https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...
Please take care not to deceptively quote the author in question. This is the full sentence:
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.
The author deliberately crafted this statement to make it clear that he is referring to qualified, non-diverse, candidates being rejected at greater rates than qualified and diverse candidates - not that unqualified diverse candidates are accepted at a higher rate.
Even in its most generous reading (yours), this sentence makes zero sense.
I'm going to guess it is the later: Lawsuit from him would cause discovery. Unlike other government lawsuit, he would actually be able to say who at Google has access to the needed paperwork/email/etc to demonstrate that he is correct in his assertion. The government would love to piggy back on him. So I'm guessing Google is cutting a very large check now.
I don't know about the discovery argument. If he was an HR insider and acting as a whistleblower to disclose an illegal practice, sure. But a regular employee can't voice opinions about something that's common knowledge and force the company to disclose a bunch of confidential information.
What are they going to do when someone else steps up and makes the same assertions with more tact? Fire him too? What about the person after them? They gave extraordinary leverage not to the person that they fired, but to the people that have not been fired yet.
It's uncharacteristically nontechnical of Google to think that of the anywhere between 30-50% of the US population that leans conservatively, there is only one of them working for Google in Mountain View and that any dissenting thoughts within the company will end with him, and that the liberal employees threatening to quit will be happy and sated just to see these few drops of blood.
It doesn't matter the size of the check Google cuts this guy, nor the next 100 individuals if they choose to also speak out. Google made a mountain out if a molehill, and they just left a very a long way for the snowball they just threw to gather some mass while rolling down.
While I think that many outlets are misrepresenting and selectively quoting the piece to make it seem more offensive than it is, the reality is that the author used a lot of loaded language and created many opportunities for misinterpretation.
If this were at my company and the article didn't blow up online I'd probably have a talk with the author to point out all the ways that this piece could easily be misinterpreted and construed as offensive and that the same ideas can be conveyed in ways that are a lot less likely to blow up in your face. If this were at my company the article did go viral like it did in real life, I'd probably let this employee go. While I would say this is placing the interests of the company over the psychological safety of my employees, the pragmatic reality is that PR and potentially internal dissent caused by retaining the employee does not outweigh the moral win of retaining an employee who wrote a tone-deaf article that went viral and was widely perceived as offensive - even if the underlying ideas aren't ourageous.
His presence inside google both legitimises his behaviour and acts a rallying point. They might not be able to prevent like minded people from seeking each other out, but they can prevent them from doing it openly. They might not be able to prevent others from acting in a similar manner, but they will do all they can to avoid emboldening them.
They are willing to deal with the external flack and legal ramifications of a contentious firing, if it helps them avoid an insurrection.
I imagine this ex-employee will get a generous severance or expect good lawyers knocking soon.
Now whether he is able to successfully sue google and make big bucks is difficult to predict at this point. But it's certain that his career is finished for the foreseeable future.
It is a profoundly stupid thing to do for anyone who likes their job as an engineer. Maybe this guy doesn't and wants to start a new career in blogging or some similar shit. In that case, this may be a great new start for him.
If Pao could sue KPC&B, I think he stands a chance, unrelated as they are, it suggests suits can go forward on slim allegations and here he has evidence clear as day they fired him for having a difference in opinion on their hiring practices. He personally didn't discriminate nor personally conduct himself untowards anyone. He offered some (unconvincing evidence about how women don't have the same aptitude as men --but you are likely to find evidence Google does have internal hiring goals and allows a culture which virtue signals against the majority culture) and they didn't like it.
Thing is, if this had been a woman or minority citing some dubious data about how more women and minorities should be hired (which I agree with but on other principles), we would not even blink at it, if it even would have surfaced)
You don't have free speech rights at work, or more to the point you can say whatever you want and the company can do just about whatever it wants in response to this speech. To go full Godwin here, if this employee had, instead of talking about how women and minorities "lowered the bar", wrote and distributed interally a manifesto about how Google had too many Jewish employees and how these employees were mostly hired because of post-Holocaust western guilt and maybe we need to reexamine whether this whole Holocaust thing really happened I can assure you that he would have been shown the door within the hour. No one is locking him up for his speech act, but Google would have had no problem in firing him for that same speech act.
Others have pointed out in great detail all of the unpleasant future consequences for any potential interaction that leads to conflict between this employee and his peers. This situation was created entirely by the employee who posted the manifesto. He can sue Google, but he will lose.
People in general can sue anyone if there's any possibility they might win. The only way her lawsuit would be thrown out if she had never worked for them, or something like that. Otherwise, the way to find out if her claims have merit is the lawsuit.
Which she lost, and was forced to pay $276k to KPC&B. So not exactly a good omen.
Here they fired him not for perf (defensible) but for difference in opinion (maybe defensible but icky) not anything bad he did. I think he stands a better chance than Pao's retaliatory suit.
He wrote the manifesto and distributed it within the workplace. That's absolutely an action he took at work, that's a thing he did.
See also the Shoe Rebellion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022280
You don't have freedom of speech at work. Apparently in the US that's not a freedom of speech issue until the Government says you can't say certain things at work.
Pao's issue was shown to be a non-issue, yet "it brought the issue to light" ok...
I wonder why the author didn't mention the resolution of the lawsuit? I wonder why she mentioned it all? Oh right, peddling falsehoods, both explicitly and implicitly.
Government lawsuit against Google right now means that he has the leverage. The odds are the same people who are tasked with the programs to promote whatever the author carefully worded in his post are the people who received/sent emails/edited internal presentations that mentioned something that a good lawyer would be able to twist into a Google's managers admitting that Google does in fact systematically pays women less than men to do the same job. Google has a lot more to lose from that lawsuit than from the author of the memo.
[Edit: typos/clarity]
I would think, with all they have on their plate right now, they can't be bothered about some idiot who couldn't keep his mouth shut in public and just do the job he was hired for.
Government's problem in this case is the same kind of problem that government had in the US v. IBM: IBM buried government in the paperwork and government did not know where to look at to dig itself out.
Here comes the author who seems to have a very good idea of the remediation programs that Google has. The odds are extremely high the people in charge of the remediation programs/diversity programs/etc are the ones who are familiar with the issues that Google has: it is fairly logical. The author probably knows who these people are. He probably talked to them. Probably those people told him whatever he used as the basis for his manifesto. If he drags those people out into the spotlight, the government would suddenly have a beacon for their case.
