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.
Why am I not surprised that the original, Google Manifesto, leans so heavily on what are frankly misinterpretations of the not-terribly-respected-possible-pseudoscience called ‘Evolutionary Psychology’?
As you probably know, a lot of those companies are just making impossible demands so they can make a case for H1B visas — people they can pay less. I heard of one company that asked for 5 years experience with a piece of software that was less than 3 years old.
@kupo
That article about the panel is horrifying. He clearly doesn’t think it was out of line. I get the impression that he only said he won’t do it again because he got called out. He legitimately doesn’t get why people reacted badly.
Also, I noted at least one quote where he referred to women as “females.”
And those posters! Cluttered and ridiculous. I feel like he would fit in with MRA meme makers.
And other way? On our ship, 24 people, only one woman. She first time 3rd officer. This man can even imagine how she feel? How brave is she to come on board and then we go cross Pacific Ocean for 17 days and see nothing. Not even birds. This man who wrote this is a coward and never knows what are true women. They so much braver than him like our 3rd officer.
@dr. ej
Not only that, but he sees nerds as being a separate category from women. I got really pissed off with his explanation that nerdy guys have a hard time talking to “girls” (yes, he infantilized us in addition to the feeeeeemales usage) because, as a nerdy and introverted woman I have a hard time talking to men, too. Making me feel like I’m in some kind of meat market like this panel would have done to me had I been there would probably make me not want to even attempt it again for a very long time.
Usually you have a much better chance of getting a full-time job if you intern with the company first (which you can usually do as a post-grad as long as you finished your bachelor’s). It’s an excuse to pay you much less than what you’d make in an entry level position.
Can confirm. I’m a woman, working in a tech company, and I take maternity leave every three months. The babbys just won’t stop forming! I think they happen during meetings.
Also: “therefrom”? ಠ_ಠ
@WWTH:
Amen to that. Libertarians are suddenly all about laws and regulations when they benefit white men/keep women and minorities in their place.
This manifesto is oddly generic for someone who supposedly worked inside the company. All his jump-the-shark complaints are from an end user perspective, not a coding, implementation, or business perspective. He’s angry at them as a consumer, not as an employee.
The rest of it – meetings that didn’t accomplish anything, useless middle managers, outsourcing – happens at just about every tech company. All he’s done is furnish it with imaginary ebbil wimmens. There’s no detail there. Nothing that couldn’t have been written by an outsider familiar with Dilbert comics.
Not saying he’s lying, but…I’ve seen too many dudebros fabricate credentials, field reports, and stories to boost their status and “win” arguments. Usually they pretend to be ex-military, lawyers, or hotshot executives pulling in six figures and living DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH.
Thank you for the article, Natasha and PeeVee!
Internships might pay $10-$15 per hour, which is much much less than what they’d pay if they hired college graduates as “normal” entry-level employees.
There’s a pretty big problem in tech with people (mostly men) putting skills or experience on their resumes that they don’t really have. Fake degrees or certifications are more of a problem than many people realize because lots of companies don’t bother to check that the university is accredited or the degree or transcripts aren’t forged.
So, since they don’t bother to check (and want to scam H1B visas and pull various other shenanigans that probably ought to be illegal), my diploma hanging on my wall four feet from my head is not worth the paper it was printed on, despite being a genuine diploma from an actual university degree program that required, like, actual coursework and suchlike.
Wonderful.
*shakes head*
Exactly! How is he going to blame women in the industry for those decisions? It makes zero sense. What you’ve posited is far more likely.
Hippodameia: You’re quite welcome.
I’ve just realised from Grumpy’s post that’s a reference to the visa and not the ‘hotness’ of the women supposedly taking over. Guess that’s some sort of confirmation bias thing because of the MRA posts we get here. No doubt Scildfreja could explain it.
Having a bachelor’s higher in anything is still good, because many employers will just trash your resume if you don’t have a bachelor’s.
@History Nerd
Sometimes higher can hurt you because they don’t want to pay for the higher degree. :/
Booooo… Hisssssssss…
I thought the level of detail was beyond human ability with pastry. Fell for it anyway.
But …. PUPPIES!
@JS
Sorry, I was just incredibly happy that such a photo existed and wanted to share. In my defense I was drinking wine and didn’t think about the wording making it sound like something it wasn’t. Should have called them donut sneks. 😀
@kupo
The part where he had everyone move to a certain part of the room was just gross , especially since he’s sitting there watching, probably picking out who he was going to approach.
FFS, his first question was, “Would you date me?”
And the women were supposed to move to an area based on their answer. Publicly, in front of him.
Ew ew ew ew ew ew ew
then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked…
@Alan, recency/primacy!
@kupo, ew ew ew ew ew, that is grody.
#Original post, siiiiigh
I hate this industry
I learned how to program on a Commodore 64! Then a 486! Then a Pentium 90 that I kept running foreverrrr. Like, I overclocked it, and it started overheating, so I soldered together a bunch of disk drive fans and bolted them to the inside of the case. The thing sounded like a hovercraft but it worked! Now I have a top end workstation with, like, five feet worth of monitor and my own magic cloud!
“not gunna do it again” as the answer to “Don’t you think it was creepy?” Yeesh. I hope he learns a bit more about good relationships before he ever gets a girlfriend.
@kupo, lol, I’d probably have fallen for it either way around.
@ scildfreja
That was an interesting read. Reminded me of something I did years ago about that 7 +/- 2 thing and recalling lists.
Doing a bit of self analysis I think it’s maybe an association thing. I saw “H1B” and somewhere in my brain there must have been a process:
Those symbols can have various meanings
On this site they’re most usually associated with “SMV rating”
So that must be it; end search.
It’s interesting that I didn’t spot it was actually an anagram. It’s like the vague word shape was enough (or I did spot it but the pre existing association bias overrode that?)
I wonder if I’d have made that association if I was on a website about pencils; or whether the MRA version is now sort of top of the agenda because it’s the one I see most?
How we process the world is a fascinating topic; one of the many reasons I love your posts.
I read “therefrom” as “therioform” on a skim and thought that the rant had suddenly gotten diverted entertainingly towards werewolves. Sadly, I was wrong, it’s just standard MRA word-puffery.
Look at these assholes, making snakes look adorable.
“i am darkness” made me laugh way too hard.