Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

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> Nobody can reasonably believe it's realistic to expect parity in hiring in the immediacy, and all the available evidence suggests --- like you'd expect! --- that Google doesn't expect that either.

You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10 yrs, including those internally and externally at Google. You're correct that expecting employer demographics to immediately exactly reflect US population demographics is stupid. You're wildly incorrect that it's uncommon.

As just one example of the top of my head, Google released their diversity a couple of years ago and coverage was almost universally: "Google has a serious diversity problem", "Google needs to do a lot better".

The actual gender numbers? Non technical employees were split down the middle and technical employees almost exactly reflected percent of CS degrees by gender.

Something isn't a straw man if it's an argument that's constantly made and carries a lot of influence.

> You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10

tptacek is, uh, not someone those words apply to. He's been involved in these discussions for the last half decade on HN, one of the key industry forums. He's run part of hiring programs at a previous employer, and founded a startup oriented on improving engineering hiring.

Politely, sir, take a deep breath. You might disagree with him, but you might want to be careful with your assumptions there.

Thanks for the context.

I wasn't saying this just as a throwaway insult. It's just that calling something a strawman (as he does downthread) depends on confidently asserting that nobody could ever _possibly_ support such a ridiculous claim. That very much doesn't fit with the experience of many of the people here,including those of us who have worked for Google now or in the past.

> Politely, sir, take a deep breath.

Haha, thanks, but I'm not sure where the assumption that I'm worked up about this comes from. The only thing in my comment that approaches impoliteness is assuming that he's not familiar enough with the conversations around tech hiring at big companies, which seemed like the only plausible explanation for thinking that no one could possibly be making the argument he calls a "strawman".

I'm honestly still not sure what an alternative explanation would be.

No, you're relying on a false dichotomy here. The logic in your post suggests that if I believe it's unreasonable to expect gender parity at Google, I must also believe that the current gender distribution at Google is OK. That doesn't follow logically.

The downvotes here indicate logic doesn't always follow where there exists polarity in a belief of "truths". While you may be correct in your assertions, you will still lose the argument because it's not what people want to hear. My own downvotes aside (within 30 seconds, no less) is the point is that some topics become "logically lodged" in a jam and cannot be freed by open discourse.

It's better not to think about vote scores here at all.

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