Just reading this brought back memories of working at LinkedIn, and why I'll never again work for a company who has institutional performance review processes. That pretty much excludes all big tech companies and I'm perfectly fine with that. The cookie-cutter performance review process is impersonal and has absolutely nothing to do with helping people do their best work.
In my case, I had a manager who simply didn't like me because I'm gay and used the performance review process, and eventually put me on an action plan and forced me to quit.
Most of the big tech companies will put you on something called a PIP, which is a "Performance Improvement Plan". It basically means they are preparing to fire you, but they give you an option: quit now, and you can have some severance, or you could try and stay and complete the PIP, but still run the risk of being fired for any reason, and in that case, you get no severance. It's exactly what happened to me, and I decided it wasn't worth the stress to try and stay and fight it so I just quit.
It was the most demoralizing experience ever, and really showed me that these processes are in place so managers can just get rid of people they don't want or like.
That's not really about the review process, but about making one of the biggest mistakes you can make: After you know your manager doesn't like you, you didn't do everything in your power to either switch teams or change companies.
Nothing good will come out of working for a manager that doesn't like you. You'll get worse reviews than you deserve and worse raises. You'll get less exposure to other parts of the company: Every second you spend in that situation is a second wasted.
That said, I am absolutely not putting the blame on you here. A manager that doesn't like one of their reports should either get over it or do their best to ship them to a place where they'll be better appreciated. The tech industry is full of terrible managers though, and you are probably not going to make yours better.
So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is at interview time might be completely different than what you'll find on day one.
> That's not really about the review process, but about making one of the biggest mistakes you can make: After you know your manager doesn't like you, you didn't do everything in your power to either switch teams or change companies.
The biggest career advice you can take: it never gets better, there is no good fight, and you should flee to save yourself.
I expect the parent post [edit: iamleppert] was blameless, but that won't save you in most companies. I dream of a company that actually gives a crap about the people writing their code, but HR / Management will always back the a??hole to preserve the company. Maybe instead of hiring widget managers they would find people who have "shipped" creative endeavors (TV Shows, plays, etc.). Don't know if it would work, but it cannot be worse.
> So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is at interview time might be completely different than what you'll find on day one.
Oh hey that's actually a whole lot of big corps ... most prominently Google, isn't it?
My interview experience with Google a couple years ago was godawful and horribly mismanaged. Just reinforced my conviction to never work for a large company.
I worked for Intel years ago, and a lot of things in this thread applied there: really awful institutional performance review processes (they called it "ranking and rating"; I think it's been changed a lot since I left though), and also hiring first and doing allocations later (I had no idea what exactly I'd be doing when I got hired, but I was only a couple years out of college so I was very junior anyway).
Working there had its ups and downs. I will say, that company could actually produce stuff, unlike some places I've seen. It was also really, really nice to have a cubicle, but they were "compressing" those when I left. I have no idea if they've moved to the stupid open-office plan or not since then, but I kinda doubt it actually. I really miss having a cubicle... I used to think they sucked, but after years of other office arrangements, I now long for a cubicle again (though a walled office would of course be much better, just like it'd be nice to live in a $10M mansion and have a private jet).
Anyway, the interview process at Intel back then was grueling and ridiculous, with a bunch of managers coming in and grilling me with questions on all kinds of stuff, a lot which I had no idea about (like device physics). But a couple years ago I interviewed with Google. That was probably the worst interview experience I've ever had.
Lastly, I've interviewed at and worked with some other large companies. Their interviews were nothing like Google's.
Google's interviews are not like other companies', and are not representative of large companies at all. Google's interviews are unique to Google, and have been roundly criticized by many.
I interviewed with them 2 years ago, as well as a couple of months ago. 2 years ago I would have rated the experience as "fine". My most recent experience was great, however. Very organized, lots of communication on Google's part, and I had a great interviewer. They have definitely made improvements.
Sure. Set up a date over email for an initial phone screen with the recruiter. Left work early to make the appointment at home. Recruiter never called. Asked WTF, got an apology and another appointment for next week. Recruiter missed that one, too (really). Finally made a connection a few days later, got bizarre questions like "estimate 2^14 (or something) in decimal". Did poorly on that, so they forwarded me to another recruiter who passed me on to a developer for a code interview. I was fairly fed up at this point and not looking for a job anyway, so I didn't do any interview prep. Interviewer sounded bored as hell, asked me to implement a graph deep copy algorithm and some other basic stuff. I haven't done algorithms implementation since college; I work in the real world where we have Google and libraries. So I bombed that, too. Got a call a few days later saying they're not interested. OK, see ya.
Just felt like going through the cogs of a machine that didn't give a shit, which really didn't give me incentive to give a shit in return. Big companies suck.
Sounds pretty much like my experience with Google. I'm an embedded programmer with a EE degree, not a CS degree, and they hammered me with a bunch of algorithm questions like you said. I'm not even interested in (nor qualified for) heavy-CS type work; I thought maybe they'd want me for more low-level stuff or doing some kind of work with hardware, custom OS or driver development, etc.
But as I said above, don't paint all big companies with the same brush. Google's interviews are not at all like the interviews I've done with a bunch of other big companies. In many big companies, the different groups work entirely differently anyway; when I interviewed at Freescale, it wasn't any different than interviewing at some small company really, and the small workgroup I ended up working in was a great team to work with, and again didn't deal that much with the rest of the company anyway. It was a great experience except for upper management screwing it all up after a couple of years.
Haha, yeah, I do systems development, not far from your area of work, I imagine. I have a CS degree, but I hated doing it. Google seemed to be aiming for CS experts, and I just want to make computers do cool/useful stuff.
Of course, there's other disadvantages to working for big companies. Lots of dead weight (see: that recruiter I worked with), lots of rules, a lack of trust, lots of bureaucracy... I'd do it if I have to, but the small company vibe works way better for me.
There's advantages to big companies too: better pay usually, better benefits, more structure, and in my experience more professionalism. Also the ability to move laterally is useful. If you're a female or minority you'll probably do better in a big company too because they're very intolerant of harassment and discrimination because they can get in legal trouble for it, so they're very proactive about addressing these things early on, providing training for it, etc., whereas some small companies I've been at seem to have a "good-ole boy" culture still hanging around. If you can get into the right workgroup, a big company can be a good experience, but different groups and departments can be run very differently from each other within the same company.
Not saying it's a good interview question, but if you ever need to quickly estimate exponents of 2 just remember 2^10 bytes=1kb, 2^20=1mb, 2^30=1gb, etc. so 2^14 would be 16kb.
That's such a strange approach. The've marked you as a "hire" but not even discussed a range? Given how long this process sometimes takes, and that good people will have multiple offers (and typically an already comfortable income), how is one supposed to make a career decision?
If you are willing to make the fanatic choice; your the employee they want. They might be missing out on a lot of talent in the industry. But they do weed the candidates down to fanatics.
That's not true in my experience, and I doubt it's true in yours. While "guys" is sometimes employed to refer to a mixed gender group of people, it would be very weird for "guy" or "dude" to be used to refer to a woman. Argue in good faith, please. And try not to police PC here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.
As someone who has lived in Southern California 90% of their life, and Berkeley, CA the rest, I can absolutely say that it is true in my experience that Californians (and I obviously include myself in this set) will use 'guy' and 'dude' to refer to anything. Men, women, children, dogs, cats, cars, burritos.
Last week I got up from the table to throw the rest of my burrito away and offered to take my wife's as well by saying "Dude, are you going to finish that guy?" I understand it isn't "correct", and the English are within their rights weep for their language if they like, but it is not weird at all in coastal California.
I refer to many servers, consoles, screens etc as him/her/he/she/guy, and I to call out any last remaining food on the kids plate in the same way as you. West coast as well.
I got it from both living in California and Miami, where many people used it that way, girls as well. For me it was a bit strange at first, but got used to it. I guess it might be some local urban stuff leaking nationwide?
You bring up your experience, basically call me a liar about my experiences and accuse me of not adding anything to the discussion.
Interesting. I grew up in California and what I said is a fact, as confirmed by other people. What are you bringing to the discussion exactly besides baseless accusations?
I'm pretty sure I've lived here longer than you have, and you're not only showing your rudeness, but the lack of knowledge you have about the Bay Area and environs. Have fun slinking back to your hole.
Considering that lady is not generally accepted as an asexual term, I'm having a difficult time parsing your statement.
Certain words mean certain things in certain contexts. If you want to start using "lady" as an asexual term, go for it. Be prepared for stares and weird looks when people don't know what you're talking about because it's not generally used that way, unlike 'dude and guy'.
Dude implies some level of laid back cool personality. A dude is someone who skateboards, skis or does lots of pot, not a typical accountant, grammarian or middle manager.
You guys should really fix English language. As a non-native speaker whose native language allows properly expressing gender anytime, I find this funny, being downvoted for what is a structural problem of your language :-D
Does your language allow referring to a person while leaving their gender unspecified? If not, your language is deficient.
All the mainstream European languages I've seen (Germanic and Romance) don't seem to have this capability at all, and it's a big deficiency. Formal English doesn't have it either, but colloquially we've evolved it, using "they" (which of course is bad because it's supposed to be used for referring to people in the plural sense, not singular).
So don't complain about a language having structural problems if yours isn't any better.
It allows both ungendered and gendered approaches. It's really up to you to choose. So in fact my language is better in this regard, worse in others. Like any language.
I would prefer mentalese over Vangelis' direct to be honest ;-)
This isn't true to my knowledge (I work at google). It's usually just another person from the interviewer pool. Decent chance you'll never see them or any of the other interviewers again after joining.
