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I don't see anything in the OP's comment that suggested a presumption of automatic female incompetence. Design in many realms is not trivial work. At Google,

by haploid 16y ago

I don't see anything in the OP's comment that suggested a presumption of automatic female incompetence. Design in many realms is not trivial work. At Google, at present, it is by no means trivial work. But one should bear in mind that consensus converges on Google's initial success as being predicated almost exclusively on relevance of results far more than any other factor. Google destroyed Inktomi and AltaVista with a better search engine, not with a better interface.

ajg1977 16y ago
His comment is written in a quite snide and belittling way. It's hard to avoid feeling that he either has a low opinion of Marissa Mayer personally, or female engineers in general. Also, I would argue that while Google was indeed a better search engine, its clean minimalist design and fast loading times also did a lot to differentiate it from Altavista and Yahoo.
dhs 16y ago
Wait, what? I used to shave - twice! - while waiting for AltaVista to load its homepage full of crappy colorful ads. Then I switched to a plain white Google page that took like a second to come up. And you're telling me that I wasn't using a better interface?
wvoq 16y ago
There was just a presumption of incompetence and an insinuation that Mayer's accomplishments are not _really_ accomplishments, without any given reason. The OP didn't state "Mayer must be incompetent because she's a woman", but that's not how sexism works--people perpetuate sexism by allowing sexist attitudes to color their judgments about the merits of individiuals, often subconsciously. Why do I think it is reasonable to ascribe sexist attitudes to the OP? Because the OP is willing to presume incompetence of an engineer a) without evidence ("I can picture it now...") and b) in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary (the alarming success of GOOG), when the only atypical characteristic of said engineer is that she's a woman.

by haploid 16y ago

ajg1977 16y ago

His comment is written in a quite snide and belittling way. It's hard to avoid feeling that he either has a low opinion of Marissa Mayer personally, or female engineers in general. Also, I would argue that while Google was indeed a better search engine, its clean minimalist design and fast loading times also did a lot to differentiate it from Altavista and Yahoo.

dhs 16y ago

Wait, what? I used to shave - twice! - while waiting for AltaVista to load its homepage full of crappy colorful ads. Then I switched to a plain white Google page that took like a second to come up. And you're telling me that I wasn't using a better interface?

wvoq 16y ago

There was just a presumption of incompetence and an insinuation that Mayer's accomplishments are not _really_ accomplishments, without any given reason. The OP didn't state "Mayer must be incompetent because she's a woman", but that's not how sexism works--people perpetuate sexism by allowing sexist attitudes to color their judgments about the merits of individiuals, often subconsciously. Why do I think it is reasonable to ascribe sexist attitudes to the OP? Because the OP is willing to presume incompetence of an engineer a) without evidence ("I can picture it now...") and b) in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary (the alarming success of GOOG), when the only atypical characteristic of said engineer is that she's a woman.