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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31262574 and marked it off topic.
Google needs to celebrate heroes. Like Jeff Dean. Or Sanjay Ghemawat. Those are Great Men. They are "Living Gods" because they solved Really Hard Problems. Getting into that class of people requires being a "lead" which necessarily means other people around you aren't leading. So you need to prove why you're worthy of being the "lead" which means proving the others around you aren't. This is toxic masculinity. Not solving hard problems.
It's called "perfing" (as in, if you do something bad, you might get "perfed hard" next cycle) and managers frequently threaten to take people "into the Perf Room" although it's just an expression (there isn't actually a dedicated "Perf Room"). Anyone who gets below 3.0 (Meets Expectation) during the calibration process is called a "PB" It used to be "pillow biter" but you can't make that joke anymore so it's just "PB", as in "How many PBs does Exec want us to have this cycle?"
It's offensive and backward, but it's also hilarious that grown men (and women, if they ever get let in to executive circles) are using language that sounds like it was invented by teenagers.
1. You must be in an incredibly toxic enclave if managers in your org are routinely threatening people that way. It's certainly possible, it's a big company, there's been a number of shitty directors/execs that have made the news. But given points #2 and #3, I have reservations about believing generalizations about this particular claim.
2. ME is not a '3.0' (Unless you're measuring on a 12-point scale, that starts at 0.) There are three ratings above, and only one rating below ME - Needs Improvement. Which is a pretty serious wake-up call for the person and their manager.
3. Very few people get NI, you seem to be confusing Google with either old Microsoft, or Amazon, whose bell curves, as I understand, require(d) ~1/5th of the company to be on the shit list at any particular point in time.
How in the world can you come to this conclusion when society hasn't been in the situation where old ladies as a whole were in a position to be close to equal financially compared to their male peers in at least the last century? If anything, you have to wait a few more decades to come to this conclusion at minimum.
Is there even any evidence that modern women are more “choosy” than men? You’d have an hypothesis like: among married 40-something women, the distribution of socioeconomic status matches that of women overall, whereas married 40-something men have higher SES than would be expected. Should be easy enough to test with publicly available data.
That's not what the above implied. You can still fulfill the condition "be more selective" if the male populace as a whole was earning way more than the female populace before, which it very clearly was. This directly questions the notion of there being a bunch of old ladies who'd have held out: the majority would've found their "better off financially" peer. Things only caught up in the last few decades or so. All those younger generation women still need to age into old ladies in the first place.
>Is there even any evidence that modern women are more “choosy” than men?
Financially? Yes. While I don't fully subscribe to the idea of "equal or better than", you only have to look for a few minutes to see the hoards of anecdotes and studies pointing towards women putting vastly higher weight on a man's finances than the other way around, to the point men can use their money to compensate for deficiencies elsewhere[0]. That alone would explain why women haven't been nearly as competitive in the workplace as men: men have a far bigger incentive to do so on top of all the other incentives both experience.
[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...
But the original idea was that women prefer men better than their peers -- that's a direct quote from that top-level comment. You seem to be saying something distinct from that, that women prefer men who are better off financially than they are. These are very different claims.
Further, if you're right that women tended to satisfy their desire for higher-status men simply due to the fact that men used to have more money on average than women did, then where is the selection pressure supposed to come from? There's no pressure -- it wasn't hard for a woman, who had few career prospects, to find a man with a job who could bring home consistent pay.
> you only have to look for a few minutes to see the hoards of anecdotes and studies pointing towards women putting vastly higher weight on a man's finances than the other way around
Take your pick between "I don't really care about anecdotes" and "I have my own anecdotes that tell me that women don't place significantly more weight on socioeconomic status than men do". I'm curious about the studies, but I'd have to find a copy of the article you cite before I'd place too much stock in it. What I'd like to see is some proof in the data that conditioning on socioeconomic status does not significantly alter marriage rates for women but does do so for men.
yes; look up sexlessness among youth by sex
Consider your words as if they were being said about a woman:
> Proving you're smart by solving hard problems is a gorilla-chest-thumping exercise.
Isn't it still true?
It may be a more competitive or masculine environment than you would prefer, and that's fine. But what benefit do you think comes from labeling the perceived problems of Google's culture as "toxic masculinity"?
[1]Yes women are also competitive, but most of the extremely competitive people are men.