MSFT did this as well (at least for my hiring) and I found it to be negative, largely due to many reorgs shortly after hiring/being in a side of the company only peripherally related to what information I had going in. (ended up making friends on the team I'm still getting coffee with even today and the team ended up turning out fine from a career/productivity standpoint, but I likely would have taken a competing offer at the time had I known the work I'd actually been doing)
>So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire first and do allocations later
This is an issue with big banks like Capital One. The management culture is absolutely awful there and they hold a tremendous amount of power and of course abuse that power as well as abuse the workers.
Just to add another view here: I'm currently a Data Scientist at Capital One and enjoy it quite a bit. I've found management to be open, supportive, and invested in my and my coworkers' success and development. They also allow and encourage people to change teams within the company, so if you find yourself in a situation that's not working out, you can move to another team.
I've also not seen anybody leave the company on bad terms. Of course I'm sure that happens, and I'm sure there are bad managers here as everywhere. I'm sorry that you had such a negative experience.
I used to work for Capital One Europe, the UK side of the business that currently only does credit cards, until last year. I'd seen a mixture of some people leaving on good terms and some on bad terms, with no obvious correlation to performance. Personally, I left on good terms for a new role elsewhere.
I'd suggest when you're talking about a company of sufficient size; there are always going to be a mixture of those leaving on good terms and those not.
The company culture tries to go in a good direction, but it fails at the individual manager level. From people I have talked to, this is not just me but widespread, especially financial services in Plano, Tx.
I get yelled at on a weekly basis. Belittling is comon too, such as being told "you're not that smart and this isn't rocket science". Managers are non technical managing a technical project and micromanagement is the norm.
IMO the majority of managers SUCK. Thankfully I've had some GREAT ones, so I can tell the difference now.
If they suck due to non-malicious ineptitude, it's usually pretty bearable, and you can self manage your way around them.. if they suck as a human being.. wooo buddy, time to bounce.
A good manager is both a buffer and a lubricant. They pave the runway, and get out of the way.. and then make you feel good about what you do, while understating their own contribution.. ( and hopefully get their fuzzies from the business stakeholders, who see the productivity and progress gains. )
I got run through a PIP ( at a unnamed company full of Jack Welch devotees - srsly, ex GE ) because I was twice old enough to vote and wanted to stay technical. They were basically lining up a layoff. This worked out long term but it was inconvenient for several months. I'd gotten a LOT of work done; multiple high value contract awards, all on time and under budget, all that. No, our way was to overrun and do Difficulty Kabuki Theater.
Why demoralization? It ain't you, it's them. There will be more people you don't want to work for than that you do want to work for anyway. I thin you'll find that the good people are bright lights in an ocean of darkness.
Also and seriously - there are still people in tech who allow homophobia to affect their behavior to that extent?
I had one large company where performance was really one bit - ranking was on a scale of 1 to 5 and, as I was told, "nobody is a 5 and if you were a 1 or 2 you'd already have been sacked".
So everyone was either a 3 (meeting expectations) or 4 (exceeding expectations in some areas).
I did manage to persuade my line manager (the CIO) to give me a 5 on something but he then felt the need to mark me down somewhere else so I remained a 4 overall.
I worked at a company that was purchased and the new management switched us to this type of system. During my time previous the buyout I had practically doubled my salary through reviews. With the new system I was one of two who got the highest rating the system offered. My raise was less than the previous cost-of-living increase I received.
Then they insisted I move to keep my job. Since the move meant going to a better job market I went along with it and then quit after a decent amount of time.
Ahh, the old 'Force reality to conform to my imperfect understanding of statistics' method. Never mind that in a small, unrepresentative sample it's entirely possible to have a team of people be all 5-star or all 1-star. Indeed, the goal is to build teams of 5-star people!
Off-topic mini rant: This is something that pissed me off about college too. Grading on a curve just serves to mask flaws. Either the professor is shit, the course is shit, the test is shit or the students are shit. Shifting the goal posts so that the top score of 54 / 100 is now an A is just dishonest.
I worked for a company with this same process. When I became middle management there, I was told I couldn't give all 5s even if I felt they were earned because "there's always room for improvement".
What's the alternative? I assume that you expect companies to promote/fire based on performance. How can you do that without a performance review process?
My experience has been that the biggest factor is your direct manager. If your manager hates you, then you have a serious problem, because no matter what kind of process (or lack of process) your company has, they can get you fired. On the other hand, a good manager can help you do your best despite any existing "cookie-cutter" process.
From what I've seen the performance review process in large companies allows you to mask a personal vendetta as a performance issue (and you'll get away with it).
Your manager can say "based on feedback everyone says you suck" and you can't really do a whole lot to look into it. You don't know where the feedback is coming from, or if it's even valid.
At a smaller company a manager seems more responsible to look at performance democratically. So if they have a personal vendetta and they fired someone for it, it's much easier for other employees and other managers to see what's going on and call it out (so they might not act on it to begin with).
Of course that's not universal, sometimes at a small company you might have one person with consolidated power so it doesn't really matter (and can be much worse). And of course, at a smaller company peer pressure can keep issues under wraps because you're worried about everyone knowing that you're the one bringing it up.
So yeah, a performance review process needs to exist at larger companies because it makes sense logistically... but criticism of that process doesn't mean it should be thrown out entirely, it just welcomes the discussion about how it can be improved. There are middle grounds between strict performance reviews and small-company democracy.
I don't know how common it is, but some companies have a process whereby your peers supply the feedback, and a management team reviews it. Surely this must address the issue of a manager who doesn't like you, right?
When you have 11,000+ employees, it's hard to have an objective team investigate every single review. Plus, how can this objective team, with little to no context of daily interactions, assess whether or not feedback is "legitimate" or dripping in disdain?
Yes, that's called 360 feedback. It suffers from some intrinsic drawbacks, though.
First, nobody has an incentive to provide negative feedback except for serious cases (i.e. you cannot work with this person) or for political reasons. It's a prisoners dilemma with indefinite iterations, so each player's incentive is to provide positive feedback.
Second, in my experience, it's only reviewed by one person rather than by a management team, which opens it up to an array of biases on the manager's part. If a manager thinks that someone is a great team-player, and a reviewer says that that person is a petty tyrant, they're likely to doubt the reviewer's motives rather than updating their beliefs.
You do it by letting managers decide based on perceived performance, and trusting in their assessments. If the biggest factor is your direct manager in either system (which I agree with), we might as well stop pretending otherwise.
This has the same result as the formal review system, but with a lot less overhead. More importantly, if you're denied promotion out of spite, you know that - they can't just say "well, it's not my fault, it's just how the process worked out".
Yes, good managers can definitely help cut through the BS even with a process in place, it takes time and effort for them - time and effort that could be used on something more valuable. And sometimes, no amount of effort is sufficient to buck the process.
From my experience, by the way, a formal competitive review system (buckets etc) makes it more important to have a good manager, because you absolutely need your manager to play the game well against other managers to yield good results for you, no matter how hard you work. If your manager is indifferent, or can't play the game well, they'll take away whatever was left on the table after the rest, and that's what you'll be stuck with.
The biggest problem for companies IMO is that the better but not much visible a person is, the bigger competitor to their own boss they become. If they produce top results and already got visibility, they are safe. If they produce top results but aren't visible, they are the prime target of their own managers, as they are just a little luck away from ascending over them.
Your problem was a manager that did not like you not the performance review process. In a small company without impersonal processes that can be only worse (or maybe better because you'd be fired earlier - fail fast after all - but in the big company you could leave once you learned the fact about your manager on your own).
If your manager does not like you, he does not need a formal review process to screw you over. In fact, without a formal review process, it would be even easier to screw you over, because there won't be any paper trail at all.
A formal review just covers the company's ass if you come back and claim that your firing was due to illegal discrimination. That is, afaik, 100% of the reason why PIPs even exist. They've decided they wan't fire you and now they need to assemble some compelling documentation that it's you, not them.
A much bigger reason is to demoralize you and convince you that you deserve to be fired, so you won't even think about a lawsuit.
PIPs aren't really good documentation of bad performance; in fact, a badly-written PIP can actually backfire on the company because the wording is usually full of holes a good lawyer can drive a truck through. Basically instead of the company having proof you were a poor performer, you now have proof the company is lying to get you out the door.
A PIP is a lawsuit deterrent, not an actual legal defense.
Not that I like anti-discrimination or wrongful termination laws anyway, though I am willing to compromise. I suggest a compromise to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws, where workers are actually commodities that are measureable and interchangeable.
Yet, you've stated you don't want to allow certain people to file these lawsuits, which are usually the only way of trying to correct the problem. So tell me, why is it ok to deprive some people of this remedy simply because of their job title?
Apparently they do, in larger companies. It's an expensive, and time-consuming process, and large companies generally don't do those things company-wide without a good reason.†
† The reason may not be immediately evident of course. But when you unwind the bureaucratic logic, ultimately there's almost always a reason behind these phenomena.
You're absolutely right. In fact, the formal review process - even though it seems terrible - is actually giving you plenty of time to find another job.
If your manager pushed you out because you are gay, that is discriminatory. I'm truly sorry to hear that and I hope something is done at LinkedIn so that environment is changed.
However, there are usually two sides to a story. I hope you are also considering the possibility that it had to do with your work, your work ethic, your ability to work with others, your ability to take direction, etc.
Speaking as someone on the other side, I hate PIPs too as well as the institutional performance review processes. I wish I could get rid of low performers easily but it is pain.
