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People can't seem to summarize his argument without getting much of it grossly wrong, because his manifesto was a haphazard collection of good points, bad point

People can't seem to summarize his argument without getting much of it grossly wrong, because his manifesto was a haphazard collection of good points, bad points, good arguments, lousy arguments, misrepresentations of others' views, and unstated implications. A perfect recipe for people to argue past each other about it. It's worth remembering that one of his conclusions was to end or replace gender-based diversity programs at Google. Given that, it's easy to understand why people would be upset. If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias, then the lack of that program means those women wouldn't have gotten those jobs.

jorgemf 9y ago
> If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias, then the lack of that program means those women wouldn't have gotten those jobs. This is a double sword thing. With the program you might hire more qualified women, but also more less qualified women and you might prevent of hiring more qualified men. Because you have to hire women as the diversity program says. If I were I woman (or belong to minority) I would prefer to be being hired without any diversity program. Imagine being a woman and being hired with this program, does it mean they hired me because I am a woman or because I am the best candidate for the position? (I said woman but applies to any minority group)
- emmab 9y ago
  > This is a double sword thing. With the program you might hire more qualified women, but also more less qualified women and you might prevent of hiring more qualified women. Because you have to hire women as the diversity program says. Are you saying there are no situations in which applying a systematic adjustment as a function of gender to interview scores could result in a predictable net-fitness-increase in the resulting skill distribution of hired people? > If I were I woman (or belong to minority) I would prefer to be being hired without any diversity program. Imagine being a woman and being hired with this program, does it mean they hired me because I am a woman or because I am the best candidate for the position? (I said woman but applies to any minority group) That's not really the important question though. Would you prefer being not being hired due to bias even though you are qualified, or being hired despite bias, even though you know it will make some people think you weren't really qualified?
  - gdix 9y ago
    >That's not really the important question though. Would you prefer being not being hired due to bias even though you are qualified, or being hired despite bias, even though you know it will make some people think you weren't really qualified? It depends on if that bias existed or not. If the bias exists then of course, I would want to have that bias compensated for. The question is still: is there a bias? Many people say the disparity alone is evidence of a bias because a completely unbiased system would result in a 50/50 split which we obviously don't have. The author of the manifesto is saying that a bias doesn't exist because the disparity has another explanation with some scientific support. You might disagree or think that the science which supports this idea is faulty in some way. But come on, the reaction has been outrageous and scary.
    - tunesmith 9y ago
      The author clearly stated that he wasn't denying that sexism exists. Another example of how the manifesto is inconsistent, unless he's saying that sexism exists but somehow has no effect on hiring.
      - jorgemf 9y ago
        I think he said the ratio of women / men in the company was matching or close to the reality. That there are more men interested in tech than women and that trying to achieve a 50/50 was a mistake. Then the based the disparity of women interested in tech because of biological reasons. Sexims might exist and have and effect in hiring but for him the effect of the diversity program was bigger, and a result it could lead to hire less qualified individuals. He said that the company should hire based on skills and not in gender or other bias. And also it should change how it works internally to create a better environment for women where they can explode their skills, those one the men doesn't have.
        tunesmith 9y ago
        This is where I don't know about Google's diversity aims in detail. The manifesto author regularly talked about 50/50, but I don't know if that is actually Google's stated goal. Regardless, even if an organization aims for 50/50, that is not the underlying objective - it's more a diagnosis to meet the real underlying objective, which is to have a hiring practice that is not subject to hidden gender biases (or seeks to make up for them in some way).
- tunesmith 9y ago
  Assuming you're not a woman or minority, don't be so sure that's what you would prefer (unless you're saying you would prefer there were no bias at all, in which case, duh). There are women and minorities that have benefited from such programs, and absolutely do not feel guilty by it, because they believe that in the absence of those programs, the unfair disadvantage would have exceeded any "unfair advantage" the program gave them.
  - jorgemf 9y ago
    When I said "if I were a woman" I was talking about me. My personal opinion. I know that there are people that think differently. I prefer to work for a company that was able to see my skills than other that hire me because other reasons. I think I would be happier and achieve more things this way. (Again, this is a personal opinion)
    - tunesmith 9y ago
      Respectfully, I'm still not sure my point is coming across. I agree with you; and I think everyone else does, that they'd rather work for a company that was able to see their skills. But, what if you knew there was bias that would keep them from seeing your skills, and would keep you from being hired because of it? What if your only choices were to be hired through a diversity program, or not be hired at all?
      - jorgemf 9y ago
        If it is either die or survive without choose survive, obviously. Why are you so sure the bias is there? Countries like Norway are one of the most equality countries but they have the higher ratios, which doesn't make sense because they have the less bias.
        Kluny 9y ago
        > Why are you so sure the bias is there? Countries like Norway are one of the most equality countries but they have the higher ratios, which doesn't make sense because they have the less bias. This sentence is a little garbled so not quite sure what you're going for, but I like to point people to the example of the Danish parliament. A gender quota was established some decades ago to ensure that female members could get the job, because obviously half the population is female and so they need to be represented. Now that they have an equal number of men and women, they're getting ready to remove the quota because it served its purpose, and it's not needed anymore. There are enough qualified and experienced women with strong reputations available that they don't need the help anymore.
- fatbird 9y ago
  If you were a woman, you might think that being hired under a diversity initiative is okay, given that the alternative is not to get the opportunity at all due to systemic discrimination in hiring.
  - xname2 9y ago
    "not to get the opportunity at all due to systemic discrimination in hiring" - this is not reality but only your imagination.
    - fatbird 9y ago
      Your denial of reality is noted. Systemic discrimination against women in hiring has been exhaustively documented and studied, including in the tech industry.
      - jorgemf 9y ago
        I think you should cite references. It will make your point stronger and I want to read them!
        fatbird 9y ago
        I don't have a pile of references at hand since this isn't my area of study, but here's what I was able to google up: 1. http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Bertrand&Mullainathan.pdf http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Bertrand&Mullainathan.pdf This study was primarily aimed at identifying the impact of race, but incidentally showed that resumes with females names received a lower number of callbacks, in addition to the race based effect. 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3970474/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3970474/ "Without provision of information about candidates other than their appearance, men are twice more likely to be hired for a mathematical task than women." 3. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract "Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant." 4. http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol65/iss1/5/ http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol65/iss1/5... "the authors show that [anonymous application procedure] increased the chances of both women and individuals of non-Western origin of advancing to the interview stage." 5. http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 Anonymization in orchestra additions (blind screening) led to women advancing out of preliminary rounds 50% more often.
- nyxtom 9y ago
  This is actually one of the points made here: https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tide%20Why%20Women%20Leave%20Engineering.pdf https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tid... "Still getting asked if I can handle being in a mostly male work environment in interviews in 2009 - I’ve been an engineer for 9 years, obviously I can. I know when I’m asked that question, I HAVE NO CHANCE AT THE JOB. It is nice they brought me in for equal opportunity survey points but don’t waste my time if you don’t take females seriously.” The point is when you have a male dominated "bro"/"frat" culture, diversity programs are indeed just to meet labor standards - but they don't actually hold water. Which is why women end up leaving these places because people can't treat women like human beings. A diversity program becomes virtually useless if you can't keep people from leaving short of incentivizing them to deal with a company's toxic culture.
  - jorgemf 9y ago
    Stupid people are everywhere. I want to think that there is a big amount of people that is not like that. As a male I was told something similar in an interview at Google: if I would mind to work in a company where most people are men? And as the girl you cite I found the question stupid. I have worked in tech I already know how is this. Instead of diversity program to hire women we should create tolerance programs for everybody.
    - nyxtom 9y ago
      Wishful thinking unfortunately :/ Hence the exodus.
    - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
      That, or employers should up their professionalism. Bring back the 9-5 job, the clean desk policy, the grumpy boss that will chew you out if you come to work wearing shorts.
      - pas 9y ago
        How does that signal for professionalism? How does that make a healthier workplace culture? It just becomes a management minefield. People can commit crimes in suits too.
- Kluny 9y ago
  As a woman with a disability who got hired by a diversity program, I don't give a fuck. I just need a job. Working at McDonald's sucks balls. If I really couldn't do the job, they could have fired me at the end of my probation period. I'm quite happy to earn my position after I've got it.
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago
    I second your sentiment. Even assuming we live in a perfect world were no-one is biased and hiring is perfectly fair based on skills etc, things like commuting time and accessibility of living spaces restricts what job people with impaired mobility can actually accept and as result they compete in a smaller job market. This applies to the majority of protected categories one way or another, but people forget it's not "just because people are biased" - while many sadly are, at an explicit or implicit level, even if they weren't there are good reason to keep certain quotas around. Edit: enlighten me naysayers, why protecting special categories with objective limitations a priory even in absence of cultural bias would be so bad?
  - noisy_boy 9y ago
