Comment by jjirsa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjirsa | Hacker News Reader

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I find this to be well written:

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

Notably:

1) The document makes a fundamentally flawed argument - that is, he's based his whole argument on a flawed premise that women just aren't interested in being engineers (and it's clearly wrong, because gender ratios were nearly identical until about the mid 80s; it's not a biological difference, it's a social and cultural difference, which means it has a social and cultural solution). Biological traits vary between genders, but the variance is TINY for most that aren't physical (strength, etc).

2) Even if he were right about men and women being biologically prone to certain traits, those he attributed to women tend to make them better engineers (and especially better engineering managers) anyway.

3) The document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, which makes it impossible for this person to be an effective member of the team. The next time a woman interviews for his team, and he votes against hiring, how does the hiring committee interpret that vote? The next time he's peer reviewed by a woman, how does that review get interpreted? The next time he peer reviews a woman, how does that review get interpreted? The next time a female candidate interviews with the author and is denied, how likely is it that the candidate will believe they had a fair interview, or is the organiation perpetually exposed to increased legal risk forever? Such a manifesto is toxic and shows a profound lack of awareness for any professional.

1. I could not find the source stating that gender ratios were identical before the 80's in engineering. I do know that there used be a more even ratio of male/female programmers but I think the field has changed enough from those times that I would be wary of anyone claiming to make an apples to apples comparison.

2.His points about what makes a good engineering manager skips over the fact that to get good at engineering you have to practice it a lot. You have to spend a significant amount of time alone coding/engineering to grasp well enough that understanding the customer starts mattering a lot more. The guy that wrote the post seems to come from a perspective of so much experience and talent that he forgot or perhaps doesn't even know how hard it is go get started in the field.

3. I think the part about alienating women comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the manifesto and probability in general. Saying that women in general are less interested or less capable to be a google enginner says essentially nothing about the individuals before you. Trying to infer qualities of an individual from a distribution is racism but making statements about distributions shouldn't be. You can only talk about the whole distribution of google employees and perhaps justify(or fail to justify) the imbalance. Obviously, being a google employee is a much more informative prior than the gender of an individual.

>I think the part about alienating women comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the manifesto and probability in general

And yet empirically, women have been alienated.

> I do know that there used be a more even ratio of male/female programmers but I think the field has changed enough from those times that I would be wary of anyone claiming to make an apples to apples comparison

Yea, it's gotten a lot easier, a lot less rigorous. Problems hadn't been solved, nobody even knew if things WERE possible (let alone how to do them), and they certainly didn't have stackoverflow to go ask for help when they got stuck. Now that you mention it, perhaps you've figured it out - maybe all the women engineers have moved on to harder, more interesting endeavors.

> You have to spend a significant amount of time alone coding/engineering to grasp well enough that understanding the customer starts mattering a lot more

There is never a requirement that you have to code in isolation. Period. Paragraph. End of story. This is a fiction. Nobody should EVER code in a bubble, and especially not junior engineers.

> I think the part about alienating women comes from a fundamental misunderstanding

Nope. It comes from reading.

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