This one has been flagged out also. It’s beginning to look like HN really doesn’t like this story, since it’s the third time in the last 24 hours they’ve blown it off the front page.
We actually turned the flags off on that story at one point to allow the thread to stay on the front page. Eventually the flamewar detector demoted it; we sometimes turn that off, too, and am not sure why we didn't do it there. Still, once a story has 300+ points and 300+ comments, reposts that contain no significant new information are obviously duplicates. If we didn't moderate them that way, the front page would be mostly dupes. If you think HN gets mad about politics, imagine how mad they'd get about that.
The HN community is divided on divisive topics. It would be surprising if it weren't; any large-enough population sample is going to reflect divisions in the society at large. (Societies, actually; HN is mostly international, and the people posting here are coming from wildly different assumption sets.) People tend to underestimate how many opposing views there are and how many people in the world sincerely hold them.
Unfortunately, each side seems to think the community is dominated by their enemies and that the moderators are secretly suppressing theirs, as you can see in the subthread below. One side is sure that we're politically correct thought police; the other side that we're misogyny- and white supremacy-enablers. The irony is how united they both are in that sort of logic. None of it is related to what we actually think or do.
Sorry, it just felt like the story was being buried when I could see no good reason to. I personally didn’t want to get involved in the conversation (which is like walking on eggshells for me), but was interested in reading the comments.
Raising a dupe flag of an article that has been demoted for any reason doesn’t make sense to me. That means each story has only one chance, no matter the source, rather than seeing it through. If someone comes in, doesn’t see the article on the front page when they think it shouldn’t be there, they will naturally resubmit because they can’t see the conversation occurring.
That's the way a popular site with 30 slots on its front page has to work. For any hot story, there are a zillion me-too follow-up articles like the arstechnica one above. Since the story is hot, they'll all get upvoted. If we don't mark them as dupes, they take over. I guarantee you the community doesn't want that. In fact, almost everything we do is determined by the community pressure that happens if we don't do it.
This does mean that a hot story will get a big discussion yet many readers never see the thread. But that's true of every thread; it follows from the structure of the site. The way around this is to use HN search to find the discussion, or links like https://news.ycombinator.com/active and https://news.ycombinator.com/lists. Edit: or just look at the second page!
I understand what you are saying, but in this case the story isn’t represented at all on the front page. If the story was allowed to have its run, then, sure, see that discussion, but if it was flagged off or demoted for some reason, I don’t see how the dupe flag is serving s purpose.
I did learn about /active, which might be better than the front page for my purposes. I probably wouldn’t have said something if I was looking there instead.
Personally I wanted to discuss the article yesterday, but it was moved off the front-page too fast despite high interest. It is very common on HN for articles that does not agree with or points out problems in the prevailing viewpoint to be blown off the front page.
I think this is emblematic of how tyrannical some of the people subscribing to the prevailing Silicon Valley viewpoint are.
I used to think HN was one of the better forums, but after recently trying to post a rebuttal to this [0] with multiple experiences from my workplace, and seeing my response vanish moments later, alongside the speed to which these threads have been flagged out of visibility (whilst anecdotal stories concerning women still rank very highly despite having far less age and far higher votes), I've lost faith both in the moderating abilities and the community to self-regulate.
There are some anti-abuse features on HN which cause some new accounts to be banned when they're created. Such comments will be marked [dead], not [flagged][dead]. I suspect that's what's happened with both 'hncensorship and 'throwaway12395 (though I didn't see the status of the latter's comment before it was vouched). Some people get caught by this feature unintentionally: if they suspect this is the case, the mods have been very open about whitelisting such accounts. You can email them via the Contact link in the footer.
Note that this is different from people being flagged or down voted by members because of content. I can imagine it's very frustrating, but they are different behaviors. In one, specific action has been taken by members; in another, one has been caught by automated anti-abuse measures.
> I think this is emblematic of how tyrannical some of the people subscribing to the prevailing Silicon Valley viewpoint are.
Why invoke the "tyrannical" rhetoric in respect to clicking a "flag" link on a website? It's not that big of a deal. Not everything is an attack by the Silicon Valley elite, all sorts of interesting topics get booted off the front page and there is always someone with a particularly strong opinion in the comments who has to exclaim why their personal issue is the bane of the HN hivemind (a hivemind that underpins a decentralized conspiracy to destroy free speech in order to avoid confronting the unavoidable conclusions of your air-tight argument). Sometimes stuff just gets flagged, it happens on both sides of every controversial topic ranging from blockchains to booth babes.
HN policy states that topics should be relevant to tech and startups. This topic in particular clearly is and also garnered a lot of interest. Arguably a majority might actually be interested in discussing this topic as they might be perceived as a majority and be potential targets of this kind of discrimination. When an ideologically possessed social justice minority then in violation of HN policy and the interest of the audience remove it from the frontpage that is problematic.
It is also disingenuous to say this happens to articles on the prevailing viewpoint to the same degree. Articles on Damore and Fowler was plentiful, and they were not voted off the frontpage. The sin of oppressing critical viewpoints in the valley falls squarely on the social justice warriors.
> "HN policy states that topics should be relevant to tech and startups."
Something along these lines is often-cited, but isn't supported by the guidelines or by comments by the moderators.
From the guidelines:
> "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Discussions on contentious issues very quickly devolve on HN: it's not built to support them well, and many members recognize that. You're right, these are important issues and they should be discussed, but HN empirically has not been proven to be a good place to do so. And rehashing the same arguments time and again is almost the definition of not interesting.
Your posting via a throwaway account is anecdotal evidence of this. That's not a judgment, that's just a reflection of how it is. Likewise your assumption that curation on HN is due to "an ideologically possessed social justice minority": that's not a assumption that engenders the foundation of good faith that discussion on contentious topics desperately needs. Regardless of other factors at play that make discussions like this difficult (and I agree they're myriad), this is one that is destructive, rather than constructive.
And please don't confuse this stance as normative. Hopefully we'll figure out better ways to use things like online forums for working through issues, but we haven't done that yet. Want to have better, deeper discussions on difficult topics? One thing you can do yourself is conduct yourself in a manner that makes that possible. Build a reputation with a regular account so people can trust that you're engaging in good faith, and assume that people are behaving reasonably for reasons that may not be clear to you or you may disagree with before deciding that they're unreasonable.
That’s very reasonable. Maybe there are new functionality that can be implemented to at least bring back to the frontpage flagged articles of interest to the majority?
I think there needs to be a punishment function for ideologically motivated flagging and maybe even other actions done by such a minority, so that it cause the articles to stay on the frontpage longer when brought back in order to dissuade the behavior.
There's already such functionality, for both of the things you mention: emailing the mods to bring it to their attention. The mods have been known to disable flags for submissions.
That said, bringing up again "ideologically motivated flagging" ignores other reasons people may be flagging, such as the belief that such discussions aren't constructive on HN, independent of one's ideological or political position. And the mods do punish those that abuse flags and votes and submissions and comments. (And many who are so penalized think it's applied unfairly to them, from every ideological persuasion. Or that it's done ideologically rather than for incivility or other abuse.)
Here's how I'd break down my position in a nutshell:
- These are important topics.
- These are topics I think need to be discussed.
- HN empirically has not been a place where such topics have been interestingly and constructvely discussed.
∴ Such topics are for the most part best discussed elsewhere (i.e., not HN).
What I read from your comment is that you think these topics should be discussed (which I agree with) and should be discussed on HN, which I don't because I don't think that HN is structurally fit to handle such discussions.
So, with that, I think there are two questions that I would like you to address:
- Do you think HN as it is now is the place to constructively have these discussions?
If you answer yes to this question, then you and I disagree, and as I noted upstream, I think the evidence is on my side. If you answer no, the next question is
- Do you think HN should be a place to constructively have these discussions?
If you answer yes, what would make HN a place where such discussions could take place? There are certain things I think are criticial to being able to discuss contentious topics constructivelly. Those include being able to identify over time the people you're engaged in discussion with. This doens't mean know absolutely: pseodonyms are fine. However, you can't get very deep into a discussion on contentious issues if you aren't able to take others on good faith, and you can't do that without establishing some kind of reputation. Repeatedly using throwaways works against this.
Likewise, there needs to be a common understanding of civility. The definition of civility isn't universal, and changes from forum to forum (both online and in real life). There's quite a bit of disagreement on HN of what constitutes civil behavior, which again makes it difficult to dig into contentious discussions constructively: a shared understanding of civility allows people to engage on equal footing. This isn't a failure of any one group or perspective. It's just a reflection of human nature. This isn't different from real life: there are some topics you discuss with your family, others with your friends (and different groups of friends), others at work. Each has their own norms that allows those different topics to be discussed constructively.
It also means that that each point shouldn't be relitigated again and again. That sucks all the air out of the room and gets in the way of people having interesting discussions on a whole host of other interesting, non-contentious topics which HN explicitly has as a goal. This is really no different than if every discussion boiled down to a language flamewar or similar repetition. It's not healthy for the forum.
This isn't an exhaustive list, but I think it captures some of the important characteristics that make constructive discussion on contentious topics possible. You may disagree.
HN, for better or worse, isn't built like that. It wouldn't be HN if it were substantially different. I'd love to see a forum that makes such discussions possible. I don't expect (nor necessarily want) HN to be that place.
Each of these is getting longer than the last, so I'll try to refrain from commenting more on this, at least until I find a publisher. ;)
> Do you think HN as it is now is the place to constructively have these discussions?
I see your point about the fitness of a platform for challenging the prevailing viewpoints in Silicon Valley, and for making sure that people can develop rapport and reputation that makes them accountable. Those are all great points.
We would agree fully if HN banned all articles on contentious topics or unapologetically allowed all viewpoints with all the mess that brings.
Where I think we differ is what the right action is when highlighting a viewpoint that cause social dissonance. My opinion is that giving the stage only to people that shout the loudest when opposing viewpoints speak is a terrible choice, as in general the most extreme people are the loudest and I doubt those represent the majority. We gave the stage to the extremes in communism and fascism, and it didn't end so well. We do not need to repeat that experiment again.
While I appreciated your clarity with regards to the instant dead-ing, I think your response here shows a disconnect with the reality of taking a position counter to the status quo on many of these issues.
To associate viewpoints with your real identity that regularly involve a spectrum of mob justice and workplace dismissals seems foolish in the current climate. If you doubt such a climate, I'd ask you to examine the post which you un-deaded, observe that it is now re-flagged and re-dead, and I'd ask you honestly if you as a moderator think that is justified.
Even on my primary account wherein I substantial reputation, I would not touch threads like this with a ten foot pole, let alone express my honest opinions. My livelihood is far too important to risk even over a topic which I consider as worthy of discussion as this.
I'd also address your statement that this is "the same argument time and again". This (OP) is material evidence coming out that adds critical depth to an issue that thus far has been painted as very uni-directional, and is, in my opinion, going to influence the next N years of tech workplace culture in dramatic ways. If HackerNews can't handle this well, why can't we take this as impetus to think deeply about that? (With the additional datapoint that discussions "on this topic" that support the status quo seem to be maintained, whereas those that oppose it vanish, so I might suggest the topic itself spawning unproductive discussions isn't the problem)
The difference is that I believe in a sense of justice and recourse, and that is something social justice warriors do not believe in for their actions. I also believe that evidence can prove me wrong, which is clearly outside the realm of social justice warriors. I continue to seek out evidence when forming my opinions, and do not form ideas uncritically in my head.
First story, at least in my feed. It has made most of the news sites, since the story keeps getting flagged off the front page, expect more submissions of the same topic because people aren't aware of existing discussions.
Marking a submission as a dupe of a previous post that was flagged away is just wrong.
At this point I expect actions like this from people holding the prevailing viewpoints in Silicon Valley whenever someone with a different viewpoint dare speak.
Unfortunately no. However, I do not personally use reddit etc.
I think we need to do everything we can to highlight injustices in the power applied to force only one viewpoint to be heard. In addition to this social justice warriors need to receive negative social and life repercussions for their tyrannical actions.
We as a society agree to state sanctioned consequences that are similar to actions unacceptable to individuals. The difference is that there need to be a sense of justice and recourse, which social justice warriors don’t think should apply to their actions. Acting like a social justice warrior in the workplace should for instance be a firable offence, and things like doxxing should receive severe punishment.
Just for posterity, since even after 1 day I'm 50% LOLing at this and 50% still mildly annoyed: because you accused me in another subthread of being equivalent to those that would send their political enemies to the Gulag, when the sum total of what I do is click the Flag button on an HN article. Perhaps sometimes (e.g., now) I might also make a post criticising people with whom I disagree.
The consequences of my doing this are so mild, I just don't accept that this is worthy of serious condemnation. If you want to think the worse of me for doing it, be my guest - but nobody's going to get packed off to the Gulag, nobody's going to get sacked, nobody's going to get sent to Coventry. In fact, even once flagged, the discussion is still there. It's just not on the front page any more. Even once flagged, there are numerous other venues where this discussion could continue! And indeed, part of the reason I click Flag is to encourage this discussion to take place in those other venues rather than here.
Meanwhile, you advocate real-life consequences with material repercussions for those whose ideology you oppose.
Accusations in a lawsuit, even when they happen to support your preconceived biases, aren't the same thing as proof. Yes, the complaining parties in various lawsuits have levelled accusations of that (or, on the last case, substantially narrower accusations of which that description appears to be a somewhat hyperbolic generalization.) But anyone who can afford a court filing fee can put any accusation they want in a lawsuit.
There are screenshots in the suits of concrete messages from people claiming they do each of these actions. At this point the question seems mostly to be about if this is systematic or just individual actions.
