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Kyth posted:I also haven't seen evidence of "most POC and women devs are choosing to walk away" in any of the retention data for the several thousand engineers in the nearest groups around me, but obviously ymmv. People who internalize the belief they are oppressed really hate to think they are actually being judged on their merits.
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Jul 12, 2018 23:21
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baquerd posted:People who internalize the belief they are oppressed really hate to think they are actually being judged on their merits. I could happily post the long series of misogyny that has decorated my life in tech, but it's likely not worth my time if this is your takeaway from my post given everything that has happened in the industry. Novel concept: it can be poo poo to be a not-white-male in tech and yet also able to succeed: it's just harder. Just because I run a team of several hundred engineers doesn't mean there's no sexism in the industry. Google has been the best place to be a woman in tech in the 20+ years I've been working and I've still run into sexism here. There's an internal list that shares stories of what women, POC, LGBTQ, etc folks experience to help show people that yes, even though Google is great, this poo poo still happens at Google and we need to all be better at preventing it.
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Jul 12, 2018 23:30
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baquerd posted:People who internalize the belief they are oppressed really hate to think they are actually being judged on their merits. The merits of this post are bad.
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Jul 12, 2018 23:37
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Kyth posted:I could happily post the long series of misogyny that has decorated my life in tech, but it's likely not worth my time if this is your takeaway from my post given everything that has happened in the industry. Not my takeaway from your post, it's just that I believe that it's not healthy to start out with an attitude of assuming and looking for oppression that often doesn't exist. The incidence rate and severity matter a lot here to what I see as an often disproportionate response where, for example, a single inappropriate sentence uttered without thought wrecks otherwise excellent careers instead of being viewed as an opportunity for education, or where someone is constantly looking to take offense as a form of self validation.
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Jul 12, 2018 23:57
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baquerd posted:People who internalize the belief they are oppressed really hate to think they are actually being judged on their merits. baquerd posted:No one's saying slaveowners were better than that, just that slaveowners that didn't take care of their slaves got sub-par returns over the long run. If you look at the most successful slave-owners, you would expect to see a general pattern of excellent treatment of well-behaved slaves.
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Jul 13, 2018 00:15
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^ ^ ^  Kyth posted:I'm pretty senior and a female leader (management ladder) at Google and haven't had issues, I'm actually really good at recruiting and retaining internal folks. Perhaps I may have been talking out of my rear end then! I would swear I saw something recently that said Google's diversity numbers showed they were having trouble with retention, but I can't seem to find it. I'll defer to your expertise. It's good to know that, even though it could be better, it's still good at one of the dream companies. Apologies for my misrepresentation
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Jul 13, 2018 00:16
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Shirec posted:Perhaps I may have been talking out of my rear end then! I would swear I saw something recently that said Google's diversity numbers showed they were having trouble with retention, but I can't seem to find it. I'll defer to your expertise. It's good to know that, even though it could be better, it's still good at one of the dream companies. Apologies for my misrepresentation Hey look, someone worth replying to! There have been high profile issues but there are everywhere that hire people in sufficiently high quantities; you still have the problems of the society you are in no matter how hard you try. You can just be "better", there is no perfect. I've worked at other big name tech firms and it was much worse. I run a large enough group that I see a lot of problems and I also see how impossible the imagined scenario of "a careless unthinking sentence that would've been fixed by a bit of education but unfortunately some hyperactive bitch used it to destroy their career" is. I've had to fire people over issues and the amount of data we needed was way more than a sentence that could be fixed with more emotional labor from the woman it was directed to.
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Jul 13, 2018 00:25
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Shirec posted:^ ^ ^ IIRC it wasn't about retention but after that fiasco with the dev that went on a rampage on how SJWs are ruining Google they tried to make changes in their hiring practices to get more diverse hires and then after a year reviewed and saw no noticeable improvements on minorities. Women however did go up!
