Nowhere is it implied that people going through rough patches will be judged for poor performance and “booted out the door.” The point is that people should be setting expectations ahead of time and will be held accountable for the expectations they set.
There is ample room in a high-performing workplace for the rare rough patch, just needs to be done in a way that optimally allows the team to minimize the disruption.
The main condition is that rare rough patches should be rare. Obviously people who constantly go through rough patches can not be expected to perform highly and are not appropriate employees in a high performing work environment.
This is well argued but some of the assumptions are false.
1) Damore never argued men were better suited to software engineering than women.
2) Damore never argued for google to violate EEO laws, and in fact it’s the opposite.
It’s very sad to me that there is such widespread misinterpretation of Damore’s nuance in his memo. In every possible factual way it’s a pro-diversity memo, but because it cites research on the average personality differences amongst men and women (which are 100% true), he gets crucified as a bigot and an anti-diversity zealot.
Furthermore, when it comes to matters such as these, “belief” should not play a substantial role. We’ve already proven that men and women don’t differ much on intelligence. No need to believe one way or another.
> Damore never argued for google to violate EEO laws, and in fact it’s the opposite.
While this may not have been his intent, this ruling appears to imply that the EEOC thinks that the content of his words do amount to that.
You can disagree, but my expectation is, being that they are EEOC lawyers and you are not, their understanding of what does or does not violate EEO law is better than yours.
I do disagree. This is on multiple thorough readings of his memo and a sound mind. He never advocates for Google to discriminate against anyone in his memo, nor does he advocate for Google to not prioritize diversity.
There is no quote in his original memo to prove otherwise, legal opinion notwithstanding.
It did give me pause, then it gave me concern, then it fizzled into lack of surprise.
Damore lost the PR battle long ago. PR justice, while disheartening, isn’t anything new. Challengers to popular ideology are never right at first, but he’ll be right eventually. One day it’ll be more faux pas to assume there are zero average personality differences between the sexes.
This is venturing off topic, but you're actually incorrect that he lost the PR battle [0]. The majority of people support Damore, or at least disagree with Google. The majority of subject matter experts, however, do not.
I whole-heartedly agree with you. I’ve been restricted on HN for much less. My posts are always respectful and encourage productive dialogue, yet I believe I’m perceived as a troll because I’m direct or maybe aggressive. Again, I’m never disrespectful but I’m willing to directly challenge incorrect thinking, you can check my history for yourself.
The regulation on style instead of substance on this site really make me question their commitment to intellectual / productive conversation.
Sometimes I wonder how long someone like Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, or Theo de Raadt would last on this site. I don’t think very long. A site that would ban the most influential hackers of our day simply for bad etiquette doesn’t really seem like a site for hackers.
There's a principle on HN that I'd like to find a way to convince the community of more fully: if you think you know someone's work better than they do, consider what you might be missing. Do you really imagine that we haven't thought of this? or care about the issue? or might it just possibly be more complex than you make out?
Would you please stop replying with completely other issues? The HN guidelines explicitly preclude comments like this, with good reason. We're happy to occasionally make an exception but not when it's a repeated pattern.
It would also be good if you'd drop the meta. 6 of your last 9 posts have been just about HN; that's bad. Meta posting is the fastest growing weed in the garden.
You can downvote me all you want but it doesn’t justify your actions nor does it make your actions any more transparent. Why did you shadow ban my submission? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16366248
Probably a combination of the personal attack in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16304324 and evidence that you've been abusing HN with other accounts. We tend to use shadowbanning in that case because it's too tiring to engage with serial trolls. When the account has been around longer we tend to post openly that they're being banned and why.
Since you've posted mostly good comments since then, we'll unban you. But would you please use the site as intended—for intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation—and follow the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html from now on?
I’ve always used it for sincere intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. My posts across all my accounts are more representative of that more than bad faith trolling. You can trace through it yourself.
Saying Bryan Cantrell has a massive ego isn’t such a massive or unfounded personal attack if I back it up with well-known evidence. He has a known and decorated reputation in the hacker community for having a massive ego. I mean, really?
Having a contradictory or aggressive opinion doesn’t make you a troll if you’re willing to continuously engage in the discussion in good faith. Trolls minimally engage and don’t add. I put effort in my engagement and I try to add to the discussion.
My treatment on hacker news has been unfair and I think your handling has been heavy-handed to the point of censorship. That being said, thank you for de-shadowbanning me. It shows you care.
Facebook isn’t the problem. Phones are. I don’t use Facebook or any social media, yet I’m addicted to hacker news and checking my email.
But even phones are not the problem. People are responsible for their own “addiction.” It’s like blaming food companies for fat people.
Widespread informed Democracy is not something we’ve ever had, and likely will never have. Democracy has always been led by the intelligentsia and the rich.
It shows that when there is a gaussian distribution of performance, then exceptionally good performance will, purely based on statistics, be followed by a decrease in performance, and exceptionally bad performance will be followed by better performance.
The point is that this effect will usually be much stronger than the effects of feedback, and if you naively analyse what kind of feedback works better, it will lead you to the wrong conclusion because praise is given for exceptionally good performance while scolding is given for exceptionally bad performance.
This is not a good use of EINTR, you can even see it’s fundamentally flawed given this usage introduces a race condition.
pselect() isn’t the right answer given it’s not portable and it’s totally broken on various versions of macOS. signalfd() is also not the answer, it suffers from a broken design: https://ldpreload.com/blog/signalfd-is-useless
To deal with cleanup on a signal while blocking in a robust and portable way, use the self pipe trick and select() (or equivalent).
There is ample room in a high-performing workplace for the rare rough patch, just needs to be done in a way that optimally allows the team to minimize the disruption.
The main condition is that rare rough patches should be rare. Obviously people who constantly go through rough patches can not be expected to perform highly and are not appropriate employees in a high performing work environment.