That's why I, personally, think Google made a gigantic mistake firing the guy.
Whether he was right or wrong, he has hurt the company. I think he is wrong to be sure. But it doesn't matter.
It is also interesting because, a loss in a major legal case may throw up interesting possibilities in the stock market. Of course, one needs to be much more legally aware, than I am, to take full advantage of these possibilities.
However, Damore did file a NLRB claim before he was fired. So he seems prepped to sue, or perhaps to negotiate a private settlement.
Without a lawsuit: DOL gets two million "records" (emails/docs/memos) related to hiring/performance evaluation/etc. It needs to sift through those two million records trying to find the ones that support its case.
With this lawsuit: author knows who in the organization deals with this exact issue. Those people probably had emails from their managers/sent emails to others that can be made to support governments position in DOL lawsuit. Now instead of sifting through the two million records that they got, DOL focuses on 20,000 records authored by those likely to have the kind of information.
That's why such dismissals are dangerous to the company engaged in a costly/high-stakes litigation with the government.
Of course the punishment for violating this is a fine of no more than $5k, per http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
That said, it _may_ open the door for a civil lawsuit per http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
Whether any of that applies in this situation is entirely unclear to me, because it hinges on the definitions of "engaging or participating in politics" and so forth. You'd probably need to talk to a competent labor lawyer in California for anything resembling clarity here.
I think this comes down to is affirmative action policy a workplace condition. Discussion about workplace conditions is separate from discrimination law entirely so 'protected class' becomes a red herring here. I'm not sure this is the best article but I tried to find something from a left leaning source I find reasonably fair given that this seems to be an anti-right topic.
California law has very strong protections for employees. And it seems that firing him for the memo may actually be illegal.
The crux of the argument is that Google may have "punished an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions", which is illegal.
Also, "California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action."
Furthermore, "It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws".
Read here for more:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fi...
It could easily be defeated as it presumes the author would not be able to demonstrate that he could be a member ( does not have to be ) of a protected class. Remember, should that be the case authors goal is not to score a touch down, it is to get a new set of downs i.e. move forward with a lawsuit.
Judges are very reluctant to toss something out that early if there's even an ounce of a possibility there could be a merit in a case.
Um, that's one possibility I suppose. But I am reminded of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUfv32dmVFw
[I work for Google, but have no insider information about this.]
For what it's worth, I do think that taking steps to decrease the false negative rate for diverse candidates is an okay system and I explain my company's process of doing this in another comment in this page. That said, pointing out that this system is increasing the false-negative rate for non-diverse candidates is 1) factually correct, and 2) not at all the same thing as calling my underrepresented co-workers unqualified. If somebody claimed that our interview process increased the false positive rate for underrepresented groups I would object to such a statement - but that is not what is said in this document.
It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].
In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate.
I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, but his argument clearly suggests that less qualified 'diversity' candidates are being hired.
For your last sentence, I did not write, and did not mean to imply anything about the number of false-positive (FP) 'diversity' candidates vs FP non-'diversity' candidates. It's true that the author hints at this comparison.
I meant to convey that, per the author's statement about 'lowering the bar', Google's practices increase the FP rate in 'diversity' candidates as compared to what would have happened without the practices.
From this perspective, the author is stating that the 'diversity' hires have a higher FP rate than might have occurred otherwise. I think this conclusion - I think it's a fair one, though we may disagree - is what people find somewhat problematic.
On a broader note, the way you're injecting a completely different message into the author's text is exactly the kind of behavior that makes these discussions toxic. I realize that might sound accusatory, but if people can't make a statement without people stuffing contradictory or unrelated words into their mouths there's no possibility of civil discussion.
This isn't a pharmaceutical trial but there's no reason why we can't follow along with the author's analogy of 'false negatives'.
Here are his words from 'The Harm of Google's Biases':
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and
I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve
a more equal gender and race representation, Google has
created several discriminatory practices:
Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar
for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false
negative rate
EDIT:
Didn't see your statistical comment. Unfortunately, I can't think of a case where 'adjusting a bar' to decrease the false-negative rate does not neceessarily increase the false-positive rate.
The fact that the author uses the phrase 'lowering the bar' suggests that he is also thinking of this statistical requirement.
Here's one:
* Phone screens have a 50% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.
* On-site interviews have a 0% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.
Non-diverse candidates do one phone screen, and if passed, do an onsite. Diverse candidates do two phone screens, and if either passes, they go on to the onsite. For all candidates, if the onsite is passed, the candidate gets an offer.
* Unqualified candidates, regardless of diversity, never get an offer.
* Qualified, non-diverse candidates get an offer 50% of the time (the other 50% are erroneously eliminated at the phone interview stage).
* Qualified, diverse candidates get an offer 75% of the time (25% eliminated at the phone interview stage due to false negatives).
It seems to me that the author is advocating either doing two phone interviews for all candidates, or one phone interview for all candidates. Neither change would alter false positive rates, since false positive rates are 0% at all times.
If you're inclined to point out that all tests have a false positive rate >0%, substitute 0% for 0.00000001% and note that I stated the change in false positive rates could be trivially small to the point of omission in the comment above.
His statement about 'lowering the bar' with respect to decreasing false negatives directly implies a relationship between candidate quality and the false negative rate.
I can't comment on your hiring analogy, as you have more experience in this area than I do. My responses were only to highlight the subtle negative character of the author's statement.
Does your recruitment process have a 0% false positive rate? If not, giving more opportunities will yield more false positives unless it's proven that the extra opportunities have a 0% false positive rate.
This has been shown across society, including applications for housing, police stops, punishments in school, etc. I don't know why employment would be the one exception.
https://pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/beta-goi...
We found that the public servants engaged in positive (not negative) discrimination towards female and minority candidates
...
Overall, the results indicate the need for caution when moving towards ’blind’ recruitment processes in the Australian Public Service, as de-identification may frustrate efforts aimed at promoting diversity.
Imagine it this way: You're a fisher. The Law says that you can only catch fish which are >= 12" long. If you're caught with < 12" fish, bad things happen, but otherwise you want to maximize the amount of fish you catch.
You have two ways of measuring length: a crude wooden stick with some fat lines on it which mark approximately 12" - this is quick but only approximate. You also have a high precision caliper which can tell you the length down to .001", but it takes 2x as long to make the measurement.
