@reasonandempathy: Shockingly enough, what he expressed weren’t political views. They were views as to why his coworkers were inherently inferior to him at their job.
everyone is saying that, and Manifestbro may have believed that, but it seemed like the memo itself was mostly focused on the lack of applicants and the salary negotiation issue, both of which are already widely acknowledged in the industry, I didn’t see it as saying anything about the quality of engineers already hired.
(It’s been long enough that I should probably reread the damn thing before wading back into this, but I’m lazy so I’ll skip it and accept the increased risk of ownage.)
The Mainstream Media™
takedowns of the memo have been predictably bad, but this counter-take I keep seeing that he didn’t say anything to justify much offense on the part of his coworkers also seems kind of silly to me.
His thesis was, in essence, that Google’s gender diversity initiatives were a mistake, and that attempting to increase the proportion of women in Google was a bad idea. My impression was that the programs he criticized had been going on for long enough to impact the workforce, so this is tantamount to telling anyone who worked there because of them that they shouldn’t be there in the first place. I would certainly expect people to take offense at that.
The other issue is that he attempts to distill the question of systemic oppression – and feel free to substitute something like “inappropriate structural discrimination” if that’s too buzzwordy – down to “does systemic oppression cause all the gender imbalance in tech, or none of it?” That is pretty much flipping the bird to people who think they faced an above-average amount of systemic oppression due to their gender, or would have in the absence of the programs he’s criticizing.
It’s worth noting that all his arguments about natural disparities existing, and of the futility of trying to push against them, could have been made without running into either of these problems. These weren’t, like, bitter pills one had to swallow to believe that sex explains some variability in traits that influence choice of profession and that this might have implications for proponents of Absolute Gender Parity Everywhere. So I think it’s fair to say that he comes off as appreciably more hostile to coworkers than the stronger elements of his argument can justify.
I suspect one could write a hypothetical Memo Prime which does not cause offense, and I suspect that no one would be interested in reading it; maybe someone can whip up a graph showing probability of something being accurate and useful and relevant vs. probability of something being interesting and widely read and discussed.