    At the risk of somewhat generalizing, a disability puts a person at disadvantage. Just being a women isn't a disadvantage. Regarding your employer being able to potentially firing you, the point isn't that they can fire you but that hiring you based on a diversity program for women could have excluded a more qualified man (not saying that you could not be the most qualified candidate). Firing you later doesn't fix the missed opportunity for that man or the employer.
    - nthcolumn 9y ago
      From what you've said it is obvious that there is some disadvantage to being a women. There is no such thing as the mythical better qualified man. ALL the people interviewed are qualified, they can ALL do the job. Progressive companies do not want the same old same old weird white male dominated culture. They want to attract people with different life experiences, different perspectives, they need diversity. Not a nice to have, need. If they want to attract the best engineer in the world ever and she looks into their office and sees a whole load of middle aged white men she will think 'Nope I don't fit in here'. She was more important for innovative, disruptive company than all those dudes she spied and we lost her because we couldn't manage our hiring process properly. Ugh, what is so hard to understand here??? Diverse is better. There is no lowering of the bar, get over yourselves!
- puranjay 9y ago
  So in my country, we have our own version of affirmative action called caste-based reservations. Basically, if you belong to a certain caste, there are seats reserved for you in every government institution (schools, universities) and public sector jobs. One of the smartest people I know belongs to one of these castes. She is brilliant at her job but constantly worries whether she got in because of her brains or because of the reservations. There is STILL a serious need for reservations and affirmative action in my country, but man does it screw with people.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
    The problem here is that even a discussion about this topic is dangerous. That's unbelievable!
    - pyvpx 9y ago
      a persons humanity should not be in question. you can discuss the merits of a specific persons qualifications but to argue "women, as an aggregate, are poor coders because they care about people and not things like dudes do" isn't a discussion. it's just grade-school level sexism. for someone with a PhD in biological systems, you'd expect a person to be a little more developed in their thinking...
      - BearGoesChirp 9y ago
        Woman and men are, on average, different. Is this wrong? These differences can be in factors that impact ones desire or ability to perform certain roles. Is this wrong? This individual person, because they are a man/woman, is unfit for the role. This IS wrong. Is it wrong to say there are differences that make women, on average, worse football players? Is that inherently bad, perhaps even blasphemous, thing to say? I don't think so. So why can't one discuss this about other jobs? Perhaps they are wrong, Perhaps which ever group isn't worse on average. But even if they are wrong, then the way to respond is to say that their information is wrong, not that they are wrong for saying it. We are treating the conversation itself like it is a blasphemy that shall not be uttered aloud. Instead, we should be asking 'is this information factual or not'. And we should be taking safe guards that averages aren't assigned to individuals.
- zouhair 9y ago
  >If I were I woman (or belong to minority) I would prefer to be being hired without any diversity program. Only someone who is not a woman or not from a minority could say this. People tend to dismiss other peoples problem or minimize them, even when those people are telling they are hurting.
  - JSONwebtoken 9y ago
    > Only someone who is not a woman or not from a minority could say this. People tend to dismiss other peoples problem or minimize them, even when those people are telling they are hurting. Only someone who is a woman or from a minority with liberal views could say this. How can you speak for 70% of people? How are you hurting from being treated equally to the 30%?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - lawnchair_larry 9y ago
    Haha. Clearly you are not a woman. I've heard many, many women express this. Do you know how insulting it is to be a diversity hire?
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      Not insulting to me. I'd love to be a diversity hire. Instead I just don't get hired, and the Government tell me I'm a lying cunt and threaten to take away my benefits for not being able to find a job.
      - dijit 9y ago
        My company is all about diversity hires; please send a CV they'd love to have you aboard if you're willing to relocate. https://massive.se/jobs https://massive.se/jobs edit: not sure why downvotes, I'm being sincere. :S
  - drakonka 9y ago
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  I think any company should hire diversely in terms of qualifications too, regardless of gender; there's far too many job postings out there where they ask for 5+ years of experience. Even entry-level with X years of experience. I'm glad at least that some IT employers care less about education and look more at potential and whatnot.
- gambiting 9y ago
  My sister was extremely put off going into CS after the career adviser at her school literally told her "you should go into CS since companies will have to hire you because you are a woman and they have quotas to fill". She was so upset by this she didn't even want to consider trying a CS degree.
- wastedhours 9y ago
  White male, so checking my privilege, however I know my "widening participation" status influenced certain opportunities I had access to in the run up to university, and quite likely as part of a numbers game for the university place itself. I've often thought about how I feel knowing something as simple as the postcode I grew up in affected how I got somewhere, but always arrive at it being a net positive. There are pros and cons to it all of course, and it doesn't take away from the fear that you don't deserve it. But, society needs to kickstart the fortuitous cycle of opportunity, direction and inspiration somehow. When a group of people have no role models, nobody empathetic of their route or life chances or aware of any other skills they can bring, we can't progress. When we're talking about whether someone is more or less qualified, it's not like it's a AAA+ grade male vs a CCD- female. It's (in almost all cases), very small variations of tangential achievements, most of which can be outweighed with a minority group bringing a different group of life experiences to the table.
  - peak_body_yo 9y ago
    > It's (in almost all cases), very small variations of tangential achievements, most of which can be outweighed with a minority group bringing a different group of life experiences to the table. Actually, diversity initiatives can decrease cultural diversity in tech. Many diversity initiatives leave immigrants behind and mainly benefit Americans. It can be said that foreigners are considered more "culturally diverse" than Americans in USA based workplaces. Diversity programs might increase gender and racial diversity, but also decrease foreign representation as a result and make a company less culturally diverse.
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
      I think male Asians and Indians are not considered as adding as much 'diversity' in tech.
- jedrek 9y ago
  I love how you throw around the term "qualified" as though it were set in stone. Like one person is obviously more qualified than the other, as though these people are 100m sprinters whose performance is measured within a fraction of a hundredth of a second. We're treating highly educated specialists tasked with delivering highly complex, variable and nuanced output like 19th century factory workers. How many hundreds of books have been published on just the question of measuring employee productivity, yet for the sake of this conversation we toss terms like "more qualified" around like they are law.
  - lagadu 9y ago
    "Qualified" was the wrong word because it can imply that the qualifications are measurable à priori, which is what I'm assuming is your interpretation. That's not what the OP is saying though, he's saying "qualified" as seen in demonstrated performance after the hiring. It would've been clearer had he said "better at the job" (as in, leading to a greater total company value) than "qualified".
  - jorgemf 9y ago
    It is a subjetive measure but still a measure. For example, the position requires knowing Python, a person with 5 years of experience in Python will probably know more than a person with 1. Yes, you can be wrong but hiring the 5 year person is the common sense, you will do less mistakes this way. Hiring the women because it is a women it is a positive discrimination. Not hiring the women with experience is discrimination, but does this really happen? Can you prove it? (Ok yes, people see a woman to hire and say +1 point because you a woman and will us pay less taxes because of the diversity balance. This shit happens too) You talk like you have written those books, enlighten me.
- StargazyPi 9y ago
  I think there are a lot of misconceptions about diversity programs, and their purpose. Let's use tech leadership as an example: The problem they're solving shouldn't be "we need more women in tech, so let's lower the bar for them". The problem they should be solving is "There are two candidates for this leadership position. One tends to use assertiveness and authority to get the job done. The other uses encouragement and persuasion. Who do you hire?". The default response is often to choose the person with the leadership style you've seen many times before, and thus the person who uses unfamiliar, equally effective techniques doesn't get a shot. You sure as hell shouldn't hire me because I'm female. You should hire me because the set of techniques I employ to do my job are effective, even though they might be less familiar to you. Every tech lead has a different style, and that style has been tailored to that individual. Measure the outcome, not arbitrary characteristics that contribute to the outcome.
  - jorgemf 9y ago
    > You sure as hell shouldn't hire me because I'm female. You should hire me because the set of techniques I employ to do my job are effective, even though they might be less familiar to you I couldn't agree more with it. And I think it is one of the points of the infamous memorandum. We should change how the companies works internally so we can use other skills in our benefit. I am not sure the diversity programs work like this, because if they worked like this the focus should be more inside the internal culture than in the hiring process. They would say something like we need to teach people in the company to increase the tolerance and assess diversity skill instead of increasing the diversity. Increasing diversity should be an emerge feature not a goal.
- saturdaysaint 9y ago
  "If I were I woman (or belong to minority) I would prefer to be being hired without any diversity program." This is like saying "I'd enjoy my success more without the Mortgage Interest Deduction unfairly advantaging me financially". Theoretically feasible, but in practical reality, uh no. If you're hacking it in a competitive environment and you have a life, you most assuredly have 1,000 more important/interesting things on your mind.
  - jorgemf 9y ago
    You have to strive for the things you want in live, nothing is easy for anyone. Do I want a better salary? a better job? yes. But I want a quality of life, I don't want to work long hours. So I wont have something better because I have other preferences in life. And I am ok with it.
    - saturdaysaint 9y ago
      Cool.
  - lr4444lr 9y ago
    Completely inaccurate analogy. The MID is in the tax code available and given blindly to everybody who wants to apply for a house, not part of any human judgment on merit or ability. A more relevant one would be whether brokers are now showing houses or discussing financing options differently to people based a perception of the person's identity group.
    - saturdaysaint 9y ago
