The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320/amp <comment><USER4> I fail to understand the outrage but attribute that to the fact that few bothered to read the document before allowing themselves to be outraged by it - such is the shallow, feeling-fueled, hysteria-laden media cycle of today.

The doc presents a point-of-view, grounded in reality. Furthermore it's not "anti-diversity", but rather anti-discrimination - specifically 'positive 'discrimination which it discredits while presenting alternative policies that are more inclusive (according to the author) and reflective of inherent psychological differences.

Have I read it wrong? Somebody correct me if I missed the controversial bits.

Edit: OK, it comes off the rails a little at the "Why we're blind" section but overall it's food for thought (and no doubt a catharsis for many Right-leaning Googlers).

Since when is dialectics grounds for ostracism?

<comment><USER5> The argument basically proceeds as follows:

1) Gender differences exist

2) ???

3) Differences in representation are explainable by gender differences

The problem with the "???" step is that it's unrigorous handwaving. "Women prefer working with people." Okay, so that's why the majority of accountants are women? That's why STEM fields that don't involve people at all (math, biology) actually have quite a lot of women, while programming doesn't have much women despite being on the social/people-oriented end of the spectrum?

It's not that people are angry about the article's conclusions despite acknowledging the strength of the logical/factual basis. It's that people won't give sloppy reasoning the benefit of the doubt when they don't like the conclusion.

<comment><USER6> I agree that "???" is unrigorous handwaving. And I don't think it purports to be rigorous; from the document: "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women _may in part_ explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership." (emphasis mine). "May" and "in part." I don't think this purports to be a proof.

Is this argument any more rigorous?

1\. There is a non-50% representation between men and women in tech.

2\. Unjust discrimination and societal pressures are the only possible explanation for this imbalance. Therefore we must intervene until it is 50%.

There is no doubt that unjust discrimination and societal pressures exist, and that we should fight these so that anyone with talent and interest can succeed in this field.

However, if 100% of these pressures were removed, would we have exactly 50% representation of men and women in tech? Many people appear to believe very strongly that this is true. What is the basis for this belief? Are we willing to entertain the possibility that, even without these pressures, we would have less than 50% representation of women in tech?

<comment><USER7> Who says we need 50% women in tech? Has Google released a statement on this? While I have seen some inflammatory articles on the subject I don't know that many woman care if there are 50% woman in tech. I can tell you as a female engineer, I just hope that women know it's open to them and feel comfortable joining the field. I don't care about convincing uninterested people.

Instead here are some of the issues Google seeks to address which seem plenty reasonable to me.

"Our goal is to create an environment in which every Googler can thrive. We check and recheck our people processes (including promotions, compensation, and more) to ensure fairness and equity in all things that impact Googlers. For example, we took action when we saw that women in tech were less likely to self-nominate for promotions. We've also long had gender pay equity in our workforce and we recently shared our approach to compensation with the hope that other organizations will adopt similar fair pay practices." [https://www.google.com/diversity/at- google.html](https://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html)

<comment><USER8> Not Google, but there are tech companies out there that set hiring quotas significantly higher than what the CS schools are producing [~20% female for the past 10 years].

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why- is-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon- valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/)

> Well, not quotas. You can't say quotas. At least not in the United States. > In some European countries, like Norway, real, actual quotas—for example, a > rule saying that 40 percent of a public company's board members must be > female—have worked well; qualified women have been found and the Earth has > continued turning. However, in the U.S., hiring quotas are illegal. "We > never use the word quota at Intel," says Danielle Brown, the company's chief > diversity and inclusion officer. Rather, Intel set extremely firm hiring > goals. For 2015, it wanted 40 percent of hires to be female or > underrepresented minorities.

> But since it began linking bonuses to diversity hiring, Intel has met or > exceeded its goals. In 2015, 43 percent of new hires were women and > underrepresented minorities, three percentage points above its target. Last > year, it upped its goal to 45 percent of new hires, and met it.

[https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/diversity/diversity-...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/diversity/diversity- at-intel.html)

> US female new hires 35%

<comment><USER9> she now works for google

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I notice a lot of misrepresentation of views on both sides, almost to the point of strawmanning. I think a charitable interpretation of the author's best points can be summarized as follows:

\- Racism & sexism still exist, even at Google. This is bad. (On the bright side, the problem seems to be getting better over time.)

\- It's good (and good for business) to eliminate discrimination based on gender, race, sexual preference, etc.

\- There are many benign reasons why a completely unbiased company can still have skewed demographics. One possible reason is that women & men tend to differ in psychological makeup. (Unfortunately, it looks like links to some studies supporting this claim were removed from the post, along with some charts.)

\- Therefore, Google should focus on eliminating bias & discrimination, not on getting employee demographics to match the nation as a whole. In short: focus on equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. If sex-specific psychological differences exist, the only way to get equal outcomes would be to lower the hiring bar for women or raise the bar for men.

\- If men & women tend to be psychologically different, Google should be aware of that and change work practices to better accommodate women. For example: More pair programming, as (to use the language of the author) that allows more working with people rather than things. Though for competitive positions requiring long hours (usually management), such changes may not be possible.

These points seem to be put forth in good faith by a frustrated employee who lacks tact. Moreover, I don't think these topics should lie outside the realm of debate. Either they're not true, in which case they can be dismissed with counter-evidence. Or they are true, and Google is wasting tremendous resources trying to solve these problems in the wrong way.

<comment><USER7> As a female engineer I don't resonate with the proposed changes for woman working with other people etc. I'm a very independent worker and that's partly why I've thrived in this field. In short, I don't think companies should make any adjustments based on gender. Just ignore it - that part I agree with - <USER2> people self select what and where they want to work themselves. And I also don't agree with quotas though I see how they might have served a purpose at one time.

If other woman are anything like me, the bullet list comparing two different points of view are cringe. People are so hard to define. And woman in particular I think generally don't feel like their potential is known yet because their presence in the workplace is so young relatively. So the last thing anyone wants is to be categorized by old stereotypes.

<comment><USER10> I also thought the pair programming example was odd, as I've never noticed different propensities for pairing based on gender. As far as I can tell, it is equally disliked. :)

<comment><USER11> Maybe it's supposed to be more like a tutoring? I don't know if such policy exists in Google but many American companies having their software houses in Poland give woman extra points during recruitment only for their gender, in order to help them start a real work even if for various reasons they miss some experience, not because of their gender but because there is much less experienced female programmers than male programmers. I don't suggest that the tutoring should be obligatory for females and made by males but simply a help from a more experienced employee would help all newcomers. I was lucky enough to get my first job in a quite small company with quite small teams and many very experienced employees(10 years in the same company wasn't that uncommon) and I took enormous advantage from such informal tutoring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting that the author considers the conceptual framework of microaggressions spurious, while describing his negative experiences as a conservative Googler in terms of what a feminist might describe as microaggressions. To further undermine his own point, he asserts that several harms against conservatives have been caused by these microaggressions.

The difference between effective negative feedback and harassment/microaggressions is the former encapsulates a desire for the person receiving the feedback to succeed. Or, in the feminist lexicon, empathy.

<comment><USER13> I noticed that as well. I find it interesting that the alt-right has started to embrace so much of modern feminist/liberal terminology and tacitly accepted so many of the premises.

The modern alt-right conservative: "I don't believe in safe spaces, but please stop bullying me!"

<comment><USER14> This is incredibly disingenuous. Much of the left considers simple disagreement to be micro-aggression, while at the same time finding it perfectly acceptable to launch hate-filled screeds of animosity and hatred at anyone who doesn't toe the line, e.g. "You're a fucking animal that deserves to be put down!!"

Your comment implicitly supports this sort of misbehavior, implying that any complaint by an "alt-righter" is just whining and carries no legitimacy.

Both the far left and alt-right have adopted extremist positions and in general have nothing good to say about each other. Please don't legitimize hateful, unacceptable behavior from the left just because the alt-right has learned to play some of the same games.

<comment><USER15> > This is incredibly disingenuous.

> Much of the left considers simple disagreement to be micro-aggression...

Tone down on the hypocrisy. If you want your side's arguments to be evaluated fairly, don't make ridiculous oversimplifications of the other side's positions.

<comment><USER16> Have you tried actually disagreeing with leftists?

Many can handle it fine and have a decent discussion. But many will explode in self righteous rage and do all the things people blinded by hate do.