You're interested in catching lots of fish, so if any fish you catch are a little close to that line, you just throw them back with one measurement.
90% of the fish you catch are red, but about 10% of the times you catch a green fish, which are really sparkly and fun, so you change your standard: if the green fish on first measurement is really close to 12"(not close enough to keep), instead of throwing it back like a red fish, you bust out the caliper and measure it more precisely, and throw out anything < 12".
So, at the end of the day, assuming red and green fish are distributed equally across lengths in the ocean, what would the distribution of kept fish look like? Would the mean and median length of your green fish be higher or lower than the mean and median of your red fish?
It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].
In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate.
I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, not to express the point you are suggesting.
Hiring the best and diverse workplaces are both virtues, but sometimes competing virtues. The problem with this entire discussion is that too many people are overly certain that one virtue is more important than the other.
His argument is that the under-representation of women in tech can be explained by biological differences that make them inferior candidates for technical and leadership positions rather than hundreds of years of disenfranchisement and misogyny that still echoes in work culture today.
But you are right, "The point is to treat people with respect by building an environment where they can be their best (whatever individual skillset they have), instead of insulting them", which is antithetical to what the author did by writing the pseudo scientific trash and then widely distributing it to his colleagues.
[disclaimer: I work at Google, my views are my own and not those of my employer]
I didn't see that in the "manifesto" at all. The assertions that "biological differences exist" and that they contribute to the under-representation of women in tech don't at all imply the conclusion that the under-representation is due to biologically-caused inferiority.
There's good evidence, summarized in this blog post, that on the average across society, equally gifted and capable girls tend to choose non-STEM careers more than their male counterparts simply because of differences in preference, combined with the fact that a wider array of career options is open to them due to their higher verbal skills (this was featured on HN a couple of weeks ago): https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
Furthermore, it seems that unlike men, women who are capable in math also tend to be capable in both math and verbal skills (whereas on the average, men have less capability in verbal skills), thus giving women more career options. Unlike men (on the average, again), women that do choose STEM careers tend to excel at all levels, including management.
> pseudo scientific trash
See the above article. It references highly cited studies that seem to clearly indicate innate differences in preference (in even 2-day-old infants and primates).
> Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar, they are about outreach.
> Nobody is being insulted by this.
[0] https://communequation.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/im-not-a-wom...
> I don’t want your ‘exclusively for women’ support groups
> I want inclusivity, not exclusivity.
> You’re victimising me when you do that. You’re indicating that it’s most
> likely I need special, extra support. Just because I’m female.
> By creating special awards for women I think you’re belittling the impact
> and effort a group of humans are having in their field – just because of
> their gender.
We can't just ignore people's lived experiences when they don't suit our positions.
The ensuing comments thread on HN also had many similar stories.
So saying that, what part of the memo was pseudo scientific drivel?
1. http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
Utterly ahistorical nonsense.
At various times (in the United States) men have been able to opt out of war by: hiring a replacement to take their place; being a conscientious objector and taking a non-combat role; being born at the right time to not be drafted, and choosing not to volunteer; enlisting in a branch of the service unlikely to see combat; pleading a hardship; finding a doctor to claim you are medically unfit; just walking away (desertion, as long as it was not during combat, has historically be inconsistently punished).
I get the feeling that this document is what Scott Adams talks about when he writes that two people can sit in the same movie theater, look at the same screen, and watch two different movies play out.
This is completely false! He absolutely does not say that, he says women to not prefer to compete for those jobs. He might still be wrong but you are grossly misrepresenting his statement in an attempt to demonize his lack of PC orthodoxy.
At colleges, lowering the bar is in fact how they have often been implemented. This article has some decent numbers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-un...
Lowering the bar is also the easiest way for a mid-level manager to achieve a target percentage. It's probably also the first method that may come to mind for many people.
Also, if you spend 3x the resources to find 3x the number of candidates (is it linear? I dunno), conduct normal interview processes, and then randomly throw out 2/3 of the male candidates that passed, while keeping all the women that passed, that is one way to triple the number of women you hire while having the same bar for men and women. However, the step where you throw out a random 2/3 of the male candidates might strike someone as highly irrational. Why not throw out the bottom 2/3 of male candidates? But then you end up with male candidates that passed a higher bar. You're not lowering your standards for women, but you're raising your standards for men, and then employees might notice and form the impression that the average male employee is better than the average female employee, which would be unfortunate. But it would probably be difficult to convince the people involved that avoiding the "unfortunate" outcome is worth throwing away 2/3 of the very best male candidates.
It might be possible to spend 3x the resources in such a way that all the new candidates you find are women. That would be a way to avoid the above problems. How would this be accomplished? Perhaps you send a recruiter to a university, and have them only talk to the female students. Hmm, that might be a little weird. How about a female-only university? That would be great. Likewise any female-only programming meetup groups. And of course any qualified female engineers that anyone knows—they'll never be wanting for a job.
How well will a company perform that spends significant resources recruiting from female-only groups, compared to one that recruits from groups that simply take the best candidates? How significant a fraction of company resources are normally spent on recruiting? And I did see a study indicating that demographic diversity (measured as age and sex) improved morale. I guess we'll see.
What would really help is if universities published the CS accomplishments of all their female students, but not of their male students. I wonder if they'd be willing to do it.
In any case, my original point was, even if a company does in fact implement its diversity program with one of the methods that does not systematically lead to higher-quality male hires than female hires, I think it is natural for someone to assume until proven otherwise that it is implemented by shifting the bar.
No process is ever random. All processes have side effects, that make some kind of memory/feed back loop.
If there are two groups of uniform set of people A and B. And you if make it harder for A to succeed. Set of people in A will have to work way harder, than set B over very long periods of time to win consistently. You will end up making A far more stronger than B. While your intention was to make B at least as good as A over time, you have now achieved the very exact opposite of what you set out of achieve.
This is common in sports, and even competitive exams. Candidates are trained to take on difficult problems than the baseline so that they can get better than the baseline.
At this point the bar for winning is largely to subject to interpretation. Did you raise the bar for A, or did you decrease the bar for B? It depends on what you consider the baseline.
If women are really worth more to the company, for diversity purposes - if not literal diversity of people, at least diversity of opinion and experiences - it would make perfect sense to just actively headhunt women from other companies and simply pay them more than the other people.