Assuming your interpretation of your manager's motivations are correct, that's horrible and I'm sorry you had to go through it. With that said, would you have had any more protections at a smaller company? The process at those bigger companies, while excruciating for all companies, makes it harder for managers to fire, not easier.
I had similar experience at VMware where my boss just didn't care enough about me. He never assigned me to any good projects, and prevented me from seeking opportunities in other teams, even if was a simple trial for a few months. Further, he was surrounded by his buddies from his previous work place and I always got the feeling that one needed to be in his clique to get any attention. Whenever I approached him for a different assignment he lectured me on how technology was just about sending data from point A to point B in the most efficient manner and he insisted that I focus on my current assignment.
As time progressed, I noticed that engineers who hung out with him often and discussed interesting topics such as good school districts, real estate, investments, sales at frys electronics etc. were rewarded not just with better work but also promotions, some of them undeservedly. When I finally decided to quit there was not even a "thank you" from him or his minions for my hard work. There were several disgruntled employees in my org who never kissed his bottom and they were all treated with similar nonchalance.
iamleppert, are you me? I went through literally the exact same situation (same problem with the manager, same outcome, etc.), though instead of quitting I finished the pip and switched to a new team (I was already on another team by the second or third day of the pip as I was taking it to HR, which doesn't always work out - it did in this case).
New team thought it was absolutely ridiculous I was on it, as did many members of the original team. I finished the pip just fine. I work at Large Transportation Company. Same shit over here.
Once I was working with a manager that loved the fact I'm gay, I do great work, stress levels are down (or at least, the stress incurred is the 'fun' kind of stress), etc.
I do agree the review process is ridiculous - I've never been in a company where they had them prior to this. We were told to choose 2-5 coworkers that were really involved in our day to days within the review period (6 months), and after doing so my manager went in and added the rest of the team (including coworkers I barely saw that I had one or two interactions with over the course of months), including other coworkers that had made very brash comments about my boyfriend/age or about gays in general.
Manager used that shitty feedback from three out of the nine total employees that reviewed me (that otherwise gave pretty glowing reviews) to initiate the pip.
There was a whole bunch of other BS with the situation - e.g. a manager and another coworker joking about satanic rituals against us in our team HipChat room - that I really don't feel like going into detail about that just added insult to injury.
What's worse, there has been no investigation into the matter much past asking the offending manager to "talk about things". Oh well.
I've been on a PIP before and they're 100% political. You're absolutely right that they're trying to fire you without immediately firing you. They'll probably also try and get you to sign extra legal documents. If you quit, you get shitty severance, if you are fired you get better severance.
A couple of decades in U.S. corporate life led me to conclude that such performance reviews are nothing more than paper/records generation to back up (legally, risk-reduction, etc.) whatever decision Management decides to make.
They have little or nothing to do with actually performance management and improvement. Well, if you are "favored" by your management, maybe some productive training/coaching will be reflected in them. If you're lucking and have good immediate management. But this is stuff that would have happened, regardless.
Performance reviews are an HR process. And any and all HR processes are about preserving the status quo. They have nothing to do with your personal well-being.
I was once put on a PIP for political reasons by a vengeful boss. That day, I applied to what ended up being my next job, and I put in my notice the day before the PIP was set to end.
It was a very small startup. Oddly enough, that boss and I get along really well outside of work, and I'd still gladly go out for drinks with him or something, but I will never work for him again.
When he's stressed, he gets very, very abusive and takes it out on his subordinates. He's screamed at me, and I've heard him screaming at my co-workers several offices over. He has no control over his temper. He's actually a better person drunk than he is sober. He's warm and friendly when he's drunk.
Also, he gets irrationally angry when anyone calls out the terrible job done by his friend who he put in an architect position. One co-worker of mine at that company... he raised the issue and ended up being railroaded into quitting a couple of months later, and then I'd heard my boss slandering him behind his back a few times.
It's been almost two years since I quit, and I still have painful flashbacks to the way he would yell at people.
But he is fun to hang out with when there's no power differential involved and when he's wasted.
> “We believe this process allows our team to develop and do their best work. Our performance-review process also allows for high performers to engage in increasingly larger opportunities at our company"
Ok so has that worked out well for Yahoo? Clearly it's been enough time by now to do an evaluation of Yahoo practices looking back and say something like: "Yeah thanks to these great management practices we have reconquered market share / are the new exciting place where everyone wants to work / or we lead this revolutionary research"? It ended up being owned by a phone company in the end.
So if Yahoo is a failing company, what they did there, will be associated with failure. It seems they effectively moved the cause of promoting women in technology fields backwards. When someone will say "we should find a way to promote women more" ... "Oh, right, Yahoo was heavily into that, yeah that was ugly, the lawsuit and all...".
It is a bit like the crazy person advocating for your favorite language or framework, it's nice to have a fan, but because they are crazy, they are pushing everyone away with their behavior.
> as well as for low performers to be transitioned out.”
"Transitioned out" ... there is an almost a positive ring to it. "We've reached out to them, found their pain points and helped them transition out to a new stage". Is that how everyone talks now? Or is it just me who finds it grating.
I'm afraid it's a question we will never be able to answer. I wonder about it myself. Disclaimer: i've known the Seymel..Bartz yahoo and I've always thought that there was an enormous execution problem amongst employees (myself included). In addition to this, in my field (engineering), I've always kinda felt the culture was rather mediocre.
Call me pessimistic, I've never believed it's a company that could be turned over, I remember jokingly letting my friends know back in 2005, when i got hired, that I had just signed up for a sinking boat. Yahoo would not die but would simply not be a landmark internet company but somehow get to a secondary rank. Apologies for the digression.
So to get back to the yank and rank strategy that yahoo followed: what's best, a mass layoff or giving people a chance to be in or out? Seems like at yahoo the rank and yank strategy was not implemented state of the art as each team had to get a certain % of employees yanked and ranked. Side effects are very well known, lower performers of high achieving teams get the axe while highest performers of low achieving teams get promotions. People start aiming at the middle to prevent promotion, and more :)
Now I still wonder what's the least unfair way to clearly cut a workforce that needs to be cut.
But when someone says "diversity is automatically good so we'll form a maths class with mostly women" and that maths class gets poor grades, it doesn't help further the notion that "more women equals better performance".
When I see a woman running an organization that believes in inequality as a prerequisite (I'm right wing and I can say that without qualification), here I'll use the Tories in the UK, then if I see a Margaret Thatcher or a Theresa May, then I know they have the right stuff.
“..less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,”
Even if they were not deliberate about it, they must have talked about how this might be perceived by employees.
As bad as this issue is, I think hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal.
However, I cannot overemphasize how demoralizing it is, especially when they aren't proven to be any better.
But I understand that people prefer to hire friends / former colleagues. It's really really hard to know if people are a good fit for a position from just a couple of interviews. It's much easier if it's someone you've worked with before; you'll know if they can do the job or not.
It's not necessarily wrong, and quite justifiable, at the individual level.
It creates significant inequities when everyone does it at scale.
Leaving aside all questions of legality and punishment (the only reason you care about punishment is if something goes wrong), what is the right way to solve this? How, in an ideal world, do we fix the significant inequity that many people today happen to have homogeneous networks, and hiring from your network means that you perpetuate any homogeneity, while also saying it's totally okay and encouraged to found a startup with a close friend instead of with someone who passes an exam?
Let me ask an incendiary question (I feel not great that I even have to qualify this, but I'm admittedly nervous of talking about these sorts of issues in certain lights given social context nowadays); but you're clearly thinking about this comprehensively enough that I'm curious to hear your thoughts, I don't necessarily have an answer either.
Is some amount of inequality at scale _necessarily_ a bad thing, if it arises from a fundamental systemic property of the socio/business/economy context we've bought into? I'll make a rather absurd parallel; look at money itself. To have more money enables gaining more with less effort, (citing the common "boots" theory of economics, basic laws of investing returns, etc) Therefore, enabling anyone to have more money than someone else creates significantly compounding inequality. Should we ensure that can't happen? I acknowlege it's a bit of a strawman but I would hope it also conveys a point both of implicit systemic cycles and tradeoffs of redressing them. As you concede, there's a tangible benefit towards hiring known entities and cohesive teams, even though at scale it tends to favor the incumbent majority.
Rather than ask if the inequality is in itself bad, I'd try to look at the funnel and see if there are any truly improper barriers to the out-group, and focus on rectifying those. Like in CS I'm always wary of KPI based iteration since it can cause "overfitting"/ignoring transitive effects, and "raw diversity numbers" to me is a very opaque KPI.
(Whether the systems that lead to these patterns is good is a totally separate discussion and one so huge I don't think I have the background to speak on it well, but I'm trying to question pragmatic steps to be taken that don't involve a burn-it-down-and-rebuild or throwing the baby out with the bathwater)
How would we distinguish this from true performance-based reviews? The question has to be asked, because when its the other way around, we defend it as normal. But this way it has to be rigged? Isn't it perfectly possible that a true objective management review would find many women to be competent? More competent than most men? Why not? Just because 'men usually win' in this context? Because its ok when men are in charge and promote mostly men? That's just 'business as usual'.
I think what's he saying is that the field of candidates - before Yahoo even gets to make a pick of hires - is skewed in favor of men. So a 100% impartial selection process would just propagate the same gender imbalance.
So in a profession that is generally 80% male, and 20% female, you think that women are so amazing that they will make up 80% of the top leadership in an even playing field?
Oh, I don't know, let's math it. I keep hearing that women need to be twice as good to make it half as far. Sooo, 20% women in STEM x 2 x 2 (twice as good; and, multiply by two to make up for half as far) = ... 80%
But should she be ousted and a new (male) boss installed and it goes back to 80% men, then all would be well and normal? No laptop outrage then.