If not, you're just sexist, full-stop. (c.f. "toxic blackness" or "toxic Jewishness")
Also, yes, "toxic femininity" is also a term (and is even linked from the other page), but for some reason I don't think you were asking in good faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalized_sexism#Toxic_femi...
> such beliefs and expectations "[suggest] there is no a priori female self" apart from the needs and desires of men and boys
textbook sexism
At best, the competition is a symptom of the real (alleged) problem of toxic masculinity: too many men. Specifically an environment where men are systematically favored over women for sexist reasons.
That Google is suffering under such a system is a claim which needs defending.
We've been perpetually informed than men and women are the same from the neck up for decades, and a Google employee (James Damore) was even fired for pointing out that men and women differ in their preferences, attitudes, and social behaviors.
That it is now OK to acknowledge those differences when it makes men look bad is quite the standard to set.
I mean, which is it? Are men and women the same or are they different (on average)?
Hyper competitiveness. There is nothing "male" in nature about pushing people to compete in a giant free for all.
The equivalent feminine expression of the same kind of dominance is a reputation war.
Reputation wars can destroy lives and relationships. If I have to choose one, I for one much prefer to deal with people winning at how awesome they are (and how lame I am) than a reputation war.
Civilized places have cracked down on violence, so male dominance contests almost never end up with a face punched anymore. Toning down the violence made them much safer.
Female dominance contests are still as deadly as they have always been.
>And it is typically more harmful for more people on average than the feminine expressions of same.
Yeah, no. This is borderline sexist. It's one thing to argue "the workplace only allows masculinity in its toxic form". It's another entirely to go "feminine better".
Nobody appreciates people who speak without knowing about what they speak!
Not to mention that any argument whose central point starts with "I would prefer..." cannot be taken seriously. Your opinions have no bearing on material realities, or, put another way, facts don't care about your feelings.
Googleyness was always about bringing up the people around you and elevating your team’s potential, something that both women and men can excel at.
I have a lot of complaints about Google’s perf process, but I never saw toxic masculinity, competitiveness or putting down co-workers. On the teams I was part of, if any of that happened it would have been dealt with harshly and stopped immediately.
PS: I am not endorsing promo-culture where impact of users/revenue don't matter but I do believe solving hard problems should be rewarded (for example, Nobel Prize or Field Model) and making it "sexist" issue is unproductive .
"Proving you're smart by solving hard problems is a gorilla-chest-thumping exercise. It's not enough to build things. You need to be better than those around you. But you have to be "googley" which means using logic and data to put down your coworkers and show why you're right and they're wrong."
Here's my data. Google values consensus - fact. This "wisdom of the crowds" philosophy was core to founding google - Larry & Sergey's brilliant insight that the collective votes of hyperlinks was a stronger signal than things like H1 tags and HTML titles in picking good search results.
But consensus means, in a literal sense, that everybody needs to agree on the right thing to do. Problem is in reality people don't always agree. So what happens when the group needs to reach consensus but people disagree? Since Google doesn't have a respectful way to disagree, the holders of divergent opinions must be minimized - either pushed out of the group or proven to be not smart enough for their opinions to be valid.
God I hate myself while I'm writing this. I left for a reason.
I want to push back on this. I think there is absolutely such a thing as “rough consensus” where everyone gets to air their concerns, but the group still makes a decision where not everyone gets their way. Rough consensus processes are much harder to do over a mailing list because there’s no sense of what “the room” wants - since all the air gets taken up by the people who have the most time & are the most argumentative. It’s much easier to achieve rough consensus in person - especially amongst groups who have good working relationships with each other.
In many ways this is a product failure of mailing lists and the like. I’d love more answers in this space to allow us to make better collective decisions, remotely.
Also, "the holders of divergent opinions must be minimized", not really. You can even continue without a consensus as far as it doesn't hurt anyone else.
"wisdom of the crowds" means respect everyone's opinion IMO. Direct attack to your colleagues will end up with warning from managers or being fired. It doesn't have any meaning of enforcing maximium level of consensus.
The problem of "try my best to prove I'm not WRONG" is much broader than Google's company culture. It's part of our self defense process and has been well identified in psychology (Well, same emotion as what you feel in this thread when someone opposed your opinon, your are trying to prove you have better understanding of the problem or smarter than them as you described yourself). Google's culture is trying to (maybe not that successful) minimize that type of self defense since it's harmful in many cases.