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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."
At-will employment refresher - IF YOU ARE A DICK WHO SAYS CUNTY THINGS, YOU MIGHT GET FUCKED, BRO. That's not Obama's fault, snowflake. Stop crying and STFU and do your damn JOB that you're overpaid for! Bitch!
and gets tens of millions from Google.
I worked at Google NY..and there is no greater thought control bubble when it comes to anything non-tech.
and every PC snowflake he sues. He did nothing wrong & he is being slandered by just about every "news" & social outfit that is willingly mischaracterizing his memo.
He's an engineer, shouldn't he have been working on technical things? Who does he really think he is anyway?
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
Everyone knows, rule by witchhunt creates the best workplace and products.
People look back on history condescendingly about the Salem Witch Trials and "how could people be so ignorant." Then you look at what's happening right now. There's some biological / social urge to "Weed out the aliens/different/toxic entity" within an organization.
There's no difference. There's no moral high ground. The same justifications only a different set of victims this time around. History repeats.
The hippies that used to protest their clean cut bosses are now the ones crushing the minorities. History repeats.
it can't be worse than any other company. This guy is an alt-right snowflake.
He might well be right. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't have seen this coming. There are things you just don't say or do, even if you think it's true. Google had no choice but to fire him and distance themselves; the cost of not doing so would have been much higher.
"And as for its impact on you: Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment."
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788
Google is more evil than Microsoft was - Microsoft at least wanted to sell you something. Google wants to sell YOU, and all your data, and while they're at it, they'll also shape your access to information to only that which they approve of.
Google is the biggest search company, the biggest advertising company, the biggest OS company with Android, one of the biggest media companies with YouTube... maybe it's time for the Feds to take a good long anti-trust look at Google...
He was free to express his opinion, they were free to fire him.
Does he want government intervention or a union or something?
I absolutely disagree with what this memo said (I've read it in it's entirety) but I think he has that right to say it. That said, he has there right to distribute it on his own time, with his own resources; not internally. Google has every right, and the moral high ground, to get rid of him for it. It's not applicable to his job and really has no place in the workplace.
Just another snowflake that can't take the heat.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
"It would be career suicide for any executives or directors to support me" - as it should be. There's being non-"PC" and then there's just being a sexist ass, and he was very clearly the later. BTW, high level execs don't tend to read every single letter every single lowly employee writes; that's not what they get paid the big bucks to do. They didn't respond for a few weeks, because it was below their radar - as an employee's ramblings normally should be.
That is no Google engineer. That guy is Howard Wolowitz!
should get you shamed and smeared. Only a Republican would disagree since they hate women.
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u cant just say that shit anymore its not 1950s u know? i dont want 2 work with intolerint ppl. he should stfu
1. Send controversial post to some co-workers. 2. It get out to larger audience. 3. I'm toast. It's all so baffling to me too!
Some settling may occur during posting.
Based on this they top out at $223K. That's like making $40K in Metro-Atlanta. You couldn't afford to live here on that.
Like I tell folks who want to go out there, take your current pay, multiply it times 5 and that's your bottom to keep your lifestyle. Don't forget, between state and Federal and local taxes, you're gonna lose half your pay out there. So, $80K in Atlanta would be like getting $400K in Silly Valley.
My parents live on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley and I live in Metro-Atalanta. They also own rental property and will not even rent to you unless you make at least $200K a year.
I'd move back but everyone in Silly Valley wants engineers for cheap.
Great, http://www.bisnisduniamaya.com
Sue them
What a special snowflake.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Poor, poor fucker.
Awww, I shot my mouth off and there were ACTUAL CONSEQUENCES for it? HOW UNFAIR!
The Idiot evidently doesn't understand that FREE SPEECH does not protect you from the CONSEQUENCES of said speech.
The First Amendment says the GOVERNMENT cannot stop you from speaking your mind, but you are (were) EMPLOYED "at will" by Google.
They can fire your ass anytime they want to, for any reason, and you gave them HUGE PR REASONS to fire you, so they did.
Deal with it.
Evidently a "Genius" like you could not figure that out?
Karma is a BITCH ain't it?
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.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
When it went viral the big G had to fire him because not doing so would have made them look bad in the public eye.
I wouldn't really care much if it had been an extremist and sexist piece but it isn't.
You may or may not agree but it's a reasoned document.
Alas, it doesn't really matter, what mattered is that it got viral and many piece of news about it made it look much worse than it really is, they said it said things that are just not there. Many people who read this terrible reporting was outraged (as I would be if it really was what they claim it is) and then the man was lost.
