It seems similar to the way it was at Facebook in that when you start, you'll be assigned a level based on your previous experience and it'll be corrected soon afterwards if it turns out to have been wrong. They mostly corrected up, though - it was very rare for someone to be assigned a high level and then downgraded afterwards.
Obviously the Glassdoor link shows that there is a pretty big range in the salary bands - I think some of this is down to people reporting total target compensation (including RSUs, bonuses etc) versus base salary but there was a fairly large range at FB too. It wasn't uncommon to stay at the same level but have your base salary go up by $20-25k.
The ranges are wide to give room for salary negotiations at the beginning of employment, but also to allow for salary raises for people who are not yet considered to be at a higher level. E.g. you could be a junior developer, but a very good junior, who deserves a pay rise because of performance, engagement or whatever, but still a junior technically.
If you get quite far into your own salary range but never get promoted (if that's how the company works), it's time for some reflection on the situation, for both yourself and the company. Note that the ranges can also overlap between job levels, in some cases.
How do you move someone from junior to the next level? For me if someone has a better performance he/she should move to the next level regardless of the time he/she has been a junior. Are seniors consider that because of their performance?
Each company has its own guidelines. A junior could be for example someone who focuses too much in the particular case of a problem rather than looking at the big picture. In interviews, for example, if they present you with a problem to solve and you don't have any follow up questions, you appear as less senior in the eyes of the interviewer.
This is just one of the criteria used, there are more.
A “compensation team” sets the salary for each hire. Tr. 165-69. The team has no direct contact with the applicant and does not have the applicant’s name, gender, race, or ethnicity. Id. For industry hires, the committee might be given the applicant’s current compensation but no earlier compensation data. Tr. 175-77.
For the employees included in the September 2015 “snapshot,” about 20 percent were campus hires. Tr. 197-98. The only circumstance under which Google might increase the starting compensation for a campus hire is when the applicant has a competing offer greater Google’s. Google will not offer a larger salary or annual bonus plan, but it might offer a larger sign-on bonus or one-time stock grant. Tr. 207, 210-16, 223. There are no starting pay negotiations, and Google considers no other factors. Tr. 197-98.
That doesn't pass the smell test. They've been paying huge sums of money for some people (deep learning, and Levandowski's $100 million). Their process is far more arbitrary and open to negotiation than that summary claims.
Maybe for little people they have a standard process. But certainly not for everyone.
Please downvote! It's 2017, an introduction to a sentence I totally hate, and 60 women are suing a progressive company for sexism. One freaking hundred years, or something, after women started voting. What happened in that time? Women were blind to say the least? How is this NOT evidence that men and women are different. I've seen countless cases of men fighting and swearing at each other, bragging about themselves, and stuff. And countless cases where women would think and say of themselves all the diminishing things, from I'm not that good to I'm not that pretty. I don't remember a single case where that was true for those women or men.
But to say, like so many people say and believe, that men and women think and act that way because they were told so, is abhorrently and viciously and so flagrantly vacuous if not downright false, that it makes you wonder if anybody really and honestly and proactively wants anything better for women working in fields were they are underrepresented, and not actually fame and money for themselves only. Please, downvote!
A social phenomena, specially one that is so enduring and prevalent, could hardly be conceived to have been caused just by repeating some magic formula to kids throughout their childhood. Never in my life have I heard, Cristian, be a physicist because that's one men do. Cristian, be a programmer because that's what men do. Cristian, be an entrepreneur because that's what men do. Heck, I didn't even know the word entrepreneur, in English or Romanian, when I started my company by myself, by working on evenings and weekends. Nor did I think 'I act like man!'
The dynamic of personal choices and psychology is so complicated and so contingent to personal background and current state, but in the same time if in the middle of all that diversity you see some very specific phenomena happening across cultural and personal backgrounds, then maybe, just maybe, there's something underlying that can not be ignored. And ignoring it would only perpetuate the same evil, if it will not actually make it worse. Please, downvote!
LATER EDIT: Regarding the 'I was not promoted because I am a woman', how could we, as readers of an article actually judge the veracity of such statements. If a man thinks of himself to be good enough for a promotion and he's not promoted, what can he do? What if an women is promoted instead? Who's judgement is to take precendence? His, the manager's? The people? The judge? What about all those tiny details about working with the person in case, the small social interactions, the gut feeling? Seems like it's a luxury men can not afford, that is to cry 'sexism'! And it's not like outthere, in the real world, there're no women manager who treat women and men beneath like shit.
and why would men at Google ask for raises while women at Google would not?
Obviously, both groups have competitive skills in the industry. I'm sure you will bring up the studies that men are more likely to negotiate. However, that applies for a more general population who work at middle tier roles at middle tier companies. People who work at Google have more bargaining power than the general population.
