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."

Comments

Of course.

[tbannist]

Of course he's saying they shamed and smeared him, to do otherwise would be to admit they had good reasons to fire him.

The problem is that he basically accused his bosses of being incompetent thought-controlling tyrants, and then let his accusations get into the media. He put them in the difficult position of either having to admit his accusations were correct or having to fire him. If what he wrote was true, they weren't going to the first one and if what he wrote was false, they definitely weren't going to do the first one.

Re:I hope he pounds the shit out of google

[AmiMoJo]

People are mis-characterizing the criticism of his memo and the reason he was fired.

We have been here before. "Black people are poor because they have less developed intelligence, and these skull measurements and IQ test scores provide incontrovertible scientific proof". Apart from being a misrepresentation of the science, it ignores the fact that the situation improves when they have an equal opportunity.

If he had said "we have reached a plateau and I think this is the reason why things are not continuing to improve for women at Google" it would have been fine. Instead he ignores that things are getting better, and that things used to be even better when the proportion of women in CS was much higher. He ignores that in some cultures women and girls don't fit these averages that he maintains are likely biological.

He does make a few valid points, but I think at best you could say that show shows some naivety, with his apparent unfamiliarity with decades of research and how these arguments were considered and rejected multiple times in the relatively recent past. If he brought something new to the table it would be different, but it's all old hat.

Re:LOL, crybaby snowflake blames everyone else.

[meglon]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

https://www.psychologytoday.co...

He followed data he didn't collect, or understand, to a conclusion he had already decided was right (even given the fact that the data DID NOT support that conclusion).... that's called confirmation bias. Even the person who did collect some of the data, whom the engineer posted as a source, says the engineer came to the wrong conclusion.

So, Google probably should have fired him for not being able to read and understand the written word, or maybe for being so clueless as to have absolutely no foresight in regards to the possible repercussions of his actions. Either way, conservatives have pushed "at-will employment" laws to undermine unions for 30+ years, and his firing is allowed by those.... so while he may not be whining, and just answering questions... all of these posts on /. past the first one is basically conservatives whining about a perceived slight because of their victim complex.