So, about Yonatan Zunger’s article.

Justin Petros
Aug 9, 2017 · 10 min read

Yonatan Zunger wrote a truly remarkable Medium post about the Google memo that’s been in the news.

So, first, a summary of the writer: Yonatan Zunger posted some alarmism in late January about how weird shit the Trump administration was doing was probably preparing for a coup. His views there were endorsed by such political visionaries as Katy Perry. It was rebutted with overt contempt by more sober analysts.

Of perhaps lesser relevance, he appears to be in possession of a mullet and a sanctimonious tone pervading every other thing he’s written.

Enough background. Fast forward to August. Yon is writing about the Google memo. These are exciting times for him! He has three points: the author does not understand gender, the author does not understand engineering, and the author does not understand the implications of his own memo. I’d disagree with the first two and agree with the third, with the caveat that no sane person could anticipate the reaction from Yon and other Googlers.

Yon opens by treating dismissively with the memo’s gender-based comments, while acknowledging the limits of his own knowledge:

I’m not going to spend any length of time on [the author’s misunderstanding of gender]; if anyone wishes to provide details as to how nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect, and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it. But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else.

Indeed, Yon, that’s exactly right: you are none of those things. You’re not a scientist, you’re not particularly smart, and I’m not even clear why you think a biologist is a good scientific specialist to ask. Fortunately, there was indeed someone else, someone else who consulted four accomplished academic experts with extensive, relevant credentials. They posted their responses here. I’ll summarize:

Distinguished professor of social psych:

The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right.

Author proceeds to really lay into the Gizmodo site where the memo was first posted, and the commenters on it:

This essay may not get everything 100% right, but it is certainly not a rant. And it stands in sharp contrast to most of the comments, which are little more than snarky modern slurs. The arrogance of most of the comments reflects exactly the type of smug self-appointed superiority that has led to widespread resentment of the left among reasonable people.

I wonder if we’ll see any of that later, in Yon’s essay? (Spoilers: Hahaha, you have no idea.)

Distinguish psych prof, founder of an institute about culture, gender, and sexuality: Not really sure about this Google dude’s opinions about affirmative action; thinks encouraging women especially to join Google is probably good. So’s open discussion, in the right context!

Professor of evolutionary psychology:

Within hours, this memo unleashed a firestorm of negative commentary, most of which ignored the memo’s evidence-based arguments. Among commentators who claim the memo’s empirical facts are wrong, I haven’t read a single one who understand sexual selection theory, animal behavior, and sex differences research.

When the memo went viral, thousands of journalists and bloggers transformed themselves overnight from not understanding evolutionary psychology at all to claiming enough expertise to criticize the whole scientific literature on biological sex differences. It was like watching Trinity downloading the pilot program for flying the B-212 helicopter in The Matrix. Such fast learners! (Even Google’s new ‘VP of Diversity’, Danielle Brown, criticized the memo because it ‘advanced incorrect assumptions about gender’; I was impressed to see that her Michigan State B.A. in Business and her U. Michigan M.B.A. qualify her to judge the scientific research.)”

Harsh criticism of the critics, Professor Miller. What do you have to say about the memo itself?

For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate. Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately.

On the topic of evolution and human sexuality, I’ve taught for 28 years, written 4 books and over 100 academic publications, given 190 talks, reviewed papers for over 50 journals, and mentored 11 Ph.D. students. Whoever the memo’s author is, he has obviously read a fair amount about these topics. Graded fairly, his memo would get at least an A- in any masters’ level psychology course.

He has a lot more words for this whole effort, well worth reading.

Neuroscience PhD, accomplished science writer:

As a woman who’s worked in academia and within STEM, I didn’t find the memo offensive or sexist in the least. I found it to be a well thought out document, asking for greater tolerance for differences in opinion, and treating people as individuals instead of based on group membership.

Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men — when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences — are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.

I’d count that as three positive on memo / very negative on memo’s critics, and one neutral-positive on the memo, zero scientists siding with the man with the mullet.

Perhaps people outside the echo chamber really do think you look undignified, Yon. Back to you! —

If you’re a professional, especially one working on systems that can use terms like “planet-scale” and “carrier-class” without the slightest exaggeration, then you’ll quickly find that the large bulk of your job is about coordinating and cooperating with other groups.

Sounds impressive, Yon! I bet the planet-scale, carrier-class product you worked on was pretty cool! I just wish I knew what it was!

Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers.

No, it isn’t. Project management is about those things. So’s engineering management, to an extent. And from the company’s perspective, “engineering” encompasses the work done by a number of people: engineers, engineering managers, project managers, and on and on. Engineering (meaning, being an engineer) is about those things you just spent multiple paragraphs deriding as the novice stage of engineering. I believe you are confusing your former duties in a high-level job in Google’s engineering taxonomy with engineering itself; while you may have held an engineer’s title, the work you describe doing would be more widely (which is to say, more accurately) classified as engineering management. It is an important function, but it is distinct from the work of being an engineer.

Anyone can learn how to write code; hell, by the time someone reaches L7 or so, it’s expected that they have an essentially complete mastery of technique. The truly hard parts about this job are knowing which code to write, building.

Empirically, no, not everyone can’t learn to write code well enough to do it as a job; this is an aptitude, and some people don’t have it. There are copious amounts of research on this subject; there are numerous reports of people getting deep into software engineering interview stages without having even basic programming skills. Even people who make significant efforts to attain that level of proficiency frequently fail.