I'm not suggesting that the change was a statistical fluke. I'm suggesting that maybe in this case some women at Yahoo! were better management candidates than some of the men. In a ratio that's large but not unprecedented. Look at the rations found in other companies - so often its 80% men but that's not seen as unusual or wrong.
Those companies still exist and are profitable, are they not?
Sounds similar to the wage gap argument here: if it exists, where are all the companies hiring cheaper workers capable of doing the same work, exploiting the supposed market inefficiency?
I was once a fan of Mayer when she first took over Yahoo, until she led a crusade against remote workers. As a remote worker myself I can tell you this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry. A lot of tech companies (especially outside the bay area) want to emulate the cool kids like Yahoo, Google, and Apple, and even the company I work for started questioning its WFH policies.
Dude, Yahoo stopped being a "cool kid" a decade ago. That's really messed up if your company actually thinks it should emulate Yahoo because it's a cool company.
I never said my company emulates Yahoo. But "cool kid" or not their influence cannot be understated. Right after the Yahoo/WFH hoopla companies like Best Buy and HP followed suit. Remember this was back when she first took over CEO and everyone believed she was the "one" to turnaround the company.
I know someone at HP who suddenly had to go in to work. This put him in a situation where he had to pay thousands for day care and he threatened to leave until they finally let him work from home again.
So, an employee was doubling as a full time care giver for his children while remote working? That sounds like exactly the kind of practice that gives remote work policies a bad name in the first place.
If I found out one of my employees was taking care of his kids while working at home, you better believe it would result in a conversation and a possible revocation of his use of the remote work policy.
Maybe they work better without coworker interruptions and in a familiar space, which offsets any negatives of caregiving.
And even still, who cares?! Do you actually have a good handle on how many of your employees just read HN or Reddit for half a day? Unaccounted for smoke breaks? Having to make personal calls while on the clock?
>And even still, who cares?! Do you actually have a good handle on how many of your employees just read HN or Reddit for half a day? Unaccounted for smoke breaks? Having to make personal calls while on the clock?
Don't need a handle on it if you block access to them.
But my work found that blocking Reddit/Facebook actually made less work get done: people couldn't spend 5-10 minutes to unwind and then plug back in and work. That policy lasted a single week.
So, an employee was found at their desk chatting with the office mate all afternoon while working? That sounds like exactly the kind of practice that gives on-site work a bad name.
If I found out one of my employees was using their office as a social lounge while working at my company, you better believe it would result in a conversation and possible revocation of their on-site privileges, forcing them to work in solitude at home instead so I could see real results.
> I'd love to hear the explanation for how checking up on a toddler every so often is akin to him grossly neglecting his job.
If we generalize that to "what is wrong with frequent distractions" - open plan offices would fall into that category. For an answer, I would direct you to read any one of the many well-articulated anti-Open-plan rants on HN. Toddler care has all the downsides of an open plan office without the (possible) upside of increased team-productivity.
Do you have a toddler? I'm not a parent but my understanding is that you can't expect them to just play quietly by themselves for any more than short stretches.
While that's generally been true since the late 90s, when Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo did have quite the honeymoon period. Yahoo genuinely became "cool" for at least a year or 2, and everyone was glowing about Mayer being one of the best CEOs in the tech world.
Don't read "How Google Works", "Work Rules" or "In the Plex" then. Meyer was just repeating the Google playbook which places a high emphasis on getting staff in the same physical space
In the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, he uses Mayer's firing of remote employees as an example of a toxic work culture that values signalling over production. Here's the excerpt:
> In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers. Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn't sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for nor spending more time checking e-mail (one of the primary reasons to log in to the servers). "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive."
"Batching" email to specific times in the day is a pretty well-known productivity win, especially for people whose job it is to engage in deep work.
> "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive."
Like a boss I had that thought programming was just typing and didn't understand why I:
1) Wrote a lot on paper and whiteboard;
2) Sat back in thought a lot;
3) Spoke with my colleagues.
I became "more productive" in his eyes by hiding in the testing lab to do my thinking. I was actually testing, too, but I didn't watch the test cases closely so I'd be writing/reading/thinking for a few minutes after each one ran.
This is something that always bothers me when I'm forced to pair program. I constantly feel pressured to put code on the screen instead of sitting back and thinking about how to tackle a problem. When I am tasked and allowed to do something on my own I often spend more time thinking ahead about the problem then actually implementing the solution, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
Programming is as much an art as it is a science, you can bang a keyboard all day but without putting thought into it (which typically requires pause or maybe a change of scenery even) it can often result in a worse product.
That's how corporate culture works - it does not necessarily reward actual work, but it does reward being visibly "busy" as in quickly responding to e-mail, attending meetings etc.
Once a company has hit the ... point of maturity to where signaling is more important than production, there's not a lot you can do about it. Because in that case, the signaling probably is more important.
And I got news for her - you can't visibly tell if I am busy or not short of standing behind me all day.
Still, you get the feeling she was sort of the sucker at that particular poker game.
Not only is that terrible management, it's audacious micromanagement that the CEO went to great personal lengths (based on the story anyways) to gather evidence to go after remote workers. That probably paints the best picture for me of why yahoo failed: a company with great institutional and market issues, had its CEO conducting an unscientific survey of the effectiveness of remote workers
To me it reads more like she didn't like the policy and went out to find a reason to justify removing the policy. Whether it made sense or not was irrelevant.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the data Marissa looked at was skewed because the corporate Yahoo VPN was atrociously terrible.
People who routinely worked outside of the office, or just wanted to be able to read their e-mail at home without the VPN client randomly panicing their system, had devised various workarounds to get things done.
The corporate VPN is distinct from production, so you could still do actual work without using it too.
I'm stating the fact that when I worked at Yahoo, one did not need to utilize the VPN to connect to production (which is where most staging / pre-prod environments existed as well).
Someone whose job pertains to operations does the bulk of their daily work on actual production hosts, for instance. Some tools (like the bug tracker) also didn't require use of the VPN.
Mine did. But it was a smaller company with about 500 people, who were mostly older with families. We had maybe 1 full-time remote worker (who was actually pretty good), and the rest of the people would simply work from home one day a week. But after hearing about Marissa's crusade, they killed that off. Didn't change performance, but it did kill morale.
Yeah, Gannett started limiting remote workers when Yahoo did. They followed in Yahoo's footsteps because to upper management it sounded like a good idea. Get everyone together!
...except for developers who were already largely working between remote teams anyway and caused some fellow employees with family and health responsibilities but were still good developers to have trouble and eventually leave the company. Cutting out existing options and freedoms to employees does not in any way help the culture of a company. I don't work there any more but every developer was very upset that I talked to at the time.
Any company I work for in the future I want at least the ability to work remote. I personally enjoy being in and around coworkers, but there were a few times when I wanted to work remote for periods of time to help with family. Being in an office can help _certain types_ of work - but it doesn't help all types of work, and development is one that can be remote.
Yes, like I stated above Best Buy announced a similar plan a couple weeks later. I will mention though that companies like Dell and Microsoft later openly stated they were expanding their WFH policies so the anti-remote working trend was short lived.
I don't know if it was in direct response because I wasn't here at the time and it also coincided with the MSNBC split from Microsoft, but I understand that NBC Technology severely curtailed its remote working policies around the same time.
Wow, so many different news about the same tech company within a month and now this one too. They could not have pulled a better stunt to compete with what Apple and Google is doing in their keynote.
I almost felt sorry for them when I read articles like that it's the saddest deal in history as they could got more much money earlier. Now, I feel good that they are gone. fuff .. gone ..
You have to wonder if there is some sort of campaign to smear yahoo? The timing does seem strange, but perhaps it's simply because they are under so much scrutiny because of the eventual sale?
Yahoo and Twitter have been getting torn apart the past few weeks, coincidentally when they are selling. Probably a little bit of column A and column B.
There’s a reason why people make tons of money playing the stock market against companies that artificially force gender, or racial equality.
Practices like these are going to ruin your business the same way being sexist, or racist will. Either you hire the best person for the job, or you’ll be beaten by companies that do.
This sounds great in mythical theoretical free-market land.
But businesses have been making bad business decisions to justify nepotism, racism, sexism, any other kind of ism you can imagine since the history of business and I haven't ever heard of competition actually punishing any of them for it. Markets just aren't that efficient. The job that two different people for the same job might do just isn't big enough (or, really, isn't predictable enough) to matter. For every position (yes, even CEO) there are hundreds of thousands of people who would do a roughly indistinguishable (at the time of hiring) job.
It's just that culture and regulation change, so the people running businesses and the laws they have to follow change, so business practices improve.
I suggest a compromise to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws, where workers are actually commodities that are measureable and interchangeable.
I think it's more of a question of how much leverage do you have.
If everyone is discriminating against you, like Jim Crow South, it doesn't really matter how much you make, because you can't go and find a different job easily.
But if discrimination is limited, and the job market for this particular job and in this particular area favors employees, then it's a self-correcting problem - people will just walk. And if an effective boycott is possible and will take care of it, why go through the slower and more resource constrained court system?
I fail to see why the ability to get a job easily should be taken into account whether you get to have a legal remedy or not. And quite frankly, I have no faith whatsoever that a boycott would work, or gain any traction at all. We have had numerous stories of companies acting shitty all over, and yet they don't seem to have problems hiring.
I don't actually particularly care about whether the boycott would work or not, in a sense of preventing the affected company from hiring more people. What I care about is remedying the material harm that is caused to people discriminated against.
