The answer is and always has been to judge people by the output of their work and nothing else. As soon as you bring identity politics into to equation, you’ve lost because many people will (rightly) take attacks on white people and men as racist and sexist respectively.
> The answer is and always has been to judge people by the output of their work and nothing else.
Should it not be to judge people by the output of their work relative to their working conditions?
I'm much more interested in hiring someone who operated 5 servers in a culture of manual configuration over ssh by introducing automation than someone who operated 500 servers by following existing procedures and using Ansible playbooks that they didn't contribute any improvements to, even though the second person produced quite a bit more output.
(If by "output" you mean to count in this way, then sure, but a lot of people don't—for instance, lots of people want to see GitHub activity without asking whether the previous employer had onerous IP rules, or the candidate has a family they're busy with on evenings and weekends, or whatever.)
> Should it not be to judge people by the output of their work relative to their working conditions?
If you keep firing people for poor performance who are not performing because of poor working conditions, then eventually you won't be able to retain anyone and the problem takes care of itself.
Meanwhile those folks have likely moved onto better jobs.
If you can increase an employee's output by $X by spending $Y to improve their working conditions (where $X > $Y), shouldn't you do it? Isn't it then worthwhile to examine not just an employee's output, but their working conditions as well?
I concur that judging someone by the output of their work as opposed to their sex or skin color is extremely important, however, I believe that by itself is a narrow and inaccurate view of the whole situation/problem. In fact, acknowledging the vastness of the problem is a major challenge in and of itself.
> As soon as you bring identity politics into to equation, you’ve lost because many people will (rightly) take attacks on white people and men as racist and sexist respectively.
So, it's pretty much been like this but times a thousand for women and people whose skin is not pinkish white.
Of course some people of color are racist towards white people, and of course some women are sexist towards men. However to acknowledge this without acknowledging the vast amounts of institutionalized and socialized sexism/racism in American culture (which doesn't just come out in tech - look at the racist/sexist behavior of the current President) is a bit ludicrous.
It's like talking about optimizing performance in one small domain while ignoring the major bottleneck!
As a non-white male who has succeeded in this industry based on talent alone, I couldn’t disagree more. I also take offense to people suggesting I need some sort of handout or special attention. Feels infantalizing and quite frankly terrible.
It's never my intent to offend anyone; I apologize.
I wasn't trying to suggest there that anyone needed a handout.
However, yeah, I do think affirmative action has its place, and also that it can be challenging to implement well. Same with diversity programs in the workplace. Personally I don't think it makes sense to characterize these program as a handout, since it's a particular policy meant to try and make up for concrete, specific injustices which have long-term effects. For affirmative action, redlining of black people in Chicago is a great example - easy to Google.
I am genuinely curious - do you think it makes sense to extrapolate from your own individual experience to all other nonwhite people, or to women?
I suppose if we wanted to try to get an aggregate sense of what people believe, we could look at polls or voting patterns of women and various peoples of color.
And, without attempting to knock or take away from your talent, it's my own belief that _nobody_ succeeds on talent alone, that we all have people in our lives (teachers, mentors, coworkers, family, etc) who help(ed) us succeed or become our best. And, correspondingly, that we have an obligation to help others as best we can.
Lastly, if my comment offended you, I have to imagine that you can understand how and why James Damor's memo (poor science and all) - I noticed you mentioned him several times in the thread - was quite offensive to a large number of people and provoked such a negative response, since it mimiced a lot of the historical rhetoric around attempting to use a misconceived scientific basis for racial/gender inferiority as a justification for discrimination, oppression and dehumanization.
> I am genuinely curious - do you think it makes sense to extrapolate from your own individual experience to all other nonwhite people, or to women?
I'm speaking of my own personal experience but you seem to be speaking for all of these other groups (nonwhite people and women). There's no way we're going to agree on things like affirmative action and diversity programs but I hope you can at least understand how some people may see that as condescending and racist/sexist in its own right.
A problem with identity politics is that people make assumptions about which groups other people should identify with. There is nothing right about taking an attack on a group of people, especially when the groups are based on their genetics.
Could you elaborate on the form of the attacks on white people and men you're seeing in SV companies? I'm both white, male, and at an SV company, and haven't seen them in my experience.
From a managerial perspective I'd love to hire more people from underrepresented groups because it would mean a bigger pool to hire from, so I'm all for recruiting efforts, outreach/education programs, etc, but at the end of the day the yes/no on the candidates coming through the door is in my hands, and even if I wanted to abuse that, I can't hire people who aren't even applying. :|
Hasn't the topic of the article already been "litigated to death" and been the subject of many flame wars?
