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.
@Moggie
If a technology exists, there’s a company still using it.
@Paul Browning
Sounds interesting. I still need to finish Gone Home. I got stuck and set it aside for a while.
Just out of curiosity, why is it called Tacoma? That’s a city near me, named for the original name the Puyallup people gave the nearby mountain (now called Mount Rainier).
@numerosis: We’re installing a local system that i’ve worked with before, and will work with Harmony. Seriously, pipeline folks, get on the harmony bandwagon. Making each studio write code to make your software work with an industry standard program is BULLSHIT.
(And too much for smaller studios to do.)
I’m not even asking for it to work with flash, though won’t someone please think of the poor flash studiossss. (Flash needs versioning help too!)
Also i want to frame the bit of your comment about our busted pipeline because CLEARLY IT IS and why didn’t the people establishing it see that? This isn’t their first rodeo!
But now thought has been put into it and (fingers crossed) everything will go smoother.
Ugh work frustration.
Also thanks for the tip on making the easy thing the right thing!! That is a great design strategy.
kupo:
Tell me about it. I spent this morning importing a bunch of CVS repos into git.
@ Kupo
Is that common knowledge; or is it something I can drop into a conversation with my SeaTac friends and pretend I know stuff?
@Alan
I’ve lived in Western Washington my whole life and only recently learned that tidbit, so I’d say it’s not very common knowledge.
@ kupo
Heh, give me 24 hours. 😀
“Actually…”
If you’ve read The Expanse novels, that seems a bit like the combat mod Clarissa Mao has in Abaddon’s Gate.
…and I had a similar wondering after my experience with slow time, which led me to plot out a short story remarkably similar to what you’re describing. Great minds.
I really ought to write that one some day….
@Gaebolga and @Moggie : IIRC, it’s something that is very bad for your heart, because it also make it beat faster. It likely have a lot of other side effects, since the other panic mode of the body I know of can have severe side effects. Like most people can actually lift a car by themselves, but they will break some of their bones and damage their muscles doing so.
That don’t prevent a conscious panic button doing that to be something that could save lives however. My cynical side say me it would mostly be used by athletes, especially on the Tour de France.
Re: Old stuff still being used.
I worked for a company in the late 1990s. They ran the accounting and finance stuff on a Vax, complete with the big “tombstone shaped” hard disks. After one big crash, leading to massive expense to buy a replacement part, they finally moved it to a Vax emulation on a Sun Sparc server. As far as I know, they’re still using the emulator.
This company, in the 1990s, had a special employee discount on a high-speed dialup modem for $149 or so. Yeah, Hayes and 3Com modems were selling at less than $50 for the same speeds at the time, I think.
JS, I worked with VAXen back in the 1980s. To my shame, I once blew up an 11/780 through poor anti-static protection. A couple of years ago, I was on a training course, and got talking to someone in the banking sector. His company still used VMS at that point (I don’t hold with this new-fangled “OpenVMS” naming). Presumably not on VAX! They had greybeards on staff to look after it.
Apparently, Julian Assange has now offered googlebro a job at wikileaks, because of course.
@Pie
What people don’t realize is that Mark Zuckerberg got very lucky. He was already a student at Harvard, so already more privileged than most CS students or graduates to begin with. He wrote a PHP script for a social networking site (allegedly without copying anyone else’s code without permission) and found ways to monetize it using a marketing strategy that beat other social networking sites. He didn’t necessarily invent a new technology, that came later from VC paying for Facebook to hire R&D staff.
Social networking has been around for awhile, since at least the more advanced PLATO network in the 1970’s. Myspace didn’t require an organizational affiliation to make an account, so both 13 year-olds and creepy middle aged men could have accounts. You needed to be affiliated with certain (usually elite) universities to have a Facebook account at first, and that was gradually expanded to any university and to high schools before anyone could make an account. Maybe that created a perception among parents that Facebook was safer than Myspace, but that’s not necessarily true.