<comment><USER17> This is my experience as well. On the right, extremists tend to sort of "clam up" and just stop engaging in meaningful dialogue. On the left, they tend to attack the person challenging them.

I say this as as extreme libertarian, so I have my share of disagreements with both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The intellectual contortion required to get from the premise to the conclusion is actually quite impressive.

> On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These > differences aren't just socially constructed because:

> They're universal across human cultures

Except the gender ratio in science/engineering is anything but universal across cultures. 70% of science/engineering students in Iran are women: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to- ta...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to-take-over- tech-70-of-irans-science-and-engineering-students-are-women/#44efca2e44de). Indeed, in many parts of the world that are not known for being "liberal" with regard to gender equality, women make up a significantly higher percentage of the scientific workforce than in the U.S.: [http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-science- technology-e...](http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-science-technology- engineering-and-mathematics-stem) (44% in Latin America, 40% in Eastern Europe, 37% in the Arab states).

In the Soviet Union, a majority of engineers were women; after the fall that proportion went way down (from 60% to 40%): [http://www.asee.org/public/conferences/20/papers/6985/downlo...](http://www.asee.org/public/conferences/20/papers/6985/download).

> Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women > generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, > relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).

If this were true, shouldn't women's interest in CS be going up now that the web is all about feelings/aesthetics/social? Programming, in my view, is actually in the middle in the "people versus things" spectrum. It's much more about people than, say, math. And of course, 45% of math majors are women, so I'm not sure how that fits into the author's theory.

> Women on average are more cooperative

Maybe, but does the degree of that effect explain the observed differences in representation? Tech is actually very cooperative. Compare, for example, litigation, which is all about confrontation and acrimony. But a third (and growing) of all litigators are women!

<comment><USER18> What do you know about women in CS in Iran? How many of them end up working in CS? I wouldn't jump to conclusions just because you find such outliers. Some weird mechanisms might be driving such numbers (like people not being given a choice what to study, people being forced to study something useful because they can't afford to study literature or gender studies for fun, women studying just to meet men to marry, men having mostly died in a recent war, and so on...).

Edit: I am not allowed to comment anymore, so this Eintagsfliege (mayfly) will die now. Bye.

<comment><USER19> > I wouldn't jump to conclusions just because you find such outliers. Some > weird mechanisms might be driving such numbers

<comment><USER18> Well do you know anything about what is going on in Iran? Then please share.

<comment><USER20> He's pointing out that you can use your argument as a counter-argument to yourself. As a result, your point is more or less moot, and all that remains is an appeal to cognitive bias (women enter these fields for "fun" or to find a husband, while men do it for the "real reasons" or something like that [1])

[1] The beauty of your vagueness is that it allows someone to inject whatever they believe is the "real cause" of the problem in the United States, perfectly allowing them to project their own bias upon your post as well. It also makes it difficult for someone else to counter it since they're not entirely sure what you're trying to say at all. An intriguing approach I must say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh dear, this seems like a bit of an unwise thing to have written. Whether or not it's true, it's something you're Not Allowed to reason about, where "Not Allowed" is in the sense of PG's [http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) .

<comment><USER22> This was an excellent read about how to deal with the irrationality and repression of mobs. Thanks.

Perhaps this is where anonymous speech is important as it allows the discussion of ideas without giving importance to the persons behind them. Of courae, allowing for the fact that nothing can be truly anonymous :)

<comment><USER23> > Perhaps this is where anonymous speech is important

I'd like to rebut that point as we have anonymous, mainstream means to socialize nowadays. Chaotic (4chan) and moderated (mediums like Hacker News).

Users speak truth to power all the time on these platforms, is it effective? eh.

IMO there is a lot of value in these words coming from someone (from google) who is clearly switched-on, yet has A LOT to lose. Either the discussion is presented to the general populace and we accept it and learn from it, or the google employee becomes a martyr.

Either way, the fallout of this document is what interests me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I agree that giving someone an unfair advantage because of their gender or race is a form of discrimination. Gender and race are just two of many factors that individuals might struggle with when it comes to their career and life.

If you're an introvert, short, fat, nerdy-looking or you have a weak posture; there's no support group to offset your shortcomings and all the insidious ways in which they will sabotage your career! It's no coincidence that CEOs look like and talk like CEOs - We live in a superficial world and we are animals; there is no need to moralise things; it might just come across as hypocrisy.

<comment><USER25> When you have a culture where more than 40 million people live below the poverty line and even wealthy people can be bankrupted by medical conditions, debates about workplace privilege seem like a niche form of special pleading.

The US economy is a monstrous engine powered by discrimination and inequality. Discrimination against (mostly) college educated women who might want to be developers is barely a footnote in the much wider political picture where access to high quality education, business development opportunities, housing, and health care, are so strictly rationed they might as well not exist for a depressingly large percentage of the population.

If discrimination is wrong, then it's wrong for everyone. If it's only wrong when some people are affected by it, then _it 's still discrimination_ \- and the argument is really about which kinds of discrimination are socially acceptable, which aren't, and to whom.

<comment><USER24> Very true, it's completely arbitrary in the grand scheme of things and it doesn't deserve so much limelight. If it's a problem in one company, then the discussion should be kept within the confines of the one company instead of making it everyone's fault and everyone's problem. It's preemptively biasing us to overcompensate in areas that are already very well compensated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was talking to coworker who recently transferred from China to the US. He told me that China is will dominate the US because diversity is the greatest US weakness.

Kind of shocking because our company is about 1/3 White, Indian and Chinese. But he doesn't see that as diversity. I think that is the answer that he can't see. Once groups accept each other as equals diversity becomes a non-issue. It does take work and there are lot of people who are not ready.

In addition, China is not one culture. It has many but maybe they are not as visible? I suspect secretly they are still very active behind closed doors.

In general, I feel that many immigrants have come from societies that are much more homogeneous. When they see US racial or gender problems some think that it's a weakness. I think that these problems can (and will) be solved but I can understand that given their upbringing they see it as an unsolvable problem.

Unfortunately, I don't think mandatory "busting unconscious bias" training will work for everyone. For some, their bias is just too deep. In time, I think many come around but some will never change. Unfortunately, they do hold a lot of power and when you report to one, you can find yourself setup to fail before you know it.

I've said this before: Women, please don't put up with stuff and don't give up. Please seek out a mentor who can help you become an executive in the company. The best way to fix this is to rise above it. It is not easy but please don't give up.

And for the "people against affirmative action", there are other ways to address your concerns. You can ask harvard to accept donations to increase class sizes. When some all-male colleges started accepting women, they doubled the class size. Please don't make it a race war. Harvard really only cares about money (and reputation). Find out what they want in order to get what you want. You don't have to take slots from people escaping a 300-year cycle of poverty. No it is not your fault, but it is your country (for better or for worse).

<comment><USER27> > I was talking to coworker who recently transferred from China to the US. He > told me that China is will dominate the US because diversity is the greatest > US weakness.

Has said coworker seen the research which suggests diversity increases company performance? [http://www.mckinsey.com/business- functions/organization/our-...](http://www.mckinsey.com/business- functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters)

<comment><USER28> The study doesn't control for companies are probably much more likely to have Diversity Programs if they are doing really well.

Sounds like a study that finds people who buy Rolexes live longer. It's not the Rolex: it's that only rich people who have money to take care of themselves well can afford a Rolex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can anybody explain to me why it is called "anti-diversity" or even "sexist"[1]? Never in the whole document the author argues against diversity.

[1] [https://www.recode.net/2017/8/5/16102476/google-diversity- vp...](https://www.recode.net/2017/8/5/16102476/google-diversity-vp-employee- memo)

<comment><USER30> It's a product of the left/right divide in modern American politics. It's mostly a dog whistle so the other side knows he is ok to unperson.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well, this is an issue that I would never have dared to tackle, myself, mainly because I do not have the political skill to do it safely. So, I offer a thank-you and a salute to the less inhibited guy who rose up and drew the first bullet. Now that I have had a chance to read this and observe the public reaction, my own views have developed further.

I was already of the opinion that the various -ism movements each represent a form of discrimination themselves, towards the inverse set of people that they represent. That starts to become a problem when there are people in the intersection of many inverse sets of -isms. This time, let's not create another -ism; let's not make "counterminorityism" just another thing to bash people over the head with.