There is a lot of smoke for there to be no fire. However, who knows. Personally I have seen the same behavior where I work so I am not surprised if this is all true.
Voat is the least censored forum I know of, but has the unfortunate problems of the communities it's become famous for. That being said, perhaps that should start being a point in its favor from how much aggressively the "HN immune response" seems to be shutting down any attempts to call out the blatant whitewashing here.
After watching how aggressively my comments were marked dead, I turned on "Showdead" and came to the realization that the dead comments were far often more substantial than those allowed to persist; at the very least it may be worth others doing the same if they want to keep trying to utilize this platform.
I don't know if you're aware but articles can move off the front page because people (like me) flag them (as I did). If enough people flag it, off it goes.
Sometimes the article sticks around, and obviously mine was a minority voice. Sometimes it disappears, probably because, I expect, most people are like me: we've seen this stuff discussed before, and the discussions are, on average, poison - or, worse, repetitive and dull.
So, flag. Flag, flag, flag. (That's what I think to myself, anyway. Actually, I only get the option of flagging it the once.) I make no bones about this, and I won't apologize for my actions, because I have nothing to apologize for. I vote according to my principles and mine alone. If these principles happen to be shared by others, great. If not, that's fine too. Democracy in action.
(Well... I do admit that I give the discussions a quick skim, just on the off-chance I might see tptacek in action. My guilty pleasure! There's also the chance that somebody might actually, you know, make a good point, but I don't worry too much about that because my experience is that the risk is very low...)
We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines.
It's pretty rich to go on about censorship and then pull a move like this. If we don't ban you, then comments like yours destroy the site, but if we do, you can do the "help help did you see he just repressed me" bit from Monty Python.
My understanding is that the flag button merely makes it more likely the discussion will vanish off the front page, and there is no punishment for the participants.
Even if that is correct it does not make it a just way of fighting for your cause. Voting for articles on the front-page of HN is equivalent to a vote in a democracy. If you removed the opposing party candidate from the ballot you might reach your short-term goal, but at the cost of a functioning democracy.
In this case the article was marked as a dupe, but this specific article was not posted twice and previous articles on the subject was quickly voted off the frontpage by people like you despite high interest. This didn't happen to articles critical of Damore, so this seems to be exclusively a social justice tactic.
Edit: explained better why talking about voting is relevant as an analogy
I expect the moderators, or whoever it is that looks after this stuff, decided that since it was discussing the same case as the other articles then it counted as one in principle.
Sometimes multiple articles relating to a particular issue are posted. When these links don't attract much discussion, this isn't much of a problem. But when they do, it's probably best to try to centralize the discussion, lest the entire front page get filled up multiple copies of the same stuff.
This has happened before in the past and it's a bit dull if it's something in which you have zero interest.
Those articles were all flagged off the front page, not many people got the chance to see them in the first place. Whoever claimed this was a dupe was just being dishonest and possibly malicious.
I understand your point that if a submission hasn't been widely seen subsequent submissions shouldn't be marked as a dupe. That said, HN is curated, both by the mods and members. It's not purely a popularity contest or a democracy. Members may (and do) disagree on the curation methods, but the curation methods don't require a certain threshold of visibility for any given piece before taking effect.
Marking a submission as a dupe serves a different purpose: it provides a pointer to the "canonical" submission for a given discussion, and not just for those that have spent some threshold of time on the front page.
You may very well disagree with the effects of HN curation in general or for this submission in particular; however, I think it's valuable to recognize that marking submissions as dupes and flagging/downweighting are independent.
Marking of a submission as a dupe that was previously itself flagged off the front page is patently dishonest. Of course, HN is curated, its members can curate however they want, for whatever reasons they want, and those reasons are not always going to be good ones, which in this case they obviously aren't.
You can’t both flag an article on a topic off the frontpage so few in the audience see it and get to claim that another article on the topic is a dupe for the audience.
I have to say, as an Asian male I found this comment by dirtyid in the article to be succinct and all too true:
> "Pour one out for Asian males. Get screwed by affirmative action in education, media representation and now employment but can't get screwed on dating apps."
Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity when it comes to tech and aren't considered an added element of diverseness within the industry despite Japan, China, Korea, India, etc. being quite different from one another.
Then you look at industries where Asians are under-represented and you can read articles from actors like Steven Yeun who talk about how they rarely get offered roles and when they do, it's often for roles that stereotype their ethnicity. For example, I just watched Annihilation and the only Asian actor they had in it of course had a broken English accent despite the fact that in real life, the actor actually has a British accent.
Pull up an article on diversity in the U.S., and chances are if you search "Asian" in the article you'll get 0 results.
I've always looked up to tech because it's a realm where we Asians are judged by our skill level and output, not the color of our skin or how attractive we look. It's a realm that rewards people who study hard and work tirelessly to refine their craft. And so it's absolutely frustrating to hear that we're too successful and that people scale back our representation despite the fact that they never happens for us in other industries.
You can use this sort of thing as a measuring point; when something like this is overlooked and inconvenient, you can tell they're making statements based on their agenda (the trend in the MSM, which is why you can see public trust dropping in them; they're not all stupid, they know it's not consistent). On the other hand, you've got people that make statements based on principle, and even if you still disagree with them, you feel it would still be nice to hang out with them, like they didn't establish their relationship with you by trying to lie to you through selective truths?
The cost of raising agenda above both principle and truth comes at the cost of a massive amount of people and freedoms, and their pretty statements about caring about any group of people don't hold water. (I'm looking at you SJWs and Aryan Supremacists)
As an Asian male this article also frustrates me. Google has always been a company I've wanted to work for but if this article is true and Google discriminates against Whites and Asians in their hiring process then they're not the dream company I previously believed they were.
I'm here to report to you that unfortunately they are not that company. I hear they used to be everything the nerds dreamed, but as the company grew, the original culture was unable to defend itself.
I like Facebook as an engineering organization, and was tempted when I was heavily recruited there. Problem is, many feel Facebook the social media company is making the world a worse place in many different ways, and their leadership had their head in the sand. Otherwise, I'd love to work there.
If you are a $race $gender, Google will hire you. The diverse candidate pool just means you need to work harder on your resume, interviewing skills, etc - since there's more competition.
> Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity
As an immigrant who came to the US from a poor Eastern European country just a few years ago I feel the same about being labeled as "white". It blows my mind that for many people a guy of British descent who was born in the US and a woman from Russia who speaks very poor English are both just "white".
It's not just between foreign whites and American whites.
Take a wealthy, white, highly-educated person from Connecticut, and a dirt-poor, white, high-school dropout from rural W. Virginia.
Both have "white privilege".
And so the poor, under-educated W. Virginian who claws his way up to being a self-educated programmer will be disregarded by Google along with the wealthy Connecticuter.
As a white Irish guy from New Mexico, this attitude irks me as well. No, I'm not the same as every other white guy out there. (I have far more interesting "gringo" stories than a white guy from Connecticut.)
No one should be judged or labeled by their skin color or ethnicity.
People don’t care about Asian males (and I am one) because they’re the highest earning demographic in the country. In a country where you die if you can’t afford health care, it’s quite reasonable to take the tack that economic challenges are in a different league than dating challenges.
Combatting discrimination isn’t about some platonic abstraction. It’s about money, wealth, jobs, health and criminal justice outcomes.
Agreed, and it's a failing of humanity that we lump people together based on their appearances. That ironically includes the people who try and "fix" discrimination.
I would say that only applies to the people who try to fix discrimination by using group-identity-based adjustments. I'd think that attempts to fix discrimination that focus on forming shared identity (replacing the old categories) would not be susceptible to the same problems.
In psychology this is referred to as the common ingroup identity model for reducing intergroup bias. There are indications that the effects achieved are only temporary in nature, and negative outcomes can result from the loss of the overridden identities.
It probably depends on the scale. If you try to form a new in-group identity over a short time in a smallish group against a background that reinforces the existing categories, then I can believe the effects will be temporary. However, if the group is larger, the background identities weakened and de-emphasized, and enough time given, I think it'd work.
My impression is that current "anti-discrimination" attitudes actually reinforce the existing categories, even more strongly and explicitly than had been done before. There's a lot more labeling and "reasoning" through labels going on in places where it seems very counterproductive.
all of what you said is true, and that's why i (asian male) will always run my own business, no matter what the perceived opportunity cost may be, because it's nothing but a mirage.
counting on the white establishment, political right OR political left to give us any kind of a leg up or break is foolish in the extreme. this google episode is a perfect example of why. because we are merely 5% of the US population, we are treated as naive pawns by two sides in a larger game of ideological chess.
i contribute financially to asian-interest causes i deem worthy, but i'm under no illusion of this changing in my lifetime. the american social fabric is configured heavily against us and will be for at least one more generation, likely another 2.
You're conflating issues, and that's fine because you're frustrated. But we are over-represented in tech, and not anywhere else. There are obvious systems-level hiring problems that this company has and they're trying to fix that. It's so strange and selfish to hear "they should not try and fix this".
Well, that's not quite what he's saying. Remember, nobody is even claiming that underrepresented groups are actually applying and getting turned away - the statistics just suggest that they never even show up in the first place. Yet the suggested fixes are always like the ones in the linked article: turn away the people who _do_ show up until some underrepresented people come in to take their place.
Given this (correct) understanding of what "diversity" really means in American culture, why do you think it is that Asian-Americans overwhelmingly vote for pro-diversity policies?
There's a time dependency in some of this. What "diversity" is, even from a purely left-wing perspective, has changed a lot within my lifetime. I was born in 1978, and when I was growing up, the left-wing diversity perspective focused on "race blindness", MLK's dream about his children being measured by the quality of their character and not the color of their skin, and that sort of thing. Now... well... I know a lot of you on HN are very, very leftist; how does that sound to you now? I'm serious about that question. I'd guess a lot of you, if you were careful and thought about it, would have a hard time answering that question, because it isn't a "right wing" perspective, but it certainly isn't a left-wing perspective any more, which now focuses intensely on looking at people by their identity groups, to a degree that (very, very much no sarcasm here) greatly exceeds anything like the KKK, who merely looked at your race, rather than race, gender, disability status, and all the rest of the intersectional categories. The idea that anyone can be race-blind is seriously heterodox stuff now; grounds to get one instantly accused of not just racism, but subconscious racism.
There's a lot of people still operating under the assumption that the older meanings of the terms are in use, because most people have better things to do than to stay up-to-date on this sort of stuff when they've got lives to lead and their own problems, not to mention the fact that there's some deliberate obfuscation that tends to go on.
"The MLK quote is such a red herring. It's a nice statement, but what one guy said 50 years ago doesn't define a culture or society."
You misunderstand my point entirely. I am not "advocating" for that position today. Nor am I not advocating for it. I am staying neutral on the "ought" in this series of posts.
I am saying that when I was 10, that was the "left-wing" position. Many people still think it is, because they don't keep up with all this stuff. As you are rather handily demonstrating, it is not today. (I was a bit concerned when I mentioned it that people would just be contrary and deny the patently obvious fact that it is no longer an acceptable left-wing position, but now I don't have to worry about that.)
I will also say that the prickliness you've been programmed to fire back with, as evidenced by the rest of your thread, is a non-trivial part of the problem. You've been left unable to understand what anyone is actually saying, instead of what you think they are saying, as evidenced by your reaction to what I wrote. You may prove me wrong by replying to this without bulldoggedly arguing about whether implicit bias exists. Should you succeed I promise to acknowledge that.
Race-blindness was never the left-wing position, unless your definition of left wing is maybe the feel-good commentary of prominent elected moderate Democrats, who had to appeal to the majority rural white populists. I don't think many or any prominent minority civil rights leaders led on any sort of color blindness platform.
In fact, the 70's and 80's were all about embracing blackness.
If i were prickly, i'd be making insinuations about you personally.
This "You were born into implicit bias/racism" shtick sounds an awful lot like religion's "You were born into original sin" shtick. The fix is almost identical too: give us money, attention, and spread the word, or else you're extra double-plus ungood and we'll shame you harder.
So you deny that implicit bias exists? Implicit bias has shown to affect areas as dry as medicine to scientific research, yet racial bias is somehow made up?
My objection, at least, is that I think for both of jerf's eras, the intended end state is still a race-blind society. And it seems perverse to map out a course to that goal that explicitly requires us to be conscious of race.
So you think it is possible to condition people to look at another person and have them never consciously or unconsciously understand them to be white, black, asian, or any other race?
I think what we're looking for is that it's just another attribute, no different from whether the person has blue or green or brown eyes, or what style shoes they're wearing.
In a conversation with my boss the other day, a newly-hired AWS engineer came up. I've met him just once, and helped him get situated because his desk is near my team. I realized that although I'd interacted with him to that degree, I had absolutely no recollection of what his race was (describing him was a logical part of that conversation). I think this is what's sought.
As he says, because they do get screwed in all the other sectors. They do happen to be in the "privileged majority" only in tech, so there they see redressing as a negative, but only there (or rather, here).
The ideal answer is not to completely drop any diversity effort, but on one side (the "revolutionaries") to recognise where they turn into zealotry, and on the other ("the entrenched", of any type) to accept they might have to lose something to gain something.
You are entirely correct that despite immigrants being the largest source of diversity in tech, all diversity and inclusion programs in tech misclassify immigrants into US demographic categories from the EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [2] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs.
For instance all of the following are categorized as white Americans; my German colleague, my French colleague of Iranian descent, my Iranian colleague, my white american colleague from Colorado, and my Iraqi colleague.
Silicon Valley recruits outliers from around the world. Applying US demographics to an industry where ⅔ [1] of the workers are immigrants does not make sense.