Companies never want to actually pay employees more money though.
It does not mean you get to decide anything for others, but it is a basic sign of respect to listen to what people say, and it is an even more basic sign of respect to not attempt to defame them.
This guy clearly isn't perfect. He was naive about what the effect of releasing his memo would be. However he was respectful and seemed to be trying to temper his perspective. He doesn't deserve the raw hatred and condemnation he is receiving. I think we should be compassionate and try our best to tolerate our differences.
They should have included him on the diversity and inclusion leadership team. Sad that Google went the route they did.
To put this in a different context, take the gender discrepancy in murderers. Across nearly all countries, men commit roughly 75-85% of murders. This nearly uniform across agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial countries, rich and poor countries, liberal and conservative countries. I would consider it totally fine to say that men innately have a greater tendency to commit murder than women (and for what it's worth I'm a man myself). Is it okay to say that because I have a Y chromosome I should be treated as a murderer? Or that I should face a different standard of evidence if I'm on trial for murder? Of course not. But stating that I, as a man, am statistically more likely to commit murder than the average woman is not the same as saying I should be presumed to be a murderer and it is not the same as saying that I should face a different standard of evidence. But the point remains, it is okay to conclude that the discrepancy in murder rates is because of innate tendencies rather than discrimination by police, juries, etc.
Agree that it's a basic sign of respect to listen to what people say. I am tired of guys not listening to me saying I'm a boring, normal woman who likes math/tech/computers, not a freak or a biological anomaly, some evolutionary mistake.
And he is not saying that you are a "freak" or "biological anomaly", he is talking about aggregated, statistical differences.
He provides no evidence to back the conclusions he draws from that data though. It reminds me of some articles or posts you might see briefly gain traction on the internet where the author starts from a point backed by one or two reputable sources and proceeds to use those references to back an argument that lies well outside the bounds of the original data.
As one of the authors of a paper cited in the memo puts it:
> In the case of personality traits, evidence that men and women may have different average levels of certain traits is rather strong. [...] But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large [1]
[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
I guess the larger point I was trying to make is that when people feel singled out because of statistical differences b it leads them to take things personally, which leads to perpetuating disproportionate reactions and a non-existing platform for actual discussion.
Vets are 80% female. Is the industry closed to men that might want to be a vet? Do we need more outreach programs for men to be vets?
Or maybe is it that men are less likely to want to medically treat animals than women, and the gender discrepancy is one of preference? And yes, men who do become vets are statistical outliers, but certainly not "freaks". It's likely the same for tech and women - you are a statistical outlier, and from your perspective things are the norm, but the majority of women are not interested in the same things that you are interested in professionally. (The majority of men aren't either, but there's a larger minority of men sharing your professional interests than a minority of women).
And as for "not getting somewhere original" - the author's point about the difference between comparing averages vs the overlap of bell curves around the averages is a great point and not one I'd seen highlighted that way before. Perhaps you have, but it was novel to me.
> This stuff has been hashed, rehashed, refried, deep fried... and he got all the biology research wrong. It just seems that he did no research, instead thinking about his feelings a lot and claiming he got somewhere original without engaging the existing scholarship at all.
Please provide examples. Your statement is incorrect. Looks like you didn't bother to listen correctly to what he said.
Need it be either/or? Can't we listen to all the stakeholders in this attempt to change the culture for the better?
EDIT: Quoted relevant section of parent for context.
Affirmative action is legal in the United States.
I work at a large SV tech company and was recently privy to an affirmative action policy that was almost certainly illegal. The wording of the policy was quickly changed after a couple folks spoke up so as to make it conform with the law. If the policy had made it to a news outlet, I guarantee you it would have been on the front page of the NYT the next day.
In short, quotas are illegal. With some exceptions, hiring based on race is illegal. However, taking race into account among many factors is legal. The on-the-ground reality of these policies is exceedingly grey.
The implication is that people who have been hired because they scored high on brainteaser problems are not, on average, going to be as qualified to do the actual job because the metric that we used to measure them (brainteaser problems) is not relevant to the job.
I'm inherently saying some of my teammates shouldn't have been hired.
Edit: just to be clear, my point is that Google has, to my knowledge, expressed this sentiment and made changes to their interview process to rely less on brainteasers. They did so without controversy. No one said "hey Google is saying some of its employees shouldn't have been hired by changing their hiring process".
The first guy is not necessarily "unqualified", but he would relative to the other guy. People who were hired for their weightlifting abilities wouldn't have had to reach a higher score on coding in order to get hired. So on average, you would expect them to be less qualified.
From your quote:
> Our interview process has put too much weight on brainteaser-type problems and I think we should scale that back.
I would not infer that you meant: The implication is that people who have been hired because they scored high on brainteaser problems are not, on average, going to be as qualified to do the actual job because the metric that we used to measure them (brainteaser problems) is not relevant to the job.
The most likely case is that someone saying the above quote would be a co-worker of mine. Someone I'm cooperating with in a common endeavor. I would assume they are trying to help us achieve our goals more readily. I would have heard something like: We're turning down highly qualified candidates for software engineering roles because of their failure to answer non-software-engineering questions. Is there any evidence that these non-software-engineering questions contribute meaningfully to our assessment of candidates? If not, we should drop the questions. Turning down qualified candidates makes it harder for to hire the great people that coming through our pipeline.
To conclude that suggesting any changes to an interview process is an implicit indication that the people currently employed by a company were unqualified means that no improvements could ever be made.
That's exactly my point.
Replace "brainteaser" with "being an underrepresented minority" and you'll see why it's absurd to suggest his manifesto is tantamount to saying "some of my teammates shouldn't have been hired".
If we would like to stop using an irrelevant but unchangeable trait (such as gender or race) as a basis for hiring and recruiting, what should we do?
And then what happens to freedom of speech? To me this sounds like a totalerian regime.
I'm actually okay with Google seeking women across the country (when they could find a local candidate), but we should not pretend that they don't have internal targets their recruiters need to meet.
A startup I once worked for sent out a memo asking that HR be involved before rejecting a "borderline" female candidate. As a generally apolitical junior employee this seemed really concerning -- we had pretty strict hiring standards and from that point on I wondered if each new female employee would have made it if they were born male.
I can't say if Google's practices are discriminatory (I don't really know what they are) but it's a very important thing to have open, honest discussion about. At the time, I kept my mouth shut because I was pretty low on the totem pole. If I were an employee at Google I would now know to do the same.