Instead, it is time to design a continuous reintegration process for our network of distinctive identity groups, to ensure that they do not become incompatible over time. We need a social/psychological framework for identifying and rectifying arbitrary imbalances of resources and social power, because that is a common theme in the root causes of all of the -isms. We need to acknowledge our culture's memes [1] as an increasingly powerful force, worthy of serious study and possibly even regulation or open engineering; take a close look at the psychological manipulation of advertising, to see why this is needed.

This true unification, for lack of a more specific word, would likely be every bit as disruptive to current social and economic structures as the decline of slavery; most powerful organizations would prefer to play meaningless games with the -isms, perhaps even play one minority off of another [2] to prevent a unification. It is something that we will have to develop from the ground up, and develop over time, with collaboration from all fields and all identities. As you can see, at this point, my (our?) feelings and thoughts on the matter are still rough, unpolished, in a state of growth. We need to start seriously thinking about these things, lest we find ourselves on the losing side of a new -ism.

[1] Ideas, beliefs and themes that persist in our collective psyche, not animated gifs.

[2] We are all in a minority. If you aren't, then that is your minority, and you get no love, no assistance, because of what you are. Welcome to the minorities.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm amazed that people are seriously upset by someone publishing that.

Somehow, most of the women I know don't complain about harassment much. The one who does complain mostly gets it from her female boss. The one in SF tech says that Uber people tend to be jerks but the rest of the industry there isn't bad. The one from France has more problems with age than with sex. The lawyer has had some annoyances, but finds it useful to be underestimated by the other side. The ocean lifeguard fought her way onto the L.A. County lifeguards (competitive with no special allowances for women, and few women make it; this is the real-world Baywatch) and is proud that some macho guys apologized to her.

This probably reflects that they're all horse people. Once you're used to dealing with somewhat pushy half-ton animals, microaggressions aren't a big deal.

<comment><USER27> > Somehow, most of the women I know don't complain about harassment much.

It does not seem productive to trivialize and disregard people's issues only because we haven't witnessed them ourselves.

Indeed this attitude is actually why an internal group where people can report sexist, racist, and other inappropriate behavior is called "Yes at Google", because so many people thought this kind of thing doesn't happen, or at least it wouldn't at Google.

<comment><USER33> _It does not seem productive to trivialize and disregard people 's issues only because we haven't witnessed them ourselves._

There's a difference between trivializing or disregarding particular complaints, vs questioning just how representative they are of the broader situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A 2011 Norwegian documentary series had an episode called "The Gender Paradox" that examined this very issue in depth with interviews with evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists and sociologists. It arrived at the conclusion that employment disparities increase in many professional fields due to natural divergent proclivities when socio-economic opportunities become equal for the sexes.

ON AVERAGE in Norway (one of the top 5 most equal countries), females prefer more people-oriented fields such as medicine and males will favor more systems-oriented fields such as engineering. Again, this is ON AVERAGE. There are major overlaps in many fields (e.g. arts and research sciences) - and in some fields there is virtually none (e.g. nursing vs sanitation). This is not controversial amongst scientists who do their best to suspend ideological or wishful thinking.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70)

</comment><comment><USER35> He started out well, but about halfway through meandered into bullshit. Bad data, cherry picked data, incorrect incorrect understanding of the science, incorrect conclusions -- he even referenced the Cultural Marxism Conspiracy theory: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory)

By the time we hit "why we're blind" he's gone fully off the rails.

I sympathize with him -- and even agree with several points, but he did himself a huge disservice here.

<comment><USER36> Why do you call Cultural Marxism a conspiracy theory? Have you actually read through any of the papers being pumped out by humanities departments in academia? Not only is marxism on full display, it's actively promoted. Hell, it's one of the foundational elements of Critical Theory.

<comment><USER35> Nutter indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Google (and other tech employers) wants to discriminate in favor of hiring more female engineers, because teams with a little bit higher ratio of female engineers work better overall, even if individual female engineers are not the best individual contributors on their teams.

However, openly stating that Google wants to discriminate in favor of females - is illegal.

So Google uses double-speak and encourages hiring more females under "affirmative action" and "diversity" guidelines.

Not everyone understands double-speak, so there is disconnect between what Google is trying to do and opinions on the ground ("why do we discriminate against males in favor of females?").

That disconnect results in internal popularity of "Anti-Diversity" papers like this.

<comment><USER38> Or maybe Google wants to hire more female engineers because they realize that 19% representation does not reflect any kind of natural proclivity and therefore must reflect some kind of discrimination. One might plausibly argue that innate differences - more in preference rather than ability - <USER3> account for a small difference. 55:45? OK, I can believe that. 60:40? Beginning to wonder. 81:19? Absolutely not.

Where discrimination clearly exists, Google could quite reasonably want to compensate for it. No, not by lowering the bar or setting quotas. Legality aside, we should all know by now that hiring less able candidates isn't good for anyone - often least of all for the candidate who is being set up to fail. Other approaches include casting a wider net, training interviewers to avoid unconscious bias that could lead to false negatives, increasing retention by providing support and additional training (e.g. in negotiating techniques at performance-review time).

None of these lead to anyone less qualified overtaking anyone who is more so. They drive people like the "echo chamber" author nuts only because those people refuse to acknowledge that the problem exists (or matters) in the first place. Because they can't conclusively pin either the problem or solution down to one place in our social code, they decide it's a feature rather than a bug. It's the very same tendency that makes them - and anyone who enables or defends them - crappy engineers. I'll bet "echo chamber" guy was on the way out already, for reasons unrelated to political beliefs. It's not "brave" to manufacture an excuse for getting canned that doesn't require acknowledgement of one's own insufficiency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> TL;DR

Some guy not only speaks his mind, but has the balls to actually write his thoughts down.

The completely predictable response from "forward thinking progressives" follows.

<comment><USER40> Are not those people also just speaking their mind?

<comment><USER39> I assume they are .. however, they take no risks with their shaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm really wondering if those removed hyperlinks are pointing to sources for the stuff that's stated as facts. I really miss any references of some of the claims he's making and I find it hard to believe that the writer added none at all.

</comment><comment><USER42> Good on him.

We should appreciate our differences and understand them rather than bury them under "equality".

I hope some good comes of this.

</comment><comment><USER43> We had this discussion years ago on my Harvard class list, back during the Larry Summers flap.

Obviously, no one would be/could be against women choosing whatever field of study and work that fulfills them the most. (I say that with 6 daughters in mind!)

However, perhaps the lower representation of women in STEM is simply because they find other fields more interesting (law, medicine, what-have-you). STEM (at least the academic path) is a fairly single-minded grind, and that wouldn't appeal to many people. Apparently it appeals to fewer women than men, and I don't blame them! What's so great about STEM, honestly? It's just another field of human endeavor, with no particular reason to value it more highly than others. (Certainly, it's clearly valued by the HN community, but we're a tiny slice of the real world.)

(I did learn (sadly) from that discussion that women have been grossly discriminated against in certain scientific fields in academia--one of my classmates is the astronomy head at a midwestern university, and she had plenty of examples to share, getting there.)

Aside: Seems to me that the public outrage is at least partially just virtue- signaling.

<comment><USER44> When I see someone mention virtue signalling, I dismiss them as posturing for their community of opinion. Is that fair?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I don't really understand why this is getting so much attention. It's just some guy's opinion.

<comment><USER46> Yeah, I assume it's the gossip aspect. Tech people love to mock tabloids and celebrity magazines, but they (we) still flock to this kind of "leak" and the takedowns of whoever is the current tech messiah.

As for the document itself, you can read literally the exact same bullshit posted on HN several times a day (and then the same kind of responses that were in the motherboard piece), so I'm not sure what's worth writing home about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > 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. Many of these differences are small and there's significant > overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an individual > given these population level distributions.

What are your opinions about this? Do you think biological differences leads to social differences (not only gender but race, height, etc)? Do our "intelligences" [1] differ based on our gender? [2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences)

[2] [https://www.elsevier.com/connect/can-brain-biology- explain-w...](https://www.elsevier.com/connect/can-brain-biology-explain-why- men-and-women-think-and-act-differently)

<comment><USER48> Some US sports are very non diverse, but it's ok because it's majority non white, and everyone agrees is mostly meritorious - Athletic performance is hard to fake (outside drugs).

Yet even suggesting that minds are subject to the same kinds of differences is considered heresy. It's almost dualistic - as if we're all born with a mind/soul of the same capability.

<comment><USER44> It's not heresy. Sports represent a closed ecosystem of relatively straightforward traits->skill benefits. Professions are not bounded the way athletic roles are. The fields of law and medicine removed various sexist barriers to women participating, and female participation increased; I've seen no one suggest that the professions have significantly shifted in nature due to an influx of female brains.