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Jul 13, 2018 00:29
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Insanely powerful
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Jul 13, 2018 00:32
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Kyth posted:Hey look, someone worth replying to! I'm really glad someone as awesome as you is out there doing good work  Janitor Prime posted:IIRC it wasn't about retention but after that fiasco with the dev that went on a rampage on how SJWs are ruining Google they tried to make changes in their hiring practices to get more diverse hires and then after a year reviewed and saw no noticeable improvements on minorities. Women however did go up! Perhaps that is where I got it muddled then. I know that wherever I land (deciding on that tomorrow!), I want to throw myself fully behind helping out in those areas. Hopefully Google can continue to refine the process and maybe they'll have a breakthrough and that will spread out like all the algorithm/CtCI testing did for interviews.
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Jul 13, 2018 00:48
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This may have gone over my head, can you please explain it? What I think you're saying is that, regardless of whether we are talking about literal slaves or people who have experienced microaggressions, the concept of a privileged/ruling class passing judgement on their merits is wrong?
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Jul 13, 2018 00:55
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The intent of the "don't go to meetings" and "don't work on teams you don't like" rules is to detect when the above systems are failing. If you have a PM or manager or whatever that schedules too many meetings, if you're getting bogged down in "syncs", you can point to this rule as justification for why you're not attending them, even if your schedule is nominally free. TooMuchAbstraction posted:I can't deny this possibility. There are absolutely issues of systemic subtle (or not-so-subtle) repression, harassment, under-promotion, etc throughout the entire industry. I'd like to think that the majority of devs aren't assholes enough to not want to have a woman above them in the management chain, such that the ones who are that level of rear end in a top hat and do leave don't sabotage the team by doing so. I don't have any statistics either way, though. An rear end in a top hat reading of "if you don't think you're getting anything useful out of a meeting, don't go to it" is "I don't have to teach, mentor, or otherwise share my knowledge with others" which strikes me as a person I'd rather not hire. It's the line & logic Musk used to hang up on the NTSB Chief, which still doesn't strike me as an aspirational example.
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Jul 13, 2018 00:59
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JawnV6 posted:An rear end in a top hat reading of "if you don't think you're getting anything useful out of a meeting, don't go to it" is "I don't have to teach, mentor, or otherwise share my knowledge with others" My VP of Engineering that I've mentioned literally told HR he "will not come to the office until it's quiet" and came in for about... 4? days over the span of 6 weeks. It's not the quietest place in the world, but by 5:10pm you can hear a pin drop. Munkeymon posted:There already is a SA Code (or Dev, maybe?) Discord. I'll try to remember to see about posting an invite link when I get home. 
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Jul 13, 2018 01:02
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JawnV6 posted:Okay, you acted like team-hopping was a routine thing that happens all the time and is culturally encouraged, not a complete breakdown of management/PM responsibilities necessitating an extreme IC reaction to unfortunate circumstances? But sure, it's both ways. quote:Okay, I don't think an exit interview for a senior software engineer at say, Qualcomm, is going to be "saw a meeting invite, bolted for the door." Over here, outside of goog, I've seen companies bend over backwards to meet talent halfway including mgmt->IC moves, 6+ month sabbaticals for personal/family leave. All the "force" language sounds like propaganda.
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Jul 13, 2018 01:14
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JawnV6 posted:Okay, you acted like team-hopping was a routine thing that happens all the time and is culturally encouraged, not a complete breakdown of management/PM responsibilities necessitating an extreme IC reaction to unfortunate circumstances? But sure, it's both ways. I view it like moving to a new apartment/house: it's enough of a pain in the rear end that I don't want to do it regularly, but I'd feel horribly constrained if it weren't an option. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'd guess that most people don't change teams of their own volition (i.e. not counting reorgs) more often than once every few years. quote:Okay, I don't think an exit interview for a senior software engineer at say, Qualcomm, is going to be "saw a meeting invite, bolted for the door." Over here, outside of goog, I've seen companies bend over backwards to meet talent halfway including mgmt->IC moves, 6+ month sabbaticals for personal/family leave. All the "force" language sounds like propaganda. To be clear, this isn't carte blanche to not do your job. You're expected to show good judgement about what meetings are actually important. This is basically saying "people are not allowed to monopolize your time just because they have access to your calendar". If you don't like that your job profile involves going to meetings, then that's on you to work with your manager and find a job that you do enjoy, probably with fewer responsibilities. Failing that, if you decide to become a recluse and not even bother to remote in to important meetings, it'll show up in your performance and impact your career, and conceivably you could be fired over it.