In what manner is that twitter link "off-topic" in the context of this article?
Has the twitter link ever been discussed here rather than killed?
I, for one, found it quite surprising. Based on news coverage and personal interactions with Googlers, I had no idea people were writing such things without reprimand from HR. In fact, I'd go so far as to say this link is the most substantive and thought-provoking comment in the entire thread.
This is what I don't understand. I'm now being threatened with being banned while adamsea is getting a slap on the wrist. If you're only allowed to discuss one side of this topic without getting kicked off HN, why even allow the threads in the first place?
I was responding to the question:
> Could you elaborate on the form of the attacks on white people and men you're seeing in SV companies?
What could I have done to answer that without posting some evidence?
I can see why, before reading that, you might think this was a double standard, but it isn't. The reason is that adamsea hasn't been using HN primarily for political battle (though I grant you his account history is close to that, and a different moderator might have called it differently). The key word here is 'primarily', which is the test we use, as explained in that comment I just linked to. I didn't reply to you on the basis of one isolated comment but rather on your use of HN overall, which is what we care about.
It's false, of course, that you're "only allowed to discuss one side of this topic without getting kicked off HN". If that were true, we wouldn't have flamewars, and boy do we have flamewars.
Got it. I used to post on other stuff but dropped off and admittedly came back to discuss what I feel are attacks on our industry and my personal career story.
If I commented more on “regular” posts, would I still be able to chime in here? It’s important to me that this point of view gets representation. I try to keep it very civil and can continue to refine that.
Right, the idea is to be here to gratify intellectual curiosity. People who use HN that way and occasionally comment on a political topic as one of many things they're interested in, tend not to have so toxic an effect on the site. I think it's partly a question of the spirit one is in the habit of adopting here.
It's a matter of degree. If you think we need more Damore wars, HN is not the site you're looking for.
No, I wouldn't say the current submission's topic has been done to death at all, though I grant you that it touches on topics that have. But it's the other parts that led us to try turning off flags on the story. I would not call the experiment successful.
Part of the art of substantive discussion, which is always in peril on the internet, is (1) to stay in the places that aren't already scorched earth and (2) not scorch them. There is constant temptation to do otherwise, and we all need the discipline to resist it. Generic flamewar topics are black holes that suck in everything that comes their way, so resistance isn't easy, but it's needed.
I am still glad to have been informed of what the tweet revealed, but thank you for the clear response. It provides a good explanation for what appeared indefensible.
Thanks for posting this. I sometimes feel a bit hopeless about typing out those detailed explanations, when no one seems interested in receiving the information, so the counterexample is tonic.
Do you work there and can elaborate on what you're seeing? I'd like to see if there's a widespread trend people are reporting here, not just a washed-over retread of a few high-profile he-said/she-said incidents.
The screenshot in that twitter link is woefully free of context. There are several contexts I could imagine where it would be harmless (e.g. discussion of ways to get a more diverse representation in a discussion already centered around that), several other where it would be very bad (e.g. direct unsolicited managerial behavior advice). To me it sounds more like the former from the limited context and tone. I'd be more likely to take offense at the implication that as a non-Googler I'm cheesy and unimportant than the "white" part.
The people I know at Google claim it isn't accurate to say there's a culture of harassment or discrimination or anything. So... in absence of video recordings, etc, from either side, I believe the people I know personally.
I've read the complaint and scrolled through the almost 100 pages of screenshots of bad internal memes and social media posts. The memes are bad, yes. But the complaint is a hodge-podge of things that reference "white" or "conservative" or "male" or any such thing, in no particular order.
For instance, under "Anti-Caucasian Postings," there's a screenshot of an employee sharing (on internal G+) a link to Tim Chevalier's blog post "Refusing to Empathize with Elliot Rodger: Taking Male Entitlement Seriously." This tells me two things: first, the people who prepared this complaint were so scattershot in their attempt that they stuck something with "male" under "Anti-Caucasian Postings." (The employee's commentary on the link is "The doc considered formally as abuse springing from an entitled worldview. Excellent essay." - so nothing anti-Caucasian there, either. The post itself, which is on the public internet, does mention race a few times, but focuses on gender.) Second, it tells me that the people preparing the complaint think that a white man's link to a white man's essay expressing opposition to the manifestos of mass murderer Elliot Rodger, mass murderer Marc Lépine, and James Damore is somehow either anti-Caucasian or anti-male (giving them the benefit of the doubt that they miscategorized it).