One thing that I'm observing in software engineering students that I have seen over the years is that in the most skilled range (ones who are quite capable of doing all kinds of tasks and also have enough market leverage to get hired for whichever kind of role they'd prefer) wind up on quite different career paths depending on gender.
In particular, the skilled male students went on in all kinds of roles, roughly matching everything that the industry demands, but the skilled female students (with very few exceptions, I've seen two IIRC), as a rule, all chose from the subset of roles that are more, how to say, people focused. Despite having excellent technical skills as well (which I have seen and compared with their male peers), they have chosen not to do the core hands-on technical work and go on to related careers in e.g. system analysis, project management, testing, on-site consulting, technical sales, etc - even if they'd be paid more as a straightforward individual technical contributor.
I've seen them decline "poaching" offers to such positions with superior pay because they prefer what they're doing now and, unlike some (not all, but a large portion) of the men they've understood that they just won't be happy spending almost all of their day fighting code problems, and since they're good and can choose their conditions, they choose something that's more rewarding for them - knowing full well that it limits their salary. Sure, it's anecdotal experience, but it's many anecdotes so the patterns seem visible.
No, I am not suggesting that. Some, not few, women speak up and take action. What's then the difference between women who do and those who don't? Especially if they have the same background. What about the women that, in the same conditions, have no reason to speak up? Or women are victims and need men's help by default?
And I immediately regret getting back on social media after this. I was honestly hoping I wouldn't see this sort of thing on HN, as I have on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook.
Here is a clue for everyone: you aren't paid according to the value you bring.
You are either paid according to some pseudo-arbitrary schedule or you are paid what you can be had for. Unless Google has a secret pay penalty for females, the problem here is women being willing to work for less. No lawsuit is needed to correct that.
If the errors are correlated with education or experience, that indicates a confounding variable problem. Most data shows that including race and gender as explanatory factors improves the model:
Until the coefficients of gender and race become approximately zero, one can say that the market is discriminatory. The counter-argument is that race and gender are not actually the real explanatory variables, but only proxies for better variables, like "ethic" or "determination". Those kinds of arguments are often viewed as racist and sexist.
where additional_factors consists of other unknown factors (e.g. charisma, intelligence, appearance?). In which case, if education, experience, gender and race are kept constant, there is still going to be a fair bit of variance in wage caused by these unknown factors.
Either way, it would be pretty hard to model when these factors are far from orthogonal. Imagine the impact race would have on work experience if race is a big factor when hiring people.
Looking at it a different way, if productivity is defined as the combination of all relevant features (education, experience, ethics, etc.) then racism/sexism imply non-zero coefficients in
wage ~ productivity + race + gender
This also assumes a competitive market where wage will asymptotically approach productivity.
Market value, however, is something that can be measured quite effectively. And I think most of developers on HN do it regularly, when they go to interviews without any real intention of changing their workplace.
Quite recently, Google was found guilty of colluding to depress engineer salaries via "no poaching" agreements. Google doesn't get the "free market" benefit of the doubt anymore in these matters.
They were only successfully accused of poaching in the USA, but the accused are global companies, and it seems unlikely they didn't do the same elsewhere too. They might well still be doing it too.
They were only successfully accused of poaching in the USA, but the accused are global companies, and it seems unlikely they didn't do the same elsewhere too. They might well still be doing it too.
"no poaching" is illegal but it doesn't go against free market principles. It's just companies willingly agreeing not to poach, as long as there is no coercion, it doesn't go against free market principles. Now, the question of whether it is unethical or not is a whole other topic. I think that "no poaching" is not very efficient anyway as it usually happens between incumbent companies only whose stock isn't growing as much as it used to. There's always an Uber or a Facebook around to poach your best employees anyway with generous stock options offers, and they do.
"no poaching" is illegal but it doesn't go against free market principles.
I call bullshit. A no poaching agreement very much resembles a cartel. Same as companies colluding in order to squeeze the highest possible value out of, say, tenders for public works.
If poaching agreements are in line with free markets then so are lying, cheating and violating just about every aspect which is the basis of contract law.
I don't think no-poaching agreements infringe anyone's liberty and it that sense I don't see how it goes against free market principles. If you sign a contract with your employee saying you won't do no-poaching then doing so would be a breach of contract obviously but that would be a specific use-case. I totally agree that it breaks the laws though as it is illegal in the US. I was talking about free-market principles and no-poaching doesn't break these principles.
My definition of the free market is the absence of coercion (ie all actors are free), not whether people should be allowed or not to sign contracts you think may distort it which seems pretty subjective. I think making people not free to sign no-poaching contracts they willingly want to would be the distortion here, the no-poaching agreements may or may not have a negative effect overall but that is not a distortion of the free market. The only characteristic of the free market is that it is free, not that it is inefficient or not. The theory is that free markets tend to be more efficient, but they are not always so.
> If you sign a contract with your employee saying you won't do no-poaching then doing so would be a breach of contract obviously but that would be a specific use-case.
