Google only really became politicized a couple of years ago when certain media publications started making demands for diversity numbers within the organization and publicly shaming them for not meeting some imaginary bar in the area.
Github was the premier hosted SCM solution long before it literally pulled its meritocracy rug from under it [0] and has been living off first-mover advantage since, succeeding in spite of the activists it now employs, not because of.
I personally _would be_ very surprised to see an identity politics focused company beat either, not merely because of their [Google, Github] current status but because those in question haven't shown themselves to be capable of building much at all.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/githubs-ceo-ditches-meritocr...
This is also historically revisionist. Google's been super political since forever, it just wasn't in the news for it.
Googler 2006-2014. I can't say I remember much politics during that time. The closest it got was Eric Schmidt having close relationships with Washington. That and the China thing but even there, Google was in China with a censored search engine up until they went and hacked the firm. I don't remember much discussion of the fact that we had a Chinese version of the search engine.
What are you thinking of?
I look at it like this. My friends who still work there complain about stupid idpol all the time now. I never heard complaints like that when I was there.
Obergefell v. Hodges was only four years ago. American conservatives are still trying to reverse gay marriage.
(And hiring mostly in SF isn't itself a political choice?)
We are talking of the company that was advocating do not evil. This was political from day 1, remember their stand on China?
Yes, when they stopped caring about engineering skills and starting caring about diversity checkboxes, their overall engineering capabilities declined. Google has done relatively little of note over the last 5 years given their size, and part of it is that they have an incompetence cancer and engineering teams cannot trust other teams (or even coworkers in larger teams).
Do you realize how harmful it is to an organization when you can’t tell if a coworker you are depending on is competent or if they were hired because of their genes?
> This was political from day 1, remember their stand on China?
Which stand? Because they flip-flop all of the time.
All candidates must past the same hiring bar, no one gets extra points for "diversity". So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired.
Retries, easier judges, removing some earlier barriers, etc would all be obvious discrimination in any other process.
You yourself admit that the process has false negatives. If those are in any way probabilistic (which is obvious that people get in after multiple tries), allowing minorities to try more frequently is lowering the bar for minorities.
If you let someone throw extra darts at the dartboard to hit the bullseye, that doesn’t make them as good as the people that hit it in fewer attempts.
> So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired.
Good for you, but not everyone was so willfully ignorant when I worked there.
Yes, the company tells you that's how it works. But I was also a Google engineer, I did hundreds of interviews during a time when it was way less into diversity than it is today. And absolutely Google bent its policies to try and hire more women. Constantly.
Some tricks I saw used:
1. Assigning the best/most reliable interviewers to women. Recruiters confirmed to me that they did this.
2. Allowing women who failed the phone screens to proceed to on-sites anyway.
3. Organising recruiting events which banned men, e.g. there was since early years Google CodeJam, a coding competition that was pretty openly used as a way to find candidates. But the men crushed the women, repeatedly. I think there was a female finalist once in 13 years. So they set up a second CodeJam with large cash prizes, but banned men from it.
In recent times there was the recruiter who quit and claims he was told to not hire non-diverse candidates. I believe that. I was told about recruitment's diversity goals by recruiters themselves.
But still, there was a lot of resistance to bending the hiring pipeline in more extreme ways. That culture carried over to Facebook. I've been told that at Facebook recruiters were incentivised with cash to hire more women, but they gave up pretty fast because stuffing the pipeline with weaker candidates didn't work: they got flushed out by the hiring committees.
By the way you're blind to a much more important trick Google uses. Eng hiring was, during my time, at least somewhat well defended against diversity abuse. But firing was totally controlled by HR. And it is an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible for women to be fired, regardless of how low their performance is. Instead they get moved around between teams. Men, on the other hand, can be and are let go for merely not exceeding expectations. Obviously that's one way to get less male workforce, if you're patient!
1. Assigning the most reliable interviewers to women ensures that women who do meet the bar don't get inaccurately rejected.
