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Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

There's an internal survey at Google that shows about 40% of employees agree with him. They are just rightfully scared of speaking out.

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There is no way that that a survey indicating that 40% of employees agree with the document is representative of Google as a whole. Google has 75k employees, nearly all of whom are aware of this incident, and a comment below suggests that the survey had <300 responses.

Indeed, a chief complaint in the manifesto is that Google is overwhelmingly liberal. Even the author of the manifesto recognized that his was a fringe position at Google.

> * Google has 75k employees*

not 75k engineers right?

> the survey had <300 responses

Given the repercussions that's a surprisingly high number.

can you cite the source? Because this sounds very unbelievable to me. I work in a mid-size company structured in many ways similarly to Google and I cannot imagine a representative survey with results already coming up.

Google has close to 70k employees. What was the sample? How selected? How representative?

It sounds very questionable,

Source data here. Who knows if it is representative, but 282 anonymous respondents have chimed in. The distribution looks like what I would expect.

https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...

It's definitely not representative. For reasons that would be obvious if you knew the history of the document, but that i can't share, it consists almost entirely of a sample of people from certain mailing lists.

It's definitely not valid to draw any conclusions about google as a whole from it.

I believe you. I also believe the 2nd chart would basically look the same if you polled 10,000 representative people from inside Google. The 1st one, not so much.

Maybe?

Remember though, that groups that are underrepresented may also be disproportionately affected.

IE women may feel the document is much more harmful than men, but by numbers, ...

You'd have to break it down by a lot of variables, and once that happens, in practice, everyone will just draw whatever conclusion they want anyway :)

Anyway, not gonna speculate on what it would look like, just gonna point out it's not valid data.

a) I'm not sure what you base your believe in. My gut feelings tells me the opposite. If you polled a representative sample of employees you'd get very different results in the 2nd chart

but that's not important because:

b) The idea that average people are good at understanding the consequences of such document is inherently flawed. It's my problem with a lot of aspects of American culture (I'm an European living in SV) - regular people are not in position to evaluate complex systems.

Every time I see an article about, say, a shooting, that ends with "Joe Black, who lives nearby, believes that police should do X and Y to stop the increase in crime", my blood boils. Joe Black is in a terrible position to understand the crime dynamic in his city, to understand how the police operates and what does and doesn't work in the pursuit of lowering crime rate.

Now, coming back to the topic, I'd argue that 95% of Googlers are completely not qualified to respond to the second question. At all.

There's a bunch of people in the HR department, with degree in sociology, group psychology, organization behavior and design, maybe people who studied micro-discrimination, gender imbalances etc. that are qualified to answer it. But the idea that you can poll employees to learn about whether this document is harmful is completely nuts.

Sorry for venting :)

p.s. But yeah... while writing this comment I saw an article about the poll asking Americans if the US should attack North Korea [0]. I honestly believe that the culture of doing that, while pretends to stay close to the roots of the country of freedom, where citizens decide about their country, is in fact terribly harmful because it builds conviction in people that they're in the right position to make such judgements on topics they have insanely little knowledge about.

[0] http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-...

> from certain mailing lists

eng-misc?

Voluntary response bias is definitely possible. People who feel the most wronged are more likely to respond to the survey.

For real, it's hard to get 40% of people to even take a survey.

Now there are 40% of people at google who can't sleep tonight because their blood is boiling and won't stop boiling for a long time.

40% of how many employees total? And which ones? Only the ones on certain discussion boards? That's a pretty biased sample.

Yeah maybe the real % is a lot higher. Quit trying to convince yourself this guy is fringe. For better or for worse, he's not.

I don't know why, but the image isn't loading unless I view it directly: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGrQOrZUQAUrwcf.jpg

Just under 280 people (out of 72,000 google employees) responded to the poll at the time of the screenshot. No indication yet as to possible bias in how this poll was conducted. Not to mention, somebody could have whipped it up in MSPaint.