← Back to context

Comment by program_whiz

1 year ago

The real reason is because it shows the heavy "diversity" bias Google has, and this has real implications for a lot of situations because Google is big and for most people a dream job.

Understanding that your likelihood of being hired into the most prestigious tech companies is probably hindered if you don't look "diverse" or "female" angers people. This is just one sign/smell of it, and so it causes outrage.

Evidence that the overlords who control the internet are censoring images, results, and thoughts that don't conform to "the message" is disturbing.

Imagine there was a documentary about Harriet Tubman and it was played by an all-white cast and written by all-white writers. What's there to be upset about? Its just art. Its just photons hitting neurons after all, who cares what the wavelength is? The truth is that it makes people feel their contributions and history aren't being valued, and that has wider implications.

Those implications are present because tribalism and zero-sum tactics are the default operating system for humans. We attempt to downplay it, but its always been the only reality. For every diversity admission to university, that means someone else didn't get that entry. For every "promote because female engineer" that means another engineer worked hard for naught. For every white actor cast in the Harriett Tubman movie, there was a black actor/writer who didn't get the part -- so it ultimately comes down to resources and tribalism which are real and concrete, but are represented in these tiny flashpoints.

> Google is big and for most people a dream job

I wonder how true this is nowadays. I had my foot out the door after 2016 when things started to get extremely politically internally (company leadership crying on stage after the election results really sealed it for me). Something was lost at that point and it never really returned to the company it was a few years prior.

You touched on it briefly but a big problem is that it undermines truly talented people who belong to underrepresented groups. Those individuals DO exist, I interview them all the time and they deserve to know they got the offer because they were excellent and passed the bar, not because of a diversity quota.