You contract is "employment law" + "your contract". I they don't agree with employment law they have to override it in your contract, in this case with a non-compete clause. If they don't, you have both agreed to the terms in "employment law" + "your contract".
As far as I know the concept is the same in every country. I really don't understand what you are talking about. When you sign a contract you agree to become an employee under the terms of the contract and employment law. When they agree to make you an employee they agree to follow employment law. So if they don't they are effectively breaking the contract. If the don't want that they have to not sign such an agreement. Which would sometimes be breaking the law but that is another issue.
I never gave them the benefit of the doubt, and knew that "Don't Be Evil" wasn't much good if you can't recognize that something isn't necessarily good just because it's good for you. And indeed, the "no poaching" stuff is pretty sorry.
They should have depressed salaries with non-competes like everyone else does.
If they can either get Google to settle or convince a jury they deserve compensation, they've retroactively increased their pay. It's a high and expensive bar, but if they clear it they get paid more for work they already did.
So to put it into the perspective you're espousing, these women are simply negotiating their rate after the fact.
> So to put it into the perspective you're espousing, these women are simply negotiating their rate after the fact.
The time for that would have been before the fact, not after the fact. You can't just change a bilateral agreement in hindsight and on your own accord unless you are Darth Vader "altering the deal", which might actually be the best analogy for what's happening here, dark side and all.
> The document, which was widely condemned as misogynistic and scientifically inaccurate
Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo?
They are re-iterating misconceptions based on Gizmodos original story, where Gizmodo
deliberately gave a misleading report, removed sources and incorrectly presented an internal memo for internal discussion as an "anti-diversity manifesto".
Even a cursory glance of the actual memo would have shown that none of these allegations hold. Less so that they were "widely condemned" by anyone who had actually read the memo.
I has honestly expected The Guardian to hold higher standards.
> Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo?
Reading the memo is irrelevant to the fact claim you quoted, which is about the response to the memo, not about it's content. (It's also completely accurate; the memo has been widely condemned on the basis stated.)
Sure. It's technically correct, but that doesn't make it right.
If I (or Gizmodo) were to write and spread fake news about you, where it is claimed that you are most likely a paedophile...
Would you appreciate news agencies afterwards further spreading the lie by using technically correct statements like "dragonwriter, which is largely considered a paedophile"? Especially considering that basic fact checking could verify that this is indeed not true?
>> The document, which was widely condemned as misogynistic and scientifically inaccurate
> Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo?
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but the document was widely condemned as being both of those things. Reporting that those condemnations occurred (they did) isn't an implicit validation of said condemnations.
I was mostly referring to how Iraq after 9/11 was repeatedly claimed to have WMDs. This was done to justify a war, which was obviously actually about oil.
US intelligence agencies time and time again claimed to posses evidence of Iraq having WMDs, and how it was vital to invade to stop Saddam from using them.
After the invasion it was obvious to pretty much everyone that the WMDs weren't there, they had been deliberately lied to, and that the "evidence" was manufactured.
I remember even Colin Powell being furious about this, seeing as he was the one who stood in front of the UN presenting the "evidence" as fact. A massive loss of face. He was not happy.
Lies like the supposed link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein [0] and the fact that 9/11 was heavily used as a rationale for invading Afghanistan/Iraq.[1]
They had their target first and tried to spin 9/11 in such a way that it pointed to their predestined target. Many US Americans fell for it back then, still believing to this day that Saddam was involved with 9/11, lies about baby incubators and that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was sanctioned by the UN.
Those are all evidently false, yet quite a many US Americans still consider them to be true, especially that last one about the Iraq invasion being UN sanctioned or else they'd have to admit that their country is leading wars of aggression for economic gains and not just to be "the good guys" aka "world police".
And because the two sides of the topic lives in their own social echo chamber, everyone will find enough validation on both claims and counterclaims, without being exposed to the the other side argument, in full with its flaws or in the parts that holds water.
The real victim here is debate. Even suggesting there's an issue worth debating is ripe for being flagged and flogged, and that's bad.
The document has been inaccurately labeled (I've seen a Slate op-ed making statements that are blatantly false) , but the people who are acting like it is some kind of academic work have apparently never done academic work.
The guy took a few academic sources and mixed in stuff from the New York Post. It's not well sourced. What people do see is an academic study linked and say "see, this is scientific", but most people aren't trained to read that literature so it's just psuedo-scientific garble.
Why is the tech world turning itself upside down for a mediocre undergrad paper?
As Julian Assange pointed out, it's been reviewed by a professor of social psychology, a PhD in personality psychology, a professor in evolutionary psychology, and a PhD in sexual neuroscience and in large part it checks out.
Debatable. I would exclude the EvoPsych chap from being qualified to comment on anything, personally, and the other two would need to show quite strongly that they weren't coming at this from a position of anti-SJW/snowflake commentary that they've previously demonstrated.
