Question to everyone.
1: Do you think forced diversity is a good thing? Is it an attack on those with ability?
2: Is this a variant of the PC movement? Do you consider this an attack on free speech?
2.) Yonatan Zunger's response to the manifesto has been highly shared, but I think his essay "Tolerance is not a moral precept" is an important framework when talking about this issue. The basic premise is that by adopting tolerance as a social norm, we are not agreeing to also tolerate intolerance. Companies like Google have set out the edict that all their workers should be treated with respect. By questioning the inate abilities of a large portion of the workforce, the manifesto's author is doing great damage to the attitude of tolerance that allows Google to operate. He isn't be prosecuted by the government, but he is necessarily being expunged from an enviromenent that he is incompatible with.
Proving once again that on HN, sometimes downvotes are really upvotes.
2. Ability in the context of software is so subjective. Software engineering is a balance of so many skills I cannot believe that any single set of abilities are dominate enough to isolate any nature of person as best at it. The ability argument on complicated code may well relate to Chess (which has sadly its own diversity problems), but that code is a minority of what we do. Diversity in IT is necessary... a lot of our software is terrible (bugs, privacy, accessibility, etc) and maybe that is representative of a lack of dominance of other abilities some of the average current programmers don't have enough of and need to find ways to include.
3. In my experience, I enjoy and worry about the cultural norms I share with most of my peers and get to enjoy through work. We like pizza, beer (fridges), burgers, the football or pool tables, casinos, the pub after work, games consoles (with Football and Fighting games) and the Giphy memes (involving comic books, sci-fi and football). As an industry we are dominated by and therefore cater mostly for young, western (Europe/USA), liberal men... how many software conferences are in Vegas? We enjoy natural discrimination that nobody (hopefully) is intending to create, but that just happens when an environment is dominated by any culture. I don't care how PC we are, we need to find a way to be more inclusive and if that involves ensuring that culture variations that aren't the majority are given additional resource or exclusivity to have room to enjoy their cultural norms in work too, then great... sadly for now, they'll still be the minority.
4. I think it is unfair to judge Google on the firing as the full context of the dialogue between employee and employer may not be apparent yet. As much damage as it might do, we do need concerns of positive discrimination to be aired and I hope Google haven't harmed that dialogue with firing the employee. Perhaps a disciplinary might have been more appropriate (the context seemed to go beyond just concern of positive discrimination and into the territory of sexism so who knows what was the right thing).
Note: the absence of women is so easy to notice that we might be missing the fact that many others are not represented well enough in our industry too: think accessibility, religions and anybody who doesn't read, write and speak English. We're terrible at some aspects of diversity and may not realise because we have people of variations amongst us, but they may not be fully representative in all ways that matter.