Google Sets Rules to Curtail Employee Debate
wsj.com
wsj.com
All of which is to say how surprised and thrown off I am by this article: it and previous ones [1] try to portray Google as a place that's roiled by political fighting where the leaders are struggling to keep control over a irresponsible and politically radical workforce. Under this narrative these new policies are just the newest, desperate attempt to restore order to the snowflake cagematch that is Google.
The reality, at least as far as I and practically everyone I've spoken to is concerned, is the exact opposite: people share their views openly, a wide range of opinions are respectfully shared, most people have the right to get into and stay out of political discussions, and the institution does the best it can to set the boundaries of what is appropriate at work while permitting a otherwise anything-goes approach. If this reality is anywhere close to being accurate, the picture this article paints is simply nonsensical.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-vs-google-how-nonstop-po...
The internal experience just doesn’t match what they’re writing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8
How would that differ from the anti-evolution groupthink I'd expect to find at certain megachurches?
As for the veiled Damore references, the problem isn’t the discussion that men and women are different in a variety of ways, the problem is he was using it as a justification to argue that his female coworkers didn’t meet the same hiring bar, and that in general some just don’t make better engineers.
Jumping from “there are differences” (which no one disagrees with!) to women shouldn’t be engineers is a huge leap. One filled with bogus arguments, misreading studies (one of the study authors damore quoted, came out and said that he drew the incorrect conclusion from it.). His essay was motivated reasoning, had tons of fallacies (commonly, the map isn’t the territory, and the world isn’t Boolean logic).
As someone who just had a baby, you would not believe how much gender patterning happens from age 0. Even before they are born, do you want the blue or pink elastic band for holding the fetal heart monitor on? Clothes choices, word choices. It’s difficult to tease this out. Additionally, we know the human body is very flexible and adaptable. You can a introduce hormones to a xy and watch it grow secondary sex characteristics. To say that the research is in and we know anything with any certainty is hubris of the highest order.
And this is all before we stop to consider how we want to build the world? Why bother with wheel chairs and ramps? We frequently reject naturalistic arguments when it comes to universal human rights. I don’t see why this is any different.
And on a final note, it seems like people think that we are now in a world of equal oppertunity and all we’re doing now is attempting to create equal outcome. I invite you to really reflect and consider, are you sure we have equal oppertunity? Are you sure? If you are, then you’d be willing to switch places with a poor black woman, because you’d still end up where you are now right?
That's not how I interpreted his memo, and I think the widespread emotionally wrought interpretation of his memo in that fashion reveals virulent groupthink. Didn't a large number of women not go to work because of induced "feels?"
You can a introduce hormones to a xy and watch it grow secondary sex characteristics.
That's strong evidence for at least a partial physiological basis of gender.
To say that the research is in and we know anything with any certainty is hubris of the highest order.
Then why would holding an opinion evoke such a strong response?
I invite you to really reflect and consider, are you sure we have equal oppertunity? Are you sure? If you are, then you’d be willing to switch places with a poor black woman, because you’d still end up where you are now right?
I dated a creole woman for 9 years and asked her to marry me. This last paragraph of yours speaks for itself, in terms of the presence or absence of ideological groupthink. If that poor black woman had the same cultural upbringing as my ex-girlfriend's maternal grandmother, then sure, why not?
Such question attempts to distill gender roles into a single binary "better" or "worse".
If I ever get accused of a crime and put in a trial then sign me up to get the court statistics for poor black woman rather than poor white man. Who would not choose to get fewer year in prison, smaller fines and better results in regard to criminal psychology tests?
If my life goals was to have a large social support network, long life, and children then again we see that poor black women has better statistical results than poor white men. Lower risk for suicide and homelessness is also nice.
If my life goals was to have a large income or have a professional title such as CEO then being a poor white man is still significant worse than rich black man, but compared to poor black woman it is better. Rich white man tops the results on this goal which usually is the only data point people care about in this kind of discussions.
Overall which one has most benefits? It depend on what goals in life one values higher. Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes in mind. Personally I find that gender roles is a mixed bag and would prefer them to go away and be replaced by equality on all data points.
Incorrect. He explicitly stated that white and Asian men faced a higher false negative rate. Not that underqualifies women and minorities were being hired.