The USA is a capitalistic society. We only pretend to look at diversity as something that should be egalitarian. Asian Americans don't have a large enough base to provide capital for any of these areas for people to see them as beneficial.
> In April of 2017, Google’s Technology Staffing Management team was instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black, or Hispanic and to purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline. Plaintiff refused to comply with this request.
Good for him. Google is now excluded from the "dream" companies I'd want to work for.
Google is the first big company that I actually rejected after receiving an offer from them. I had a really bad experience, and just felt like the company was looking for things I am much more qualified from.
I was interviewed by engineers who were all just recent college grads, no managers, tech leads, or anyone I felt were probably more qualified to interview me. The environment felt toxic. Most people I talked to looked unclean, like they just got out of bed to work. Had red eyes like they were tired. And the workplace was just not as clean as I was hoping. There were a set of dirty plates in the conference room I was interviewed in, and no one bothered to remove them the entire time.
From people I have talked to, my experience was pretty unique, and most people have had good interviews there. But even as an outlier, I don't like the chance of it being exactly like my experience. Things like this really put stuff in perspective for me though. I still went through the entire process, but in the end, rejected the offer. I wouldn't want to work in an environment like Google's, it feels toxic, and engineers feel like they are overworking themselves to death.
Actually your experience is not unique; you could see on Googlers in Mountain View or Zurich that many of them are one step from a burn-out, they are also often crammed next to each other in larger noisy rooms; most of them seemed pretty stressed out, not joyful, starting from receptionists. Such a huge contrast in attitude comparing to Microsoft (content/happy) or Facebook (high-energy).
I too rejected a job at Google after feeling like they just wanted to pigeon-hole me, so to speak. But, as a former Microsoft employee as well, it's not all sunshine there either. While experiences tend to vary, there I was crammed in a small, loud room with too many other people who I'd argue were more complacent than content. Similarly, I've had colleagues at Facebook describe it more as "exhausting" than high energy.
I've come to the opinion that, unless you're a "famous" engineer, or very senior one, that can command a lot of respect and autonomy, most of these "dream job" companies are going to feel a lot more like a well paying sweatshop. At least, that's been my experience as someone with only several years in the field.
I do feel like Google and co are riding on their reputation a lot - one they built up some years ago with promises of e.g. three meals a day and high pay and only hiring the best and such. I got one recruitment mail which basically said something to the degree of "hi I'm from Google, please apply here". Not convincing.
Yeah, it depends on the project usually. It's like what you are hearing from people at XYZ (a higher rated company on Glassdoor than FB/GOOG I don't want to mention by name) who left to Google and 50% of them returning back after ~1 year telling everyone how much it sucked there :D
I really think you should stay in such a company for 1-3 years, build your cash cushion (i.e. stage 1 booster) and then lift-off (make your own startup using connections you made).
> people at XYZ who left to Google and 50% of them returning back after ~1 year
If only it were possible to access the data Linkedin has on employee flows. You could get an idea on which companies are actually enjoyable places to work at versus ones that people are fleeing.
I've just completed an onsite at Google MV and this stood out to me, too. This is Google's famed incredibly tough bar to pass? Out of six companies that I interviewed with in the area, Google's interview was the easiest.
I was also shocked at the lack of social skills from the interviewers. Most seemed to be 40-year-old college grads who had never left the Google campus. One interviewer arrived 20 minutes late, badmouthed the company and apologized in advance because I would probably get rejected.
It really lowered my opinion from "wow this is famous Google I'll be with superstars" to "oh maybe I'll tolerate it for childcare benefits and comp but with an expectation to shift offices in a few years".
Having read about (but not been through) the Google process, the idea is that you get interviewed by people who would be working for and with you, not (just?) people above you. Is that possible here?
As a black IT professional, I tend to leave the demographic information blank on applications because I want to avoid the racial implications of my application. I don't know if I'll be dismissed because I'm black and I don't want to be an affirmative action hire either.
I made it to the 3rd round of interviews with Google back in 2012. Maybe if I had told them I was black, I would have gotten the job.
If including your race gives you a leg up, then I think you should do it. I saw a whole lot of casual racism when I was in college, and if that was indicative of the experience of others then you don't owe the rest of us shit.
The ultimate goal from my perspective should be to eliminate implied tribal biases, rather than band-aid them. There's a fair bit of negatives with trying to force the issue with quotas, in my opinion -- by hiring on grounds other than merit, it might even perpetuate the bias. Those hired might for instance be thought of as "second class hires" within the company from the get go. So despite the casual racism that unfortunately exists, I can see why the poster leaves his or her race off applications.
In other fields, hiring can probably be done by ways that try to heavily reduce bias, and get similar increases in diversity without, from what I can see, the negatives of quotas. Some orchestras for instance have used "blind auditions" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_audition) for quite some time, with a noticeable increase in diversity as a result. I see in the Wiki that some tech companies are experimenting with this approach. I'd strongly prefer this sort of system over what Google has (if the details described in the lawsuit end up being true).
Oh man! The irony of this. Diversity hiring doesn’t help anyone. What if you had gotten the job and your peers thought you were only there because of being Black. They don’t take your technical arguments and code seriously?
I know my craft and I'm good at what I do. Code that I wrote as an intern was in use for many years (to the best of my knowledge, it still is) at a former employer.
Sigh, don't perpetuate this. Being an underrepresented candidate may (or may not) help you with getting your foot in the door for an interview, but no one is getting hired if they're unqualified.
I was qualified for the position but I got the impression that Google was just going through the motions. They got around to interviewing me a year and a half after I submitted my resumé.
I'm surprised that people still view Google as a cool place to work.
It seems to me that ship sailed years ago. They are a giant corporation reliant on one monopoly product to fund everything else.
Employees usually are stuck with some tiny part of a component in a system. The office perks are nice, but are you really going to do interesting work there anymore?
Google has produced some amazing software and continues to do so. I work with Kubernetes and Angular 2, both of which originated there. The quality of design, implementation, and documentation is a model for accomplishment in computer science. As an engineer it's hard not to envy the folks that got to work on those projects.
So...I think it really depends where you work. That's true of all big companies as far as I can tell.
Bear in mind though, the lawsuit is a one-sided presentation held up against millions of dollars of PR investment in publishing an image about how great it is to work there.
Yeah, reality probably falls somewhere in the middle, but the default narrative is already slanted incredibly far the other direction.
Unless the screenshots are faked, Google has racist/illegal hiring practices. There's no narrative here: just Alogna's own words being published publically.
Do you seriously think that Google is going to stop hiring white men?
What is claimed sounds like a completely crass method. Whether you like Google or not they typically do things in a fairly data driven method even with their hiring.
It is also blatant discrimination that as others claim would be fairly easy to prove in court. This would be stupid.
For Google to be both crass and stupid seems unlikely.
Do you really want to work for a company where world-class work might not be that important for your career progress? Do you think a super talented high-achieving person with wrong gender/race should be expected to sacrifice their achievements for "common good" as defined by internal diversity officers? Do you think those diversity hires would be happy staying at junior positions and not pushing beyond their capabilities by non-merit related ways, not exploiting prevailing winds? I think second world countries would love to talk to you about how this turned out.
Obviously, interviews aren't that great indicator of success, especially in a company that tries to hire the best according to their criteria, so the overall medium-term effect might be small, but they do risk losing those people that could knock them out of the ring in the future, and making those people forever negative towards them. But maybe that's already taken into account and weighted in their internal decision tooling and they are fine with that.
"Do you really want to work for a company where world-class work might not be that important for your career progress?"
I think pretty much every company has employees who would say that there are definitely people who get promotions and bonuses for reasons that are not related to "world-class" work.
Yeah, which is sad to observe with increasing probability in what should be one of our industry's flagship. It's double sad as there is literally nowhere else to go as a regular employee with high ideals; our industry could have done better.
They will stop hiring level 3 engineer who are Asian and white according to this allegation. The discrimination against asians matters to me even if you're perfectly happy with it in your social justice utopia that discriminates against me.
Meaning the "asian and white" people will become more entrenched in the (I assume) higher levels, with minorities doing the junior work. Or am I missing the point?
> Do you seriously think that Google is going to stop hiring white men?
What kind of question is that? Maybe you should rethink it. Why would being discriminated against like this make me feel better if maybe some other white man gets a job? What are we fungible?
How a company deals with a bad manager is very important. Assuming you believe the accusations (1), the fact that Google wasn't immediately firing people and settling with the plaintiff is worse than the original complaint.
(1) A big if. I haven't seen any hard evidence yet.
I imagine that not believing the accusations (or believing other accusations - true or not - made by the manager against the plaintiff) play a large role in Google not rushing to settle. They'd be mad not to regardless of their politics if the course of events happened exactly as described.
It's not hard - if in this escalation the company would have facepalmed and fired the manager, than that would be the case of one weird manager; but if the company fires the recruiter and keeps the manager, then obviously that's the company culture they intentionally want to have.
This isn't too big to fail, it's "a bad egg doesn't ruin the bunch." Whether that's the case here is arguable, but no one is saying they aren't responsible for their actions.
Is 'allowing for variance' up to and including racism and sexisism in hiring? Because it seems like you are giving them a pass, because there are many hiring managers.
If someone who worked for Walmart became a murderer, would you condemn all of Walmart as murderers? Promoting a culture of murder?
If that's too far removed from the actual job for you, how about if someone at Walmart acted in a sexist way in an interview. Would you condemn all of Walmart? Would you automatically assume there is a culture of sexism? Or would you at least entertain the possibility that Walmart employs thousands of managers, so it's not crazy to imagine that some of them might sometimes act in sexist ways, even without such a corporate culture?
You need more than a few instances to prove a claim of "this must be a cultural thing", IMO.
A Walmart shop could be an isolated environment where a bad person can prosper despite a generally contrary company culture, but it isn't an appropriate comparison for this case: important HR managers like this Alogna aren't many, even in a large company, and the higher level management who kept him and fired the recruiter is an even smaller part of Google. They must be assumed to be representative of the whole company.
I'm not saying that bad behavior should be dismissed. But I am saying that the larger the organization, the more potential there is for there to be a bad actor that doesn't match the overall organization's culture.
If the recruiter's accusation is indeed true, then we should ask questions about whether it is endemic to the entire organization. Though given the company's size—especially its growth through acquisitions (such as YouTube)—it's likely that the behavior is constrained to a single manager or department.
I doubt this single incident alone is the reason, but maybe the catalyst. Google and its unhealthy lust for diversity has been an increasingly frequent topic. Hell, someone got fired for posting an anti diversity rant last year. While his arguments were weak or flat out wrong, it's clear that Google is making a point to single out underrepresented minorities to the detriment of others who may actually be better candidates.
I mean, if it's the same memo in thinking of, it wasn't a "diversity memo" he was fired over, it was a manifesto that has been reviewed and agreed on as sufficient cause for his dismissal several times now.
In it, he argued that women were essentially worse at logical tasks than men, and further that this made them poor engineers.
That's not a diversity memo, that's a sexist screed.
> In it, he argued that women were essentially worse at logical tasks than men, and further that this made them poor engineers.
No he didn't. He said they were inherently less interested in STEM, and speculated about a few personality characteristics from psych research that might explain why, but all of that is irrelevant. Damore explicitly said that you can't judge individual competence from a probability distribution, even if the distribution of competence of each gender were different (which they largely are not).
Turns out, he was right that women seem to have different interests. I suggest reading about the things vs. people hypothesis. You can get more women into STEM subfields that deal with people if you highlight those aspects. Hiring quotas and some of the other measures Damore was arguing against would indeed have no effect on gender diversity given these facts.
That is not what the memo said. did you not read it or is this what you think the writer meant even if he did not actually write that but you have some kind of mind reading abilities?
There are a couple of reasons people are so quick to claim other people didn't read the memo verbatim. The first being that the first major publication to run with it, and the biggest one here on HN, was the verge's article where citations and graphs were stripped away from it.
The other is that is it often given such uncharitable descriptions that people who have read it simply can't believe the hate levied at it comes from actually having read the thing. I've actually talked this whole topic through for hours back and forth with someone who is very against the memo, but even they they would call it a sexist manifesto. That sort of thing comes across as off the cuff criticism by people who haven't read the thing.
There are many people who’ve read it and reached the same conclusion about his claims. Simply accusing people of not having read it – or the other standard talking point of claiming that the citations somehow completely change the meaning – is a dishonest way to avoid engaging with those criticisms. If they’re wrong, it should be easy to demonstrate that or find a statement by Damore that he didn’t intend his words to be read that way.
Sure thing. He says as such during his interview with Joe Rogan. If your claim is that he intends to present the idea that women are inferior in this field, that interview contradicts it.
Right, so that would be the thing to talk about rather falsely accusing people of not reading his original memo — it was certainly sloppy enough to be possible that the way many people read it was not how he originally intended.
If he's made direct statements rejecting biological determinism it should be easy enough to cite them — and it'd be useful to do so to avoid distraction when his supporters try to rehash the arguments in favor of that position.
You do no get to decide what contributes and what does not beyond your +-1. you do not have the moral high ground when you are repeating lies. It is clear to me that anyone that has read the memo, and is not laying will not describe it the way DanHulton did. Seems to me that what ever conversation you want to have it should not be based on falsehoods.
I read it, and I think DanHulton described it in pretty much the same way I would. The charts struck me as lacking meaningful context, and loose correlations were treated as logical, causal relationships in support for discriminatory hypotheses, reading like a case study in how to fallaciously present opinion as fact through charts and statistics.
