House of Eratosthenes

The background is that a senior engineer at Google contributed this 10-page “manifesto” to an inside-company group discussion of diversity efforts. Those of us who have worked in tech for a few years, who happen to be six-foot-tall straight white males with nothing interesting about their personal attributes, understand these efforts to artificially embiggen the proportional representation of said interesting personal attributes within the ranks of engineering talent. Need more chicks! It has nothing at all to do with getting the job done, but management keeps getting hung up on it. Well…any engineer who’s worth a damn is going to take note of which solutions DON’T work, in addition to the ones that do, and these “diversity” efforts don’t bring any positive results. It’s just year after year of “still inadequate female representation on our teams, we have to up the diversity” or something. Translation: There is institutionalized sexism somewhere, the stats speak for themselves, we have to work harder at getting rid of it.

So those who actually want to justify their plush engineering paychecks are put in an awkward position: They have to show good engineering discipline day-to-day, and bad discipline when management tells them, “We’re all going to work a lot harder at this drive that hasn’t offered any positive results.” And, pile on with a rash assumption that the stats must manifest prejudice. Somewhere.

Well, the engineer WENT THERE. No, he did not say the chicks are naturally unqualified or under-qualified to do engineering work. You might have heard that. You can see from looking at the document yourself that it’s a deliberate lie. There are many others being told. Anyway, what he did say is what people who’ve looked into it awhile, by which I mean more than a few minutes, know already. The chicks just don’t wanna do it. Figuring this out is not hard, since the alternative would have to be, there’s a huge glut of chicks wanting engineering jobs and their applications are being ritually blocked or turned away at some point in the pipeline. Well, where’s the glut? And where’s the blockage? Can you imagine the job of hiding such a restrictive device, in this climate…or being the device, the manager who says “no chicks on my team”?

When, all this guy did was talk about it. Oh yeah. Continuing with the background — he is fired. Oh, so fired. But if you haven’t been living under a rock, you know that already.

About the most offensive thing the guy actually did say was where he said women are, on average, more emotional. It’s true, but I try to avoid saying things like that because we live in an age wherein men are acting more like women. Nevertheless, even this was given some strong backing by real-life events when it emerged that female employees at Google were skipping work because they were so traumatized by his memo. Those who defend the firing, point to this “trauma” done to the fairer sex within Google’s workforce, as evidence that the company made the right decision. Had they taken no action, so the argument goes, the female employees could have sued due to the hostile work environment.

The other piece I linked up above, the one that substantiates the points that chicks don’t want to do engineering, falls back on this point as well: The REASON they don’t want to do it, is men make the workplace so uncomfortable. With all our awful presumptions that women don’t know tech, and stuff…

This whole thing has really made me think hard about my own career. I’ve been at this thirty years. Nearly forty, man & boy, if you count the “work” I did before I was getting paid to do it…well, let’s just count the actual work. What I’ve realized is that, as a six-foot straight white male, I’m really not completely comfortable in my job. I wasn’t comfortable in my last one. Or the one before that, or the one before that, or the one before that…anyplace I picked up a paycheck, I never was absolutely comfortable. Nor did I expect to be. After all, I was being paid to be there.

From whence arises this expectation that a workplace should be comfortable? And if it isn’t, you can sue? Oh yeah right. Lawyers.

Well, it’s wrong.

It’s just as wrong as the other flawed premise, the one Mr. Damore was targeting in his memo, that if female representation is not up to par then it must mean something is wrong with the environment. It could very well mean your environment’s just fine. You could be looking at — you probably ARE looking at — the end result of people being able to choose what they want to do in life, based on how much personal fulfillment they get from doing it, and yes, how reliably they can deliver what’s needed.

Mr. Damore’s memo is called “Google’s ideological echo chamber”…and, he was fired for writing it. His own sacking proves the truth of what he wrote, because he got fired for saying the wrong things. Nevermind whether I like it or not, or you like it or not…it’s simply unworkable.

“We have to do whatever it takes to up the female representation in our engineering teams, so SPEAK FREELY! All ideas welcome!’

“Women and men are the same, and don’t you say anything different or we’ll fire you.”

“Women are the true source of creativity and we need their participation…don’t say anything different or we’ll fire you.”

…pick ANY TWO.

If you insist on maintaining all three, as Google did and continues to do, and many other tech companies continue to do, then what you have is…drum roll please. A hostile work environment. An environment in which people of all demographic make-ups can continue to survive ONLY by avoiding the subject entirely. Or, by lying.

Or, by avoiding it just selectively…which is really the same thing as lying.

The Simpsons really nailed it. “Just tell me what to say!”

I hope people who consider themselves to be “centrists” are watching this very carefully. So many of them are hardcore liberals, and don’t even realize it. I’ve said before a few times that when the difference between conservatives & liberals is most starkly defined, it’s when each side is opining about the cause of human behavior…conservatives say it’s incentives, liberals say it’s enviornment. There should be overlap between the two, since the environment drives incentive. But THERE. IS. NO. OVERLAP. None here.

