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One thing that bothers me as someone who works at Google (but is speaking purely his own opinion) is that this manifesto implies some pretty wrong things about

by jfasi 9y ago

One thing that bothers me as someone who works at Google (but is speaking purely his own opinion) is that this manifesto implies some pretty wrong things about our hiring process. In particular, it conflates diversity sourcing programs with a lower hiring bar. As an engineer who's done a fair bit of volunteer recruiting work as well as conducted interviews, my experience has been that race- and gender-specific programs are used exclusively as outreach, sourcing, and mentorship tools. James claims there are "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate," which strikes me as untrue. Regardless of how they are sourced, once candidates are in the interview pipeline their are all treated exactly as rigorously as one another. In other words, recruiters are responsible for finding, reaching out to, and advocating for candidates. Once they source the candidate they "throw them over the fence" to the cold, hard interview process, which involves experienced interviewers and a hiring committee of senior-tenure engineers. The aim is to ensure you can trust that those who make it out how the hiring committee to be top-notch. After years and years of working at the company I haven't heard even a whisper of complaint among anyone about the quality of people we're hiring. After working with people of all stripes I can say I haven't met a single person where I thought to myself "how did this loser get through the filter."

ImSkeptical 9y ago
>After years and years of working at the company I haven't heard even a whisper of complaint among anyone about the quality of people we're hiring That point is less persuasive after Google has demonstrated it will terminate people who complain - even if they do so in a reasoned manner.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  That's a major crux, though. You're implying that what this fellow did was provide a reasoned complaint, but if I were to distribute manifestos at my workplace, unsolicited and unofficially, I'd be disciplined or terminated regardless of what was written in it. To add to that, it wasn't a constructive argument with a new solution -- the only proposition was regressive action. I'd posit that it's akin to someone arguing that since civil rights were not smoothly implemented, we may as well roll back the clock because some members of society had it easier that way. It's pretty weak, and certainly not what I'd call a well-reasoned manner.
  - ImSkeptical 9y ago
    My understanding is that it was shared on a message board of some kind intended for employees to share and discuss their thoughts. If that isn't true, and he sent this document out to some mailing list or what have you - then I take back what I said and agree with you (though firing seems a tiny bit extreme). To your second point, the document proposed multiple steps at investigating or remediating the problem, such as the author saw it. Regardless, I hope you would agree that applying the standard of "You cannot discuss a social problem unless you have a solution to it, or else you will be fired" seems suboptimal.
    - dymk 9y ago
      > "You cannot discuss a social problem unless you have a solution to it, or else you will be fired" This isn't what happened though; this guy circulated an authoritative sounding memo accusing the women in Google's workforce as being held to a lower bar as the men, and outright stating that their "biological differences" was holding back engineering productivity.
      - dijit 9y ago
        That's precisely _not_ what was said. But I guess the brigading has commenced- I would invite you to read the thing without bias and read it's citations and sources. Even if you disagree that we could do more to remove things like, stress and status to make tech less appealing to men.. you might find out why people are agreeing with him and why this piece circulated internally. Mostly, it seems, scientists agree[0] with the "facts" he states that arent' google specific. So dismissing it outright without having the discussion is only doing the women in tech a disservice. [0]: http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/ http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
        dymk 9y ago
        > Mostly, it seems, scientists agree with the "facts" he states that arent' google specific Really? Yonatan Zunger[1] seems to disagree with you. [1] https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788 https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
- pkilgore 9y ago
  "reasoned manner" != suggesting colleagues have inherent traits that make them less biologically suited to their work. I get it. Some of the points in the memo were reasonable. But just because the bread and cheese on your shit sandwich look delicious, doesn't mean it's not still a gross shit sandwich.