Bias is real. The exact same resume is, on average, considered more qualified if there's a typically male name at the top versus a female name. Did you ever wonder how many of your male colleagues unfairly benefitted from that sort of thing?
From http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas... :
After running the experiment, we ended up with some rather surprising results. Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data.
No, I didn't consider it about anyone until they gave me a reason to. Prior to that email I had no reason to think that anyone working there was anything other than the best of the best. Well-intentioned policies can have resounding negative effects.
To your second point -- I'm not saying bias isn't real. I'm saying certain methods of counteracting bias have a strong potential for collateral damage.
At least one recent study found the exact opposite: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
> The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door.
I've experienced this as an engineer, where I've been in environments where I was totally over my head. In retrospect I'm grateful for the rejections as much as the postitions I've landed, because they've pushed me to learn and advance my skill set.
To be fair to you, I don't think you actually think that. But it's almost like the author of the diversity memo touched a third rail by suggesting that perhaps "lowered standards" could be an outcome from such diversity efforts. Is that a fair consideration to raise or is that beyond the pale now?
However, if the number of hires is kept constant, and a given process is claimed to be flawed, then you are implicitly stating that one or more offers should have gone to what was a non-hire instead of what was a hire.
[my opinion, not my employer's.]
If someone claims their employer discriminates against black candidates, you must equally infer they think some of their white coworkers have been let in because of weakened standards, and out they go...
I mean, I'll admit there is a small core of logic there, but I think it's pushed absurdly far. Wouldn't it make more sense if hiring standards could be discussed without firing anyone who wants to change them?
Why MUST we have 50% of male and female in any industry? Have you noticed how almost every media outlet ignores female dominated industries (such as veterinary science) [0], where over 85% of vets in the western world are female? The strongest argument in this thread appears to be that there must be equal numbers for equality, but it's only EVER applied to male dominated industries (Google it if you doubt me). However, not only is this argument unjustified, it's continually selectively applied by most mainstream media outlets, again and again. There is no challenge or balance to any of these arguments from the mainstream media.
I am disappointed that Google sacked this engineer. To understand this mindset, you really need to watch this video on Yale. People being shut down from talking because they're male or white [1] or because angry mobs don't like what they have to say. People in this thread talk about sexism and yet they struggle to provide any evidence (while I can point at truck loads of evidence of misandry, eg. domestic violence, veterinary science, etc). This Yale video talks about this exact problem i'm describing. We have a society where you are no longer allowed to express selective views (even with evidence). Google have confirmed this with their dismissal of this engineer. What we've become concerns me deeply.
To all of the people who have stood up for free speech (and you're in the clear minority in this thread), I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you want to be able to sort out the media that's worth listening to, watch reporting on this topic closely over the next few days. Look for extreme prejudice and emotive language from the media. To quote an excellent quote from the Yale video, "these are moves of power, not reason" (3 minutes in, [1]).
So where are the rational arguments? What about the percentage of female university graduates with relevant skills? What about Dr Simon Baran Cohen's findings on very young children and trends to their thinking patterns? Where are the facts? Why are most people side-stepping facts?
Now please re-read this entire thread and ask yourself about freedom of speech. Ask yourself about democracy. Ask yourself about how many people have presented facts. There is something seriously wrong. You should be deeply concerned about the lack of debate, the lack of evidence, the number of emotive arguments and the message Google has sent to anyone who doesn't toe the politically correct line.
[0] http://career-advice.careerone.com.au/career-development/pro... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM
But a counter-point to the focus on male-dominated industries: I suspect it has a heck of a lot to do with the average salary of male-dominated industries compared to the salaries of female dominated industries. If vets were paid like anesthesiologists and vice versa (and across all industries), I think you'd see a lot more articles about equality in female-saturated careers.
Of course, personally I'd rather see a reduced pay gap between gender dominated industries instead of women being forced into jobs they aren't as interested in simply to earn as much as men who gravitate towards those fields. But I've no idea how you actually follow through on that, and "girl-code camps" are a heck of a lot easier to run and self-serving for the runners than "restructure the supply/demand labor market for 20-40% of all industries)".
I think that your argument needs further refinement.
1. The fact you have to dig to find a rare prestigious, yet women-dominated field (veterinary science) demonstrates the lack of equivalence between software engineering or any other men-dominated field. Most high-paying fields are dominated by men in most states. The essence of this controversy is not that there are men being kept out of veterinary science and nursing. It's that women are actively and passively discouraged from entering, staying, and succeeding in the field.
2. I don't think any of the credible stakeholders expects a 50%/50% women to men ratio in software engineering. I think this is a misrepresentation of your opponents.
3. Linking this to freedom of speech and democracy is going to generate "but freedom of speech is just from the government, not from consequences" responses.
4. Claiming this is a trend in Fortune 500 companies is likely to yield from your opponents a considerable amount of examples of liberal workers being terminated from Conservative-style companies for political actions taken on-the-job. Even excluding union agitation, there are many examples from the past ten years.
But in general, he's right that we're in a scary age with the aggressive and dogmatic ideology that favors political correctness over intelligent debate and will defend that ideology with mob rule (even leading to professors being told by police that it's not safe for them to be present on campus).
I'm not looking forward to seeing the political result of this movement becoming a tea party to the left, which I fear is inevitable in the next few years.
4. So what? discrimination at conservative companies doesn't justify discrimination at liberal ones.
I disagree with your premise; termination for political activity on-the-job is easily justifiable. I doubt you want to hear non-stop tirades from a PETA activist coworker.
I think your criticism of #2 is facile; which policies in particular are vague? Every corporate anti-discrimination policy I've ever encountered was essentially "don't discriminate against people in a way that will get us in trouble with the Feds."
> Part of my work this year has resulted in 42% of the LargeCo engineering staff in WestCoastCity are women.
Bingo. Feelings have replaced facts as a measure of righteousness. And, sadly, there are entire industries plugging feelings of injustice by "white cis-males" or some other group of people who are oppressors by dint of simply being a majority.
It's such a mess. And if you give a sht about the Western tradition of reasoning*, it's a cultural shame. Entire national narratives are being powered by lies and mistruths.
The least we could do is talk about it.
But look at what happens when you question this insanity? You're fired and ostracized.
Genuinely sad.
> The Harm of Google’s biases:
...
