Did you read the essay? He certainly did not make that claim. Population averages are not statements about individuals. This is pure censorship.
I also sometimes think about topics that would be inappropriate in an office environment (such as sex) and I censor myself by not saying what I am thinking. We even have an Internetism for that concept - NSFW.
None of this is new - we are expected to conduct ourselves appropriately for the current situation. It's just how society works.
I didn't even read the document in question, I just have a very hard time with people getting riled up about being "censored" at work. It's work, what exactly do you expect?
Regardless, your clever analogy doesn't apply. Companies are welcome to be political in their own environment. They own it. Employees are not. They're employed at-will.
Anyway, the financial benefits of diversity are almost certainly overstated. I don't know why we can't just say, "we're hiring diverse people because we think it's the right thing to do".
As a society we've been trained or perhaps tricked to suppress our sense of justice and fairness In Gabor of money.
Hence the studies promoting the idea that diverse companies are more profitable, as if that should make any difference. It's a sick obsession with viewing just about everything through a financial lens even when money shouldn't come into it.
However, I sympathize with younger people because it's a double-edged sword at places like Google, where your work and your life are very intentionally blurred. You eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at work. You go out and socialize with your friends from work. You do laundry at work (I'm not sure if Google still does this or not). It's not like the 1980s where people check in at 9am and leave at 5pm.
Then why are you assuming you know what it said?
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I did skim it and it seemed like the pseudo intellectual mumbo jumbo people who think they are being really smart but really are just being obnoxious write; since I read way to much of that sort of thing already I didn't care to read further.
This is the kind of behavior that woke me up (in my early teens) to the dangers of adopting my values from my religious background/peers. I never thought I'd have to deal with witch hunts for wrongthink in tech.
> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
> * A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
> * Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
^ Isn't that exactly what the author is saying?
He says that Google 'has created' (past tense) a discriminatory hiring practice.
Presumably his coworkers were hired in the past and not the present or future.
Thus, the hiring practices that prevailed when his coworkers were hired were discriminatory, per the author.
I believe that everyone should have a fair shot at a good career. I can't even begin to talk about how that is not the case in America - if we disagree here, I'm not sure we'll ever come to agreement.
It's not clear that the workers favored in this alternate pipeline are incompetent (which is really the implication that everyone is making). What is clear is that people with their perspectives are not as prevalent in the technology field.
Perhaps companies are recognizing a) the value of multiple perspectives or b) the structural difficulties that deny some people the same 'fair shot' we all have.
I'll leave you with this. The SAT should be a test of one's aptitude, perhaps readiness for college. If some individuals receive years of tutoring, but others have to go to the library to get test preparation, is our metric for college readiness fair? Maybe you'll say yes, but if we were talking about any other thing (cars, experimental models, you name it) we would clearly recognize these two groups had different pre-test levels of preparedness.
If you must spew hate, could you at least choose a more interesting criteria than skin tone or genitals? These have been done to death.
No, it is not censorship. He can say those things. He just can't pretend to be an effective team member if this is what he believes about his coworkers and he is unwilling to learn from others.
But that's the point of being more cautious at work than you are in your personal life. You don't know how people will react. Most people are uncomfortable even identifying their choice of political party at work.
For some, it's simply a critique of ineffective hiring practices.
For others, it's veiled sexism dressed up with statistics to lend it an air of legitimacy.
Seen that way, this is a pretty interesting social science experiment, albeit at the expense of his job (if not his career)...
What about the behaviour before / during / after publishing it?
What kind of post-truth, post-logic universe is this? I want off this fucking planet.
I understand you would like to live somewhere that context does not matter and documents are self-contained.
Until you live in that world, please consider that there is an external world relevant to what an author's intentions are, whether they are lying or exaggerating, whether they are deliberately misleading or naively misinformed.
Does he have good intentions or bad intentions? Well, you would want to look at the other opportunities available to him to reason about that.
"This is what he believes about his co-workers" You: He did not write this
If he did not think that the performance of the women around him was holding back Google, then he wouldn't write the memo.
Can you give an explanation of how this was the best choice available to him if he did not think this was the case?
