Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

does this guy have a case if he decides to take legal action against google?

i thought this bump would be for this:

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/07/secrets-of-silicon-valley-review-are-we-sleepwalking-towards-a-technological-apocalypse

which was on BBC2 on sunday and pointed out that Disruption wasn't usually a good thing.

(the reporter did have a man-bun and a ponytail mind)

that's my first time venturing over to Breitbart in a long time and just lol @ this headline

T-Shirt Company Attempts to Rebrand Swastika as ‘Symbol of Love and Peace’

womp

Harvard University tells me James Damore did not complete his Phd. He completed a masters degree in systems biology in 2013

— Nitasha Tiku (@nitashatiku) August 8, 2017

and this reply is from an extremely well-connected googler

Did you ask Harvard University whether he was ever disciplined or whether he was ever the subject of a harassment complaint?

— Liz Fong-Jones (@lizthegrey) August 8, 2017

lol

this dude's week is about to get much worse i guess

Lol

Liz really asking the right questions here

it would be extremely interesting if he had wafted the aroma of phd over his resume when applying to google

not that there's any chance harvard would answer

this shit didn't happen to jerry maguire smdh

not that there's any chance harvard would answer

I think those records are confidential unless criminal charges are pressed against you, at which point it becomes part of the accessible public record. Don't quote me on that, though.

really wondering if the career/life strategy of asserting you want an active role (nay, deserve it!) in determining the work you do really hit a brick wall when he got to google and realized it's full of people with similar backgrounds and getting promoted isn't just a matter of making noise

wouldn't be surprised if he skipped out on his phd track after finally getting an advisor or superior who wanted him to present a thesis that was actually useful work. I have an acquaintance who ran into just that: had a thesis topic, was pretty much doing work for his advisor's lab, and then his advisor left and the new one vetoed his topic as trivial

yeah, life suddenly gets challenging for all but a tiny minority of the academically successful at the 2 year point of a phd program. no shame in that, but it doesn't get easier if you move to google.

http://15809-presscdn-0-93.pagely.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/media/MTIyMzAxNjk5ODY3MDQ1MTQ1.jpg

this rug was on the floor at github

utopia and meritocracy, both coined first as sarcastic takedowns, then adopted uncritically as an ethos

xps: yes dan, standard academic practice is what i had in mind. i think telling that someone attended, and received a degree, is the most any university will do.

https://medium.com/@bobwyman/back-in-the-1970s-when-i-first-got-in-the-software-business-i-remember-there-being-a-much-higher-f70e8197fbd9

excellent comment

Yeah, I was thinking about this recently myself; at the beginning of my career, everywhere I worked was very close to a 50/50 split between male and female software engineers/managers; around the tail end of the dotcom boom, everything suddenly became very, very male. Now, we have I think 3 women on our team; 2 in QA, 1 in development. A 4th recently left the company. All 4 are among the top performers in our group and are in high demand; this has been true of the vast majority of women I have worked with over the past 20 years.

When I started in software development, my first workplaces were very unstructured as far as job role went, and developers were more closely linked to the people outlining business needs. One of the first restructuring processes divided the role of analyst and developer, where the former would be more involved in talking to business clients and determining scope and what software would do, where developers were on the implementation side of things.

It was pretty obvious at the time that many of the women I worked with were put in the analyst role as opposed to the implementation side, and the implementation of software diversified with teams having more roles (software architect, specialist roles, junior and senior developers) where the analyst side of things shifted more to the business aspects over time. The implementation groups grew a lot faster.