> - A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
...
> - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.
Do you really not see the concerns this engineer has introduced for Google over his ability to objectively judge his peers who are women or members of an underrepresented group or at least how such coworkers might now have these concerns if they find themselves working with him? Do you not see how the long-term detriment and risk to Google could be (substantially) greater than the value the engineer brings to the company? Even if you remove the high-mindedness and virtues that tech companies like to project in their PR, do you not see how this is the only rational business choice for a Fortune 50 company?
You are in the position where you want to constantly hire a lot of qualified candidates. If you have discovered a way to decrease false negative rate, why would you not apply that across the board? It's like you have learned how to fix hiring but then carry it out only with some arbitrary cohorts.
Sounds irrational to me.
The implications of that worldview are totally toxic.
And therefore it is false?
The author has a popular science level understanding of gender differences. Based on that he concludes women are unsuited to be engineers compared to men.
Well, then make that argument.
If you wanted to pick out any argument out of those 10 pages to disassemble, you could have chosen any one of his arguments that haven't been corroborated by hundreds of years of scientific consensus.
Ok, but how do you propose the paper to be rewritten taking those into consideration.
Or do you suggest that Google force every employee go through a medical exam to determine their sex and make sure no one chooses to identify as a different gender to pass through the hiring process easier...
Sorry, I don't quite see what you're getting at there basically, it can interpreted in a few ways.
Such a claim would, after all, be an insult to many of his coworkers, who might feel as if he believes they're only at Google because society lowered the bar for them.
Personally I'd like it if people could make both arguments in a reasonable fashion and not jump immediately to outrage and calls for termination.
Should a son of a several-year unemployed coal miner be discriminated against because of his gender and race, just because other people with that same gender and race have done better than average?
The entire summary was "consider the individual not the statistic."
If you are concerned about socio-economic advantages, look at tax returns not skin color - the whole point of some prior civil rights movements was that skin color is a terrible proxy for evaluating the person underneath.
Honestly the graph examples of the overlapping bell curves vs the plotted averages in his document was such an excellent point, and yet the extremely salient points that should be discussed are being railroaded over by misrepresented hyperbole - your straw man theoretical imcluded. There's a great deal of nuance he paid attention to, and I really wish his detractors had the same consideration for nuance in their counter-points.
Edit: I didn't realize on first read that you were creating a hyperbole to highlight the bias in the calls for his firing. Leaving the comment as is though, as in general there needs to be a lot more nuance considered, particularly by his detractors. Apologies for misreading your comment's intention.
Dodging the question by saying you don't find the principle "interesting" when applied on the other end of the argument is effectively admitting that you know the principle is flawed.
To be clearer, white privilege exists. Male privilege exists. That is a power dynamic over women and minorities, enjoyed by men and non-minorities.
To deny those privileges exist increases the privilege. To deny that existing bias exists helps to increase the bias.
To admit those privileges exist decreases the privilege. To admit that existing biases exist helps to decrease the bias.
So, writing a manifesto (that admits white privilege) does not put white people into greater danger beneath those who enjoy the power dynamic over them (no one).
But, writing a manifesto (that denies sexism) does put women into greater danger beneath those who enjoy the power dynamic over them (men).
Is that clearer?
This doesn't necessarily follow, because insofar as male privilege exists, so does female privilege (such as no draft, "women and children first", the "women are wonderful " effect and the fact that women represent the majority of the voting base), so it's really hard to say one sex is more privileged than the other, rather than just privileged differently.
> where male privilege exceeds female privilege.
I'm not sure I can categorically agree with this. While male privilege exists over women, I find it ludicrous to suggest that white women are less privileged overall than black men, despite black men benefiting from male privilege. I think many of the misunderstandings that occur when discussing privilege come about due to using only a few easily categorized traits in defining privileges, rather than a broader set that also include things like socio-economic conditions, health, upbringing, and a variety of personality or physical traits.
I don't think it's that hard. There are unfair privileges to either gender, but the male ones are vastly larger.
This kind of claim (regardless of which direction you're making the claim in) ony makes sense if you reduce "privilege" into a single dimension. Which I don't think you can.
It should absolutely be ok, if it's true. Which it unequivocally is.
> (and that's 100% what he did, he also made up pseudo-scientific bullshit to try to justify it, but he flat out insulted countless people within his company).
What about his post was pseudo-scientific? He cited studies, and to my knowledge, the actual facts of what he said are fairly uncontroversial.
> - The next time a woman interviews for his team, and he votes against hiring, how does the hiring committee interpret that vote?
Did you read the document? He explicitly embraces diversity. He even says he's in favor of programs to help promote diversity.
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)"
That is accompanied with citations. OK, sure, let's take that at face value. No dispute here.
Next, he says:
"These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics"
No studies, no evidence, no nothing for this claim. X may lead to Y, because... the author feels in his gut that it may be true? This is not science. This is an unsupported assertion. The rest of the doc is littered with these claims, which I could happily go point by point through.
He may have gotten the science about biological differences between men and women correctly, but the conclusions that he drew using that science is totally unsubstantiated. And frankly, it is extremely deceptive to defend him by saying that "he cited studies" without examining how he linked those studies to his own pure speculation.
EDIT: And as has come out, the author of this memo has a PhD in Biology. Here are comments from four PhD scientists in Sociology on the issue, if you'd like some credentials to go with it:
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
"But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm."
That pretty succinctly summarizes my view.
No, he doesn't; he lied about it on his linkedin page: http://www.businessinsider.com/james-damore-removes-phd-stud...
What are the costs/benefits of having this "debate" at work over a hypothesis that cannot be proven, as you state?
Look again at what the author was doing. He was using scientifically demonstrated biological and psychological differences between men and women (women have "higher agreeableness") to hypothesize about how that affects their work choices and, notably, their performance ("This leads to women generally having a harder time ... speaking up, and leading.").
What this is doing is connecting a gender stereotype (which, sure, is scientifically supported in aggregate - that's true for a lot of stereotypes!) to work practices and outcomes. The authors claimed benefits of presuming that this connection is true are basically a) this will make conservatives feel more accepted at work, and b) diversity is "bad for business" (which is just provably wrong by an enormous amount of evidence that the author ignores). I think a) is absolutely a worthy benefit, but there are lots of other ways to do this without linking gender stereotypes to work performance!