Liberals want to think it’s all got to do with the environment, because it gives them an excuse to twiddle with it. Oh, make this rule here, oh, eliminate that option over there, force people to do this thing, stop them from doing that thing…

Once you go down that road, you’re all-in whether you realize it or not. You have to ignore the incentives. Pretend they don’t exist.

Fire, or exclude or ostracize in some way, anyone who even thinks of mentioning it. “Chicks don’t wanna do it” is BadThink and not to be tolerated…even when the evidence supporting the contraband thought is, literally, everywhere.

Update 8/12/17: It’s become a full-time job just figuring out which article has something new to contribute…nevermind excerpting. A link round-up is the only way to go.

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2017/08/12/james-damore-was-right-the-inconvenient-truth-behind-the-google-memo-n2367631

Playing Into Every Female Stereotype, Women At Google Stay Home After Memo For Emotional Reasons

Google Can’t Seem to Tolerate Diversity

How Google Has Just Harmed Its Women Employees

Purge: Amid Leftist Fury, Google Fires Engineer Who Wrote Memo Criticizing Politically-Correct Groupthink

Jordan Peterson’s interview right after Mr. Damore put “his hand in a blender”:

It’s 1984 at Google: David Limbaugh. Handy, well-written summary of events, and this: “While constitutional issues may not be involved in the Google case because no state action is involved, moral shaming has become a chilling cudgel in the hands of leftist-dominated institutions.”

Diversity flaps are often manufactured: Jonah Goldberg. “It’s absolutely true that women were once blocked from many careers. But since those barriers were lifted, women have flooded into, or even have come to dominate, all manner of fields. Is it really plausible that sexism is the primary, never mind sole, explanation for female under-representation in computer science and engineering? …The issue here isn’t diversity, but conformity.”

By Firing the Google Memo Author, the Company Confirms His Thesis: “Of course, Google can take any political positions it likes. But its overwhelming power and reach into the everyday lives of so many Americans makes it a perfectly legitimate target for criticism.”

WSJ Best of the Web: Google’s Silent Majority: “There is no guarantee that the finalists and semifinalists of coding competitions will always want to work at Google. Perhaps the company should be focused on attracting and developing all kinds of employees, including non-leftists.”

I’ll say, in my 30 years of working, that I’ve never once seen a woman do the same amount of work as a man. I agree completely that they COULD do it. I’d never argue that there are things they can’t do as well, or even better. However, having said that, there is not a SINGLE job I have worked where the hardest-working female put out more than 90% of the output of the laziest male.

I’m sure there are “old-boy” work environments somewhere where a pompous ass has a bevy of beauties that he lords over and they do all the work and he reaps all the benefits, but it’s rare enough I’ve never seen it, and I’ve never encountered anyone who did. In all the places I’ve worked, the men have to put forth extra effort to make up for all the days off for parenting of the married girls (which is understandable), and extra effort for all the days off for excuses for the single girls, which usually translate into “partied too much/have hangover” or “just feel listless, going to claim female troubles,” or “want some free, paid time off, going to claim harassment.” The last one is rampant in today’s America. I’ve never had it happen to myself, but I’ve seen far too many innocent men punished because some lazy biddy feels like her 75% workload is too onerous.
- P_Ang | 08/10/2017 @ 07:34
90% of the output of the LAZIEST male?

I don’t know if I can go that far…males can be very lazy…
- mkfreeberg | 08/10/2017 @ 09:30
The “chicks are being kept out of STEM!” chestnut disappears in the same puff of logic as the “chicks are only paid 75 cents on the dollar!” chestnut. Really? You mean, I could hire this huge glut of top-tier engineering talent, AND make my company the darling of the Smart Set everywhere, AND take 25% off my overhead, at a single stroke? Sign me up!

Man, those eeeevil capitalists who only look at the bottom line — so much so that they’ll let orphans starve in the street without Healthcare(TM) if it’ll save ’em a buck — sure have missed a trick here.
- Severian | 08/10/2017 @ 09:59
“90% of the output of the LAZIEST male?
I don’t know if I can go that far…males can be very lazy…”

Well, ok, that also is subjective to what I’ve personally experienced. I’m sure in addition to “good ol’ boy” networks there are some damn lazy bastages out there. However, I do get very, VERY tired of doing extra “cover” work and then hearing about how I owe someone because they weren’t getting paid enough while I (and other like-gendered individuals) did most of their work for them.
- P_Ang | 08/10/2017 @ 10:56
“I don’t know if I can go that far…males can be very lazy…”
Speaking of which, Sev, it’s been like two weeks since your last RC post! What am I not paying you for?!
- P_Ang | 08/10/2017 @ 11:40
Sir, no excuse, sir!!

(unless you count laziness, illness, and not having much of anything to say).
- Severian | 08/10/2017 @ 12:54
[…] Any engineer who’s worth a damn is going to take note of which solutions DON’T work, in addition to the ones that do, and these “diversity” efforts don’t bring any positive results. House of Eratosthenes […]
- Satuday Review of the Labyrinth - American Digest | 08/12/2017 @ 09:36

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That Google MemoThursday, August 10th, 2017

That Google Memo
Thursday, August 10th, 2017