> Jumping from “there are differences” (which no one disagrees with!) to women shouldn’t be engineers is a huge leap. One filled with bogus arguments, misreading studies (one of the study authors damore quoted, came out and said that he drew the incorrect conclusion from it.). His essay was motivated reasoning, had tons of fallacies (commonly, the map isn’t the territory, and the world isn’t Boolean logic).
At this point you've completed diverged from what was written in the memo. At no point did the author say women shouldn't be engineers. His point was that we shouldn't try to socially engineer an arbitrary diversity target, and accept the possibility that even absent social pressures women may not choose to enter tech at the same rate as men.
We live in highly constructed environment! Socially constructed. Laws, physics design, social structures, etc , etc.
We do not live in a world where “social pressures” that might pressure women not to join tech can’t possible be “absent”. That just doesn’t exist, nor ever will.
Thus, facing this reality, given the fact that women are under represented, what do we do next? I say, let a higher goal, one of equality of opportunity and a desire for more equal representation drive us to build a society that gives women the same chances men get. No one is saying hire regardless of talent.
As for the original memo, I’ve read it many times and he has a core argument that women didn’t meet the hiring bar. Just repeating that isn’t what he claimed isn’t convincing.
Bottom line: we do social engineering all the time. We will always do it. We can’t not even do it. Let’s instead of pretending what we do now is “neutral”, recognize it isn’t, determine what kinds of outcomes we’d like and ways to design those without being blantantly unfair. Rather than pretending status quo is as good as it gets and give up now.
We live in highly constructed environment! Socially constructed. Laws, physics design, social structures, etc , etc.
Women are over represented in medicine in some fields in some countries. I guess it's time to start discouraging them and getting them in line with population statistics. Sorry, but you're missing some links in the causal chain. If you study actual history, you'll find that disparities between groups in different fields are the norm. In particular, there is considerable human capital transmitted through culture. (This notion is poisonous, equally to the progressive left and the Alt Right.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-RuKiFDIeU
Asians are over-represented at Harvard. I guess it's time to get out the tactics people used to use to exclude jews, blacks, and homosexuals to "engineer" this right.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-ame...
Social engineering is, in principle, the same sort of thing that resulted in the deaths of 6 million Ukranians by starvation in the 20th century. How about we give people freedom and opportunities, and let them work it out?
Damore repeatedly stated that he belived that society does influence behavior, and that women's lack of representation in tech is likely not entirely due to innate factors. He only stated that innate factors probably play some role, alongside societal factors, so parity will likely never be achieved. I do not understand how you came to the conclusion that Damore claimed social pressures are absent.
> As for the original memo, I’ve read it many times and he has a core argument that women didn’t meet the hiring bar. Just repeating that isn’t what he claimed isn’t convincing.
These are his words, quoted directly from the document: "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" In other words, Google structures its hiring process such that non-diverse candidates are more likely to be erroneously rejected. Not that diverse candidates have a higher false positive rate.
> Bottom line: we do social engineering all the time. We will always do it. We can’t not even do it. Let’s instead of pretending what we do now is “neutral”, recognize it isn’t, determine what kinds of outcomes we’d like and ways to design those without being blantantly unfair.
It sounds like you agree with Damore in most respects. He actually lists 5 ways to improve diversity in non-discriminatory ways:
* We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration.
* Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.
* Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.
* Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.
Damore only took issue with the policies that explicitly discriminate between candidates and employees labeled diverse and non-diverse.
What of Google managers quoted in media vehemently saying they wouldn't hire people harboring certain political positions? Why is it that so many of my acquaintances who work at Google pig-piled James Damore over his professional competence, despite none of them being in a position to have any idea about that? All of this smacks of a degree of ideological groupthink I would label as "virulent."
What you are saying would still fit if the overwhelming majority of Google had a large political skew and subscribed to a particular ideological groupthink. The majority would feel that, "people share their views openly, a wide range of opinions are respectfully shared, most people have the right to get into and stay out of political discussions," since conversations about things everyone agrees with can only go so far without an "enemy" who disagrees. A minority in that situation would still feel oppressed. It's how well minorities are treated which is the true indication of how open and benevolent an organization is.