      Apparently it's your hobby horse, but there's no reason an analogy has to adhere to the topic of identity politics. Few people give active thought to the advantages they're born into or receive throughout life - that the GP thinks people advantaged by hiring preferences would prefer to have been hired some other way is just a failure to comprehend human psychology. Unless they're writing a blog on the topic, most people are more busy with their jobs and lives to care about their hiring process.
- roguecoder 9y ago
  Why do you assume the men being hired are more qualified than the women who were passed over? The hiring process is subjective, not fair. There is extensive evidence that just having a name that is assumed to be female makes a candidate less likely to get hired. Without diversity programs, less qualified men are hired over more qualified women, producing the skewed results we observe. Women are on average more qualified than the men in the same jobs they hold because of these social forces, so your assumptions make you particularly systematically wrong.
99mistakes 9y ago
> If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias You mean unqualified women not getting jobs due to a lack of bias, right?
lazyjones 9y ago
> because his manifesto was a haphazard collection of good points, bad points, good arguments, lousy arguments, misrepresentations of others' views, and unstated implications. Is this really an honest assessment? I haven't yet seen a single reply to the manifesto that addresses its points and counters the supposedly "lousy arguments" in a neutral tone and objective manner. Please point me to one if you have...
- tunesmith 9y ago
  Sure, the second paragraph of this is a good example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953024
  - Simon_says 9y ago
    > It's worth remembering that one of his conclusions was to end or replace gender-based diversity programs at Google. Given that, it's easy to understand why people would be upset. If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias, then the lack of that program means those women wouldn't have gotten those jobs. This is not exactly a strong counter-argument.
    - lurker69 9y ago
      > If gender-based diversity programs are responsible... > If... Nothing empirical in that sentence just assumption. And even if we assume that statement is true, on the other side of same coin are qualified men that didn't get job solely because of their genitalia.
      - Simon_says 9y ago
        Exactly. A very reasonable document is criticized as being "unscientific" or "discredited", and when pressed for specific inaccuracies, this is the best response? The left and corporate culture has gone full retard on this issue.
zouhair 9y ago
The big problem I had with his "memo" is that, for a text that is about a hot and controversial topic, it lacks (more like doesn't contain any) references to backup his points. A lot of factoids and nothing to back them up.
- JSONwebtoken 9y ago
  He's a Harvard trained Systems Biologist (3 years into a PHD based on LinkedIn). If his educational qualifications aren't enough for an unofficial rant, all of the graphs and hyperlinks he used as external references were edited out by journalists before it was mass distributed.
- jkoll 9y ago
  Unedited version of the memo: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
  - BlackLotus89 9y ago
    Thank you for the link. I only read the poorly formatted version and was disappointed because of this. Now it seems even worse how the whole situation was handled. For instance https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbv54d/google-on-anti-diversity-manifesto-employees-must-feel-safe-sharing-their-opinions https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbv54d/google-on-... > And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I'm not going to link to it here as it's not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages. > Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws. Yay we believe in "a culture in which those with alternative views [...] feel safe sharing their opinions" (except when they diverge from our view). We want them to feel safe sharing them and we show this through firing people who ask for an open discussion. Bravo google. And linking to the manifesto or at least quoting an example of what is wrong is bad, because ....? (Yes a shitstorm is brewing and there now is a hot headed "discussion", but the main problem is that nobody actually references or talks about the actual manifesto. People talk _about it_, but quotes are sparse and the critics never point out any (logical) fallacies. It's a much to emotional "debate".) Anyway thanks to the full text I now actually could revise my opinion on the whole matter (I actually have yet to follow all the references/sources), but am disgusted at googles reaction to fire someone because their opinion created a toxic reaction. If such a reaction spawns, maybe there is room for an open discussion and maybe we can find a solution everybody is happy with. Killing off unwelcome voices doesn't sound like a welcoming environment to me and unethically at best. Edit: Let me close with a quote from the manifesto in relation to the response from the VP of Diversity > My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. He now seems kind of right at least in that regard.
ThomPete 9y ago
Gender based diversity programs are hurting more than they are helping because they are confusing the role of gender diversity with the role of talent diversity. These programs are most likely not responsible for qualified women getting jobs and even if they are they are also responsible for qualified men not getting the jobs so nothing is really gained. The idea of qualification is something that is misunderstood far into academia as it assumes some sort of quantitative measurement is possible. The reality is that short of what you have paper on (she's a bachelor he's a bachelor) qualifications really isn't about skills but about personality and I would challenge anyone to find even close to a way of measuring how a person fits into a company short of asking the people who work there whether they think person X fits or not. Furthermore the idea that diversity is better for companies really need to die. Diversity is good in many cases but you can easily have one company filled with women and one company filled with men and having the group of women being of very diverse backgrounds and the group of men being of very diverse backgrounds. You still have diversity. Hell you can even have a group of women being of exactly the same background and a group of men being of exactly the same background and do really really well. The idea the women brings something to the table simply by being women or that men does simply by being men is what is so wrong with this whole conversation. The individual brings something to the table but the individual needs to fit into a culture not being force fed into it. Having hired and interviewed a great deal of people in my life in the tech industry I think it's fair to say that most companies will look for ANY talent they can get to. Talent is extremely hard to find and being a woman or being a man is not enough. More women will hopefully start companies and I hope some of them will hire only women if they feel it's better for their culture. But until they start doing that to the same extent that men does and until they start to the same extent having interest in technology early on, gender based anything will always be hurting more than it will help because just having gender diversity isn't going to make your company better off there simply aren't anything proving that. And just to be clear. I have worked with women and men far better than me. When it comes to the best there really isn't any difference. I have worked for plenty of female bosses and they are as good as the men I have worked with.
- tunesmith 9y ago
  Sure, if you define diversity as having nothing to do with gender, then of course you don't need women to have diversity. And if you define corporate responsibility as doing only what is needed to put effective people in chairs, then there is no need for diversity programs to meet corporate responsibility (at least, assuming sufficient talent). But your entire comment misses the phenomenon of biases having affected women their entire lives, from what hobbies they were steered towards, to their experiences during education, to their interviewing process, to their working environments after having jobs. These are all part of what gender diversity programs are trying to combat. And honestly, I'd say that this statement right here: > These programs are most likely not responsible for qualified women getting jobs and even if they are they are also responsible for qualified men not getting the jobs so nothing is really gained. is more of a really effective example of the actual problem, and an illustration of why gender diversity programs are needed, than an effective counterpoint against them.
gopz 9y ago
I would disagree. While he obviously sees the diversity programs as misguided, he stops short of calling for an end to them. To quote: > Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs. I understand that discussions within a business are different than talking with friends around the kitchen table, but I still think that you should go as far as you possibly can to have open discussions about sensitive topics like this. Of course you aren't going to open a dialogue about the benefits of white power, but there is still a lot of ground to cover between that and what people are doing this weekend. I think that the original article fits into that realm of what is acceptable to at least talk about, regardless of whether you disagree or not.
- josteink 9y ago
  > > Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs. To which the diversity proponents are quick to rally a mob and get the guy fired. Open and honest discussion indeed. If you are so insecure in your ideological position that you can't even have a discussion about it without calling foul, I'd consider that the best possible sign that you actually need to have that discussion. It's the only way to make sure that it's properly rooted and based on fact, and to legitimize it, and by proxy, the means you use to further it. Sticking your head in the sand to avoid criticism will probably do the exact opposite, and sure as hell wont further your cause.
  - faceplanted 9y ago
    Except it wasn't a call to open discussion, it was an anonymously published manifesto that directly affected other members of the company. You can't just publish a manifesto about the benefits of slavery without some backlash, you can't publish your opinion that we should repeal the laws against religious discrimination without backlash either, nor can you publish your opinions about race or gender without expecting backlash because publishing those opinions inside a company where those groups are present is inherently threatening. It's been accepted for a long time that the place for arguments against racial, religious, or gender programs is not the workplace. I'm a man and I find his manifesto an issue, he said things about men that are blatantly untrue, and frankly unhealthy as well, and I wouldn't want to work with him. People's opinion on their coworkers is for private discussions with their manager and HR, and don't get precedence over their colleagues comfort and security at work. It's been that way since black people got rights and women got the vote.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case. If the author is wrong, that there definitely isn't some inherit genetic behavioral bias influencing job choice, than the bias is happening before students finish highschool. I'm a proponent for an "early bias" theory because of far lower female graduation and entry level application rates to CS jobs. If less than 25% of CS graduates are female, which is currently the case, it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women. That means that the overall point of the authors manifesto, that programs designed to specifically increase the ratio of female engineers are unfair, is true. We need to do something about the low number of women going into tech fields in school. Punishing companies for not hiring women when the vast majority of candidates are men is a perverse incentive that is biased against men and doesn't fix the real problem. It's like punishing someone for taking more yellow onions at the market when there's 3 times as many nice looking ones as white onions. The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. In the real world, farmers would begin switching to white onions and the supply would increase. Unfortunately, our supply of women is governed by a mostly government run school system that doesn't exist in a world of supply and demand and likes to shift the blame for their ineptitude. Fixing this at the education level would mean owning up to a mistake. It's much easier to just fine everyone to make it look like you're fixing a "problem" caused by inadequate regulations.
