By David Futrelle
By now, you’ve probably heard about the so-called “Google Manifesto,” one anonymous Google dude’s ten-page anti-diversity rant that suggests, among other things, that women are somehow biologically unsuited to work in tech.
It’s hardly an original argument, but it’s one that has a lot of appeal to the sort of aggrieved tech dudebros who post a lot on Reddit — many of whom apparently also work at Google, where (Motherboard reports) the memo went “internally viral.”
Well, it turns out there’s a Yahoo! manifesto too — a bit shorter, to be sure, but equally revealing of the aggrieved male entitlement that permeates the tech world. The anonymous Yahoo! manifesto seems to have originated on 4chan’s technology board in 2012; it’s been posted on assorted manosphere-friendly sites since then, and cropped up today on alt-right fantasy author Theodore “Vox Day” Beale’s Alpha Game blog.
Take it away, anonymous shithead:
As a former employee of Yahoo!, I can say with absolute conviction that the majority of the problems with the company stemmed from too many women being involved in the first place. When I started in 1999, it was mostly guys. By the time I left last year, it seemed like it was easily 75 percent women.
Yeah, not quite. As of 2014, two years after this “manifesto” was written, only 37% of Yahoo!’s employees were women, with only a small percentage doing actual tech work. Studies suggest that men routinely overestimate the percentage of women in mixed groups. Even if Mr. Anonymous was exaggerating somewhat for effect, he’s dead wrong: women are vastly underrepresented at Yahoo!
No matter what job or position they were doing, they either were out on maternity leave half the time or just getting back therefrom. It was the most frustrating thing in the world to try to work with.
Yes, it’s true: working women spend literally half their time on maternity leave, after which they get pregnant again and push out a new baby one to three months later.
Have you ever gone to a meeting with six women and yourself as the only guy? You might as well not even turn up; nothing is going to get done, anyway. It’s just going to be an hour spent on irrelevant, tangential nonsense with no decision reached at the end.
Pretty sure this is every meeting ever, dude.
I wasn’t a misogynist before working there, but after seeing the company go from pretty good to total shit, and with it being directly related to the number of female employees fucking everything up, I kind of am now.
You ladies forced him to hate you!
Everything was awesome in the beginning; then they basically outsourced everything they could, brought in cheap labor, and took away 90 percent of the perks that the employees used to enjoy. Everyone of any value was replaced by H1Bs and women started to swell the ranks of middle management.
Ah, the inevitable racism has arrived!
It was just shitty decision after shitty decision, Who the fuck greenlit the goddamn Yahoo! Music engine? Terrible product. Then they fucked up Yahoo! Chat by taking away profiles and trying to force this worthless social networking Yahoo! 360 garbage that no one liked. Then they ruined the message boards and classifieds.
You know that most of those making high-level decisions at Yahoo! are still white dudes, right?
Yahoo!’s problem was that they got filled with a bunch of middle management useless twats who kept ‘fixing’ things that weren’t broken because they felt they had to justify the existence of their jobs.
Or maybe they’ve just never recovered from the success of Google? I’m frankly amazed the company still exists.
Rather than actually making improvements, they ‘improved’ their userbase away with a bunch of shitty changes that took away everything that anyone actually liked about the products.
Alter that, it was basically just hanging around collecting a paycheck and doing shitty work because I didn’t care. Everyone else was doing pretty much the same thing.
Sorry you hate your job, dude, but you really can’t blame women for that.
The one comment under that article, @Jes,
Yyyyyyyeap. “They need to learn some consequences, so now we have to hurt them, because I don’t understand what freedom of speech is and am frightened that standards that were once only applied to women and minorities are starting to be applied to white men.”
Crybullies indeed.
@Scildfrega
I’ve been busy in the comments at this newsweek article. No takers yet but it might become enjoyable.
http://www.newsweek.com/who-james-damore-alt-right-furious-after-google-fires-engineer-over-anti-647716
Startups are often exempt from following certain parts of labor law. So they can fire you for reasons that are allowed to be much more arbitrary and capricious than whether you wrote an unacceptably incendiary document rejecting part of the company’s mission or vision.
Brace yourselves for more “I don’t understand what free speech is but I know the Left hates free speech. OK, now it’s time to fire the people who didn’t show up to Fireball pong.”
