The man in question claimed that some large portion of folks are hired under diversity programs which supposedly “lower the bar”. That is, those people don’t deserve to be at Google, and he doesn’t believe that they are qualified.

That’s in his own words, and I would have fired him a hell of a lot faster than Google did, because I will not have my team disrupted by a prima donna.

This is not what the document stated. Here is the quote about "lowering the bar" in its original form:

> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

The author deliberately narrows the scope of this sentence stating that the hiring practices decrease the false negative rate, not increasing the false positive rate. Stating that the false negative rate is lowered for diverse candidates is to say that qualified, non-diverse, candidates are rejected at a greater rate than qualified and diverse candidates. It is not stating that unqualified, diverse, candidates are accepted at a greater rate.

I have little context here, but from a statistics point of view, this statement is... odd:

"...decrease the false negative rate, not increase the false positive rate."

The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship. You cannot decrease one without increasing the other. It is, for example, one of the difficulties in making good medical diagnostic tests.

without dumping in a lot more money or w/e...

Dumping a lot more money is what my company does. Normally, we do one phone interview and one onsite session which consists of multiple interviews. We perform multiple phone interviews if a diverse candidate fails the first (or, occasionally, the second).

The final hiring decision is almost entirely entirely on the on-site interview, the phone interviews essentially act as a first-pass filter. And we don't do any sort of weighting of diversity in the final hire decision. From my experience, the phone screen has the highest false-positive rate. In this system the false negative is reduced considerably for diverse candidates, while the false positive remains mostly the same (since the on-site is pretty rigorous).

For what it's worth, while I can understand the author's opposition to this system I think it's an okay way of increasing diversity. I don't think this system has ever caused us to take on a diverse candidate of insufficient skill or experience. Does it mean that non-diverse candidates get filtered out on the phone interview step at a higher rate? Yes. But not so much that I'd consider it an issue - and this is coming from a (mostly) non-diverse guy. And while it does cost the company more money, in the sense that we spend more time interviewing some candidates than we normally would, it's money well spent.

He literally says that those hiring practices can effectively lower the bar.

Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.

> Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.

This is not necessarily the case. This is a vast oversimplification of a tech company's hiring process, but for the sake of simplicity let's say that phone interviews have a 50% rate of generating a false negative and on-sites have a 0% error rate.

Say a company does one phone-interview, and if passed, moves on to on-sites. But for diverse candidates they do two phone interviews and if either passes they move on to on-sites.

* Unqualified candidates always fail, since neither phone interviews or on-sites have a false-positive rate.

* Qualified non-diverse candidates have a 50% chance of getting the job.

* Qualified diverse candidates have a 75% of getting the job.

At no point do any unqualified candidates receive offers. But at the same time, qualified non-diverse candidates are still rejected at twice the rate as diverse candidates.

The "bar" so to speak isn't always something that people have a higher chance of passing the better their skills are. A working knowledge of data structures and concurrency is all that's necessary to pass all of my company's coding interviews. Practice and luck is probably a greater asset than skill in many interviews. But getting into the efficacy of technical interviews is opening a whole 'nother bag of worms.

I had to read this a few times, but I think I get it now. The original manifesto author means that the "bar is lowered" for diverse candidates because they're scrutinized more carefully and fewer qualified candidates are eliminated? If you're good enough and diverse, you're more likely to be hired than if you're good enough and ... whatever the word for not-diverse is? The original author is not claiming that more unqualified diverse candidates are hired, just that it's easier to get hired if you're qualified and diverse?

If I've understood that correctly I really appreciate your effort in explaining it. Your comment should be higher so more people could see it :)

Also, if I understand you correctly, the phrase "lower the bar" might have gotten him fired for something he wasn't intending to say.

That's exactly right. Thanks for taking the time to read my comment thoroughly.

I also agree with your point around phrasing. I agree that lot of people took away the wrong meaning due to the phrase "lower the bar" (which is a very loaded phrase). This piece probably could have been better received if the author sought out proof-reading with trusted co-workers and friends beforehand. In particular the author should have:

* Dropped the awkward and monolithic generalizations of "Left" and "Right" at the beginning.

