Nothing about the Google memo?

Of the ass?

I figured it was CYA in case of "hostile workplace environment" type harassment complaints.

Except he never said that. At all.

That's just nonsense. He did not say anything that was so bad that others couldn't work with him.

This is starting to become a major problem on the left in America. If there is even a hint that someone you work with doesn't think the exact way you do that it's okay to scream that you can't work with that person and demand that person be fired.

He said absolutely no such thing.

The echo chamber didn't read what he wrote, just assumed he said something evil, and then demanded his head. By echo chamber I mean the left wing echo chamber on the internet in general.

And yet people on both the left and right somehow got that impression from what he weote. Huh. It's like there could have been some sort of implicit message.

Uhhhh no......

The left, in particular the news organizations, hacked his words up and than went around telling people he said something that he didn't say.

Since most people are too damn lazy to read past the headline and the first paragraph these days that is the reason so many people got the wrong impression of what he wrote. They didn't get it from him, they got it from a news media that felt it was okay to lie about what he wrote.

Mostly they all just repeated each other without ever actually reading what he wrote. Remember Google originally didn't release the doc people just gave their extremely biased, slanted, and untrue interpritation of what they thought he wrote.

Such as when he said that men work better with tools and women are better at social interactions? Who knows what that could mean for their professional competence.

That's not for you to decide, that's a decision for his employer to make, and make it they did.

That's not an especially compelling argument, and frankly implies that women can't act professional and put aside personal issues, which unfortunately bolsters his case, and with which I disagree with.

Men, and women, put aside issues on a daily basis to work together. Hell, I've had to be professional with people I've come to physical blows with. I've managed professional relations with women who I've clumsily come on to, and who have come on to me. Even ones were its been rather obvious some bedroom yoga has gone on at some point.

Just so long as his opinions do not colour his actions, and if they did I'm pretty sure he'd have a litany of HR complaints against him that Google would've have referred to as part of his kicking out, it's an issue of managing and educating staff, not firing.

That's reaching.

I'd say that men do work better with tools, and women are better at social interaction, in general. And that is more down to society and education rather than any biological function (there may be a biological reason, but I'd like to see evidence first)

On an specific, individual level, I'm pretty sure he must have encountered females and found them competent. If he says otherwise, sure pass me a brickbat to fling at him, but otherwise you're marching up to a molehill with mountaineering equipment.

And as to the social influence on how gender roles are defined, one of the biggest influencers these days is advertising.

Now there is something Google can have an influence on.

I work with a few assholes. I don't agree with their politics and I think some of them can be obnoxious. But they're not incompetent at their job. They show up and do their work.

Should I demand that my employer fire them? Or should I learn to deal with people I don't like?

Ok. He makes a similar claim, but he believes it is biological rather than societal, and his evidence for this is that it differs from one society to another.

Precisely. Which is why his suggestion to base policies at Google on general statistics for other populations is bad.

I didn't realise you considered the latter an option.

I am afraid this is what happened. Though the the actual text wasn't released by Google until after the firing so none of the media actually read or saw the text and instead were relying on what "offended parties" claimed the text says which is never a good idea.

It reads a bit whiny and like the author thinks he's a lot brighter than he is, but didn't seem worth firing, imo.

Well, most people started with the Gizmodo coverage, which was outright deceitful and described it as a screed and a manifesto (when it was neither). Gee, I wonder how anyone could have gotten the wrong impression.

No, he said men work better on average with tools and women are better on average at social interactions. That's a completely different thing.

It absolutely should be, but his argument loses that distinction when he bases suggestions for Google policy on those vage averages for a general population. That's him failing to make that distinction, not us.

Which policy suggestions in particular don't deal with it on those terms, and in particular, how does that imply lack of confidence in his female coworkers' competence?

All of them. What you just cited is the basis he offers for his policy suggestions, after all. You could also go through individual suggestions, such as the idea to have female Google engineers work in close teams because females, not Google engineers, supposedly prefer working with people to working with tools; but the argument from general statistics defines the whole structure of the paper.

Already described upthread.But if you want a particular example, once he has suggested that women at Google would profit from more team work in order to give the best job performance, he goes on to say that providing those teams often won't be possible. And so on.

A friend of mine said that the author of the memo wrote that women aren't good programmers/engineers. I suspect that's how a lot of people heard it.

That's how I heard it.

Than of course the truth started coming out.

No. Reread it. He said that more women would become interested in software engineering in general and Google specifically, if Google had more pair programming.

You seem to be reading what you want it to say rather than what it does say.

Is there a third version of this text? The second one on Motherboard that @Ebeneezer Goode linked to sas the following:

Looks like he's saying we can get more women into software engineering by catering to their needs, one of which is a higher interest in working with other people as a team.