  - WhiteOwlLion 9y ago
    On page 3, he clearly discusses overlap between men and women even with biological differences. He did not write in absolutist terms. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I... Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. _______________________________________________________
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ImSkeptical 9y ago
    I meant "reasoned manner" in the sense that it was a document with footnotes citing scientific research, and that he wasn't out on the plaza screaming about how he hated women, or something like that. The former, even if you object to the conclusions or the spirit they are offered in, you can just ignore by not reading it, or rebut by pointing out flaws with your own document. The latter is obviously a real problem in every way. Suppose someone asked why it is that Jews are overrepresented in things like winning nobel prizes, being millionaires, working as a college professor, or working in politics. My answer would be that Jews tend to have higher than average intelligence, so it is only natural that they are overrepresented in fields that require higher intelligence. But wait - some of my colleagues are not Jewish! Am I suggesting that my colleagues are less biologically suited to their work? Oh dear, that can't be right. Maybe the politically correct answer is that there is a secret cabal of Jews who run society and try to elevate their own into positions of power... but, come to think of it, that doesn't sound like such a good answer either. Maybe the real PC answer would be to accuse whoever asked of being a racist. To your point about some of the arguments in the document being gross and terrible, I'd like to discuss those points in particular. I read the document and didn't see anything obviously wrong or objectionable. If there is something wrong, it seems to me the thing to do is correct with a better argument or better evidence, not fire the author for having the wrong opinion.
uncletaco 9y ago
As someone who's participated in outreach efforts for undergrad internships, I too find his conflation of outreach and hiring worrisome. Very few of these programs, from what I've seen, do more than get minorities into the interview or selection process, which I'm ok with. My problem has always been how few big tech firms seemed to recruit outside of their usual circles (Ivies, private schools, flagship universities). I went to an HBCU in undergrad and one of the most frustrating experiences I had was when Microsoft sent an employee to talk to our group about what they were doing with regards to increasing diversity instead of what we could do to become better candidates.
jorgemf 9y ago
This should have been the response of Google, and make him apologize. Not firing him. Why Google hasn't said publicly the same as you?
- IanDrake 9y ago
  Can you quote the specific part of his memo he should apologize for?
  - jorgemf 9y ago
    As far as I understood he says google has a positive discrimination policy to hire minorities and want to achieve a 50/50 gender diversity (or at least something that doesn't match the diversity in the pool of candidates). That was my conclusion from sentences like this from the document: - "Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races." - "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership." - "I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism)." If this is not the case he should apologize for it. Note: I mostly agree with his arguments.
    - smithsmith 9y ago
      > If this is not the case he should apologize for it. Even if your understanding is correct for which of the 3 points he should apologize for. My opinion is none.
      - jorgemf 9y ago
        Well the manifesto is a clear claim of the positive discrimination in Google during the hiring process but if this is not true (which I am not sure), he should apologize. The top comment says the diversity programs only focus in increasing the amount of people in the hiring process but the selection is the same for all. The author of the manifesto says there is positive discrimination (artificial bias) to hire minorities, the lower the bar for them. So if Google doesn't lower the bar for anyone there is no way to say anything against them, everybody is treated equal. Can I quote a specific sentence for this? No, I would have to quote the whole manifesto.
curun1r 9y ago
