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Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo On Gender Differences (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet Inc.'s Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo blasting the web company's diversity policies, creating a firestorm across Silicon Valley. James Damore, the Google engineer who wrote the note, confirmed his dismissal in an email, saying that he had been fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes." Earlier on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent a note to employees that said portions of the memo "violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace." But he didn't say if the company was taking action against the employee. A Google representative, asked about the dismissal, referred to Pichai's memo. Damore's 10-page memorandum accused Google of silencing conservative political opinions and argued that biological differences play a role in the shortage of women in tech and leadership positions. It circulated widely inside the company and became public over the weekend, causing a furor that amplified the pressure on Google executives to take a more definitive stand. After the controversy swelled, Danielle Brown, Google's new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance, sent a statement to staff condemning Damore's views and reaffirmed the company's stance on diversity. In internal discussion boards, multiple employees said they supported firing the author, and some said they would not choose to work with him, according to postings viewed by Bloomberg News.
Here's what Google said internally, according to TechCrunch:
This has been a very difficult few days. I wanted to provide an update on the memo that was circulated over this past week.
First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”
The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent. So to be clear again, many points raised in the memo — such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all — are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics — we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions.
The past few days have been very difficult for many at the company, and we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree — while doing so in line with our Code of Conduct. I’d encourage each of you to make an effort over the coming days to reach out to those who might have different perspectives from your own. I will be doing the same.
I have been on work related travel in Africa and Europe the past couple of weeks and had just started my family vacation here this week. I have decided to return tomorrow as clearly there’s a lot more to discuss as a group — including how we create a more inclusive environment for all.
So please join me, along with members of the leadership team at a town hall on Thursday. Check your calendar soon for details.
That seems harsh. Does this prove the part of his post about being scared to disagree?
"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom." --Justice Edward Terry Sanford
I'll bet anything the guy got a solid severance package though.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
64-bit ARM servers, less than 10. This one--2500.
After the controversy swelled, Danielle Brown, Google's new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance, sent a statement to staff condemning Damore's views and reaffirmed the company's stance on diversity. In internal discussion boards, multiple employees said they supported firing the author, and some said they would not choose to work with him, according to postings viewed by Bloomberg News.
Looks like Google decided to help Damore make his case by reinforcing their bias against differing opinion. Science also supports (mirror) his conclusions.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Obey the party line or be fired and banned from the industry.
For such an "inclusive" and "tolerant" company, they sure are quite Soviet in their treatment of dissent.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Company makes "A" company policy. Company is under legal threats for not being sufficiently "A". Employee posts rant against "A" and gets fired. Surprise?
P.S. Also let's try a thought experiment: a medium level wall street banker calls on his employer to be "less hostile on socialism". How would that go?
I don't agree with the pamphlet but I take it diversity is fine as long as you follow the arbitrary rules (aka code of coduct) that are set and don't argue anything that might actually lead to a real discussion.
I feel so sig.
With so many other employees refusing to work with him, he effectively poisoned his own well.
But hey, I'm sure some conservative outfit will employ him, right?
Just like they take in all the unwanted children produced due to making abortion hard to access, and such. /s
"At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint)."
And to prove that their fears are well founded, Google will simply fire one of them. Got a minority conservative viewpoint? Don't you dare to express your view or suffer the consequences.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
Google specifically flagged the fact that the fired employee had said women are "neurotic" and show "a lower stress tolerance" (and criticized women for being "agreeable" rather than "assertive").
An interesting question for discussion might be whether we agree or disagree with what the fired employee said. That is, do you think women are "neurotic" and show "a lower stress tolerance" (and that their careers suffer because women are "agreeable" rather than "assertive").
They just proved Damore's point about conformity at the company. What good is gender diversity if everybody is forced into goodthink?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
If he takes them to court and can prove that his statements are scientifically backed at the statistical scale, they they aren't stereotypes and it would be wrongful termination right? I would LOVE to see that happen. So tired of the like that says everyone is genetically the same. It's literally shouting at proof to try and scare it into falsehood.
"There is no gawd but profit and the google is his prophet."
I hope I'm not offending anyone, but I really don't know how touchy certain people might get about that sort of not-quite-a-joke.
The earlier motto of "Don't be evil" has been a joke for a long time now. However, I still haven't made up my mind about the relevance of "All your attention are belong to us", which actually arose out of a discussion with a former-coworker now at the google. Right before he ghosted me for some reason.
Does anyone else feel like the google is withdrawing into its own special universe?
Anyway, I posted various other thoughts about the topic in the earlier discussion a few days ago. Not much reaction, including mod points. Hmm... Considering how long its been since I saw a mod point, maybe that power (of moderating) has been grandfathered in some weird way?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
By kicking Damore out of G, they have bolstered his hypothesis that other ideas are absolutely not welcome. Sundar Pichai should have clarified on what points is the author wrong, and how. Given that the author's post had got out of company and is circulating in WWW, people of the world should know and get clear on what G's ideologies are, rather than just writing "He violated the code of conduct". IMO, if these people feel women are purposefully kept out, the idea is to break the social norm by having reforms where such discouraging (towards women) behaviour should be reduced. Also, the example of women (anonymous, but names available on request) in this field should be provided. But when it comes to rewards and jobs, there should be only meritocracy. Those who bring value to the table should be allowed to join rather than focussing on genders and sexes. It was exactly the issue with Damore's essay too. He was trying to focus on sexes and their characteristics while he should have enforced meritocracy and secularism in his group. That would have been a better example. Also, I don't believe in the fact that X% of population MUST be female to prove that they are as good. They may be as good, but less interested, yes? Or could it be that they are actually bullied? or could it be that the field looks too complicated to them to scare them?
Killing the messenger of a politically correct and quite honestly really moronic memo was not the right move.
:p
He did not make the memo public -- so even if he wrote it -- it was not him that "damaged" Google... Google obviously has it's own issues and feels that firing the employee rather than dealing with issues directly would be the best PR move... He should not be fired over his memo -- I would however not put him up for promotion since he would have a high bar to prove that he would be able to work with all others without bias. If he was able to do his current job, and do it well (meritocracy)... they should have just used the memo as a discussion point and say although they thoroughly disavowed the comments in regards to gender equality.
Then just assign him to always work for a woman... who was proven to be better than him
Does it make it any better that Google said this in their internal statement:
There are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent. So to be clear again, many points raised in the memo — such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all — are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics — we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions.
You're free to say anything you want, unless we don't like it.
Why not just anonymously post somewhere without doxing yourself?
When I see things like:
"At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent. "
I realize google is interested in diversity, just not any that make people think...
If it blew up this big and became known as the "anti-diversity memo" he probably should have asked a few of his female coworkers to proof read it before hitting send.
Agreed. At least they didn't drag this out by having a 'committee' perform an investigation. Sorry Eric Holder, nothing to see here. The guy got canned, and deservedly so. Pro tip: If your CEO (Sundar Pichai) happens to be from a country and/or ethnicity where the people have been persecuted based on their race (aka genetics)....probably not a Harvard PhD caliber idea to recycle that tired line of argument in your own personal gender grievances on aforementioned CEO's corporate social network. Also don't interrupt your CEO's family vacation. Side Note: Similar to that woman who was canned by Tesla for mouthing off, how is it that this guy passes for a "Senior Engineer"? His major LinkedIn endorsements are LaTex and MatLab.
They ask for open internal discussion and when they get it they fire people. He expressed his views after being invited to do so privately within the company. TLDR: men and women are different. And that Google company should not be extreme right or left on any issue.
The correct thing to do would have been to rationally disagree. All he did was express his thoughts.There was no proof he took any action of discrimination. He was in fact pointing out discrimination he sees his company doing and they turn around and prove him right.
Google is all about image. The communists in China should hire Google to run their country for them. I have a feeling they fired him and gave him a big paycheck to leave quietly; not to sue them or talk publicly.
It must be hard being a RWNJ when reality keeps slapping you with its liberal bias.