Furthermore, depending on your level of abstraction, “which code to write” is often something tasked to a lead designer, an adjunct in a lateral role, or a non-engineer staffer.

I’d like to stop for a moment here and observe that, while I have been dogging Yon for being mistaken about the usual purview of a engineer, none of the points he is making run contrary to what the memo says. The memo quite literally says Google should emphasize cooperative and collaborative functions in engineering to better leverage all its employees’ strengths. It talks about most of the female qualities it mentions as unambiguous strengths in engineering. Repeat, Yon has by this point put seven paragraphs into railing against this memo, lecturing its author — badly — that cooperation and “women’s” strengths were important and should not be neglected, when that was one of the core conclusions said author had drawn.

It’s almost as though Yon hadn’t read or understood the memo he was replying to.

What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas.

Literally everyone I know who works at Google would agree that the company contains incompetent people who are kept at their jobs because firing people is a painful process for managers there; it’s even hard to get people transferred to an incompetent team like the GMail Gulag. Google still pays people to work on Google+, for fuck’s sake. The existence of dumb or useless Googlers is not a controversial point.

The above paragraph was my initial response to Yon’s piece. After writing it on a friend’s Facebook, I was informed of the name of the lead engineer on Google+. That name? Yonatan Zunger.

Here’s an audio depiction of my consciousness after reading this and turning back to regard Yon.

*

Also, whoops! I got so distracted by that that I forgot to mention: no, Yon, you incredible lying scumbag, at no point did the memo assert anything remotely close to “female Googlers are at root not good enough to do their jobs.”

You’ve misunderstood the purpose of the memo completely. It said nothing about the fitness of any current employees; it simply asserts that the cause of a gender gap in tech representation (specifically, why there are fewer female engineers) might not be sexism. Its overt goal is to try to increase representation of women at Google in legal ways, as opposed to the suspected illegal ways the diversity program was engaging in; it was originally submitted to that program in a request for feedback. It’s nonsensical to leap from there to claiming he said (or thinks) his coworkers suck at their jobs, particularly when most of his memo is about asking whether diversity initiatives are addressing a real problem.

I need to be very clear here: not only was nearly everything you said in that document wrong

It wasn’t, c.f. numerous academic experts saying so above. Repeat, *you* are wrong, the guy you are talking down to was right. Consider the words that follow in that context. Your words.

the fact that you did that has caused significant harm to people across this company, and to the company’s entire ability to function. And being aware of that kind of consequence is also part of your job, as in fact it would be at pretty much any other job. I am no longer even at the company and I’ve had to spend half of the past day talking to people and cleaning up the mess you’ve made. I can’t even imagine how much time and emotional energy has been sunk into this, not to mention reputational harm more broadly.

The people I have seen complaining of harm’s comments on the memo itself do not appear to have read it.

As in, I discussed the memo and meta-discussion around the memo for over an hour yesterday with a good friend who was upset about it but literally hadn’t read it. They’d just read the media controversy around it. “He said women were biologically worse at programming!” That’s a really sexist comment, good thing it’s not in the memo!

Regarding others I have seen attacking it, my objection generally isn’t about the manner in which they rebutted the memo’s points; it’s about them failing utterly to identify what the memo they’re responding to says.

Whenever anyone’s upset over something of controversial merit or badness, there’s always some uncertainty over why they are upset. Their supporters say it’s because the material in question was offensive; their critics say it is because of a flaw in themselves. There is seldom a bright line to be drawn.

But consider the combination of extreme hostility and contempt for the memo’s writer, severe misrepresentation of its contents — to the extent that nearly every commentator claimed it said that women at Google were worse at engineering, including Yon, including the CEO — and the pretense to knowledge of science refuting the memo’s claims. These things paint a BLAZINGLY bright line. If this were all, I would merely believe this essay to be full of bluster and bereft of merit, but in view of the fact that Yon worked on fucking Google+ and I’m quite angry.

(I’m not fabricating this grudge. When I’ve been driving around Mountain View and someone pulls some asinine driving maneuver, I’ve imitated their thought process, in my snottiest voice: “Um, wow. EXCUSE ME! I happen to be the LEAD ENGINEER on Google Plus! Out of my way, peasants!” It’s been my canonical example of a baseless sense of self-importance for 4 years.)

Not all ideas are the same, and not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy.

No, Yon, they are not. Exempli gratia, your part of this conversation has had no legitimacy. The assertion of scientific backing seems empty and without warrant, you failed to correctly identify the conclusions you thought you were arguing against and ended up arguing for, your intent was in bad faith, your manner was as condescending as it was ill-considered, and most unforgivably, you fucking led Google+, a $600 million clusterfuck that no one likes. It is quite beyond me how you talk to anyone about how True Engineering means empathy with the customers and somehow manage to avoid physically imploding from your sheer vacuum of self-awareness. Maybe if you’d had $700 million to work with, you’d have been able to make a planet-scale product that at least two people liked.

In conclusion, watching you or indeed most Bay Areans try to talk about anything political is like watching a worm try to walk. Fuck you for writing this, fuck you for stirring up a lynch mob, fuck you for costing a better man his job, fuck you for daring to lecture him, fuck you for lying about this memo to good people I care about, and most of all, fuck Google Plus.

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