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.
All this talk of the average citizen reminds me of an English class way back at the end of my matriculation where we had to define “average reader” to a professor who had a lot of experience poking holes in student arguments. (Same professor who was delighted when we papered his office door with all the 3 x 5 cards we’d used to prep for his ModBritLit final, with the “Terence, this is stupid stuff” quote smack dab in the middle.)
ETA: No comment on how we celebrated the line “And malt does more than Milton can To justify God’s ways to man.”
@ orion
Heh, that’s probably stretching the definition a bit. But my point was how could anyone so miss the point of the allegory. It’s like coming away from King Midas thinking “Right, must remember to wear gloves”.
I like that. As for Omelas, I know it can be interpreted in many ways. My take, which you may have seen me bang on about, is that because I buy ridiculously cheap clothing without thinking too hard about where it comes from and use fuel from countries where we’re supplying bombs that ‘accidentaly’ get dropped on kids, or flush away enough clean water to keep a family alive for a day every time I take a piss, I am one of the ones who stay.
@Rhuu
Oh. My. God. Why would anyone ever let end users decide where to save something? Please tell me that was within a very restricted area that was basically theirs?
Another one who has had just one (that I remember) slow-motion hyper-awareness experience in my life (definitely saved my life): several sheets of plate-glass falling, edge-on, right over my head. I felt as if I had hesitated for a considerable time before deciding which way to jump while the glass oozed down through invisible treacle; the other witness present (who was up top, watching in utter horror as the glass fell a distance of about 3m from where he’d accidentally knocked it over) said that I just vanished.
Perception is wonderful, amazing and often completely counter-intuitive.
@kupo: NOPE. Currently end users can save anything anywhere. (With the slight exception of the one locked folder on the server, that only some people have access to.)
Originally there was some sort of idea of moving folders with our important files from one stage to another….
……………………………..
That lasted two seconds, mercifully.
For the most part, files are saved in the right spot. And if they go missing, usually people are working locally so there’s a file we can go back to. Or an earlier version, and the person can redo whatever they’ve done because why weren’t you working locally???? Always work locally!
Named correctly? Versioned up correctly? That is a whoooole other thing.
To keep people from over writing my files I move everything into the ‘OLD’ folder, then put in an animated gif that has my name at the end. So when someone is like “OH HEY let’s not check the tracker and see if anyone is in this file BUM DE DUM” and goes to work on MY FILE, they can’t. And they know who to talk to.
I’m sorry if this makes you sad. BUT A BRIGHTER FUTURE IS ON THE HORIZON and I am so excited!!!! We will take all of that power away from our end users! A program will do it for us! We’ll be able to SEARCH!!!!!!!!
It’s so close I can taste it.
http://pa1.narvii.com/6248/f2df4e2fd7840b43c338bbf4c7cbec8cc22564aa_hq.gif
(Also there are over a hundred people with varying levels of knowledge both of this industry and of computers in general… I can’t believe we pulled it off. BUT WE DID.)
ETA: @opposablethumbs: My mental image of you now
(image from Life Is Strange, if you don’t recognise it. It makes sense with your story, I swear!)
@ opposablethumbs
That might actually be related to the general topic. Tunnel vision can be a consequence of shock, so you end up with a literal blind zone outside the immediate area of focus. People have reported in firefights that someone has stepped sideways out of line of fire and seemingly disappeared.
Rhuu :-)))) I don’t know the character, but it’s great because she looks a lot cooler than I am 🙂
Tunnel vision in a situation demanding heightened focus, wow. It’s unbelievably wonderful that we manage such a weird and complex system as we have – and seamlessly, a lot of the time (well, apparently seamlessly I mean). Memory and perception and feelings and abstract thought – and we do it all with electricity and chemistry running on meat – it’s fantastic!
@opposablethumbs: *whispers* if you like video games I would recommend Life Is Strange but I finished it like a month ago and am still recovering so… It’s good. But gives you lots of tough decisions to make.
