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It attacked diversity policies, which form the reason for power for a great many Google managers, and one of the only ways to climb the corporate ladder at Google that aren't to build a new product (which is the incredibly hard way. Maybe one in 1000 to one in 10000 Googlers does that). These people see these reactions as only fair. After all, this memo attacked their careers, so they attacked the author of the memo. Doubly so, of course, when it turned out to be well-written, effective, and, crucially, led many people to question the reason for the policies that form the basis of many "careers" (sorry "initiatives" I hear is the current term) at Google. I've heard similar stories of this happening at many companies. Google is just doing what every other company is doing. Managers are directly rewarded or punished for diversity, but (at the moment) also for effectiveness. So they give out the jobs that don't matter exclusively to women. And of course management is enabling this. The cleaning staff. Security. There are many kinds of women-only internships. HR. Finance. Does this result in equality ? No, of course not, it results in antagonism, resentment as careers are destroyed because the person behind the career is the "wrong" gender, and to a lesser extent color, religion, ... (and, I would like to point out, as can be clearly seen in any SV company: minorities are racist too. There are teams in every company that "just happen" to be young Japanese males. Indian females with a few males among them that are behaving VERY obediently. Pakistani males. And so on. Zero diversity in those teams, and from the stories I hear, not because people don't join those teams) The real thing diversity wants to achieve (imho), a more reasonable, perhaps even equal proportion in the various departments like engineering, is something that may happen over, well, let's be optimistic and say between half a generation and a generation, 15 to 30 years (from what base I don't know, because it still isn't the case at all that women and men have equal proportions in university CS). Those are the rules many higher ups live by. You attack me, I attack you. Issue is that a LOT of people in the lower echelons don't know what might attack them. Diversity efforts are at the moment idiotic : it is not possible to recruit 50% women engineers from a pool that is 95% male, so the stated result is impossible to achieve and to get better scores they must cheat. Pointing this out, in a way that becomes popular, is an attack against the careers of higher ups and will result in very high up management demanding your dismissal. |