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Fired Google Engineer Says Company Execs Shamed and Smeared Him (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report, in which the recently fired employee has been interviewed: James Damore, who until Monday worked as an engineer on video and image search at Alphabet's Mountain View, California, headquarters, said he initially shared the 3,300-word memo internally a month ago. But it was only after the memo went viral that company leaders banded together to make him an outcast, he said on Bloomberg TV. When he initially circulated the memo, "no one high up ever came to me and said, 'No, don't do this,' even though there were many people who looked at it," Damore said. "It was only after it got viral that upper management started shaming me and eventually firing me." The memo, which was leaked to the public over the weekend, argues that conservative viewpoints are suppressed at Google and that biological differences between men and women explain in part why so few women work in software engineering. Even if someone in Google management had agreed with some of the arguments put forth in his piece, they wouldn't have felt safe speaking up, he said. "There was a concerted effort among upper management to have a very clear signal that what I did was harmful and wrong and didn't stand for Google," Damore said. "It would be career suicide for any executives or directors to support me."
Let's be clear... he was fired for exposing their $265M boondoggle: https://www.axios.com/googles-...
How many targeted scholarships and local/urban school improvements could have been had for $265M?
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
He was free to express his opinion, they were free to fire him.
Does he want government intervention or a union or something?
So you are saying that telling the truth you should expect to be punished? And you don't seem to think that is the issue?
Well, there's plenty calling for his life to be ruined and ensure he can never provide a living for himself, so they're definitely figuratively calling to burn him at the stake. But lets be honest with ourselves, this is the modern internet, I'd be shocked if there weren't a fair few number of people calling to literally burn him at the stake, or kill him in one way or another.
"There are things you just don't say or do"
That's exactly how we got in this mess. That is EXACTLY how things got so PC that you can't even present well cited data in a logical manner any more if it could be (mis)construed to mean that anyone is "marginalized." And If anyone actually read it, they would know that the guy isn't anti women or anti diversity - quite the opposite actually. He's only a skeptic of the methodology which has lead to this exact situation. Because some things are too taboo to talk about. It's ALL related.
BTW, the company had asked for feedback on company policies, and specifically asked for critical/controversial topics. They shouldn't have shamed him and defamed him after he did what they asked. Also, it's obviously a reactionary move to the sudden outcry, which implies it was FINE before. There's so many ways that they were wrong, even if they may or may not be legally in the right.
He might well be right. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't have seen this coming.
He was certainly right - at least to whatever extent the science was right. The core of his memo was a survey of the current scientific literature, with citations. Of course, this stuff isn't physics, but it is repeatable measurements with known (if limited) predictive ability.
He's pretty young though, and a PhD, so I suspect he was quite naive. "Should have" seen it coming, sure, I agree, but understandable that he didn't. An engineer addressing an unknown by studying the science behind the problem, and using that as a basis to ask some obvious questions. Sort of what you want an engineer to do.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I kind of wonder if he intended to get fired and the sue... It wasn't exactly hard to predict. He could have published it anonymously, but didn't. It just seems like he wanted to martyr himself.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Part of this memo was a claim of illegal hiring practices (i.e. benefiting women because they were women and not merit). Part of it was illegal discrimination based on political views (protected in California and obviously meant to protect snowflake liberals who can always make a firing about their IDENTITY rather than their performance but it will be fun to use it against the creators in this case).
Part of it is grey-area discrimination that may not be "illegal" all on its own but when combined with the above actually illegal actions can elevate the "crime" to include more serious things like retaliation, defamation of character, hostile work environment, etc. It all sort of snowballs into a scenario that could be easily defined as whistle-blowing (see actual illegal actions by Google).
Or, even if you're not a "dick who says cunty things", but just somebody presenting facts, backed up by statistics, that hurt somebody's feelings.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I find it ironic, that conservatives, that have ranted and raved against any sort of labor protections and the NLRB, seem to be rejoicing at pushing a NLRB complaint.
If this is not an example of conservative white male privilege, I don't know what is.
I find it ironic that liberals rejoice when the science concerning global warming is settled, but rant and rave when science that doesn't fit their narrative is presented.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/0...
If that's not an example of hypocrisy, I don't know what is.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
How is "reverse" discrimination not discrimination?
You can make a simulation: generate a number of individuals with assigned skill scores, by a given distribution. Generate also a population B, with a same or similar distribution but a lower mean (or alternatively, same mean and lower variance, etc). Use any bell-curve distribution (such as normal) with no cap (so D&D-like 3d6 is out).
Now, pick N top scorers from the combined population. Compare the same with various kinds of racism:
You'll see that any kind of racism hurts the person doing the discrimination as he gets an unoptimal result. You can also notice that affirmative action is drastically more harmful than traditional racism. Both are bad, though, and there's a big gain for being race- (and gender-, etc) blind.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
seem to be rejoicing at pushing a NLRB complaint.
