Any criticism of existing hiring policy would logically result in the same implication. If it's fair at all to question a hiring policy, this needs to be not taken personally.

Besides, presumably at one point, all the "pro-diversity" initiatives mentioned in the memo didn't exist, yet someone was able to make the case that they should. This, too, would be an implication that some of the existing colleagues shouldn't be there, because there should have been more diverse selections.

Yet nobody was making lists of people they "can't possibly work with" for having that opinion.

Yes -- the management of the company decided this.

I don't really understand why Google engineers would assume that they should have free rein to debate company policies, on company networks and on company time...? A public corporation is not a democracy.

Publicly second-guessing HR practices is completely outside of a software engineer's job at a place like Google. If you want to make your own rules, go start your own company.

It's strange that the right is always in favor of giving corporations more power over employees -- except this time, when someone gets fired for doing their style of politics on company time.

  > I don't really understand why Google engineers would assume
  > that they should have free rein to debate company policies,
  > on company networks and on company time...?

A few months later he posted it into the 'skeptics' group and that is when the mob formed.

Therefore, he was explicitly doing something that had been asked for. Because of this your argument is totally invalid.

It's very hard for an outsider to judge what is appropriate for a forum called "skeptics". In principle I would assume that same rules of conduct apply there as elsewhere in the company, but I wouldn't know.

(a) Diversity programs would at some point stop being ineffective.

and

(b) Identity politics would achieve cultural hegemony.

I agree that it would be wise to shut up if doing so had no long term effects (as in your example of a manager asking about religion), but that clearly isn't the case here. And in the case of (b), I would say that long-term effect is extremely undesirable, for both businesses and individuals.

I seriously doubt this will happen unless people criticize the failings of diversity programs, and diversity officer take this criticism seriously.

However, I don't think this necessarily excuses him entirely. If there's a company-wide discussion group for future directions on tech stacks inviting input, and I write a long post arguing, in complete seriousness, that the best long-term tech stack for the company is to use Classic ASP on Windows NT 4.0, and I pull some stats about successful companies in the dot-com boom that used ASP, I think it is entirely reasonable for the company to re-evaluate whether they badly misjudged my critical thinking skills. I am not excused simply because they invited feedback from the whole company.

Whether this particular post is a comparable situation is certainly debatable, but I think that we cannot simply excuse it by saying that feedback was requested.

With PHP vs ASP, we trust people to behave civilly and allow space for debate. With men vs. women, we don't. One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens; draw your own conclusions...

The fact is, the primary reason someone is a bad technical worker in this era is that they're a poor coworker. Almost no projects of any significant merit are developed by a lone hero in a corner.

Morality is a psychologically distinct category. Being morally wrong is not the same, is not treated the same, as being factually wrong. A core part of the problem here is that something we'd want to be discussed factually, like choice of programming language, instead became a moral issue.

If a programmer advocates for ASP in a PHP company, it's reasonable he'd be fired, although I'd hope he'd be given a warning and a second chance first. However, thousands of people across the company would not get involved, the CEO of a megacorp would not cancel his family vacation to make a personal statement, the news media would not give it prominent coverage. Nobody much would care about a not-very-senior employee turning out to have a foolish or wrong factual opinion and being fired for it. But everyone cares about an employee making a moral stand that some (including other employees) may agree with, and being fired for that.

To repeat my earlier point: advocacy of ASP, here standing for any technical or factual matter, might be very wrong factually; but advocating for ASP would not hurt people's emotions and feelings of safety.

I mean, we could argue that this isn't a moral matter, but the fact is that a huge number of employees at the company do see it as a moral matter, and it affects everything from morale to recruiting to trust to retention. A warning is a luxury we have when this isn't true, but it's not one that's affordable here. To be clear, I am absolutely on board with giving him a generous severance (and a sinecure or PIP if needed to maintain immigration status or something), because I care very much about the wellbeing of all humans regardless of whether I find them to act morally. I'm not here to punish him for his immoral behavior. But the important thing is that he needs to be removed from day-to-day activities and decisionmaking at least as much as someone who seriously and earnestly advocated ASP would.