"He is unwilling to learn from others" You: He did not write this
Is it your position that he did not have any options for taking his opinions to others inside the company and getting feedback before circulating broadly?
He knows that this is sensitive - that definitely gets mentioned in the document - but there is no indication that he has gone to the people responsible for diversity policy to discuss the intentions, metrics or organisational concerns that shaped the policy.
If you don't know the functional and non-functional requirements for a system, you should find them out and if you disagree go to the stakeholders. Choosing not to do so is not high-performing employee behaviour in any organisation.
Come on now, which one do you think he believes? He made it pretty clear, clear enough that pretty much no one would want to work with the dude.
That’s in his own words, and I would have fired him a hell of a lot faster than Google did, because I will not have my team disrupted by a prima donna.
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
The author deliberately narrows the scope of this sentence stating that the hiring practices decrease the false negative rate, not increasing the false positive rate. Stating that the false negative rate is lowered for diverse candidates is to say that qualified, non-diverse, candidates are rejected at a greater rate than qualified and diverse candidates. It is not stating that unqualified, diverse, candidates are accepted at a greater rate.
Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.
This is not necessarily the case. This is a vast oversimplification of a tech company's hiring process, but for the sake of simplicity let's say that phone interviews have a 50% rate of generating a false negative and on-sites have a 0% error rate.
Say a company does one phone-interview, and if passed, moves on to on-sites. But for diverse candidates they do two phone interviews and if either passes they move on to on-sites.
* Unqualified candidates always fail, since neither phone interviews or on-sites have a false-positive rate.
* Qualified non-diverse candidates have a 50% chance of getting the job.
* Qualified diverse candidates have a 75% of getting the job.
At no point do any unqualified candidates receive offers. But at the same time, qualified non-diverse candidates are still rejected at twice the rate as diverse candidates.
The "bar" so to speak isn't always something that people have a higher chance of passing the better their skills are. A working knowledge of data structures and concurrency is all that's necessary to pass all of my company's coding interviews. Practice and luck is probably a greater asset than skill in many interviews. But getting into the efficacy of technical interviews is opening a whole 'nother bag of worms.
If I've understood that correctly I really appreciate your effort in explaining it. Your comment should be higher so more people could see it :)
Also, if I understand you correctly, the phrase "lower the bar" might have gotten him fired for something he wasn't intending to say.
I also agree with your point around phrasing. I agree that lot of people took away the wrong meaning due to the phrase "lower the bar" (which is a very loaded phrase). This piece probably could have been better received if the author sought out proof-reading with trusted co-workers and friends beforehand. In particular the author should have:
* Dropped the awkward and monolithic generalizations of "Left" and "Right" at the beginning.
* Stayed way the hell away from talking about biological differences, just say that men and women have different preferences for working hours, fields, etc. and don't touch on possible causes.
* Don't emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, but rather the possible negative effects for the group as a whole. The point about OKRs contingent on hitting a certain percentage of diverse team members turning hiring and transfers into a zero sum game was actually a really good point that potentially hurts diverse groups themselves by limiting cross-team mobility.
* At the end, don't try to turn this into a Conservative vs. Liberal issue. Just point out that affirmative action is not nearly as uniformly supported as people make it out to be. For reference 42% of the population opposes affirmative action for race in the workplace, and 33% for gender [1].
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/184772/higher-support-gender-affi...
* Mentioning of left echo chamber was pandering to the right. And he got huge support form right leaning and centrist media and personalities.
* Biological differences he mentioned were sourced, so not his personal opinions. He knew this will trigger outrage from pro feminist camp that will start witch hunt against him, based on unproven accusations that he holds misogynistic beliefs.
* Emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, was another passive aggressive attack on one of SJW/PC/regressive-left sacred cows.
I dont really know if he planned this, but if you spend any time following anti-SJW sphere, then you should agree that reaction was totally predictable.
Basically he just said that google created environment where people who dont perfectly align with left leaning echo chamber agenda (here he was pandering to anti-SJW anti-PC / centrists, conservatives...) cant safely express their opinions anymore. And he was fired for doing exactly this. Proving his point on himself. Google HR had two bad choices, not fire him and cause outrage among many of their left leaning (snowflakes); or fire him and prove his point that they re indeed left leaning echo chamber.