If you are looking for a job, and they tell you that you needn't apply because of your race/gender/..., but there are thousands more equivalent jobs in your market that don't have such restrictions, there's no substantial harm to you - you can just pick any of those other jobs. If this particular business can hire enough bigots (or just people who don't care) to keep them running - so what? It still doesn't harm you. So it becomes a matter of principle, and from that perspective, I think freedom of speech and association is a more important principle than private non-discrimination, and so for the lack of measurable harm, the former should be preferred.
It's not just about jobs, too - same principle applies to services. if you have 100 bakers around you that aren't bigoted, and one who is, they cannot cause any meaningful amount of harm to anyone but themselves, by driving customers away.
Of course, if other businesses take note and start discriminating too, at some point, there are enough of them that your ability to get a job or service is hampered - you can't just go elsewhere (not easily, at least). Where and when that happens, discrimination should become illegal - but localized to the affected area and/or industry.
Think of it as anti-monopoly legislation. There are many shady practices that we don't punish businesses for until they are in a market dominant position (either by themselves, or through collusion with other businesses, which sometimes can be implicit). Same principle - shady or not, it shouldn't be prohibited unless it clearly harms someone.
"If you are looking for a job, and they tell you that you needn't apply because of your race/gender/..., but there are thousands more equivalent jobs in your market that don't have such restrictions, there's no substantial harm to you"
You have lost all credibility with that statement.
If it's not meant as a rhetorical comment, I'm afraid you'll need to explain it in a bit more detail, pointing out where exactly my reasoning is wrong. In particular, if you object to the statement that there's no substantial harm in being rejected from a job for discriminatory reasons, when the job market has thousands more equivalent (i.e. same pay, same career opportunities etc) jobs that are yours for the taking instead, you'll have to explain what constitutes said harm.
The action is either harm or it's not. If I have a fence, and you run your car through it, the harm is not judged on whether I can replace the fence quickly.
Further, your statement goes a step further and seeks to normalize and legitimize discrimination. You're saying that it's perfectly ok for this to happen, borderline encouraging it by removing any and all penalties for the action.
The onus is not on me to show harm. The onus is on you to demonstrate why your statement should be taken seriously, and why there is no harm. And simply being able to find another job before you starve to death is NOT evidence that there is no harm.
Sure, but refusing to hire you is not an action, it's the lack of one. Hiring you would be an action. That's exactly the problem with such laws - you are not prohibiting people from doing something, you're forcing them to do something. That needs to meet a much higher and/or nuanced bar of social need to override the inherent infringement of individual liberty.
Discrimination is already legal in many contexts - private individuals can discriminate in most countries, private membershib clubs can discriminate in many places etc. Furthermore, even in areas where discrimination is illegal (e.g. public accommodation), there's generally a very limited list of traits on which it is illegal - race, religion, gender etc. Anything not on that list is not illegal to discriminate on - for example, it is perfectly legal to refuse to serve someone on the basis of their political view in US.
Do you believe that all forms of discrimination should be illegal, including private and personal? Do you realize the implications of that?
And yes, the onus is, in fact, on you to show harm. That's how legal system works in most cases. I don't see why it should work any differently here. Do you really want to people to be able to just claim discrimination on the basis of any random thing, and demand that the other party prove the lack of discrimination?
Also, you still haven't explained what, exactly, the harm is in being refused a job when other equivalent jobs are available. Is it material? If so, what exactly is the nature of the loss? Or are you claiming some sort of psychological harm?
It gets a bit tricky. The problem is that a lot of this kind of stuff is really pervasive, but there's no conscious collusion. Things like "women are just not as good at tech" become pervasive cultural stereotypes, and employers apply them subconsciously, with the result being widespread discrimination that is obvious in aggregated data, but not necessarily in any individual case.
So the kind of analysis that's necessary to determine whether legal anti-discrimination measures are needed or not is rather different from what anti-monopoly watchdogs usually do.
But yes, something like that in principle. A government institution that keeps track of various metrics and accepts individual reports, aggregates them, and determines which fields, industries, locations etc need anti-discrimination enforcement with teeth. Presumably with some sort of due process where this can be challenged etc, but ultimately, the decision should be made on the basis of whether there is discrimination or not, and not on whether it's intentional or not.
It is often the case that the discrimination is pervasive, but not that it is difficult for women for example to find jobs. If deliberate collusion makes it difficult for women to find jobs, that would be when I would suggest anti-trust regulators to be involved. This may include for example anti-discrimination restrictions in consent decrees.
It's not just about being able to find a job. It's about being able to find a job that pays the same money for the same skill & experience, and offers the same career opportunities in the future.
Based on the statistics that we have, it's definitely a problem, at least in the tech sector.
For example, proving that an employee is performing or not is relatively easy with most manual labor jobs. This is why performance reviews are often used in these lawsuits (particularly wrongful termination). This is not true for something like programming. Remember that they were designed back in the 1960s.
You're depriving people of a legal remedy, so you are de facto making it ok. So why do you want to make it ok to discriminate depending on the job title? Why are some people not deserving of the same protections as others?
It's not about successful communication, it's about how you present an entire group of people. Using the term "the blacks" or "Blacks" makes you sound like Archie Bunker, dude. Negative social signal.
Maybe the goal is to send a specific type of social signal so people like you can self-select themselves out of his life? The term isn't pejorative. So, chill out.
It's more pejorative for the same reason that "White Pride" has negative connotations in today's society while "Black Pride", "Asian Pride", "Gay Pride" have positive.
White people weren't / aren't systemically discriminated against since before the founding of this country. come on son, log off lesswrong and learn some social context.
that's a poor strategy these days, because 1) most companies do diversity in one way or other and 2) stocks can remain irrational/affected by gazillion of other things much longer than you can remain solvent
This is ultimately the result of things like 'implicit biases' training that tell you to accept that you are unfairly subconsciously advantaging majorities and that you should explicitly disadvantage them to make up for your biases. Disgusting.
> and that you should explicitly disadvantage them to make up for your biases.
This isn't correct. Any "training" program which would advocate for this would be highly unethical. At the end of the Vox article linked to by dankohn1, it gives steps to reduce implicit bias. These steps are all about awareness and mindfulness. Nowhere does it explicitly state to trade one form of discrimination for another.
Reverse discrimination is just reactionary discrimination that hasn't become mainstream yet.
There's a good Dr Seuss story about a guy that comes into town with a machine that stamps a star on your chest. A few people get it and think they're better than everyone else until everyone gets the star and the fashion becomes not having the star, and the story oscillates between star and no-star until everyone's out of money and the huckster with the star/no-star machine moves onto the next town.
Discrimination of all kinds is and has always been about mobilizing people against each other for the sake of accumulating power/money/resources.
I object to the term because of this, from the article you linked to:
> In a narrower sense, it refers to the specific negative impacts Whites or males may experience because of affirmative action policies. The two meanings are often conflated, which leads to confusion and misinformation.
As companies try to fight historical biases, there will be some from the dominant group that suffer — those that might have been promoted under the old biased system won't be under a new less biased system. Advantages that the dominant group had will naturally be eroded. That's all well and good; an inevitable and desirable consequence of progress in the right direction.
However, if the Yahoo! figures from the article are right, this seems to be a case of active discrimination against male employees, which isn't the same thing at all.
Calling them both "reverse discrimination" elides the difference between those two possible meanings. So I prefer to think of what we're discussing here as active discrimination of no substantive difference to the usual historical discrimination. In Yahoo! some female managers were the dominant group — they had the power — and they used that power to discriminate against male employees to fill the ranks with other women. That's straight-up discrimination.
Of course, the whole thing might be nonsense, but we'll have to wait and see.
The term "reverse discrimination" is one of the biggest examples of modern racist and sexist thought. Using it makes it clear that you don't believe women/non-whites to be equal to white men.
"reverse discrimination" What does that even mean? It really comes out as a bullshit term to be honest. How can you be reverse discriminated? It makes no sense! Its either discrimination or it is not.
That's like saying because turning exist, left turns aren't a thing. "Reverse discrimination" is a bad name, but it represents a specific type of discrimination. That doesn't mean it isn't discrimination.
Implicit bias tests could end up becoming another big embarrassment for psychology. Worth reading this tweet storm [0] for the little amount of conflicting [1] literature that is available.
I wouldn't treat a Vox article as evidence that something is true.
Nice snark. But, the point isn't to trust a Twitter account, the point is to read the actual scientific literature that they linked to...
As others have pointed out already [0] IAT hasn't faired well in the replication crisis.
Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that 'implicit bias' doesn't exist in any form. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I'm just pointing out that saying "a real phenomenon backed up by good studies" in light of recent studies is kind of a stretch.
Not sure why Dan is being downvoted. Implicit bias is a very well documented phenomenon. Just because Yahoo might have done something really stupid, doesn't diminish the problem of implicit bias in any way.
As far as I can see this is a straw man. Can you demonstrate a particular training program that actually does that?
Everything I've seen in this area focuses on ways to avoid bias (of whatever type) by process. How effective this is I don't know but it certainly isn't suggesting explicit disadvantage.
Verizon is doing their due diligence and whatever transpires in public is done to negotiate the purchase price lower or to eliminate liabilities later down the road.
Management is responsible for every aspect of how an organization functions and operates. When management fails this comprehensively, it's not unusual for the organization to fail in multiple different ways.
But Yahoo has been on this trajectory since long before Mayer joined them. They are to internet services what Blackberry was to mobile devices. They were a transitional platform, just advanced enough from the old platforms (CompuServe, AOL) to succeed when they failed, but too like them to succeed once the industry transitioned to the new paradigm.