2. The hiring bar is enforced at the on-site, not at the phone screen.
3. Sourcing an all-women group from a hiring event and sending them through the normal interview process is ... sending them through the normal interview process.
If you want to claim that Google is trying harder to hire qualified women than qualified men, sure, I don't think anyone disputed that. The dispute was whether Googlers ever think an unqualified person was hired to meet a diversity goal.
(And how often does Google fire someone for discovering that their interview process emitted a false positive? Given the incredible cost of making that mistake, most hiring processes are tuned to err towards false negatives instead of false positives, and Google's intensive process should be particularly good at that. Unless you're claiming HR is firing qualified men to meet a quota - i.e., textbook wrongful termination at scale - a bias for never getting around to firing women can't have a noticeable effect.)
This is a lie perpetuated by googlers. That’s a false dichotomy. There is no evidence that their process reduces false positives. Pointing to a bunch of false negatives just means they have a process that produces a bunch of false negatives. For how smart googlers are purported to be, you would think they wouldn’t report such an obviously illogical statement.
Please don't troll on HN.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...
Maybe you don't agree with those claims but please don't simply write off anything you don't like the sound of as trolling.
Cool, you should sue. The SJW women are suing alleging Google has been discriminating against them: https://googlegendercase.com/ Are you going to let the SJWs win? It sounds like you have an open-and-shut case, from what you're claiming.
> Feminists would utterly lose it.
Again, that's not what's under dispute. What is being claimed is that Googlers have no reason to doubt that every person there met the hiring bar. Even in your scenario, that would still be true. Even if Google refrained entirely from hiring white men - which, yes, would be illegal - they could still enforce the hiring bar.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...
I don't have any documents or hard evidence, just what I saw and heard. So I can't contribute to that case even if I wanted to get involved.
They aren't opposed goals; an organization with a meritocracy that over-optimizes on too few metrics is fragile and collapses in a dynamic market.
The best recipe for a company that isn't printing billions of dollars from Advertising to go bankrupt is try to follow their book and culture.
If you remove infinite money and market dominance would it still work out in the end ? My guess is that it wouldn't.
Google feels sometimes very much like startups with VC money just being inefficient and burning other people money, except of course, Google is burning it's own money that is generated from the non sexy / cool stuff (ads and enterprise email / storage )...
Google in the early days didn't have infinite money nor market dominance and it obviously worked out. Doing what they did is what got them from A to B.
> If you remove infinite money and market dominance would it still work out in the end ?
And the answer to that is clearly: yes. It would because it did.
None of Google's success it had to do with identity politics. In many ways, you could argue Google was a-political for most of its life.
They should be surprised as it hasn't ever happened before. That's not to say that it won't or shouldn't happen, it just would be surprising.
I suspect if a company says "Bring your whole self to work, and we're actually serious about it, only bother applying if you think you'll gel with the folks already here," they'll still be able to hire as many people as they need and they'll deliver better products because of it.
I would argue that they are less productive seeing that after all these years they haven’t diversified from advertising - where 90% of their profit comes from - as compared to Apple or Microsoft or even Amazon.
What they're now learning is that this decision is incompatible with certain forms of revenue like military or immigration-enforcement contracts. That doesn't mean that the right answer is that you should accept such forms of revenue and reject the employees who don't support it. That just means you have to choose. What they're regretting is simply that they can't have it both ways.
(Also, GitHub in particular is trying to endorse a particular form of politics at work - they've been defending the practices of ICE in their internal and external communications. If opposition to ICE is political, support of ICE is political too, no?)
Google and GitHub are trying to turn into IBM and Oracle. That's fine, but they should remember that they were originally trying to beat IBM and Oracle. And they shouldn't be surprised if a company that explicitly embraces activist engineers and forswears sources of revenue incompatible with that activism, a company that says "We will talk about politics at the workplace and this is our particular form of politics," one day beats the pants off them.