It's sad we've gotten so uptight about certain topics that merely suggesting something different to the accepted narrative can get you fired.
I fully agree with you ! They can fully fire anyone they want. But now they have to change the motto, or not, since most totalitarians have no problem with hipocrisy.
Conservatives believe that individuals should be responsible for their actions without government interference. That mostly means laissez-faire, market-driven outcomes; low income taxes that shrink government spending and intereference complements that.
This person thinks that women are genetically inferior to men and shouldn't be considered for engineering jobs because that would just be some kind of quota system. This is not Conservative and does not put him into a government protected class.
What I don't think this guy (or his supports) understand is he wasn't fired for his opinions. He was fired for embarrassing Google so much that they had to react. He said so himself that he tossed some of these ideas around the office. and some people probably agreed and some didn't. But while it was just a guy shooting off his mouth around the water cooler, no one really cared much.
The issue is he then wrote a giant, essay-length rant, sent it out from his work account and distributed his thoughts (in writing) all over the place. At that point management cant' just shrug it off, it's public, it's something they need to react to. If he's just kept talking about this with his boss or buddies, he would have been fine. It's publicly embarrassing the company that got him shown the door, not his views.
Anyone working in an office should know that you don't write this stuff down and you sure don't air your politics in mass e-mails. He should have known better and, hopefully, now he does.
Yet another dipshit who refuses to read the actual 10 page memo and still has the false belief that everything they read on a site labeled "news" must be true.
Nobody claimed the guy was a whistle blower, oh bearer of the tiny straw man. They claim that he was slandered and wrongfully terminated.
I read the memo, unlike you. IANAL, but believe he's got a pretty solid case. The Stalinist tactics being used by many are being illuminated.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I don't care what it says, don't write a manifesto for work unless it's part of your job. This guy's an idiot on multiple levels, says idioto
The free market says you're fucked, bro.
You cannot expect to use biology as your shield for supporting inequality without expecting a severe backlash. This country is founded on equality. If you want something else, find a different geography that espouses your views.
Let's be real.
We will never achieve perfect diversity.
But we are guaranteed equal opportunity under the constitution. Equal opportunity is not conditional on biology or "suited for" conclusions. The measuring stick is independent of biology. Unfortunately in these jobs, the perceived capacities often overshadow the real measurements and hence we get inequality based on biology.
If he wants to support "to those based on need from those based on their merit" - there is an ideology and a geography that supports that. And they would be happy to take him in. And for kicks - they may even drink his homo superior vs homo sapiens koolaid.
But not in this country. It's not about right and left, right and wrong. It's about equality.
I'm actually pretty disappointed that this didn't trigger an avalanche of support from within Google. I'd like to think that if I worked there, I'd type up my own suicide note in support of him and circulate that internally.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
This whiner needs to STFU and go away already.
This incident is a good example of how identity politics can tear apart an organization. It doesn't matter if it's a corporation or an open source project. The moment identity politics are introduced into an organization, everything sours. It's no longer about people working together toward a common goal. It becomes about one identity fighting another identity, and nothing productive ends up happening.
It may surprise some people here, but one of the earliest victims of this latest wave of identity politics was the GNOME desktop project. Slashdot reported about this back in 2006, with its "GNOME Reaches Out to Women" submission. Once that happened, GNOME was no longer about a bunch of programmers around the globe naturally coming together over the Internet to build a desktop environment. The original goal, software development, took a back seat to identity politics. Anyone who has used GNOME 3 knows just how awfully it all turned out. Also of interest is the 2014 Slashdot submission entitled "The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money".
The Rust programming language project is another example. The technological aspects of it have been dwarfed by the identity politics that have become the foundation of that project. Rust is better known for its tyrannical Code of Conduct and oppressive Rust Moderation Team than it is for its technological innovations! This has also driven away potential users and developers who aren't interested in engaging in pointless identity politics, resulting in a community that is quite insulated and limited. What could have potentially been the most important and innovative programming language since C++ has ended up becoming what's essentially a joke.
Identity politics will destroy whatever they touch.
Discovery will turn up the conspiracy by nutcases, and their mgmt overlords.
Some lawyer will have a complete field day with this, before moonwalking his way into a tens of million dollar payout. If it even gets to that level, since Google mgmt knows they are politically and morally corrupt. They'll pay out to keep this secret. This will be Gamergate II, only better, and waged in a courtroom and via depositions.
I'm wondering how many SJWs in the media they've been conspiring with to slime this guy. They probably know they were creating a hostile environment and that he had reached out to the NLRB.
