Some thoughts on the firing of James Damore from Google

As the world knows by now James Damore was fired from Google for writing a memo that questioned Google's diversity policies.

As a holder of Google stock I have a few thoughts on this.

Software engineering is a job where you cannot replace one brilliant software engineer with six adequate ones. It really is a job where the best people can lever their work over millions of computers and the whole world.

If you are Sundar Pichai (the CEO of Google) your job is to attract, hold, motivate and direct the very best software engineers - and to make sure their work does scale over the whole world.

In doing this he literally should not care whether men are better software engineers or mathematicians on average than women. Google should not interested in average. Google should be interested in the best.

I will hold Emmy Noether up as better than pretty well all men in all current mathematics and physics faculties. There may be a dozen in the world who can match her.  Probably less. If she pops along you should hire her. Even if women are less good on average at maths than men that should not matter. Emmy Noether is clearly better than anyone else you are going to hire this year.

The truth or falsity of James Damore's assertions in the memo literally do not interest me and should not interest Sundar Pichai. His memo made his job of hiring the the best harder. If the best happened to be a woman or another minority they might prefer work somewhere more welcoming.

If I were the Google CEO I would not have just fired James Damore. I would have been proud to fire him.

There is a lot of talk about Mr Damore receiving compensation from Google for his firing. For what? He broke the Google code of conduct and was fired for cause.

Yes, his feelings and the feelings of many delicate petals on the right are hurt.

But they are no more entitled to compensation for hurt feelings than anyone else.

If Sundar Pichai wastes shareholder funds compensating him I will be disappointed.

And don't think for a moment that this is a liberal line. Google is and should be a proudly elitist place for a software engineer to work. And Mr Damore was fired because he offered a phoney elitism (based on gender rather than competence).

Phoney elitists like him don't deserve to work in such a place.

Mr Damore was right on one thing. Diversity shouldn't be valued for its own sake in such a place either. But I haven't noticed a lack of elitism in Google staff I have met. They positively drip elitism.

Diversity is valued though and it seems is valued for the right reason. It gets you a better chance of recruiting the best.




John

E&P decoding - Pioneer Natural Resources edition

I think I know what this means but as per usual the internet is full of people who know far more than me. You dear readers are my 20 thousand person expert network. 

This is from the Pioneer Natural Resources conference call. I would really love people to explain it - preferably word-by-word in the comments. In particular I want to understand the drivers of the pressure changes (which matters for proppants for instance) and how the four-string casing deals with the problem.

Thanks in advance:

We've mentioned this in all the slides and such, but we did fall behind operationally on our completions in the Spraberry/Wolfcamp, in large part due to unforeseen drilling delays. What happened is the delays were really the result of unexpected changes in pressure regimes in the field.  

So what we've seen is increasing pressures in some of the shallow formations that means we have to mud up substantially to deal with that problem and then we immediately then are drilling into lower pressure depleted zones. And we were at the knife's edge of this really through all 2016. But these pressures have changed in a subtle manner such that we now find we had a higher percentage of what we refer to as train-wreck wells, where we have all kinds of problems with lost circulation and other issues because of this pressure change. 

The easiest way to remediate this is with a drilling plan takes us from a three-string casing design to a four-string casing design. So that's exactly what we've done. We solved this issue. We have addressed it and we've done so by changing the casing design, which has proven to be very successful. 

One thing it does is it does increase the well cost substantially, about $300,000 to $400,000 per well, and it does increase our time of drilling five days or so. But we're also nickel-and-diming away other costs in these wells to try to get that money back, including changing out surfactants and other things to try to reduce costs and reduce days. So we're not going to stand pat with this increase. We're going to chip away at it and reduce it. 

Cumulatively, though, what happens is because we've impacted the schedule, we've also then reduced the number of POPs we're going to be completing this year by about 30. Those essentially will move into 2018. That's 100% due to these drilling delays I mentioned, which I believe we now have mitigated. But you have to also factor in the delays not only result in the deferral of wells you put on production, but also loses production days for all the wells that get delayed that are going to be POP'd in the future, particularly later in the next year. But the point is we're now dealing with that. I think we have that squared away. I have a later slide we'll talk about more detail on that.