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.
Not many places do User Acceptance Testing, so it usually falls on a QA Engineer, who is told it’s “by design” and not a problem. Then they don’t understand why people leave in droves.
I remember when The Mary Sue sent out a survey basically trying to get buy-in from their users on putting invasive ads on their page after they’d already done so. They found that no one was willing to pay for a subscription because they had already fouled everything up by no longer paying contributors, putting invasive ads, making it so you can’t use ad blockers, content had already gone massively downhill, etc. Abrams himself tried to argue that if we subscribed he’d fix all of that, but personally I’m not going to just throw my money at him and hope he follows through. Had he offered a subscription option before he screwed it all up when the content was good and contributors were paid, I would have gladly paid. Instead, I took the money he was asking for a subscription and put it towards a Patreon for one of the former TMS editors. I rarely visit that site anymore.
@Kupo thank you very much! I will look into it tonight. As long as the alias won’t show that it’s connected to my YouTube account that should be alright.
@weirdwoodtreehugger my bet is they do test the sites – with ads disabled. And they think they don’t have to care, because their real customers are the ad companies that are paying them. But now this model is falling apart because of ad blockers.
I wouldn’t have an ad blocker if ads didn’t slow down my browser, hide the entire screen, shout loud sound at me, etc. I wouldn’t mute ads on the TV either if they weren’t often so much louder than the show.
I’m probably their ideal audience, too. I’m easily swayed by advertisement. I own a lot of products advertised on podcasts because the advertisements are not abrasive so I actually listen.
Re: reasonable vs rational
Ooh, I could do a real polemic on this; but I’ll try to be uncharacteristically succinct.
“Reasonable” is probably the most litigated word in common law jurisprudence. It crops up as a ‘test’ everywhere, from criminal law to civil.
Maybe one day I’ll write something about how “reasonable man” evolved through “reasonable man sharing the characteristics of the accused; which could include being female” to “reasonable person”. But the “reasonable person” test is basically how we assess ‘objective’ criteria. Ie “What might the reasonable person do in these circumstances?”.
It’s not a single answer question. The law accepts that a whole spectrum of responses might fall within the ambit of reasonable.
But it’s also a legal maxim that “the reasonable man is not a rational man”. That is to say, the law does not insist on Vulcan like dispassionate decision making. Emotional responses are treated as perfectly valid.
Over here the courts still use “The man (or woman) on the Clapham omnibus” as the archetypal average citizen.
Adding to the add frusteration. My phone browser slows to a crawl when trying to track what I’m doing in the comment box and it’s constantly loading and running shit. It’s taken me 15 minutes to do a simple reply and I sometimes lose stuff to a crash.
That’s a lot of hate tied to the products they happen to be showing at that moment. Very counter productive. Most people won’t put much energy into recalling why they feel hate when they see brand x or y, they only know that they hate it.
I had a similar experience once with a near-accident, and I fully credit the “slow time” effect with allowing me to successfully navigate a very narrow path out of a 3-car collision immediately in front of me on a reasonably crowded 4-lane freeway. It’s the only time in my life that I’ve ever experienced slow time.
Immediately afterwards, I made my way over to the shoulder to both report the crash and give my body a chance to stop shaking. The come-down on whatever hormones and such triggered that state was brutal.
Totally OT, but…
@ JS
Now I want to know what a good slippery slope looks like. In my mind, it looks like frictionless shoes and a spring-loaded launcher to get up the hill.
@Brony
So it’s not my phone that’s the issue. Good to know.
Re: Ads… I dislike Huffington Post and other places who pop up little warnings saying how they “need ad revenue to keep open”, and yet have no visible way of giving them money otherwise. At least they haven’t ALL started blocking ad-blocker users, and some of the rest don’t know about the ad-blocker blocker blockers.
@Ray of Rays
Most any water/park slide would count as a good slippery slope.
@Ray of Rays:
I think.
ETA: High five to JS who had pretty much the same idea, haha.
Yahoo! failed because the company didn’t improve its more popular services. There’s still a large consumer market for Internet chat and IRC (though a lot of people on IRC are really, really, really horrible).
@Alan Robertshaw
I appreciate this.
We haven’t gotten there yet in Economic theory. Or rather, we have, but not at the undergrad level. This is why there are so many capitalists running around talking about ‘the tragedy of the commons’ as if it accurately predicts human behavior. I’ve noticed they usually don’t have Econ degrees.
I only had one professor who made sure we could all distinguish between the theoretical rational actor, and a real human being.
I like this phrasing, haha.
Anyone have a recommendation for a good ad blocker blocker blocker?
@kupo
I have a galaxy s5. I switched from Firefox to chrome hoping that would help, but no. The keyboard seems to be part of it for me. Like it’s the browser, comment field, keyboard, ad combo.
@Jesalin
And Trumpanzees outright harassing and assaulting minorities, left, right and center. The last few times I’ve visited my sister in Houston, TX we’ve been openly harassed at Dennis, Academy and Walmart for speaking Spanish in public. This wasn’t a thing we experienced before Trump announced his candidacy but nowadays it seems more common.
@ preuxfox
I do a fair bit of self defence law and there’s a popular quote in that field (attributed to Oliver Weddell Holmes*) “No man is completely rational in the face of an upturned knife.”
If you’re stuck for something to read, this is quite a nice exploration of the legal philosophy behind ‘reasonable’. It’s not just a criminal law thing.
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/reasble.html
(* what he actually said was “Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.”)
@Brony
Yup. There’s some ad here that routinely crashes my tablet browser, it’s infuriating.
@PreuxFox
And have clearly never actually read “The Tragedy of the Commons”, or they’d know that ‘leave it up to the market’ is the opposite of a solution.