- andreasklinger 9y ago
  a) i agree that it's a problem for the whole society not just the corporates. it starts by far earlier as you said b) your argument is that 50% is currently not possible most companies are <20% in tech positions and <20-30% for management a few years ago even <10% [2] [1] https://pxlnv.com/blog/diversity-of-tech-companies-by-the-numbers-2016/ https://pxlnv.com/blog/diversity-of-tech-companies-by-the-nu... [2] https://unreasonable.is/silicon-valley-more-female-engineers/ https://unreasonable.is/silicon-valley-more-female-engineers...
  - slackingoff2017 9y ago
astrodev 9y ago
I expected any discussion of the memo to be quickly shut down, its supporters classed as filthy misogynists. It was surprising to see over 1,000 comments and upvotes. I'm glad that it's becoming OK to discuss these topics again.
- dcposch 9y ago
  A few hours later, it's been completely removed from the main HN page (even a few pages in), despite 1600+ votes. It's a shame that the administrators of this site feel the need to shut down discussion on important issues like this. The story is clearly important and less than 24 hours old, and already it's been forcibly removed from the front page in favor of a bunch of 15-vote ephemeral Javascript trivia posts. Pro tip: use https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best
shawn-butler 9y ago
Diversity programs have been shown to be ineffective at reaching their stated aims. A longitudinal study of over 700 U.S. companies found that implementing diversity training programs has little positive effect and may even decrease representation of black women. [0] They seem to be used by companies as a "shield" when sued for discrimination. [1] The so-called “diversity defense”. It worked for WalMart. [0]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000312240607100404 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122406071004... [1]: https://hbr.org/2016/01/diversity-policies-dont-help-women-or-minorities-and-they-make-white-men-feel-threatened https://hbr.org/2016/01/diversity-policies-dont-help-women-o...
Chris2048 9y ago
> If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias But is the bias substantiated so that diversity hiring tracks it? Do the men who lose out to diversity candidates, the same that are benefiting from bias (as individuals, not "men, as a group")? Isn't this like saying "Jailing innocent men is a fair price to ensure the guilty don't get away"
- roguecoder 9y ago
  Yes, that's what "systematic bias" means. In actual observational studies, the men who are excluded from positions by gender quotas are less competent than the women who replace them: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/03/13/gender-quotas-and-the-crisis-of-the-mediocre-man/ http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/03/13/gender-quot... This is why there is such intense reactions against correcting for bias: men with imposter syndrome or who are actually incompetent are afraid that they wouldn't be able to compete if the system wasn't so heavily skewed in their favor.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    Which statement are you answering "yes" to? I asked if the quotas "track" bias - in the sense that bias is actively measured, and quotas adjusted accordingly. I haven't read the study in your link, and might not even be qualified to interpret it, but two things stand out to me: 1) The study appears to focus on a single "event" or "snapshot" - not an ongoing, corrected process: > Our research asks what happened when the central party organisation of the Social Democratic party imposed the quota on 285 local (municipal) political parties from the 1994 election and forward. As such, it might be that the "mediocre reducing" nature of the results only apply to one-off applications of gender quotas where there previously were none. In fact, if one of the concerns is "cronyism" (or "insider bias"), then any quota requiring employment of outsiders might just be as effective at ousting the mediocre. This has nothing really to do with my question, of whether such policies actually "track" bias, because it doesn't seem this example does. 2) They use a problematic/controversial definition of "merit": > A competent politician, we argue, is a person who makes more than the median amongst politicians with similar characteristics. They directly equate personal income with competence/mediocrity, which invites all kinds of questions... Also, politics is a little different - there is a sense that politicians "represent" their populace, so the race/sex of politicians should also be more representative. Plus, politics is more "restricted" in the sense that only a certain population (size) of politicians need serve a certain national population (size) - but the restrictions (market size) in the corporate world might not be so distinct; There is plenty room for more qualified software developers.
SmirkingRevenge 9y ago
> It's worth remembering that one of his conclusions was to end or replace gender-based diversity programs at Google. Given that, it's easy to understand why people would be upset. If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias, then the lack of that program means those women wouldn't have gotten those jobs. Wouldn't the same be true about any non-optimal hiring practices and procedures though? Google is pretty famous for constantly evaluating and tuning their hiring processes, because presumably - they sometimes fail to hire qualified people, and sometimes hire unqualified people. They want to tune their process so they are as close to 0 as humanly possible for each of those cases. Maybe the guy is a sexist and racist asshole, I don't know him - but if I give him the benefit of the doubt and read him charitably, I take it to mean he's saying gender-based diversity programs might produce worse ratios of qualified/unqualified hires, and unqualified/qualified passes than some of his other proposals. In other words, tune the hiring process, as it relates specifically to diversity hires, to improve the ratio of qualified/unqualified workers. I have no idea if that idea is crazy or sensible, but it doesn't strike me as being obviously one way or the other. I'm sure with all the attention this is getting somebody, somewhere, who may be experts in these things could offer their take on it.
- Simon_says 9y ago
  The elephant in the room is that it's mathematically impossible to optimize for quality of hires and diversity simultaneously. You have to pick one or the other or some compromise between the two. Start with some selection of people chosen optimally for job performance; any deviation from that for any reason will necessary give sub-opitimal performance.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Of course you can optimize for quality and diversity simultaneously. Let's take an extreme example and say that your hiring process only accepts purple people, and then judges them on merit. If you remove the requirement for purple people and keep the rest, your diversity and quality will both improve. Here's the problem: "Start with some selection of people chosen optimally for job performance...." That's the hiring equivalent of "assume a spherical cow." Sure, if your existing process optimally chooses people for job performance, then any move toward diversity will reduce quality. Likewise, if you have a spherical, frictionless cow, then its speed after descending a slope with a height of 100 meters will be 44.3m/s. Both statements are correct and equally applicable to the real world.
gadders 9y ago
He only thought/suggested that, though. He's being punished for his thoughts.
- roguecoder 9y ago
  Once you say it out loud, it's not being punished for thoughts anymore. Speaking is an action. As this thread shows, if he'd just kept his whiny assumptions about women's innate incompetence as engineers to himself he would have been able to remain happily employed in a cushy job.
  - tunesmith 9y ago
    FWIW... as someone who (I think, still mulling) is supportive of him being fired due to the code-of-conduct and contributing-to-an-unsafe-work-environment arguments, I'm pretty sure I'd be against firing him if he had posted these thoughts outside of his employment situation. It's even more interesting to think about if he had posted this outside of google and anonymously, and then someone had doxxed him. Then I'd probably be pissed and would be arguing on behalf of him - not his views, but that he shouldn't have been treated that way.
    - dictum 9y ago
      Can't speak for him, but I imagine his thought process was: This is an internal matter, and the intended audience is Google employees, so to prevent attracting attention from the wrong audience and maximize attention from Googlers, I'll post it in the internal board... It doesn't help that Google apparently encouraged employees expressing their thoughts.
      - tunesmith 9y ago
        Yeah honestly that part strikes me as being a bit weird. I've also never worked for a very huge company, but when you've got companies that are so large that they want to basically start embedding your entire lifestyle into it (free food, culture, etc) then it seems like a recipe for this kind of conflict of interest. There it starts to blur the line between "You shouldn't express these thoughts at work" with "You shouldn't have these thoughts in the first place."
leroy_masochist 9y ago
I'm a veteran whose hiring through 2/4 jobs in the last 10 years has been through a distinct veteran recruiting pipeline. In the other two, my veteran status was likely a factor as well. As such, I've personally benefited numerous times from diversity hiring programs. If someone at any of my previous employers had written an internal memo criticizing the respective company's diversity program (ie the funnel through which I was hired), I can't imagine calling for their job, even if the way in which they stated that opinion was offensive to me. I say this with the understanding that there's an obvious difference between choosing to join the military and being born as a woman or person of color.
mikeash 9y ago
"A perfect recipe for people to argue past each other about it." Well put. Regardless of what side you take, I'm sure everybody understands that this is a controversial, emotionally-charged topic that must be approached with extreme care. This fellow did not do so, and created a firestorm in his wake. That alone seems like sufficient reason to fire him. It's sort of the verbal equivalent to lighting a match to illuminate a darkened oil rig. Maybe you just wanted to illuminate things, but there are better ways to do it.
brandonhsiao 9y ago
There's a real problem where people see the social context in which a document is being discussed before the document itself, and the two become inseparable in their heads. From the start the discussion was framed around lossy compressions of its content. "He says women are biologically unfit to be programmers." "He's anti-diversity." At the height of lossiness: "This manifesto is sexist and bigoted." When in fact he never says any of these things, and in some cases says the opposite. Try asking people to link to the specific section in http://diversitymemo.com http://diversitymemo.com where the author supposedly said what they claim he said, and surprisingly often they're unable to do it. At some point, lossy compression crosses over into mendacity. Shame on Gizmodo for initially reporting this as an "anti-diversity" memo. If you're a journalist, you know that is not an adequately high-resolution description of a complex body of text. But it's good for page views, so they do it. And the other publications follow suit.