Also if you don’t like spoilers don’t search anything, just finding that image gave me a spoiler for episode 5 I would have HATED. It’s on Steam and the various consoles. 🙂
If you don’t like the video games ignore me, I’m just still really stuck on it haha.
Looooove Life Is Strange. Highly recommend. Also of note, it’s extremely casual friendly.
+1 for Life is Strange. Trying to steer clear of spoilers as much as I can, it was one of the few games where I’ve cried at the ending.
Omg, a gmod gif. Perfect.
I’m a semi-old-school Valve dork (to put it very mildly), so seeing that gif in a WHTM post gave me a much-needed smile just now.
Google manifesto author fired.
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo
@PeeVee
That’s a start. Now if they could disclose their pay info to the Dept. of Labor, pay women equally, promote women, etc, etc.
I was just thinking of ice cream flavors, when I thought of this one:
Orange Wall-Nut
There’s a general exacerbated problem with “bro culture” in some startups because there’s often no demand from investors that the startups hire older and more experienced executives. That means you get young and inexperienced leaders who are usually completely clueless about social justice issues or working with people who are different from them. They end up hiring people they like rather than focusing on qualifications, so that leaves you with (cluelessly unintentional at best) systematic discrimination against women and minorities.
@History Nerd
Pretty much the opposite, in fact. You practically want a bunch of barely-post-adolescent techbros staffing the company you’re funding, because they’ve got colossal egos and are happy to pack in 100 hour weeks because they’re totally going to be the next Zuckerberg. In reality of course, most of these folks are going to sacrifice their youth and health on the VC altar and burn out in short order as their company crashes and burns, as most will.
Experienced staff want more money, have more sense and might have already been through a cycle of this bullshit, and you don’t want that sort of influence around the expendable manchildren you’re throwing into the code furnace. They might get ideas.
PeeVee:
And of course a lot of dudes are whining about freeze peach. Do these guys really not understand what a workplace is?
@Moggie
“A place where we used to have free speech before the feeeeeemales took it away!”
On the subject of games, I played Tacoma (the new game from creators of Gone Home) over the weekend and loved it.
As with the previous game it’s not for everyone but I loved the way it gave me the same fear for the fate of these characters I’d never actually met, even in the game world 🙂
Thank you Rhuu – I don’t, but I appreciate the thought 🙂
Ah, of course there is/will be a freeze peach complaints explosion now – you’d think they’d never heard of companies not wanting to be brought into ill repute. And employers sometimes placing contractual restrictions on people’s behaviour and utterances during work hours/on work premises/on the virtual equivalent of work premises or clearly linked to them …
Not that those things are always good, but they can also be good and reasonable (like patient confidentiality and suchlike). Or not broadcasting bigoted rubbish under the company name.
@opposablethumbs, it’s not just about harming your company’s reputation, of course. There’s also the little matter of creating a hostile environment for your co-workers. Turns out that telling a bunch of colleagues that they’re inherently inferior and don’t deserve to be there can be harmful to working together! Sensible employers tend not to like that, and might decide that your post would be better filled by someone who doesn’t shit all over the company’s ability to provide a productive work environment.
Rhuu: I’ve found the key is to make the easy and lazy thing be the right thing to do. Understanding what’s easy and lazy for person X is half the battle.
Trying to stop people from doing the wrong thing using technical means just doesn’t work reliably. Permissions are nice: sure, stop everyone from accidentally overwriting the series bible (for a tv series). But once people are allowed to save files, you are kind of stuck with some possibility of screwing up. And artists are very clever, they’ll break your system just as well as any black-hatted hacker.
Also, dear god I hope you’re installing shotgun or perforce asap. You’re managing versioning by hand?! Every instance of people needing to type in a filename is a workflow that’s busted.
Maggie: more strongly, if the employer didn’t take serious steps to deal with this issue (i.e. a strong and very public denunciation), it would *on its own* provide evidence of a hostile workplace. Regardless of that employee’s position — or even his existence (granted it’s hard to fire someone that doesn’t exist).
People still use Perforce?
Moggie & numerobis, yes, absolutely. I was forgetting that companies can sometimes aim for avoiding a hostile working environment :-\