Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

> how a particular group of employees are less likely to be as proficient at their work as I am due to some immutable biological trait(s) they possess

Is that what Damore actually said? That's not my recollection. I think his main point was that due to differences in biology, that women had more extraversion, openness, and neuroticism (big 5 traits) and that women were less likely to want to get into computer stuff. That's a very far cry from him saying something like "women suck at computers" and seems very dishonest to suggest.

View on HN

- I think his main point was that due to differences in biology, that women had more extraversion, openness, and neuroticism (big 5 traits) and that women were less likely to want to get into computer stuff.

I'm generally anti-woke and it was more than that. It's not just 'less likely' it was also 'less suited'

It would be helpful if you can post such a citation. I did a quick search and I'm not seeing "less suited" in his memo.

"women have more interest people to things so to improve their situation we should increase pair-programming, however there are limits to how people oriented some SE roles are".

This is literally saying we should change SWE roles to make it more suited to women... i.e. women are not suited for that currently.

But that's not talking about suitability to architect solutions or write code, it's talking about the surrounding process infrastructure and making it more approachable to people so that people who are suited to software engineering have a space where they can deliver on it.

When businessses moved towards open offices, this infrastructure change made SWE roles more approachable for extroverts and opened the doors of the trade to people not suited to the solitude of private offices. Extroverts and verbally collaborative people love open offices and often thrive in them.

That doesn't imply that extroverts weren't suited to writing software. It just affirms the obvious fact that some enviornments are more inviting to certain people, and that being considerate of those things can make more work available to more people.

Open offices are the GNOME of layouts: they cater to the wrong crowd.

Programming rewards introverts content to self-study in solitude and hack away at code the way Linux caters to power user neck beards. For extroverts and normies, those things are both torture. Those stereotypes exist for a reason, and it's fundamentally flawed not to tune towards them.

So he's actually thinking of ways to improve the work environment for woman, and people are blaming him for saying that woman are not suitable for the work?

It's not about what you say, it's about how the article reporting on you describes you.

"We could do these changes at Google to make it a better place for women." "So, what you are saying is that women are biologically incapable of working at current Google? Our female colleagues at HR department are so triggered they literally can't stop crying!"

What's the implication of "There's some roles we can't accomodate to make them more suitable for women" for you (which is literally said in the paper) ?

I don't see that line anywhere in the original memo

Do you want me to do a drawing ?

Yes please, it seems like you're making stuff up

Which is still pretty ridiculous on the face of it. Software beyond school assignments and toys are always a collaborative effort where extroversion, openness, and neuroticism are benefits to getting stuff done

Based on his software opinions, I'd guess he was let go for performance issues more than anything. It's unlikely that he could write code that another person could agree with, work with, or read, and that if somebody asked about his code, he'd be unable to talk about it.

It's fair to say that general female population is less suited, i.e. a random woman is less likely to be suited than a random man.

We're talking about small fractions of both men and women, mind you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com