Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

yes it's https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-damore-b277b62b/

I can't help laughing at this Googler's misogynist manifesto because it reminds me of what one female Uber HR rep told me

— Susan J. Fowler (@susanthesquark) August 7, 2017

She told me that, in her experience, there were more Asian women in accounting because Asian women are just really good with numbers.

— Susan J. Fowler (@susanthesquark) August 7, 2017

Likewise, she said, there were more white men in engineering because white men were simply more suited for engineering than others!

— Susan J. Fowler (@susanthesquark) August 7, 2017

(woman who wrote the "strange year at uber" thing)

"Black people would be great in Customer Support roles because Black people know how to talk to people." ~Investor who will remain nameless

— EricaJoy (@EricaJoy) August 7, 2017

“You should be able to say that women are bad engineers. But sharing salary info will get you in trouble.” - Googlehttps://t.co/sKpCTPrpIT https://t.co/Qr050oBQki

— Elizabeth Sampat (@twoscooters) August 6, 2017

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/110526/images/nj7348-545a-i2.0.jpg

also last i heard is that this google guy's manifesto is an internal nightmare for higher ups who are still figuring out what to even do

— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) August 7, 2017

employee revolt vs legal nightmare plus validates what people already latently believe about engineers and tech anyway

— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) August 7, 2017

for some reason I was assuming the writer of the rant was older than me, which is definitely not the case

thank you for your aggregation and reportage, caek!

forgive me but i looked up his publications. he didn't finish his phd afaict (which makes the "he's a biology phd, he knows what he's talking about" line less useful). this is the most cited of his two papers, and it's seems to be a screed about people not being logical enough. you can sense that he had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies open in the next tab while he was writing.

*this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3176967/

microbial cooperation is very interesting and people are writing about it more and more

so this guy's education/career route followed the princeton -> research science -> oh shit I want the silicon valley money -> software engineering -> google route

this is not unique among people I've talked to

there but for the grace of god go i. but i find it ... noteworthy that he seems to have written purely polemical papers (not even theoretical, much less working with actual data) and quit before it got hard.

you actually had a career that morphed over time, though, right?

the other confounding thing I heard from someone who used to work at google is that, if you're not in the software development track, your opinions on app ideas or what might be interesting products to develop are ignored. because software developers are the ideas people.

yeah i finished my phd and did a couple of postdocs. not saying that was the best (or quickest) way of learning what i learned in academia, but it's clear this guy did not get to the bit of a phd where you deal with the real world.

ok but lol

google interviews are infamous for basically asking zero non-technical questions. you could be willing to admit to murder if asked, and it wouldn't come up in their recruitment process.

i knew you'd be on this mordy

tbf this guy sounds like an idiot and i have no feedback despite reading (most of?) the manifesto. but i had to lol at "did not get to the bit of a phd where you deal with the real world."

i don't recall murder coming up in any of my job interviews tbf

like you never tried to murder an interviewer or they never asked u your opinion of murdering in general or

I think that's why I didn't get past the first round of the HYDRA interview

there is a bit. it's usually at the end. xxp

I should start asking interviewees about murder instead of just relying on the "have you committed a felony" check box on the application.

i've interviewed at a bunch of tech companies (not google) and they all have substantial "cross functional interviews" about "what would you do if" conflict handling and ethics stuff that at least officially they take seriously.

btw lol at the pathologizing of not being willing to work more than 40 hours a week http://www.businessinsider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-who-barely-work-silicon-valley-2017-7?op=1

definitely

at the very least I've asked questions to determine how someone would communicate with other groups or analysts if something would require a change in project scope, or how they address conflict. usually people don't say "well if they're a woman they're not being logical" doesn't come out immediately as a response, but uhhh... you can read between the lines

I obviously stopped to check on a work email message mid-post there, but you get the point

"how do you convince your boss you need more training data?" is a good superficially technical question for that in my field

from the rest and vest:

As tired as she was, she couldn't just quit this job. She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock and needed her salary to pay those taxes.

sell-to-cover next time, maybe?

if they're RSUs in a post-IPO company that you work at then you can owe tax on them immediately when they vest, but be prevented from selling them by insider trading laws. not sure if that's what was going on here.

(and if you were in a senior role in the acquired company you may also be prevented from selling by the terms of the acquisition)

I'm surprised that you can't still sell-to-cover in that case. It seems like you could lose a whole lot of money if you accepted a large RSU bonus from a company that then went under.

tbf it sounds like a carrot-or-stick way that people are bound to stick with their jobs post-acquisition or IPO. you want the people who built the technology or company to stick around, but holding the payoff just out of reach while working them just as hard creates a high-pressure job that's demoralizing. you theoretically got your payoff, but you can't touch it. the tax situation is the stick, the payoff is the carrot that's out of reach

most big companies garnish the RSU grant at vest to cover tax for you, so it's usually not a problem. that's true for regular new hires, but if this person was in a management role her deal may be structured differently which yes raises the possibility of being underwater.

i'm looking at an acquisition term sheet right now, and yes, a minority of employees are being given very secure golden handcuffs

I believe you, but I imagine the RSU grant, even 50% of it, being so much larger than a salary in most of these situations. It seems like you could at least schedule a remittance or something. Or maybe there's always other money involved. I've heard many stories about people watching blacked out stock become worthless during the telecom bubble burst, but I wasn't aware that some of these people may have then owed a tax bill based on the pre-burst vesting price.

I guess you can just claim the loss in that extreme case, though.

yeah i think some people got completely wiped out by their options in the first bubble. startups have become better at making sure that doesn't happen to their employees, and the use of RSUs by late-stage companies significantly reduces the risk

and post IPO at a place like facebook the risk for a new employee is miniscule, so yeah, the person in the article may be partly to blame for for the situation she found her in

My only issue has been if you buy options from a startup, and their value increases (even if you don't sell them, and the company hasn't actually gone public), you can get hit with big AMT penalties.

Heard this on NPR this morning and thought of this thread:

http://www.npr.org/2017/08/04/541417748/could-a-bus-with-sleep-pods-replace-airplanes

Cabin, an overnight, SF-LA bus with sleep pods. Introducing the story, David Greene referred to them as "hermetically sealed." Yikes!

Not as "disruptive" or flat out ridiculous as other tech shit, but still has some chuckles. Like this last bit:

"You may be wondering how I slept for so long, since LA to San Francisco is only a six-hour drive. Well, to guarantee a full night's rest, the creators of Cabin turned it into eight hours — by driving slower and using back roads."

lol

re the google guy can I just

Presidential Physical Fitness Award 2005, 2006, and 2007
Highest Ranked Rise of Nations Player in World 2004

this is on his cv guys

lol. link?

www.gorelab.org/James_Damore__CV.pdf

Should we have the obligatory conversation about "doxxing" someone who has already been thoroughly doxxed, or just skip it

his name was on the manifesto and he wrote it to be read, so this is not doxxing

he posted a document for everyone within his publicly held company of 70k people to see with his own name on it, and all of these things are on the public web