Are we counting reviews by pushing the same narrative that was being pushed by the people he originally offended? What I've seen is a number of scientists (in the specific fields that are related to it) backing his work, others attacking it, and all agreeing it doesn't rise to the muster of a peer reviewed paper/meta-analysis (though that seems a pretty insane bar to begin with).
Where there is smoke, there might be fire. Its not unlikeley related to KPIs set by high managment (given the news around Google in the past). And further down the food chain managers want to look good and do these things.
This is a good point. There's a lot of negative press and truly appalling allegations swirling about Google, but it's near impossible to get an accurate idea of extent or even the truth of the situation from the outside.
Based on Reddit stories for a while, it seemed that even settin foot in the US was a near guarantee one would then be tasered, have their money taken by police officers, and then detained by agents from an unknown 3-letter agency and shipped to Guantanamo.
It's possible, though we have no way of knowing, that what's in this story is a case of a lone manager with an axe to grind. It's also possible that the attitude is pervasive.
It's likely best to withhold judgement and keep asking questions.
I work at Google. It is the most unpleasant place to work, largely because work evaluation is almost 80% politics (might be 100%). I am a senior engineer. You get stuck here because the pay you better than elsewhere, but I think it is a very bad and very sad place to work. My stomach curdles every morning before going to work and I wonder if it is worth it. Many of my peers talk in the same vein.
Please consider not working here, if you have other options (which you almost always do)
Many of us have been there, and it is not worth that feeling in your stomach every morning, because it drains the life out of you, can cause all kinds of physical and emotional problems.
Go take a job somewhere else, where you might earn less - but will be less miserable - or maybe even happy.
I left Google a few years ago, and I did love working there, but unfortunately my experience was similar. I was on one of the non-software engineering ladders. The group I was part of grew very rapidly the first few years I was there. We were poaching the absolute best people from the best companies to come work on our team. It seemed like there was a new former principal engineer from MegaCo joining us weekly, and it was fantastic to be part of such a team.
But how people got promoted was sometimes a mystery, at least at first. Everyone knew who was the most productive, the most valuable. Yet the promotions too often appeared random. Because we were on a narrower, more specialized engineering ladder the promo committees consisted of the same handful of very senior engineers each time. After a while, it became clear to us that the people that worked with those engineers on the promo committee in their day-to-day ended up having their promotions approved. Those that didn't had far less chance.
This might not sound all that bad - if you're doing high-level work you should be engaged with high-level people. But it ended up becoming a patronage system: people would volunteer their support and time for the pet projects of those on the promo committee and in return they would get promoted. Engineers who weren't comfortable with such an arrangement ended up jaded and underpayed.
I saw one engineer who left a very, very senior position at a well-known company especially hurt by the realization that they would have to participate in this charade to move up. He/she had attempted to get promoted the right way a few times and failed. Under pressure from their significant other, they played the game and it visibly hurt their sense of pride. The promo committee members took turns jerking them around with various tasks for a year or so, but he/she got their promotion. The rest of us took notice.
I got the sense that this system was more comfortable to those who came to us from academia. I barely have a college degree myself so maybe I can't relate.
Google has an internal system which allows engineers to transfer to other teams. If what you described happened to me, I would secure a transfer and then report the situation to higher ups.
IIRC that works only if you never got a bad performance rating, then nobody would touch you internally and your chance to transfer within Google is lower than to move to another company to a better level.
Can you tell me more about this? I have interviewed at google 2 times now. The first interview I bombed -- and I knew it. It was my first interview in near 10 years. The second interview I thought I aced. There was not a single answer I could not answer expect one about obscure hardware that nobody uses any more -- which I think was a test on how I handle not knowing something -- I ended up learning something neat.
The process took a long time -- much longer than the first interview or any of my other friends. And every time I talked to the recruiter I could tell something was up. At the end the recruiter confessed there was issues at the hiring committee and a unusual event of a manager getting involved. They seemed to indicate there was a fight about me being accepted. I have a unique skill set and am very qualified to work at google. I have over 15 years working the full stack. I write drivers for Linux, and design big cloud deployments -- I have the history and the background, so I would not be a gamble on any front. So I thought it odd that there would be an issue at this level, it was only later that I figured I was not diverse enough when a intern I helped train -- who happens to be diverse did get into google.
Anyways, with all the politics going on I am wondering if it is even worth responding to a current recurrent request.
My questions for you xxcode are the folllowing --
It sucks, but are there teams I can try and get on that would not suck? Somebody at google has to be doing good things and just be excited about working on the project they are working on.
I have a good job in Texas. It pays me $150k a year. I sometimes get bonuses and have a fairly good thing going with stock (not options, but stock). Is the money good enough at google to make it worth while?
Will living in CA/MV negate any gains in pay and benefits?
Is there any way to work at this company and avoid the entire diversity thing? I just want to write code and build awesome software that people enjoy using. Diversity -- while I care about it -- is not something I want to actively take cycles out of my life to solve -- there are fare more passionate people who are better equipped to think about these issues, I would rather write software.
Please don't think I am a horrible person. We here on this planet once, and writing code what I want to do with my life -- not everybody has to be a warrior for social justice.
I can't speak to most of the following, but I just escaped California for Texas and I'm fairly familiar with the numbers.
Per a recent news article (don't have it handy, but it was on HN so someone will probably post it), moving from SF -> Austin, holding salary constant, is a de-facto raise of $66,000 per year due to lowered cost of living.
And this is in _Austin_ which, I'm led to believe, has a very high cost of living relative to Texas. If you're somewhere else in Texas making $150k, your de-facto raise relative to California is even higher
Meanwhile, working at Google or another name brand company in SF, your total compensation is going to be anywhere from $200k to $300k. Working at a regular tech company in SF, depending on seniority, it's going to be $100k-$180k. Without giving specific numbers, I was making around $150k as a software engi with 6 years experience in SF, and I took about a 10% pay cut when I moved to Texas.
----
In short, if you're making $150k/yr in Texas, anywhere, you are doing better in terms of overall life (money after adjusted for stress/QoL), and if you're making $150k/yr in Texas outside of Austin, you are probably making more money in absolute terms than the typical Google employee. Please, do yourself a favour and stay in Texas
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Edit: To add, a major part of why I moved out of California was because the politics was omnipresent and unavoidable. I have so many horror stories, things I would not believe to be true if I didn't witness them first-hand. And this is at regular normal tech companies. Companies that don't have the budget to spend on politics. Companies that risk their existence by spending money on things outside of their core business (read: the software they're building).
If you're like me, and you just want to do the job you're good at, do it right, and make a good wage, then California is not for you. It's not avoidable, it will drive you crazy. Maybe California will sort itself out five, ten years from now, but right now people are silently leaving in droves over it.
Please, for the love of reasonableness and moderation, stay in Texas and help us keep this place focused on the craft, instead of getting distracted by orthogonal social issues
Why don’t you work for google for a bit and experience it first hand. You can probably go back to your present job later if you want.
As senior engineer at google, it is definitely 75%+ politics and project management and 25% technical competence. Depends on a group but perhaps if you are on a mission driven group like Brain etc, it can be better. I don’t know.
I would recommend joining a smaller group at google, and also one which has engineers who haven’t all been around at google for 5+ years.
Overall, it can be fun at times but relatively unfulfilling. Google pays above market though. I think if it paid market, almost 50% of tech staff would leave.
Product managers at google are also very political and if they are not, they get pushed out etc. I had one PM who always passionately argued about the user etc, and was eventually pushed out because he was not internally ‘aligned’. The product he was arguing against got cancelled this Friday after 2 years of work
I wouldn't think of someone as "horrible" for not caring what color other people's skin is. That's a testament to the world we're in. If you don't actively and consciously take skin color into consideration, you're a bad person!
On the other side Google’s getting shamed for not being diverse enough. I’m sure many recruiters and hiring managers’ bonuses are tried to how many diverse candidates are hired.
In other words, this mess could be due to a lack of true leadership. They're reacting to one criticism then the next, without really having a coherent, defensible idea of their own.
I don't think this anecdote is a good way to judge bias. Companies don't always want to hire the most senior and experienced person that interviews, and that's not always a bad thing.
Google already suffers from a lack of junior people (see the post from a few days ago from a Xoogler complaining that the work he was doing was not deemed promo worthy), so it's not necessarily a surprise that the hiring bar for junior engineers would be lower - they're junior engineers.
And this law suit alleges that Google discriminated against non-diverse candidates at the most junior level anyway.
I feel I must respond since I also moved from Dallas to SFO. Equivalent salary will be around 230ish for your 150.
You may still struggle to buy a house because of competition. Just a head's up.
Maybe you two should compare where you work and what you do; Google's a big company with over 72.000 employees, it's highly unlikely everyone has the same experience worldwide.
Exactly, two engineers could have an entirely different experience based on their team. Engineers can transfer to different teams too, though that team will obviously look at the engineer's history of performance.
Two engineers on the same team can even have vastly different experience. Google is big enough that it attracts a huge spectrum of engineers and one person's hellish workplace is another person's bliss.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but attitudes like what you just described contribute to a toxic work culture--people sticking around just because of the money but hating every minute of it. It implies that people there are not just unhappy but will do/say things they don't believe in just to keep the paychecks rolling in.
Working at big companies like Google is not for everyone. Unless you have material reasons for staying--such as funding care of aging parents--wouldn't you be happier and more successful by taking your own advice?
p.s., I don't work at Google and don't ever want to.
There is no victim. This isn't chattel slavery. OP can say no to shitty culture and find another job. Take some of that good money save up a 6 month emergency fund and GTFO. There is no reason you should be going into work everday with a curdled stomach.
There is no victim. This isn't chattel slavery. Women can say no to shitty culture and find another job. Take some of that good money save up a 6 month emergency fund and GTFO. There is no reason you should be going into work everday with a curdled stomach.
people should take ownership of the consequences of their actions, especially when those actions are part of their professional identity and are reasonably within their control. Google is by almost no account a "stressful" working environment in the sense that its employees are well paid even within the context of a wealthy developed nation, have the freedom to leave, have ample access to health care, sick days, and paid vacation, have a physically safe workplace with minimal to no risk of personal injury, have socially highly respected work that is building a foundation for whatever career future they want, etc. etc.
This isn't a field worker complaining about back-breaking labor conditions and wage theft, this a professional engineer at a top company who I certainly would not want on my team (I'm also a software engineer) if they're as checked out as they say, both for their sake and mine.
I've worked with plenty of checked-out paycheck/stock-vest campers, and their effect on team morale is palpable, and the damage they do during their remaining tenure is usually pretty severe.
"people should take ownership of the consequences of their actions, especially when those actions are part of their professional identity and are reasonably within their control."
That's a normative statement, which I personally agree with, along with the rest of your post, so this is by no means disagreement with anything you said. But it's really easy for people to rationalize away normative statements.
I prefer something a bit more direct: Nobody else is going to save you. Whether or not it "should" be your job to manage your own happiness is an interesting philosophical discussion that happens to have absolutely no bearing on your life, because in your real life, it's on you.
If you are that unhappy with your job, do something. Nobody else will.
Congratulations on your determination. Many people don't have the fortitude to take such a step; while it may seem a bit silly, I recommend going ahead and taking a moment to allow a bit of pride in that, so as to encourage the brain bits that allowed you to do that.
So you don't see the problem as lying with the people who dictate stupid policies because they don't know what they're talking about? You think the problem is with the people who try to push back, realize that there's no future in it, and learn how to shut up and keep their head down? Uh...
Once there's a reply it can't be deleted, only edited to remove the content. After two hours that's not even an option anymore.
Generally, I think it's good policy to be very guarded on the internet and/or change accounts often. There are all kinds of awful people out there, and you can't control who you may come across.
It's not only about malicious actors within the company; they might end up in some sort of external blacklist scrapped off HN that would complicate their life once they depart their current company. It's best to have 0 private opinion trace on doxxable accounts these days and usual VPN + Tor circuit.
Thank you. This is a good point. I deleted a submission that had my email address. Perhaps they will black ball me but I dont think I said anything that was libel or false. I just shared my opinions.
You are correct that if you work in tech create a throw-away account to discuss anything critical of the prevailing viewpoints. Many holding the prevailing viewpoints are tyrannical and have shown themselves willing to destroy the lives of anyone pointing out problems in their viewpoint.
Oh man. That is quite a twist to the Google of 2010. But I guess any company that crosses 10,000 people mark will have heavy politics.
Google makes so much money from ads, it doesn’t know what to do. Like Microsoft, so much middle management that from customer pain to engineers, requirements are loaded with a ton of personal agenda and political gain.
Reading this hurt. Life's to short. Quit. There are plenty of places that pay just as good or give you much more than just raw cash. If you've a family to feed (like me) I totally can get why you'd want to say. I know it's easy for me to say quit and find something else too. But please take it from a dumb guy who pities others that he feels are making the same mistake as he did. Quit. The world is too beautiful and miraculous to lose days to feelings like that.
I have avoided LargeCos for precisely this reason. Worked in one a long time ago and witnessed the same thing - this is hardly unique to Google.
Once companies significantly outgrow the Dunbar-number range[1], political processes are the only way to manage things, and it infects everything.
For me, my quality of life is worth the tradeoff[2], and I turn down headhunters from them AmaGoPleBook seemingly constantly. If you want to pursue your actual work, as opposed to refining your skill at signaling games, move to a smaller shop.
[2] Another reason to keep debt low and personal commitments fluid - turning down a six figure raise because it would make life hell gets harder with both.
I found this shocking. How did this come to be? Don't places like Google reward people based on merit. Isn't it the hallowed ground for egalitarianism? I read an article about the hiring practices at Google that spoke highly about it.