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Jul 13, 2018 01:17
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Again, I've seen multiple other big companies wholly support moves between teams without making up stories about themselves being sole beacons of reason in a sea of inanity. I assure you it's entirely possible to do this.
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Jul 13, 2018 01:35
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JawnV6 posted:making up stories about themselves being sole beacons of reason in a sea of inanity I defy you to point to where anyone besides you said anything like that.
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Jul 13, 2018 01:57
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I defy you to point to where anyone besides you said anything like that.  its uTooMuchAbstraction posted:But again, the underlying principle behind all this is that you can't force people to work on your team. If they don't like the environment, they'll walk away and find a job somewhere else. If you don't give people the freedom to say no to meetings that they don't think are useful, then they'll look for another team; if you deny them the option to move to a different team within the company, then they'll go to a different team in a different company. They might do that anyway! TooMuchAbstraction posted:More generally, it's a recognition that you cannot force highly skilled/paid professionals to work on projects or in environments that they do not enjoy. If "keep them on the team" is not an option, then "keep them in the company" is vastly preferable to "have them leave to go work at $competitor". Naturally you'd rather they wouldn't find themselves wanting to leave, but that's not always realistic; Google has its fair share of bad managers and unpopular projects. That's actually one big difference at my current place. At Intel, getting "IR" on a perf review meant "go find some other team that wants you," here it's "shape up to your current assignment's standards or you're out." I knew one guy (who also had an interesting visa strategy) that washed out of a team I was on and did fantastic with the next group of folks. Rest assured, I, too, wish I'd stopped after mocking your initial statement of the cultural "value" inherent to starving a bad team of talent and not had condescending corporate propaganda regurgitated back in my face, but here we are.
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Jul 13, 2018 02:27
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JawnV6 posted:
Yeah, you're reading things into my posts that I certainly wasn't intending to convey. Language being the lovely means of transmitting information that it is, I will accept some responsibility for not being sufficiently clear that I didn't think this was somehow unique to Google. But that said, quote:Rest assured, I, too, wish I'd stopped after mocking your initial statement of the cultural "value" inherent to starving a bad team of talent and not had condescending corporate propaganda regurgitated back in my face, but here we are. Maybe next time...don't mock to begin with unless you're rock-solid that someone said something mockable? I mean, I don't see anyone laughing. When you're the only one pointing and laughing, maybe just a little bit it's on you. And that's the last I'll say on this topic, 'cause it's gotten dumb and derailed.
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Jul 13, 2018 02:54
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JawnV6 posted:Intel explicitly encouraged folks to hop teams all the time. I wish they'd stay a little bit longer. They learn how to push a review to gerrit and not to use arbitrary string literals as comments but leave before they can learn how to resolve merge conflicts and write their own objects.
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Jul 13, 2018 03:52
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JawnV6 posted:Does any software company anywhere "force" folks? Is that a reasonable word to describe "sit in front of a box and make 6 figures"? This entire schtick is ridiculous and the imagined alternatives in your head are hosed up and not representative of my time in the industry. You keep describing basic aspects of big company work and acting like it's goog's secret internal tricks to keeping devs. Intel explicitly encouraged folks to hop teams all the time. This is correct. However: Having managed many different places across a wide spectrum of companies, Google is the first where if I tried to block someone's transfer because the team was in trouble, or it was a really critical area, or everyone else had quit and if this person quit we'd be truly hosed, I'd be told to take a hike and it sucks to be me but the person is transferring -- and I work in one of the areas of Google that is receiving the most headcount, press, and attention. The handful of times when transfers have been actually been blocked lit's been a Really Big Deal and the engineers have pushed back hard. It's definitely a different culture than what I've experienced at some of the other big tech firms. (Been a manager at multiple.) Google is not unique in encouraging engineers to move, they are however unique in MY experience in their insistence on allowing it even when the senior leadership believes the business will be harmed by the transfer.