Considering a replacement tombstone hard drive (dimensions measure in feet and inches) doesn’t actually exist any more, any company still running VMS is not doing it on a VAX.
As someone else noted, wikileaks is in favor of misogyny and stupidity, so he’ll fit right in.
‘Slow time’ perception may be partly due to the effects of adrenaline, though there are side effects during an adrenal rush that you would not want continuing for log. An example is hair growth stopping, leading me to wonder if it sometimes leads to allopecia. Matt Smith and Duncan Goodhew reported developing the condition after stressful experiences.
Re: ‘Matt Smith’ sorry, should be ‘Matt Lucas.’
@Pie
What people don’t realize is that Mark Zuckerberg got very lucky. He was already a student at Harvard, so already more privileged than most CS students or graduates to begin with. He wrote a PHP script for a social networking site (allegedly without copying anyone else’s code without permission) and found ways to monetize it using a marketing strategy that beat other social networking sites. He didn’t necessarily invent a new technology, that came later from VC paying for Facebook to hire R&D staff.
Social networking has been around for awhile, since at least the more advanced PLATO network in the 1970’s. Myspace didn’t require an organizational affiliation to make an account, so both 13 year-olds and creepy middle aged men could have accounts. You needed to be affiliated with certain (usually elite) universities to have a Facebook account at first, and that was gradually expanded to any university and to high schools before anyone could make an account. Maybe that created a perception among parents that Facebook was safer than Myspace, but that’s not necessarily true.
Startups are more or less industry drop-out factories. VC funds a bunch of startups expecting a small fraction to succeed, though there’s no guarantee that they won’t replace all their staff once they’re successful. Older managers and executives might believe in more “old school” social responsibility, that businesses exist partly to help employees live better lives and to help the local community. Instead, they’re giving people 18-60 months of employment working 80-100 hours per week, and your body simply won’t allow you to work that much at some point after you’re 24 or so.
@Moggie,
@Ohlmann
@Wolverine’s granddad (formerly Kevin)
@Moggie, I imagine this is something you could train your brain to do! Hormone production is very much within your conscious control. In the brain it’s produced in the pons – the lower brain – and it’s connected to all sorts of nonsense. It accepts input from the medial prefrontal lobe of the neocortex, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for what we tend to think of as conscious thought (what we metathink? hmm.)
This would be an exercise in thought control to a great degree. Meditation is central for this sort of thing – carefully directed thought patterns and very deep self-awareness. I can’t tell you how, but I can give you some ideas on it.
– Adrenaline (and noradrenaline, which is what we’re actually talking about here) is produced from dopamine. Your body will need a bunch of it to pull this off. So, happy thoughts! Good times! Relax and feel good. Probably incompatible with depression.
– You will need to be able to control your sense of panic. Turn it on and off like a switch. I’d suggest meditative sessions in which you start calm, bring yourself to as high a height of panic as you can, stay there a little while, and then bring yourself back down – and end as calm as you started. This would probably be good for you, to be honest.
– You will probably feel “dissociated” from yourself while doing this. Like the panic isn’t yours, that your body isn’t yours and your sense of panic is disconnected from you. That’s normal and probably a sign that it’s working.
– Try to avoid ending sessions in a panic or at any level of unease. You don’t want to teach yourself to be panicked all the time. You want to control it.
– Like Ohlmann and Kevin warned, it’ll be a stressor on your body. As long as you’re relatively healthy though, it’s not going to hurt you too much. Your body is used to swimming in adrenaline when you’re being physical, and you spend hours every day swimming in stress hormones, typically while you’re asleep.
It’s a really neat idea and I sort of want to try it for myself, just to see what happens! I’m confident it’s possible, but I really don’t know just how much work it would take.
Related to the main topic : I have seen a frightening amount of normally progressive male devs say what amount basically to “well, the guy from the Google manifesto is polite and articulate, so he must have a point”.
Meanwhile, if you read that and replace the cliche on women by cliche on jews, you have something straight out of metapedia.