jorgemf 9y ago

> If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias, then the lack of that program means those women wouldn't have gotten those jobs. This is a double sword thing. With the program you might hire more qualified women, but also more less qualified women and you might prevent of hiring more qualified men. Because you have to hire women as the diversity program says. If I were I woman (or belong to minority) I would prefer to be being hired without any diversity program. Imagine being a woman and being hired with this program, does it mean they hired me because I am a woman or because I am the best candidate for the position? (I said woman but applies to any minority group)

emmab 9y ago
> This is a double sword thing. With the program you might hire more qualified women, but also more less qualified women and you might prevent of hiring more qualified women. Because you have to hire women as the diversity program says. Are you saying there are no situations in which applying a systematic adjustment as a function of gender to interview scores could result in a predictable net-fitness-increase in the resulting skill distribution of hired people? > If I were I woman (or belong to minority) I would prefer to be being hired without any diversity program. Imagine being a woman and being hired with this program, does it mean they hired me because I am a woman or because I am the best candidate for the position? (I said woman but applies to any minority group) That's not really the important question though. Would you prefer being not being hired due to bias even though you are qualified, or being hired despite bias, even though you know it will make some people think you weren't really qualified?
- gdix 9y ago
  >That's not really the important question though. Would you prefer being not being hired due to bias even though you are qualified, or being hired despite bias, even though you know it will make some people think you weren't really qualified? It depends on if that bias existed or not. If the bias exists then of course, I would want to have that bias compensated for. The question is still: is there a bias? Many people say the disparity alone is evidence of a bias because a completely unbiased system would result in a 50/50 split which we obviously don't have. The author of the manifesto is saying that a bias doesn't exist because the disparity has another explanation with some scientific support. You might disagree or think that the science which supports this idea is faulty in some way. But come on, the reaction has been outrageous and scary.
  - tunesmith 9y ago
    The author clearly stated that he wasn't denying that sexism exists. Another example of how the manifesto is inconsistent, unless he's saying that sexism exists but somehow has no effect on hiring.
    - jorgemf 9y ago
      I think he said the ratio of women / men in the company was matching or close to the reality. That there are more men interested in tech than women and that trying to achieve a 50/50 was a mistake. Then the based the disparity of women interested in tech because of biological reasons. Sexims might exist and have and effect in hiring but for him the effect of the diversity program was bigger, and a result it could lead to hire less qualified individuals. He said that the company should hire based on skills and not in gender or other bias. And also it should change how it works internally to create a better environment for women where they can explode their skills, those one the men doesn't have.
      - tunesmith 9y ago
        This is where I don't know about Google's diversity aims in detail. The manifesto author regularly talked about 50/50, but I don't know if that is actually Google's stated goal. Regardless, even if an organization aims for 50/50, that is not the underlying objective - it's more a diagnosis to meet the real underlying objective, which is to have a hiring practice that is not subject to hidden gender biases (or seeks to make up for them in some way).
tunesmith 9y ago
Assuming you're not a woman or minority, don't be so sure that's what you would prefer (unless you're saying you would prefer there were no bias at all, in which case, duh). There are women and minorities that have benefited from such programs, and absolutely do not feel guilty by it, because they believe that in the absence of those programs, the unfair disadvantage would have exceeded any "unfair advantage" the program gave them.
- jorgemf 9y ago
  When I said "if I were a woman" I was talking about me. My personal opinion. I know that there are people that think differently. I prefer to work for a company that was able to see my skills than other that hire me because other reasons. I think I would be happier and achieve more things this way. (Again, this is a personal opinion)
  - tunesmith 9y ago
    Respectfully, I'm still not sure my point is coming across. I agree with you; and I think everyone else does, that they'd rather work for a company that was able to see their skills. But, what if you knew there was bias that would keep them from seeing your skills, and would keep you from being hired because of it? What if your only choices were to be hired through a diversity program, or not be hired at all?
    - jorgemf 9y ago
      If it is either die or survive without choose survive, obviously. Why are you so sure the bias is there? Countries like Norway are one of the most equality countries but they have the higher ratios, which doesn't make sense because they have the less bias.
      - Kluny 9y ago
        > Why are you so sure the bias is there? Countries like Norway are one of the most equality countries but they have the higher ratios, which doesn't make sense because they have the less bias. This sentence is a little garbled so not quite sure what you're going for, but I like to point people to the example of the Danish parliament. A gender quota was established some decades ago to ensure that female members could get the job, because obviously half the population is female and so they need to be represented. Now that they have an equal number of men and women, they're getting ready to remove the quota because it served its purpose, and it's not needed anymore. There are enough qualified and experienced women with strong reputations available that they don't need the help anymore.
fatbird 9y ago
If you were a woman, you might think that being hired under a diversity initiative is okay, given that the alternative is not to get the opportunity at all due to systemic discrimination in hiring.
- xname2 9y ago
  "not to get the opportunity at all due to systemic discrimination in hiring" - this is not reality but only your imagination.
  - fatbird 9y ago
    Your denial of reality is noted. Systemic discrimination against women in hiring has been exhaustively documented and studied, including in the tech industry.
    - jorgemf 9y ago
      I think you should cite references. It will make your point stronger and I want to read them!
      - fatbird 9y ago
        I don't have a pile of references at hand since this isn't my area of study, but here's what I was able to google up: 1. http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Bertrand&Mullainathan.pdf http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Bertrand&Mullainathan.pdf This study was primarily aimed at identifying the impact of race, but incidentally showed that resumes with females names received a lower number of callbacks, in addition to the race based effect. 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3970474/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3970474/ "Without provision of information about candidates other than their appearance, men are twice more likely to be hired for a mathematical task than women." 3. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract "Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant." 4. http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol65/iss1/5/ http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol65/iss1/5... "the authors show that [anonymous application procedure] increased the chances of both women and individuals of non-Western origin of advancing to the interview stage." 5. http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 Anonymization in orchestra additions (blind screening) led to women advancing out of preliminary rounds 50% more often.
nyxtom 9y ago
This is actually one of the points made here: https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tide%20Why%20Women%20Leave%20Engineering.pdf https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tid... "Still getting asked if I can handle being in a mostly male work environment in interviews in 2009 - I’ve been an engineer for 9 years, obviously I can. I know when I’m asked that question, I HAVE NO CHANCE AT THE JOB. It is nice they brought me in for equal opportunity survey points but don’t waste my time if you don’t take females seriously.” The point is when you have a male dominated "bro"/"frat" culture, diversity programs are indeed just to meet labor standards - but they don't actually hold water. Which is why women end up leaving these places because people can't treat women like human beings. A diversity program becomes virtually useless if you can't keep people from leaving short of incentivizing them to deal with a company's toxic culture.
- jorgemf 9y ago
  Stupid people are everywhere. I want to think that there is a big amount of people that is not like that. As a male I was told something similar in an interview at Google: if I would mind to work in a company where most people are men? And as the girl you cite I found the question stupid. I have worked in tech I already know how is this. Instead of diversity program to hire women we should create tolerance programs for everybody.
  - nyxtom 9y ago
    Wishful thinking unfortunately :/ Hence the exodus.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    That, or employers should up their professionalism. Bring back the 9-5 job, the clean desk policy, the grumpy boss that will chew you out if you come to work wearing shorts.
    - pas 9y ago
      How does that signal for professionalism? How does that make a healthier workplace culture? It just becomes a management minefield. People can commit crimes in suits too.
Kluny 9y ago
As a woman with a disability who got hired by a diversity program, I don't give a fuck. I just need a job. Working at McDonald's sucks balls. If I really couldn't do the job, they could have fired me at the end of my probation period. I'm quite happy to earn my position after I've got it.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  I second your sentiment. Even assuming we live in a perfect world were no-one is biased and hiring is perfectly fair based on skills etc, things like commuting time and accessibility of living spaces restricts what job people with impaired mobility can actually accept and as result they compete in a smaller job market. This applies to the majority of protected categories one way or another, but people forget it's not "just because people are biased" - while many sadly are, at an explicit or implicit level, even if they weren't there are good reason to keep certain quotas around. Edit: enlighten me naysayers, why protecting special categories with objective limitations a priory even in absence of cultural bias would be so bad?
- noisy_boy 9y ago
  At the risk of somewhat generalizing, a disability puts a person at disadvantage. Just being a women isn't a disadvantage. Regarding your employer being able to potentially firing you, the point isn't that they can fire you but that hiring you based on a diversity program for women could have excluded a more qualified man (not saying that you could not be the most qualified candidate). Firing you later doesn't fix the missed opportunity for that man or the employer.
  - nthcolumn 9y ago
    From what you've said it is obvious that there is some disadvantage to being a women. There is no such thing as the mythical better qualified man. ALL the people interviewed are qualified, they can ALL do the job. Progressive companies do not want the same old same old weird white male dominated culture. They want to attract people with different life experiences, different perspectives, they need diversity. Not a nice to have, need. If they want to attract the best engineer in the world ever and she looks into their office and sees a whole load of middle aged white men she will think 'Nope I don't fit in here'. She was more important for innovative, disruptive company than all those dudes she spied and we lost her because we couldn't manage our hiring process properly. Ugh, what is so hard to understand here??? Diverse is better. There is no lowering of the bar, get over yourselves!