The man is a biologist odds are you aren't. Care to wager who has a better handle on reality's bias ?
By kicking Damore out of G, they have bolstered his hypothesis that other ideas are absolutely not welcome.
I'm certain that we haven't heard the last of this dude's persecution complex.
Sundar Pichai should have clarified on what points is the author wrong, and how. Given that the author's post had got out of company and is circulating in WWW, people of the world should know and get clear on what G's ideologies are, rather than just writing "He violated the code of conduct".
This makes no sense to me.
First off, Sundar Pichai was on holiday. Nobody should be expected to write a press release while on holiday. And nor did he; he wrote an internal memo which leaked. The "people of the world" as a whole were clearly not the intended audience, merely that subset who are already supposed to be aware of what the Code of Conduct says.
But when it comes to rewards and jobs, there should be only meritocracy.
Of course. Many younger programmers don't really understand what constitutes "merit" in this field, though. Engineering is the craft of solving human problems through the intelligent and appropriate application of science and technology. If you can't deal with the "human" part, this isn't the business for you.
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Consider yourself informed.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I mean, firing people over an _opinion_, formulated without aggression and without attacking anyone - that's harsh. I'd be scared shitless in such an environment that I might accidentally say something that bothers the SJWs and be fired for my troubles. And it's a great demo how, once again, "diversity" means "you'll agree with me or I'll silence you."
An employer who acts like this is not worth working for.
If people refused to work with him because of his moronic views, then the same people could potentially not work with others because of other bias. In other words, when someone will not work with someone else regardless of views, it is their problem and should be let go. If the fired employee would not work with others -- he should be fired. He should not be fired because of his views -- no matter how moronic they are. As an individual employee (not representing Google and the statement was not made externally and attributed to "google employee"), he should be judged on his work -- not on his views.
I am not conservative , right winged. I am left winged (a look at my post history for the last 10 years should show that) and for TRUE equality of opportunity, something we did not have until recently with women and skin color minorities being suppressed consciously or unconsciously by the work environment, HR, and the various team leaders. But i am for a good discourse because women and men are different on how they handle situation, how they view social activities, and how they will have bias. This naturally impact on how they will for example chose a job, and while part of it is socially learned, part of it is inherent to sex (I avoid gender due to the pitfall of TG). And that is where I break peace with many of my friends on the left side. I am against equality of outcome. Because you then inherently 1) spit of all sex science and spit on the difference between women and men 2) add inefficiencies by having less good candidate over take better candidate to match an outcome "more women , more minorities". Naturally the converse is that since society move slowly, minorities and women would have been screwed for longer had we not have the equality of outcome. That may be true too. But that still does not make it right or better than equality of opportunity. But where it goes to the "wrong terribly wrong" deep end, is when you get fired for having this opinion like this seem to be in this case. Granted I did not read the full memo, but what I overflew seem to be quite clear : google bent over and fired him to avoid looking "sexist". And thus died any discourse right or left at google.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
this is getting close to a neurotic behavior... guess she proved the point this guy made.
It does not matter.
If you are not the boss starting a high profile political shitfight in your workplace that gets the attention of the press is a bad move no matter what your politics are.
That word "research" gets a serious workout on this site despite it being almost always misapplied - how is looking up wikipedia "research"? So he cited something, maybe the journalist at Gizmodo thought it wasn't authoritative? Maybe they didn't dig down to where it came from etc before deadline. I've been told it's better to leave a quote out instead of finding you've accidentally quoted something originally from the Onion. Besides - the real story (as far as the journalist would see it IMHO) is that someone started a political shitfight at google. The details and justifications are not that difficult for those interested to find out this time since it's all online.
"Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm a mid-level manager at Google, having worked my way up from a new-hire engineer. I'm a white male and I think the guy made some valid points. However, I also 100% fully support the firing, and I think any large company in the United States would punish this guy at least to some degree. I know this is an extremely unpopular opinion on Slashdot, but here's why:
This memo is a quintessential example of creating a hostile work environment for women, which is flat-out illegal. Here are some relevant quotes:
- "Women, on average, have more neuroticism"
- We don't see women in leadership positions because "these positions often require long, stressful hours"
- "myths like social constructionism and the gender wage gap"
- "Stereotypes are much more accurate and responsive to new information than the training suggests"
- "Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employees sacrifice, we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power."
- "Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence."
He is taking a group of people that consistently feels unwelcome in tech, and he's making them feel even more unwelcome. He insults them ("neurotic" and spenders of men's hard earned money), he trivializes an extremely sensitive issue (gender wage gap is factually "a myth", women don't lead primarily because they don't work hard), and he encourages others to follow his example (stereotypes are actually accurate, and the company is wrong to discourage discussing the pros and cons of gender-based stereotyping). Hearing this from co-workers is legitimately upsetting for women, and the author explicitly says his primary goal is to encourage more of it.
Freedom of speech is a good thing in private life, but it simply doesn't apply to what you say at work in large companies. Some topics are just incredibly toxic and divisive, and as an employee of a large company, you have a responsibility to NOT be toxic and divisive. Imagine for example someone who writes a public 10-page article about how team X is complete shit and the people on the team are on average lazy and self-entitled. Whether that's true or not, it's still an incredibly inappropriate way to deal with the issue. This is the same thing. Just ask yourself: how many women do you think want to work with this guy going forward? And that doesn't even getting into the political stuff he also goes into. It's not okay for an employee at a big company to deliberately create these kinds of rifts, and if someone manages to do so, then yes they should be fired.
I absolutely agree with this guy that Google has a strong left-leaning bias and there was lots of similarly toxic stuff being said after the presidential elections; it was bad enough that leadership had to even publicly ask for people to stop it. I'd like to believe that if there was one person so at the heart of the toxicity then as this guy is now, then that person would also have been fired. I also agree that Google errs on the side of over-compensation when it comes to gender bias, and criticizing these programs is just fine. The catch is any criticism has to be made in a way that does not make a large swath of employees feel unwelcome. And if that makes it impossible to start your grass roots political campaign, well remember that large companies aren't democracies...
Dumping humans who spend their time causing problems rather than solving them is one way to fix things. We've all had colleagues like that.
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I'm certain that we haven't heard the last of this dude's persecution complex.
By any chance, are you meaning that the guy's ideas are less founded than the VP of XYZ and Sundar's Ideas, without listening to them in completion? So if someone takes up a charged issue for debate, and he's in minority, instead of listening and then convincing him why he's wrong, should we sharpen our pitch forks and start the witch hunting game? And we expect that the thought of the world would change by this action (also called threatening someone)?
This makes no sense to me.
First off, Sundar Pichai was on holiday. Nobody should be expected to write a press release while on holiday. And nor did he; he wrote an internal memo which leaked. The "people of the world" as a whole were clearly not the intended audience, merely that subset who are already supposed to be aware of what the Code of Conduct says.
He's a CEO of the company and being paid millions, as compensation. Do you know why we call it compensation? Because of such discomforts borne by the people. When you are the CEO of a company, you are never on leave and regular privileges do not apply. You signed on the dotted line that you'd be 24x365 present for the company. If people feel that breaking their holiday is a non-negotiable thing for them, they are free to not take the responsibility of CEO. After all, it's a free world!
But when it comes to rewards and jobs, there should be only meritocracy.
Of course. Many younger programmers don't really understand what constitutes "merit" in this field, though. Engineering is the craft of solving human problems through the intelligent and appropriate application of science and technology. If you can't deal with the "human" part, this isn't the business for you.
And if you don't promote merit and don't let people choose freely of what they do, then it's autocratic and there will not be any new ideas. Also, you are not dealing with the "human" part of thinking out of the box. Why do you want everyone to think the same? Why not make them the better them instead!
In both cases, people have come up with theories contradicted by science, and are making life and death decisions based on those discredited theories. Except the SJWs wield a lot more political power than anti-vaxxers.
How does one being a woman or an alien or Chinese help the computer science? Being meritorious and creative does. It's this simple. Just because some people can shout loud and don't have clarity of vision, doesn't mean we'd never have renaissance!
