But this memo has dominated a lot of the internet that I use and figured surely someone has done the work to pull it apart.
I'm not going to read two books just to figure out some google guy's 10 page memo - call me lazy but perhaps nobody is going to read two books just for that purpose.
Well, if it's any consolation, I wouldn't read it for that either. The blog posts and memos do accumulate, though, and at some point it's worth it just to have the sources to refer back to.
The is Google lol, not some guy from i hate women dot com. Perhaps based on his platform alone we can consider it an honest attempt at conversation and debate it with our own honesty.
I can tell you that the norm among engineers, even at Google, is to receive lore and anecdotes from people slightly more educated as if it were gospel, and to repeat it uncritically until someone else more charismatic comes along. This happens so often that someone wrote a book called [The Leprechauns of Software Engineering](https://leanpub.com/leprechauns) about the unsourced commmon knowledge that engineers will blindly repeat without thinking about it.