The threat of impending or active litigation will make Verizon reluctant to close a deal with Yahoo. It's new downside risk for Verizon that they have no desire to take on. Verizon may ask that Yahoo settle the lawsuit before closing the sale.
So, it may be that the lawsuit was timed to put maximum pressure on Yahoo to settle, by creating risk of jeopardizing their sale.
I'm extra-suspicious of this lawsuit because of the opportunistic timing. He was fired in January 2015, more than 1.5 years ago. And yet the lawsuit is only filed now during Verizon's process of closing its acquisition of Yahoo. Whether or not he has a case, his motives now have an antagonistic taint because he no doubt timed this to maximize the PR damage and his chances of getting a quick settlement.
If he was truly wronged, then why WOULDN'T he time his lawsuit so that it is most advantageous? If he is in the right, of course he wants to maximize his changes of getting a settlement.
If the article is a good preview of the case, it does seem to be bullshit... The mechanism by which this discrimination supposedly happen was the stack ranking feedback system.
Now I believe stack ranking is stupid and somewhat cruel. But I don't see how it allows more discrimination than other grading systems. The lawsuit also doesn't claim intent and it'd be quite a stretch to assign liability to the CEO for hard-to-prove unintentional side effect.
Now, once the lawsuit is filed, he gets to do discovery. And if some exec at Yahoo has ever said something over email to the effect of aggressively promoting women, and, given the current set of beliefs in the Valley, it is hard to believe nothing would turn up, the guy might have struck gold here.
Because performance reviews are highly subjective to begin with, you can easily hide discrimination behind the guise of stack ranking. It's easy to prove liability, she is CEO she has all this performance data at her fingertips.
If the lawsuit is to be believed, it's a stack ranking system with some unusual twists - most notably, the part where higher ranking managers can arbitrarily change ranking scores of anyone under them, bypassing their direct managers. He gives a specific example where scores of several people were decreased from above with no explanation, and seemingly no clear basis other than gender.
Mostly because there are people with opinions that differ from the hn/reddit echo chamber.
Nobody denies that yahoo failed, but most people also believe that it's fate was sealed the day it refused to buy google, and that she did about as well as anybody would have.
...but also: she'd get a 60$ million bonus if fired, and considering that yahoo has already lost 90% of its former value and is being sold of, people probably stopped caring.
Isn't that bonus peanuts to the incredibly bad deal she signed with Mozilla? I love Mozilla so was happy when Yahoo got outmaneuvered on that deal, but she certainly didn't "[do] about as well as anybody would have" on that deal.
Yahoo refused to buy Google? I don't remember that.
In 2000, when Yahoo signed the deal to use Google search results, they also made an investment as well. IIRC, they sold that when Google went public. Obviously, Yahoo made a ton on that.
Larry and Sergey tried selling their pagerank engine to Yahoo back in 1998, before they formed Google. Yahoo wasn't interested. They founded google as a fallback plan after being turned down.
I would think the the board of Yahoo believes that since it is selling the company anyway they should let the new buyer pay the golden parachute instead of the existing stock holders.
I don't really understand the reference, but despite the spot she was in when she started she obviously have done some bad shit right from the get go. Like banning remote work and now this.
Then there is no seeming investment in the stuff Yahoo! is good at which is simply weird.
I'm not sure why you wish to remove agency and assign victimhood here. She knew the job was difficult when she took it.
Speaking of Fiorina, there was a guy who was a CEO of a company taking tons of water too. He turned it around. And then he won the primary in which Fiorina also ran.
I wasn't assigning victimhood that I know of - Yahoo is just an older company. My read is that they'd have had to have pivoted pretty sharply. We tend to assign praise or blame on people who pivot depending on how it works out, but it's just not clear that anyone ( except perhaps a very select few ) is simply better at that than anyone else. It's as much gambling as it is playing a game.
I am not 100% sure which primary you refer to, but McCain never turned any company around and Trump has just pivoted to being a floating brand. He's left a trail of wreckage in his wake but still gets to claim otherwise. I don't hold bankruptcy against anyone but you don't then get to construct an "I'm a winner" narrative from that. At least his communications style is that of a con man.
Now, in America, the phenomenon of Perfesser Harold Hill is really a thing - a "jasper" who does good without being good - but the narrative there doesn't work, either.
I'm deeply offended by this and personally I will cease to use Yahoo Mail. I urge any self-respecting males to stop using any of Yahoo services as a form of protest for this despicable act of discrimination. And I'm serious; too much is too much.
I don't deny that the situation must be analyzed carefully but going from "less than 20 percent female" to "more than 80 percent female" in less than 2 years leaves little room for doubt. Also this adds up to the undisclosed security breach and the fact that Yahoo secretly scanned emails for US Intel.. Not a very defensible behavior.
I had no problem with it, why would I have ? Some workplaces have 99% men, others 99% women but very few workplaces fire out 60% of their employees just because their gender is not trendy anymore.
Going from less than 20 percent female to more than 80 percent female is being exactly as discriminatory, though. You should have been offended all along, right?
If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad.
On the other hand, if your company goes from 80%/20% to 20%/80% in 2 years, it's the difference that is very suspicious. Either you're deliberately discriminating (possibly "reverse discriminating"), or the distribution of candidates changed that much, or you have removed glaring discrimination that existed before.
Either way, you need more numbers to judge.
Oh, also - this all makes sense if we're talking about a sufficiently large sample. If it went from 8 men and 2 women to 8 women and 2 men, I wouldn't be comfortable making any conclusions - on a sample that small, I would expect individual differences to dominate.
The reasonable null hypothesis is that they aren't. Once we remove all the other factors, if we still have a bias in the results, then it would be time to conclude otherwise - but not until then.
Also note that "spend time tinkering with computers as young boys" is exactly what I mean by discrimination earlier in the pipeline - if your parents and other adults expect you to not be interested in computers as a kid on account of your gender, and don't provide opportunities to explore that (i.e. when boys get a Lego robotics kit for their birthday, but girls get dollhouses), that's already discriminatory.
But this isn't about tech, this is about people reporting to the chief marketing officer Maybe women are more likely to be interested in that, no? Every stereotype of gender roles would favor 80% women there to 80% men there.
> If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad.
I'm not (right now) interested in ethical obligations to discriminate or reverse discriminate or anything. I'm interested in hiring the best candidate for the job.
If your candidates are 800 men and 200 women, and you need to hire the 100 best candidates from that pool, you have very little to believe that the 100 best candidates are roughly 80 men and 20 women. You have even less reason to believe that if you have a suspicion that there's discrimination happening in the pipeline.
So if your goal is hiring the best candidate for the job, you shouldn't look at the ratios of demographics coming out of a known-biased pipeline at all. If you end up hiring 80 men and 20 women, you should have your own reason why four times as many men than women were in the set of best qualified people.
If your goal is some vague social-justice politically-correct nonsense like ending reverse discrimination, then you care about putting the blame on the pipeline and slavishly following the numbers it gives you.
>> If your candidates are 800 men and 200 women, and you need to hire the 100 best candidates from that pool, you have very little to believe that the 100 best candidates are roughly 80 men and 20 women.
Why not?
Statistically, at least, this should be true, provided that the candidates have been treated equally before they came to you. If they have disadvantaged in that treatment, it will skew the outcome even more against the discriminated minority - e.g. if women tend to get shittier education in certain field because their teachers don't believe them as capable as men, then of those 200 female candidates, the proportion of ones that are less qualified is likely to be lower.
If you somehow end up with the numbers that are reversed, it's not at all unreasonable to ask why - there ought to be a cause, and for a difference that big, it should be prominent. It may well be a reasonable cause - maybe you just got a bunch of really bright women in that batch, and that will be reflected in their career records etc. But it may also be sexism or other form of discrimination not related to performance.
We do investigations of discrimination against minorities based on statistics like these all the time. For example, one of the underpinnings of the ongoing push for police reform in US is the disproportionate number of black people when it comes to police interactions, arrests (esp. for often substance-less crimes like "resisting arrest" or "disorderly conduct"), and convictions. Generally speaking, this is not considered proof of discrimination by itself, but when there's corroborating evidence (e.g. you find out that some PD had a racist internal culture, based on the SMS the officers send to each other etc), it can certainly strengthen the case to the point where discrimination becomes the default assumption, and another explanation would require substantial proof.
In this lawsuit, the guy does cite several specific examples that, at face value, do indicate discriminatory approach, so dismissing such a large disparity and such a quick rate of change as "it just happens, wasn't on purpose" out of hand is not feasible - it requires evidence to rebut.
No you don't get it. When men get their jobs its because of their hard work and abilities. When women get jobs its because of mass discrimination against males!
"When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines, were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female"
Taken from the article, do you really need more proof?
"Yahoo’s diversity reports indicate that the percentage of women in leadership positions at the company rose slightly to 24 percent in 2015 from 23 percent in 2014."
1. Just as much as the 20 percent male did. This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%.
2. How is the gender ratio of the broader industry relevant here? If everyone discriminates, is it okay to discriminate? Maybe these women were just better at their jobs than the male candidates.
Anecdotally, the average woman I've worked with is far more competent than the average man I've worked with. Are you willing to deny fundamental but politically-incorrect gender differences in your social justice crusade?
> This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%.
Can you cite any sources for said ratio, for middle management in IT?
I'm genuinely curious - I don't know the numbers, but I also find it hard to believe, just on the basis of the distribution that I've seen in various places where I worked.
When you have an hard fact like: In one year the administration when from 20% female to 80% female.
You can come up with all the legal mumbo jumbo you want and with your handsomely paid lawyers you can even win the lawsuit, but it's obvious they where guilty of sexual discrimination, you don't need a court ruling to understand that.