I base my speculation on fact that he put his full name on memo, instead of pseudonym and this quote:
> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.
"...decrease the false negative rate, not increase the false positive rate."
The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship. You cannot decrease one without increasing the other. It is, for example, one of the difficulties in making good medical diagnostic tests.
without dumping in a lot more money or w/e...
The final hiring decision is almost entirely entirely on the on-site interview, the phone interviews essentially act as a first-pass filter. And we don't do any sort of weighting of diversity in the final hire decision. From my experience, the phone screen has the highest false-positive rate. In this system the false negative is reduced considerably for diverse candidates, while the false positive remains mostly the same (since the on-site is pretty rigorous).
For what it's worth, while I can understand the author's opposition to this system I think it's an okay way of increasing diversity. I don't think this system has ever caused us to take on a diverse candidate of insufficient skill or experience. Does it mean that non-diverse candidates get filtered out on the phone interview step at a higher rate? Yes. But not so much that I'd consider it an issue - and this is coming from a (mostly) non-diverse guy. And while it does cost the company more money, in the sense that we spend more time interviewing some candidates than we normally would, it's money well spent.
If he wants to argue that Google should lower the false negative rate for men too, I am totally on board with that! They should lower the false negative rate for everyone. They are bad at high-signal interviewing.
But the meaning of the phrase "lower the bar" is that less-qualified people are being let in, that people are being held to lower standards, etc. The entire point of the phrase "lower the bar" is to convey that the bar should have been be left where it was.
Honestly even if he wrote something like "Hiring practices which are more likely to improve outcomes for individual 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" I'd have much less of a problem with it. (I called out this specific sentence on Twitter yesterday; it was one of the things that particularly bothered me about the document.) But he used words with a specific meaning.
If he used words by mistake that his colleagues reasonably interpreted to mean that he thinks they're unqualified, that's all the more reason he shouldn't have his job. At a company at the scale of Google, a huge portion of effective engineering is effective communication.
The copy on the documentcloud link floating around this thread shows that "effectively lower the bar" is a link to an archived thread from the internal Google Group "coffee-beans-discuss".
I am curious if that post, or a summary thereof, has been leaked: I find the use of this phrase just baffling and technically incorrect (in addition to being insulting) and it seems like the author did have some specific intention here. Is he quoting someone else who's arguing that false negatives "effectively lower the bar"?
You should read what he wrote more closely. He said that Google was creating hiring practices that "lowered the bar by decreasing false negative rate." That last bit is important because it fundamentally changes what he's asserting and means you've entirely misrepresented what he was saying.
Anyone familiar with the Google hiring practices knows that, unless you're famous to some extent, there's an element of luck to getting hired. A lot of qualified candidates get rejected because Google just gets a lot of applicants and they can't hire everyone that's qualified. Those candidates are the false negatives...people they could have hired without making a mistake but didn't.
What he's saying is that while a white male needs to be qualified, pass his interview and not be one of these false negatives, the minority candidate just needs to be qualified and pass his/her interview. That is a lower bar for entry, but it isn't what everyone is accusing him of having said...that his minority colleagues aren't qualified or are less qualified. They still passed all the merit parts of the process, they just never had to undergo the arbitrary part of the process that non-minorities are subjected to.
Are you saying he's wrong for pointing out that Google has affirmative action policies? Or that the policies themselves are bad? I don't understand.
He believes neither. We don't need to speculate, because the author writes quite deliberately to communicate his point. Here's the quote you're likely referring to, the one that mentions "lowering the bar":
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate. (emphasis mine)
The author is not stating that Google's hiring practices result in unqualified diverse candidates receiving offers at a higher rate than non-diverse candidates. The author is stating that a greater portion of qualified, non-diverse, are being rejected. In other words, the author is not stating that diverse employees at Google shouldn't be there. Rather he's claiming that there are a substantial number of non-diverse candidates who should have received offers, but didn't.
It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].
In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate. I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, not to express the point you are suggesting.