Honestly, I'm not so surprised. A lot of stuff about employment Google reads like hagiographies. Maybe it was that way in the distant past, but its most notable perks (20% time, etc.) have been cut and it's big and publicly traded now, so rot has definitely had time to set in.
20% projects have been cut? I wish someone told me that before I started a 20% project which spanned multiple quarters, and still did well in my last performance review.
If an engineer isn't doing well on their 80% project, a 20% project might be frowned upon, that is true.
I guess the policy has changed. My impression was in the early days you could work 20% on your own stuff (no/few approvals necessary) and 80% on your corporate assignments. That's changed into something that, frankly, isn't very unique:
> In 2012 the firm began requiring engineers who wished to work on individual projects to run their proposals by their managers first. This was a significant change from the firm’s previous policy.
> In 2013 it was reported that managers had clamped down on staff taking ’20% time’ so as to avoid their teams falling behind in Google’s internal productivity rankings. Managers are judged on the productivity of their teams—Google has a highly developed internal analytics team that constantly measures all employees’ productivity—and so time spent on ’20% time’ projects would impact this.
2013 Google sounds like pretty much every other major company, in this area.
I think you can still do a 20% project. This was about the performance systems, and not about workload. Workload is easy peasy. Its almost a sinecure for most people because all you need to do is to optimize for promo.
So that refrain seems to imply the 20% project must be done as additional work after spending 40 hours a week on the 100% project. My point was you actually can spend roughly 32 hours a week on your main project, if you are performing well, and then roughly 8 hours a week on your 20% project, and still get high performance ratings.
Pay attention to what people do more than what people say. People vote with their feet. A senior engineer at Google can easily get a high paying job anywhere else.
a quick browse of your comment history suggests we'd enjoy working together. n3twork, mobile video games. san francisco. email me at erin@n3twork.com if you think you might be interested.
True, but it's also a very biased view with events that take place in most of large companies (you can find these reports for Amazon, Apple, etc. etc.) And yet others seem to get a free pass while Google is targeted by wrath of HN. Why?
Mostly because Apple has legions of fanatics which are well established here. Apple gets criticism, you just don't get to see it unless you change your prefs to show flagged/dead posts.
It's ironic, because Apple fans were painted as carrying the sledge hammer of inconvenient truth, not acting like the grey drones who oppress all differences of opinion in the 1984 commercial.
Old social media accounts are available for sale exactly because they look more legitimate. (I'm just pointing a general fact, not that the user in question is a shill.)
I read an article describing the fenomenon, I can't find it now but there's plenty of interesting results if you search Google.
I'd be surprised if people were selling HN accounts for this purpose, it's much easier to reach a larger audience, and have more impact, on a general social media site than HN. I wouldn't suspect the practice is likely to happen here.
People should check out the actual complaint [0]. It includes a lot of things the article doesn't including:
A screenshot of an email from Allison Alogna to "Team" stating
> Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically unrepresented groups.
Another stating in part
> And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups.
It also tells us that this wasn't the first time the plaintiff had issues with his manager over this topic. He had the same issues with the previous manager, the previous manager was found by internally by Google to have retaliated against him for his complaints, and Allison Alogna was hired to replace that manager.
I don't understand how this didn't raise red flags from legal/HR.
From the article:
> In a statement, Google said [...] it has a "clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity. At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles[...]"
You can't have it both ways. You're either based solely on merit, or on merit and how non-male and non-white they are. Which is discrimination.
EDIT: Sorry -- Finding pools in "diverse" areas is fine, but dropping resumes in the bin when they are not "diverse" enough is not.
I hate that "diversity" has been politicized like this and I feel like it's one of the failings of the left's identity politics bent that will come back to bite them.
Getting minorities in your company to win some diversity points is great, but missing the actual benefit to society. The goal should be, for society, to equally encourage minorities to get STEM degrees and jobs so that companies don't have to play this stupid "look how diverse we are!" game.
And it won't happen overnight.
Companies should just hire on merit[1]; be completely blind to their workforce's background. They should enforce this neutrality like they enforce neutrality toward anyone's religion. "I don't care as long as you can do your job". If they are concerned about monoculture, then advertise and advocate in areas that they think will improve that. But just leave hiring to merit.
Eventually diversity will trickle-up. It shouldn't just be up to companies.
EDIT [1]: Yes, merit can be an ambiguous term. And I should have also stated they can hire based on "fit", which is another ambiguous term. But sorry, if your devote beliefs restrict you from using any electronic devices, then no, you aren't getting the web developer job. It's not a good "fit".
> You can't have it both ways. You're either based solely on merit, or on merit and how non-male and non-white they are. Which is discrimination.
Actually yes, you can. There are 2 steps in recruiting:
1. Find people who want to apply
2. Have them go through a hiring process to select which one you make an offer
You can seek diversity in step 1 and be completely merit-based on step 2.
If your step 1. is mostly ask your (currently overwhelming white male) engineers for referrals, of course you'll get a bunch of white dudes. You have to find other channels.
Diversity shouldn't be excluding people who happen to be part of the current majority, but enlarging your pool of candidates.
Also, the whole idea of hiring "merit-based" is a bit naive because you're not hiring people on a single objective metric. There are a bunch of metrics, most of them judged subjectively: technical abilities, adaptability, communication abilities, person easy to work with, and the list goes on.
So while Google definitely screwed up by trying to take the easy path to a more diverse workforce, you can seek diversity without excluding white dudes.
Yes -- I missed the "pool of candidates" part. I was assuming based on their defensive posture they were referring to the hiring manager dropping resumes of otherwise qualified individuals.
I think the challenge is how to correct for unconscious bias (e.g. the classic NBER finding that "black" names have to send in 150% of the resumes of "white" names to get the same interviews[0]) without over-correcting. When people think they're making objective, merit-based judgements, they are actually being racist, sexist, classist, etc.
So how do you fix this? One way is what you suggested: "companies ... should be completely blind to their workforce's background. This is doable in the interview process; for example a test which results in an offer if passed. (Though normal interview processes are not like this.)
But recruiting is more difficult, because right it involves humans reaching out to other humans who they judge to be a good fit. So being truly merit-based there requires some correction of one's own intuition.
I mean, if recruiters were really instructed to "purge the hiring pool" of non-diverse candidates then that's obviously pretty blatant. But I just wanted to note that being 100% merit-based is not easy.
Trying to find a diverse pool is fine. You can recruit at historically black colleges, you can offer benefits like family leave or daycare that might appeal statistically more to women. You can try to show that your organization is not racist and will be welcoming to people of color.
It is fine to try and attract a diverse group of applicants, but after they apply, the basis of hiring should be who is qualified.
Good luck defining and hiring purely on merit. Good luck separating merit from unconscious biases related to where you've seen merit previously. And typically most of what you've seen previously is people like you.
I've seen plenty of excellent computer engineers who started out as physics majors, or astronomers, or music majors...but they were universally white men (mostly because I've only ever been around white men in this business).
If a black woman came to me with a background in East Asian linguistics, would I naturally associate her with the success stories I've seen, or would I think she's unqualified and needs to get more experience elsewhere?
> If a black woman came to me with a background in East Asian linguistics, would I naturally associate her with the success stories I've seen, or would I think she's unqualified and needs to get more experience elsewhere?
> I suspect the latter.
Really? And you would not think that of a white candidate?
Frankly, I would be intrigued by anyone with a background in East Asian linguistics who taught themselves programming, and would be very careful not to quickly discount them.
Completely agree about missing the actual benefit to society of focusing on better education and opportunities for all. Amazing how quickly things can go off the rails when you start evaluating middle management off some metric like "number of diversity hires" which seems like a good idea but then backfires into something ridiculous like this. I hope this sets a fire under Google's management to keep better track of HR
Problem is that leaving companies open to lawsuits from individuals, organizations like the NAACP, and even from the DoJ.
Whenever the demographics of a company do not match the demographics makeup of society at large, then the company is legally on the defensive. And the fines can be BIG
This definitely changes the tone of things. That's pure discrimination. It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all.
Sounds like someone above the manager is responsible for this and the manager is carrying out orders. You don't get a historic paper trail like that by not being told to continue on.
> It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all.
Any sufficiently low quota is equivalent to exclusion (ie a quota of 1 is pretty much like a quota of 0, which really means "nobody"). The very notion of quota implies exclusion (of those who are "past the quota").
Affirmative action literally means the opposite of what you think it means. It means that there will be efforts taken to ensure no discrimination in hiring on the basis of race, sex, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246 etc
That’s a very selective and intellectually dishonest defense. That was the original law, then extended by Johnson and taken in a different direction altogether by future leadership.
The current Department of Labor on affirmative action [0] clearly paints a very different picture that more accurately reflects the current meaning:
For federal contractors and subcontractors, affirmative action must be taken by covered employers to recruit and advance qualified minorities, women, persons with disabilities, and covered veterans.
And here’s the dictionary entry for “affirmative action:”
efforts to make education and employment available to people who have traditionally been treated unfairly, for example because of their race or sex, by giving them some advantages over people who have traditionally been more powerful
Another interesting thing there is that it's only L3's, which (it seems) are juniors / new people; you could argue that that too is discriminatory and it enables the "white male" stereotype to remain in leading positions while the "grunt work" is done by underrepresented groups.
Apart from the difference between not hiring aspirants and driving away old employees, the metrics of diversity are probably based on pure head count, not on having quotas on important roles (which would also be unlikely to be satisfiable).
Thanks for finding this, this seems different than what the article alleges.
This actually seems more likely, since it lines up with what Google has said previously - that they do not alter the hiring bar for anyone, i.e. that interview/hiring committee is independent, but they do ask recruiters to focus on finding diverse candidates, and they have also said they coach diverse candidates about what to expect from interviews.
I think how this will play out depends on whether this applied to all recruiters in the company/all recruiters filling a set of specific roles, and/or if non-diverse candidates could still apply to Google and get into the funnel.
I suspect that lawsuits like this will show that trying to artificially influence diversity through hiring practices is an incorrect approach. When I'm in a hiring position, it's not like we sit around a table and say, "we'd prefer the white male." We just don't have enough women and minorities in the hiring pool to begin with.
The problem is that there aren't enough women and minorities entering our field. We just can't decide to hire more women and minorities when there aren't any to hire. Getting women and minorities to choose tech as a career isn't something that I honestly don't know how to solve. Ultimately, our employees reflect who's in our hiring pool.
The same happens in other fields, too. In pediatrics, there aren't a lot of men entering medical school, so there is a desire to hire more men.
Anyway, getting back to the original topic; I suspect there's more going on than we realize. I'm curious about how much this reflects Google actual policies versus a decision of a middle manager.
> Getting women and minorities to choose tech as a career isn't something that I honestly don't know how to solve.
A lot of the histrionics lately seem to indicate a general lack of humility. We can't be condemning people for not getting with the program if we don't even know if the program will work.
A supreme court justice was asked the same question. I don't agree with it completely but think it's an interesting opinion.
>Rosen: Why is it good for men—as you said recently, there should be nine women on the Supreme Court …
>Ginsburg: No, I didn’t say there should be. The question was when will there be enough, so there’ll be enough when there are nine.
>For most of our history, except the times the court was less than nine, and the one time there were 10, they were, until Justice O’Connor, all men. And nobody thought anything was unusual about that.
The logic there is just terrible. Maybe her point was that even if eight women were sitting, we'd still be considering women candidates for the open seat? If so, it didn't come across in the text.
"enough" of a specific demographic in this sort of discussion usually means "roughly proportionate to that group's percentage of the overall population". this belief is held most ardently by those who attribute the difference in outcomes to societal pressures (as opposed to inherent biological differences). of course this is mainly relevant in the context of an entire field or industry and not a specific company's workforce (although if the company is big enough the lines blur).
Since the US has 10s of thousands of open developer positions which are going unfilled, then purely from a pragmatic "what would help the economy" perspective, a good lower bound on "enough" is "we are able to fill those open positions".
That's kind-of-true, but I think doesn't fit in this case.
I mean, let's take a hypothetical world - only one person knows how to program. You could say "there's no such thing as a labor shortage - just a price mismatch, she should be receiving one billion dollars for every line of code". But you could also say "maybe we should teach a few more people programming. And clearly, lots of software wouldn't get written, because its cost would be too high.
This is the "same" situation, only a bit more spread out. Maybe those 10k jobs legitimately aren't worth paying more for - that doesn't mean that, if there were more programmers and therefore their salaries would be lower, that software wouldn't be valuable. It's still a good indication that there's lots more to do.
While what you said is true you can still try to improve your own pipeline by targeting places other people look for jobs, using language that minimizes bias (careful here, lots of pseudoscience going around), and ensuring your company culture is welcoming to others (eg not acting like a frat).
You may not be able to expand the opposite end of the pipeline but you can try to make the start of your pipeline as large as possible.
I work at Square, and there was an interesting presentation in front of the company about diversity efforts. Someone asked our head of diversity (who has since left) what "diverse" means, to which she responded pretty casually "non Asian and non White".
As an Asian male I guess I feel privileged to be lumped in with the White males? I came here with my parents at age 10 with not much, and lived in an attic above a car rental company for a year because it was the cheapest rent we could find. Both parents worked labor jobs for years (i.e. inside a dry cleaner, and inside a factory assembling CD cases).
Thanks to their efforts, I got in a good CS program (my parents couldn't pay for shit, were still poor), and then got a job at Square. It's just kind of weird to hear your entire people get lumped in with the "privileged white males" in front of the whole company like that.
