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from the diversity-of-opinion-department dept.
Gizmodo got their hands on an internal memo gone viral at Google that criticizes extreme biases and blind promotion of diversity. The memo's author confronts the practice of silencing such minority opinions through shame:
"Despite what the public response seems to have been, I've gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired. This needs to change."
Are these hints of the writing on the proverbial wall? One fears the diversity pendulum will break rather than be allowed to swing back.
[Update: Google has written a memo to its employees about the document. - ed]
Also at Motherboard and BBC.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 07 2017, @01:20PM (8 children)
"Brilliance is no excuse for being an asshole."
That may or may not be so - but feel-good bullshit is no excuse for failure. I'm one of the guys who doesn't want to attend another meaningless meeting where everyone gets to say something, while everyone nods their heads in agreement. I'm one of "those guys" who wants to pick up his tools, and tackle the problem - with or without help. The feel-gooders can't get the job done, and I do. I shit you not - I've seen half a dozen men huddled around some piece of equipment, talking the job to death, and failing to get it done. I come in, they go home, and I get the damned job DONE. If you want aesthetically pleasing work, you can wait on the talking heads, and you may or may not get the thing working sometime this year. Let me at it, it may be ugly, but it WORKS.
Maybe you'd like to make another excuse for failure?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 07 2017, @03:54PM (6 children)
Ah, you're one of those people. Make it work whatever the cost! Personally I can't stand know-it-alls like yourself who just come in and slam a job until its done. Almost always some detail is lost, some potentially important safety factor ignored, etc etc.
Then again, I've also seen the group of guys who sit around for an hour accomplishing literally nothing :/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 07 2017, @04:25PM
Are you saying that Runaway is the Cable Guy? Thought that was a parody of certain redneck Southern American males. . . . Oh, right.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 07 2017, @05:02PM (3 children)
Well, part of your problem is, you expect us to idiot proof everything we do. But in the race to produce idiot-proof, and to produce better idiots, you always win. We could strip some of you fools naked, toss you inside of a rubber padded room without corners, and you would still hurt yourselves. Even if gravity were turned off, you would STILL hurt yourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 07 2017, @05:36PM (1 child)
Brilliant counter argument! Who needs OSHA? Fucking pansies want to protect people.... Natural selection, Darwin awards!
I'm sorry for triggering you so hard, I didn't think you tough military types were able to be hurt by mere words. Lets hug it out bro, bring it in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 07 2017, @06:15PM
Yup, Runaway does need a safe space where he can just work on machines, with no other people around. He's not anti-social, he's just more a-social. Not quite human, actually. More of a poor version of John Galt, without the original talent. He does not work well with others. Does not post on Soylent well with others. Poor, poor, Runaway.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday August 08 2017, @09:05AM
I really love the victim-blaming mentality of macho asshole engineers. Somehow it's always the user's fault when they push an unlabeled and unprotected button that sets off a nuclear explosion.
Sure, there are no practical limits to human stupidity, nevertheless it is part of the responsibility of engineers to make a reasonable effort to make it difficult for a normal person to kill or injure themselves or others accidentally while using a product or building in a normal manner. But because of attitudes like yours we have many objects and machines in existence that have killed or injured many people repeatedly, and nothing is ever done to change the design, because of victim blaming. If a company started selling a chair that exploded when you sat on it, there would be some asshole defending the resulting user death toll by saying they should have read the manual more closely. With some of the insane design failures I've seen blamed on end users I don't even feel like I'm being hyperbolic at all.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 1, Informative) by khallow on Monday August 07 2017, @09:31PM
I would recommend sitting down then.
The perversity of this statement is that people who don't "slam a job" often have the same problems. It depends on the situation. The job may be well defined and understood enough that you can slam it and cover those safety factors. Or it can be so complex and obscure that slamming it is the fastest way to learn what the details and safety factors are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Tuesday August 08 2017, @06:30PM
Man, that's fucking *EVERYONE*, it's got nothing to do with "feel good bullshit". Christ, I work with unix shell developers who look at a shebang and say "Well that can't matter; it's commented!" Or folks who ask for support because a job that's never run before returned a success code but printed "Moving previous day's files" followed by "Files to copy: 0" followed by "mv: name* not found". Or the people who see a job failed and report the FIRST FREAKING LINE IN THE LOGFILE as the "error", ignoring the hundred lines below that after which is the log of the ACTUAL error that occurred. Or the unix shell developers who spend months working on an rsync script and can't figure out why it won't cross filesystem boundaries. Then you ask them why they have a "-x" if they want it to cross filesystems and they have no clue what "-x" does or possibly even what a filesystem is. The other day I had to teach someone on my team HOW TO COUNT. Seriously, he was trying to count days since an event, and he'd point to the day it happened and count "1". Took two people to explain that shit to him. AND HE'S A SYSADMIN!
"Coders" are a dime a dozen these days -- twenty or thirty years ago that wouldn't have been the case. "skilled coders" are still expensive, but management doesn't know the difference, and hires whoever is cheapest. THAT is the root of your problem. They'll hire anyone intelligent enough to copy a couple acronyms onto their resume, and they'll probably hire that idiot over the guy who sends in something honest, because they look better on paper. And everything is decided on paper.