Yeah, those comments are *exactly* what I expected to read.
Still haven’t figured out how to set them on fire with my mind yet. Workin’ on it.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/107/802/1298606607030.png
So many frozen peaches!
I should bake a crumble.
I hooked a few! I’ve been experimenting with rapid posting lately. I don’t think I’m overextending myself but hitting walls is inevatable.
@Brony
On the topic of phones crashing, I just installed the latest Android update and it’s worse, and no longer just when on Web pages. FYI.
@Brony
I like how they went almost immediately from “alt-right isn’t what they call themselves” (despite evidence to contrary freaking everywhere), to “Brony, You’re an idiot.” (well, they called you by another name, but I didn’t want to repeat it here, possibly personal info, etc.)
Wonderfully civilized, aren’t they 😛
One of the main rules of a traditional 4chan “op” is that the people will NEVER admit that anything was planned on 4chan.org or the #4chan channel on Rizon IRC. They will always deny they’re from 4chan and might name some other website. Maybe the alt-right appropriated that.
@Brony:
I particularly liked the guy who wrote
I mean, “demise”? Being required to not say derogatory things about a group of your co-workers is potentially androcidal? Who knew.
Also the guy who wrote, “They’re tired of being told they’re bad because they’re white.” No, you’re told that you’re bad because you’re being a jerk to others.
So it appears that googlebro may have lied about his education:
Social momentum is a thing, it can be reversed. It’s too damn implicit when I do it. Maybe I can start conceptualizing it better when I’ve practiced what Scildfrega just gave me.
@JS
They are trying to turn the tables in interesting ways. They know that the alt-right is seen as a negative. It’s close to the surface than I thought. Someone tried to analogies “claims of alt-right” to “claims of satan”.
This bears strategic thought. It suggests things about them and their community structure. There are many ways of thinking of and using something like this.
@GrumpyOld SocialJusticeMangina
I actually enjoy pulling their definition of political terms out of them. You can get away with a lot when they go first and in aggression.
They’re used to the behavior being tolerated, usually based on a “free speech” philosophy. A few anti-bullying laws have been struck down based on First Amendment grounds, or courts imposed new requirements that the bully needs to take some overt act beyond speech. The freedom of expression rights in Canada and Western Europe usually balance preventing social harm with the openness and intellectual freedom necessary for people to make responsible decisions in a democratic society.
@Moggie
Not surprising. If evo psych accurately describes human psychology, then unconscious bias training is possibly a form of psychological abuse because you’d be suppressing evolutionary adaptations that make you prefer your in-group. The standard argument is that efforts to completely eliminate in-group bias or a preference for able-bodied or healthy people are at least just as psychologically damaging to people as bias or discrimination, so you can’t have “too much equality” (as, IIRC, Jonathan Haidt says).
It’s possible Damore did all the coursework necessary for a PhD in Systems Biology, but he didn’t complete his dissertation or he didn’t complete it by the deadline. Students who did very well at a top school in undergrad will usually go directly from a bachelor’s to a PhD. Many people drop out “late” in PhD programs, so they will file paperwork to get a master’s in their last semester (though they’re far passed the minimal requirements for a master’s). Grad school sucks. No shame in being a PhD dropout.
I don’t know what Damore put on his resume when he applied for a job at Google. But it’s normally grounds for immediate termination if you list a degree from an accredited school you don’t really have, even if you forget to put “All But Dissertation” or suchlike. I’d assume he had Harvard send Google his transcripts, so Google HR would’ve checked his resume against them. Your LinkedIn page is not an official job application, and whether he lied on it will take a few weeks to clear up.
@Moggie
Not surprising. If evo psych accurately describes human psychology, then unconscious bias training is possibly a form of psychological abuse because you’d be suppressing evolutionary adaptations that make you prefer your in-group. The standard argument is that efforts to completely eliminate in-group bias or a preference for able-bodied or healthy people are at least just as psychologically damaging to people as bias or discrimination, so you can’t have “too much equality” (as, IIRC, Jonathan Haidt says).
