3 ms·

can you cite the source? Because this sounds very unbelievable to me. I work in a mid-size company structured in many ways similarly to Google and I cannot imag

can you cite the source? Because this sounds very unbelievable to me. I work in a mid-size company structured in many ways similarly to Google and I cannot imagine a representative survey with results already coming up. Google has close to 70k employees. What was the sample? How selected? How representative? It sounds very questionable,

icelancer 9y ago
Source data here. Who knows if it is representative, but 282 anonymous respondents have chimed in. The distribution looks like what I would expect. https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.html https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...
- DannyBee 9y ago
  It's definitely not representative. For reasons that would be obvious if you knew the history of the document, but that i can't share, it consists almost entirely of a sample of people from certain mailing lists. It's definitely not valid to draw any conclusions about google as a whole from it.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    I believe you. I also believe the 2nd chart would basically look the same if you polled 10,000 representative people from inside Google. The 1st one, not so much.
    - DannyBee 9y ago
      Maybe? Remember though, that groups that are underrepresented may also be disproportionately affected. IE women may feel the document is much more harmful than men, but by numbers, ... You'd have to break it down by a lot of variables, and once that happens, in practice, everyone will just draw whatever conclusion they want anyway :) Anyway, not gonna speculate on what it would look like, just gonna point out it's not valid data.
    - zbraniecki 9y ago
      a) I'm not sure what you base your believe in. My gut feelings tells me the opposite. If you polled a representative sample of employees you'd get very different results in the 2nd chart but that's not important because: b) The idea that average people are good at understanding the consequences of such document is inherently flawed. It's my problem with a lot of aspects of American culture (I'm an European living in SV) - regular people are not in position to evaluate complex systems. Every time I see an article about, say, a shooting, that ends with "Joe Black, who lives nearby, believes that police should do X and Y to stop the increase in crime", my blood boils. Joe Black is in a terrible position to understand the crime dynamic in his city, to understand how the police operates and what does and doesn't work in the pursuit of lowering crime rate. Now, coming back to the topic, I'd argue that 95% of Googlers are completely not qualified to respond to the second question. At all. There's a bunch of people in the HR department, with degree in sociology, group psychology, organization behavior and design, maybe people who studied micro-discrimination, gender imbalances etc. that are qualified to answer it. But the idea that you can poll employees to learn about whether this document is harmful is completely nuts. Sorry for venting :) p.s. But yeah... while writing this comment I saw an article about the poll asking Americans if the US should attack North Korea [0]. I honestly believe that the culture of doing that, while pretends to stay close to the roots of the country of freedom, where citizens decide about their country, is in fact terribly harmful because it builds conviction in people that they're in the right position to make such judgements on topics they have insanely little knowledge about. [0] http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-threat-grows/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-...
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    > from certain mailing lists eng-misc?
- Aunche 9y ago
  Voluntary response bias is definitely possible. People who feel the most wronged are more likely to respond to the survey.
ryan_lane 9y ago
For real, it's hard to get 40% of people to even take a survey.

icelancer 9y ago

Source data here. Who knows if it is representative, but 282 anonymous respondents have chimed in. The distribution looks like what I would expect. https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.html https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...

DannyBee 9y ago
It's definitely not representative. For reasons that would be obvious if you knew the history of the document, but that i can't share, it consists almost entirely of a sample of people from certain mailing lists. It's definitely not valid to draw any conclusions about google as a whole from it.
- icelancer 9y ago
  I believe you. I also believe the 2nd chart would basically look the same if you polled 10,000 representative people from inside Google. The 1st one, not so much.
  - DannyBee 9y ago
    Maybe? Remember though, that groups that are underrepresented may also be disproportionately affected. IE women may feel the document is much more harmful than men, but by numbers, ... You'd have to break it down by a lot of variables, and once that happens, in practice, everyone will just draw whatever conclusion they want anyway :) Anyway, not gonna speculate on what it would look like, just gonna point out it's not valid data.
  - zbraniecki 9y ago
    a) I'm not sure what you base your believe in. My gut feelings tells me the opposite. If you polled a representative sample of employees you'd get very different results in the 2nd chart but that's not important because: b) The idea that average people are good at understanding the consequences of such document is inherently flawed. It's my problem with a lot of aspects of American culture (I'm an European living in SV) - regular people are not in position to evaluate complex systems. Every time I see an article about, say, a shooting, that ends with "Joe Black, who lives nearby, believes that police should do X and Y to stop the increase in crime", my blood boils. Joe Black is in a terrible position to understand the crime dynamic in his city, to understand how the police operates and what does and doesn't work in the pursuit of lowering crime rate. Now, coming back to the topic, I'd argue that 95% of Googlers are completely not qualified to respond to the second question. At all. There's a bunch of people in the HR department, with degree in sociology, group psychology, organization behavior and design, maybe people who studied micro-discrimination, gender imbalances etc. that are qualified to answer it. But the idea that you can poll employees to learn about whether this document is harmful is completely nuts. Sorry for venting :) p.s. But yeah... while writing this comment I saw an article about the poll asking Americans if the US should attack North Korea [0]. I honestly believe that the culture of doing that, while pretends to stay close to the roots of the country of freedom, where citizens decide about their country, is in fact terribly harmful because it builds conviction in people that they're in the right position to make such judgements on topics they have insanely little knowledge about. [0] http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-threat-grows/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-...
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  > from certain mailing lists eng-misc?
Aunche 9y ago
Voluntary response bias is definitely possible. People who feel the most wronged are more likely to respond to the survey.

ryan_lane 9y ago

For real, it's hard to get 40% of people to even take a survey.