[jglamine]

This essay is weird. The author lumps James Damore, rank-and-file software engineer, in with Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg. Damore hasn't updated his LinedIn since 2018 - he might not even work in tech anymore?

It closes saying they need to stop reliving their glory days and be good fathers and not the town drunk. Those are serious accusations - being a bad father and a drunk. The author doesn't give any evidence for either.

[g_sch]

The author is pretty upfront that the conclusion was meant as a reference to a character in the movie "Hoosiers", not that any of the personalities named were literally drunks or bad fathers.

[jglamine]

IDk, I feel like they're doing the thing where you list people they don't like, then list other worse people and kind of imply the first set are related / just as bad as the second set.

It's a motte and bailey where if people accuse you of doing that you retreat to saying "no see they're separate lists".

[arduanika]

Maybe the author just forgot which three interchangeable white guys he named at the top of the article, up there with the DEI topic that he broached but then never came back to. Maybe he thought he had written "Elon Musk", about whom the bad father parallel is a little easier to insinuate from the public record.

Or maybe whenever he reads a headline about a billionaire, he just files it under one golem in his head called Zuckermuskezosdriessen. A golem which also includes James Damore (???).

After all, we're dealing with someone who writes sentences like, "the vast majority of your fellow students were men, and they were more or less all the same person as you." This is not an author who sees two people of the same demographic as separate individuals whose sins need to be litigated individually. If Musk is a bad father, what should it matter that Zuck seems to be a fine one?

Sloppy thinking, sloppy writing.

[eej71]

The Free Press recently did an interview with him.

https://www.thefp.com/p/google-memo-james-damore-vindication...

Basically he has kept a very low profile.

[jeffbee]

Nothing screams "merit" like retiring to Luxembourg after having never had a real job.

[tristor]

I would love to read it but it's paywalled behind a subscription and they've been able to break the way archivers like archive.is strip paywalls.

[layer8]

Paywalled, unfortunately.

[jglamine]

No, and you can see my post history to verify this.

[jeffbee]

Yeah that was weird. Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry? Never heard of them in the open source world. The way I read their arc, they went directly from cosseted upbringing to finding out that they weren't anywhere near as gifted as they'd been told their entire life and shifting from trying to actually compete in the industry to being a paid podcast guest in the grievance-sphere.

[jglamine]

I think that's uncharitable. He was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. Sure he went to Harvard, maybe he had wealthy parents (IDK his background) but neither of those are crimes.

I don't think he's the activist people make him out to be. He went on a few podcasts early on but has generally kept a low profile. I'm not under the impression he's doing the paid speaker / podcast circuit. Probably just living his life.

After he was cancelled probably nobody wanted to hire him, maybe he left tech completely.

But yes, agree it was weird to include him next to the other names. He's not like, a billionaire founder.

[llm_nerd]

>Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry?

It seems you've contrived a strawman that unless you know what they've done specifically in open source, they don't matter. I assure you that almost no one agrees with you.

This and the other post of yours about Damore are super weird, and you seem incredibly bitter about the guy. Weird stuff.

Damore's appearance in this piece is bizarre. He was an SWE at Google that made speculations about diversity targets, not realizing, courtesy of being the spectrum, that it was a massive taboo. For this guy to lump him in with Andreeson and Zuckerberg in his bizarre ageism screed is absolutely bizarre, and makes it seem like it was some LLM generation or something.

[arduanika]

Where does this "they" come from? You seem to know a lot about the guy. Do you have some information about his gender that's not public to the rest of us?