Against that, we have a long history of pseudo-scientific arguments that biological differences matter and thus justify discrimination. And we have a long history of ending discrimination and proving those arguments to be bullshit, so we're now rightly sceptical of the sort of biological determinism that the manifesto author wants to resurrect.

<comment><USER47> > I've seen no one suggest that the professions have significantly shifted in > nature due to an influx of female brains

Here you have it: [https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851](https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851)

Most people in the video are scientists and work in the topic.

<comment><USER44> I see that it's an extended attack on the nurture side from the nature side based on the fact that, despite years of concerted government effort, significant gender divisions remain at the professional level in Norway. I'm not disputing these facts.

I'm not seeing that it asserts that the influx of women into the medical or legal professions has substantially changed how those professions are practiced. If women think differently than men, wouldn't a significant increase in the number of women in a profession show up as a change in the general model of the profession?

The author of the manifesto actually suggests changing the practice of software development at Google (e.g., more pair programming) to make it more friendly to women's natural inclinations, as a way of achieving better gender balance instead of affirmative action programs.

<comment><USER47> > If women think differently than men, wouldn't a significant increase in the > number of women in a profession show up as a change in the general model of > the profession?

It makes sense but I think the problem is that women do not get leadership roles very often, so they cannot change things. The two theories about why this happen is, first, the oppression of the women and the glass ceiling [1]; second, the women avoid confrontation and stress which are typical in leadership roles.

I like the idea of changing things to include more diversity. I don't know if it can apply to everything but I think it should be an option to explore. Pair programming is a good idea, another good idea is to have more meetings to discuss the processes and getting feedback from projects. Definitely a more emphatic mind will help a lot for this. I don't think this is economically viable in small companies, but Google could give it a try.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_ceiling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_ceiling)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> It is one thing to debated the veracity of a view, it is another to declare that that view should not be debated. For every point there is a counterpoint; every argument a counterargument. Arguing that the reasoning is flawed is not sufficient to ban it from discussion.

<comment><USER50> So, would you also agree that the existence of climate change should still be up for debate, even though there is overwhelming scientific evidence in one direction?

NB: I do not know what the scientific consensus is on cognitive differences between men and women.

<comment><USER45> That's a straw man reply. You cherry picked one of the most easily defensible claims and then implied that the OP would disagree. What gives you the right to implicate them in this way? Or did I miss another post in this thread where the OP did, in fact, express skepticism of climate change?

<comment><USER50> What _stops_ me from implicating them in this way? The OP made an unqualified assertion - "for _every_ point" \- which means it would apply even to the most extreme example.

Edit: And I didn't ask the OP if they are skeptical of climate change. I merely asked if they would be in favour of letting those that are skeptical express their opinion.

<comment><USER51> > _The OP made an unqualified assertion - "for every point"_

No, it is possible to defend every point imaginable. Look up "Hempel's ravens". It is trivial to generate evidence supporting or opposing any claim you like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> There's already extensive discussion of this here, with the full text linked as the top comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934581)

<comment><USER4> That post is 12 hours old, the comment with the link was posted 30min ago.

<comment><USER53> And most people in that post had not seen the document. They were commenting on the biased reporting from an article, who themselves got a biased interpretation from an employee. That's 2-3 levels of indirection there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> My son was in the hospital recently and the head surgeon was a woman. Her primary assistant was a woman. The anesthesiologist and her assistant were women. There was a male nurse or two.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have encountered this situation 25 years ago. I'm sure "biological factors" mean "most women don't go into medicine" because of the years of hard work separated from their families, and they aren't excited by the technical bits. Even if you wanted to hire women doctors, they don't bother going to medical school.

I'm sure a thousand male doctors wrote a thousand letters just like this one as they saw their workplaces changing. And guess what, it happened anyway, and the state of medical care across the world is better than ever.

The field of software engineering is still crawling out of the stone age.

<comment><USER55> I think it's more a cultural problem where certain jobs and studies are very polarized and tied to a specific gender. This is not just software engineering/it, but a lot more common than you would think, also the other way around.

When talking about masters, where consistently over the last 10 years or so, 56% of the students is female here in Belgium, law, medical and chemistry studies are currently 60%+ female and some studies, like language, biology, crime, pharmaceutical are 70%+ female, arts and psychology 80%+ and pedagogy and logopedic/audiologic over 90%. That are pretty huge gaps, and yet that's not something you hear about that often.

These stats are taken from multiple reports (in Dutch) from a few universities here in Belgium in years ranging from 2010 to 2013 [1] [2], and one report I only have on paper (all with pretty similar results)

Yes there are also many areas where it's more equally divided (surprisingly, mathematics and economics), but I don't think it's necessarily the 'software engineering' field, it's for a large part society. My gf for example studied chemistry, and even if she's a bit of a geek sometimes, she never even considered software engineering/it as a study. And when I asked her why, she said it just doesn't have any appeal to her, although when I taught her to write small scripts in python and some basic HTML she thought that was awesome.

And I know quite a few geeky girls just like her, doing stuff ranging from having studied sexology, veterinary, economics, law, chemistry, ... Only 3 of the ones I knew started in software engineering and 2 never finished. One became a cop, the other switched to medical, and the one that finished her degree now teaches mostly math since she didn't see herself writing software her entire career.

The only way I see to get more women interested in engineering in general, is to get girls interested from a young age. You can't just wave your magic wand around and wish there's a even a 70/30 male/female ratio when only 10% of the software engineering students in the first year is female, and many of them drop out over the years.

[1] [https://www.kuleuven.be/diversiteit/pdf/20130927%20Gender%20...](https://www.kuleuven.be/diversiteit/pdf/20130927%20Gender%20en%20Studenten%20Openbaar.pdf)

[2] [http://www.ugent.be/nl/univgent/waarvoor-staat- ugent/diversi...](http://www.ugent.be/nl/univgent/waarvoor-staat- ugent/diversiteit-en-gender/beleidscel/pers-en-publicaties/mv-rapport.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > Microaggression training

wat? They now train people in microaggressions at work? Is the "training" mandatory?

<comment><USER57> It's not mandatory. However, when I was at Google several years ago, it showed up on my calendar, it was not optional, my manager said that I was expected to attend, and I attended. But it's not mandatory.

<comment><USER58> So is it ""not mandatory"" then ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> He, and it is a 'he' has missed the point entirely. It is not that we do not recognize that people are different, it is that we value that diversity and therefore endeavor to remove from our community such impediments to achieving a balanced social group. It is a classic dominant social group position that the incomers fit in rather than the group dynamic have to change to accommodate. It is surprising to have a Google thought-leader with such low- brow views. If you think you are in an echo-chamber or bubble perhaps it is simply because nobody agrees with you.

</comment><comment><USER60> Well I'm fully on board with the notion that (workplace) diversity is overrated nonsense but this document could only be described as counter- productive at best. So things like this will only be used to justify the very thing he claims to be objecting to.

</comment><comment><USER61> "...(ignoring or being ashamed of its core business)..."

This deserves its own "manifesto".

In case of any misinterpretation, I interpret "core business" to mean the ever exciting business of selling online ads.

</comment><comment><USER41> How is this not on the front page btw? It has almost 200 points an comments in 2 hours and it's placed 37 at the moment. This seems like a failure of the HN ranking algorithm. @dang (or someone else) could you explain what's up here?

<comment><USER62> Another article along similar lines seems to have received similar un- accounted-for down-modding: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14834758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14834758)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I hear a lot of complaints about conservative ideas being shunned and bullied, but I disagree completely. Why haven't I read a 10 page pro-diversity creed circulating at google?

I haven't heard or read about progressive ideas in a long time, a long long time.

I'd be willing to bet a pro diversity creed would get much stronger bullying against it too.

Anyways, I'm tired of this issue, and people trying to pretend there's an optimal truth. This is a human made field, if we wanted, we could change it. We just need to agree on what to optimize for, and there lies the problem, I don't think we know or care what we ultimately optimize for. Too me, it seems we're currently optimizing for the stock market. And until it's clear that women make a big impact on that, people will be cautious to fray too far from what's been tried and worked in the past.

<comment><USER64> First of all, let me lead with: I'm a neoliberal democrat type person, I support diversity initiatives, reaching out to and supporting under represented communities, making changing to work culture to help people who haven't succeeded historically (IE mothers who leave to take care of their kids) etc. I disagree with most of the points in the guys doc.