But all four are (in my opinion, whatever that may be worth) qualified to comment on psychological claims, which is more what the paper was about.
This doesn't change the fact that psychology is a very fuzzy science with lots of room for ambiguity and subjectivity. The human brain is among the most complex computing devices known to humans, and it's one which humans had no real part in designing; psychology basically amounts to reverse-engineering a convoluted and obfuscated closed-source program running on an entirely-undocumented computing platform. Oh, and the software - and even hardware - in question is constantly rewriting itself as part of the way it processes inputs.
Our understanding of psychology is changing constantly as a result; information from even as little as a decade ago is fraught with inaccuracies revealed since, and information from today will almost certainly be invalidated - whether in part or entirely - within the next decade.
Put simply: just because these authorities have validated the paper in question does not make that validation - or the paper - actually correct.
"I has honestly expected The Guardian to hold higher standards."
... what? It's the Guardian. It's a left-wing version of Breitbart. The vast majority of their 'reporting' is ideology-based fact spinning. I keep wondering why people somehow say that it's a 'respectable newspaper'.
I read the whole thing and I think the allegations hold. There is one citation to a scientific article in the memo: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004..... It's a meta analysis that looks at abstract personality traits (agreeableness, people-orientation) in studies involving socialized adults. The big takeaway is that these studies show that women are more "agreeable" and "people-oriented."
Everything after that is handwaving and ipse dixit. Egregiously, the memo takes it for granted that software is "thing-oriented" rather than "people-oriented." That defies reality. Software development is far more collaborative and social than, say, being a historian (a field where women receive 45% of the PhDs).
The memo also asserts, without proof, that these observed differences are stable across cultures. That's just false. Take education, for example. In India, men are overrepresented in teaching (80% of teachers are men).[1] And gender representation in STEM majors varies dramatically between different countries. Women are 40% of the STEM workforce in China. Over a third of the USSR's engineers were women, even in the 1960s.
In short, the reasoning in the article is so flimsy I'd be embarassed to be that sloppy in an HN post, much less in a company-wide memo. Which brings me to sexism. I have a hard time believing that anyone smart enough to work at Google actually finds such sloppy reasoning convincing. Instead, the memo smacks of the sort of grasping at straws rationalization used to justify existing prejudices.
[1] The underlying study also makes egregious assumptions about whether professions are "people oriented" versus "thing oriented." Figure 1 depicts a people-things axis and an ideas-data axis. It puts "teacher" at the far end of the "people" axis, and characterizes that as a feminine profession. The study also characterizes "biologist" on the masculine side of the column, even though a significant majority of biology majors in the U.S. are women.
If there's one thing I've learned by being around a lot of highly educated people, it's that you should never underestimate the power of pre-conceived notions to live beyond a sane lifespan in a person's mind. I don't find it at all difficult to believe that anyone smart enough to work at Google would find such reasoning convincing. Indeed, I have seen smarter people convinced by sloppier reasoning that happens to align with what the person wants to be true.
Not only that, but software engineering at the very least sits at the intersection of people & things. Very few people build things for the sake of things, and I think it's a fair assumption that "people-oriented" thinking, when building for people, may have business benefits that aren't as simply quantifiable as "Candidate A more assertively diagrammed a binary search tree on a whiteboard than Candidate B".
> that software is "thing-oriented" rather than "people-oriented
Yes, that is the dominant view. You may have a different opinion (which you haven't substantiated except by assertion), but that's just that, your opinion.
> without proof, that these observed differences are stable across cultures.
Actually, most of the studies that replicated these findings (with large effect sizes and very large sample sizes) were cross cultural.
One of the most interesting finding (that's also been replicated), is that gender differences in these traits increase the more egalitarian the society. This is the exact opposite of what you'd expect if the differences were caused by cultural pressure.
> flimsy, embarassed to be that sloppy in an HN post..
Well, you just were.
EDIT: And even if he had been completely wrong, that doesn't make what he wrote ("We need more diversity, but we're doing it wrong") misogynistic in any way shape or form.
> Yes, that is the dominant view. You may have a different opinion (which you haven't substantiated except by assertion), but that's just that, your opinion.
Whether the view is widely held has nothing to do with whether its supported by evidence. You can't claim to be making a scientific argument, when a major link in your chain of reasoning is nothing more than an appeal to preconception.
> Actually, most of the studies that replicated these findings (with large effect sizes and very large sample sizes) were cross cultural.
The studies don't show that occupational preferences are stable across cultures (and in fact they're not). The fact that places like China have much higher representation of women in STEM is a smoldering hole in the theory that these preferences are biological.
> One of the most interesting finding (that's also been replicated), is that gender differences in these traits increase the more egalitarian the society. This is the exact opposite of what you'd expect if the differences were caused by cultural pressure.