Now let's look at the harms of having this "debate", particularly at work, which are numerous and measurable. While there are no studies demonstrating the link between biology and STEM job performance, there are many studies demonstrating the impact of widespread gender bias in STEM fields (classic recent reference: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract) and how it affects hiring and advancement. The memo's author correctly acknowledges these types of biases. So the harm is perpetuating gender biases in the workplace that affects people's careers. Not to mention the harms of opening up Google to gender discrimination lawsuits (ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Waterhouse_v._Hopkins), the productivity cost of employees who don't want to work with people with publicly broadcasted unproven gender biases that could affect their decision making ("hostile work environment"), etc. And not to mention losing the many economic benefits that a company reaps with a diverse, inclusive workplace.
So no, I don't think it's worth having this "debate", especially at work, where the benefits are negligible at best, and the harms are clear. If you want to have this debate, go write a medium article or something. Don't send this around your workplace. It's not that hard, really. People call this thought policing, or groupthink or whatever, but it's just harmful and a waste of time at work.
If bias exists it is culturally and biologically motivated and that can only be fixed by changing the culture significantly.
Women in free cultures do not like STEM. That is a fact. In countries where gender roles are being silenced (that's a good thing) women dislike STEM even more!
I went to a STEM focused high-school that had equal numbers of women and men (3000 students). Not the same percentage went for STEM fields after graduation. Women were also more successful during high-school. Every year the questionnaire confirms that women just aren't interested in STEM and go to fields that deal with people much more (medicine and similar social fields - rehabilitation, working with children with disabilities, social work etc.))
Interesting assertion without a citation! Unfortunately, you are wrong. A good meta analysis reference: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/research/publicati.... I can provide more if you like. I encourage you to review the literature.
> Women in free cultures do not like STEM. That is a fact.
Another interesting assertion! I'll let you do the homework finding citations about how you're wrong here.
> I went to a STEM focused high-school ... blah blah blah
Nice anecdote! Is there anything else about high school that you'd like to generalize to the entire population of the world?
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frederick_Oswald/public...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308926636_A_Meta-An...
I can provide more if you like.
Show me a study that measures gender bias, does an educational intervention and succeeds in improving that measure significantly. None exist. At best they do not work.
> I'll let you do the homework finding citations about how you're wrong here.
Cool, good thing I did my homework. I'm quite aware that percentage of women in STEM is increasing every year. Check out research for countries that have successfully removed gender roles.
> Nice anecdote! Is there anything else about high school that you'd like to generalize to the entire population of the world?
Good thing that there's research confirming the same thing. Although I was not generalizing. The 3000 students and the results of questionnaire every year are pretty consistent. I'm sure someone will do a study on the data, will link to it surely when it happens. Although, I'm sure it will not matter given that you value meta-analysis but only those that confirm your bias.
That's exactly what I was thinking when I read your comment! What about my comment are you replying to? Did you perhaps reply to the wrong comment?
Attitudes like yours have polarized me to the extent that now I just say, "I'm super racist, here's what I think:" just to see people's confused reactions.
Employees are free to say whatever they want on a personal blog on their own time.
"Before being fired, Mr. Damore said, he had submitted a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board claiming that Google’s upper management was 'misrepresenting and shaming me in order to silence my complaints.' He added that it was 'illegal to retaliate' against an N.L.R.B. charge."
Maybe this is why he was fired? It sounds like he was becoming pro-actively hostile toward Google. And there may be more than we outsiders know going on.
a) Men and women should be hired based on merit, and ability to perform required tasks.
b) Men and women are unable to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.
The author of the manifesto was arguing for (a) and against (b).
Also, who decides on "merit" and "ability?" Most real-world problems are not math equations with clear answers. In that case, a homogeneous group is going to decide that merit is based on their group's definition. A diverse group will create a broader definition that accounts for a wider array of ideas and approaches.
I've seen these arguments rehashed over and over by the very same people who overly critcized the manifesto.
Yet I have never seen any argument or document written as well as the manifesto supporting these arguments.
Diversity in tech has essentially become people who look different but think the same way.
You can fix it by changing it to
b) Men and women aren't allowed to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.
edit: HN comments eat double asterisks???
The strawman is much better than the actual argument.
A lot of clumping happens in fields. Tell me why women are better at symplectic geometry than symplectic topology (or not). Tell me why women are better combinatorists than number theorists -- I want to hear something about counting the tubers they gathered. Tell me why women are so much more suited to advanced heart failure and transplant cardiology than interventional cardiology (https://www.aamc.org/data/448482/b3table.html). I kinda love all the post hoc analysis that goes into explaining these differences, especially when you have to explain then why Portuguese and Italian women are great in algebraic geometry but French women aren't (except for the notable exceptions like Claire Voisin).
Most people aren't pioneers; most people follow the pioneers into situations in which they feel mildly more comfortable than the alternative. Sexism plays a huge role, while not being the only factor. Is it really surprising that if you put up a "girls r dum" sign on a clubhouse many will find somewhere else to go?
Women electing into different fields is pretty much tautological here. The question is why, and whether it's for reasons we want to support and/or perpetuate. The whole point of the memo at issue is that he figures it's built into women biologically because computers aren't cuddly and that it is thus justifiable and right to perpetuate or support the current set of social roles. I don't know that the guy should have been fired, but it's clear he's not going to be a great team player or supervisor for women.
This article [0] presents a good argument about how and why men and women self-select in to different fields.
0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
It means that applying is no longer first-come, first-serve.
Of course it isn't because then it would expose the hypocrisy of what they advocate. It's white-knighting at its finest.
> Men and women aren't allowed to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.
I agree there is sexism in tech, both overt and casual that discourages women from entering tech and/or causes them to leave. The question is, does increasing diversity actually fix this problem?
The author of the memo specifically addresses this, and states that the focus should be on providing psychological safety for people of all groups, rather than forced diversity that may not end up addressing the problem.
Even the SATs struggles/d with making sure their tears didn't implicit strengthen the scores of any one group of students.
Engineering has large degrees of opinion mixed into any non-rudimentary implementation.
The result, even just the code itself, is also not judged on a binary yes/no scale, which again leaves a lot of room for opinions and bias to muddy the water.
I've done hundreds of engineering interviews. Conducting objective interviews is very hard. Anybody thinking they are objective either has never done interviews or is fooling themselves.