I'm surprised that so many people, especially intelligent people from Google like you, completely ignore the "false negative" part and respond to his claim as if he'd said "false positive" instead. You're putting words in his mouth and misunderstanding the point he's making. Just to clear things up. A false negative is someone qualified who gets rejected. A false positive is someone unqualified who gets hired. He claimed that diversity candidates have a lower false negative, not a higher false positive. The "cold, hard interview process" you refer to is both technically challenging but also has a degree of arbitrariness to it. Google gets so many applicants that it makes sense to design a process that has as few false positives as possible without regard to the false negatives. I knew someone that applied to Google because our former manager had gone to Google and wanted to hire him again. He did really well in the interviews (he was recommended by all of them) but was rejected because the hiring committee felt his GPA, for an art degree unrelated to the work he'd be doing at Google, was too low. Our former manager brought him on as a contractor instead and he eventually transitioned to full-time and he has been very successful there for almost a decade since. Most people never find out the reason they weren't hired. The only reason he ever did is because he knew the hiring manager personally and, even then, he didn't learn the reasoning until after he'd transitioned to FTE. Aside from the fact that his manager was able to circumvent the hiring process to, over the course of a year, bring someone he wanted in, this is a rare example of a known false negative. As an outsider with no access to Google's hiring records, I can't say for sure how many false negatives there are, but I have to assume there are a lot more people like him that don't get hired. I've met good engineers during my career that were rejected by Google. And I've worked with enough former-Google engineers that weren't that impressive. The only thing I can say is that I've never met an engineer who worked or works for Google that I felt was terrible, which is more than I can say for most companies. It sounds like the complaint being made is that Google used a situation almost no other company has, a constant surplus of people passing their interview process and took the expedient route to increasing their minority hiring...they're just ensuring that minorities aren't cut from that last, somewhat arbitrary stage of the hiring process. They know that committee is mostly deciding between candidates who would all be good hires because the process up to that point will have already eliminated the unqualified candidates. It's both a reasonable strategy to quickly increase the number of minority hires without sacrificing on quality and it's a lower bar.
weberc2 9y ago
This is a reasonable rebuttal to the memo; I wish the other responses would address these issues instead of misrepresenting the memo and calling the author a Nazi. The way this should have unfolded was that Google launched an investigation into its hiring practices, which would probably turn out as you describe. Instead, they fired the author, giving the appearance that their hiring practices are shady and demonstrating the suite of other points made in the memo.
wolco 9y ago
Instead of choosing candidates based on diversity during the interview process the recruiting process select candidates to reach out to by diversity. You realize that you still are not selecting the most skilled candidate if you filter based on diversity at any level.
- jchrisa 9y ago
  You are forgetting the diversity itself is valuable. For lots and lots of reasons. One is that that the metrics that people who ignore diversity tend to use are easily gamed: GPA, fancy degree, etc., and may correlate more to privilege than capability. So by casting a wider net you put all the candidates in a more competitive setting, and hopefully force interviewers to figure out what they are actually looking for, not just things their gut correlates with good hire.
- jorgemf 9y ago
  > You realize that you still are not selecting the most skilled candidate if you filter based on diversity at any level. This depends on the size of your sample and the positions to fill. It is easier to find one good candidate from 100 individuals than 100 from 1000.
dlubarov 9y ago
I don't think he said that Google's sourcing programs themselves lower the bar. He seems to make two separate arguments: 1. Sourcing programs with race/gender restrictions are unfair to those excluded, and bad for business because they restrict the funnel of participants. (The same criticism would apply if Google had a while-males-only program -- it would be bad business since it would restrict the funnel without a good business reason.) 2. Google's hiring process gives special treatment to certain "diversity" candidates. He doesn't give any details, and I don't know the context, but he linked to an internal discussion which seems to imply that a "more accurate" process might be applied with the intention of reducing false negatives. (Of course anyone reading a public copy won't see this.)
ythn 9y ago
Wouldn't that explain, then, why women are underrepresented at Google? If 500 males get "thrown over the fence" and, say, 5 make it through... that means if 50 females get "thrown over the fence" it is reasonable to expect 0 will make it through.

