nowo's comments

> Can you explain to me the point I've made that you're arguing for or against with your question.

The idea in your comment is that you can't, or at least are dissuaded, to express certain opinions. Most the things I hear about Google, including the existence of a list talking about the harms of political correctness, that the author felt free to write such a report and many other reported freedoms at work indicate that this isn't the case. That in fact people at Google are more free to express themselves in these types of issues than at other companies.

You're the one who seems to be upset. I wrote one line and you jump to conclusions, question my motives, dig into my comment history and even managed to bring up Hitler. I try to argue the facts. Maybe you should question yourself as you question others.

You realize his paper was posted to a list at google called "pc-considered-harmful"?

I stumbled on that one too. But of course a high cost of living results in a low score and vice versa. Probably should have called it affordability.

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.

> 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".

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.

I think it was wrong to fire him too. But honestly it somewhat of a feat to manage to criticize large parts of the organization, make a large part of the company angry and end up on big news sites, all at the same time. Especially since Google is pretty infamous for their hiring process, keeping things internal, flagging troublemakers and protecting their reputation.

It's pointless to claim "lack of critical reading ability" without presenting an argument, since anyone with critical reading ability would have to dismiss that statement as unsupported.

Everyone is saying that they are open to discuss this, but as soon as someone says what they think about the paper they are met with dismissal. People interpret his large focus on the biological traits of women, by presenting those traits as the primary cause of the gender gap and without showing causality between those traits and the gender gap as disrespectful. Because it suggests that women are primarily at fault. That he inserted a few disclaimers and tries to avoid responsibility by saying things like "possible" doesn't really make things better but further the feeling that he didn't really care to what degree it was true.

Women 31% overall, 20% tech.

https://www.google.com/diversity/

> I haven't seen a single criticism of the paper that even recognizes the author is referencing large-scale incontrovertible research involving the Big-5 personality model (the giveaway is the use of terms "agreeability", "conscienciousness", "neuroticism").

Because it isn't relevant. The major weakness of the paper isn't that there are studies suggesting some differences between men and women, but that it doesn't convincingly argue why these difference are relevant to what is being suggested.

I don't agree that this is a benign reason in itself. Regardless if you say that women don't want to be programmers now or that women never wanted to be programmers, you have to find a good reason why they don't want to. Because women have no problem sitting in front of computers in economics, so why do they in software?

I don't think it is hard to find a good reason why someone wouldn't go into nursing (even if this wouldn't disprove sexism in nursing). It has barriers to entry by requiring formal education, which can be competitive. The working conditions are somewhat difficult having to work irregular hours and be exposed to emotional stress as in seeing people dying. At the same time it still relatively low status, not necessarily well paid and has limited career prospects.

Of course you can argue that this shouldn't be the case. That the profession should help people dealing with stress and have good working conditions etc. Still it much harder to imagine these sort of "hard" reasons, negative things that are inherent to the profession, when it comes to programming.

> The question is: where are the goalposts? Is the industry sick and oppressive towards women until it hits 50% representation? I don't think that's a fair expectation.

It's hard to find a benign reason why the percentage of women CS majors would halve in the last 30 years while the profession as such has become more attractive.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Much of CS is more similar to economics, accounting, statistics etc. than engineering. Making a statistical model is generally much closer to CS than making the hull for a boat.

The "facing 40 years" is a quirk of the US justice system. While still often out of proportion he's not going to get 40 years.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/41-months-weev-underst...

They could presumably investigate you with much greater power outside of the US where you don't have the same rights. I don't know if they could later use that in court, but that was at least what someone argued regarding Silk Road.

"In any event, even if the FBI had somehow 'hacked' into the SR Server in order to identify its IP address, such an investigative measure would not have run afoul of the Fourth Amendment," Turner wrote. "Because the SR Server was located outside the United States, the Fourth Amendment would not have required a warrant to search the server, whether for its IP address or otherwise."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/us-says-it-can-h...

While it's a different situation, it's still not a good one. The lack of rights for foreigners, the NSAs reach, the willingness to prosecute citizens of other countries, long detentions and harsh penalties for computer crimes etc. puts people in a situation where the US government can make things very uncomfortable for them. I do think some risks with e.g. mass surveillance have been exaggerated, like being pursued on a basis of keywords. But if the US government actually has evidence against you of things they consider illegal, your legal protection against abuse will have weakened. So while it's unlikely that the FBI has a list of dissidents that they've correlated with collected evidence and are just waiting for people to cross the border, it's still not a situation people should have to, or have to, accept.