> His lack of political savyness is mind-boggling but then he was hired not for that.
No... I can see something of me (from 20 years ago) in him. Engineer (or is he even a 'real' one given his degree?), male, mid-20s... I don't find his lack of understanding exactly how "political" people and society actually are (and predominantly so, to the detriment of capital T-truth) to be unexpected. People can be, and tend to be, willfully manipulative, and it takes some life experience to get a handle on that knowledge.
In my mid-20s, I was a government contractor working on a large DoD project. Some impromptu hallway meeting with the bigwig PM running the whole thing led me to going blahblah with him explaining how easy it might be to do something he'd dreamt up the day before. I was just being an engineer who didn't understand social systems very well. So a few hours later, I get sort of chewed out by various PMs on our side as this 'idea' which was not in the contract and not in scope was now in scope... Part of the learning experience of how business actually works, and building things (hell, everything) is secondary to profit. The actual engineering part is secondary to organizational related bullshit - always.
Basically, I think engineers need more exposure to the humanities and stuff like this might not happen. That is another essay entirely, explaining how STEM subjects became excessively important since the 60s, to the detriment of society. The stereotypical engineer does not understand social systems very well, I certainly didn't. But at this point in my life, I think understanding them is far more important than knowing a bunch of tech that will generally be obsolete in a few years; understanding how insane Western society is in some respects has become easy.
I didn't read all of his manifesto, it was tedious and I understand enough social psych et al already... There is a balance that needs to struck and all the ideologues on both sides don't care for things to be in balance.
Everything else in the parent comment, I agree with. Now I read that female Google employees may be suing re: the wage gap etc. Hmmm... I actually blew off two attempts from Google years ago to interview me :) I didn't want to go through their stupid interview process and had already had enough of large badly managed orgs (i.e. the DoD). The pay would have been nice though (a joke!)