[Aapjes]

geofft,

By your reasoning brighteyes has just proven that you have reached conclusions not justified by the paper, so will you resign from your job, given that you think such incompetence on the part of Dalmore is inexcusable and makes him incapable to do his job?

[geofft]

If this were an internal company forum where I were making serious policy proposals that I expected the company to take seriously -- that is, if this were something I were doing as part of my job, and I were paying as much attention to detail as I should for every part of my job -- and if I had a senior title, then yes, definitely, I would offer my resignation or at least request a demotion. I would be letting my coworkers down if I continued to insist on a senior title and senior levels of respect. But I am being much less rigorous here than I would be for work. I don't try to be deliberately wrong on HN, but my standards for accuracy and professionalism (and copyediting, there are incomplete sentences in too many of my comments) are less exacting than they are for my employed work.

(And if I have done such a thing, which I don't believe I have. I'm really not sure why you say I've reached conclusions not justified by the paper?)

[Aapjes]

During his interview with Jordan Peterson, Damore explained that he was looking for criticism/push back against his claims, which was why he posted it to a Skeptics forum within Google.

He didn't actually present it directly to management, nor did he publish it publicly. Many people improve their work by asking for feedback, so you seem to demand the impossible: for him to create something great, but without allowing him to refine his work in a way that many people need to create something great.

BTW. I am not aware that Damore had a senior job title and even if he had, his job didn't involve writing rigorous papers. So I'm not sure how you can say that this document proves that he was bad at his job. In his interview he said that his last performance review put him in the top few percent of performers at Google. So if we assume that he is not lying, you seem have drawn wild conclusions based on weak evidence, that far stronger evidence actually contradicts.

[geofft]

> BTW. I am not aware that Damore had a senior job title and even if he had, his job didn't involve writing rigorous papers.

What else is a design document or review, a non-LGTM code review, or an outage postmortem beyond a rigorous paper? The skills are exactly the same: you have to take external research and internal data about your business practices, and explain why the observed facts were as observed, what the company should do about it, and why your proposed approach is correct.

This is a significant part of every job I've had, and Google tried to hire me earlier this year at only L4 and not L5. (The fact that Damore was L5 is well-attested by both pro-Damore and anti-Damore sources.)

When I'm not sure about something, I'll generally ask a question like "Hey, why are we using Debian instead of Fedora" or "Hey, why are we structuring on-call like this, the SRE book says we should structure it like that," and look for an explanation. I won't write a document saying "This is why Fedora is better than Debian and why all the attempts to use Debian are based in a fundamental misunderstanding of reality" and then ask for criticism.

> In his interview he said that his last performance review put him in the top few percent of performers at Google.

Who were his reviewers? Did they deserve their jobs either? Given what I know of Google's hiring practices, I would be entirely unsurprised if there are many pockets in the company consisting of incompetent people propping each other up.

This is a well-known phenomenon in large companies. Quoting Guy Kawasaki recalling something he learned from Steve Jobs:

Steve believed that A players hire A players—that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly—my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It’s clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve called “the bozo explosion” to happen in your organization.