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Jul 13, 2018 04:02
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Maybe next time...don't mock to begin with unless you're rock-solid that someone said something mockable? I mean, I don't see anyone laughing. When you're the only one pointing and laughing, maybe just a little bit it's on you. TooMuchAbstraction posted:actively encouraged as a way to starve bad teams/projects of resources Rocko Bonaparte posted:I wish they'd stay a little bit longer. They learn how to push a review to gerrit and not to use arbitrary string literals as comments but leave before they can learn how to resolve merge conflicts and write their own objects. Kyth posted:The handful of times when transfers have been actually been blocked lit's been a Really Big Deal and the engineers have pushed back hard. Kyth posted:It's definitely a different culture than what I've experienced at some of the other big tech firms. (Been a manager at multiple.)
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Jul 13, 2018 05:05
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Mmmkay https://discord.gg/dadJYC That expires in 24 hours since this is technically public, albeit buried pretty deep.
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Jul 13, 2018 13:39
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About white male privilege in IT: it means that the reason for my succes is not that I am perceived as a decent developer but that my skills are overvalued thanks to outside values. And that sucks because now I can never be sure why things are working out for me. Skill or skin / gender?
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Jul 13, 2018 14:27
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Keetron posted:About white male privilege in IT: it means that the reason for my succes is not that I am perceived as a decent developer but that my skills are overvalued thanks to outside values. And that sucks because now I can never be sure why things are working out for me. Skill or skin / gender? it's not that your abilities are overvalued, it's that others abilities are undervalued. macro != micro. it doesn't help that there's a dedicated vocal minority of people on the internet that deliberately confuse the issue.
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Jul 13, 2018 14:56
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the issues women face in the workplace have a lot more to do with systemic failings of capitalism and how companies value labor than they do with shitheads like damore writing screeds about how womens soft minds and feefees cant handle the hard rugged world of increasing ad conversion by 0.02% this quarter imo
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Jul 13, 2018 14:58
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Keetron posted:About white male privilege in IT: it means that the reason for my succes is not that I am perceived as a decent developer but that my skills are overvalued thanks to outside values. And that sucks because now I can never be sure why things are working out for me. Skill or skin / gender? I can speak to that a bit, although I am still learning myself about that, as I straddle both of privilege and non-privilege (white woman) (queer but can pass). Others here can feel free to correct or add anything It's not so much that your skills and abilities are less than you think they are. It's more that the road you've taken has been smoother than it has for others. When an interviewer, who in most cases will be a white man, speaks with you, he recognizes himself in you. Instinctively, a lot of people (we all do this) want to help people "like us". Traits that in POC or women may have looked down on were instead brought forward as positive attributes. You "take charge" instead of being "bossy or demanding". You are "charismatic" not "chatty or overly social", so forth and so on. In general programming/development/engineering, so-called "masculine" traits were prized over "feminine" ones. You may have a lot of socialized behavior that primes you for success, unlike the aforementioned POC or women. You are told to ask for raises, because you're worth it. You are told to take charge and lead, because it's your place. That is not true of others. In my personal experience, I've been punished for asking for promotions that were naturally given to my male co-workers as their due. Also! You are able to use your discomfort with these things to stop conversations and pushes for this. I spoke about this in the newbie thread, but a lot of white folks will use their discomfort with ever thinking their behavior is racist to stop/delay diversity training/initiatives.
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Jul 13, 2018 15:02
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If we are getting into feminism here for all the duders, then I call upon all those times you stuck to doing something stupid in school or your job out of "toughness" as a case of toxic masculinity. I stuck with computer engineering due to it being the elite, tough major at my school; computer science or software engineering were for when you weren't tough enough. The measure of toughness was how well you put up with doing work that was not covered in class, notes, or literally any books in the syllabus. If you got roped into an all-nighter due to virtues such as toughness then it is the same. Now, if you did any of this for other reasons then sure, maybe it wasn't a toxic masculinity thing--for you that one time. It's just that it isn't as simple as a slider to value one type of person or another.