by jfasi 9y ago

ImSkeptical 9y ago

>After years and years of working at the company I haven't heard even a whisper of complaint among anyone about the quality of people we're hiring That point is less persuasive after Google has demonstrated it will terminate people who complain - even if they do so in a reasoned manner.

52-6F-62 9y ago
That's a major crux, though. You're implying that what this fellow did was provide a reasoned complaint, but if I were to distribute manifestos at my workplace, unsolicited and unofficially, I'd be disciplined or terminated regardless of what was written in it. To add to that, it wasn't a constructive argument with a new solution -- the only proposition was regressive action. I'd posit that it's akin to someone arguing that since civil rights were not smoothly implemented, we may as well roll back the clock because some members of society had it easier that way. It's pretty weak, and certainly not what I'd call a well-reasoned manner.
- ImSkeptical 9y ago
  My understanding is that it was shared on a message board of some kind intended for employees to share and discuss their thoughts. If that isn't true, and he sent this document out to some mailing list or what have you - then I take back what I said and agree with you (though firing seems a tiny bit extreme). To your second point, the document proposed multiple steps at investigating or remediating the problem, such as the author saw it. Regardless, I hope you would agree that applying the standard of "You cannot discuss a social problem unless you have a solution to it, or else you will be fired" seems suboptimal.
  - dymk 9y ago
    > "You cannot discuss a social problem unless you have a solution to it, or else you will be fired" This isn't what happened though; this guy circulated an authoritative sounding memo accusing the women in Google's workforce as being held to a lower bar as the men, and outright stating that their "biological differences" was holding back engineering productivity.
    - dijit 9y ago
      That's precisely _not_ what was said. But I guess the brigading has commenced- I would invite you to read the thing without bias and read it's citations and sources. Even if you disagree that we could do more to remove things like, stress and status to make tech less appealing to men.. you might find out why people are agreeing with him and why this piece circulated internally. Mostly, it seems, scientists agree[0] with the "facts" he states that arent' google specific. So dismissing it outright without having the discussion is only doing the women in tech a disservice. [0]: http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/ http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
      - dymk 9y ago
        > Mostly, it seems, scientists agree with the "facts" he states that arent' google specific Really? Yonatan Zunger[1] seems to disagree with you. [1] https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788 https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
pkilgore 9y ago
"reasoned manner" != suggesting colleagues have inherent traits that make them less biologically suited to their work. I get it. Some of the points in the memo were reasonable. But just because the bread and cheese on your shit sandwich look delicious, doesn't mean it's not still a gross shit sandwich.
- WhiteOwlLion 9y ago
  On page 3, he clearly discusses overlap between men and women even with biological differences. He did not write in absolutist terms. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I... Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. _______________________________________________________
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ImSkeptical 9y ago
  I meant "reasoned manner" in the sense that it was a document with footnotes citing scientific research, and that he wasn't out on the plaza screaming about how he hated women, or something like that. The former, even if you object to the conclusions or the spirit they are offered in, you can just ignore by not reading it, or rebut by pointing out flaws with your own document. The latter is obviously a real problem in every way. Suppose someone asked why it is that Jews are overrepresented in things like winning nobel prizes, being millionaires, working as a college professor, or working in politics. My answer would be that Jews tend to have higher than average intelligence, so it is only natural that they are overrepresented in fields that require higher intelligence. But wait - some of my colleagues are not Jewish! Am I suggesting that my colleagues are less biologically suited to their work? Oh dear, that can't be right. Maybe the politically correct answer is that there is a secret cabal of Jews who run society and try to elevate their own into positions of power... but, come to think of it, that doesn't sound like such a good answer either. Maybe the real PC answer would be to accuse whoever asked of being a racist. To your point about some of the arguments in the document being gross and terrible, I'd like to discuss those points in particular. I read the document and didn't see anything obviously wrong or objectionable. If there is something wrong, it seems to me the thing to do is correct with a better argument or better evidence, not fire the author for having the wrong opinion.

uncletaco 9y ago

As someone who's participated in outreach efforts for undergrad internships, I too find his conflation of outreach and hiring worrisome. Very few of these programs, from what I've seen, do more than get minorities into the interview or selection process, which I'm ok with. My problem has always been how few big tech firms seemed to recruit outside of their usual circles (Ivies, private schools, flagship universities). I went to an HBCU in undergrad and one of the most frustrating experiences I had was when Microsoft sent an employee to talk to our group about what they were doing with regards to increasing diversity instead of what we could do to become better candidates.

jorgemf 9y ago

This should have been the response of Google, and make him apologize. Not firing him. Why Google hasn't said publicly the same as you?

IanDrake 9y ago
Can you quote the specific part of his memo he should apologize for?
- jorgemf 9y ago
  As far as I understood he says google has a positive discrimination policy to hire minorities and want to achieve a 50/50 gender diversity (or at least something that doesn't match the diversity in the pool of candidates). That was my conclusion from sentences like this from the document: - "Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races." - "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership." - "I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism)." If this is not the case he should apologize for it. Note: I mostly agree with his arguments.
  - smithsmith 9y ago
    > If this is not the case he should apologize for it. Even if your understanding is correct for which of the 3 points he should apologize for. My opinion is none.
    - jorgemf 9y ago
      Well the manifesto is a clear claim of the positive discrimination in Google during the hiring process but if this is not true (which I am not sure), he should apologize. The top comment says the diversity programs only focus in increasing the amount of people in the hiring process but the selection is the same for all. The author of the manifesto says there is positive discrimination (artificial bias) to hire minorities, the lower the bar for them. So if Google doesn't lower the bar for anyone there is no way to say anything against them, everybody is treated equal. Can I quote a specific sentence for this? No, I would have to quote the whole manifesto.

