallenged (see the entire history of workers' rights movement, basically). We consider this immoral, and advocate for various limitations on the ability of businesses to do whatever they want.

If free speech is a public good, then why shouldn't the same standard be applied to it? I'm not even talking about legal aspects here, but purely the ethical side of things - shouldn't we at least condemn a situation where an entire industry effectively suppresses some opinions using its economic levers (employment among them)?

And if it's not considered a public good, then that should be explicitly stated, because that used to be one of the pretty basic tenets of liberalism.

elihu2• 9 years ago

The United States has historically given very broad protections to free speech in public, which is something I support and am very glad of. There is some kind of speech that isn't appropriate in a corporate setting. There are some kinds of speech that I think should be legally protected both inside and outside a corporation. I think the manifesto should fall inside the category of protected speech, as he was only saying things that a reasonable person might think given what he saw inside of Google. Workers should be free to criticize management decisions or comment on working conditions.

There are some things that aren't okay, though. I wouldn't want to work with someone who decorates their cubicle with iconography commemorating the third Reich, or who makes unwanted remarks about which of his or her attractive coworkers they would most like to sleep with.

I don't know exactly what the criteria should be for what speech inside a corporation should be protected and what should not, but I'm not comfortable with the idea that an employee has no right whatsoever to any free speech in the course of their job, but I don't think that an employee has exactly the same free speech rights while they're on the job that they would have in any public place.

Const-me• 9 years ago

In US, only 1.5% plumbers are female: http://www.contractormag.com/blog/stop-calling-yourself-plum...

In IT, in 2008 women held 25% of all professional IT jobs in the US: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorikozlowski/2012/03/22/women-...

An order of magnitude difference.

I have never seen discussions about gender-based discrimination for plumbers, or biological or sociological factors preventing women to seek career in plumbing. My personal opinion, on average, women just don’t want to do plumbing. And the society seems to be OK with that.

I wonder what’s so special with the software development that causes companies to do positive discrimination, gender-based hiring targets, and other stuff these companies apparently do in the US?

kamaal4• 9 years ago

>I have never seen discussions about gender-based discrimination for plumbers

In general only jobs which have a high value of effort/money-earned are preferable to anybody.

Im pretty sure most plumbers don't get into plumbing because they are passionate about it.

Also curiously you can be passionate about something if you earn well doing it. So, ultimately its all about home much money you can make, at what effort.

Make plumbing a high paying job and calls for diversity in plumbing will go up like no tomorrow.

ubertaco2• 9 years ago

Im pretty sure most plumbers don't get into plumbing because they are passionate about it.

I'm pretty sure most office desk jockey computer nerds don't get into being stuck sitting at a desk all day because they're passionate about it.

I'm pretty sure most professional head-trauma punching bags don't get into being an NFL defensive tackle because they're passionate about it.

I'm pretty sure most accountants don't get into hunching over spreadsheets and calculators because they're passionate about it.

See? I can concoct blatantly-false statements from lots of my-opinions-are-universal bubbles!

aeharding2• 9 years ago

Are you saying that women are too good for plumbing, but men aren't? That's pretty sexist.

mvindahl• 9 years ago

Like it or not, I think speaking openly against defined corporate dogma will get you in trouble in most places. He should probably have realized that and adjusted his course accordingly. Outright being fired is a pretty harsh sanction, and in this case it probably only came to this after the story blew up and Google had to exert damage control in public. A more conventional response would be an uncomfortable talk with your manager and the implicit warning of your career being sidetracked. That alone is enough to keep most people in line.

I don't think the core of this matter is if he was right or wrong, or if he overstepped the red line of PC. I think it's about any culture or any company having things that you shouldn't say. You can challenge these but you do so at your own peril. I think if a Google employee wrote a ten-page, widely circulated, manifesto on the ickiness of ad trackers, he or she would get into similar trouble.

On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

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