Why, did they remove almost all the woman there in 1 year to change it for men? Talk about apples and oranges.
Besides, do yourself a favour: Just walk into any Computer Science major class, check the number of woman/men there and let us all know how much they go above those 20% and go check the numbers in the previous years while the board of Yahoo (and any major company in that area) was being built. Ok?
I don't know who is in the wrong or right at Yahoo (or if it's even that simple), but you really aren't thinking about this very carefully.
There is a obvious rational path for them to get there. I'm not saying it is correct, mind you, or that the implementation would be a good idea. I'm saying that the statements to the effect of "well obviously it was discrimination" are sloppy.
The obvious path looks something like this. 1) Become convinced that there has been a systematic bias in hiring and promotion that has promoted one class of workers in your organization (in this case, men) above their merit. 2) Become convinced that this has led to an inversion of talent in your reporting structure (in this case, many women in your company working for less capable male bosses). 3) Believe that the structural problem represented threatens the effectiveness of the company.
If you truly believe these three things to be true (and they are all at least plausible, there is nothing terribly far fetched in the above), then you act as in any other structural problem - you re-organize. If you believe you have an untapped layer of female talent in your organization due to systemic discrimination, it absolutely would be in your company and shareholders best interest to try and redress that.
Again, I'm not saying it is correct. I'm just saying that "well obviously it has to be discrimination" is either lazy or inept - and that it surprises me to see it echoed here so many times.
To your last paragraph, CS majors are a very poor proxy for competent management, and using previous make up is only useful if you assume that was not exhibiting the same bias you are trying to correct.
> To your last paragraph, CS majors are a very poor proxy for competent management, and using previous make up is only useful if you assume that was not exhibiting the same bias you are trying to correct.
And what bias is that? That 20% of woman in Yahoo, actually reflects very well the percentage of woman with expertise in the area, because that's also the percentage of woman that actually took the effort to learn about the subject trough college and in faculty?
Please let me know exactly where is the bias in expecting that an IT company reflects the same ratios between sexes that you actually see in college for an IT area.
They are two different comments to go with your two different statement, I was perhaps unclear.
1) Most people in a college IT program are not going to end up in management (or at least, not with much responsibility), so using that class as a whole is a poor proxy. Assuming the ratio persists in a subset is too strong to leave without support.
2) Using the previous ratios of something as a baseline is only meaningful if that isn't exactly the thing you are trying to look at changing.
Again, I suspect this is just lack of care in thinking about it.
but dude, what about that extremely common corner case, like if you gave your 2001 yahoo email to a very large number of people and institutions ? what do you do then dude ? no, seriously, how do you migrate and email (because I'm about to try it)?
Yahoo services are pretty much low quality anyway. Flickr is okay but it doesn't really work on mobile w/o installing their app. So why use them anyway? You don't need this as a reason when there are already better services out there. Plus Mayer will probably be pretty much gone soon, since instead of saving what was left of Yahoo, she made it even less relevant than before. It will be probably bought by Verizon.
Again, maybe because Marissa chose a metric that changed the status quo. And fairly applied it. No need to think its a coincidence. It could be exactly the right people got put in position because they were fairly measured and promoted.
It's not a coincidence AT ALL that it happened when a new boss got in town. That could be when the biases got removed.
But this forum will not give up on the idea that women in management has to be a mistake and can't occur except by some cheating.
I don't necessarily think the complaint is that they are incompetent because they are female. The complaint of gender bias is still valid even if the people who benefited from the bias are fully capable of the job. If it can be shown that the 80% women were not hired based on gender bias then the complaint is unjustified.
Do we go looking for that gender bias when its 80% men? Again, women have to prove they belong; the assumption is there has to be some bias or they would not be in those positions.
Yes of course we do. Do you read the same Internet that I do? You can't open a single web page without reading something about gender discrimination in tech and how it's biased and unfair against women. You can't walk into a college campus in the country and not see companies and universities bending over backwards to try to force more women into tech to reverse the trend. There are programs, scholarships, engagement programs, all specifically for women because the entire community acknowledges and understands the bias. Firing or demoting 60% of your workforce instantly so you can reverse the extreme inequality into a mirror in the other direction is discrimination as well, but it is explicit and direct, not implicit and insidious which is why people are offended.
We live in a "free" and democratic society but when you work at mid-large companies they are all basically idealistic dictatorships with brown shirts running the ranks. It really is a conundrum in some places.
Worked for a high tech company in the US that hired mostly ethnic Asian people especially immigrants from China, Japan, Korea because most were single or came over alone and would work 12 hours, weekends, etc. THey did not protest, maybe could not protest because of whatever visa they were on. CEO was from China, family members in senior positions at the company etc.
Does anyone here even use Yahoo's products or services? I wonder why Yahoo is still significant and why there are stockholders dumb enough to stay. Yahoo is a sinking ship, imho.
Yes. I used Flickr before Yahoo purchased it, and have watched Yahoo ruin it.
I've tried alternatives (Instagram, 500px) but keep coming back to Flickr because I just prefer it to the rest.
Over the last couple of months, I have started migrating my photos/contacts to other photo sharing networks in anticipation of the eventual straw that broke the camels back.
Yahoo services (like the core branded stuff, not Flickr etc.) are still really popular here in Japan. News/entertainment content, and yahoo shopping all seem to be well-liked. I don't know any numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if it leads gmail as an email provider.
I used Flickr for a long time but moved to 500px as the whole site is just significantly better than Flickr. So no not anymore I guess. Why would I use Yahoo for anything?
>Yahoo’s diversity reports indicate that the percentage of women in leadership positions at the company rose slightly to 24 percent in 2015 from 23 percent in 2014.
This is buried in the very last line of the article.
Feminism is not about egalitarianism. Saying that is the equivalent of responding "All Lives Matter!" to BLM.
I'm not saying that Yahoo did something right or wrong (maybe qualified women started to flock to yahoo because of its female CEO? Who knows! I will let the justice system sort that one out). But I really dislike feminism constantly being watered down to mean anything other than "the advancement of women."
Like, women have a lot of issues across the globe. Women get acid thrown in their faces, get denied education, etc. etc. Feminism is about stopping all of that, NOT about egalitarianism. There's already a word for egalitarianism, why the need to make feminism mean that, too?
Woman here: If it turns out to be true, then yeah, that is absolutely sexist and is absolutely 100% bullshit. That's the point of wanting equity for everyone: being a woman or being a man should have no bearing on whether or not you can do the WORK, so if that starts to be a point of consideration then yeah, that's kinda inherently sexist. Just like men getting the side eye when they want to be elementary teachers or women in stockrooms getting asked if they need help carrying something.
As a man in tech from an underprivileged background, I couldn't disagree more. I worked as a cleaner for three years while educating myself, at the same time slowly winning freelance work. I know and worked with other men who went through similar situations. That we might be considered ripe for purging due to our genitalia is some somewhat remarkable. That people seem to support it with apparent glee is disheartening.
If you recognise intersectionality is "a thing", how can you justify supporting any measure which discriminates based on an arbitrary attribute such as gender? Surely the concept is one which demands a little more nuance in matters like this?
Maybe you don't understand. White men are all the same. They all grew up with a silver spoon in their mouths and no hurdles to overcome. Life is just easy for them. /s
How can you be fine with laying off persons based on their sex?
You come out as someone who has chucked the whole keg of coolaid.
"Discrimination against an otherwise unoppressed majority really fails to make me care." - You don't think that leads to oppression? When will you care? When white males are rounded up in death camps and ridden by BLM deathsquads, will you care then?
You don't think it is comparable to saying "Discrimination against islam - a religious majority really fails to make me care" ?
And lets start with "intentionally levels it". Why is there evidence that is happening? It would be equally reasonable to say "when the discrimination of male managers is removed".
Or are we to assume that its natural and right for 80% of managers to be men.
Please don't post deliberately inflammatory generalizations about the community. It only serves to make the discussions predictably worse and ruins the threads for everyone.
Funny you should mention her. I'm 100% sure that it can't be coincidence that the only "really bad CEOs" I keep hearing about on social media are Pao, Meyers and Elizabeth Holmes. But people really don't react kindly to accusations of sexism without proof.
I wonder how unlikely it is that the 90% of male CEOs in high tech are all exemplary.
In recent times (5 years-ish), those three are about the most spectacular/ popular failures/ scandals (more of a scandal and less of failure in the case of Pao and Meyers) happened. Seeing that reddit is easily like the 2nd or 3rd most popular "social media" (with a loose definition of the term), is it a surprised an issue involving it would be popular on social media? And if any white male want to try starting a 10B fraudulent company, I have faith that HN will be dragging your name all over the place bashing you as well.
That said, when I read "really bad CEOs on social media" and tried to think of an example.... "Steve Balmer" comes to mind. I took the liberty of searching for just "steve balmer" on the HN's search. First article reads "Why Balmer failed", and this is a couple of link down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6263205 .
Microsoft did NOT fail during his tenure as a CEO, and that is how he's judged. You might consider if your sampling is having a bias.
You must be reading different social media then me since there are plenty examples of bad male CEOs. Isn't there a Twitter article on the main page? HP is a special case as they have had a run of awful CEOs (the SAP guy being one of the worst) and most damaging a criminal board. I think the jury is still out on Meyers. Holmes is basically a criminal. Not one has approached SCO or Enron bad. There are plenty of sucky male CEOs out there.
[edit: seems the male Backpack CEO made the front page doing something far worse]
I dunno Jack Dorsey, the guy from Just Mayo, Blue Apron, there have been some pretty damning exposes on male CEOs in the tech industry just in the past few weeks. Hell, plenty of valid criticism is made of people like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.