> Why haven't I read a 10 page pro-diversity creed circulating at google?

The corporate culture in SV is pretty far to the left (all things being considered), you don't see things like a 10 page pro-diversity creed circulating internally because for the most part, those type of documents are official company policy. IMO, this is a good thing.

I think open discussion of ideas like the one in this document would be beneficial because they are easy to refute and all people involved can take it as a learning or educating experience. The guys conclusions aren't "morally bad", but they are "demonstrably wrong" and its easy to see why if honest discussion was permitted. The problem is, open discussion is not permitted because the culture of the left seems to confuse "demonstrably wrong" with "morally bad" and thus makes having bad ideas a sin, instead of say, an opportunity that one can be educated on an enlightened.

<comment><USER63> How many people in SV join Google and spend time thinking about why those policies are in place, what underlying principle and reasoning has warranted them? How many explanation is there for why the current Google status quo leans left or appears to do so? Is that open for discussion too? I don't think so.

Now, I also find it ironic that status quo is considered progressive. The underlying principle of progressivism is change, continuous improvement through conscious change, measured by the impact on the lowest common denominator and the sum of all value. That is, you want to make the pie bigger and the smallest piece of pie bigger too.

I'm open for conversation, but you need to hear all data points to make an informed decision, one way discourse is possibly worse then no discourse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I have one simple ask here. To those who agree with any of this article beyond "we should be able to discuss this openly", please read this. People have all read this document, and if you agree with it, you value diversity of opinion. I'm not asking anyone to debate it - there's plenty of that here which doesn't seem to be going anywhere, as usual, which you can and should join into to try to reverse that. But read this first.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why- is-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon- valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/)

</comment><comment><USER66> The author has a point. One suggestion to hire people without bias is to make the interview online for the most part and then conduct very few face to face interview with multiple rounds and getting an averaged feed back of the interviewees in text format and judge based upon it.

</comment><comment><USER62> Is this being downmodded? (230 points, 3 hours ago, 298 comments, and already on page 4)

<comment><USER62> #290 6 hours later. This must have been down-modded. Before we ascribe political intent, however, consider that they may downmod controversial posts regardless of political leaning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I'm very sad to see this happening to a great company like google. I first encountered the new culture at Google I/O extended event I attended a few months ago. It disturbed me very deeply but I couldn't figure out exactly why since I didn't actually disagree with anything that the diversity proponents wanted to achieve. I've had some time to process it though, and here's the deeper issue that I find so disturbing about what seems to be happening at google ...

How we habitually respond to "uncomfortable situations" in life matters a great deal. As individuals, it strongly influences our trajectory in life. In companies, the predominant tendency strongly influences the trajectory of the company.

One option is to habitually respond by "getting curious" and by "identifying that part of our predictive model of the world which is weak and seeking to understand the situation more deeply with the intent of strengthening our predictive model." When we choose this option we tend to want to listen intently to those who believe differently than us, to seek to understand the deeper needs that are driving them, and to strive to pursue win-win (or "positive sum") solutions to problems. The option tends to leads to a strengthening of "moonshot thinking" because our confidence in our ability to solve problems grows in direct proportion to the strength of our predictive model of the world.

Another option is to habitually respond by "being offended", "to sink into victimhood, powerlessness, learned helplessness", "dividing into us vs them", "initiating conflict", "appealing to authority to protect us from the threat of them". When we choose this option, we tend to disconnect from those who believe differently than us, to be unaware of the deeper needs that are driving their behavior, and to sink into pursuing win-loss (or zero sum) solutions to our problems. This option tends to lead to a strengthening of a downward spiral of "victimhood thinking" which decreases our confidence in our ability to solve difficult problems by skillful means.

edited: What I find so tragic about this is ... we have 7.5 billion minds in this world growing ever more connected to each other and to vast sums of knowledge by the internet. From a first principles perspective these minds represent more than enough resources to solve the most challenging problems that affect us all. If we would only fight each other with win-loss intent LESS and instead direct our aggression towards solving the difficult important problems that affect us all, we could solve these difficult problems so much more quickly. Why would we choose waste time fighting each other, when we could, for example, be building a piece of the puzzle that helps researchers cure the leukemia that my friend's young son was just diagnosed with? Why would we make that choice?

Presumably this was the hope of the google founders who established the mission of "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible."?

I propose that >the tendency to "get offended" and "seek win-loss" solutions to problems should be targeted for extermination. We are better than this. > the tendency to "get curious" and find "win-win" solutions should to take its place.

</comment><comment><USER68> I believe the gap is more cultural-made than sex-made. Basically there are the same differences of capabilities between two random males and between a random male and a random female.

<comment><USER30> If you are talking about IQ the data would support you, the problem comes when you look at standard deviation and we see men have a slightly higher standard deviation which leads to the extremes on both sides being overwhelmingly male. It's not something we need to worry about much in day to day interactions because you wont notice it but in hyper selective environments it might become an something people notice.

<comment><USER68> How do we now this isn't something that is being caused due to the female being suppressed in our history? This studies are biased due to the fact that females haven't been treated equally for centuries and this affects on how the female see the world, affecting the real purpose of the study.

It's like taking a male that you have treated emotionally bad and you tell him thru all his life he can't do this and that and a male where you tell him he must be strong, he must do this and that. Boths are males and I bet you will find the same differences between these two males and between a male and a female.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> The first ever computer programmers were women.Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, etc did pioneering work in the field. Women can absolutely be great programmers.

</comment><comment><USER70> Wow, refreshing. The truth will set you free.

</comment><comment><USER71> It seems that my receiving my SWE Lifetime Member pin about a week ago is a bit fortuitous.

</comment><comment><USER72> Wow, I didn't know I could cringe that much in such a short time.

<comment><USER45> The only thing cringe worthy IMO was that he didn't appear to cite any studies or data to back up his claims. Or did that publication of the document omit things like that? If he had done so, would it still be cringe worthy?

<comment><USER73> From Gizmodo's summary:

> Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.

I'm guessing the author did link to studies (or at least summaries of studies), but these were removed by Gizmodo or the leaker.

<comment><USER45> Yes. I'm seeing now many reports that the Gizmodo publication, which was billed as the "full 10-page" memo, was, in fact, abridged and omitted links to data that the author had cited to support his arguments.

Very disingenuous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> This guy claims that women are more neurotic and talkative than men; and that they prefer thinking about aesthetics; and that women are more "cooperative."

The subtext is that this is the reason we shouldn't support women becoming software engineers.

Uggghhh.

<comment><USER75> You either fail at reading comprehension or you are being dishonest.

Nowhere does the author say we "shouldn't support women becoming software engineers". His argument is simply that women are, on average, less inclined to become software engineers because of innate psychological differences, which explains the unbalanced gender ratio in tech. He suggests we should stop all forms of "positive" discrimination in the form of employment quotas that are aimed to correct the gender imbalance, and instead select individuals based on their merit.

<comment><USER38> > employment quotas that are aimed to correct the gender imbalance, and > instead select individuals based on their merit.

That is itself misrepresentative enough that your own snark about reading comprehension or dishonesty rebounds on you. Quotas aren't the issue. Echo Chamber Guy is railing against _all_ measures to increase diversity, including many that would _improve_ the correlation between merit and hiring/promotion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> As a former Googler: dude is _so_ getting fired and blacklisted. I've seen people driven out just for saying someone else looks good in a bathing suit. Not a direct or indirect report, mind you, a person completely outside the chain of command, at a team event in (IIRC) Hawaii. A small minority of people takes victim mentality and makes it near religious internal dogma. The rest just go along with it due to fat paychecks and the lack of desire to get fired for not being PC enough.

<comment><USER77> > I've seen people driven out just for saying someone else looks good in a > bathing suit.

understandably, as that is extremely unprofessional and sexual harassment

<comment><USER78> Your comment was one of the points argued in the memo.

It's important to understand and prioritize intention or else: > _increases [in our] our sensitivity, which is not universally positive: sensitivity increases both our tendency to take offense and our self censorship, leading to authoritarian policies._

This means distinguishing between a well-meaning comment and a maleficent or predatory remark.

<comment><USER77> your intentions don't excuse inappropriate behavior.

if you really didn't intend to say something that made someone feel disrespected, your response should be "Oh, I am so sorry, I won't make that kind of comment in the future", not "Well you're wrong for being offended." that kind of response is basically saying "your feelings don't matter, all that matters is what is going on in my head and not what I actually did and how it actually made you feel"

<comment><USER78> Intent is vital in the deliverance and sentencing of criminals (as well as severity).