I respond that this is inconsistent with both stated policies and established practice, and such managers can and should be targeted to answer for their bias and have it corrected. I would also respond that if a journalist with an axe to grind were to search hard enough and interview enough people, they're bound to find someone they can put on a pedestal and point to saying "look at how corrupt these people are!"
If anything, a person believing this sort of anecdote about an organization says more about the believer than the organization in question.
> Why is it that so many of my acquaintances who work at Google pig-piled James Damore over his professional competence, despite none of them being in a position to have any idea about that?
That does sound unfair: Damore was a senior engineer, which not a title that's given out lightly. Again, though, peoples' possibly unfair commentary on his professional abilities says nothing about the quality of discourse in the company. And again, one's willingness to balloon these sorts of individual anecdotes into indictments of an organization as a whole say more about the person doing the indicting than the organization in question.
Given that such managers were quoted saying such things in public communications, that makes your spin on this look doubtful.
> Again, though, peoples' possibly unfair commentary on his professional abilities says nothing about the quality of discourse in the company.
It said a whole lot about my fellow classmates. Yes, those acquaintances were all people who were once my college friends who I spent a lot of time with, but drifted away from. (One of them I once would have counted as my "best friend.") I would never have imagined that they would engage in mob-like condemnations of that harshness. Really, something struck me as being completely out of whack. The most likely Occam's-friendly explanation I can think of is some kind of ideological groupthink at Google.
The point is that such managers are NOT being targeted. The lynching of James Damore was enthusiastically conducted by the very top of the management hierarchy and they are on record as having lied in public about what he actually said. Rather than correct their own bias, Pichai has stated that he has "no regrets" over his behavior and the legitimate concerns that were raised by James continue to remain unaddressed because they conflict with the dominant ideology.
Sunday agrees with me. Maybe you’re the one who’s wrong about what was in there?
Not all scientists would agree.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU
> motivated reasoning and slander against all of his female workers.
Only if you don't take what he says at face value and impute motivations which aren't directly stated in the text. The very need of this imputation to justify his treatment and the huge reaction, as well as the intellectually dishonest way in which the Google management and the left-leaning press engaged in hit pieces -- all of this smacks of ideological groupthink.
The very fact that people can reasonably disagree about the interpretation of the memo, contrasted with the outsized reaction are pretty damning.
Here's a feminist who disagrees with Damore's position in his memo, who lays out a cogent argument for why he's wrong, and there is systemic bias, but who thinks the reaction was a "little off,"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIRvtA2JIIA
Also, note that my position is that there is also some cultural bias in the programming field -- as a field. (Hackers in the HN sense have model train clubs as their cultural forebears.) However, this doesn't preclude that women within our current cultural context may well decide not to become programmers for their own reasons, and that some of this motivation may be correlated with their gender -- without there being systemic bias within hiring organizations.
Did Damore refer to them as "bitchgrammers"? Do their writings get leaked and misrepresented to the press, who then strips them of their links and fans the flames? Do they lose their jobs for bringing honest citations to the table?
No, in fact, they can apparently just claim to be made to feel "unsafe" by a memo responding to official company workshops, and decide to stay home, with no repercussions. Their opinion pieces are lauded as brave, and they are rubber stamped as important evidence and valid lived experience even if made up 100% of anecdotes.
Well if that's the level of fragility that is the norm, then what Damore went through amounts to a human rights atrocity. But of course, displaying an ounce of empathy for a "cis white man" is no longer fashionable, and I can already hear the chuckles and hollering from the Bay Area all the way here to Europe at the mere suggestion.
Discrimination is equality, heartlessness is sympathy, fragility is strength, ... It boggles the mind how this is not black on white obvious, no pun intended.
There is no need for cherry picking. The scientific evidence that men and women have different interests and that those interests become more pronounced as the society becomes more egalitarian is overwhelming.
Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Differences in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf
This seminal paper has been cited over 3000 times and the findings have been replicated by numerous researches.
The blue church dogma that female underrepresentation in tech is due to oppression is not supported by the evidence.
James Damore should not have been lynched. He is owed a sincere apology.
I'm not at google but I'm at a bay area tech startup. I'm in slack channels around things ranging from learning to speak japanese and korean, keto diets, coffee discussions, lgbt issues, politics (aside from my groups on work specific things).