puranjay 9y ago
So in my country, we have our own version of affirmative action called caste-based reservations. Basically, if you belong to a certain caste, there are seats reserved for you in every government institution (schools, universities) and public sector jobs. One of the smartest people I know belongs to one of these castes. She is brilliant at her job but constantly worries whether she got in because of her brains or because of the reservations. There is STILL a serious need for reservations and affirmative action in my country, but man does it screw with people.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  The problem here is that even a discussion about this topic is dangerous. That's unbelievable!
  - pyvpx 9y ago
    a persons humanity should not be in question. you can discuss the merits of a specific persons qualifications but to argue "women, as an aggregate, are poor coders because they care about people and not things like dudes do" isn't a discussion. it's just grade-school level sexism. for someone with a PhD in biological systems, you'd expect a person to be a little more developed in their thinking...
    - BearGoesChirp 9y ago
      Woman and men are, on average, different. Is this wrong? These differences can be in factors that impact ones desire or ability to perform certain roles. Is this wrong? This individual person, because they are a man/woman, is unfit for the role. This IS wrong. Is it wrong to say there are differences that make women, on average, worse football players? Is that inherently bad, perhaps even blasphemous, thing to say? I don't think so. So why can't one discuss this about other jobs? Perhaps they are wrong, Perhaps which ever group isn't worse on average. But even if they are wrong, then the way to respond is to say that their information is wrong, not that they are wrong for saying it. We are treating the conversation itself like it is a blasphemy that shall not be uttered aloud. Instead, we should be asking 'is this information factual or not'. And we should be taking safe guards that averages aren't assigned to individuals.
zouhair 9y ago
>If I were I woman (or belong to minority) I would prefer to be being hired without any diversity program. Only someone who is not a woman or not from a minority could say this. People tend to dismiss other peoples problem or minimize them, even when those people are telling they are hurting.
- JSONwebtoken 9y ago
  > Only someone who is not a woman or not from a minority could say this. People tend to dismiss other peoples problem or minimize them, even when those people are telling they are hurting. Only someone who is a woman or from a minority with liberal views could say this. How can you speak for 70% of people? How are you hurting from being treated equally to the 30%?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- lawnchair_larry 9y ago
  Haha. Clearly you are not a woman. I've heard many, many women express this. Do you know how insulting it is to be a diversity hire?
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Not insulting to me. I'd love to be a diversity hire. Instead I just don't get hired, and the Government tell me I'm a lying cunt and threaten to take away my benefits for not being able to find a job.
    - dijit 9y ago
      My company is all about diversity hires; please send a CV they'd love to have you aboard if you're willing to relocate. https://massive.se/jobs https://massive.se/jobs edit: not sure why downvotes, I'm being sincere. :S
- drakonka 9y ago
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
I think any company should hire diversely in terms of qualifications too, regardless of gender; there's far too many job postings out there where they ask for 5+ years of experience. Even entry-level with X years of experience. I'm glad at least that some IT employers care less about education and look more at potential and whatnot.
gambiting 9y ago
My sister was extremely put off going into CS after the career adviser at her school literally told her "you should go into CS since companies will have to hire you because you are a woman and they have quotas to fill". She was so upset by this she didn't even want to consider trying a CS degree.
wastedhours 9y ago
White male, so checking my privilege, however I know my "widening participation" status influenced certain opportunities I had access to in the run up to university, and quite likely as part of a numbers game for the university place itself. I've often thought about how I feel knowing something as simple as the postcode I grew up in affected how I got somewhere, but always arrive at it being a net positive. There are pros and cons to it all of course, and it doesn't take away from the fear that you don't deserve it. But, society needs to kickstart the fortuitous cycle of opportunity, direction and inspiration somehow. When a group of people have no role models, nobody empathetic of their route or life chances or aware of any other skills they can bring, we can't progress. When we're talking about whether someone is more or less qualified, it's not like it's a AAA+ grade male vs a CCD- female. It's (in almost all cases), very small variations of tangential achievements, most of which can be outweighed with a minority group bringing a different group of life experiences to the table.
- peak_body_yo 9y ago
  > It's (in almost all cases), very small variations of tangential achievements, most of which can be outweighed with a minority group bringing a different group of life experiences to the table. Actually, diversity initiatives can decrease cultural diversity in tech. Many diversity initiatives leave immigrants behind and mainly benefit Americans. It can be said that foreigners are considered more "culturally diverse" than Americans in USA based workplaces. Diversity programs might increase gender and racial diversity, but also decrease foreign representation as a result and make a company less culturally diverse.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
    I think male Asians and Indians are not considered as adding as much 'diversity' in tech.
jedrek 9y ago
I love how you throw around the term "qualified" as though it were set in stone. Like one person is obviously more qualified than the other, as though these people are 100m sprinters whose performance is measured within a fraction of a hundredth of a second. We're treating highly educated specialists tasked with delivering highly complex, variable and nuanced output like 19th century factory workers. How many hundreds of books have been published on just the question of measuring employee productivity, yet for the sake of this conversation we toss terms like "more qualified" around like they are law.
- lagadu 9y ago
  "Qualified" was the wrong word because it can imply that the qualifications are measurable à priori, which is what I'm assuming is your interpretation. That's not what the OP is saying though, he's saying "qualified" as seen in demonstrated performance after the hiring. It would've been clearer had he said "better at the job" (as in, leading to a greater total company value) than "qualified".
- jorgemf 9y ago
  It is a subjetive measure but still a measure. For example, the position requires knowing Python, a person with 5 years of experience in Python will probably know more than a person with 1. Yes, you can be wrong but hiring the 5 year person is the common sense, you will do less mistakes this way. Hiring the women because it is a women it is a positive discrimination. Not hiring the women with experience is discrimination, but does this really happen? Can you prove it? (Ok yes, people see a woman to hire and say +1 point because you a woman and will us pay less taxes because of the diversity balance. This shit happens too) You talk like you have written those books, enlighten me.
StargazyPi 9y ago
I think there are a lot of misconceptions about diversity programs, and their purpose. Let's use tech leadership as an example: The problem they're solving shouldn't be "we need more women in tech, so let's lower the bar for them". The problem they should be solving is "There are two candidates for this leadership position. One tends to use assertiveness and authority to get the job done. The other uses encouragement and persuasion. Who do you hire?". The default response is often to choose the person with the leadership style you've seen many times before, and thus the person who uses unfamiliar, equally effective techniques doesn't get a shot. You sure as hell shouldn't hire me because I'm female. You should hire me because the set of techniques I employ to do my job are effective, even though they might be less familiar to you. Every tech lead has a different style, and that style has been tailored to that individual. Measure the outcome, not arbitrary characteristics that contribute to the outcome.
- jorgemf 9y ago
  > You sure as hell shouldn't hire me because I'm female. You should hire me because the set of techniques I employ to do my job are effective, even though they might be less familiar to you I couldn't agree more with it. And I think it is one of the points of the infamous memorandum. We should change how the companies works internally so we can use other skills in our benefit. I am not sure the diversity programs work like this, because if they worked like this the focus should be more inside the internal culture than in the hiring process. They would say something like we need to teach people in the company to increase the tolerance and assess diversity skill instead of increasing the diversity. Increasing diversity should be an emerge feature not a goal.
saturdaysaint 9y ago
"If I were I woman (or belong to minority) I would prefer to be being hired without any diversity program." This is like saying "I'd enjoy my success more without the Mortgage Interest Deduction unfairly advantaging me financially". Theoretically feasible, but in practical reality, uh no. If you're hacking it in a competitive environment and you have a life, you most assuredly have 1,000 more important/interesting things on your mind.
- jorgemf 9y ago
  You have to strive for the things you want in live, nothing is easy for anyone. Do I want a better salary? a better job? yes. But I want a quality of life, I don't want to work long hours. So I wont have something better because I have other preferences in life. And I am ok with it.
  - saturdaysaint 9y ago
    Cool.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  Completely inaccurate analogy. The MID is in the tax code available and given blindly to everybody who wants to apply for a house, not part of any human judgment on merit or ability. A more relevant one would be whether brokers are now showing houses or discussing financing options differently to people based a perception of the person's identity group.
  - saturdaysaint 9y ago
    Apparently it's your hobby horse, but there's no reason an analogy has to adhere to the topic of identity politics. Few people give active thought to the advantages they're born into or receive throughout life - that the GP thinks people advantaged by hiring preferences would prefer to have been hired some other way is just a failure to comprehend human psychology. Unless they're writing a blog on the topic, most people are more busy with their jobs and lives to care about their hiring process.
roguecoder 9y ago
Why do you assume the men being hired are more qualified than the women who were passed over? The hiring process is subjective, not fair. There is extensive evidence that just having a name that is assumed to be female makes a candidate less likely to get hired. Without diversity programs, less qualified men are hired over more qualified women, producing the skewed results we observe. Women are on average more qualified than the men in the same jobs they hold because of these social forces, so your assumptions make you particularly systematically wrong.