You'll find that the U.S.A's EEOC does not label one-off remarks as sexual harassment.[0]

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_harassment#EEOC_Definit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_harassment#EEOC_Definition)

<comment><USER79> There's a difference between "sexual harassment" and "sexual harassment to a level that's criminal". I think it's reasonable to say that something is simultaneously inappropriate at work _and_ not something you should be arrested for.

<comment><USER78> Is the primary authority's (EEOC) definition of sexual harassment: _It is unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person's sex. Harassment can include "sexual harassment" or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature._ [0]

And is the primary authority's (EEOC) definition of harassment in general: _Offensive conduct may include, but is not limited to, offensive jokes, slurs, epithets or name calling, physical assaults or threats, intimidation, ridicule or mockery, insults or put-downs, offensive objects or pictures, and interference with work performance._ [1]

Neither of which make the remark in-question constitute of sexual harassment or harassment in-general. I'm sure there is a proper word that accurately describes unwanted remarks about a person's body, but by calling it sexual harassment you are marginalizing the serious cases of sexual harassment that fit under the legal definition.

[0][https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm](https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm) [1][https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/harassment.cfm](https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/harassment.cfm)

<comment><USER79> Mind you, by that definition it's easy to construe it as borderline "unwelcome sexual advances" or "verbal harassment of a sexual nature".

That said, I acknowledge it's very situational whether something might be read as unwelcome. Which is why avoiding these things in a professional context seems pretty wise.

Anyway, since we're replying here to door's comment... I think they're right regardless of whether we want to call it "sexual harassment". If you offend someone in a way which feels creepy / harassing to them, even assuming that you _absolutely_ meant it in a non-sexual non-flirtatious entirely-platonic matter, your should apologize, maybe clarify your intentions, and say you'll do better in the future. Attempting to argue that you didn't mean it that way so they shouldn't be offended is counterproductive.

<comment><USER78> I agree with you there. If someone unintentionally offends another, an apology, followed up with extras (e.g clarification) where needed, is the correct course of action.

My only gripe was with semantics, which have the potential to do more harm than good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> > internal meme network

i really want to believe that at Google there is a massive distributed cluster dedicated solely to facilitating meme throughput

<comment><USER81> There most likely is, I know an engineer that works on it.

Apparently they were one of the teams piloting Tensorflow for Android...have no idea why though....

<comment><USER82> Sometimes the best places to swing for the fences, technologically, are places far away from the core business, where the impact of a half-baked idea is minimal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How is it sexual?

<comment><USER77> straight men commenting on the attractiveness of women's bodies is pretty blatantly sexual. what other reason is there to make that kind of comment? "pure aesthetics"? like Wow Jessica from accounting's body is consistent with Greek Ideals about Archetypal Female Beauty. come on.

<comment><USER31> Commenting on someone's bathing suit is not inherently sexual, because we do it in non-sexual contexts; for example, I complemented my nephiew's new swim trunks earlier this summer.

A particular complement might be sexual, but we shouldn't assume that. For all we know, the guy is gay, and we are now discriminating against that.

Furthermore, commenting directly on the awesomeness of someone else's body is also not inherently sexual. Have you never admired a female athlete, the way you admire a male athelete?

<comment><USER77> >Furthermore, commenting directly on the awesomeness of someone else's body is also not sexual. Have you never admired a femal athlete, the way you admire a male athelete?

I am bisexual so the analogy doesn't quite work lol. and yes sometimes that can be non-sexual, but a workplace is not a place to make those kinds of comments because it is a VERY thin line and can easily make someone uncomfortable. and 99% of the time men commenting on women's bodies is sexual or has sexual undertones so it's really a corner case here. when's the last time you heard a straight man say something like "wow she always has super cool outfits and I love what she does with her makeup" or whatever lol.

<comment><USER29> > 99% of the time men commenting on women's bodies is sexual or has sexual > undertones

Stereotyping is ok, as long as we do it for the right reasons!

> when's the last time you heard a straight man say something like "wow she > always has super cool outfits and I love what she does with her makeup" or > whatever lol.

The same time the same straight men wasn't called sexual harasser for such comment. So you basically say "men complimenting women coworkers are sexual harassers" and then ask "why don't men compliment women coworkers more in non- sexual context?". I hope you can see a case of circular reasoning here.

<comment><USER77> no i made a distinction between commenting on the attractiveness of a woman's body and something that is purely aesthetic and non-sexual (clothing and makeup)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> "Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently."

As an experiment, I'd like to see if HN upvotes or downvotes this statement from the memo.

I'm willing to put my karma score on the line to find out what HNers believe (this will help me decide if HN is a community worth investing further time in).

<comment><USER82> You might be getting downvoted by people who don't like this kind of experiment. Or your use of scare quotes or something. I'm not sure you can draw a lot of conclusions from the score on your post.

But, yes, most of the HN community lives in a bubble. If we're honest, we all do, but people who take pride on their education and intelligence are especially challenged when finding that kind of humility.

<comment><USER83> Good points. I have removed the scare quotes (not intended as such)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Yonatan Zunger, a (recently departed) distinguished engineer at Google, wrote a very good response: [https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this- googlers-man...](https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers- manifesto-1e3773ed1788)

<comment><USER84> chroma's summary above does a much better job understanding the manifesto than that medium post imo (cf [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14938457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14938457) ). Yonatan just hones in on that one botched idea and then berates the author for the rest of the post.

<comment><USER44> Chroma's summary is a "charitable interpretation" (his words), and shouldn't be considered necessarily accurate or representative of the manifesto author's intent. A straight faced reading of it yields something not nearly as constructive as what Chroma presented.

Yonatan isn't simply berating the author. He's explaining in detail why the manifesto is problematic in many ways that have to do with context and circumstance. What the author presents as ideological intolerance, Yonatan describes as the host of practical considerations to running a business and a workplace that, one suspects, the author wouldn't have a problem with if he weren't feeling constrained.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Wow, this paper is a textbook example of begging the question. The author makes a number of completely unfounded generalizations about women and men, then goes on to use those as a basis for protesting against Google's corporate diversity programs.

I wonder if the author would like to keep walking out on his very weak limb, and claim that African-Americans are under-represented in tech because of their genetic characteristics.

</comment><comment><USER86> Also ridiculously racist. Really!

Amidst his rambling "evolutionary psychology" argument concerning the gender gap he also protests racial diversity programs.[1] And his explanation for that? Are black people also bad at programming because of evolution? It's buried here:

"Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., _IQ_ and sex differences)." (emphasis mine)

So non-whites are doing worse in engineering because they're dumber, according to science. Seriously, does dressing these views up in pseudo-academic prose make them any less racist?

[1] "Stretch, BOLD, CSSI, Engineering Practicum (to an extent), and several other Google funded internal and external programs are for people with a certain gender or race"

<comment><USER87> I can't speak for software engineers as I'm not really one myself, but I have seen evidence that guys in the development and IT fields are legitimately _scared_ of interacting with women and in the process violating some rule they didn't know of [0]. Reality may be different from what they perceive, the but point is that some men do actually perceive this "threat". The motivations of this internal letter, whatever they are, seem to be almost certainly highly emotional.

Whenever a difficult, nuanced topic like the one HN is discussing here comes up, its important to consider the medium by which all of us are communicating. Your quote with emphasis added is a perfect example: it may have been something this particularly frustrated individual threw out without much thought (the entire letter going public at all shows a lack of thought), but it could very well have been dog-whistling to racists.

The thing is, we can't know. Unless we're in a forum (in the Socratic sense) where thoughts can be clarified, I propose we take things at their face value. That's all we can confidently do.

[0]:[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664)</comment></comment>


Modern JavaScript tooling is too complicated? - <AUTHOR> https://changelog.com/jsparty/89 <comment><USER2> Yes, but if only the tooling was too complicated, it would not be too bad. IMAO the entire front-end JS world is one big pile of MISERY, complicated is not the word or the problem at all.

Not 1 year you can write the same kind of code (professionally), every month new libraries you have to use, always a new framework or cloud service on the horizon, always a new hype in the making. And if all the new things in the JS world would be great solutions it could be awesome (maybe). But the reality learns that it only gets more complex and tiresome every day. Juggling with design patterns, not because they are a better solution than the design pattern you were using before, no, it's because some famous JS artist came up with an 'idea' and the entire JS herd is following it blindly. Think you can still write in the old fashion? Nope, PR declined! You protest? Beware of the company politics, the herd always wins.