That conflates two different things: what gender roles a society imposes on adults, and how the society socializes children. Those two things are not necessarily linked. Take India for example: it's not very egalitarian; women are still strongly encouraged to stay home with kids (and the work force is 70% men). On the other hand, half of STEM majors in India are women. How do you explain that result if you assume that preferences are biological?
> That conflates two different things: what gender roles a society imposes on adults, and how the society socializes children. Those two things are not necessarily linked. Take India for example: it's not very egalitarian; women are still strongly encouraged to stay home with kids (and the work force is 70% men). On the other hand, half of STEM majors in India are women. How do you explain that result if you assume that preferences are biological?
Presumably because they're not free to choose what they would prefer, and instead do what their family expects of them.
Of course, we're getting back into your "women make a choice because they've been socialized to make it" territory here, which I find pretty convincing.
> You can't claim to be making a scientific argument,
> when a major link in your chain of reasoning is
> nothing more than an appeal to preconception.
"Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People
There is considerable interest in understanding women’s underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. Career choices have been shown to be driven in part by interests, and gender differences in those interests have generally been considered to result from socialization. We explored the contribution of sex hormones to career-related interests, in particular studying whether prenatal androgens affect interests through psychological orientation to Things versus People. We examined this question in individuals with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), who have atypical exposure to androgens early in development, and their unaffected siblings (total N = 125 aged 9 to 26 years). Females with CAH had more interest in Things versus People than did unaffected females, and variations among females with CAH reflected variations in their degree of androgen exposure. Results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with Things versus People."
"To sum up: I think there is more than "a shred of evidence" for sex differences that are relevant to statistical gender disparities in elite hard science departments. There are reliable average difference in life priorities, in an interest in people versus things, in risk-seeking, in spatial transformations, in mathematical reasoning, and in variability in these traits. And there are ten kinds of evidence that these differences are not completely explained by socialization and bias, although they surely are in part."
UPDATE: But actually, that does not really matter. His argument was that because there are differences we cannot rule out the possibility that unequal outcomes may have causes other than discrimination, not that he had proof that these differences are the cause.
Stipulate that men and women like things and people respectively, and this is a fundamental biological truth.
With this, tech is more biased than it should be. Engineering as a whole is pretty people-oriented: projects are team efforts and require a lot of collaboration, requirements gathering and user research. Math, as a counterpoint, requires much less of this but is less biased. That suggests that the Thing/People dichotomy doesn't fully explain the gender distribution of high tech.
As a side note, it is suspicious that science is exactly matching up with how the West has structured it's society. Other societies have different distributions despite having the same biological impulses.
> Engineering as a whole is pretty people-oriented: projects are team efforts and require a lot of collaboration, requirements gathering and user research.
Just like the statement about coding, I think that's a tad bit generalized because you can apply this to anything you scale bigger. You can make a big project, involving lots of different people, out of pretty much any skill.
Tho that doesn't change the basic "requirements" to be good at a specific skill. A coder can still code an app on his/her own, he/she might need more time, but the whole "additional people" thing is entirely optional in this scenario.
Same deal with engineering: It might take more time, but even big projects can be done with very few people. Adding more people is an entirely optional thing to speed up the process.
It's for that very same reason that many big projects, involving lots of people, have positions solely build around managing the whole "people" part of the project, leaving the engineers to do their engineering and the coders to their coding.
Because that's just how we humans are: We ain't perfect at everything, we can't be because lots of it is based on trade-offs.
all your examples are from repressive regimes (either economically, or politically). You see very low participation rates on hard STEM among women on countries where women have both large degree of economic and political freedom.
Basically, when women have choices, they choose against hard STEM. It is not just the US, but other countries with even better gender relations (Norwawy, Sweden, Denmark), it seems women just don't want to study computer science/engineering or physics.
In communist countries people were assigned jobs and often it was not their choice where they ended up. If the country had X % has to be women, then so be it.
But, we all know his forced centralized planning is a failure on the long term.
There was also a BBC article on this: "Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech?"
Quote:
"Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more likely to be rooted in Stem subjects."
> all your examples are from repressive regimes (either economically, or politically).
So socialization doesn't affect peoples' preferences, except in societies where socialization does affect peoples' preferences. Got it.
> Basically, when women have choices, they choose against hard STEM.
1) This presupposes, without evidence, that girls in the U.S., Denmark, etc., aren't socialized differently than boys, even if they are not actively discriminated against in terms of careers.
2) This uses "hard STEM" as a wiggle word. Under any rational definition, math is "harder STEM" than computer science. (And frankly, I'd argue that so is chemistry and biology.) Yet, the representation of women in math and physical sciences majors is twice as high as in CS: https://higheredtoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/nsc-bs-....