It's always really weird that "Asians" get treated as one homogeneous group in the name of diversity. It's weird because if you are say Hmong, or Cambodian, or from Laos, or Thailand, or Vietnam, or various parts of Southeast Asia, or Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka, statistically you are far more disadvantaged than your "traditional" Asians, like Indians or Chinese or Koreans or whatever. Yet these individuals often become disadvantaged in the name of diversity.
Also for anyone working at Square, can we please stop referring to a candidate as "diverse"? I really hate that term, to describe one candidate as diverse, when it just means non White/Asian/Male.
When I was applying to universities I came to realize all they actually care about is how you will look in a slide or pamphlet about diversity. They don't care about your story or experience or upbringing. Diversity as they use it only means physical appearance
A side note I also had a real existential crisis as a half white half asian male. What do you put down in order to be fucked over the least? Asian? White? Both if they let you or would that make you twice as screwed? Why should I have to make that decision at all?
it also doesn't make much sense for white people. There's rich and poor, educated and uneducated, privileged and unprivileged in any arbitrary grouping of people. The idea of lumping a trust fund Ivy League kid in with a working class Ukrainian because of skin colour is just blatantly nonsense, and you can map that nonsensicality onto any designation of group privilege. Hence the idea of individualism, or treating people with respect to their actual circumstances rather than what one assumes to be their circumstances based on correlative but not absolute indicators like race.
I was once asked to do recruiting at a university. They told me to only collect the resumes of Females, Blacks, and Hispanics. And that they would not consider any other genders/races for the positions. This was for the BOLD program: https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/bold.html.
Talking around with my co-workers, we found Google has multiple programs like this. Another is a program to hire only LGBTQ people for entry MBA positions.
Still afraid to speak up within Google as I fear my job would be at risk.
Google claims its a meritocracy. It used to be a meritocracy , but in the past few years thats no longer the case. We've become a Microsoft.
They will email the LGBTQ organization at the university. And the only place they'll be is that club. For BOLD most people were only emailing the Hispanic / Black frats & organizations.
I know that Google even has a dedicated team who does interview prep & mock interviews (with real questions btw) for `diversity` candidates. This training is not available to whites / asian males. Obviously if you've interviewed 10x before hand and seen all the real interview questions, you're going to do better.
Basically they are doing everything they can to make sure diversity candidates are applying and have the absolute best chance of getting in.
If this is true and the recruiter has emails to back up his case it should be a pretty easy case to win.
According to the the rules:
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which makes it illegal to discriminate against a person on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
I have recently left tenure at a large telecoms company in the UK. They definitely had a practice of encouraging female hires. Even if they weren't the best fit for the role.
Don't get me wrong, I am not approaching this in a sexist way - on the contrary I have worked with excellent and poor colleagues of both sexes.
I think it diminishes the accomplishments of genuinely great minority/female employees to have this policy.
I would prefer identity to be neutralized somehow during the hiring process. The best person for the job, no matter your sex, colour, creed, disability.
Except that’s not what we get right now. We have qualified women driven away from the profession because of all the unwanted attention and hurdles that come along wit being a minority at work.
In my profession (corporate law) we get a balanced gender distribution of applicants at the entry level. But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today. We’d be getting the subset of the best people who were willing to put up with a highly gender skewed environment.
At a higher-ranked law school, 80% of graduates will go into private practice, about evenly split by gender. What the prospects are at the other end has a big impact on the people coming in.
As to what law firms do—they do about the same thing any Big Corp. does, and it works out at the entry level (at least as to gender) because the pool of applicants is gender balanced. The more interesting question is how they got there. There was a strong push in the 1980s and 1990s to simply hire more women, to make up for the fact that the profession was 95% men due to past discrimination. The whole industry did this, from law schools to law firms to the judiciary.
And it ended up being largely self-perpetuating. While law still faces challenges retaining more senior women, there is a critical mass (probably a third of potential clients as well as judges are women) such that qualified left-brained women aren’t turned away from the field because they don’t want to put up with a 10:1 ratio.
Now you can debate about whether two wrongs make a right, but realize that’s a different point than what I was replying to. If you’re in a highly gender-skewed industry that hasn’t tackled the effects of past discrimination, you’re not getting the best of the best. You’re limiting half your potential talant pool to the subset of people who are willing to put up with the hassle of being a minority in their field.
why do you think the push to hire more women is the reason for the current gender balance in law hiring rather than a simple increase in the number of women choosing to pursue legal qualifications? there is a huge push to hire more women in tech yet it has done little so far to change the balance. there is certainly no hard barrier on women pursuing a tech career as there was for women pursuing a career in corporate law before the 80s.
There hasn’t been a huge push. What law firms did in the 1980s and 1990s was basically decide “we’re going to hire an equal number of men and women.” Eventually, women came to see law as a career women could pursue because there were lots of women in the profession. There were other women to be mentors and role models and friends. Eventually, the need for affirmative measures evaporated.
Having done both, I just find it difficult to believe that substantive preference (rather than the preference not to be in a single gender environment) has anything to do with it. I’m surrounded by highly analytical left brained women who dissect mortgage backed securities for a living. I think they would’ve been great programmers. But the path to being a programmer starts with being the only girl in your high school CS class, and that’s a huge disincentive.
> There hasn’t been a huge push. What law firms did in the 1980s and 1990s was basically decide “we’re going to hire an equal number of men and women.”
If this is true, then there must have been a lot of women coming out of law schools in the 1980s and 1990s. Otherwise, law firms in general could never hire and equal number of men and women. It's statistically impossible.
Whereas there are only a very small percentage (<10%) of women now graduating with CS and software engineering majors.
you missed the biggest factor in explaining the balanced gender distribution - more women are qualified for and apply for corporate law jobs.
the vast majority of software engineering jobs have pleasant working environments than a typical corporate law job - "unwanted attention and hurdles" doesn't work as an explanation.
Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent. In combination with the dismissive tone, it's not a good contribution to the discussion. Piling on by being presumptive about the reason for downvotes doesn't help.
> But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today.
Is that not a counterfactual?
> Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent.
I didn't realise it wasn't clear. Maybe I should have defined the term & pointed out exactly where it was:
Counterfactual: 'Relating to or expressing what has not happened or is not the case.'.
Then again I expected people to be able to connect the two things together.
I guess my tone was because I'd expect someone who works in corporate law to know better. Maybe I should have outlined that as well. I could have explained that I was shocked. That's what I thought the tone conveyed. Surprise: Really?
Does that not convey surprise?
I guess it could be dismissive, but dismissing what? I'm asking a question.
I'm sorry if I was dismissive to the corporate lawyer regarding his use of a counterfactual (with the presumption that I'm correct). I probably could have pointed out I thought they were wrong in a nicer way.
You get off on the wrong foot assuming I’m trying to prove the counterfactual. This is a discussion of gender disparity in engineering, why would I be trying to prove what law would’ve been like if there hadn’t been measures to address gender disparity?
Rather, I used a counterfactual to restate an epidemiological inference. “City A introduced a sewer system in 1845, cholera rates went down. City B did not, and cholera rates stayed high. Had City A not introduced a sewer system, cholera rates in City A would have stayed high.” Obviously you can’t prove that last counterfactual—but that’s besides the point. It’s just another way of stating the inference that sewer systems reduce cholera.
City A is law, and City B is engineering. More so than engineering, law was strongly associated with men, because of the nexus to business, politics, and public performance. And both fields long maintained an uneven gender ratio by, e.g., hiring women to be secretaries rather than professionals. Law took explicit measures to make up for that discrimination. Engineering hasn’t, not to the same degree. We may draw inferences from the comparison.
You're assuming with certainty that there was a causal relationship. Given that assumption you were comfortable in proclaiming the counterfactual to be true. You "knew" it was true because you "knew" the mechanics of the world, thus could predict the counterfactual truth-value.
Did you use something like Hill's criteria for causation[0]? To establish anything? Like in epidemiology? It's how they can make such statements.
I do take your point about how one can be somewhat certain of a counterfactual. You couldn't be though; because you've got no criteria by which to judge the causality.
I've witnessed this at least twice in my career. Both cases by "women", the "diversity-promoting" manager actually meant "mid twenties attractive female".
It makes me sick that people need to tip-toe on these issues and add the obligatory "not-sexist" appology to an obviously not-sexist text.
This is indeed a hidden problem in most of these conversations: you see in several fields an overabundance of good looking women, who have been hired by men for equality but over their probably (statistically on average) more qualified but less attractive sistren.
In our campus placement, one of my female classmate was asked a single question in a "technical" interview. Which was, "Are you willing to relocate to city x".
I won't make any conclusion as that would get me tons of downvotes.
> I think it diminishes the accomplishments of genuinely great minority/female employees to have this policy.
This view is contradicted by the weight of evidence for unconscious bias in hiring.
[Edit] Although obviously I don't know exactly what their policy was... maybe they were hiring badly, but the evidence suggests that people (of both sexes) discount the abilities of people in gender-incongruous roles.
> I would prefer identity to be neutralized somehow during the hiring process. The best person for the job, no matter your sex, colour, creed, disability.
I agree with this (disclaimer: this is what my startup does) but my reasoning is that quotas and other active methods (a) generate resentment, even though they have been shown to raise the bar not lower it, and (b) require a lot of study to determine the 'correct' targets... and even then it's a gamble... so are clumsy and expensive to get right.
It's a complicated topic though, not well suited to sweeping statements.
People have tried fully anonymised hiring processes. The problem is that in tech women and minorities don't even apply, so it's attacking the problem too late in the process. When they do apply, there's stereotype threat to take account of as well, so even if the employer doesn't know anything about the candidate, that's not enough to correct the bias.
I can't speak for this situation, but I was involved in situations with corporate crime at high levels. People were very cognizant of what was in email and what was verbal.
When I considered whistleblowing -- what started as little spiraled out of control -- and looked over evidence, there was very little.
One attorney at the company was fired for putting the wrong thing in writing.
Interesting. The lawsuit only has a couple of screenshots of emails which relate to one manager, but no screenshots of emails which relate to the wider organisational allegations.
The factual allegations in the lawsuit mention several times that management asked people to delete emails that related to the policies and targets. This might mean that there's no proof of these emails any more, or it might mean that the allegations are false. I think in these cases, the plaintiff has to prove things.
Contrary to what many people think, employee discrimination suits are quite difficult to win, as the courts tend to favor corporations. It's not uncommon for a lawsuit that, to a layperson, might seem like a slam-dunk, fail or even get thrown out.
Complicating matters for the plaintiff is that Google has a disproportionate number of white and Asian men in both its overall employment and in leadership positions.
A cynical view on things, but, you're probably not wrong. Discrimination is definitely something being treated with a double standard, both actively (like in this case) as passively (like in male rape victims)
Something I have been mulling over lately is, how "progressiveness" encodes bias in and of itself.
Let's reason out a (very naive and overly simplistic) thought experiment:
You are BigCo and want to promote diversity. Part of your cultural strategy is nurture a culture that is "progressive". Therefore you implement a litmus test behavioural question that implicitly tests the candidate's attitudes to sexism as part of your hiring procedure.
Enter candidate A and candidate B, both are male.
Candidate A went to IvySchool and studied CS, candidate B grew up in LEDCountry but was #1 national algorithms prize-winner.
Suppose A and B were identical in performance in every part of the interview, save for the "progressive" litmus test. A gave a stellar answer, meanwhile B gave some answer which could be described as being a bit "traditional".
Under these conditions, A would probably get the job for being a "culture-fit".
What interests me though is that being able to speak the same "language" of progressives is correlates with access to education, and access to education is largely coupled to wealth. So here we have a system which is yet again entrenching a power group of sorts, and extrapolating, I see echoes of the institutions which churn out readymade bankers and lawyers.
Now this is all grossly oversimple, and I don't really have any solutions I can propose, but I find the notion of bias in culture fit, even the paradoxically "I am pro diversity" culture to be a curious idea.
Any time a principle is applied to a culture at a specific point in time, when you look back from an even better place the original improvement can look barbaric.
An example: killing animals to eat them. In the ancient world I heard that it was common to tie up an animal and cut off one limb at a time, keeping the animal alive as long as possible to keep the rest of the meat 'fresh'. When you got hungry, you would go hack off another limb, etc.
This means that the kosher laws that involved swiftly killing an animal before eating any part of it actually reduced the animals suffering quite a bit. But from our modern perspective where we have access to even more efficient slaughterhouses, by our standards the kosher laws seem unnecessarily gory and greusome.
In this case, the principle has remained the same over time: try to reduce the animal's suffering and bring it a swift death…but when you compare how that progressive principle gets applied into different cultures at different times, you can have wildly different perspectives on how ethical the different practices are.
I once had the ‘privilege’ of talking to one of the admissions directors at my alma mater (an Ivy fwiw). An eminently qualified Asian candidate I had interviewed was rejected (while an inferior Jewish-Cuban candidate from the same school was accepted), I had quit the interview program out of disgust, and my complaints were escalated up to this director.
Now this particular individual happened to be Asian himself. So am I. I expected empathy. Here’s what I got instead: this director asked me to imagine what a predominantly Asian campus would look and feel like. Is that a university experience I would have appreciated?
I found this absolutely flabbergasting. This director had blown past the tacit admission that a quotaless, merit-based system would result in a visibly higher ratio of Asian students into outright stereotyping and borderline racism.
Here’s the problem: people equate diversity with race and gender. They really do. They’re not after real diversity. They want the outward presentation of real diversity. Then no one can ask them difficult questions. No one is going to ask them to prove that they’ve achieved true diversity on the basis of character and intellectual bent.
I find the whole thing offense. I'm 'white'(ish coloured), I'm also half-african, half-asian, due to geography, and I'm sick of the identity politics. At the end of the day, I can be ~28th generation African, 28th generation Asian, 100% white, and not meet a 'quota'.