Oh btw, I guess the title is inappropriate, JS is deprecated, it's Typescript now! Not sure for how long, but the jobs where you can write JS are disappearing. So web developers are now forced to write in another language, with all it's brand new issues and pain points. Nice! Did I have problems with types in JS? Hardly, but that doesn't count, I now write about 20% more code to get the same result and regularly spend a few hours to get a basic line of code working because the TS compiler complains. It goes on and on, really, unbelievable.. Web development took all the love I had for programming away.. And I acknowledge it is a great recipe for burn-out, if you fancy that.

I originally came from C++ and recently went back to it after 8 years of web development. I totally unexpected rediscovered my joy for programming. I can code things again that actually work and are understandable, without all those black boxes of magic that are pure hell when something goes wrong. I gave up on it, it's not for me.. But still, I can imagine when you're young you can kind of enjoy the JS(TS) world with all those new and exiting things.

<comment><USER3> Also originally from C++, now been working with the likes of React for about five years. After grappling with Redux, React Router, Immutable, Typescript, Flow Typing and a hundred other libraries, my solution was to go back to basics: build applications with vanilla JS, using a bare minimum of libraries and a lot of standard browser APIs. In my case, basically React only. How do I do client-side routing? addEventListener('hashchange'). Type safety? Unit tests. Mapping actions to components? onClick: dispatch(new CustomEvent('foo')) etc.

Edit: Parcel for module bundling and transpile, but I'm waiting for JS native modules. Eventually React too, will go away in favor of Web Components.

<comment><USER4> That speaks a lot towards React - it's "the basics" now. It's basically supplanting what Jquery was known for.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree, but that it's "the basics" _now_.

I remember a time when jQuery was considered so standard that every StackOverflow question about "How do I X in JS?" had as the top voted answer "Use $X() in jQuery". All that accumulated knowledge is now essentially a graveyard. I feel React too will be supplanted by something more closer to a WHATWG standard in the future.

<comment><USER5> But jQuery was just syntactic sugar on top of a broken API. For all intents and purposes, React _fixes_ HTML and DOM. The reason we _have_ such complexity in the front end these days is because _we can_. We've eschewed all the bullshitty parts of web development (global styling, unpredictable browser APIs, hand-holding DOM through complex interactions) and opened ourselves up to actually writing applications.

The problem, as I see it, is front end developers are still expected to churn out features like they used to in large scale organizations, but we've matured as developers. It's no longer throw a .js file, a .css file and an .html file at a browser and woo hoo you have a site. It requires more time and bootstrapping, but the promise is code that breaks less often and is easier to maintain. It also means we have front end developers that are now specialists in different facets of frontend, such as builds, data layer, typing, feature development and framework design. Notice these are meta jobs.

In order to meet the demands put upon us by our former velocity, we often have to resign ourselves to blackbox libraries and such, which don't always contribute positively to one's stack. Just today we ditched a node module we'd been using because the owner refused to update it. We should be building more internally than we do.

<comment><USER6> Building your own frameworks and libraries is always a minefield. Too often I've seen it done badly.

Unless you're a big company best to use what's already out there if you can reasonably

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use server side generated HTML pages with progressive enhancement using JQuery (I prefere it to plain Javascript). Not complicated and works very well.

Of course this is not popular/cool, though.

<comment><USER8> It's not complicated because you're not doing anything complicated with it.

<comment><USER9> In practice, a lot of complexity in front-end development comes because front- end developers only solve problems by adding layers of abstraction, never removing them.

Like, in vanilla JavaScript, you have a single global tree representing the state (the DOM), and you write event handlers that manipulate that tree. But that isn't a good fit for every use case, so you introduce React, which encapsulates all your functionality into components.

But that turns out not to be a good fit for every use case, so you add a state-management library like Redux on top. With Redux, you have a single global tree representing your state (the Redux store), and you write actions that manipulate it.

Congratulations, you are now back where you started, but you've introduced two third-party library dependencies (probably more, if your libraries need separate adapter libraries to work with one another) and a bunch of overhead and complexity.

See also: client-side navigation. "Pages on my website load slowly because the browser has to run all the JavaScript I wrote. How can I solve this? Oh I know, even more JavaScript!"

<comment><USER10> Are you proposing using the DOM for state management? (of data, not document elements)?

<comment><USER11> Why not storing local state in the components themselves? Why do you need global state management at all, except for the very rare cases in which many totally unrelated components need to tap into the data?

<comment><USER12> Because some complex application have multitude of variables that need to be passed along various components and that's exactly what is doing redux. In these cases it is much simpler to work with the tools that the community built, and as soon as you actually understand how redux and connect work, you are usually rather happy about what it does for you.

<comment><USER11> Yes. I think that some applications, with multitudes of variables that need to be shared between unrelated components, will benefit from a store that manages _only_ those variables.

For all the other cases, I don't see any reason to use one, and my experience of the same application developed, by different people, with and without a reactive store, tells me that the solutions without a store are generally much simpler and look way more maintainable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Webpack is a _godsend_. Do you not remember Gulp?

Or....Gradle...?

Modern JS is a dream to work with. The days of pre-transpilation and modularization with hundreds of script tags and giant IIFE's and worrying about cross-browser was a total mess. It finally feels like the web has matured as an application platform and I've been waiting for this day for a long time.

<comment><USER14> I could understand what was going on before transpilation. There was just Javascript, and while some functions might not exist in different browsers, the core was the same.

Now I have to figure out the difference between: 'umd', 'commonjs', 'esnext', 'es2015', 'es2018', and a whole bunch more.

I don't want to keep up with JS politics just to be able to develop with the latest version.

<comment><USER15> Just about the time Chrome and Firefox came out with working debuggers for JavaScript, everybody rushed onto non-debuggable bandwagons, so we're back to the bad old days of using "alert" to debug...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Blanket statements about "web development" are not reasonable to make because there's such a wide variety of applications.

Is using TypeScript, Webpack, React, and 20 other external libraries "too complicated" for a static marketing site? Probably. For a 200,000 LOC complex productivity tool? Probably not.

<comment><USER17> Seriously, it's just poor professional discretion. I work on a cross-browser multimedia sequencer, no fucking way you're hand writing all necessary DOM management code. You absolutely need React for that to prevent that kind of shit show. This custom video player project the team got assigned? Probably can write those on our own. To be fair though, framework and library marketing tends to be fairly disinterested in talking about suitable and unsuitable problem cases. I don't think that's completely intentional, but front-end tends to have more engineers with non-CS and other untraditional software education backgrounds in situations where they feel pressure to "get shit done"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A lot of people complaint about Webpack.

But most other languages only provides up to Grunt and Gulp equivalent, namely Gradle, Fake etc.

As who had maintained large Gulp scripts, those Scripts would eventually become a huge pile of non-standard and ad-hoc scripts.

Webpack is complicated, I admit. But it's much better than Gulp I my experience, so why is everyone complaining?

It turns out the problem Webpack or JavaScript solves are more complex than other language solves. JavaScript is the center of the Web, you cannot expect let CSS bundling itself, so do images and fonts. Let alone compression, prefixing, and giving fonts and stuff size thresholds to in-line them in JavaScript.

There would definitely better tools in the future like Parcel and Pika are trying but the problem doesn't go away.

I'm looking forward to see other languages facing the same issue in WASM age.

</comment><comment><USER19> JavaScript itself has a complicated, hairy history. It's hard to write a single line of code without wondering, must I query [https://caniuse.com](https://caniuse.com) to be sure this API is supported by all of my organization's targeted browsers? It shouldn't be all that surprising, that in order to rectify the lack of parity, we have to accept come additional levels of complexity in our tooling.

Sure, I could import all of corejs and call it a day. Everything would be polyfilled, but then I'd be wasting precious bytes and negatively impacting page load times. Some will even say the concern is no more than bikeshedding. But if you give little thought to bundle optimization, your carelessness will add up, and materially impact TTFB. It's a death by a thousand cuts.

My personal answer is no. Whether it's Stockholm Syndrome or not, you can conquer the complexities of shipping web applications written in modern JavaScript.