I guess I don't see why I wouldn't talk to my coworkers about things I like and care about? Some coworkers don't like to talk about these things so they aren't in those discussions - that's also great. We also have a code of conduct but it doesn't curtail debate it's just pretty much what you would expect - I imagine very much like google's
I think part of the problem with the forced socialization at a lot of these companies is that it creates cliques that in turn introduce a lot of bias into the workplace. If I'm not interested in whatever you want to discuss but a majority of others are, this can potentially have a negative effect on how I'm perceived and also compensated/promoted while having zero to do with my actual work product. After work socialization involving drinking is another example. If my lifestyle for whatever reason does not accommodate that, I might be seen as not a team player, no fun, etc.
One response to this could be simple: you're there to work, not to discuss X, where X is something not related to work. Nobody is preventing you from finding a common interest with a coworker and chatting about it outside of work hours, but if it interferes with actual work, which, based on these lawsuits, seems to be happening, then it probably shouldn't be discussed during work hours.
Another larger issue here is that a lot of these tech companies have "flexible" hours, which ultimately means people never leave work. Sort of like the lie of "unlimited" vacation days :)
Your link: http://archive.is/Sa5OC
Almost without question this policy will be used to silence people objecting to their "diversity" programmes, not the people actually attacking their coworkers.
That said there's a difference between "I am talking about opinions and views that are irrelevant or inappropriate for the workplace", which is a mistake that is perhaps easy to make and can be trained out of people, vs "I am literally calling my coworkers nazis and demanding they be fired for expressing their views", which is not exactly a mistake and I see no real reason to tolerate such behaviour in any company.
There are focused discussions on politically relevant topics: such as immigration. It’s a given at google that immigration is a net benefit to the country. If you disagree then well, your option isn’t going to be well received. There is another option that diversity is good (based on both research and the fact that google is trying to build for everyone so we need representation to do so).
I find that all companies have some basic facts and truths, axioms if you will. Arguing against them means you need to leave the company. You won’t be successful. For example, would you try to advance the argument that the web isn’t important and web search is pointless? Of course not.
This goes for every company on the planet. Smaller ones have less axioms, the simplest being “boss is always right”.
I have not worked anywhere where immigration policies were brought up at a company wide level. Diversity does come up elsewhere, but mainly so management can pay lip-service to the idea that they care about diversity.
By the way, I'm not placing all (or even the majority) of the blame on the people bringing up immigration or diversity, though I would argue they aren't appropriate topics in most workplaces. If you hold a controversial opinion on those issues (and others) and it's not relevant to your job, maybe you should keep your opinions private at work.
A core mission of google is to foster innovation, at the big and small levels. The company considers itself driven by innovation. So how do you grow the next billion users, which is a business goal, has implications in who you hire etc.
Also, a lot of googlers are immigrants, very smart people who have moved to the us. Basic human consideration about their fate is a dilemma. To blithely say it’s “just” a hr problem, well that sort of seems to me like it’s actually a non problem at all.
Maybe it's because we have too many people employed who have nothing to do. They sit in front of their computer all day reading the toxic news all day and get radicalized. Idle hands mixed with overconsumption of news can make for a toxic mindset.
Not sure why companies have gotten so politicized. I think a bit of it is the types of people working in HR. The ubiquitous toxic news, especially on social media. You would think shareholders, the board and the CEO would want people to be as apolitical as possible since that makes the most sense to run a profitable company composed of a diverse group of people.
When I consider that the logs of these intranet conversations are a legal liability, and moderation actions may cause legal challenges as well, it strikes me that perhaps google should hire professional moderators that report up through their legal division.
I imagine a lot of employees might balk at this, but having developers losing sleep over how to respond to intranet drama may be considered undesirable as well.
It sounds like these employees are not also paid for their extra time spent on moderating.
I know that by the numbers, their per person revenue is off the charts, but what if they just have a few awesomely automated money spigots and like half of the employees are not really as wonderful as we've been told?
I mean, the Google images AI that classified black people as gorillas hasn't actually been fixed yet, for example: they just removed the ability of the AI to classify any images as "gorilla"... As one example.
If people are complaining about the busy message boards and there are a lot of different boards that are used, how much work is really getting done?
Why are there even discussions about this on a work forum? Why in the world would anyone want to talk about this stuff with the people they work with? Is it a side effect of the company being so large it's impossible to know everyone?