* Stayed way the hell away from talking about biological differences, just say that men and women have different preferences for working hours, fields, etc. and don't touch on possible causes.

* Don't emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, but rather the possible negative effects for the group as a whole. The point about OKRs contingent on hitting a certain percentage of diverse team members turning hiring and transfers into a zero sum game was actually a really good point that potentially hurts diverse groups themselves by limiting cross-team mobility.

* At the end, don't try to turn this into a Conservative vs. Liberal issue. Just point out that affirmative action is not nearly as uniformly supported as people make it out to be. For reference 42% of the population opposes affirmative action for race in the workplace, and 33% for gender [1].

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/184772/higher-support-gender-affi...

He might have planned all this. He was apparently chess champion as a child.

* Mentioning of left echo chamber was pandering to the right. And he got huge support form right leaning and centrist media and personalities.

* Biological differences he mentioned were sourced, so not his personal opinions. He knew this will trigger outrage from pro feminist camp that will start witch hunt against him, based on unproven accusations that he holds misogynistic beliefs.

* Emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, was another passive aggressive attack on one of SJW/PC/regressive-left sacred cows.

I dont really know if he planned this, but if you spend any time following anti-SJW sphere, then you should agree that reaction was totally predictable.

Basically he just said that google created environment where people who dont perfectly align with left leaning echo chamber agenda (here he was pandering to anti-SJW anti-PC / centrists, conservatives...) cant safely express their opinions anymore. And he was fired for doing exactly this. Proving his point on himself. Google HR had two bad choices, not fire him and cause outrage among many of their left leaning (snowflakes); or fire him and prove his point that they re indeed left leaning echo chamber.

I base my speculation on fact that he put his full name on memo, instead of pseudonym and this quote:

> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.

Then why is he using the phrase "lower the bar"?

If he wants to argue that Google should lower the false negative rate for men too, I am totally on board with that! They should lower the false negative rate for everyone. They are bad at high-signal interviewing.

But the meaning of the phrase "lower the bar" is that less-qualified people are being let in, that people are being held to lower standards, etc. The entire point of the phrase "lower the bar" is to convey that the bar should have been be left where it was.

Honestly even if he wrote something like "Hiring practices which are more likely to improve outcomes for individual 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" I'd have much less of a problem with it. (I called out this specific sentence on Twitter yesterday; it was one of the things that particularly bothered me about the document.) But he used words with a specific meaning.

If he used words by mistake that his colleagues reasonably interpreted to mean that he thinks they're unqualified, that's all the more reason he shouldn't have his job. At a company at the scale of Google, a huge portion of effective engineering is effective communication.

Answering myself in part: I'd read the copy of the essay on Vox Day's blog (since I like to see opposing ideological opinions just to make sure I still disagree with them), which, like most other copies, did not have links.

The copy on the documentcloud link floating around this thread shows that "effectively lower the bar" is a link to an archived thread from the internal Google Group "coffee-beans-discuss".

I am curious if that post, or a summary thereof, has been leaked: I find the use of this phrase just baffling and technically incorrect (in addition to being insulting) and it seems like the author did have some specific intention here. Is he quoting someone else who's arguing that false negatives "effectively lower the bar"?

> That is, those people don’t deserve to be at Google, and he doesn’t believe that they are qualified.

You should read what he wrote more closely. He said that Google was creating hiring practices that "lowered the bar by decreasing false negative rate." That last bit is important because it fundamentally changes what he's asserting and means you've entirely misrepresented what he was saying.

Anyone familiar with the Google hiring practices knows that, unless you're famous to some extent, there's an element of luck to getting hired. A lot of qualified candidates get rejected because Google just gets a lot of applicants and they can't hire everyone that's qualified. Those candidates are the false negatives...people they could have hired without making a mistake but didn't.

What he's saying is that while a white male needs to be qualified, pass his interview and not be one of these false negatives, the minority candidate just needs to be qualified and pass his/her interview. That is a lower bar for entry, but it isn't what everyone is accusing him of having said...that his minority colleagues aren't qualified or are less qualified. They still passed all the merit parts of the process, they just never had to undergo the arbitrary part of the process that non-minorities are subjected to.

yeah, the entire screen against women in tech is not claiming anything about any women he works with, no siree