It’s possible Damore did all the coursework necessary for a PhD in Systems Biology, but he didn’t complete his dissertation or he didn’t complete it by the deadline. Students who did very well at a top school in undergrad will usually go directly from a bachelor’s to a PhD. Many people drop out “late” in PhD programs, so they will file paperwork to get a master’s in their last semester (though they’re far passed the minimal requirements for a master’s). Grad school sucks. No shame in being a PhD dropout.
I don’t know what Damore put on his resume when he applied for a job at Google. But it’s normally grounds for immediate termination if you list a degree from an accredited school you don’t really have, even if you forget to put “All But Dissertation” or suchlike. I’d assume he had Harvard send Google his transcripts, so Google HR would’ve checked his resume against them. Your LinkedIn page is not an official job application, and whether he lied on it will take a few weeks to clear up.
It’s also possible he completed his PhD research project while at Google. But that’s a bit like Kent Hovind saying his doctoral project is the current version of his creationism seminars (well, it’s probably unfair to compare him to Kent Hovind, or to compare any accredited school to Patriot Bible University). But you typically don’t get your graduate degree unless you complete research or project requirements while you’re still a student. Most life experience credits are for undergraduate degrees, not grad school.
Peevee: Yes, that’s it! Thanks for the link. I don’t know why my computer was refusing to show anything but medium.com as the link.
Thank you to WWTH (btw I love your nym) and others for the discussion of libertarians. Perfect.
Puppies! Pug puppies!
(I was going to attach a pic of the pug who lives downstairs when he isn’t visiting me, but once again computer issues.)
By way of intro, though I’ve posted once or twice before, I am not STEM-involved except tangentially. Psychotherapist who attended a STEM school long ago and now reads Interpersonal Neurobiology stuff for fun and CEUs.
If you’re a good therapist, you are STEM-involved. With all the crap going on with ignoring scientists, good therapists are vital.
Welcome to STEM! Some of the power, and most of the responsibility. Be careful out there, we need everyone.
I can say without even having been there that “everyone else” was not doing that.
Only he and dudes who looked like him (who were probably the only people he ever noticed anyway) were the only ones doing that … because the only people *I* know with the luxury of doing nothing and still collecting a paycheck for it are all white dudes.
@History Nerd
Sticks and stones can break my bones..
..but words can make me think I deserve it.
-xkcd
JS: Thanks! I try (and I’m not sure all therapists need to be STEM-involved, but trauma treatment certainly does), but am often intimidated.
I had a realization. I was thinking about all these techbros standing up for the former Googler by trying to claim that women are indeed biologically inferior at programming and flat out refusing to believe that women were the first programmers. I was thinking about those early women programmers and how much harder it was back then (Grace Hopper helped make it easier, though), and how all these techbros wouldn’t be able to do it without all the tools that make it easier.
And then I thought about the history of midwives and how men came in with their forceps and forced women out, claiming they’re biologically inferior and unable to work forceps when they’d been there all along without the tools that make it easier.
Basically, women are badass and men refuse to do the same work until someone finds a way to make it easier, at which point they need to stroke their own egos and make the job more prestigious than when women were primarily doing it.
@kupo
That about sums it up.
I fear ‘argh’ is my main response to this whole thing. : / Least I got a recommendation for Hidden Figures out of it, which I’ve just seen, it’s a bit Hollywood-ised, but still well worth a watch. Despite the overall feel-good vibe of the movie itself and the celebration of three smart black women, it’s kind of a downer to look at where the US is today and compare, though, there’s even the cold war background.
Re: game design, as discouraging as these dudes can be, I feel like it’s possible, and there can be improvement. For all the MRA-whining, Horizon: Zero Dawn, for instance, was very well-received, what mostly mattered in the end was that the game is very fun to play, and easy to get into. While it’s not perfect (I wish they used the earlier design concept for Aloy), and there’s a political naivety to it, it at least seems like it’s trying. Even some of the dudes complaining ‘games shouldn’t be political!’ (meaning, of course ‘games should only represent the political status quo, which I perceive as neutral’) will in fact shut up in the face of a good game.
@Scildfreja
Really interesting! As someone with panic disorder who practices meditation, I’d say you’re def.on the right lines there abut how to trigger adrenaline states. Not necc. incompatible with depression, though I think it depends where you’re at with it (a relative ‘up’ rather than a down), it seems to blunt the panic and help with dissociating?