I haven't read the "manifesto," but I do have an engineer title, and that title has moved past using numbers. And "planet scale" and "carrier class" apply similarly to utilities.

I was going to say the writer here is correct in skipping gender differences, but after putting my phone down for a few minutes (to clean up cat vomit) I want to come back to it.

Are men and women different? Yeah, probably. But where the manifesto writer failed was not recognizing the scale and scope of those differences.

I think the scale is tiny when talking on terms as broad as gender. And because it's tiny, there's tons of overlap. It's sort of like sports: at the elite level the best man is faster than the fastest woman. But once we move beyond the outlier best of the best, everyone starts blurring together.

And the scope is important, too. The writer here talks about this in section 2. Engineering isn't comparable to winning a race. It's far broader than that and requires more diverse skills, some of which women excel at.

When I think about the people I've worked with, there are a lot of white men, but there are non-whites and women throughout my career. And thinking about those fifty or hundred engineers (and quasi-engineers) I've worked with closely enough to judge? Being bad at one's engineering job isn't unique to any single qualifier.

A man trying to claim women aren't good at his job sounds like someone trying to justify why it's ok for him to be bad at his job.

Edit: I have read the manifesto now. The writer writes from the perspective of things like microaggressions being routinely discussed and criticized at Google. I can't speak to that. If it does exist, I can imagine it being exhausting to hear. Other than being unable to comment on the actual culture at Google, I have nothing to edit above. I have my doubts that culture actually exists outside of far left and far right (as a boogeyman) internet forums.