@Brony
Same phone. The keyboard will sometimes disappear, sometimes freeze up. It’s really annoying. I might reinstall the adblock browser and see if it helps.
Oh, and possibly best title ever for a book about clinical negligence:
@wwth
I use Reet’s Anit-adblock killer script via Greasemonkey. It’s not perfect, and requires installing something fairly technical, but it does work some of the time. If your blocker has ever been detected you’ll probably have to remove some cookies before they stop “re-detecting” you.
It’s an arms race between the ad blocker blockers, and the ad blocker blocker blockers. Apparently some of them have ad blocker blocker blocker detectors as well.
Virginia had radar detector detectors, which most radar detector makers foiled by putting a radar detector detector detector circuit in and shutting down the detector before it could be detected.
Sounds like I’m getting paid by the word to use blocker and detector, doesn’t it :-Þ
@ dalillama
Eh? How can anyone think that’s the moral of the story? It’s like the Ur-allegory on the need for regulation. It frikkin’ says ‘Tragedy’ in the title.
ETA: “The ones who walk away from Omelas” – How you can power an entire society with just one easily replaceable kid.
Xemo: I strongly disagree with your definition of “empathy”.
In my (tiny) company, every day we use empathy. We are, for very hard-nosed-capitalist reasons, trying to understand how our clients feel, and how their employees feel, and how their clients feel — and why.
This is *hard*. The end users are directors and 3d artists and game designers, the people signing the contracts are lawyers and accountants, and our direct contacts are project managers. We are none of those things. I spent about 5-10 years turning my nose up at all these soft and fuzzy issues that come up when dealing with humans rather than machines, and am only twenty years along the recovery from that.
The only way to have any success is to be in constant communication, constantly integrating very harsh criticism, and constantly questioning ourselves afterwards as to whether we actually understood what was communicated. It’s hard, and it hurts.
If we couldn’t do all this, if we sat back and talked “rationally” only about our own experiences without forcing ourselves to put ourselves into someone else’s ill-fitting shoes, we’d be out of business. When people hire us, they don’t have a specification — they’re hiring our ability to empathize with the end user of our software. That’s what lets us design a spec that addresses the actual need, architect the software so that it’s flexible in the right dimensions, then iterate on the software and workflows and documentation (and train the end users) until it’s all actually useful.
As soon as we deliver that mostly-good software, we’re shown the door. They pay us the big bucks for the empathy-requiring part; they can have an employee maintain it afterwards for a third the price per hour. We just need to train them… oh, and teaching requires empathy, understanding what the student knows and doesn’t, and what’s the biggest chunk of unknown you can slice off at a time before they panic.
And that’s just the engineering bits. We also have to do the business development bits, which is all about empathy and emotion.
PS: we’re hiring a junior C# / Unity or Maya/mel/Python programmer for a 2-month gig in Montreal. It’s a position where empathy isn’t really needed, because the more senior people will spec it out for you beforehand. I bet gbro would do well at it… oh except that he would report to a woman.
@Alan,
I can’t tell if you’re asking a genuine question or making a rhetorical point that’s gone over my head, so please forgive me if I’m mansplaining to you:
I’ve always taken “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” as something akin to a reductio-ad-absurdum argument. Kind of a reverse reductio, actually, more like what the kids these days call a “steelman argument.”
The point isn’t that powering a whole society on one kid makes sense. The point is to ask whether it’s ever acceptable to secure wealth and comfort for us/the many by exploiting the few/the other. Le Guin wants to argue that it’s never acceptable, so she deliberately constructs the most favorable possible scenario for the other position, the idea that a certain degree of exploitation is inevitable and acceptable. The point is not that you could ever power a society on the suffering of one child; the point is that if we recoil at the idea of deliberately condemning one child to misery, we should definitely object when we consign tens of thousands to misery and desperation.
@ David
I noticed that you changed the image in the main article. I rather feel like the new one captures the mood of the topic better.
Gaebolga:
Same. In my case, I credit the slow time effect with my being able to pull off a manoeuvre on a wet road at 40 mph which took me through a gap with no room to spare. Result: only superficial damage, nobody hurt. I don’t believe I could have done it without overclocking. Drove away afterwards, and had to stop a few hundred yards down the road, when the shakes started.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether it’s possible to learn to invoke this state voluntarily, and whether there would be a lasting physiological cost to doing so.
@numerobis: If you’re involved in the sort of thing I think you are involved in, as one of your (almost) end users* I want to say THANK YOU.
This is actually a super good way to look at this whole thing, and one I hadn’t thought of before. It’s so important to talk with your end users and be like “here’s what we’ve built. We listened to what you described, used our experience in what others in similar productions have wanted, and made something. Now use it, tell us what is broken, and we will fix it.”
Not in your case as you’ve already described why, oh to have a big budget. In my experience working within a studio, things need to go from departments to department and back sometimes because of different needs that weren’t always foreseen by the previous department.
You have to understand how someone with a totally different skill set is going to approach everything, especially when the product being made is being made FOR THEM. Most end users don’t want to know how something works, it just needs to do so, and making it intuitive is, I think, an exercise in empathy.
(Also, do NOT let end users name anything. Or choose where to save on the server. In fact, the more you can understand how someone would screw something up while thinking they were being clever and STOP THEM from doing that, the better the end result is going to be for everyone. That is what I’ve learned in my sort of kind of pipeline engineer job I kind of tripped in to?)
NO DON’T PUT AN EXTRA ROW THERE YOU HAVE BROKEN EVERYTHING ARRRRRGHHHHHHHHH~… *cough*
*Not a 3D person, 2D here.