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Jul 13, 2018 15:20
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quote:That would be a point of distinction. The trump card at a couple places was the "disagree and commit" approach, calling the walk-out-the-door bluff. Still think it's laughable as a replacement for cancellation process. I'm not sure why you are insisting it's a replacement for the cancellation process. Just like changing teams to get away from a lovely boss isn't a replacement for systems to catch lovely bosses and try to fire them. Google is often deeply pragmatic about human behavior. So yes, ideally you say "this is a lovely meeting!" And everyone agrees and it's fixed or cancelled. ...but maybe it isn't. Okay, you go to someone higher up and say "this is a lovely meeting!" And they agree and it's fixed or cancelled. ...but maybe it isn't. And maybe you've gone through everything you can think of and it's still lovely. The point of what TMA is saying is that there's a written down doc from leadership that applies to all of engineering and says if you don't have an agenda, if it can be better handled by email, if it's not well-run, if it's not a good use of your time, if you can't get things fixed.... You have air cover. You are allowed to vote with your feet. If someone tries to force you to stay, you have a document supporting your choice to not be there. Because sometimes that's the only message people hear. And we'd rather make some dense meeting-runners uncomfortable and sad than to have a culture where engineers are miserable, stuck in pointless meetings with no recourse. And then maybe, when people stop coming, the dense meeting-runners will finally pay attention to the feedback they've been getting.
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Jul 13, 2018 15:27
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:If you got roped into an all-nighter due to virtues such as toughness then it is the same. Now, if you did any of this for other reasons then sure, maybe it wasn't a toxic masculinity thing--for you that one time. It's just that it isn't as simple as a slider to value one type of person or another. In the old days, we simply called that building character.
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Jul 13, 2018 15:56
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Kyth posted:…if you don't have an agenda, if it can be better handled by email, if it's not well-run, if it's not a good use of your time, if you can't get things fixed.... You have air cover. At some point, when I have more clout at this new job, I want to stress all of these points. I've had so many meetings where nobody stated what the desired takeaways were. Or only two people talked to each other while the other three held their eyelids open. Or it was a training session for the UI of an application where I only ever touch one table in its database. Or we discussed how to smooth the flow and automate a process that only a dozen people had used all year. The last one was especially bad, because after somebody revealed that only a dozen people used it, I suggested ending the meeting and reconvening if/when the adoption rate picked up. Everybody laughed and continued the meeting.
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Jul 13, 2018 16:54
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After refusing meetings for a while I got much fewer invites allowing me to code more. Other devs followed, about half or two third of the recurring meetings were cancelled. We got so much more done.
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Jul 13, 2018 17:09
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I'm reasonably sure that I wouldn't have gotten my current job if I weren't a middle class white male. Since I applied straight out of uni, with an unrelated degree and very limited programming experience, the fact that I looked and talked like the two interviewers probably won me some points - although I still have no idea why they picked me in the end. Nowadays the hiring process has changed, and we've hired a far more diverse group of developers. Senior management are actually quite proud of that. It's a pity they can't run a business and we've been laying off a bunch of people to try to control costs lmbo
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Jul 13, 2018 22:05
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Going by how many people showed up in Discord this morning, a lot fewer of you have me on ignore than I probably deserve!
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Jul 13, 2018 22:49
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I joined, I am now in.
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Jul 14, 2018 02:16
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I didn't join but only because the invite expired  I'll PM someone
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Jul 14, 2018 16:06
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Shirec posted:Perhaps I may have been talking out of my rear end then! I would swear I saw something recently that said Google's diversity numbers showed they were having trouble with retention, but I can't seem to find it. I'll defer to your expertise. It's good to know that, even though it could be better, it's still good at one of the dream companies. Apologies for my misrepresentation It says something that Google publishes diversity numbers and that internal mailing lists like yes@ exist. The first step to solving a problem is admitting that it exists via first hand accounts and other measurements. The second step is to make yourself accountable. By both gathering metrics and publishing some part of the demographics publicly, Google is saying "yes there is a problem and we want to be accountable". Measuring and publicizing the truth - even if it is disappointing - goes vastly further on the road to progress than any amount of corporate sloganeering and feel-good messaging.
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Jul 14, 2018 20:13
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Phobeste posted:I didn't join but only because the invite expired .
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Jul 14, 2018 20:45
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I got a couple of PMs so I'll post another one https://discord.gg/9Q4QHY
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Jul 16, 2018 13:38
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Munkeymon posted:I got a couple of PMs so I'll post another one https://discord.gg/9Q4QHY I'm there and am happy to do algorithms-y mock interviews for folks because I'm a huge algorithms and teaching nerd and have done far too many interviews here at the goog
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Jul 16, 2018 19:14
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