If a programming exercise is subjective, from what perspective is it subjective in bias of? Likely the author's, who's bias will be derived somewhat from their race, gender, sexuality, socio-economic class, background, peer group, etc.
Code is correct if it works. But plenty of "working" solutions will be rejected as being "incorrect" based on current trends, internalized philosophy, preferred approach, etc. etc.
As someone who hires engineers, it is difficult if not impossible to separate personal bias and preference from an evaluation.
But there's a billion ways to write that code. Which ones will the evaluator prefer and/or reject? That's where subjective opinion comes in.
You are judged and reviewed on a myriad different factors other than this. Are you a "team player?" Do you mentor others well? Do people like you? Were you picked to do complex projects this review cycle? Are you too loud? Too timid? Do you ask insightful questions? Is your coding style "normal"? Do you dress professionally? Can you be asked to interface with clients?
Every little thing that can be used will be used to form a composite picture of you as a person. It's wrong to expect a foreigner like me to be judged on whether I know baseball stats but I'm sure someone somewhere has made an inside reference about baseball around me and written me off when didn't even acknowledge it.
That's what diversity programs and affirmative action programs try to short circuit.
Humans, contrary to what they may tell themselves, are not effective, impartial judges of "merit". Diversity initiatives correct for this deficiency.
c) Human beings are poor judges of merit due to cognitive bias, poor intuition for statistics, prejudices based on emotional reactions to irrelevant past experiences, and perverse incentives. It is therefore justifiable to apply a post correction.
I'm a bit surprised that techies don't see this as obvious. How often do inferior products win due to superior marketing that plays on these biases?
I am also surprised programmers have such confidence in absolute meritocracy in code shops given that every coder knows how hard it can be to evaluate the performance of coders on a team. Let's say one coder closes tons of tickets but does shoddy work while another works more slowly and creates things of beauty. The former often looks better but the latter might be the real MVP. I've seen coders who add little code but are indispensable on a team due to things like deep domain knowledge, great judgement, spooky horse whisperer debugging skills, etc.
Yet suddenly some are convinced of the infallibility of our ideas of merit as soon as someone tosses a culture war grenade in the room.
I don't even want to bring up the softness of some of the areas of science cited by that manifesto or the reproducibility crisis they've had but... Oops I just did.
Personally I am on the fence about diversity measures such as the ones I've heard exist at Google for practical reasons. I am not convinced they work very well and as an engineer I prefer things that work. My sentiment is on their side though, and I have become deeply repelled by the opposing movement (now generally called the alt-right) ever since it unmasked itself. Head over to alt-right subs on Reddit or worse Voat if you want to see what they really stand for. So if I were forced to pick a side I would begrudgingly pick the diversity nazis over the actual Nazis.
But if your premise is that (essentially) people are wrong, how do you know that the post-correction will be appied "correctly" (i.e. not make things even more wrong)?
It only hurts because it is plausible and causes self-doubt.
But Google can prove this conclusively just by plotting the distribution of performance reviews between "diversity hires" and the regular pool of employees. You either show that there are negligible differences (the diversity program works) or the guy is right (the average bar did get lowered).
Google will never publish this data because they are cowards.
You take a lot of really smart people and get them to work together, and most of them are going to feel like they're not as smart as their peers.
Anything that creates self-doubt is going to really fuck up their retention.
Anyone who writes a manifesto to do just that should expect they'll be promptly walked out of the building.
Can you elaborate on that one? I'm really curious, as my naive assumption would be that impostor syndrome should improve retention (something like "I'm not as good as my current employer and coworkers think I am, so I better not change jobs because this is the best I could get").
That makes it pretty easy to take a new gig and make that nagging imposter voice in your head quiet down.
"I work at the world's most powerful tech company, get paid embarrassing sums of money to do it, and get good reviews from my manager. But I don't feel super smart, so I quit."
When you come in as a newbie, and you see all these people seemingly directing themselves effortlessly, and creating cool shit day in and day out, it can be seriously soul crushing. You're still on your tricycle trying to figure out how to do anything at Google, and aside from your laptop, virtually everything is a technology that is Google specific and shares almost nothing with anything you've touched before.
Between those two things, a lot of people feel like they'll never make it. They hold on for their 1 year anniversary if they can and then shop their new Google experience around to find a good exit.
> Such a manifesto is not just fundamentally wrong, it's toxic
Isn't this how every Inquisition is justified?
A private company firing someone over their views is a long, long way from an Inquisition. Your right to say and believe things is not a right for continued employment. The same libertarian argument that you seem to be making has been made the other way many times -- that companies should never be compelled to retain an employee for any reason.
Is this the first firing that was perhaps an overly sensitive reaction concerned with appeasing a very touchy ideological base? Because I can think of a number of other people railroaded out of a job because of online "outrage."
We aren't all that far from an Inquisition (not prongs and tongs type Inquisition, but a "your job depends on agreement" type Inquisition). The most significant thing missing from the equation is that the most vocal social justice voices lack political influence and power. If you see this movement organize politically and get candidates in office, any student of history should recognize that things will get worse for open expression of ideas before things get better.
Should a female doctor avoid mentioning this article to a male colleague to avoid getting fired?
The employee in this case deserved a reprimand, not termination.
It's ironic that the two countries who not so long ago were horrific totalitarian regimes now are more free (at least in this aspect) than USA - "the land of the free".
This argument only work is every woman can only see themselves as part of the group and are incapable of seeing themselves as individuals.
I would be willing to bet that there are women (and other diversity hires) at Google that know they are capable of doing their jobs and deserving of being hired. Some of those people might object to being lumped in with the whole and not being seen as individuals.
It seems pretty extraordinary and I'd like to see more before I believe it.
If an organization does, at any time, use hiring priorities besides work ability, and thus hires people whose work ability was not as good as it could be - from henceforth on, nobody can ever criticize those hiring policies, because that would imply criticizing the people hired under those policies.
>Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, it becomes impossible for this person to be an effective member of the team
Funny, lots of people I've worked with have alienated me, and others, and various groups of people (different teams, specialties, ages, men, conservatives, etc). We somehow still manage to keep functioning in the same building. You, with bigotry of low expectations, seem to think women don't have the maturity for that.
Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, it becomes 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 organization perpetually exposed to increased legal risk forever?
Such a manifesto is not just fundamentally wrong, it's toxic and shows a profound lack of awareness for any professional.