Dude, if she reads slashdot, she'll recognize herself. Where should I send the flowers?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Kind of disappointing to see them fold so quickly over something so minor, but then, as a soon to no longer be Youtube Red subscriber (just for the commercials, not any of their bland original nonsense), I'm not surprised by any of this.
I subscribe to a lot of different channels from gaming to science to entertainment and politics and almost every single content producer has complained about the new algorithms that have forced most of them to either greatly cut back (it becomes just a hobby for them) or they have to ramp up to lower quality daily videos (which I can't and don't really desire to keep up with). And many of the people I'm watching are apologizing and explaining why they've been force to do it. I feel bad for them. But it's also destroyed what I once loved.
And now they're talking about censoring anything controversial. Ok, well not censoring, but making it so you can't like, share, monetize and it won't show up in recommendations, meaning yeah, censor. Like most normal people, I like controversial. It's fun. Google execs are not (God that place has to suck to work).
Youtube has been so much more valuable to me than Netflix ever was, but it's gone off a cliff in the past year due to poor management decisions. It's such a shame, there really isn't a viable alternative.
It's more the CEO (and other execs) who need to be fired, not this poor sap.
"Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
Had they shown him the psychology journals and that the studies show otherwise, he'd have stood corrected. Probably with a warning to write substance backed claim, he'd have a better depth. What did that guy learn? What message was passed to the world and other employees?
This guy had some issues and instead of maybe discussing them in a discreet manner instead tries to blow it up into this huge issue. Much of what he wrote is just opinionated rant. I tried to find some damning accusations against Google or some overwhelming conclusion in his writing but there aren't any.
A company like Google that employs tens of thousands of people has a lot of experience in dealing with people. Google was absolutely right to fire him for nothing else than for creating a huge disruption to the company because of his BS.
By any chance, are you meaning that the guy's ideas are less founded than the VP of XYZ and Sundar's Ideas, without listening to them in completion?
I'm sure that Sundar read the memo and skimmed some of the ensuing discussion (including this guy's responses) on the internal G+ instance. And as the CEO of one of the biggest organisations in the tech industry, I'm sure that Sundar has it all before, expressed in less inept ways. I don't work anywhere near there, and I've heard it all before.
But all this is completely beside point. For the several hundredth time, this guy was not fired for his ideas. He was fired for his conduct.
Everyone inside Google knows where the Code of Conduct is and what it contains. He pointed to the relevant sections. This is more than enough.
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Had they shown him the psychology journals and that the studies show otherwise, he'd have stood corrected. Probably with a warning to write substance backed claim, he'd have a better depth.
Exactly. If they had shown the evidence that women aren't neurotic (hint: they aren't), then the whole thing would have calmed down. Firing people just adds anxiety, and now people are going to wonder, "am I neurotic but no one dares to tell me because I'll get fired?"
Supporting free speech is the best option.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And because of his conservative teachings - he had what I and others would consider moronically backwards viewpoints with respect to women's place in society. Despite these viewpoints, he was a diligent worker and did not allow his personal feelings to interfere with working with women to get the job done. His personal viewpoints are known because he is not shy about telling people his personal opinions...
Because of his viewpoints, others would refuse to work with him... should he be fired because others let their personal feelings get in the way of their duty to the company to get past personal disagreements -- and get the work done? I would say -- no. His personal viewpoints, no matter how moronic I consider them are not a reason to fire him. If others have a problem working with him because they don't like his personal viewpoints -- they should be fired for letting their personal feelings get in the way of their duty to the company and to get things done.
I have worked with and for people I personally despise, but I have never let it get in the way of actually getting the work done.
A perfect example of why the current generation is weak -- they cannot tolerate anything with respect to differing opinions (as long as that is all it is opinions). The newer generation (left and right) are made up of too many snowflakes.
Make no mistake, this is exactly what happened in all communist dictatorships such as the countries in Eastern Europe. You spoke against the official ideology, you were fired and basically ruined for life. Frankly, they were actually able to concoct better-looking "reasons" for punishing you that this Google statement shows. No problem, though, they will learn in time, as they are only beginning the brave new society. I almost can't believe that not-so-long ago, the US was known as the land of the free, and that freedom of speech was paramount. My people fought against the communist madness (I'm in Eastern Europe), and the US standards of freedom were always the thing to look up to as an ideal. What a shame!
My assumption is that this guy is a PhD, and from Harvard, and working in G. He has sufficient brilliance to understand where the line is drawn. Instead of discussing his train of thought, and showing him "WHY" along with "WHERE" he was wrong, he'd have understood.
Code of conduct is written by people- and it can have issues. Let's not hurry up saying that the rule is cast in stone and will never change. May be there's an issue, may be not. But when a person (probably a thinking person) spent 3400 words' worth of time penning the article, he might have spent some time thinking.
If sexism is the thought that needs to be eradicated, it must be shown where is the issue in that, again and again, whether it's hundred or thousand times, immaterial.
Firing the person has done what, you have seen that. The whole situation turned lose-lose. It was the worst resolution ever.
Also, why should there be a number, like X% women (or put any other name of group, like Chinese, foreign students, aliens, blacks / browns etc) must be in this org?
What the people want is a fair world towards everyone. For that, the rules and discipline should be inculcated, rather than fixing a number. Let the number be flexible, as in a free market. Those who feel good about the cause will come and join. This will show the real picture of how many women are interested in say, literature vs Computer Science vs say, just being home makers? Ideally, this should be the case. Numbers are constructs which force people without reason.
I don't care if most people here on Slashdot will hate me for this, but regardless of his personal views, he took a decision to share and spread an opinion that goes against company policy. It's worse than accidentaly sharing porn "to all" because it cements his ideological position in public perception directly against a stance that Google adopted as a whole. In fact, it undermines a whole ton of effort, money and time the company has spent over recent years.
When that message got leaked it directly affected the company's image, and action had to be taken.
It'd be far worse for Google not to do anything about it because that would be interpreted as Google sharing the message, which had too many assumptions, some very few valid criticisms, and sugarcoating of quite frankly some very nasty prejudice and sexism.
The entire essay poses as a misappropriation of supposedly scientific reasoning, statistics and whatnot to support an anti-diversity position, and if you summarize the whole thing, there's content there that would be the equivalent of modern day Mengele and bogus science to justify the superiority of the Aryan race, only as a crusade against diversity efforts. It is entirely presumptuous, it assumes that just because some things are the way they are we should not try to change it, and that he feels violated in his rights because people are striving for more equal rights inside the company.
He basically sounds like a well mannered slaver trying to explain why he thinks slavery is right. It is by no coincidence that he uses some of the exact same lines of defense. We are biologically different. Such and such class of people seek different things. We're not getting any payoff for forward thinking actions. Lets not focus on this particular issue, but rather try to solve more generalistic things.
So yeah, while I really don't mind Google employing every sort of person there independent of political leaning, religion, gender, skin color and whatnot, when one person decides to share their personal views with the entire company and then the world, you are obviously going to be judged for it both inside and outside the company. This isn't new or anything, it's a problem people have with knowing what to share, when and how.
And if it reaches a point where it's affecting parts of the company that they've no doubt spend a metric ton of money and time, you can expect to be fired for it, no matter what the subject is.
If he's a reasonable enough person, he'll find another job, end of story.
Are you really so naive to think that - are you on your Dad's account or something or did we just get you before the first coffee of the day?
It's not about any *ism. It's about being critical of the company wide employment policy and ultimately the CEO himself. Any correspondence with feminist or any other dogma is co-incidental.
Pick a very public fight with management on an emotive issue, get it into the press and shit happens. Of course he got fired. He was demonstrating a lack of loyalty in a very public way and the issue itself doesn't matter.
How relevant is feminism in the millenial "bro" locker room environment of Google anyway? It's just a bullet point in the hiring policy to stop the place looking like a juvenile sausagefest to the outside world.
Supporting free speech is the best option.
