Slashdot Mirror


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."

3 of 711 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I hope he sues... by Major+Blud · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. Re:I hope he sues... by KiloByte · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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:

    • only the "better" group A (exclusive traditional racism)
    • a bonus for group A (traditional racist preference)
    • a bonus for group B (affirmative action racism)
    • racial quotas

    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.
  3. Re:I hope he pounds the shit out of google by swillden · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?...

    --
    Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.