Years ago, working with a US company going after 'Section 503' funding for something, I was the randomly pulled auditee. The auditor freaked out at the notion that I can be half-african, half-asian and white, and I refused to 'update my answer' on the government survey. Seriously.
What happened to the idea that in Tech we'd have a legitimate meritocracy. It really doesn't matter what someone's skin tone, language, gender expression, or sexual preference(s) are. We do work, we do work individually and collectively, and we put our best into it. Anything else is simply disingenuous.
What about if you are white working-class man? Is a middle-class black woman less privileged than a white working-class man? What about short versus tall people? What about beautiful versus ugly people? The halo effect is well-known. The whole thing is just absurd and dehumanising.
> White high school dropouts are wealthier than Hispanic college graduates.
What I'm seeing is "people who have lived in America for a long time (European heritage) are on average wealthier than people who arrived fairly recently from third world countries (Hispanic heritage).
the article says absolutely nothing about immigration or third world countries. whether the paper controls for generational wealth i don't know.
>Why is that surprising?
...it's not to me since i understand we live in a structurally racist society
>Why is that a problem?
...the op asks about "privilege" not whether it's problematic. inherited wealth is most certainly privilege. i was only addressing that. there are many good reasons why privilege of this sort is problematic that i will not rehearse here (many smart people believe estate tax should be 100%; here is the guardian on it https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/24/utopia...).
So people work hard all their life for their wealth (maybe they earned a lot or maybe they were just frugal) and smart people think it is okay for the state to take 100% of it away? And you think that's okay? I just can't get my head around how anyone can think that's moral at all.
Oh yes, I see this is teh same Guardian writer that was defending Stalin so no surprises really.
>I just can't get my head around how anyone can think that's moral at all.
it's not rocket science: fair is value-system and ethics dependent. yes in a certain value-system and ethics it is not fair to give people advantages they didn't themselves earn. whether it's the right ethics/value-systems is up to you as an individual and us as a society to decide.
really obvious example: weight classes in combat sports.
Sure but I rarely hear people talk about class which isn't so visible as other things. You can be a black woman born to professors or a working class white man born to garage store attendants.
I'm interested in your definition of privilege. How exactly do the millions of variables that make up a person's life get outweighed by their skin color? Especially when we're comparing two people with similar job paths and economic equality? And how will answering this question not imply making drastic assumptions about an individual based on their race?
> In April of 2017, Google’s Technology Staffing Management team was instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black, or Hispanic and to purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline.
If this were remotely true, we wouldn't see any white men hired in a junior level at the moment. Yet every year you see hundreds hired at that level.
> the manager of YouTube's Tech Staffing Management Team, Allison Alogna
So not all of Google, just junior engineers who came in via this manager. Also
> Google had a policy that recruiters were not to hire Level 3 ad Level 4 Software Engineers. However, YouTube recruiters were given permission to hire Level 3 and Level 4 Software Engineers, if they were diversity hires.
and I've been told the general way to get hired at Google as a new graduate is to apply to a general thing, and that you get placed somewhere in Google after you get hired, so it's quite possible that most junior engineers even in YouTube simply don't go through people working for this manager while getting hired.
There is a good chance if this was true it was just the result of a rogue manager. You can imagine some managers might have incentives to increase diversity, and there is also a policy of non-discrimination in hiring. However, one of the easy ways to increase diversity to achieve your objectives might be to engage in a discriminatory hiring policy. So it might be very tempting for some managers to go rogue if they are not able to hit their objectives using non-discriminatory methods.
... and not even Google, but YouTube. Even if it looks like to be Google, there is still a separate YouTube LLC and last time I checked, it was also a different organization career-path wise.
> In a statement, Google said that it would “vigorously defend this lawsuit,” adding that it has a “clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity. At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.”
How? Creating a diverse pool of candidates, and selecting the most meritorious individual from that pool, are two separate stages in the hiring pipeline.
Google's policy as stated in that quote is simply addressing the fact that entrenched network effects (known more popularly as "patriarchy" and "white supremacy") cause minorities – and, by extension, talented minorities – to be underrepresented in the hiring pool. It's entirely possible to enrich the hiring pool by focusing on minority outreach, yet still select from that pool the most meritorious candidate (who may or may not be a minority).
Yesterday there was a comment on another story to the effect of, "I [male] wouldn't introduce myself to a group of two or more women at a professional conference, because I'd be the odd one out." The ultimate loss of networking opportunities for women and minorities which stems from such behavior is what Google's policy (as stated) seeks to correct. Reach out to those women (or minorities) who were denied a professional connection due to their gender/race/etc., so that they are granted a chance to be judged on their merit, alongside others for whom the opportunity to be interviewed came as easily as getting a sunburn or growing a beard.
Granted, it sounds like what happened in the case in TFA was one of explicitly culling the pool to remove otherwise meritorious candidates based solely on their race, which is in conflict with the above policy statement.
It’s not. The idea is that when evaluating/interviewing an applicant it’s strictly merit based. But when reaching out to potential candidates on LinkedIn, choosing how to represent the company on campuses and at conferences the company can choose to act in ways to bring in more underrepresented applicants. So without changing their hiring standards, they can hopefully still increase the diversity of the pool of applicants and in turn increase diversity of the company. A lot of tech companies right now are adopting this diversification strategy.
I don't see any contradiction. Enlarging the pool - actively seeking people who might think they wouldn't be hired because of their background - looks to me like the best way to balance diversity. While excluding qualified candidates only because they're the wrong gender or color is exactly the wrong way to go.
I wonder how that'd pass muster if it was the other way around. I can't imagine a company that discriminates against black applicants getting a pass because they say their interview process is fair, but they just throw most of the black resumes in the trash before it starts.
You can't fix in hiring what's already broken before people even get to college. I'm pretty sure Google's hiring disproportionally much women, black people, gay people already if you would compare it to what's graduating from the compsci careers in the US.
Google is making other companies probably even more exclusively white/asian male because they tend to hire more of the women that do qualify for programming jobs.
There are only two things you really can do:
- Fix the school system. But the people that really call the shots in the US would call that communist because you would have to raise taxes
- Train people from minority or disadvantaged backgrounds yourself
If they really would care about diversity they could have Google schools in prisons to educate the more motivated and promising inmates in the skills Google requires.
> If they really would care about diversity they could have Google schools in prisons to educate the more motivated and promising inmates in the skills Google requires.
Precisely. Or sending recruiters to Mississippi/Alabama/Louisiana/etc to identify brilliant 18 year olds who can’t go to college because of their socio-economic situation, etc. One can come up with many other ways to directly attack these problems.
But really, most at Google/FB/Apple/etc do not believe there is much of an issue. They just want to appease the media by saying how much they care about diversity, resulting in terribly misaligned incentives all over, resulting in the kind of crazy situations the original linked article describes.
"Google said that it would “vigorously defend this lawsuit,” adding that it has a “clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity. At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products."
You'll notice that official statement from Google did not claim the allegations were false nor that the events by the recruiter's manager did not take place. Defending yourself vigorously doesn't mean you're not guilty. Usually we see companies come right out and say that the claims are false. Google didn't do that, I suspect, because this is almost certainly documented in emails and formal communications. If this guy knew he was stirring the pot and causing issues and making claims of illegal activity, I doubt he didn't put at least some of this in email to protect himself. I'm sure Google performed a preliminary investigation once the lawsuit was filed and found internal emails which clearly show this guy documenting what he was told to do and his objection to it. Emails which the guy probably CC'ed or BCC'ed himself on so that he would also have a record of some of it is probably included/mentioned in the lawsuit when it was filed.
One thing I never understand is how people claim to support both equality and pro-minority/anti-majority actions at the same time. It's like saying you support democracy and kim jong un.
There are two ways to nullify a problem. 1. Solve it 2. Create another problem in equal magnitude and opposite direction.
Unfortunately, most countries/organisations seem to prefer second one, because it's easier and shows effect earlier, although over long period of time, it's going to be the worse one.
Do you believe it feasible for Google, or even a theoretical consortium of powerful companies like Google, to solve the gender, race, and socioeconomic inequalities in access to education and other resources that enable someone to work at such companies?
If yes, how?
If no, do you think it's better for them to attempt to compensate in a way that is feasible, or to do nothing?
They should solve the problems, instead of hiding the symptoms. They need to encourage women to enter tech field. This could be done at school level. They could ensure that women don't face harrasement at work. They could help women find jobs after a gap due to childbirth.
Find why women don't take admissions in STEM as much as men do. If there isn't any human-made reason, then let it be. Don't force equal numbers down the throat of deserving candidates.
What is currently going on in the world isn't going to solve the problem of race/gender based problems.
I think all these suggestions could help. But it seems highly unlikely that a single company (even a powerful one like Google) can categorically solve the problem through these methods.
The reason I asked about your view of feasibility here is that you seem to be arguing that Google (and others with diversity preference in hiring) are making the wrong choice. But the alternatives you seem to favor are not a real choice Google could execute. It's not like they thought about massively altering the perception and delivery of STEM education to all kids, figured out an effective affordable method to do that, and then just did diversity hiring instead because the VP of HR felt like it.
You could certainly make the argument that there's a better choice they could make, or that their apparent choices are doing more harm than good. But right now you're comparing against an impossible straw-man so it's hard to take the argument seriously.
>Do you believe it feasible for Google, or even a theoretical consortium of powerful companies like Google, to solve the gender, race, and socioeconomic inequalities in access to education and other resources that enable someone to work at such companies?
certainly. These companies have funds that can compete with entire country's governments. They can definitely do outreach at the elementary level and provide funds to entire towns, encourage an environment of tech, and more if they wished to.
Do they? no. mostly because these are long term solutions that do nothing in the now outside of a small PR boost. Doing this on a major scale may also cost them profits for a while, which would not reflect well on their stocks.
I know in my country when my city was founded, the industrial moguls invested and created schools to improve their workforce education (and thats for manufacture workers). I think that would be the right direction to take.
Look what happened in India. The brahmin were once the richest group and at the top of socio-economic ladder. Today, they are the poorest ones, at least in the state of Maharashtra. A major reason being that brahmins don't get job/education reservation or caste based scholarships as many others do.
That would be unique to Maharashtra due to Peshwa rule. Everywhere else Brahmin were mostly poor. My family is from Bihar and Brahmin caste. My grand parents lost four out of five children due to poverty. Luckily my grand Father got a job as coal miner and the families situation improved.
Nirdhan Brahmin has been a popular motif in Indian mythology and epics. Brahmins became victim of same kind of propaganda as happenings with Asians right now in SV.
Equality of Opportunity versus Equality of Outcome, with a small helping of cognitive dissonance. People who favor expediency tend to favor Equality of Outcome. Its the same line of thinking as "zero tolerance" policies in schools; there's some outcome or metric we want to optimize for, and we want the quickest solution to that outcome without considering more expensive or harder solutions.
Generally a push for expediency comes from external pressure, not internal standards, culture, or morals. When I see stories like this, my first thought is that Google doesn't actually care about diversity. What they care about is a negative social stigma around a lack of diversity.
Alternatively, or maybe additionally, it shows a distinct lack of character development and exposure to the complexity of the real world on the part of those in decision making positions. This is a very difficult one to convince people they're victim to; its essentially telling someone that they're too inexperienced to hold their position, but not by any quantifiable metric, yet they've had no problem meeting the metrics they've been assigned. They're doing their job by every metric they have, but the problem arises in the validity of the metrics themselves and the sustainability of the methods they use.
Its the same reason why Engineering teams have architects; you need low-level "expedient" people to implement the tactics of a solution, but you also need strategy at the top to set non-expedient policy and ensure that both the metrics the expedient people work toward are the right ones, and that the methods they use to reach them are sustainable.
If you have 90% asian male/white male candidates, and 10% women/minority candidates, would you still remove most of asian/white male candidates to bring equality?
Ah. To answer your previous question, no. Just like if my soup is too watery, I won't add more water, even if I have an effectively infinite supply on tap.
It's interesting, in the time it took me to read through the comments this went from #4 to #33. The discussion isn't crude or a flame war, so why does it get flagged?
When I started working in the late 90's I had worked for this old guy who now looking back was way smarter than I caught on. He always said crotchety shit like:
I'd ask hey lets put a job ad in the newspaper and he'd respond, " When you go fishing for trout it's best to cast your line by a stream and not out in the ocean."
I'd have a stack of resumes to contact and he once picked up half of them and threw in the trash. He said "You don't want to work with unlucky people"
I wonder if Enterprise HR's cultures have gotten so PC that they're losing sight on the companies needs. It'd be better to go to largely black universities, or smaller colleges. Code quizzes and job fairs on college campuses attract people who can afford to go. The kids I've helped largely have families that need them outside of college, and jobs. Maybe an internship/mentorship-hire program would be better fit than a top-down candidate approach.
As with all extremes, the pendulum must return to its path, and soon we will see a return to a meritocratic approach. Approaching the lack of diversity in this industry from a hiring perspective is too late stage and short sighted- the change should happen with education during childhood and teen years in areas where there are concentrations of historically uninterested parties that are uninterested due to a lack of mentorship availability.
I want to see after school programs being arranged, charter schools being built, stipends for families who encourage this field of study, fair pay for the teachers who are selected to offer to service to these areas, extracurricular activities that focus on tech and following through with those that show any modicum of interest potential.
The change begins at home, and it has nothing to do with race, it has to do with opportunity to learn and the freedom to abstract your home life problems and concerns long enough to make use of the education without the preoccupation of where the next meal is or where you’ll sleep.