+1
Also, people should be allowed to think, but they should be guided to corroborate their thoughts with evidences and facts. When the issues are emotional, facts become best guides. They may hurt for a moment, but eventually, you come to terms with the truth. In this poor guy's case, if he was wrong, probably, he'd take it to heart and will not improve much, thus the egalitarian world idea was defeated for this and many such individuals.
When SJH brigades first began to push the "Code of Conduct" requirement, most people suspected the purpose was to silence dissent and punish heretics. Now Google has very publicly demonstrated those suspicions were correct.
If you can't deal with the "human" part, this isn't the business for you.
Dealing with the "human" part also means dealing with the hard fact that differences between men and women exist and solution which might be most effective for men might be less effective for women and vice-versa.
It is harmfull at Google to express views that are different from what some people think. So there are illegal opinions. (don't confuse opinions with actions, BTW, those can be illegal)
This is a very dangerous situation, as freedom of speech is most important for those who think differently. (Again, speech, not action)
We also see one of the big problem about the current pseudo left scene. They don't seem to oppose the opinion, some haven't even read that document, or Googles response to it, but they only seem to want to shit storm that person.
We need to tolerate differing opinions, ideally even temporarily suspending our believe in our own opinions to be able to find out if the other opinion is any good. If it's bad, you can use logic to argue against it, if it has some good aspects, you can take those for your own, then more refined, opinion.
How does one being a woman or an alien or Chinese help the computer science? Being meritorious and creative does. It's this simple.
How many products have you seen that purport to solve your problems, but are uselessfor some large segments of the population?
We all know of products that don't work if you're left-handed, or have a strong Scottish accent, or some other thing created by a homogenous group of designers making unconscious assumptions.
Hell, the F-35 helmet is designed to disproportionately kill women when ejecting. Nobody thought that was a good idea. Just... nobody thought.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
At some point, enough is enough.
I get Sundars arguments and points, but this move is very wrong imho. Instead of writing a text debunking this guys conclusions and maybe disciplining him for releasing memos not related to his work and causing PR trouble he fires him. This is a very wrong signal IMHO and will cause backlash in the long term. Google as a company could've stomached an uncomfortable debate and lead the way into the next step in the gender debate and equality for women. Instead Googles C-level chose the safe path. That's a shame and not helpful.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
With respect (I'm sure you are good at something) the title of it alone is asking for a fight with the CEO, let alone what follows (eg. accusations about management being blind to things etc). In addition, the undergraduate fumbling with psychology included is frankly embarassing even to someone who didn't study the topic formally like myself. Take a look again considering it from the point of view of Google's management and I'm sure you'll work that out.
Free speech in the workplace, especially an American corporate workplace, shouldn't be expected unless you are prepared to work for free (or get kicked out the door).
While it would be nice if such a thing would be tolerated and other workplaces would tolerate it, the "we own you" attitude is very strong in corporate America. A CEO can talk like that, but down the ladder it's seen as far too much biting of the hand that feeds you.
Even if he's 100% correct (not my opinion, it looks like a pile of emotive overly political whiny shit, but let's say it is 100% correct under that) it is a bit confronting and a one-way ticket out of the building unless done outside and preferably anonymously.
The headline starts out already making a value judgement. "Divisive" is subjective and has no fixed definition. This is particularly true when the topics cover social, cultural, and political/ideological issues and viewpoints.
Hell, anything anyone has different opinions on is "divisive". What is "divisive" and to what degree varies greatly and depends largely these days on who says it, and any of these things could change completely tomorrow possibly based only something 'trending' on FB, or a twat someone posted on Twitter (yes, I'm aware).
So, now voicing an opinion that does not comport with current Progressive groupthink now causes loss of employment and destruction of a career? Wow, how very tolerant and inclusive of diverse ideas and cultures! If you cannot at least find common ground with your fellow countrymen, how will you be inclusive to people from totally foreign cultures who don't at all share any of our values, opinions, etc, including your own?
Starting to feel very 1937-Germany-ish these days! We even have snowflakes attempting to "LARP" as 'brown-shirts', all dressed up as 'antifa' (lol!). (You can almost get a faint whiff of Zyklon-B near this bunch if you're downwind!)
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
A good way to sum up the essay is that the author set up a social minefield and played hopscotch making sure he hit every one of the mines.
He's even had a dig at evangelicals just as an analogy - so much for "stop alienating conservatives".
Of course he was going to get fired as soon as this angry "I'm the victim" bro-screed came to the CEO's attention.
Someone at Gizmodo should be shot or sued for editing the memo, "Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber," by removing the references—"hyperlinks," as they call them. The hyperlinks are to many scholarly journal pieces and otherwise respectable publications. Without the references to back up the author's claims, he just looks like a boob to most folks.
Here is a link to a PDF that contains all the hyperlinks to references and also two missing figures left out from the Gizmodo version.
https://assets.documentcloud.o...
Hell, the F-35 helmet is designed to disproportionately kill women when ejecting. Nobody thought that was a good idea. Just... nobody thought.
How many female combat pilots are there in the USAF? If the answer is "none", then designing a helmet that would better protect women seems not just superfluous on the surface, but may lead to impaired operation for men. Head size differences and neck strength may result in compromised solutions for men. Is that sexist?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I am against equality of outcome.
Outcome is a good indicator for inequality of opportunity. If the employment had 40/60 split in either direction, nobody would care. IIRC the split is about 20/80, which indicates that there is some serious cause behind it. That is unlikely to be need for absolute the smartest people possible (there is no such need), nether is need for physical strength, nor is testosterone helping in any way. It is most likely social reasons, and most more than a few.
google bent over and fired him to avoid looking "sexist"
Perhaps google did exactly what you were asking for — equality of opportunity. The justification letter seems to indicate, that google sees the manifesto as attacking opportunities of whole category of its present and future employees.
I don't know the answer to your question, but by concentrating on the USAF you have ignored the two other US military branches and ten other countries that the JOINT Strike Fighter is supposed to be designed for.
Do you work for Lockheed Martin? You seem qualified.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I've mostly moved away from Google products because of their privacy eroding stance but this crosses a line that is going to be very difficult to uncross. I refuse to support a company that promotes sexism in the name of "equality".
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
We all know of products that don't work if you're left-handed, or have a strong Scottish accent, or some other thing created by a homogenous group of designers making unconscious assumptions.
Let us take any group. If there is a value added by including that group, I agree, include them. But from where does the number X% come from? Where does the code of conduct come from? In India, the scene is- Hindus and Muslims are uncomfortable talking (even good) about each others' religions. Men and women, likewise, feel uncomfortable discussing their differences or deficiencies. Why should they, when they are anyways going to be penalised. Management should either ask everyone to not raise the sex related topic, or let everyone discuss it freely. "We are progressive, but we act in haste" is a bad logic to work on.
When there's a need to be filled, there are SME (subject matter experts) who know what customisation would be needed in current design to suit the other party. For example, by just hiring women developers, or hiring 50% women, one can not make products which are women oriented. A woman can partly be true about herself, but she can not know what exactly goes where.
Google misfired on this one. They wanted to create an open world where women, if they will, would get into CS without any oppression too. What they created was a secluded world where women are the holy cows and by questioning (which is fundamental to democracy) one would become a villain.
I'm in an at will state, so I'm not going to comment on whether his firing was proper in California, but as a small business owner, I would have let him go. However, he wasn't let go because he's a jerk. He was fired for the liability. There was a stretch this year where it seemed like each week the WSJ would have something about the male-dominant culture in Silicon Valley and how so many of these companies have sexist, hostile work environments. I'm just imagining this guy being Exhibit A for a forthcoming class action lawsuit against Google. Sure, it's not Uber, but seriously? Who was EVER going to leave this guy in a position to evaluate, review, or interact with any female employees? Maybe he'll sue, and maybe he'll have a case, but can you imagine the expense of a class action suit with this guy as Exhibit A?
Make love, not reality television.