Becoming aware of the nuances has made me a stronger developer. Developing a deep understanding of polyfills, bundlers, transpilers, module formats (CJS, SystemJS, UMD, ES Module) and which browsers support which APIs has made led to me being more thoughtful in the code that I write. For people just looking to solve a business problem, without understanding the more tedious parts of JavaScript, it absolutely is too complicated for them. I empathize. But if you want to be a skilled front-end software engineer, it's in your interest to tackle these tools with some zeal.

<comment><USER20> > But if you want to be a skilled front-end software engineer, it's in your > interest to tackle these tools with some zeal.

I guess what we are saying is that there must be a better, not yet invented way to do frontend, without having to deal with this huge complexity that is unique to this specific field.

<comment><USER19> You can make it zero-config, polyfill everything, apply all babel plugins so everything is transpiled to support IE 7, for all you care.

But everyone has different needs. So tools like Babel and Webpack allow you to pick-and-choose what polyfills and transpilations are necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seeing a lot of hate here for modern JS workflows. The truth is you can make a mess no matter what ecosystem you buy into. I've encountered some absolute trash fires of complexity in Java, PHP, C, and (yes) Javascript code bases. They all suffered from the same problem: lack of communication and planning. This is a framework agnostic problem IMHO.

<comment><USER3> Different perspective: In Java, PHP and C (I've worked with each), comes very close to "no assembly required" to get a simple project running: install, write code, optionally compile and then run. In JS, unless you're doing vanilla JS, you need to select and bolt together a lot of different third party tooling first, or you have to use a boilerplate, of which there are many versions to choose from.

<comment><USER22> I see you've never developed in Java if you think that comes 'no assembly required".

<comment><USER23> definitely - having recently started working in Java it's far from "no assembly required" for certain things but feels _much_ more sane the types of problems I'd encounter in web/mobile dev land

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there transcript for the hearing impaired? Otherwise people are just going to respond to the title.

<comment><USER25> Not sure it would help as:

 _" it's 1v1v1 with Mikeal reppin' team Yep, Divya on team Nope, and Feross sitting in the middle on team It Depends."_

That is, the transcript, if it existed, is just 3 people reacting to the title.

<comment><USER26> Thanks, you saved me 20 minutes :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hope someone pointed out that it's legacy JavaScript that's too complicated. Very modern JavaScript is quite a bit _less_ complicated.

<comment><USER28> IMO, there are two big problems with Javascript:

\- there are too many ways to do something: it's hard to understand patterns (they change with every framework, for example), many different standards that aren't compatible with each other.

\- javascript delays failure and fails silently: it makes software prone to bugs as well and it also makes the language hard to debug.

NodeJS, npm, yarn, millions of frameworks and libs just add complexity to the language.

<comment><USER29> All of this can be addressed with best practices. Just enforcing lint rules can mitigate the majority of your complaints. Flow and Typescript can take that even further. Webpack will streamline your process.

My primary complaint would be that working in Javascript is absurdly difficult for the beginner. It's ridiculously hard to understand the fundamentals when they have been a moving target since the early 2000's.

<comment><USER30> _All of this can be addressed with best practices_

The problem is that "best practices" changes every day, and from one employer or team to another.

<comment><USER31> I don't agree with this. Over the last few years I've watched the JS universe coalesce largely around three points:

\- Structural, optional typing is good. Use it. TypeScript seems to have de facto "won", but _just use something_ ; the very act of thinking about input and output types tends towards better code and you always have the flexibility, within your module boundaries, to go outside the type system if need be.

\- Structured, functional-or-mostly-so view libraries make your system less fragile. Use them. React, Vue, whatever. They discourage your developers from making tag soup; this is a good enough reason. (Yes, there are some people on the "vanilla JS" train, but there are reasons it's a minority group--it's harder, you run the very real risk of making a worse thing, and there's less out there to bail you out if you get yourself into a corner.)

\- Do the work up front: lint aggressively, format consistently, run coverage tests, and so on. It's an investment in correct code, and get in the habit early.

What you use matters less in putting into effect good practices. Why you use it and what they do matter much more.

<comment><USER32> I'm afraid the "javascript sucks" meme has taken hold. The infection is terminal now. At least, in the minds of most developers judging web development from the outside.

<comment><USER31> I mean, from the outside I get it. For a _very_ long time I avoided frontend jobs because JavaScript _did_ suck. And I'd say that JavaScript-as-it-was--not writing ES6, not polyfilling browsers, not using a sane framework--sucks today.

These days I write pretty exclusively NestJS serverside and React/React Native on clients, using TypeScript through the whole stack and Swagger-generated clients for plumbing, and it definitely no longer sucks. But I had to 1) have a reason to get into it, and 2) spend a _ton_ of effort to weld together a consistent environment that values developer time.

There probably _is_ too much nonsense going on at any one point in the JavaScript ecosystem. I mostly work in infrastructure/devops roles, where it's just expected that you know ten thousand little things that are arbitrary and stupid but will eventually bite you; having to hold an entire stack in my head and understand how to pivot and manipulate it is kind of what I do everyday, but it's not a standard programmer skill. If you don't have somebody who can do that--and it's a mixture of human communication and empathy, technical skill, and a certain kind of technical taste, so it's not as common as one might like--I still, today, see why somebody might say that JavaScript sucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Honestly. I used to build the buildmaster for Ant builds back in the day. They could actually be quite incredibly elegant (if you used Ant-contrib). The reason was actually a lack of magic. SURE, ant was very verbose compared to modern build systems, but it did a lot of things relatively straightforward. You invoke tools in the chain you want.

Today it is very different. There is a huge chain of auto-wiring tools with very cryptic error messages. To just build a basic ES6 javascript webpack project with React I need over 800 libraries, many of which are automagically invoked via convention.

I literally have no idea what my build does, and hope my lucky underwear actually works today. Most of the time I am browsing through weird bug reports trying random snippets on the internet because there's no sane way to debug anything.

So the point is, explicit is a huge virtue. It is code you can trace and debug. Sure it adds a bit of time, but it is time up front that saves A LOT down stream. Meanwhile today's tools are built to save time up front and waste time downstream. You either follow the exact formula the original developers wanted or you're shit out of luck.

</comment><comment><USER17> Everything terrible about the front-end is a consequence of scale and demand for warm bodies pumping out code that targets the world's largest networked application runtime: upper- and middle-management everywhere exerting downward pressure to ship for the cheapest rates facilitating code bootcamps, etc to pump out more non-traditional CS educated labor, meaning less shared generational communal knowledge that normally standardizes names for things like patterns, etc. Devs are thus even more interchangeable and we see less opportunity for mentoring, yet another means of transferring generational knowledge (and software engineering is _not_ a science), and people regularly leaving companies after 1 - 5 years. None of this really has anything to do with the question of whether JS tooling is too complicated save for the implication that professional _discretion_ has less and less reason to be cultivated - grab a framework/library and glue it together to meet the deadline that isn't a deadline but it's actually a deadline

</comment><comment><USER34> Most young Javascript devs have no experience of hacking "DHTML" for Netscape Navigator and sundry incompatible versions of IE back in the late 90s. That was the real low point of front-end development. Nothing comes close to those life-sapping days so enjoy the immense resources you have today, particularly evergreen browsers following a standard.

<comment><USER35> And yet, with a little thought, we could use those hard-won compatible apis more directly, and for the vast majority of websites, write less code, configuration, etc.

But we still act as though the very basic DOM functionality is some arcane art that has to be "fixed" by a library like jQuery, or as is more common now, an entire stack of large tools.

Having done paid work with React-stack apps, and personal projects with vanilla JS, I still see more advantage with less code on the vanilla side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I agree that a lot of mainstream tooling and frameworks are too complicated.

But there are simple tools out there for building your typical business applications. Stateful apps with NodeRun.com ([https://noderun.com/docs/concepts/stateful- apps](https://noderun.com/docs/concepts/stateful-apps)) make development similar to what VB used to be like back in the day (but for JavaScript). There is a Visual drag-and-drop designer for the UI and inherent database integration. I find that building normal database-driven apps is 10x easier compared to rolling your own HTML, CSS, React, Angular, Express, etc.

</comment><comment><USER37> No more than you choose to make it over complicated.

</comment><comment><USER38> The answer is simple: Don't use a tool if the benefit doesn't outweigh the cost. Also, only use tools that are "market leaders" in their segment. So that there will be plenty of fixes/tutorials/help available to get you over bumps on the road.

</comment><comment><USER39> Javascript libraries are good at creating problems other than problem solving.</comment>