Jackass of the Week: James Damore

If you’re still looking for a succinct, pin-point-accurate, easily grasped explanation for what was wrong about Google engineer James Damore’s essay arguing against Google’s efforts to address gender (and, I think implicitly, racial) diversity in its workforce, look no further than Damore himself, in this series of tweets:

Imagine your company spent $250 million on programs that assumed Santa Claus is real.

Then you wrote a document detailing why Santa Claus is a myth, which upset the brainwashed employees that believe in Santa Claus.

It’s your fault if you make a 3 year old cry by telling them Santa Claus isn’t real. It’s society’s fault if that makes 30 year olds cry.

I found his original document extraordinarily tedious to read because it contained about two pages worth of ideas spread across 10 pages of a sort of academic-ese-like writing. He used that abstract, detached, wordy point-of-view to make his thesis come across as non-confrontational. I’m not against women in tech, I’m just pro facts, and here are some facts.

Now, unleashed from any pretense of evenhandedness or detachment, we get a succinct summary of his argument: the notion that women should, based on merit and talent, constitute a larger percentage of the tech industry is like believing in Santa Claus. A fantasy.

Fuck this guy.

Also, nobody cried after reading his “document”. They simply explained, often in point-by-point painstaking detail, why he was wrong and needed to be fired.

★ Tuesday, 22 August 2017