The correlation need to be proven job by job , as in many case, it is not the case. There are many job where there will be inequality of outcome because simply some gender are not interrested into the job, even with fully equal opportunity. The basic example given are usually hauling garbage, army job (even if you eliminated the inherent sexism, there is no 50/50 of women/men wanting to go into the army), and various job like nurse or teacher. There is *some* inherent sexism, but that does not explain 100% why in some job you have a 80/20 toward one gender or the other. What do explain it is that some gender are more inherentely attracted toward one type of job than the other. Now you could argue that this is due to society and young mind get warped and set in a specific role at some age, but that still leave there is a reason women are seen as more social oriented and men are item oriented. In fact in some job, like teacher : Worldwide there is 64% teacher which are female, and in the US it is even around 85%. Shall we enforce an equality of outcome to have 50%/50% male teachers ? I am personally against it, we should have an equality of opportunity , do not put additional obstacle agaisnt male teacher, but we should not enforce it. But you certainly seem for enforcing having more male teacher, no matter the consequences, and you automatically suspect sexism.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Where I live it is sometimes the opposite of this. During our last military confronation, people were fired for writing facebook statuses against the war. There are companies whose policy is not to hire people who skipped conscription, and in general "leftist" is mostly equated with tratior. Sure, there are few companies that are more left leaning and act the opposite, but to me it feels the same. Everybody knows that without a workplace you will starve, thus they decide to threaten you with hunger in order to make you comply.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
So after wasting a portion of my life reading his comments....
Who cares? So some over intelligent literalist has a contrarian view. Fine. Lock him in an office and pay him for his code.
There's three real problems here:
1. The guy likes to take intellectual short cuts through complex issues.
2. Some people at Google have very thin skin and are raising a huge stink.
3. Google fired him. Dumb move.
So while the morons on the left are raging the morons on the right have a martyr.
So what does it mean?
Some insurance company will pay for the settlement, Mr. Damore will become the moron of the moment in conservative circles, and we are all entertained.
Are we not entertained?
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
I would imagine after seeing this she's your ex-girlfriend.
I am against equality of outcome.
Outcome is a good indicator for inequality of opportunity. If the employment had 40/60 split in either direction, nobody would care. IIRC the split is about 20/80, which indicates that there is some serious cause behind it. That is unlikely to be need for absolute the smartest people possible (there is no such need), nether is need for physical strength, nor is testosterone helping in any way. It is most likely social reasons, and most more than a few.
google bent over and fired him to avoid looking "sexist"
Perhaps google did exactly what you were asking for — equality of opportunity. The justification letter seems to indicate, that google sees the manifesto as attacking opportunities of whole category of its present and future employees.
One of the difficulties is that we don't actually know the real differences between men and women, or as a book "Brain Sex" put it, the difference between "male" brains and "female" brains, or rather, a continuum of differences in traits between "male" pattern and "female" pattern, and that those different brains can appear in women or men.
Then the next issue is cultural values, and cultural values have gone through major stages, largely speaking, pre-modern to modern to post-modern to post-post-modern, and this is why feminism itself has so many variations, why the left has so many variations, and why the right has so many variations.
So anybody who wants to write a manifesto would have to bear in mind that, whilst the issue itself is an open question, whatever they write in their manifesto is going to be read and interpreted by a dozen different viewpoints/values.
And one of those viewpoints/values is that we should all keep conforming to a cultural standard which says that any mention of differences between men and women is just a patriarchal move, akin to pure racism, and as with recent history, where people try to justify oppression by alluding to biological differences. Likewise, take, say, a book by a famous feminist, which argues that nobody in the West should mention FGM in African cultures because doing so is just a patriarchal and imperialistic move.
So, along comes some dude who thinks he just needs to "write some sense" not realising the utterly incompatible VARIETY of views out there, and the impossibility of keeping everyone happy or on the same page.
And then some CEO who has to make the company look good comes in and wonders why he is now having to deal with the cultural wars -- a topic he or she is likely woefully incapable of making any sense of -- and so they say, right, we will fire whomever caused us this problem.
But if you are an individual who is having to live and work and just kinda get on with your family and friends, a simple rule is, men are stupid and women are crazy, in that, if a man started having a woman's thoughts, he'd think he'd turned crazy, but if a woman started having a man's thoughts, she'd think she'd turned stupid -- the difference is that some brains are more interconnected and some less so -- and maybe just maybe that means different people are better suited to different jobs or that they are suited to doing the same job in different ways -- there is something called the Athena principle which says that in the modern world, women make far better managers because they can handle more connection and complexity, whilst men are better at focussed narrow goals. But "men" and "women" in the sense of, people whose brains are patterned more one way or the other, not actual "man" or "woman" by genitalia.
As a man I don't actually like most men, and prefer working for women. Yet I personally intuit from experience, as far as I can tell, that men and women are quite different. Intrinsically equal as human beings of value, but functionally different.
There are also books out there which discuss the myriad ways that women put men at a disadvantage.
For Difference of Opinion. How utterly pathetic Google...
"Supporting free speech is the best option"
For whom? Not for Google. Nor for virtually any other employer. That's why job contracts have all sorts of limits on how freely you can speak, ranging from "don't embarrass us in public" through to "don't tell our competitors our secrets".
My assumption is that this guy ... has sufficient brilliance to understand where the line is drawn
Demonstrably not the case. He stepped over the line which, had he been as brilliant as you describe, he really ought to have seen. So he was fired for demonstrable lack of brilliance. The meritocracy in action.
Thank you. I am not a liberal, though some conservatives would call me a "RINO" due to some positions I hold on social issues (Eff them, but that's another conversation). I think you hit the nail on the head, and many of my peers would agree, but can't speak out freely on the topic.
Just another day in Paradise
Well ... seems google is now at that point where they are ripe for takeover.. we have all seen it in the tech industry.. what happened to yahoo? What about Lucent Technologies and HP? the fact is it costs you $75 to get a business license and no one in this day and age can say the world is closed to them because of white privileged .. case in point that guy in Vietnam who wrote those android games and became a multimillionaire then shut it all down because he was paranoid to have so much money. Do you think that guy had more or do you think a minority/female in the USA had more access to do what he did? The guy was wrong and Google is wronger.. the developers aren't white men today they are chinese people who pound out these apps and write other code and develop hardware and make that hardware... JayZ might make headphones that cost $500 and a few pay website I will never visit.. but Chinese people are hammering out crap faster than you can pay that 99cents for it.. The truth is what it is and the reason this is an issue is that every person in this world has their own perspective and that perspective obscures what true reality is.. There are a billion black people in Africa there are a billion other people in india and pakistan and china and south america and so on... but what is the true reality here.. .. true reality is if you have the ability you can be that guy from vietnam.. or you can go much farther in this world... no one is holding you back.. but when you look around and see horrific outcomes like Yahoo and HP.. and then you say to yourself where are these minority female companies that were started with a $75 business license that are so dam easy to get.. a kid gets them for a lemonade stand... where are these minority powerhouse companies?... and then you need to step back once again and open google play and go through the app store and findout who is making what and seek reality...... Google has been taken over by social justice warriors.. they are now ripe to be replaced by the same move that they did to yahoo and bing when those companies were in their infancy of social justice... and social justice in this case means promoting for reasons other than the ability to produce... in all business the ability to produce should be the only reason that you value your employee.. there is ZERO room for propaganda or other motives... Production and nothing else... so I would say Google just moved from a buy to a hold and possibly a sell as soon as another company can replace them... hey when was the last time you bought an IBM computer.. it can happen overnight.. or within a couple years.. remember when everyone was on Myspace then moved to Facebook because it was more adult... I long for the day of facebooks replacement.. it will happen.. and it will happen to google .. you can bet on it.... PRODUCTION.. can you actually produce? now go open your app store and find out where those authors are from.
If that was written at work I would have fired the guy for wasting company time. The thing is 13 pages long. How much time would it take to author a such well thought out document? (I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the crap in there, and I haven't read the thing in its entirety either. I'm just saying the structure and supporting arguments are well thought out and well executed.)
