Google male engineeer saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers
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Anonymous
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Assume most people have seen this by now if not google
Curious on thoughts of individuals Are there actual differences between males and females? How much should companies push for diversity (sexual, racial, etc)? For something like coding does race/sex matter at all shouldn't you just higher the best coders period? |
Anonymous
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I think he is completely wrong that there are innate differences in women's vs men's interests and abilities - to the extent that those differences do exist, they are hopelessly entwined with messages women vs men receive about their competencies starting as children, and social expectations around childcare, etc.
But the part about how there are certain conversations we simply cannot have because they are politically incorrect... he is absolutely correct on that count. |
Anonymous
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As The Washington Post's Jena McGregor wrote in March, just 1 percent of Google's technology employees are black - a percentage that hasn't moved since 2014.
Indians do not hire African Americans, we have seen this at Infosys, Cognizant, Hexaware, TCS, and Wipro |
Anonymous
Does it matter if code is written by backs, Indians, males, females, as long as it works |
Anonymous
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I applaud Google's effort to get more women in tech positions like software developers.
Does Google also make such efforts to ensure an equal balance of men in HR and PR/marketing positions? Those are often overwhelmingly female, so we could benefit from diversity there as well. |
Anonymous
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On the one hand, I'm being told there are decided differences between male and female brains because of the current transgender trend.
On the other hand, I've been told my whole life there are really no differences between male and female brains and the differences in what men and women seek out in employment is likely mostly a reflection of socialization, barriers to entry, etc. Color me confused. I read his post, and I don't think he was saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers. I think he was saying Google is possibly wasting time/money with their efforts to encourage specific sub groups, and they should rethink that, as well as consider what minority groups they aren't even thinking about. |
Anonymous
Anonymous
| He sounded stupid |
Anonymous
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OP, your title is misleading. That is not at all what he said.
10:04 summed up what he wrote quite well, including why this recent transgendered push is ludicrous and runs contrary to science. (Another discussion entirely) |
Anonymous
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He's a rank and file nobody. He probably thinks, "I've made it to Google! I'm the best of the best!" while he plays ping pong and rides the bus back to San Francisco to go sleep in a shared yurt.
Guys like this are the worst. They're completely insecure now that they're among the best, and look around to see who they might put down to elevate themselves. |
Anonymous
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Wage gap is a myth (agree)
Diversity for diversities sake is a joke should hire the best (agree) Women are different than men and are better at certain things (agree) Anyone not agree with those 3? |
Anonymous
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I thought this was a pretty good rebuttal...from a man, and former Google employee
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788 |
Anonymous
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I refuse to read the whole thing, because I've heard enough of it and people who make selectively-informed arguments like that don't deserve that much of my time. But I will point out a few things:
1) Arguments like this assume that the only benefit of "diversity" are to the under-represented groups. Companies have an interest in having their workforce reflect the demographics of their users, because those perspectives might make their products more interesting, usable, and valuable to their users. I worked in the engine division of an auto-maker in the '90s, and engineers were openly making the argument that we needed more women because women made the majority of vehicle purchase decisions. This isn't a profound or new idea, but it's interesting how such a basic economic concept seems to elude these supposedly logical and rational male engineers. 2) These arguments typically hinge on cherry-picked data showing differences between women and men, but they don't explicitly draw the line to why that means women (or blacks or hispanics) should be software developers at Google. One common argument I've seen is that women are more interested in outcomes than in technical details. For example, a woman is more interested in the fact that dishwashers clean dishes than in how they work. This may or may not be true, but it's also irrelevant. Being interested in what something can do doesn't mean that you can't build the thing. In fact, the move to user-centered design and customer-oriented agile development methods in SW means that industry is shifting to a more outcome-based methodology. My completely anecdotal observation is that women 'grok' this change more intuitively, and are much better at aligning their work to producing actually useful results whereas men will waste weeks on end developing something they think is cool but is ultimately useless. They also view usability as a waste-of-time, meaning that development teams often end up with tons of half-finished features. These arguments completely miss all the ways in which the qualities that are supposed to define women could be an asset to engineering teams. 3) All of these arguments are basically irrelevant, because as the recent Uber revelations made abundantly clear blatant sexism remains. So who knows if the "right" percentage of women in tech would be 20% or 60% if the playing field were truly level? We know explicitly that it's not level today. The overwhelming experience of women bears this out, and most decent men who spend long enough in their careers (and especially if they are married to technical women) end up coming to this realization. Women are constantly having to prove their worth in technical sectors, and any single slip up will be given a lot more weight than decades of success. Google is no different in this regard. I was at a Google conference earlier this year, where they paid a lot of lip service to diversity. At some point during a break I was chatting with a google engineer, whom I had prefaced my conversation with the fact that I lead a team as part of a large development effort in a mid-sized company. Clearly this never registered with him since it seemed so implausible, so he proceeded to talk to me (and even give me specific advice) in a way that would have only been appropriate for a clueless, fresh-out-of-school person who had no idea what they were doing or the market they were playing in. This infantalizing of technical women is quite common, and something I've at times been able to use to my advantage...but it's generally pretty offensive. So if you want to know what I think about this, there it is. And BTW, there is nothing brave about posting an anonymous "opinion" and pretending that tired old arguments about "why girls are bad at math" are somehow profound. |
Anonymous
But what are the criteria for determining "the best"? The author thinks that they don't need to spend time training people about unconscious bias. (I guess he doesn't--his biases aren't unconscious at all, he's very upfront about them.) He thinks women AS A GROUP are more neurotic than men AS A GROUP. If you think "the best" person for a job should be able to handle stress, and you think women AS A GROUP can't handle stress, then you aren't going to see a man and a woman with otherwise equal qualifications as both being "the best." You are going to only see the man as "the best." That's why you need to affirmatively promote diversity. Get it? |
Anonymous
| The rant reads like someone who feels threatened by competition in the workplace. |