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Comment by Overtonwindow | Hacker News Reader

I'm deeply troubled by the response to this "manifesto". Pitchforks are out for this guy, and when they find him, it won't be pretty. I think that's wrong. He has expressed his opinion, and people are free to confront, and denounce him all they want. But this guy might lose his job. His career. All for voicing his opinion. I don't think it matters that he did this internally. Had he stood up at a discussion in Palo Alto and said these words, the pitchforks would still be out. Our country has reached a dangerous fork in its evolution where the freedom to speak can literally ruin your life. There was a time when people were, and still are, shot for speaking their minds. Is this the natural evolution we are heading towards?

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But this guy might lose his job. His career. All for voicing his opinion.

This has always been true and I can't understand how you would imagine it was ever otherwise.

Right. Firing at-will is legal. Firing on the basis of a protected class, such as race or gender, is grounds for a lawsuit.

I'm not sure if you're being defensive or cynical here. It's true that people have always lost their jobs and careers (sometimes lives!) for voicing unpopular opinions.

What's interesting is how people's moral judgment of that correlates with their sympathy for the particularly unpopular opinion in question. Lots of people lost their jobs and careers for voicing opinions that were sympathetic to Communism, and we call that "McCarthyism" and "a witch hunt". This guy loses his job and many of us would cheer for it.

I don't know that much about McCarthyism but I think it's safe to guess that you know less. It was considered a witch hunt because nobody cared about facts or evidence, the spectacle was the point. Victims we're persecuted because they were juicy, suceptible targets, not because of anything they did or didn't do.

The situation we're discussing here is pretty different.

> It was considered a witch hunt because nobody cared about facts or evidence, the spectacle was the point. Victims we're persecuted because they were juicy, suceptible targets, not because of anything they did or didn't do.

You're right--you don't know a lot about McCarthyism. The "Hollywood Ten" screenwriters who were blacklisted by the film industry (private employers making employment decisions!) were, in fact, members of the Communist Party USA, an organization that was directly controlled and financed by an adversarial world power. There was substance behind the spectacle.

As for people being accused of things without evidence--well, witness the people in this thread who keep repeating the lie that the author of the manifesto considers his women coworkers less capable than he is, the outright fantasizing in OP about the author getting punched in the face, etc. Looks pretty spectacular to me.

The "Hollywood Ten" screenwriters who were blacklisted by the film industry (private employers making employment decisions!) were, in fact, members of the Communist Party USA...

Yes, but 1) that was just the tip of the iceberg labelled "McCarthyism," and 2) even at the time, the issue wasn't that they had joined a political party, the issue was what that party proposed to achieve.

In the case of the Google's manifesto, I don't see anyone upset that the author holds an unpopular opinion or that he publicized his unpopular opinion; it's the content of the opinion itself that's at issue.

Both McCarthy himself and the Googler in question here tried to harm other people's careers by spreading untruths in a self-aggrandizing way. That seems like the most natural parallel to me.

It's going to get a lot worse, now that these people have been forced out of power in goverment, they will turn their eye to other things.

People keep claiming this, but I know not one single sexist developer who can't find a job. Not even the ones who actually, literally committed sexual assault: they are all still employed.

It is only possible to justify identifying with this asshoel by completely ignoring the harm his "speech" does to his company's culture while vastly over-inflating the consequences he is likely to face. If he had said, "programmers should sit down, shut up, stop whining and write what they are told" no one here would have a lick of sympathy for him getting canned.

> But this guy might lose his job. His career. All for voicing his opinion.

Perhaps you aren't employed in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

If you are in fact aware of this concept, then I really don't understand your hyperbole.

Maybe he should have thought about that before he posted it. The author of the medium article is right that the manifesto implies that a lot of coworkers are less capable.

It's a grey area though.

Where does he say that?

There are lots to say/critique on that manifest, but Yonatan's commentary piece is pure dishonest bile. Ironically it also strengthens the claim of an authoritarian regime at Google and its "our way or the highway" policy when facing discussions.

The piece is simply garbage. It was an ad hominem that attacks viewpoints the original author never presented, such as "... how women and men are intrinsically different and we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers". Quite the opposite.

It's the obvious implication from stating that women are biologically prone to being inferior engineers, and that they should end diversity hiring programs.

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