From the document:
but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired.
Well, he's insightful enough to have called it. Show of hands, who didn't see that coming?
So what you have are two sides of a situation, both with valid perspectives, pushed to irrational extremism in a game of one-upmanship and dehumanizing the other side.
First off, there is undeniably unfair discrimination against women. Even if hypothetically you wanted to try to blame some biological (which I am skeptical of, but will confess that it's such a taboo subject that science can't explore it objectively) or cultural/environmental factors prior to the professional workplace (which would point to other things needing to be addressed), but the workplace undeniably has a role. I have seen first hand an instance in my role where the best candidate I interviewed was passed over for a lesser candidate despite my recommendation, and I could find no other explanation other than the lesser candidate was a man and folks were more comfortable that way. She was professional, intelligent, and showed cleared signs of working to keep her knowledge up to date and explore new things. The guy who got the job however could not speak to anything new in the last 10 years, didn't seem to even care enough about the interview to try. It was maddening, particularly when they ended up firing him for not doing any work.
However on the other side, careless 'diversity' hires can just make things worse. Years later in a different environment, we traditionally had to scour candidates to find an acceptable one, taking a great deal of effort and multiple rounds of evaluations for promising candidates. It just so happened that all the applicants were male. On one occasion, a woman applied. That woman skipped the initial rounds and went to the final interview and was immediately hired, despite being woefully unqualified, unmotivated, and disinterested in anything but getting paid and talking about social stuff at work. So the same sort of people responsible for the previous scenario get their world view reinforced that women are somehow ill-equipped, because they were forced to work with an unqualified person and they blamed their biology rather than the circumstances of diversity hire. If we did the same thing with a random male applicant, we'd get the exact same BS, but we know better. Folks have good intentions in trying to balance the scales a bit, but hiring unqualified people simply because they have a generally maligned gender/ethnicity is not without problems.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Exactly how I felt when I was reading Yonatan Zunger's reply yesterday. -- Yeah, right, Dr Zunger, writing like a true "expert". Those in any relationship knows better -- all pundits look cool only because the shit hasn't hit their own fan.
The field is completely toxic! One cannot even remain silent. The best one can hope for is that the shit doesn't hit him/her/ze. So, my sympathy is with Google. (Google, here's a tip: make it go back to Uber instead.)
Company policy is way down the list of laws, far below the Human Rights bill, Constitution, Federal Law, State Law, etc. It doesn't precede them, and if they say certain activities can't be forbidden, the company policy can't delegalize them.
In particular, criticism of the company policy within the company is a legal right of the employee, and that's the core of the letter in question. The defense lawyer would need to wiggle quite hard to single out statements that violated the company policy and simultaneously weren't expressly permitted by the law.
Doesn't mean there aren't any. But the case of the defense is way more difficult, and a slip may result instead in the court invalidating large parts of the company policy and issuing severe fines for having a policy that violates the law.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I’ve read the memo, and it’s not the evil manifesto that people are making it out to be, at least not at the beginning. In fact, it generally seems like all it’s trying to do is just challenge the status quo for the sake of keeping scientifically valid ideas fresh in our minds, in a reductio ad absurdum sort of way. Are there biological differences? Most certainly. You can find these things at the DNA level. (Mind you, they’re extremely small, but small genetic differences can make huge phenotypical differences.)
Here’s where I think he goes wrong:
He begins with *speculations* about gender differences that may be due to genetics, which are certainly good questions to ask. But then be promptly forgets about the cultural biases that we KNOW about that affect how men and women are differentially trained. At a minimim, we have a massive uncertainty about what is causing the gender disparity. Nevertheless, he transitions from speculation to assumption and then makes recommendations based on that. This is a bad leap of logic.
Then he suggests that, given his assumed fact that these differences are fundamental, Google is being inefficient, wasting money on training programs for underrepresented groups. Other things he doesn’t like are making diversity a moral issue, empathy, and unconscious bias training.
Let’s assume for a moment that his assumptions have validity, and that the choices made by Google impact efficiency. If we were talking about a small business that was on the edge of failure, then MAYBE this would apply (but they wouldn’t have diversity or unconscious bias programs anyhow, and everyone would be focused on just getting the job done).
Google, on the other hand, is a huge company that can afford a little inefficiency for the sake of giving everyone an equal chance. From the manifesto, it is not clear how empathy, for example, makes engineers less efficient or less able to be objective about facts. This is just another of his assumptions he doesn’t substantiate. Of all companies, it is those like Google and Microsoft that should be leaders in cutting through the culural barriers that have kept certain people out of tech jobs. Perhaps once those are dealt with, we’ll finally be able to measure the real genetic differences in isolation. But even then, there’s no particular reason anyone, regardless of their genetics, shouldn’t be encouraged to learn technology and get into these kinds of jobs.
As someone who has worked in the tech industry for a LONG TIME, let me give you my opinion and observations. Low level things like coding are just mechanical jobs. Anyone can learn to code, just like anyone can learn to read or write. Some people may enjoy it more than others, and some may be faster or slower, but coding is just drudge work. In that regard, the women I have known generally worked harder, even in environments where it was clear that the men never questioned their abilities.
The next level above coding is debugging and basic problem-solving. People who are sloppy and over-confident will write bad code and then get lost when they can’t figure out their bugs. People who worry more about mistakes are more inclined to code carefully and build in ways to test and debug from the get-go. This is an area where the women have an advantage, because they are not granted the automatic confidence that men are. (One common disadvantage is that there are environments where men feel free to ask for help but women don’t, and there should be no shame in asking for help! Some empathy could help here.)
Above that are things like product design, project planning, management, and some of the creative aspects of the tech profession. At this point, it is almost entirely a people thing where, according to this guy’s manifesto, women should once again have the advantage. Below, this level, it’s just mechanical work. AT this level, diversity is an advantage, because
This kind of stuff is exactly what many companies do to go into a death spiral. Google is still too big to die right away but in 10-20 years it will be a husk of what it used to be. Twitter had the same thing happen, as did Yahoo - political correctness for the sake of political correctness is damaging long term, you distill a feeling of distrust among employees afraid of speaking up and make customers feel like they're going to get whiney downtrotten employees on the phone when they work with the company.
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You realize that equality of opportunity is pretty much meaningless, right? Animals in the jungle have equality of opportunity. That's why conservatives love to throw the term around so much, it gives them the appearance of having some interest in equality when they don't.
It sounds like you think that equality of opportunity means "no clear and gratuitous bigotry in hiring" and little else.
We should not consider an idea to be bad if it causes inefficiencies (especially from a trickle-down economic point of view). Efficiencies can certainly be bad. The most efficient state of affairs would create a utilitarian, anti-human hellhole. We should be willing to sacrifice efficiencies for the good of society.
To increase equality at all, we need some degree of equality of outcome for certain inputs.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
In any matter of employee relations, the most feared department of any large company is HR. Did Pichai even render a personal opinion on the Damore case, or did he just ask HR how to 'handle this without getting sued'?
Basically this guy had to know his career was over the second he sent this.
California, where wrong-think is a crime, is already violently intolerant to anyone who isn't left of Stalin.
The San Francisco area is simply California turned up to 11.
And the environment in these isolating Silicon Valley cult indoctrination centers is simply San Francisco hypercubed.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
like I have been working towards? ..."
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
"I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at a glance how different subsets of the community felt about the progress or completeness of different arguments or action plans (somewhat like a debate flow diagram), where even a year of two later one could go back to an existing debate and expand on it with new ideas. As good as, say, Slashdot is, such a comprehensive open source sensemaking system would be to Slashdot as Slashdot is to a static webpage. It might help prevent so much rehashing the same old arguments because one could easily find and build on previous ones.
My latest efforts along that line: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
And I put together ideas here like using IBIS:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Of course, there seems to be so much age discrimination at Google (including against people who can't easily relocate), not much point in me applying there in my 50s:
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
Of course, older software developers with families and community roots might help provide a moral conscience to the organization as well as provide examples to others about work/life balance -- which might be bad for Google's short-term bottom line...