(In fact, one of the few scientifically-cited claims in the document is "moralizing things that shouldn't be moralized is bad," but there's no strong argument, scientific or otherwise, for "... and this is one of those things that shouldn't be moralized.")

1. What is and isn't in the domain of morality is a matter of culture and history and current events; if enough people feel something is immoral, that makes it immoral pretty much by definition.

2. Immoral behavior is, and in some sense ought to be, punished more harshly and more swiftly than merely being factually wrong or incompetent.

But of course people never agree on what is moral or immoral, or even what should be moralized or amoral. In particular, I believe in and argue for the free discussion of factual claims in the pursuit of truth, and against the moralization of empirically-testable propositions. (So, I agree that moralizing such things is bad).

I can give lots of reasons for why this produces a better society (as well as better science and technology), but in the end it's only a better society for those who care at all about truth (and, inseparably, about working science and technology). If someone disagrees with this on moral grounds, and feels it's better to force everyone to lie if the truth might be offensive, then I probably won't convince them otherwise.

And I think we all know Google didn't fire him because they believed him to be incompetent. In fact, Google didn't even claim as much, they fired him for "advancing harmful gender stereotypes." How can we ever have a genuine conversation about the under-representation of women in tech if people with a certain "undesirable" opinion get fired for expressing it?

Although, to your point, that doesn't really require critical thinking. It just requires impressive mental gymnastics to dispute.

There quite possibly are biological (and cultural) differences that ultimately affect the representation of women among Google software engineers that are not sexism. As a result, a diversity / hiring policy that assumes sexism is far and away the only relevant cause is not likely to work well.

Is this really that much of a stretch?

He also explicitly mentions ability: "Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."

(Also, let's be clear, someone who seeks out the support of Stefan Molyneux to advocate his viewpoint cannot be meaningfully distinguished from alt-right folks who supposedly want to distort his viewpoint.)

With diversity quota's, the company may decide to hire a less able woman in favor of a more able man.

Using your number, with 2k out of 10k applications being indistinguishable elite, that means 1 in 5 applicants are suitable to be hired on merit. Assuming that female applicants are no better or worse than the men, you'd expect 100 of those 500 female applicants to be indistinguishable from 1,900 male applicants.

So then 400 women would be hired who are in fact distinguishable worse than those elite 100 women and 1,900 men.

1: Even if there are a 1000 positions, and only 1000 candidates, if they are underqualified, they do not get hired. Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc, try to have an objective bar, not one relative to the available candidates.

2: Nobody is pressuring for a 50/50 workforce. It's an ideal, and a reasonable-sounding long term goal, but even the most aggressive pro-diversity initiatives do not set a target of 50/50 ratio. In fact, in most cases HIRE targets aren't set at all. The targets are set for opportunities - ie number of diversity candidates evaluated or interviewed. The hiring process remains pure.

Source: Work for major top-10 tech company and do a ton of hiring, and diversity training.

I agree with your conclusions from these stats, but why is this theoretical scenario relevant? Do we believe that this more closely resembles the actual scenario than one where there are, say, 4,000 female applicants and 6,000 male ones?

But the specific numbers are not the point of my comment. The issue is that if there is a lot of pressure to get a 50/50 workforce, but the pipeline is not 50/50, then favoring less qualified men over more qualified women becomes a possibility or even very likely, since how else are you going to achieve this?

I think that it is up to those who desperately want a 50/50 workforce (just for tech, not for most of the other gender-imbalanced jobs) to make the case how they can do this without sexist discrimination in hiring or if they do favor sexism in hiring to make that explicit.

I downvoted this.

Given that there is a fair amount of incompetence in tech; that there is also a significant number of women in tech; that you are not a junior person and that men and women have similar abilities, I find this statistically implausible. Please consider the possibility that you have a subconscious sexist bias against men.