May that be because tech is perceived as more competitive or stressful? Lots of people make fortunes these days doing technology and the pace is tremendous, unlike in sciences. Anyway, I think the theory that it's probably just parents telling their girls it's a man's sport most of the time appeals to me a tiny bit more. I don't however see any reason to straight out presume biology has no effect whatsoever, it's probably a complex mixture of factors.
The Guardian (and other news outlets) can report on claims that others make without fear of repercussion. If their reported viewpoint is later shown to be defamatory, they can fall back on simply reporting the facts: Some other source condemned the document.
But if they make the claim that a document, person, or company is misogynistic or scientifically inaccurate, stating it as fact, then they are liable.
This is why so much reporting today is sprinkled liberally with the word "alleged". It's more common (and reasonable) in reporting on crime, when police or prosecutors claim that someone is guilty before the trial is complete, but it seems to be a habit that seeps into all reporting.
>> The document, which was widely condemned as misogynistic and scientifically inaccurate
>Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo?
Well, they were quite clever, weren't they. They didn't make any claims about the document itself, just about its reception.
And so what they write is technically true, the memo was widely condemned as misogynistic and scientifically inaccurate, even if those condemnations were completely wrong.
And of course the impression the sentence gives is that the document was these things. Journalists are good with words, they do this sort of thing all the time.
I used to read "Der Spiegel" a lot, one of the premier German weeklies. And I used to take what I read at face value. Until they started writing about stuff I had first hand knowledge off. Which tended to be comically inaccurate.
And then I started looking more closely, and noticed that they would pull these little language tricks all the time: giving an example, then an absolute number of one thing, comparing it to a percentage of another thing. Creating impressions and "causal" connection between events or facts by simply mentioning them next to each other, without ever making the claim. Etc.
It is actually entertaining to analyze, but don't expect to get too much useful information.
And no, I am not yelling "Fake News", most of the alternative news sources are far, far worse, not relying on linguistic trickery but just simply lying.
Anyway, the ones that do this the least (that I know of), are the Economist (their pro-finance, pro-CEO bias is transparent enough not to be much of a problem), the BBC (they actually really try hard) and Die Zeit (German).
Every time an article like this pops up, I see the same sort of response. It's always
- Women don't negotiate
- Women get pregnant
- Women work in lower pay professions
And 90% of the time, the article already accounts for the nuances of those topics. Not to mention these arguments have been answered thoroughly many times over, and a cursory google would reveal that. I just wish people would do some basic research before posting, especially in the light of the Google memo.
And it's also been proven time and time again that the "gender pay gap" is a lie. A myth propagated by people who don't know how to read statistics and raw data, instead curating it to be something it isn't.
Even if those facts are true, Google must have programs to make things fair. For same responsibilities same salary.
You can say women are different than men or say they are exactly equals. Whatever is your position for the same job you must have the same salary. There shouldn't be any discussion here.
> For same responsibilities same salary.
Why is that? If there is someone who is willing to take on those responsibilities for less pay, well that's just fine for the company and I think that people tend to forget that Google (and many other IT companies) is a for-profit company.
For me at least, I've always seen salary negotiations as somewhat of a "right person at the right moment". If you're very lucky and the company really needs they will be willing to pay you more than what you would make at a different company on the same role, maybe more than what others are doing on the same role, just because you were there, at that time, when they were most in need. It may not always be like that, but think of it as demand/offer relationship.
So regardless of gender/race it's the need of the company that comes first. Because as a employee you fulfill a need that the company has and you are being paid for that.
So you say that some who is starving if Africa we shouldn't care because he wasn't at the right place at the right moment? If you answer is that it is not the same case where do you put the line? Because your argument for getting things is basically luck.
Yes and it's luck + skills. Because otherwise you wouldn't even be in that position in the first place.
And what does Africa have to do with this? This was related to people working at Google and/or similar companies.
So you're point is that we should give unqualified people jobs that they are clearly not meant for just because they are having a hard time? There are NGOs and state help for this. Of course if I'm having a hard time, I'd like someone to help me, but the first one to help me should be ME. I should do everything that is in my power to help myself, I shouldn't expect help from others.
Don't know if that is what you were asking, but please stay on the topic of the discussion next time.
I want to balance the world and given the people what they deserve (same job = same salary). Try to fix the luck issue (either if you are starving in Africa or your salary at google is lower than the rest).
I never said given unqualified people better jobs, I said give people in the same jobs the same salary (don't accuse me of not staying in the point when you don't understand my argument and them make a claim of something I didn't say, please).
> I'm having a hard time, I'd like someone to help me, but the first one to help me should be ME. I should do everything that is in my power to help myself, I shouldn't expect help from others.
You think everybody has the same opportunities in the world, which is not the case. Sometimes you need external help and you cannot do anything by yourself (maybe you are lucky and will never suffer this, but doesn't imply it doesn't happenn).