Granted, I'm not on twitter or facebook, but from what I understand social media is a hellscape and should be avoided at all costs.
You could add Carly Fiorina to that list, to continue the theme.
Or Charles H. Keating, Jr. (Lincoln Savings & Loan). Or Albert J. "Chainsaw" Dunlap (Sunbeam). Or Bernard Ebbers (Worldcom). Or Kenneth Lay (Enron). Or Bernie Matoff (self). Or Angelo R. Mozilo (Countrwide Financial). Or Richard Belluzzo (SGI). Or Dick Fuld (Lehman Brothers). Or Maurice R. Greenberg (AIG).
I don't even remember the executives, but from a Quora listing of SV failures: PayByTouch (John Rogers, convicted felon), SpotRunner (Nick Grouf and David Waxman), Homejoy (Adora & Aaron Cheung), Joost (Mike Volpi), DashMobile (Jamyn Edis), Cuil (hey, one I actually remember: Tom Costello), SearchMe (Randy Adams), Friendster (Ganesh Kumar Bangah), Digg (Jay Adelson & Kevin Rose), Reatrix (Robert Hoffer), and Color Labs (Bill Nguyen). All but one were run by men. Cumulatively they lost over $1 billion in funding capital with nothing to show for.
Or you could look at Yahoo itself: Ross Levinsohn, Scott Thompson, Tim Morse, Carol "Fuck You" Bartz, Jerry Yang, and Terry Semel have all guided, spurred-on, or frantically tried to halt its descent, to little effect. Only Bartz is female.
I'm quite unimpressed by Mayer given news of the past few weeks. I never thought she had much of a chance of salvaging Yahoo, and thought the company was walking dead, with my estimate a year or two back that it likely had about three years to live. The Verizon deal looked like a least-bad exit, and I was willing to give credit for that at the time. Rolling forward, I'd be willing to argue that Mayer has all but scuppered one of the few lifeboats she might have scampered into through mismanagement.
But that's on her. And there's plenty other failure to go around.
Truth is: business, startups, and infotech are tough gigs.
Holmes is a bad CEO? She built a 9 billion dollar company using only smoke and mirrors. That just doesn't happen everyday. Imagine how successful Theranos would be if they actually had a product.
The decision to oust Eich is the reason why I would never knowingly hire people who practiced social justice activism.
There is evidence all over Silicon Valley, including this thread, that they just cannot keep their politics and work separated. Indeed they believe it is their job to mix the two.
It would be like hiring a KKK member in HR. Toxic results would be a foregone conclusion. It is the paradox of tolerance all over again. Social justice actvists will never hire rightists. KKK members are never going to hire blacks. And yes this is a valid comparison because social justice groups such as Black Lives Matter do have people in them advocating violence, being involved in riots and even murder with the sniper in Dallas being one example. Eich was a moderate kind of rightist so there is no chance somebody like me would be allowed to exist.
I would have no problem hiring people who disagree with me on every political subject. The problem starts when you begin using your influence to deliberately select members of your 'tribe' to be appointed to positions. That is the trademark 'feature' that should cause you to deselect them, it is no contradiction to discriminate against negative discrimination.
Look at Ycombinator. It has many well known characters who clearly disagree in politics but it does not turn into a problem for their working relationship. That is the kind of pluralism we should want to have.
> Trump does have the support of one of Silicon Valley's biggest names: Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir.
And sama says:
> On a personal note, Peter is one of the two people (along with PG) who has taught me the most about how to invest in startups.
So it is possible for people with different politics to work together. In fact I thought that was the whole point of diversity, that it was represented intellectually instead of having just a phenotype of diversity.
Personally I do not believe intellectual diversity is spread equally across all people. Many people look different to each other but exhibit evidence they are the same person because they hold so many views in common with each other. If you meet people who watch television all day you know it is true. Their minds are in sync with that of the hive. They ask the same questions and seek the same answers. That is the essence of tribalism, which is fine in competition or conflict but disadvantageous if you're searching for flaws in something, trying to found a new business model or find an untapped market segment, because that is where it makes more sense to think like a cross-pollinator.
I don't think it is a coincidence that Silicon Valley personalities are drawn to contrarianism. This is probably the biggest reason I don't like social justice people. I don't believe they are capable of being innovators. Their personality mitigates against it. I think they are masquerading as something they are not. I can think of many software projects and I'm sure you can too, in which there is a vocal minority with political opinions that sank the enterprise. The number of lines of code contributed by such people is typically either zero, low or of no real importance.
I think if you look at this upsidedown what I'm saying is obvious. Imagine you had programmers giving each other 'brofist' all the time and breaking into impromptu song 'Onward Christian Soldiers', handing each other leaflets bemoaning the local abortion clinic, maybe trying to get former army buddies onto the board...
Pao doesn't deserve that label at all -- later info showed she probably fought for free speech on reddit as much as anyone -- but that doesn't come from the world's bias, merely reddit's. It was after all Alexis Ohanian who made the decision[1] that got Ellen Pao fired. Holmes, on the other hand, isn't a bad CEO, she's a scam artist. So if those are the "bad CEOs" you've been hearing about, you've been hearing from some pretty misinformed people.
Arguably the founders of Sun were pretty bad businessmen (but excellent engineers). Tim Cook's reign at Apple has been questionable. Eric Schmidt is remembered more for being some sort of Machiavellian New World Order type who is way too friendly with the State department. Steve Ballmer is sort of like Meyer in that he was blamed for not saving a company whose market was simply getting smaller. It's possible that you don't hear about bad male CEOs as much because male CEOs aren't notable simply for being CEOs.
I think that Meyer missed an opportunity to beat Google at privacy by taking it seriously. Yahoo was excellently situated for that. Once they're part of Verizon, though, it's too late. On the other hand, Ellen Pao's primary mistake was being both female and famous on reddit.
This whole thread is deeply disturbing. The bald statement in the headline is deeply disturbing. The fundamental assumption that women can't possibly be deserving of management positions. That any objective measure of performance would certainly favor men. That any man that loses his job to a woman has been treated unfairly.
This kind of discrimination could be excused if it brought a tangible value to the company, but this reshuffling did nothing to help this ailing company.
Meyer's actions were discriminatory at worst; at best, it was merely gross incompetence.
Lots of companies fail to survive Silicon Valley forever. Yahoo!'s future aside, the conversation was about promotion, not ailing companies.
A lot of women are routinely overlooked in management promotions. Since its 80% (or usually much more) men in every other company in Silicon Valley, we'll have to call discrimination and incompetence at all of them?
The assumption that women can't possibly belong in management is galling. No mystery why Silicon Valley has the reputation it does.
>The assumption that women can't possibly belong in management is galling. No mystery why Silicon Valley has the reputation it does.
You're putting a lot of words in other people's mouths in this thread, and I believe you are equating skepticism and discomfort from the lawsuit's allegations with willful ignorance or even sincere sexism.
If a CEO wishes to fire half the company and hire new people, sure. If the CEO wants to fire half the company (who happen to be men) and replace them with new people (who happen to be women), again, sure.
If a CEO implements a review system designed to illegitimize honest work by a cohort of people and have them demoted and/or fired to minimize severance costs while bringing on or promoting people of a different cohort, then we have a discrimination problem.
Honestly I am a little surprised at the accusations of sexism towards people that are expressing discomfort with what appears to be a primarily sexist act.
One of the things that has been only lightly touched upon:
> ... and have them demoted and/or fired to minimize severance costs ...
Tangential to this was the violation of the California and federal WARN act. Yahoo reduced the workforce by 600 employees without declaring the corresponding reduction in force under WARN acts.
If a company has 100 (federal) or 75 (California) or more full time employees that have been employed for 6 of the past 12 months and lays off 50 or more employees during a 30 day period, the employer falls into the WARN act.
Yes -- because people go to tech websites and spam entire comment sections with hundreds of comments saying exactly the same thing and telling everyone that they are sexist while intentionally missing the point.
Joe, no need to feel disturbed. HNers are good people. I used to think otherwise, but dang corrected me. The percent of misogynists or racists is far less than 100%. I would say at least 80% of the comments in this thread are not sexist in anyway. Which to be honest is pretty good.
I'd be more comforted if even the not-overtly-sexist comments didn't have an assumption of the truth of the title: its a problem when significant numbers of women are promoted into management.
Most comments do not imply that. What they imply is that the magnitude and the speed of the change is suspicious (not necessarily a problem, but likely to be indicative of one). It would be just as suspicious if they went 80% to 20% in the other direction at the same rate.
I keep reading this positive stereotype about women needing to be twice as good to make it half as far, and yet this outcome would be a the natural consequence of that if assessment was to suddenly become fair. People need to better choose their 'ladies in the workplace' stereotypes methinks. Unless it's true, in which case...
Let's see, 20% Women in STEM x 2 x 2 (twice as good; and, multiply by two to make up for half as far) = ... 80%
In my case, I had a manager who simply didn't like me because I'm gay and used the performance review process, and eventually put me on an action plan and forced me to quit.
Most of the big tech companies will put you on something called a PIP, which is a "Performance Improvement Plan". It basically means they are preparing to fire you, but they give you an option: quit now, and you can have some severance, or you could try and stay and complete the PIP, but still run the risk of being fired for any reason, and in that case, you get no severance. It's exactly what happened to me, and I decided it wasn't worth the stress to try and stay and fight it so I just quit.
It was the most demoralizing experience ever, and really showed me that these processes are in place so managers can just get rid of people they don't want or like.