Why is this statistically implausible?

There is a fair amount of incompetence in tech; there are a significant number of women in tech; I am not junior; men and women have similar abilities; many men seek tech because it's high-status instead of because of intrinsic technical interest (Damore 2017); many men have a sexist bias towards men.

The natural statistical result is that while both competent men and competent women get hired (as they should!), incompetent men get hired much more often than incompetent women.

Is this logic flawed?

> Please consider the possibility that you have a subconscious sexist bias against men.

I am certainly considering that possibility, and I know exactly why I might have that bias if it is in fact a bias: every single person I've been frustrated at working with has been a man. I don't want to be biased, and would definitely appreciate being talked out of this, if it is in fact a bias.

One (the one you seem to be in favor of) is that due to higher hiring standards even if the average abilities are similar, after the hiring filter average woman is more skilled than the average man.

Another is that (just like it was described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14988086) you have lower standards for women than for men so that you cut incompetent women some slack.

Yet another is that while the averages are similar, men are much more varying in their abilities, so that both ends of spectrum (outstanding competence and extreme incompetence) are dominated by men.

Etc. There can be a lot of explanations besides the bias in hiring and without some empirical evidence it is difficult to choose.

FWIW I've met my share of incompetent women. But I'm not US-based, and that might explain the difference.

Proof? Gender neutralized experiments find a great variety of results, with sometimes a bias in favor of women and sometimes a bias in favor of men. There is no consistency here that can be seen as proof that men are always biased towards men.

I'm not aware of any scientific studies in the tech field, but this layman experiment in tech with voice masking for phone interviews found that women who were made to sound like men were rated slightly worse and men whose voice was masked to sound more like women were rated better:

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

They found that the actual reason why women did worse in their interviews is that women handled failure at the interview worse than men. The women often quit after initial failure, while the men persevered and came back to try again. So it was an issue with how men and women were conditioned to handle failure in combination with the way their hiring practices were set up, NOT discrimination by the interviewers against women.

This kind of discovery is exactly why we need less of the kind of 'common sense' that results in people assuming they know the cause (usually by putting all blame on one group) and more actual research into the causes.

> Is this logic flawed?

Your logic is not flawed, but it's nothing more than a theory when you don't have solid evidence to back it up.

There are equally plausible explanations that you did not consider. For example, we know that men are more willing to take risk, including risk of failing by the Peter principle. So women are often unwilling to take jobs they do not know for sure they cannot do. This latter explanation actually explains the known facts a lot better than the 'men are much less willing to hire women' theory.

> I know exactly why I might have that bias if it is in fact a bias: every single person I've been frustrated at working with has been a man.

That is merely justification for being less willing to work with men, not justification for assuming that men are biased to hiring men AND that this is the main/only cause of the disparity. You have inserted a ton of assumptions to get from A (worse experiences with men) to B (assuming that the cause of the gender disparity is gender discrimination during hiring). The sheer quantity of assumptions necessary should drive a rational person to verify whether these assumptions are true.

I see you as biased for jumping to conclusions and especially for defending retributions against those who question those assumptions. At that point, my charity ends and those who desperately want to blame one group and who are unwilling to consider the possibility that anything they do to that group can be unjust, get lumped in with the other evil groups who desperately wanted to blame one group and were willing to harm that group.

If a bunch of people fired for pro-ASP opinions got together, started their own company that used ASP, and produced a successful product, they would get a lot of money, everyone involved would be happy including Google who would sell them ad services, and perhaps the market would shift in favor of ASP.

If a bunch of people fired for anti-"diversity" opinions got together, started their own company that did not discriminate in favor of women and minorities in hiring, and produced a successful product, there would be a media storm and probably a boycott and demands for the company to not be allowed to use the Google Ad network.

This is why I think you're wrong when you say the reasons for firing are "exactly the same" in both cases.

The opinion that biological differences between the sexes result in different career preferences isn't exactly wildly uncommon, extreme, or nonsensical.

