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Google, Apple Call Workers' Race & Gender Trade Secrets
theodp writes "The Mercury News reports that Google, whose stated mission is to make the world's information universally accessible, says the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released. So do Apple, Yahoo, Oracle, and Applied Materials. The five companies waged a successful 18-month FOIA battle with the Merc, convincing federal regulators who collect the data that its release would cause 'commercial harm' by potentially revealing the companies' business strategy to competitors. Law professor John Sims called the objections — the details of which the Dept. of Labor declined to share — 'absurd.' Many industry peers see the issue differently — Intel, Cisco, eBay, AMD, Sanmina, and Sun agreed to allow the DOL to provide the requested info. 'There's nothing to hide, in our view,' said a spokesman for Intel. Some observers note it's not the first time Google has declined to put a number on its vaunted diversity — in earlier Congressional testimony, Google's top HR exec dodged the question of how many African-American employees the company had."
Our numbers don't look very good. After all, didn't a Google executive pretty much tell us that if we've nothing to hide we've nothing to fear?
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
It's the H1Bs.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Google just doesn't want to be subjected to draconian and racist equal opportunity laws or quotas.
I'm pretty sure they are hiring people based on merit and technical ability, not race or color.
They probably want to pick the most qualified worker rather than the most politically correct one. If they end up with an entire workforce full of white employees, perhaps an investigation should be done as to why there are no other qualified candidates in the area.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
If I had mod points I would mod you up. Equal opportunity is flawed because it is based on a flawed assumption of equal aptitude. If you think about it just a little you'll realize how applying this at a business level instead of immediately at kindergarten level is doomed to do more harm than good.
Ha ha ha! Wait, that's not funny... Did you mean something like "In Soviet Russia, diversity tracks you!"?
Dark Reflection
More likely it'll prove this wasn't a joke.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
They probably want to pick the most inexpensive worker rather than the most politically correct one. If they end up with an entire workforce full of H1B employees, perhaps an investigation should be done as to why there are no other qualified candidates in the area.
FTFY
Watching people get excited about and defend Google gives me terrible nostalgia of Microsoft's history.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
There's a difference between "certain races are inferior" and "certain races are statistically more likely to not be qualified for certain jobs" (as a result of how education funding is related to a neighborhood's wealth, and white people tend to be richer than everyone else).
I'm not usually one to demand any particular degree of "diversity" of companies, but it is rather immediately noticeable how Apple's executives all come from the same demographics: white males between 40 and 65. You'd think there'd be at least one person from some other demographic--- it's not like this is the uniformity you see if you walk into a CS or engineering department at a university (ever seen one without a single asian?).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The States has serious issues whereby many actually do think that there is something wrong with a particular group but that if they keep changing words fast enough then they can outpace the prejudiced and keep ahead of them. Bollocks. You can see the progression with all sorts of terms - from negro to black to coloured to black to African-American and on again. (knew a black guy from Mozambique who hated how lots of people in the US called themselves African). Oriental to Asian. Cretin to Spastic to Retarded to Learning Disability. On and on, any word that some idiots have an issue with, another group takes it upon themselves to start condemning the word instead of the attitude. The correct response is to say that there's nothing fucking wrong with being black and saying someone is black is not an insult - just a fact if they are and a bizarre statement if they're not. Why should "Oriental" be an insult? Unless you think there's something wrong with being an oriental, then it's just a statement of fact. And if you change the words, then you're implicitly accepting that there is something wrong with being "oriental" and that you wish to disguise or gloss-over that fact.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I think it is much more likely that they want to just avoid a tangle with the regulatory agencies.
Google is now big enough that they will be asked "why don't you have exactly 0.03274% female black jewish mentally handicapped" employees, to reflect the population?
Hiring should be blind to race, gender, etc. - that is true equality of opportunity. The agencies don't see it that way - they play a numbers game, and it's worth a lot of effort to avoid this discussion, or at least to avoid having the discussion in public.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.