Now, you may certainly argue that it's distasteful, unprofessional, unacceptable, and perhaps even unconscionable to have your coworkers compare you to two mass murderers simply for having written an article that (in their view) makes similar points. I'd certainly agree that there were and still are attacks on James Damore as an individual at Google. But that is in no way anti-white or anti-male, unless you think that the content of those manifestos, and (in two cases) their direct connection to mass murder, is somehow intrinsic to whiteness or maleness - which seems both wrong and a huge attack on white men, more than anything alleged in the complaint.
Plenty of other posts are similarly not attacks on whiteness or maleness, many of which are miscategorized - other "anti-Caucasian postings" include someone writing that "the creator of Dilbert is ... a paranoid sexist dickbag", a link to an HBR article entitled "Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?", a truly awful-quality meme conveying "0 days since last ... white male says diversity isn't important," etc.
Finally, remember that this is a lawsuit by one side, which has a story to tell. We don't know that we're not seeing a cherry-picked picture. Maybe these sorts of low-quality memes and overly-political posts on corporate channels affect everyone. It's certainly the case that shortly after Damore's suit, a story came out about an employee with rather diametrically opposed opinions being pushed out by management: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15JokX8thp1TxG_I9aodYUxDw...
It's a company of 72,000 people where employees are encouraged to speak their minds.
Get any group of 72,000 people together and have them say what they actually believe and you'll find a lot of wingnuttery. Just look at the comment section of any blog, news story, YouTube video, or Internet forum.
The alternative viewpoint is that humanity actually holds far more diversity of thought and ideology than you had ever conceptualized before, and that this is a peek into the minds of many, many of your fellow human beings. It's glorious (and somewhat miraculous that we haven't killed each other yet, knock on wood...)
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological and political battle. That's an abuse of the site—it kills the spirit we want here—so we ban accounts that do it, so please don't.
It isn't a question of individual threads but of overall behavior. If you're using HN primarily for ideological battle then you're not using it for intellectual curiosity, the intended use of the site. The two are not compatible. Worse, one destroys the other, so we have to moderate HN to keep that toxin below fatal levels.
We can't exclude politics altogether, nor would we want to. But we can't let it take over the site either, and it's like fire: it consumes everything it touches. This is a conundrum. Our way out of the conundrum is the 'primarily' test:
We noticed that the most damage comes from users who don't care about much except their politics, while users who are interested in plenty of different things and occasionally post on politics tend to be benign. The first group is abusing the site while the second is using it as intended. That turned out to be a clear line that we can rely on as a standard for moderation.
We try to warn people first, especially when they've been on the site for a while, but if the pattern persists we do ban them. So would you please reread the site guidelines and use HN in the spirit of curiosity, not battle, from now on?
dang - I very much appreciate the fine line that HN toes here - I think there is much to be learned from genteel debate about issues of the day, moreover when you can push the ideologues out of the conversation, and instead refocus the debate on the actual issues at hand - this kind of environment allows people to learn and perhaps understand points of view that they would be unable to learn about otherwise because of the inherent echo chamber of their social network - in most debates there is some inherent truth to both sides of an argument, but usually we're too busy with out own cheering section to hear the other side of the discussion.
This veers way off topic, guarantees a flamewar, and is nothing that HN hasn't gone over dozens of times by now. Please don't wreak this kind of damage here.
"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." He lays the groundwork for that argument there, and then his rhetoric which builds upon this throughout the memo basically argues that, possibly, men are better biologically suited than women for high status/stress/leadership roles, or roles involving "things", as he says men are more into "things", and women more into "people".
He argues that biology is, in part, a cause for different preferences and choices between men and women. At no point did he claim any superiority of ability.
"X is worse at Y" is not at all the same thing as "X, on average, will choose to do Y at a smaller rate."
Also, I find the notion that people who choose to not work in tech or work smaller hours are somehow inferior quite demeaning. My brother wasn't very interested in tech, so he went into a different field. Am I (who did go into tech) a superior person to my brother due to our choice of work? Similarly, would I be a lesser person if I worked 30-35 hours instead of my usual 40-45?
So let's take that "biological difference in choices" as premise A, and then take premise B to be the company professing a policy to want a more even split.