Note that the opinion in the memo isn't restricted to different career preferences correlated with gender (at least some of those opinions in the memo, like women wanting better work/life balance and men having rigid gender roles, are so uncontroversial that they're part of the standard feminist position too). The opinion also includes the claim of different abilities correlated with gender, because that's what's relevant to the business practices he's arguing in favor of changing, and in particular abilities relevant to qualification for engineering roles at Google. That's a much more extreme position.

...yet nobody took personal offense because of the implication that some of them shouldn't be there. That's the point.

I'll agree that the context is questionable... but only because we don't have the details. I don't think there's anything inherently unreasonable about making a case for a change in hiring policy.

If the place where it was posted was specifically used to discuss how company policies can be improved, it seems reasonable. If it's a place only visible to HR and management, it seems reasonable. If it's a place specifically for topics that are potentially political and offensive in nature, it seems reasonable (even if internal). If posts in support of (or proposing extending) the existing diversity policy were effectively allowed in that place, it seems reasonable.

It's the double standard where one set of politics is approved and encouraged, but the other is fireable that is problematic.

Could you elaborate on this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14966388

Regardless of what you think of the merits, a public corporation can't afford a persistent shadow of workplace discrimination. Firing the responsible employee was the only possible option.

It's not a free speech issue, as there is no such thing in a work environment. Here's an exaggerated example: if you call the CEO a "limp-dicked faggot" on the corporate intranet, you can expect to be fired, and it probably won't help much if you explain that you simply wanted to have a frank discussion on whether the CEO should use Viagra and be more open about his possible homosexuality, and that you hope this argument would be examined based on facts rather than emotions.

The memo doesn't promote discrimination, and in fact, raises concerns about how the existing policy is legally murky because it does--just in the other direction.

Your analogy is ridiculous, and just because some people perceive discrimination doesn't mean any has occurred. That there's a legal issue if you presume it has simply because people were offended is immaterial.

I haven't read all of the memo, but it didn't seem to me that he was advocating discrimination. Wasn't the point that he claimed there _was_ discrimination and he wanted it to end?

In any case, I can understand that actually discriminating in hiring could be illegal, but would _advocating for discrimination_ really be against the law, if that's what he actually did?

If he wasn't lying when he said he'd filed a claim with the National Labor Relations Board, his firing was illegal under current US law.

Only, as I understand, if it was in retaliation for the claim; firing for the memo, and any perceived hostile workplace effects it had, would not be illegal (and may actually contribute to avoiding liability for that conduct.)

Of course, if he made a claim it will be a disputed question of fact as to whether or not it was retaliation.

The broader patriarchy/privilege theory behind those "pro-diversity" policies has the unavoidable implication that many of those white male colleagues really shouldn't have their careers (and many other rewarding parts of their lives) at all, because they are based on 'oppressing' others.

There are poison grenades being thrown constantly by every side; only a severe double standard would allow someone to ignore this.

The real solution is to realize that any criticism of hiring policies (including criticism by 'diversity' advocates) means someone shouldn't have been hired. And then, to act like an adult and deal with it rationally anyways.

>unsupported biological claims

The claims are very well-supported by decades of research. Some journalistic outlets removed the links to Damore's sources from the copies of the memo they redistributed, to make the claims look unsupported. Don't fall into that trap.

If you want to see some of the research, Pinker has your back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mYeZ9by-eM

Damore was very clear, neutral, and professional. But, there is no way in any universe Damore could have delivered that message where you would not criticize it like this. No matter how careful he was, you'd simply set the bar further out, increase the emotional sensitivity even more, engage in even more aggressive mind-reading and hostile misinterpretation. His writing could never, ever, in any form, never meet your ever-shifting standard because your standard is designed to be impossible to meet.

The reality is that you want him to be silent and you'll seek any excuse for him to suffer for questioning beliefs you see as morally obligated.

Saying, "He can of course question, but he has to do it better," while actually having impossible standard, is just a way to look/feel like you're being open when you're not.

