So you think there's no such thing as employment discrimination?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Patrick Shyu, who bills himself as “Ex-Google Tech Lead” and is (at least until now) currently a Facebook Tech Lead – Patrick Shyu - Facebook | LinkedIn

Well, he went on Twitter, and started boasting about how he treated women who were being interviewed as candidates for jobs at Google. And it’s all really good stuff:

(Via Business Insider - Ex-Google Tech Lead Brags About How He Used to Trash Women's Résumés)

So when I used to conduct interviews for Google, I rejected all women on the spot and trashed their résumés in front of them.

I told them, ‘Go have some kids. Don’t worry, I’m smarter than you, I know.’ Then I gave them an NP-hard problem and went home.

He had more to say before he deleted all his Tweets:

Shyu followed up his tweets on May 22 with multiple posts attempting to explain his stance. For instance, he suggested that women shouldn’t code and should instead work as influencers or creators — careers that would lean into “their natural strength.”

“Coding is a brutal 24/7 job, mutually exclusive with motherhood,” Shyu said, saying that mothers would come back “obsolete and outdated” after maternity leave.

“No one asked for women programmers. We asked for women influencers and instead got ‘independent women’ in pants suits. Independence does not exist if you want a family. A woman should prioritize being a good mother and wife, not a coding machine. ‘Mother/Wife’ is a great job,” he tweeted.

This isn’t discrimination. It’s like women soldiers - no one wants to see a pregnant woman on the battlefield.

Do it if you want and we’ll support your choice, but … men don’t choose between family or career. Only a fool chooses career.

No one asked for women programmers. We asked for women influencers and instead got “independent women” in pants suits. Independence does not exist if you want a family.

A woman should prioritize being a good mother and wife, not a coding machine. “Mother/Wife” is a great job.

To be clear, I think women can be great programmers. But we should encourage them to stay home as much as to work. Unless your tech job supports part-time work for 3+ years, you don’t support mothers.

Most men sacrifice for family.
Women sacrifice family for career.

Women shouldn’t code … perhaps be influencers/creators instead. It’s their natural strength.

coding is a brutal 24/7 job, mutually exclusive with motherhood - after 9-months maternity leave, they come back obsolete & outdated. Elon Musk even says birth rater is falling too much.

‘misogyny’ doesn’t actually exist. It’s an excuse for incompetent women who spent too much time researching ‘misogyny’ instead of improving themselves.

So, the citation of Elon Musk’s opinion is gold, of course.

And the list of fallacies is so deep, can we come up with a list?

  • Should the coding profession demand 24/7 dedication and sacrifice of family life?
  • Why shouldn’t fathers be just as dedicated to their families as mothers are?

Some of it is incoherent. I don’t actually understand his statements about sacrifice and choosing family or career.

I wonder whether Facebook will think twice about having this guy as a “tech lead.”

Apparently, he is also involved in shady cryptocurrency stuff.

3

I’ll move this to IMHO, I see no Debate framed at all. Please let us know if you would prefer it in the Pit as it seems to be mostly a rant.

5

I’m guessing this is going to the Pit.

I don’t think you’d find even 1% of Dopers claiming there’s no employment discrimination. Maybe we’d debate on the nature or prevalence of it, but nobody denies it.

6

The 24x7 coding crap is pure garbage. Most coders are salary with all the disadvantages of being salary and little of the benefits. And that sucked. I know Engineers fall into the same trap. Companies expected crazy long hours, travel to other locations, trouble calls at 3am but still demanded you were in office for core hours. Company is 8am to 5pm but you spent 2.5 hrs cleaning up some morons mess, you still should have been here at 8am.

Women are at least equal to men as coders, any claim otherwise says you’re a retrograde business major and not a coder.

I worked in the industry for 27 years or so. A lot of management were dinosaurs.

In case it is not known, I’m a middle age white guy that recently retired from programming. My wife is a Software Engineer which basically means she is a better and more educated programmer than I.

7

I wonder if this guy is going to end up a right-wing darling, like James Damore.

8

Sounds almost like he is aiming for it.

9

Sure, in addition to the blatant misogyny on display, the subtext there is “Coders are an incredibly elite group of geniuses whose work is so massively cool and important that they’ll sacrifice anything for it, and you should consider it a great privilege to work eighteen hours a day for peanuts just to be part of this charmed circle”.

I agree with the OP, it was all disgusting but the citation of Elon Musk as an authority on anything made me not exactly LOL, but at least snort audibly.

10

The idea that you would be so out of dating on programming skills from a 9 month hiatus for maternity leave is also fairly crazy. I actually have friends who work at Facebook, parts of their technology stack is basically mid-2000s technology, and infamously so. Lots of big companies are running software stacks anywhere from 5 to 15 years old (some even older), there is a steady churn of “new shit” in software, but large enterprises rarely like to adopt the newest bleeding edge stuff every four months. There’s plenty of jobs in software supporting tried and true frameworks using tried and true programming languages, and a 9 month absence would have little impact on that.

11

Sounds like he wants to be the next red pill celebrity influencer.

As someone who has been a software engineer for 35 years, I can say he’s full of shit. The only coders I ever see that work long frantic hours are the shitty ones that sit in front of the monitor and start banging out code without actually doing a design first, then debug and rewrite and debug and rewrite and debug and rewrite for 80 hours a week until they get it working. The rest of us point and laugh as we sit for a few hours at our desk, work up a rough design, then code it and go home at 5:00 .

Of course, the shitty guys get the last laugh when management sees “wow - they’re so dedicated, they deserve a raise and promotion for working all those unpaid hours, not like you slackers who go home after 40 hours”. They’re too fucking stupid to realize they’re getting the same amount of work from each of us.

Yep. I’m pulling down 6 figures in 2022 writing C++, Perl and Python. And so are all the women I work with, including my boss.

12

You noticed that too? Did I mention how many IT managers are bad coders and glorified business majors instead? :slight_smile:

13

That explains a lot.

14

He sounds like a charming fellow with an engaging personality and excellent personal hygiene. I wish him the best in his professional and personal endeavors, and hope no one ever sells him a firearm or allows him near children.

ETA: Wait, he’s this guy?:

*Waahh! Waahh! Waahh-waahh-waahh!*

I swear, investing in cryptocurrency is nearly as good an indicator of self-aggrandizing alt-right-ish, misogynistic douchbag as posting on 4chan and worshipping Elon Musk.

Stranger

15

He is from Japan himself, through high school. There is still pretty significant cultural pressure in Japan for women to quit work after marriage.

16

Yeah, it was the money’s fault.

17

And of course the sweet irony of declaring that misogyny doesn’t exist after exquisitely demonstrating misogyny for days.

18

Yet he decided to stay here where women don’t do that and his wife still thought she was better off in Japan…

19

I’m thinking that at some point she not unreasonably decided that her metric for “better off” directly correlated with geographical distance from this guy. One of the nice things about Japan is that there’s an entire ocean between it and anybody you don’t want to see in California.

20

Exactly. When I read this my first thought was “he’s doing it wrong.”

When I started my web development company 25 years ago yes we worked 24/7. We bit off more than we could chew and had to learn as we went. By the time I was in my mid-20s, it became a 9-5 gig and has been that way ever since.

21

If anything, it seems to me that coding as a profession is much more family-friendly than most, in that you can work from anywhere, and a lot of your best “work” is going to come when you’re not even sitting in front of a computer. No particular physical exertion, either.

22

That has rarely been true in the business world until recently.