99mistakes 9y ago

> If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias You mean unqualified women not getting jobs due to a lack of bias, right?

lazyjones 9y ago

> because his manifesto was a haphazard collection of good points, bad points, good arguments, lousy arguments, misrepresentations of others' views, and unstated implications. Is this really an honest assessment? I haven't yet seen a single reply to the manifesto that addresses its points and counters the supposedly "lousy arguments" in a neutral tone and objective manner. Please point me to one if you have...

tunesmith 9y ago
Sure, the second paragraph of this is a good example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953024
- Simon_says 9y ago
  > It's worth remembering that one of his conclusions was to end or replace gender-based diversity programs at Google. Given that, it's easy to understand why people would be upset. If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias, then the lack of that program means those women wouldn't have gotten those jobs. This is not exactly a strong counter-argument.
  - lurker69 9y ago
    > If gender-based diversity programs are responsible... > If... Nothing empirical in that sentence just assumption. And even if we assume that statement is true, on the other side of same coin are qualified men that didn't get job solely because of their genitalia.
    - Simon_says 9y ago
      Exactly. A very reasonable document is criticized as being "unscientific" or "discredited", and when pressed for specific inaccuracies, this is the best response? The left and corporate culture has gone full retard on this issue.

zouhair 9y ago

The big problem I had with his "memo" is that, for a text that is about a hot and controversial topic, it lacks (more like doesn't contain any) references to backup his points. A lot of factoids and nothing to back them up.

JSONwebtoken 9y ago
He's a Harvard trained Systems Biologist (3 years into a PHD based on LinkedIn). If his educational qualifications aren't enough for an unofficial rant, all of the graphs and hyperlinks he used as external references were edited out by journalists before it was mass distributed.
jkoll 9y ago
Unedited version of the memo: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
- BlackLotus89 9y ago
  Thank you for the link. I only read the poorly formatted version and was disappointed because of this. Now it seems even worse how the whole situation was handled. For instance https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbv54d/google-on-anti-diversity-manifesto-employees-must-feel-safe-sharing-their-opinions https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbv54d/google-on-... > And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I'm not going to link to it here as it's not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages. > Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws. Yay we believe in "a culture in which those with alternative views [...] feel safe sharing their opinions" (except when they diverge from our view). We want them to feel safe sharing them and we show this through firing people who ask for an open discussion. Bravo google. And linking to the manifesto or at least quoting an example of what is wrong is bad, because ....? (Yes a shitstorm is brewing and there now is a hot headed "discussion", but the main problem is that nobody actually references or talks about the actual manifesto. People talk _about it_, but quotes are sparse and the critics never point out any (logical) fallacies. It's a much to emotional "debate".) Anyway thanks to the full text I now actually could revise my opinion on the whole matter (I actually have yet to follow all the references/sources), but am disgusted at googles reaction to fire someone because their opinion created a toxic reaction. If such a reaction spawns, maybe there is room for an open discussion and maybe we can find a solution everybody is happy with. Killing off unwelcome voices doesn't sound like a welcoming environment to me and unethically at best. Edit: Let me close with a quote from the manifesto in relation to the response from the VP of Diversity > My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. He now seems kind of right at least in that regard.

ThomPete 9y ago

Gender based diversity programs are hurting more than they are helping because they are confusing the role of gender diversity with the role of talent diversity. These programs are most likely not responsible for qualified women getting jobs and even if they are they are also responsible for qualified men not getting the jobs so nothing is really gained. The idea of qualification is something that is misunderstood far into academia as it assumes some sort of quantitative measurement is possible. The reality is that short of what you have paper on (she's a bachelor he's a bachelor) qualifications really isn't about skills but about personality and I would challenge anyone to find even close to a way of measuring how a person fits into a company short of asking the people who work there whether they think person X fits or not. Furthermore the idea that diversity is better for companies really need to die. Diversity is good in many cases but you can easily have one company filled with women and one company filled with men and having the group of women being of very diverse backgrounds and the group of men being of very diverse backgrounds. You still have diversity. Hell you can even have a group of women being of exactly the same background and a group of men being of exactly the same background and do really really well. The idea the women brings something to the table simply by being women or that men does simply by being men is what is so wrong with this whole conversation. The individual brings something to the table but the individual needs to fit into a culture not being force fed into it. Having hired and interviewed a great deal of people in my life in the tech industry I think it's fair to say that most companies will look for ANY talent they can get to. Talent is extremely hard to find and being a woman or being a man is not enough. More women will hopefully start companies and I hope some of them will hire only women if they feel it's better for their culture. But until they start doing that to the same extent that men does and until they start to the same extent having interest in technology early on, gender based anything will always be hurting more than it will help because just having gender diversity isn't going to make your company better off there simply aren't anything proving that. And just to be clear. I have worked with women and men far better than me. When it comes to the best there really isn't any difference. I have worked for plenty of female bosses and they are as good as the men I have worked with.

tunesmith 9y ago
Sure, if you define diversity as having nothing to do with gender, then of course you don't need women to have diversity. And if you define corporate responsibility as doing only what is needed to put effective people in chairs, then there is no need for diversity programs to meet corporate responsibility (at least, assuming sufficient talent). But your entire comment misses the phenomenon of biases having affected women their entire lives, from what hobbies they were steered towards, to their experiences during education, to their interviewing process, to their working environments after having jobs. These are all part of what gender diversity programs are trying to combat. And honestly, I'd say that this statement right here: > These programs are most likely not responsible for qualified women getting jobs and even if they are they are also responsible for qualified men not getting the jobs so nothing is really gained. is more of a really effective example of the actual problem, and an illustration of why gender diversity programs are needed, than an effective counterpoint against them.

gopz 9y ago

I would disagree. While he obviously sees the diversity programs as misguided, he stops short of calling for an end to them. To quote: > Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs. I understand that discussions within a business are different than talking with friends around the kitchen table, but I still think that you should go as far as you possibly can to have open discussions about sensitive topics like this. Of course you aren't going to open a dialogue about the benefits of white power, but there is still a lot of ground to cover between that and what people are doing this weekend. I think that the original article fits into that realm of what is acceptable to at least talk about, regardless of whether you disagree or not.

josteink 9y ago
> > Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs. To which the diversity proponents are quick to rally a mob and get the guy fired. Open and honest discussion indeed. If you are so insecure in your ideological position that you can't even have a discussion about it without calling foul, I'd consider that the best possible sign that you actually need to have that discussion. It's the only way to make sure that it's properly rooted and based on fact, and to legitimize it, and by proxy, the means you use to further it. Sticking your head in the sand to avoid criticism will probably do the exact opposite, and sure as hell wont further your cause.
- faceplanted 9y ago
  Except it wasn't a call to open discussion, it was an anonymously published manifesto that directly affected other members of the company. You can't just publish a manifesto about the benefits of slavery without some backlash, you can't publish your opinion that we should repeal the laws against religious discrimination without backlash either, nor can you publish your opinions about race or gender without expecting backlash because publishing those opinions inside a company where those groups are present is inherently threatening. It's been accepted for a long time that the place for arguments against racial, religious, or gender programs is not the workplace. I'm a man and I find his manifesto an issue, he said things about men that are blatantly untrue, and frankly unhealthy as well, and I wouldn't want to work with him. People's opinion on their coworkers is for private discussions with their manager and HR, and don't get precedence over their colleagues comfort and security at work. It's been that way since black people got rights and women got the vote.

slackingoff2017 9y ago

You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case. If the author is wrong, that there definitely isn't some inherit genetic behavioral bias influencing job choice, than the bias is happening before students finish highschool. I'm a proponent for an "early bias" theory because of far lower female graduation and entry level application rates to CS jobs. If less than 25% of CS graduates are female, which is currently the case, it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women. That means that the overall point of the authors manifesto, that programs designed to specifically increase the ratio of female engineers are unfair, is true. We need to do something about the low number of women going into tech fields in school. Punishing companies for not hiring women when the vast majority of candidates are men is a perverse incentive that is biased against men and doesn't fix the real problem. It's like punishing someone for taking more yellow onions at the market when there's 3 times as many nice looking ones as white onions. The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. In the real world, farmers would begin switching to white onions and the supply would increase. Unfortunately, our supply of women is governed by a mostly government run school system that doesn't exist in a world of supply and demand and likes to shift the blame for their ineptitude. Fixing this at the education level would mean owning up to a mistake. It's much easier to just fine everyone to make it look like you're fixing a "problem" caused by inadequate regulations.