I am asking the same question again, where do you put the line to take an action? For you it is clear the jobs are not an issue, if someone have a better salary with the same job position we shouldn't do anything. But when should we start taking action when the luck is harming people? I put the example of the person in africa starving as an extreme to try to help with my argument.
> I should do everything that is in my power to help myself, I shouldn't expect help from others.
That's a seriously dangerous mindset and one of the main reasons why we are dealing with a burn-out epidemic and generally massive mental health issues.
Some people are just really bad at asking for help, whether it's because they don't want to admit they ain't "perfect" and hurt their pride or because they simply don't realize they are in way over their head.
The result is that many people set themselves up to fail as they refuse to ask for help even when there's plenty of it aviable and they are clearly in need of it because they fear it might devalue their achievements by not having it done "on their own".
"Because your argument for getting things is basically luck."
Luck is really what drives a successful career and life:
- Lucky to have been born in the right place
- Lucky to have the right skin color
- Lucky to have the right sex/gender/orientation (and for those to match up in the "right" way)
- Lucky to have the right family
- Lucky to have an outgoing and/or extroverted personality
- Lucky to have an interest in a skill that's in demand
- Lucky to be in the workforce during a time when that skill is in demand
- Lucky to be in a location where that skill is in demand
- Lucky to have been hired amid the dozens or even hundreds of other candidates applying for your desired position (this is less of a problem now, but was a huge problem just a few years ago when labor demand was nowhere close to being higher than labor supply)
- Lucky to have been hired by a company that actually wants to give out raises
- Lucky to not have been laid off or otherwise terminated for circumstances beyond your control
The list goes on and on and on. I certainly think we should care about the implications of personal success and well-being being driven heavily by luck rather than actual merit. The case where someone is starving in Africa is indeed a case of "wrong place and/or time", and we as a species really ought to be cognizant of that and try to work toward "wrong place and/or time" being less severe of a problem.
I agree with you. What I am saying is that we should try to make the world more balance and not let it be driven just by luck or discriminatory reasons.
I'm not sure what you are arguing in favor of exactly.
Say we do make actual individual merit the only factor in hiring and pay. Would those "unlucky" enough to have been born a starving child in Africa ever have a chance at getting a high paying IT job? Likely not, as they won't have the education or skills needed to do the work.
I'd argue your use of "luck" in all these cases is wrong. It's more like fortune, and that hiring and pay is tied to both individual merit, and the merit of your ancestors. And when I say ancestors, this is usually as little as 2 or 3 generations. A vast majority of those in the US are descendants of a wave of poor immigrants in the mid and late 19th century. Going back 4 or 5 generations on all sides of my family tree, no wealth of any significance was transferred down, other than work ethic and usually trying to give offspring the best chance they can. It was not by any means perfect, but I was the first in my family to go to college, earn a degree, and be "successful". Note: I'm defining successful as "more assets than debt". I'm not wealthy by any sense of the word but I have a stable income and I'm able to save for retirement and own a home (via mortgage).
If we take that merit out of the equation - what societal pressure or incentive is there to improve upon oneself, and make a better life for one's children?
"I'm not sure what you are arguing in favor of exactly."
I'm not really arguing in favor of anything. Just pointing out that personal success and well-being is indeed currently driven by luck, regardless of whether we like it or even realize it. Pretending that the only variable involved is merit or "hard work" is ignorant of the existence of billions of perfectly capable and "hard working" people currently unable to achieve such personal success due to circumstances entirely out of their control.
That problem is currently unsolvable (or at least very difficult to solve, and with no clear solution). I'm certainly not going to assume that I - of all people - have some kind of magical answer there.
It is, however, possible to at least gradually address the problem through whatever hard work it takes to make the next generation a little luckier: folks lending their shoulders for their children to stand on, and their children in turn lending their shoulders to their children, and so on. It sounds like your own ancestors did precisely that, as did mine. Whether we call it "luck" or "fortune" is a terminology issue that is irrelevant to the main point: the playing field is by no means level, and neither of us chose to be born into our respective families.
> the playing field is by no means level, and neither of us chose to be born into our respective families.
Agreed. However our parents did choose to have us, raise us, and give us the best fighting chance. Ignoring that ignores their hard work and skills to properly rear children. If in this new system we just give everyone a job and a good salary "because" then what incentivizes anyone to properly rear their children or give them anything other than the minimum the State mandates.
I'd argue that the drive to provide a better life for one's offspring is the fundamental building block of empathy. By society ignoring that capital that someone's parents built up in their children, you risk a change in behavior where parents say, "your life will be great because you will have a job and salary no matter what." Then, the very idea of love and empathy for one's offspring breaks down, and thereby in society as a whole.
"However our parents did choose to have us, raise us, and give us the best fighting chance."
Right, and we were lucky that they did so, which is my point. Plenty of people weren't so lucky, whether because of a lack of parents (e.g. orphans), neglectful/abusive parents, etc. Understanding that possibility is essential to understand why the playing fields aren't level.