The result of that might be an action C, where you lower the standards required to hire people who are in one group to get the numbers more even - otherwise A will cause there to be not enough people of your usually quality for the numbers you want in B.
And that was what he alleged: that the women hired didn't have as high a bar to pass.
And that's where, if you're a woman in the same job as him, you take offense, because the implications of his argument are inescapable: a lot of those women are inferior.
So if you're a Google higher-up who doesn't believe that their diversity/outreach programs are a lowered standards (say, you think they're a different approach to compensate for preparation differences in readiness for certain interviews), then you pretty much have to get rid of the guy who insists on shouting from the rooftops that a bunch of his coworkers aren't as good as he is.
Damore sealed his own fate because he either (a) didn't think through this all, sabotaging his own credibility in the process, or (b) evil-genius arranged it to give himself a platform for a lawsuit and a bunch of conservative media fawning.
This second premise, that Google hires under qualified candidates of they're diverse, is also incorrect. He claimed that Google made the false negative rate higher for non-diverse candidates. Here's the relevant quote:
> "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.
In other words the bar was only lowered in the sense that diverse candidates didn't need to be as lucky as non diverse ones, with nothing to do with skill or ability. Many media outlets omitted the italicized part, so this misconception is common.
Also you're omitting the most plausible explanation in your last paragraph: the negative and often exaggerated media coverage on the memo. Remember the memo was circulated for a month without repression. This indicates that it was the media coverage, not the memo itself, that caused Damore's firing.
Ah, good point, I do remember that false negative bit. That was actually the first thing that jumped out at me, because it seems incredibly implausible and ridiculous!
Here's why I think he's full of shit on that one. Reducing the false negative rate without lowering the bar is an unambiguous positive. He's asking me to believe that Google invented a better interviewing process that will save them tons of time and money in recruiting, and chose not to use it widely.
I simply can't believe it. Not with the salaries they and their competitors are paying. If they had a magic bullet to get more just-as-qualified candidates through the pipeline, they'd use it everywhere.
And in a world that loves to write articles about interviewing / click on those articles as much as this one, I think we'd have heard about it by now.
(Yes, the media coverage contributed to everyone else thinking he was judging them, but so did the text itself. But, in turn, you (and he) are missing the most likely explanation for why Google says they want a diverse workforce: not to discriminate against men, but to look good in the media without intention of actually making major changes to follow through, as their actual recruiting policies appear to be stuck in the same place they've been for years, based on the recruiters I've talked to there. Lotta algorithm questions, lots of years-of-experience and existing-knowledge-of-language-details crap. All stuff that's gonna favor a certain typical profile at the screening stage. PR BS is PR BS, in other words.)
It's not implausible and ridiculous. In fact, in my experience it's one of the most common methods of increasing diversity. Here's a run-down of what my company does (my past workplaces have had similar policies):
* Applications of diverse candidates are accepted from non-traditional backgrounds. In this context, "non-tradition" means majoring in a non-tech field or attended a coding boot camp of some sorts (this applies for non-experienced candidates. For experienced candidates it doesn't matter what their educational background is).
* For diverse candidates, they get two tries at passing the phone screen.
* That said, all candidates go through the same on-site interview loop. The on-site is where the actual evaluation of skills and decision making process is made. This process is not made with any bearing on the candidate's diversity status.
This is a clear example of lowering the false negative rate without lowering the quality of accepted diverse candidates. The false negative rate is lowered by having a more lenient selecting in the first stages. However it's worth noting that these only determine if the candidate move on to the stage where the actual evaluation of skill occurs. The phone screens and resume reviews aren't reliable enough signals for us to make decisions so we only use them to determine the set of candidates that move on the to last stage. Some would point out that this increases the number of false positives for diversity candidates, but that's simply by increasing the total number of diverse candidates. It does not affect the false positive rate. And
The reason why we don't do this for all candidates is because of cost. There's a substantial cost to having full time engineers doing interviews. We already spend ~6 hours a week doing interviews and writing feedback. We couldn't deal with the increased load if we used the first and second points on all candidates. Second, we also want to have larger share of diverse employees in tech positions. Even if people think it's just for better public perception, that's still a tangible and significant benefit.
For what it's worth I think it's perfectly fine way of improving the chances of diverse candidates getting offers. That said, saying that this system is discriminating by decreasing the false negative rate for diverse candidates is an unambiguously true statement and I would object to any of my co-workers being fired for sayings as such.