It actually resembles behaviors you see in abusive relationships - the impossible standard that shifts every time it's met.

I have previously refuted the idea that the claims are supported by research. See the first part of this comment, which is based on reading the version of the document that does have the sources:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956998

It's true that there's decades of research cited. It's true that he makes claims. It's not true that the research supports the claims he's making.

The bigger point is anyone that thinks his claims are 100% true or 100% false is definitely wrong.

I have refuted the idea put forth by other people that his claims are supported by the scientific research he links to.

(My position, upthread of that comment, is that the document itself doesn't so much make claims that are wrong as display the deficiency of the author's critical-thinking skills to such an extent that Google should not have hired him. Imagine trying to read a design document or an outage postmortem written to the same level of coherence and with the same level of intellectual honesty.)

I do agree (and admit as much in that comment!) that there are claims that he correctly cites, e.g. "Women score higher for 'neuroticism' as defined by psychology." My contention is that none of those claims are relevant to any plausible thesis of the document.

(I think that saying "there exist irrelevant claims that are supported by science" is completely pedantic. If I write an nonsense essay about garbage collection vs. refcounting and correctly cite a scientific paper on the acidity of apple juice, I think it's perfectly justifiable to say that none of my claims are supported, since it's not an essay about apple juice.)

> sex differences in personality traits can be detected in early childhood [..] and remain fairly constant across adulthood [..] The effects of these sex differences lead to predictable differences in men’s and women’s leisure behaviors, occupational preferences, and health-related outcomes [emphasis mine]

Overall I think it's possible for reasonable people to disagree on whether group differences in neuroticism and agreeability or an affinity to people vs. things etc. etc. are or are not not relevant to the thesis. I respect your point of view that they do not. I'm just saying a reasonable argument can be made for the other side too.

(To be clear, he also makes several bad arguments, I'm not defending him. I'm just saying that some of his claims are supported by science.)

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-fires-engineer-over-a...

He's making the same counterclaim that I am - that while there are biological differences and they almost certainly affect interest, there's basically no rationale to conclude that they're the cause of the specific situation Google is attempting to change with the specific initiatives he's denouncing (and calling illegal), and there's also no rationale to entirely discount cultural factors, including both gender roles and sexism, as causes of the situation.

But regarding

> and there's also no rationale to entirely discount cultural factors

He doesn't do that. First, the section's very title is

> Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech

and

> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes

(emphasis mine in both). Proposing that biology may play a role is not the same as saying that biology is everything.

By your reasoning brighteyes has just proven that you have reached conclusions not justified by the paper, so will you resign from your job, given that you think such incompetence on the part of Dalmore is inexcusable and makes him incapable to do his job?

(And if I have done such a thing, which I don't believe I have. I'm really not sure why you say I've reached conclusions not justified by the paper?)

He didn't actually present it directly to management, nor did he publish it publicly. Many people improve their work by asking for feedback, so you seem to demand the impossible: for him to create something great, but without allowing him to refine his work in a way that many people need to create something great.

BTW. I am not aware that Damore had a senior job title and even if he had, his job didn't involve writing rigorous papers. So I'm not sure how you can say that this document proves that he was bad at his job. In his interview he said that his last performance review put him in the top few percent of performers at Google. So if we assume that he is not lying, you seem have drawn wild conclusions based on weak evidence, that far stronger evidence actually contradicts.

What else is a design document or review, a non-LGTM code review, or an outage postmortem beyond a rigorous paper? The skills are exactly the same: you have to take external research and internal data about your business practices, and explain why the observed facts were as observed, what the company should do about it, and why your proposed approach is correct.

This is a significant part of every job I've had, and Google tried to hire me earlier this year at only L4 and not L5. (The fact that Damore was L5 is well-attested by both pro-Damore and anti-Damore sources.)