"If in this new system"
I'm not proposing any kind of "new system", as I already explained. I'm just describing the problem.
"By society ignoring that capital"
I'm not calling for society to ignore that capital. If anything, I'm calling for society to recognize that not everyone has access to that capital by zero fault of their own and (ideally) to provide an alternative means to acquire equivalent capital. Folks shouldn't have to be punished for their ancestors' mistakes (or even non-mistakes).
A lot of this can and should happen through the public education system, but even that's not a given; even for those who have access to public education (which is far from 100%), not all public schools are created equal. It - again - more often than not boils down to luck.
This is one of those arguments the grand parent was talking about. Unfortunately this argument is why someone has a larger salary than someone else, not why there are disparities between groups. Unless different groups unequally finds themselves being "right person at the right moment", it should statistically average over time.
That said, I don't see a good reason to defend salaries that don't match performance. It's sometimes a reality, but still not desirable. Especially since many times being the "right person at the right moment" isn't luck. It's knowing the right people and having that matters more than your performance.
What if Joe and I and have the same responsibilities. Just to build working code. However, I can produce 100 working/tested lines of code a day and Joe can produce 150 lines of the same.
Joe isn't entitled to a higher salary because he's more talented?
lines of code as productivity measure is not the best example. Can you provide a better example?
I can drop your example just with this: maybe your 100 working/tested lines produce more money for the company that the ones Joe wrote. Or the company needs the 250 lines of code to produce any money, without all of them your value for the company is 0.
I agree with everything. But two points. First you cannot measure productivity per employee, it is incredible complicated. Second the difference is not going to be as big as you would expect to have huge differences in terms of salary (like 20% or more). So basically I think when two people with the same job positions have a very different salary you have a clear bias to give one more than the other. If they are really different in their productivity you might consider to fire the less productive or give the other person a better category (in the companies they have Junior I Junior II, Senior I, Senior II, etc).
I always thought that the problem was about changing culture. The existing culture is too elitist and male oriented.
Which isn't a problem in itself. But these are gatekeeping mechanisms that are gatekeeping what may become the ONLY good jobs in the future as everything becomes automated.
It's not about proving your worth but looking out for people trying to cram into the departing boat.
Whether there's enough space or if the boat can grow or even if the boat is as useful as it claims is another story.
Goverments used to burn books not because peasants could read them but because of the lifeline it extended. An opportunity to challenge.
Tech exponentially creates more and more knowledge requiring more and more specialization. It's not enough to throw scraps because difference can still grow if the scraps are small enough. Even though the rising tide lifts all boats, the difference in speed creates master/slave like riers.
Certain societies and cultures place more emphasis on the responsibility of the powerful to create these lifelines. Others are more individualistic.
I've been a bit of a Google fan for a long time, but I'm also afraid of leftist authoritarianism, and their handling of the memo had galvanized me against them. I'm not one for boycotts or overreactions, but the "silencing cultural dissenters" business is simply the antithesis of liberal values, and it's especially wrong coming from a company that purports to be a bastion of freedom and defender of rights. So on the one hand, hang 'em high, but on the other hand, not for failing to sufficiently toe the party line.
It's fascinating that management at google didn't speak to fact that the memo points to the very real issue in silicon valley that the culture there openly shames those who are right of center into silence. Discrimination is something both the left and the right can do, but in the current landscape, the left seems to get away with it, and are sometimes even praised for it (see virtue signaling).
This could be a wake up call, and I suspect that secretly it is for many people.
This incident confirms tech is indeed a hostile place for women full of insecure men, who will grasp at anything to retain privilege.
And women should be rightfully wary of all these fragile men who will watch them like hawks looking for any excuse to confirm their bias.
The kind of comments these threads are full of are a shocking reflection of a complete lack of understanding of history, sexism, privilege and women.
But the root cause is some people have convinced themselves they are so 'special' and 'superior' only a tiny 'approved' elite can do the jobs they do and anyone who diminishes this supremacist insecure identity will pay with bad science.
The irony is all these self appointed 'geniuses' who can 'decide' all by themselves about their own skill level and 'lowering the bar' do not have anything remotely approaching science or measure to explain how they came to this fruity conclusion about themselves and others. This is beyond absurd.
This is out of control self importance and hubris fuelled by SV culture and is as far away from rational scientific discourse as any self obsessed victimhood peddling supremacist.
If women are getting paid less for the same work, that's wrong. But I sense this is not what's happening here: we are paid less for whatever the reason and we are suing google for it because there's this new religion, that's having a huge bias against discrimination.
I'm sick of seeing this everywhere. Well f that. I'll have 15 children and my wife will stay at home all the time. Our civilisation survived because this was the healthy family model for thousands of years, I'm not participating for this sick liberal experiment any more.
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