Although such older people (of all genders) also might have helped Google think through better ways to do hiring long ago.
Also, I've made some previous comments I made about Google in 2008 that might be problematical in getting me hired there: :-) :-( ... quasi-evil ... not evil enough" hobbyists with smaller budgets to save the Asteroids and the Planets (including Earth) http://www.openvirgle.net/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-ra...
"So what is Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California but a little temporary space habitat bubble of happiness for regular employees, but floating on a sea of relative misery for everyone else planetwide who supports it? Can't we as a society or Google/Virgle as an aspiration do better that that? And even within that bubble are emerging issues. How long can a company expect to run on twenty-somethings without kids?
Google-ites and other financially obese people IMHO need to take a good look at the junk food capitalist propaganda they are eating and serving up to others, as in saying (even in jest): http://www.google.com/virgle/o... "we should profit from others' use of our innovations, and we should buy or lease others' intellectual property whenever it advances our own goals" -- even while running one of the biggest post-scarcity enterprises on Earth based on free-as-in-freedom software.
Until then, it is up to us other "semi-evil
from financially obese people and their unexamined
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
1) Stating that there are biological differences between men and women.
2) Staring at said biological differences.
It is formatted way better than Gizmodo's is too. Why didn't they just publish this?
Unless he was in a position of power with those coworkers, there's no grounds for worry. This is nothing but an excuse to make the drama go away. Google doesn't want to have this conversation, and while it's happening on their dime, it probably should be a national discussion.
Just another day in Paradise
Well, my point is, most people are 20 years out of date on this topic. That may be why it sounds like crap to you. Try reading Warren Farrell. But what would you use as a real method to understand this issue? Just blindly assert that there are no differences?
Every single white male got that, eh? But other people, not you, are the bigots. I see.
I disagree with almost everything in your post but you have so far stated the most articulate defense of Google's actions. I guess that's is the difference between Slashdot and Google (and most other comment sections).
Someone at Gizmodo should be shot or sued for editing the memo, "Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber," by removing the references—"hyperlinks," as they call them.
Shooting may be satisfying, but too extreme (IMO, YMMV), and sued would fail big time due to freedom of the press.
The hyperlinks are to many scholarly journal pieces and otherwise respectable publications. Without the references to back up the author's claims, he just looks like a boob to most folks.
I think you have discovered their probable intent. I suspect the article's author will be rewarded since the vast majority will read and accept the article's implied message without looking further. It is the small minority that will seek truth, and not just drink what is fed to them.
Freaking hilarious.
https://twitter.com/NPR/status...
It is actually very well thought out and well stated. I disagree with his choice of the word neurotic though, it is going to hit hard in the same way calling someone ignorant does.
http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320
OK, then how many female combat fighter pilots are in that pool? Again - you used the example, then you back it up. If it is 1% of all pilots, and there is a 20% increase in potential injury to that 1%, and solving that potential injury method results in a 1% increase of damage to the other 99% of the pilots, is that a good change? There's a reason that air forces around the world don't allow overly tall or portly men as pilots - they would have to redesign too many things to handle enough adjustments. Look at MIL-STD-1472 (any version). The US military - and most militaries around the world - design for the 85% case. If you're an extreme outlier for the typical person in a given role, you're not going to "fit" in - literally.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Also, in order to justify something as deplorable as firing someone for political reasons, a lot of people are attributing to him sentences that he never wrote, a character assassination that is typical of authoritarian regimes.
Not only this is obviously wrong, but it is even counterproductive to the cause of a progressive society, because it will foster the persecution complexes of certain voters, urging them to elect even more far-right extremists in order to fix society. Well done, really.
Sorry I'm so slow witted these years. Took me a while to realize this, by which time the discussion on Slashdot has almost expired. Of course the saddest part might be that today's Slashdot doesn't actually value diversity or insight, eh? Hopefully as I search some more I'll find that some clever folks have already found the horse and flogged it hard. However, I don't see how to label it more precisely than "profitable" or "real diversity", and those keyword searches of currently 496 visible comments came up dry.
The problem the google is having is a PR thing. Lack of diversity looks SO bad that it has created a new kind of crisis. It actually started a while back as a minor crisis, just arguing with the government about the meaning of some regulations to reduce discrimination. Now it's putting the google under the microscope, and the google is HATING it.
REAL diversity would mean including less profitable people, but that is the antithesis of today's google. The google is optimized along the single dimension of profits, and the ONLY concern with diversity is when the public perception of the reality of extremely limited diversity becomes a threat to increasing those profits. Therefore the google needs a PR offensive for a sufficient appearance of diversity to avoid impeding the increase of profits. Not REAL diversity, but just enough of the tatemae for "profitable diversity".
Been reading a lot of books about the google this year, including Work Rules! and How Google Works , and such research had led me to the conclusion that the google wants to optimize around a tiny intersection. The Venn diagram features super-creative innovators, super productive programmers, and people with a nose for money, and the google's objective is for half the company to be from the triple intersection. From the HR perspective, the incentive structure is to reward and retain these people based on their actual track record. It's an extremely peculiar and non-diverse population. Let's tag them "s-googlers", perhaps for star or super.
The google wouldn't mind at all if the s-googlers included more women, but I think it's rather unlikely. I don't think the underlying reasons are sexist or racist or religious or even national, but more along the lines of personality variables that happen to correlate with sexual, racial, religious, and national characteristics. Just to evade all of those stereotypes, let me introduce my conclusion as a joke:
"Nice people need not apply!"
Just in case your history lessons were deficient, that's a reference to "Irish need not apply". Look it up.
Now for the REAL religion underlying this. I've decided that grand joke goes like this:
"There are no gawds but profits, and Apple, JP Morgan, Berkshire Hathaway, Wells Fargo, Gilead, Verizon, Citigroup, Google, Exxon, and Bank of America are their profits."
http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Your understanding leaves much to be desired. Since California is an at will state. The company does not need a reason to fire a person. They do not have to defend their actions, unless they are being accused of discrimination of a protected class. Dumb ass, who embarrasses the company is not a protected class.
Public reputation, eh?
So how do you feel about a double icon system? As I'm currently imagining it, the left icon would be a self-selected avatar linked to the usual self-created profile. The right side icon would be a standardized visual representation of your public reputation, and as a link would take you to detailed analysis of the numbers and links to the data. In my excessive imagination, the basic image would be a little radar diagram with two-way axes for each dimension of reputation, the transparency would indicate the amount of data, and the overall color would give a gross summary, such as green for likely to be worthwhile, yellow and orange for increasingly dubious, and red for "almost certain you don't want to look at this guy's rant".
The REAL power of such a system would be the ability to save time by ignoring people with sufficiently low reputations. Take the trolls, for example. Please. Or in positive terms, the ability to prioritize your limited time for people with EARNED high reputations.
Just joking, of course. No possibility Slashdot could ever consider such a thing given the current financial model. I'd even be willing to help pay for such a time saver, but that's NOT an option.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
From https://www.reuters.com/articl...
"At will" or not, if he can make a case that Google fired him in retaliation of his making an NLRB charge, he may stand to cash in big time.
Dude, you just nullified anything logical in your own statement by insinuating that Microslop has a chance in hell of ever being on top again.. Xbox is the only thing people buy from MS anymore and mostly because they are morons. The sooner MS dies, the better. They have abused their power far too long. I mean seriously, lets take a look at their current game. They cant invent anything new and useful so they try to tag along with anything currently hip. Windows phone, windows tablet and I love their latest, incorporating BASH into windows. What moron would use that? For years they made it hard on linux users and now all of a sudden when the heat is turned up, they are trying to slide in the back door as if they were always strong supporters. If MS wants to change, they need to hire someone real, genuine and someone with an actual purpose to invent and not just piggyback on other peoples hot products. So unless MS hires me to turn things around, they are starting to look more like the next Hewlett Packard.