andreasklinger 9y ago
a) i agree that it's a problem for the whole society not just the corporates. it starts by far earlier as you said b) your argument is that 50% is currently not possible most companies are <20% in tech positions and <20-30% for management a few years ago even <10% [2] [1] https://pxlnv.com/blog/diversity-of-tech-companies-by-the-numbers-2016/ https://pxlnv.com/blog/diversity-of-tech-companies-by-the-nu... [2] https://unreasonable.is/silicon-valley-more-female-engineers/ https://unreasonable.is/silicon-valley-more-female-engineers...
- slackingoff2017 9y ago

astrodev 9y ago

I expected any discussion of the memo to be quickly shut down, its supporters classed as filthy misogynists. It was surprising to see over 1,000 comments and upvotes. I'm glad that it's becoming OK to discuss these topics again.

dcposch 9y ago
A few hours later, it's been completely removed from the main HN page (even a few pages in), despite 1600+ votes. It's a shame that the administrators of this site feel the need to shut down discussion on important issues like this. The story is clearly important and less than 24 hours old, and already it's been forcibly removed from the front page in favor of a bunch of 15-vote ephemeral Javascript trivia posts. Pro tip: use https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best

shawn-butler 9y ago

Diversity programs have been shown to be ineffective at reaching their stated aims. A longitudinal study of over 700 U.S. companies found that implementing diversity training programs has little positive effect and may even decrease representation of black women. [0] They seem to be used by companies as a "shield" when sued for discrimination. [1] The so-called “diversity defense”. It worked for WalMart. [0]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000312240607100404 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122406071004... [1]: https://hbr.org/2016/01/diversity-policies-dont-help-women-or-minorities-and-they-make-white-men-feel-threatened https://hbr.org/2016/01/diversity-policies-dont-help-women-o...

Chris2048 9y ago

> If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias But is the bias substantiated so that diversity hiring tracks it? Do the men who lose out to diversity candidates, the same that are benefiting from bias (as individuals, not "men, as a group")? Isn't this like saying "Jailing innocent men is a fair price to ensure the guilty don't get away"

roguecoder 9y ago
Yes, that's what "systematic bias" means. In actual observational studies, the men who are excluded from positions by gender quotas are less competent than the women who replace them: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/03/13/gender-quotas-and-the-crisis-of-the-mediocre-man/ http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/03/13/gender-quot... This is why there is such intense reactions against correcting for bias: men with imposter syndrome or who are actually incompetent are afraid that they wouldn't be able to compete if the system wasn't so heavily skewed in their favor.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  Which statement are you answering "yes" to? I asked if the quotas "track" bias - in the sense that bias is actively measured, and quotas adjusted accordingly. I haven't read the study in your link, and might not even be qualified to interpret it, but two things stand out to me: 1) The study appears to focus on a single "event" or "snapshot" - not an ongoing, corrected process: > Our research asks what happened when the central party organisation of the Social Democratic party imposed the quota on 285 local (municipal) political parties from the 1994 election and forward. As such, it might be that the "mediocre reducing" nature of the results only apply to one-off applications of gender quotas where there previously were none. In fact, if one of the concerns is "cronyism" (or "insider bias"), then any quota requiring employment of outsiders might just be as effective at ousting the mediocre. This has nothing really to do with my question, of whether such policies actually "track" bias, because it doesn't seem this example does. 2) They use a problematic/controversial definition of "merit": > A competent politician, we argue, is a person who makes more than the median amongst politicians with similar characteristics. They directly equate personal income with competence/mediocrity, which invites all kinds of questions... Also, politics is a little different - there is a sense that politicians "represent" their populace, so the race/sex of politicians should also be more representative. Plus, politics is more "restricted" in the sense that only a certain population (size) of politicians need serve a certain national population (size) - but the restrictions (market size) in the corporate world might not be so distinct; There is plenty room for more qualified software developers.

SmirkingRevenge 9y ago

> It's worth remembering that one of his conclusions was to end or replace gender-based diversity programs at Google. Given that, it's easy to understand why people would be upset. If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias, then the lack of that program means those women wouldn't have gotten those jobs. Wouldn't the same be true about any non-optimal hiring practices and procedures though? Google is pretty famous for constantly evaluating and tuning their hiring processes, because presumably - they sometimes fail to hire qualified people, and sometimes hire unqualified people. They want to tune their process so they are as close to 0 as humanly possible for each of those cases. Maybe the guy is a sexist and racist asshole, I don't know him - but if I give him the benefit of the doubt and read him charitably, I take it to mean he's saying gender-based diversity programs might produce worse ratios of qualified/unqualified hires, and unqualified/qualified passes than some of his other proposals. In other words, tune the hiring process, as it relates specifically to diversity hires, to improve the ratio of qualified/unqualified workers. I have no idea if that idea is crazy or sensible, but it doesn't strike me as being obviously one way or the other. I'm sure with all the attention this is getting somebody, somewhere, who may be experts in these things could offer their take on it.

Simon_says 9y ago
The elephant in the room is that it's mathematically impossible to optimize for quality of hires and diversity simultaneously. You have to pick one or the other or some compromise between the two. Start with some selection of people chosen optimally for job performance; any deviation from that for any reason will necessary give sub-opitimal performance.
- mikeash 9y ago
  Of course you can optimize for quality and diversity simultaneously. Let's take an extreme example and say that your hiring process only accepts purple people, and then judges them on merit. If you remove the requirement for purple people and keep the rest, your diversity and quality will both improve. Here's the problem: "Start with some selection of people chosen optimally for job performance...." That's the hiring equivalent of "assume a spherical cow." Sure, if your existing process optimally chooses people for job performance, then any move toward diversity will reduce quality. Likewise, if you have a spherical, frictionless cow, then its speed after descending a slope with a height of 100 meters will be 44.3m/s. Both statements are correct and equally applicable to the real world.

gadders 9y ago

He only thought/suggested that, though. He's being punished for his thoughts.

roguecoder 9y ago
Once you say it out loud, it's not being punished for thoughts anymore. Speaking is an action. As this thread shows, if he'd just kept his whiny assumptions about women's innate incompetence as engineers to himself he would have been able to remain happily employed in a cushy job.
- tunesmith 9y ago
  FWIW... as someone who (I think, still mulling) is supportive of him being fired due to the code-of-conduct and contributing-to-an-unsafe-work-environment arguments, I'm pretty sure I'd be against firing him if he had posted these thoughts outside of his employment situation. It's even more interesting to think about if he had posted this outside of google and anonymously, and then someone had doxxed him. Then I'd probably be pissed and would be arguing on behalf of him - not his views, but that he shouldn't have been treated that way.
  - dictum 9y ago
    Can't speak for him, but I imagine his thought process was: This is an internal matter, and the intended audience is Google employees, so to prevent attracting attention from the wrong audience and maximize attention from Googlers, I'll post it in the internal board... It doesn't help that Google apparently encouraged employees expressing their thoughts.
    - tunesmith 9y ago
      Yeah honestly that part strikes me as being a bit weird. I've also never worked for a very huge company, but when you've got companies that are so large that they want to basically start embedding your entire lifestyle into it (free food, culture, etc) then it seems like a recipe for this kind of conflict of interest. There it starts to blur the line between "You shouldn't express these thoughts at work" with "You shouldn't have these thoughts in the first place."

leroy_masochist 9y ago

I'm a veteran whose hiring through 2/4 jobs in the last 10 years has been through a distinct veteran recruiting pipeline. In the other two, my veteran status was likely a factor as well. As such, I've personally benefited numerous times from diversity hiring programs. If someone at any of my previous employers had written an internal memo criticizing the respective company's diversity program (ie the funnel through which I was hired), I can't imagine calling for their job, even if the way in which they stated that opinion was offensive to me. I say this with the understanding that there's an obvious difference between choosing to join the military and being born as a woman or person of color.

mikeash 9y ago

"A perfect recipe for people to argue past each other about it." Well put. Regardless of what side you take, I'm sure everybody understands that this is a controversial, emotionally-charged topic that must be approached with extreme care. This fellow did not do so, and created a firestorm in his wake. That alone seems like sufficient reason to fire him. It's sort of the verbal equivalent to lighting a match to illuminate a darkened oil rig. Maybe you just wanted to illuminate things, but there are better ways to do it.

brandonhsiao 9y ago

There's a real problem where people see the social context in which a document is being discussed before the document itself, and the two become inseparable in their heads. From the start the discussion was framed around lossy compressions of its content. "He says women are biologically unfit to be programmers." "He's anti-diversity." At the height of lossiness: "This manifesto is sexist and bigoted." When in fact he never says any of these things, and in some cases says the opposite. Try asking people to link to the specific section in http://diversitymemo.com http://diversitymemo.com where the author supposedly said what they claim he said, and surprisingly often they're unable to do it. At some point, lossy compression crosses over into mendacity. Shame on Gizmodo for initially reporting this as an "anti-diversity" memo. If you're a journalist, you know that is not an adequately high-resolution description of a complex body of text. But it's good for page views, so they do it. And the other publications follow suit.