When I'm not sure about something, I'll generally ask a question like "Hey, why are we using Debian instead of Fedora" or "Hey, why are we structuring on-call like this, the SRE book says we should structure it like that," and look for an explanation. I won't write a document saying "This is why Fedora is better than Debian and why all the attempts to use Debian are based in a fundamental misunderstanding of reality" and then ask for criticism.

> In his interview he said that his last performance review put him in the top few percent of performers at Google.

Who were his reviewers? Did they deserve their jobs either? Given what I know of Google's hiring practices, I would be entirely unsurprised if there are many pockets in the company consisting of incompetent people propping each other up.

This is a well-known phenomenon in large companies. Quoting Guy Kawasaki recalling something he learned from Steve Jobs:

Steve believed that A players hire A players—that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly—my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It’s clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve called “the bozo explosion” to happen in your organization.

I just reread the document to confirm I read it right the first time. The subtle implication, and I'd argue one of the most harmful effects of the document, is the claim that biases (whether from nature or nurture) in interest also translate to biases in ability. There's a huge difference between saying "More men than women are interested in the job but we've got to hire the most qualified people regardless of either gender or interest" (and he almost gets there in his discussion of men seeking high-status jobs!), which I don't think I could really complain about, and "More men than women are interested in the job so our efforts to hire women are 'effectively lowering the bar' and probably illegal."

If you are at the point where you have 10 resumes on your desk from 10 qualified women, and 10 resumes on your desk from 10 qualified men, and you put together a team of 9 men and one woman, no matter how true it is that women as a whole are less interested in the job, it's not relevant.

(Incidentally, that's a quote from the portion of the abstract where they're mentioning existing research instead of their own, and it cites three sources, the first of which is a book by a lawyer that appears to be targeted at the general non-fiction market. I'm rather surprised that this is a permissible citation in a scientific paper, and I'm wondering if my standards are wrong or this isn't a super reputable journal.)

No, he talks about both:

> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.

and

> These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.

(emphasis mine in both cases). And that linked document does support that claim of his.

(Again, I'm not defending all his claims; just that one.)

If preferences partially explain why psychology is dominated by women and why computer science is dominated by men, then preferences can partially explain part of why psychologists tend to be women and tech employees tend to be men.

And that's a big part of the memo: why is there a gender gap, what causes it, etc. So it's not surprising that one issue he focuses on is preferences. And he's not alone in doing so, that preferences are important in the tech gender gap discussion is something agreed upon by both sides:

* A lot of important diversity work done by progressives focuses on increasing interest in tech among young girls: girls' preferences matter.

* And on the other side, conservatives tend to say that preferences explain most of the tech gender gap and not discrimination.

I am disputing that preferences are relevant to the business purpose of this memo, which was to claim that what Google does with applicants once they have applied is both unlikely to work and illegal.

I am also disputing, more directly, that he or anyone has shown that preferences are relevant to the gender gap for engineering roles at Google; I'd think that there exist both more qualified men and more qualified who are interested in working at Google than Google has positions for, and the difficulty is in identifying these people. This is supported by how the specific diversity initiatives that the author calls out are all about properly evaluating applicants, and none are about encouraging people to apply or have an interest in the field. (And anecdotally, as someone who received a job offer from Google in May and spent three months going through team selection and ended up accepting another offer, both my own experience and the stories of others I've talked to both inside and outside Google is that headcount is sparse.)

These two claims I'm making (that preferences are irrelevant, and that the memo does not argue that preferences are relevant) are definitely falsifiable, so I'm interested in evidence to the contrary.

Note that this is a different point from the gender gap in tech as a whole. I'd definitely believe that preferences are much more relevant there, especially if we count things like wanting better work/life balance (or wanting better maternity leave, etc.) as preferences.

Clearly both are important topics, and they have some obvious connections - for example, the gender gap as a whole often motivates specific corporate policies, that's one reason he brings it up - but they can also be debated separately.

So I think it's fair to say the memo does make some valid points, but it looks like you think it's wrong on other points that it makes in other areas (which could well be true).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Rightist_Movement