I go out of my way to not discuss anything that comes within a whiff of a controversial topic with the people I work with. I go to work to pull a paycheck and because I enjoy the work that I do, I do not go to work to make friends or to hang out with people. If I end up making friends with some of the people I work with, great, however, we hang out as friends outside of work and we don't discuss things as friends via any work channels. Is making your co-workers your friend group a new thing? Is it a side effect of working so many hours you don't have time to hang out with anyone else?
Of course, most people are political, social, etc animals.
Ugh, that's messed up. In grade school I was forced to spend significant amounts of time interacting with classmates who I detested. They brought their "whole selves" and it was torture. I assume most people had this experience?
As an adult I appreciate being able to choose who I associate with in my free time. Since I'm forced to interact with certain people at work, at least give me the mercy of bland "professional" personas!
It should be possible to conduct yourself professionally and not burn up inside over whether or not someone harbors some ideology that conflicts with one of yours.
More and more, it's portrayed in the media that people who are so out of control they can't tolerate different opinions are the "genuine" ones. This goes hand in hand with how certain kinds of ad-hominem attack are somehow morally laudable and intellectual worthy activities.
I feel like the idea "our hiring policies are getting us a lower quality of incoming employees than we should be getting" seems OK in the workplace from a topic standpoint...
smh...
I wonder if it's generational. I work with a group of millenials (~30) and my attitude is exactly like yours, but they're mostly all friends with each other, go to each other's places, etc. I'm honestly shocked that they ever hired me in here.
I still don't see why you would do it with people you don't personally know. If you want to talk to randoms, the Internet is right there anyway.
Friend is a strong word. You might go out to a bar with your coworkers, watch movies, game, attend birthdays. But it's a superficial "friendship". You don't talk about anything deep - that would be a "bummer".
This is likely flowery writing, and all you can conclude is that these forums do exist. That isn't surprising to me, in a company of tens of thousands of employees, that one person would start a group about some sensitive subject or another.
Well, at Google we have things like Memegen where people post memes, and those memes have comments, so I guess you can see where that goes. Why do people post memes? I guess for the same reason I'm on HN at work; they're bored.
> I go to work to pull a paycheck and because I enjoy the work that I do, I do not go to work to make friends or to hang out with people.
I only go to work for the former and having friends at work just makes work more tolerable for me. I can eat lunch with them, get coffee with them, play ping pong with them, take classes at the gym with them, or just have a walk outside when I'm taking a break.
It feels lonely otherwise.
Also, many of us have moved far from home for work, so we had no friends, and it's much easier to make friends when you have common ground. Plus, as you say we spend so much time at work that in a way there are more opportunities to make friends there.
Yeah, but posting on HN doesn't advertise to my entire company that I'm dickin around instead of doing work.
Thank you. It's strange how everyone from the CEOs to the journalists to ordinary people missed this. Why are any employees wasting time and resources on such unproductive thing during company time?
> Is it a side effect of the company being so large it's impossible to know everyone?
More importantly, why hasn't the board or CEO come down hard on these people wasting company resources and time? Last I checked, these people have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make sure the company isn't wasting money on nonsense.
> I go out of my way to not discuss anything that comes within a whiff of a controversial topic with the people I work with.
I think that's 99.99% of all employees. How companies have been turned into a political turf war and a tool of their employees to actualize their political objectives is shocking to me. Either work or leave. Worry about politics and sexual expression on your own time.
edit: clearing cookies does the trick!
Opening in a private window does not allow me to read.
Second gen was already loosening up on individual freedom but there was a strict border between the private and the work persona.
Now it seems this border is breaking down and there is one persona. Delicious to find most commenters here on the wrong side of a generational divide. Soon you will be dismissed as grey beards with out of date ideas.
It’s not unreasonable to put these restrictions on - which btw are content neutral - workplace tools/discussions. It’s not an attempt to quell dissent but to focus it in a useful manner.
I believe, that damore was arguing in bad faith, attempting to trigger and troll, and do so in “polite” language, which doesn’t excuse him at all. You can’t write a meandering argument that isn’t well founded, filled with incorrect suppositions, and bury that all your female coworkers are not as qualified and expect that to end well.