@ scildfreja
I’ve mentioned before the “porthole” technique some military personnel are trained in; that’s basically what they’re aiming for.
It’s hard to simulate real panic. We do use a few techniques to come close though. Firstly we do a few rounds of that HIIT/Tabata thing, until the person is exhausted. That gets the heart racing and some of the same hormones flowing. Then we train the moves. During that the instructors will randomly strike or slap the subject. It’s not to cause actual damage, just to induce a bit of apprehension. Partly that’s to create ‘stress inocculation’ but mainly it’s to train the techniques so they operate on a subconscious level (we talk, inaccurately, of ‘muscle memory’).
And the idea is also to push yourself beyond the mind’s usual ‘cut-off’ switch. There’s an idea that when your body is saying ‘that’s the limit’ it’s only really operating at 40% capacity. I’m not sure about that, but it is the case that you can train yourself to move that shutdown point without actually getting any fitter, it’s just a psychological thing.
I’d love to take you to a training session. You might enjoy it from an academic point of view; and you could probably explain to us what’s actually occurring.
Interesting.
Cannabis and slowed time. Cannabis and paranoia. Cannabis makes it easier for me to function socially and I get a bit manic when enough is enough.
I need to think about this before pulling things from my ass in terms of broader meaning.
@Ohlmann,
The reaction to Hillary Clinton and to Bernie’s loss in 2016 has forever scrubbed my brain of the thought that “normally progressive male devs” are progressive. They’re happy to be progressive so long as progress is in their favour. As soon as someone suggests that their behaviour might be a problem, it’s toys out of the pram, and they’re as bad as any conservative.
@Alan, that sounds like a lot of fun, and good for you! I’d love to go to something like that.
The “Porthole” technique you talked about it very similar, yes. Not sure how the military approaches accomplishing it, but it’s all about self-control.
The slaps and strikes during training is something that’s done in some monastic practices – the proverbial head monk whacking the pupil’s head with a board while they’re trying to meditate. That accomplishes a few things – disrupting thoughts, increasing flow of stress hormones. Overall trying to train the involved neurons to be strong enough to continue to fire when inhibitory signals interfere.
That’s pretty much what the 40% thing is. Brain’s doing a thing, hits fatigue or inhibitory signals, threat-analysis system engages, determines that the current activity isn’t useful in self-preservation, and the brain makes up a reason why you stopped doing the thing. If your activity is due to a structure that’s unusually strong, though, the inhibitory signals aren’t enough to inhibit the signal and it continues.
Or something like that! I’m not a neuroscientist, that’s just me babbling.
@ scildfreja
Oh wow; just goes to show there’s nothing new under the Sun.
I knew you’d be able to explain all this. 🙂
Moggie: yes, people still use perforce!
It handles large binary files reasonably well, unlike its competitors, which gives it a reason for being in an animation studio (which are mostly trying to version images, videos, audio, and maya files… all of them being large binary files).
It’s also reasonably well integrated into various tools. As Rhuu points out, integrating your tools together is a bloody expensive pain in the arse.
Rhuu: since we’re mostly working in 3d, we haven’t really done much at all with Toon Boom. We probably should stop by and say hello, they’re only about 500m from our offices.
@numerobis: Please please please please. Seriously, it was so disheartening looking to try to find something that would work with Harmony files and see that, while there were tonnes of things for 3D, there was just nothing for Harmony.
Harmony has apparently bought a pipeline company, and is going to develop something for themselves? Which would be so good, but in the meantime we’re just kind of scrambling.
Some studios can afford to pay someone to write something to make shotgun work with Harmony, but others just need something out of the box that is going to do 95% of what they want.
(Also if you could tell Harmony to let us set what a default composites comes in as, maybe they’ll do it if people just off the street tell them. SERIOUSLY HARMONY NO ONE USES BITMAP. Stop making me change it every time.) XD
Have I mentioned how much I enjoy this community, and the various people who have found their way here? Because everyone here is cool.
http://globalnews.ca/news/3654690/google-anti-diversity-memo-employee-job-offer/