I strongly believe diversity should be solved when students declare their major, and not by HR years later (though I have no idea "how" we could achieve that.
If the workforce of a country in a certain is composed of 80% white male, then having the same representation in your company is NOT wrong.
Hire people that are competent and with who you would enjoy working with. That's it.
No less a bastion of conservative lust than the US Military actively pursues diversity in promotion and selection processes. While it makes my own life a little harder, I can't disagree with the motivation. And, quite frankly, it's not the minorities internally pushing this. It's saltine-white leadership over-ruling minorities in management positions and demanding they find even the most marginally qualified minority candidates. I have heard a senior black woman say "I can't in good conscience recommend any of the available candidates" only to hear the senior member say "I totally understand, but the slate as it stands is completely white. I, the institution, cannot accept that. This will face public scrutiny. Of the options, who's the most qualified? Of the white slate, who can we most easily replace?"
There has to be a way to use tech to anonymize vetting and hiring until the hired candidate shows up for work the next day. Phone interviews could be handled in such a way that gender can’t be determined say by using voice scramblers. Whiteboarding can be done in separate rooms with a digital whiteboard that evaluators see and where the candidate can ask questions but not be seen. Etc etc. or, or, people could stop being biased which as you get more educated you become less racist and biased and sexist I thought.
Unless you are fresh from an undergraduate degree, the thing people care about is what you have shown you can actually do in the industry. And showing what you can do will in most cases instantly identify who you are.
As soon as I say what projects I've worked on or what my skills are anyone recruiting me will know exactly who I am.
But how are you going to use something as bland and generic like that to differentiate your applicants?
You've got twenty applicants, and they've all built a production API using Go or some equivalent language and they used some design pattern like micro-services or something else. Now what?
Plus in my field even something as generic as that would identify me.
I still fail to see how that generic tagline (albeit admittedly bad for a resume) is self identifiable. What industry are you in that is so small that one could find you from that?
There's more than a few very large tech companies that have let politics and emotions take over from innovation and excellence. It's opened the door to mass demotivation because people know inherently what is fake and posturing over what is real, creative, and interesting.
Google has for a while been toxic to the technology ecosystem. I don't think their halo is deserved, certainly not on the basis of the "free" trinkets they release to the public (like, say, Kubernetes). More often than not they are corrosive to innovation, and I don't take them at their word when they swear that your/mine/everybody's data is safe in their hands.
It comes as no major surprise that their actual workplace is as toxic as their role in the market, even with all the creature comforts they dangle in front of their employee.
I think, or hope, one day we'll come to realize the only fair way to do any sort of affirmative action is by evaluating on economics, after ability.
That's to say the objective is not to hire underrepresented groups based on loose ethnic lines, but rather on their circumstance in life, all other meaningful qualifications being equal and lawful.
That said, regarding women, that's a special case where we want to improve things at the input side, get pupils when young excited so that one day they may find it's what they want to do to contribute to our society.
Companies should clearly articulate how diversity programs work. It seems like people don't understand that diversity outreach programs don't create an advantage for minorities, instead they level the playing field as once closed pipelines get opened/discovered.
I fear that all this recent news about diversity and Google will create an environment where perfectly qualified non Asian minorities won't feel welcomed or will unfairly have their competency questioned.
Isn't this allegation an exact counterpoint to what you are saying? Throwing out the resumes of everyone who isn't hispanic, black, or female seems to be creating an advantage.
This specific allegation seems like "reverse discrimination" sure. But as of right now it's just a one sided allegation presented in a lawsuit. I'll be interested in seeing what the evidence bears out.
I have intimate knowledge of the workings of diversity programs at some of the FAANG and big 4 consultancy companies and none of them involve purging white male applicants. Do postmortems occur when the diversity goals aren't met? Well sure, it IS a targeted diversity program after all. Sourcing initiatives have no bearing on whether a candidate meets a manager's hiring bar or not.
Almost anyone working in tech has seen race and gender discrimination in favor of women and minorities at this point. I have personally experienced it.
If we were to apply affirmative action then class would be a better differentiator than race or gender. As it stands now an upper-middle-class Ivy League educated person of the right identities will receive affirmative action over a man that worked his way up from a poor neighborhood in Bangalore. I fail to see how that is just.
Well every one except for me apparently. I've literally never worked with a (non-white) hispanic or black engineer before, so I have no personal anecdotes there. Female engineers are rare but I have worked with some and they mostly have been good (only 1 exception ime).
The irony in all this hoopla is that literally every engineer who has been so bad that I wondered how the heck they made it past the interview stage has been......drumroll ... white or asian male. That's simply because they are over represented in the field obviously. But this argument that there are floods of under qualified minorities and women engineers getting jobs is hilarious.
> The irony in all this hoopla is that literally every engineer who has been so bad that I wondered how the heck they made it past the interview stage has been......drumroll ... white or asian male.
I work with a lot of engineers of all backgrounds, and no group has been without bad apples.
> But this argument that there are floods of under qualified minorities and women engineers getting jobs is hilarious.
You are misrepresenting the argument. The argument is that there is explicit discrimination in the hiring and promotion process which comes at the cost of equal opportunity.
In addition to this the people that experience this or feel this is unfair say they have experienced illegal retaliation when bringing this up. I personally experienced such retaliation.
>I work with a lot of engineers of all backgrounds, and no group has been without bad apples.
Indeed. So it's only natural that the demographic that represents the vast majority of the candidate pool is also going to represent the vast majority of false positives. Where is all the outrage over white and asian males who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag yet some how keep getting jobs?
Hiring managers literally need to employ silly openers like fizzbuzz because these unqualified candidates keep getting opportunities presented to them by recruiters!
>The argument is that there is explicit discrimination in the hiring and promotion process which comes at the cost of equal opportunity.
The numbers don't bear this out though. Companies don't purposely hire unqualified candidates for the sake of diversity. Is it equal opportunity when referrals get interviewed, how about the graduates who come from a handful of universities? Recruiting pipelines are just that, restricted channels to a specific segment of candidates.
This is such a minefield of an issue that I don't envy anyone who has to deal with it. For one, it seems almost impossible to have a rational debate about the issue of diversity because there are some pretty strongly held views on both sides of this.
So just some general observations with an explicit disclaimer that I know nothing that directly relates to this case.
1. I'm personally a little skeptical about a flurry of lawsuits like this. Lawsuits can be a little... opportunistic. I mean this in the sense that they're somewhat predatory and there's a tendency to "pile on" when the other side has a vulnerability. This isn't to say that this or any other given case doesn't have merit. It's just that a flurry tends to raise the chance that any one case of spurious.
2. US CS graduates are still predominantly white males [1] [2]. Obviously there are also graduates outside the US. I'm not sure on numbers on those but it's hard to come up with a reasonable estimation given the fact that a) employment in tech is predominantly US-centric and b) visa quotas in the US artificially limit the number of non-US people you can hire.
3. The graduate figures are important for those who take the so-called pipeline view of workforce diversity, namely that if 20% of graduates in a given field are women then you can't really expect more than 20% of your workforce to be women. This is not a universally agreed principle where some argue you can and should do better than this;
4. Doing better than this seems like nothing more than local vs global optimization. For example, I've known different companies to mandate diversity targets from the executive level and some orgs will deal with this by simply hiring underrepresented groups from other parts of the same company in a classic "robbing Peter to pay Paul" type scenario. It's hard to argue that this does anything more than make some manager or director's numbers look good and nothing more.
5. Other commenters have argued that favouring underrepresented groups is illegal. IANAL but the case law on this in the US isn't so clear. Just look at SCOTUS's rulings on affirmative action eg [3].
6. While some hold the view that you can't discriminate in favour of one group you are by definition discriminating against others. This is both strictly true and too simplistic a view. Specifically, others will argue that you need such "positive discrimination" to correct against bias and historical imbalance.
7. Elements of the majority arguing that there is bias against them isn't of course limited to tech eg [4] [5].
8. One wonders, in situations like this one, that (if true) whether management's instructions (mentioned in the complaint) were a response to an executive edict to increase diversity numbers.
9. Pipeline issues aside, it's worth considering internal long-term diversity trends within a company and within different parts of the company. For example, let's say 25% new hires are women, after 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10 years how does that figure change? Does it stay constant or go up or down? If it goes down, why? This may hint at cultural issues worth addressing.
10. Being an engineer and having worked with lots of engineers I think I can fairly safely say that engineers (IME), as a group, are more socially awkward than the general population. This alone may well be a significant factor in long-term retention of a more diverse workforce.
I am a female engineer. All of this is so frustrating because whether what Google is doing is right or wrong (and I do have opinions on that to come) about how they are going about this, regardless, this kind of media buzz belittles the general view of value add of female engineers like me.
I work really hard, and I don't want to be given extra breaks, or have the bar lowered. I would rather fail an interview (and I have) than be given a boost in the process.
That being said, one thign that annoys me about the media scrutinizing tech companies like this, is that the MEDIA themselves is one of the most masogogynistic cultures out there, with the most widespread global impact on the perception of male and female roles in society, yet they have the audacity to scrutinize industries who have done far more for society, pumped far more into education programs for just females, both males and females, science fairs etc and provided more opportunities to open the playing field than anyone else.
I went to an engineering school as an Electrical Engineer with a minor in Computer Science and my department was 5% female is f that, despite my school bragging 30% of our school was female. Yeh right, 90% of those girls were management majors, the rest of us were sparsely strewn across the engineering majors.
I am a female engineer. All of this is so frustrating because whether what Google is doing is right or wrong (and I do have opinions on that to come) about how they are going about this, regardless, this kind of media buzz belittles the general view of value add of female engineers like me.
I work really hard, and I don't want to be given extra breaks, or have the bar lowered. I would rather fail an interview (and I have) than be given a boost in the process.
That being said, one thign that annoys me about the media scrutinizing tech companies like this, is that the MEDIA themselves is one of the most masogogynistic cultures out there, with the most widespread global impact on the perception of male and female roles in society, yet they have the audacity to scrutinize industries who have done far more for society, pumped far more into education programs for just females, both males and females, science fairs etc and provided more opportunities to open the playing field than anyone else.
I went to an engineering school as an Electrical Engineer with a minor in Computer Science and my department was 5% female is f that, despite my school bragging 30% of our school was female. Yeh right, 90% of those girls were management majors, the rest of us were sparsely strewn across the engineering majors.
I have worked in male dominated environments my entire career and at the age of 27, I am and almost always have been the youngest in upper level management meetings in addition to being the only girl.
What I can tell you is this, and i have talked to many female and male engineers working on east coast, west coast, multiple countries in Europe, India and Asia including Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and many other places in China.
The issue is this. Yes (disclaimer) everyone needs to take responsibility for their own success, companies included, but this is really about society, and the tech companies are at the end of the pipeline of a girls life before she hits her career, the end of a pipeline of 21 grueling years of social conditioning, and the tech companies inherit the results of our heavily biased society.
And I would also like to add, WOMEN DO ADD TO THIS PROBLEM. I've seen more MOTHERS steer their daughters away from STEM to engage in socialite activities and trophy wife conditioning and I've seen MORE WOMEN than men making fun of girls for being "weird" (weird in America means, oh my gosh that girl does all of her homework and prioritizes her school and career over boyfriend. O. M. G.)
to put it best, someone I know who has worked at 2/3 big three companies on both coasts and in Europe, as well as other people I know, men I respect, work with, men who have daughters they teach to code and want to raise to be strong independentm, smart respectable women, have said this "The western culture is very limiting to women. What women need to do to do more in STEM is stay at home, play with things on their computer and break things. Women are not encouraged to stay at home and be introverted and curious"
I agree, women are taught to waste their money and time being politically polite, politically correct and wasting money on clothes and makeup to seem desireable.
If you don't believe me just leave your home and go to any store, gas station, grocery store, clothing store, anywhere basically where other humans reside and you will see this conditioning all around you.
This is not the fault of tech companies, yet the media, the very people propogating this disgusting excuse for equality (spoken from the microphones of women who are airbrushed in pencil skirts with perfect hair) is asking tech companies to fix all of the root of societies problems with women and equality because they found a statistic the liberal media (I'm a liberal myself, but I'm also capable of scrutinizing my own party, you know why? Because I'm not in a cult.) and its just not going to happen.
Tech companies are an easy finger to point to.
YES, beleive me, I have lots of rants about the companies I have worked for, but I can tell you this issue did not start at these companies. They should take on more responsibility to stop it.
However, to believe that these issues begin and end with tech companies, and that tech companies can make their portfolios equal in 5 years with some stretch recruiting goals is unreasonable at best, but the media is pressuring them to do that.
I would LOVE to see this same scrutiny go to the finance industry, which is WORSE than tech and WAY worse when it comes to how they treat women, but finance and media are all snuggled up together in NYC so they are pointing at their biggest industry threat, which is tech.
What good are these discriminatory efforts to hire "diverse" people? They are essentially programs to hire technically mediocre people; even the most actually progressive employer is going to think "maybe this woman chose Google because she couldn't be hired on merit elsewhere".
> one thign that annoys me about the media scrutinizing tech companies like this, is that the MEDIA themselves is one of the most masogogynistic cultures out there
NY Times, Huffington Post and many other outlets have a social justice agenda so this is easily shown to be false. Any news publication regularly read by left leaning Americans stay uncritical of anything that furthers a social justice agenda.
How often do you see news articles critical of the prevailing viewpoints? How often do you see articles critical of the prevailing viewpoints on the left?
Plausible deniabilty. Google will claim the illegal activity was due to the management of the recruitment company and not direct orders. And ARS puts illegal in scare quotes. Shameful.