They find it ironic, too. That's why they are rejoicing. They are watching the left get burned by their own tools.
If this is not an example of conservative white male privilege, I don't know what is.
This is what you get when you force people into an identity that they don't want. Love how you added "conservative" in there, as if liberal males are magically free of the advantages that white males generally enjoy.
To be clear, it is a moral failure on the part of society that a black man is forced to adopt the identity of a black man, no matter what position he has in life. No matter if he has anything at all in common with any other black man, he's forced into that identity. This is not a choice, and it's a shame, and people should not be surprised when black men then choose to band together to fight their common oppression. Except for white supremacists and extremists, white men do not typically feel a conscious "white male" affinity toward other white males. Irish? Sure. Italain? Sure. German? Sure. But white? No. But if you repeat the error that we've done with black males, they will eventually adopt identity politics, band together, and generally this country will be worse for it. So cut it out.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
At-will in a state where firing him for political viewpoints is illegal, and in a country where his essay counts as whistleblowing (he's alleging Google engages in illegal practices) and where retaliatory action against whistleblowers is illegal. Google can't fire this guy after the incident / dispute, nor can they reassign him to nothingness, hold him back in his career, etc.
Google fucked up.
It is counterintuitive, but there's no or only a slight difference (depends on the distribution) between a group being less numerous, or having less skill.
We don't care about the mean, or the bulk of the population -- only about the tail end. And tail ends of distribution D(x) tend to be similar between D(x-a) vs D(x)/b -- for some distributions like exponential exactly equal, for some close enough to be hard to distinguish on real noisy data.
And we don't care about the number of graduates either, as that is affected by artificial programs. A more telling metric is eg. the number of women among top 1000 kernel contributors, a sample of Debian package maintainers, etc. I've did the legwork and counted kernel contributors with gender-obvious names (I'm familiar with western and slavic first names), among the top 1000 commiters whose first name reveals gender, there's _8_ women. Yes, only 8 out of 1000!
But those 8 are no worse than their peers. Not only rarity is indistinguishable from low avg skill, low avg skill in indistinguishable from rarity! Thus, if you apply equal fair standards, you'll get a smaller proportion of top achievers than the general population would imply, but individuals from group B who do qualify above the threshold, are no worse than individuals from group A.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
But at Google the gender gap in tech roles is 80-20, according to their own self-reporting. There's something more systemic going on than the subtle psychological differences between men and women.
Perhaps. This woman argues that the differences are self-exaggerating, that fields which fewer women are interested in pursuing tend to be male-dominated, which makes them even less attractive to women, which makes them more male-dominated, in a cycle which leads ultimately to a situation where only the women most devoted to the field stay in it.
Read the article, it's well-written and insightful.
This accords as well with the experience of Scandinavian countries who have bent over backwards to ensure not just absolute equality of opportunity, but that everyone has the opportunity to pursue whatever course of education they like and have the talent for. And what they've seen is that rather than fields which are historically dominated by one gender or another equalizing, the ratio has become even more extreme. In Norway, for example, engineering fields tend not to be 50/50, or even 80/20, but 90/10. It appears that when you free people to pursue their own interests, the gender gap increases.
An interesting exploration of this issue in Norway is presented in https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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So only a government can be authoritarian?
In the way of Stalinism, yes. I mean, it's possible for other institutions to try to act authoritarian, but their power is quite limited, because they're not a government (with some exceptions, such as "company towns" in the US back in the 1800s where the company owned everything and had hired thugs to keep people in line). A company can't really be authoritarian: if you don't like the way they're treating you, you're free to leave at any time, and there's plenty of worker-protection laws on the books these days.
The term refers to the method of enforcing and reinforcing an ideology.
Right, and the only institution that has the power of enforcement in modern times is a government. A church may have an ideology, but they can't force you to donate or prevent you from leaving. And companies obviously do have ideologies, but again basic employment law prevails and you can quit any time.
but if I said Nazi you would claim I was trying to Godwin the discussion.
No, I wouldn't. I never say that, because it's an utterly stupid thing to say. If a comparison with Nazis is warranted, then by all means make it. That whole "Godwinning the discussion" thing is such bullshit. "I win! I win! You brought up Nazis! I win!" -- something only a complete idiot would say, but I have seen it here from time to time.
But the Nazi comparison makes little sense here again because we're talking about a company; companies in the US may have too much political power IMO, but they don't have any power to use violence against employees they don't like. The Nazis had thugs (like the SA (stormtroopers)) that would use violence against political opponents, and they got control of the government.