I don't agree with your interpretation of the memo, however, you definitely touch on a challenging point -- what was actually being said?
I don't entirely agree with this article I found either, it actually skews more to your point of view, however it was quite interesting.
The author's description of the challenge the Damor memo touched upon:
"What we are dealing with here is the problem of how we might offer possible explanations for what is going on, while at the same time keeping in mind the impact those explanations might have on the people and phenomena we are trying to explain. It is important to understand this problem, so I will explain it here. Technically, this is called “the problem of the double hermeneutic”. A hermeneutic refers to a method or system of interpretation. In psychology and the social sciences, hermeneutics refers to the ways people develop systems of meaning and justification that allow them to make sense out of the world."
That makes sense you would find that notion demeaning. I do as well. As I said to someone else, if you took offense (which wasn't intended) from my comment, I'm sure you can understand why many people would take offense from Damor's memo :).
> That makes sense you would find that notion demeaning. I do as well. As I said to someone else, if you took offense (which wasn't intended) from my comment, I'm sure you can understand why many people would take offense from Damor's memo :).
No, in fact this it's just the opposite. Claiming that "women are less likely to choose to work in tech" is a harmful statement is implying that those who do not work in tech are lesser. This is what I am pointing out. Those that do take offense to Damore's memo are inherently implying that people who choose not to work in tech are lesser. Otherwise it would not be an insult to say that group is less likely to choose to work in tech.
I read his memo, the Wired article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, the Quora article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, and the recent Gizmodo article about the lawsuit. I glanced at your twitter link; once I saw it was about his lawsuit I shifted gears to the root of the issue.
I thought Damore's comment in footnote 9, when discussing compensation in the workplace, that "Considering women spend more money than men" was particularly insightful ;) /s
"The problem is, the science in Damore’s memo is still very much in play, and his analysis of its implications is at best politically naive and at worst dangerous"
"But despite the legal gymnastics of Damore’s attorneys, getting fired for his memo wasn’t discrimination, and it certainly wasn’t censorship. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the time of the memo’s circulation, it violated the company’s policies, perpetuating sexist ideologies. Damore disclosed to his non-male colleagues that he believes that they are predisposed to being worse at their jobs than males. Former Google engineer Yonatan Zunger sums it up nicely in this line from his blog post responding to Damore’s memo: “You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.” In a workplace, you can’t say whatever you’d like without consequences—violating a company’s code of conduct is grounds for firing."
"TL;DR: Yes, men and women are biologically different — which doesn’t mean what the author thinks it does. The article perniciously misrepresents the nature and significance of known sex differences to advance what appears to be a covert alt-right agenda."
(FYI, I agree with your views but I think that shifting this thread to the merits of the Damore memo is off-topic and unproductive - it's months old, and everyone who knows about it has made up their minds about it already. I think there's room for productive conversation about the blog post this comment thread is supposed to be about, and I think re-litigating the Damore memo is just going to push this thread in the flameward direction, as 'dang puts it.)
How people treat others in the organization can negatively impact the output of others' work. If firing an asshole (who otherwise has high quality output) increases the quality of the output of others past a certain point, then that's an easy argument from a simple financial/productivity perspective that treating others with respect is a positive for the company.
It's often true that firing assholes improves others' output, but that shouldn't be the only reason to fire them.
I think there is independent merit to removing people who are terrible, even if doing so deprives the company of an incredibly valuable asset--e.g. firing your mythical 10x founding engineer because they're harassing other employees and making them feel unwell/unsafe, even if it severely damages your company's ability to produce. This is because growth and profit are not--and despite the "100% meritocracy free market" advocates' arguments, never have been--the sole aims of a business.
Businesses exist within a broader community; they aren't optimizing for widget creation in a vacuum. The rise of intangible/cultural reasons for punishing a business in the court of public opinion (uber; those scandals didn't highlight things that directly impacted the company's bottom line, but rather things that were unacceptable ethically to the broader community, or things that might have, given time impacted the bottom line) speaks to this; so does the decrease over time in Tamany Hall/Boss Tweed-type abuses of employer authority.
In short, for a business, acting ethically has an objective value which is independent from (or, if you want to nitpick "independent", at least has primary influence on) profit/growth.
I would like to challenge this assertion. If "good programmers" are replaceable, and "great programmers" are not, then keeping one "great programmer" and rotating the "good programmers" may be a wise business decision.
YMMV what "great" and "good" means, or how disposable "good programmers" are, but I don't think the assertion is categorically true.