I've only ever reported to women in ten years in the public sector it's cool because you can blind them with logic iirc

you don't actually go blind when you roll your eyes all the way back

Ha

time for some levity

can't believe Google just fired me for sneaking up on Indian co-workers and using my calipers on their skull... I have a right to my opinion

— real gabagool 🔷🥇🆒 (@jimpjorps) August 8, 2017

lol

nice

you're much too emotional right now to engage on a rational level with me. good-day, sir

— real gabagool 🔷🥇🆒 (@jimpjorps) August 8, 2017

Yeah, I was thinking about this recently myself; at the beginning of my career, everywhere I worked was very close to a 50/50 split between male and female software engineers/managers; around the tail end of the dotcom boom, everything suddenly became very, very male. Now, we have I think 3 women on our team; 2 in QA, 1 in development. A 4th recently left the company. All 4 are among the top performers in our group and are in high demand; this has been true of the vast majority of women I have worked with over the past 20 years.

I got this impression from where I work too. If you filter everyone who's been there for 20+ years, you get a pretty even split. Nowadays our training classes are something like 80/20. I thought that Medium comment hit the nail on the head but I can't help but wonder if gamer/nerd culture which is predominantly marketed to men has a lot to do with it as well. When I was in college I couldn't help but notice I was one of like three comp sci dudes who didn't want to make video games. I imagine a lot of young gamers choose coding as a career by default. Sometimes I wonder if I did.

money attracts young, stupid men. it's not that complicated.

this happens to any industry that gets "hot", it gets overrun by young asshole men looking to get rich, they're like lemmings. evil lemmings.

I guess in America you can append "white" to that and still be reasonably accurate

what? i thought men and women had the exact same drives and motivations, and sought high paying jobs with identical fervor, and it was systematic sexism that precluded women from getting those jobs? wait... actually i thought 'men' and 'women' were societal constructs with no basis in biology, so what is this conversation even about?

the freedom to waste your coworkers' and managers' time with your interesting social theories on their inferiority

we just give all the good stuff to white dudes and they start measuring your cranium and complaining about emotions on the rare occasion when they don't get what they want

and yes i read his memo. the original, with the charts and footnotes and everything. hard to know if the biodeterminist anti-anti-racist types are lying to themselves or to the world but my patience for them is zero.

really? it's not hard to know. they're sincerely believe what they're arguing. duh.

tbh the only real response to his entire spiel is "Nah"

I also, having met some of these types and having had some really retrograde ideas in my youth, would claim that a lot of this isn't sincere belief as much as feeling uncomfortable at situations where you feel a loss of sense of control and adopt some reverse-engineered logic others have put out there to justify a certain status quo

the best is when you find one of the scientifically-employed ones saying things like "we need to save race-science [not called that by them obv] from actual racists" or "it's a shame you can't talk about this w/o people accusing you of believing terrible things"

and yeah the memo is mostly about gender but, in v anodyne language, it's all there:

Be open about the science of human nature.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.html

○ Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.

yeah there's a lot of dog whistles in there. this isn't a naive guy who has no idea who he's aligning himself with.

lol I have a couple scientist friends who are brilliant and analytical but occasionally will make a guess or assumption about something outside their field and it's painfully naive. I love them, though

imo he might still be naive enough not to know why these ideas are bad or why people reacted to his words the way they did

that's the other emotional intelligence thing that they miss -- having an idea of how your ideas are perceived by others is important when communicating with them. if you're a successful racist or sexist you still need the *perception by others* that you're an understanding person, even if you're actually hiring all men because you're a misogynist

really aside from the content i have trouble wrapping my mind around the motivation here. yes i assume these things all seem painfully self-evident to him, but... i mean who on earth is going to write up a report about an extremely painful and contentious political subject and then send it to everyone at work. it's nuts!

this is literally how software bros communicate, via long manifesto. I don't think he sent it as in email, but posted it to his public google docs and linked it in their discussions or w/e

ok. something about the internal culture there is clearly alien to me.

there are a number of software blogger types that have been linked on a handful of threads, I get the impression that blog-like posting internally at google is a thing for people to do when they want to make broad proposals, although someone closer to their internal culture can confirm that

he's not objectionable, but the formatting and graph interjections reminded me of blogs like Jeff Atwood's:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/

btw never forget http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/pharaohs-silicon-valley-my-journey-through-google--2618