There are some air forces where women comprise 8% of pilots (Israel IIRC) and the helmet famously increases the risk of death by a factor of 4.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Oh and the helmet isn't that heavy because it protects the head better, it's because it's an over-engineered augmented reality headset which hasn't been miniaturised.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Though I could rant on about the prejudice and mistreatment that has plagued me in this field of IT, I am going to say what needs to be said about the depth of fear I feel over this so called manifesto! This engineer's inability to understand what the company he worked for actually does, is somehow both disturbing and expected. As many of you already know, Google has been working on collecting genome data, health data, creating artificial intelligence and basically trying to find a way to expand its business into every aspect of our human lives. The aggregation of this information requires not just empathy for humankind, but also requires that the people that manage and care for its data mining, storage etc. have integrity and the ability to show care with how this information is used and secured. I fear Information Technology professionals may not be up to the task and it is truly upsetting. I'll add that we are not sure where this quest for AI will lead us. We do know that Facebook shut down Artificial Intelligence agents because they created their own language outside of human understanding. AI has the potential to cause great harm and it is of the utmost importance that each and everyone us understand this and that we fully engage ourselves (male and female) and decide what actually makes us human and what would make AI sentient. Because, we ALL have a stake in this endeavor! As for the Google engineer that was let go. I think it is a good thing, because he is showing a lack of understanding that is necessary for such responsibility.
You put way too much way stock in someone having a PhD from Harvard. Any idiot would have known what a dumb idea writing this manifesto was, especially given its overall tone. So if he's so fuckin' smart he woulda known better, unless his real goal was to stir shit up and get his fool ass fired.
I do not have a signature
He didn't embarrass Google in public. Whoever leaked his internal memo to the public did that.
If you believe his claims to be completely true then surely it makes sense to have more women doing coding at google instead of a stressful life and death career such as nursing?
You are taking a bizarro-world spin on something that is already bullshit.
The "biology" is just a prop for a silly "bro-victim" screed. There are many jobs far more stressful than coding at google, even in the field of software development.
His claims are no more than a distraction and run completely counter to his argument instead of supporting it, so it really doesn't matter if they are true in this context does it? If it is true by some act of magic then it weakens his argument.
And it's the legal right of the employer, especially in California, to fire critics.
Yes, the gentleman who wrote the memo even suggested that ENCOURAGING FEMINIZATION OF MEN is a path to solving this. Pg 6 "If we as a society allow men to be more feminine...[then unicorns + rainbows]" which is pretty darned dyed-in-the-wool left-badge talk. However he *lead* with "women are more prone to anxiety" which will be read as "women are disabled." A better marketed lead would have been "men are more prone to impulsiveness, risk-oriented and dangerous behavior as evidenced by their 93% workplace fatality rate vs females." I'm not saying that this would have WORKED. I *am* suggesting that this quite noble, honest & well composed document can be marketed better by starting with describing how all of us chaps are such awful craven louts. It is more defensible to lead with "men suck in domains gamma where women excel, [insert women dominated gammanian fields]" then "women, however, on a population basis appear to still be catching up in domains theta where men are still dominant [insert thetan field population stats] and GOOGL could encourage catchup by telling all us dudes to become panty-waisted sissies who hold hands in the cafeteria and crochet." Okay maybe we could reword the last couple dozen words or so but all my fellow and fellowette (THAT'S NOT FUNNY!) associates here can upgrade our next attempt to bring higher rationality to the leftmob.
Solandri -- order of presentation likely significantly alters the spectrum of impact and thus calibrates response. I read the report and suggest modification by leading with "men suck and are disabled in domain gamma (e.g. impulsiveness, risk, overconfidence) whereas women are effing AWESOME gammas" then after reaming out our Y-chromosomed bretheren approach topic "women are better risk managers (as evidenced by female financial portfolio performance, i.e. less churning, more long-term-hold) yet can also be described as the opposite of male-impulsive which is sometimes described as 'XX anxiety'. This can be harnessed by Google to increase XX population by [solution]" I entirely agree with you (and, btw, really look forward to your posts for the many years I have lurked before this month starting to post) yet we engineers and scientists can improve this gentleman's dialogue and debate impact by re-ordering some of the thoughts for smoother marketing. See my above post CTRL-F "panty-waisted" to find it. Yeah, I know THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!!. :]
While I agree on the post, I disagree it applies only where inequalities goes in disfavor of women. As you put yourself "those who do want to be in those professions will suffer unnecessary social penalties." and "My guess is that men are taught that they are the breadwinner" in other word a man going into teaching could suffer social penalties - therefore there is an inherent social and sexist component against men and it should be fought against in teaching. "If they don't care, we shouldn't change their minds. To this strawman I answer" to this strawman I answer, first the social penalty is your claim, demonstrate it does exists rather than simply being a choice, and there are certainly enough counter example of people wanting to do such job, secondly you still did not explain why we should correct it when only when the imbalance is in perceived disfavor of women. Again, pretending as I read everywhere that teacher get paid less or there is a perceived social penalty for men, does not explain why we should not strive for equality of outcome there too. My point is One either strive for equality of outcome EVERYWHERE or one admit one is biased. Personally I just for equality of opportunity.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Google just keep showing that they're more concerned about social issues than technology.
If you're a smart engineer that wants to push the boundaries of technology and work on bleeding edge projects, Google is not for you.
Google as an innovator is dead and is the place you go to if you want to retire comfortably.
Or, he's too smart, and either knew he could wake up the system, or probably knew he could fool google into believing he was being sexist, when he was on fringes, and then sue for multi million dollars?
In one of the companies where I was employed, the HR was always ready to chop engineers' necks if even a slight issue happened. I wonder what good do they do, apart from hiring good talent!
I would suggest, read his memo again. Nowhere does he say women are inferior to men. Mostly he claims that they might not be interested, etc. He says they are different from men. I don't think being different is crossing the line. Difference is like vector, it has components, and can not be compared directly!
Since there are no standards in their feelings-based "science" regarding modern liberal views on gender, he could invent his own gender. I had a gay dream once and now wish to have my own gender and a very complicated set of custom gender pronouns. My letter will be D (for dreamer) in the LGBTQ alphabet.
However, I'd guess you're for equality of opportunity.
The problem is that outcomes are fairly easy to measure, unlike opportunities. Moreover, when we've investigated inequality of outcomes, we have very often discovered inequality of opportunity. This means that a clear inequality of outcome is suspicious at best.
Moreover, many people seem to think we have an ideal society. Let's say that there are biological reasons favoring men in software development, and cultural reasons discouraging women. I see a lot of people claiming that the observed difference is due to biology, when that's only part of the reason. We could do better by finding the cultural factors working against women and eliminating them, or at least weakening them, but many people think that it's the woman's choice and they want special treatment, when in fact we're doing our best to come out neutral.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The author injects too much left/right stuff into his memo. However, make no mistake, he is correct in stating that there are issues that are too sacred for discussion - getting fired is proof of that.
But seriously men, learn from this. If you have an opinion that is not in lockstep with management, don't give it to anyone.
If you want to keep your job, keep your fucking mouth shut. There are corporate and societal "truths" that will not accept any ideas other than what you are told your opinion is. Freedom of speech does not mean you can say anything you want - it just means that the government cannot arrest you.
Regardless, this goes on in both left wing and right wing companies. Google is no exception.
And if your opinion isn't what your opinion is allowed to be - keep that yap shut, or get another job where you are allowed to have that opinion without getting shitcanned.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
From the vitriol of most of the comments made on /. I'd say the SJW positions are fully vindicated.
Privilege is threatened when those reactionary privileges are exposed, especially when a company attempts to correct the cultural bias that has been the norm for so long.
This is not to say that creating a more level playing field is an easy thing to accomplish. That will most likely take time and many more non-threatening open discussions of the problems to arrive at better solutions.
That being said, crossing the line should not be justification for firing the offender, but rather a teaching moment that could possibly arrive at a better policy for everyone.
PlaynBass