curun1r 9y ago

I'm surprised that so many people, especially intelligent people from Google like you, completely ignore the "false negative" part and respond to his claim as if he'd said "false positive" instead. You're putting words in his mouth and misunderstanding the point he's making. Just to clear things up. A false negative is someone qualified who gets rejected. A false positive is someone unqualified who gets hired. He claimed that diversity candidates have a lower false negative, not a higher false positive. The "cold, hard interview process" you refer to is both technically challenging but also has a degree of arbitrariness to it. Google gets so many applicants that it makes sense to design a process that has as few false positives as possible without regard to the false negatives. I knew someone that applied to Google because our former manager had gone to Google and wanted to hire him again. He did really well in the interviews (he was recommended by all of them) but was rejected because the hiring committee felt his GPA, for an art degree unrelated to the work he'd be doing at Google, was too low. Our former manager brought him on as a contractor instead and he eventually transitioned to full-time and he has been very successful there for almost a decade since. Most people never find out the reason they weren't hired. The only reason he ever did is because he knew the hiring manager personally and, even then, he didn't learn the reasoning until after he'd transitioned to FTE. Aside from the fact that his manager was able to circumvent the hiring process to, over the course of a year, bring someone he wanted in, this is a rare example of a known false negative. As an outsider with no access to Google's hiring records, I can't say for sure how many false negatives there are, but I have to assume there are a lot more people like him that don't get hired. I've met good engineers during my career that were rejected by Google. And I've worked with enough former-Google engineers that weren't that impressive. The only thing I can say is that I've never met an engineer who worked or works for Google that I felt was terrible, which is more than I can say for most companies. It sounds like the complaint being made is that Google used a situation almost no other company has, a constant surplus of people passing their interview process and took the expedient route to increasing their minority hiring...they're just ensuring that minorities aren't cut from that last, somewhat arbitrary stage of the hiring process. They know that committee is mostly deciding between candidates who would all be good hires because the process up to that point will have already eliminated the unqualified candidates. It's both a reasonable strategy to quickly increase the number of minority hires without sacrificing on quality and it's a lower bar.

weberc2 9y ago

This is a reasonable rebuttal to the memo; I wish the other responses would address these issues instead of misrepresenting the memo and calling the author a Nazi. The way this should have unfolded was that Google launched an investigation into its hiring practices, which would probably turn out as you describe. Instead, they fired the author, giving the appearance that their hiring practices are shady and demonstrating the suite of other points made in the memo.

wolco 9y ago

Instead of choosing candidates based on diversity during the interview process the recruiting process select candidates to reach out to by diversity. You realize that you still are not selecting the most skilled candidate if you filter based on diversity at any level.

jchrisa 9y ago
You are forgetting the diversity itself is valuable. For lots and lots of reasons. One is that that the metrics that people who ignore diversity tend to use are easily gamed: GPA, fancy degree, etc., and may correlate more to privilege than capability. So by casting a wider net you put all the candidates in a more competitive setting, and hopefully force interviewers to figure out what they are actually looking for, not just things their gut correlates with good hire.
jorgemf 9y ago
> You realize that you still are not selecting the most skilled candidate if you filter based on diversity at any level. This depends on the size of your sample and the positions to fill. It is easier to find one good candidate from 100 individuals than 100 from 1000.

dlubarov 9y ago

I don't think he said that Google's sourcing programs themselves lower the bar. He seems to make two separate arguments: 1. Sourcing programs with race/gender restrictions are unfair to those excluded, and bad for business because they restrict the funnel of participants. (The same criticism would apply if Google had a while-males-only program -- it would be bad business since it would restrict the funnel without a good business reason.) 2. Google's hiring process gives special treatment to certain "diversity" candidates. He doesn't give any details, and I don't know the context, but he linked to an internal discussion which seems to imply that a "more accurate" process might be applied with the intention of reducing false negatives. (Of course anyone reading a public copy won't see this.)

ythn 9y ago

Wouldn't that explain, then, why women are underrepresented at Google? If 500 males get "thrown over the fence" and, say, 5 make it through... that means if 50 females get "thrown over the fence" it is reasonable to expect 0 will make it through.