I just started reading "The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network" by Katherine Losse. First chapter identified her as a woman, a woman who browse the Internet anonymously because of stalkers and trolls, and Facebook @ Johns Hopkins University was the first online service she ever put her real name to. She comes out to the West Coast, gets an advertising job in San Francisco, and then gets recruited by Facebook in 2005. Should be an interesting read.
I mean, it can't be any worse than inviting "Clock Boy" to the White House, right?
Honestly, he's saying exactly the opposite. "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."
There's a lot of talk about free speech, but it sounds like Google was okay with him expressing his opinion, and didn't try to silence (or shame) their engineer in any way whatsoever -- for at least a month, up until it became public. If we're going to really listen to what the engineer is saying, then Google actually is tolerant of different viewpoints under most circumstances.
Instead of a huge slamdunk firing of some big $$$$ rapist-executive, we get this little guy, with his softball "paper" that just got syndicated to the entire world.
He got 1) Global media coverage, 2) Big names involved, 3) Unintended legitimacy. Even the most denouncing articles openly state "there are a lot people who feel this way".
And now he's gonna get a huge payout and basically live on vacation. Might even turn this in a cause celebre and get talking gigs like Anita whatshername, turning what was a throw away document into a minor career. They should have just ignored it :(
Anyone who didn't see this cascade of consequences from the beginning isn't thinking very hard about it. The irony of the Delicate White Snowflake whining about losing his Safe Space was assured based on the tone of his screeching ten page screed.
Google motto 2004: Don’t be evil
Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define
Google motto 2013: We make military robots... also, we help hillary overthrow governments
Google motto 2017: Trump is evil and we hate science
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Whether you agree with him or not, Google is being a rational large company. Their lawyers met with the chief counsel and calculated that allowing, then settling one wrongful termination suit far outweighs the damage that might be caused in the press each time the two parties show up in court. Not to mention the potential class actions -- every female who ever had any interaction with James Damore, every female who was denied a job by Google, every female who wasn't promoted, and on and on. It's the same thing that happens with product liability -- do you issue a recall or hope everything blows over, even though you're on the hook for a lot of money and reputational damage if someone connects the dots? Takata, VM and the GM ignition switch cases are good example of this.
I said it yesterday, but it bears repeating -- even if it's not overt, if a company knowingly creates what a jury believes is a hostile work environment, and doesn't take action to stop it, they're on the hook. This was their smart play in this case -- they showed that they took immediate action and disavowed that Damore was speaking in any way for Google in general. I know people are turning this into a "conservative witch hunt" story, but I think it's just legal butt-covering.
Serious ugly, like somebody beat a gorilla with a shovel. Ugly giant shit-sniffing nostrils. Firing this guy wont change that
I rather suspect that Google would have been sued for inaction over a toxic work environment if they hadn't fired him. Seriously, another nonsensical "biologically unfit for ..." theory? If it's lifting 300 pounds, you can validly produce a statistical likelihood that most people fit for the job will be male, but mental tasks? Horseshit. We've been down that road for millenia and the "biologically unfit" crowd is ALWAYS wrong. I'm sure he'll sue, and his lawyers might make money, but I expect he won't see a dime.
What is evident from this is something that has been known for a long time. A lot of people that profess given believes only pretend to do so and frequently have either different beliefs or completely antithetical beliefs to their professed beliefs.
Tolerance, diversity, openness to ideas, empathy to people's feelings, etc are not actually genuinely held beliefs of the "social justice" community. Its confirmed again and again... man or woman comes to a college campus to say something some of them don't like... result is a riot. Fire, vandalism, threats, and screeching.
Some AC says "at will employees" have no right to say X or Y in chat... and its hypocritical because if an at will employee were fired for saying what he wants he'd probably want to burn the building to the ground.
We're going to see some interesting things with this stuff. First, this atmosphere is going to drive talented people away from these companies. The money is good but it will take a toll. The irony of them building these monuments in San Jose... massive corporate compounds... just in time for them go into decline. Second, they're running afoul of labor department rules. This is amusing because it was people like this that put a lot of these rules in place precisely to stop behavior like this... and that its going to be needed to restrain them speaks to the insincerity of the movement. Next we have secrets, a lot of this stuff is done off the record and in as an opaque method as possible precisely because they know their actions wouldn't survive in the light of day. All of this is for power and money... people that can't compete on the basis of merit instead gang together to bias outcomes. They want control over things they don't deserve to have control over and they want to be paid more than they deserve to be paid.
Ultimately, I think the root cause of the problem is google's corporate culture which seems to be this anti-hierarchical we're all big happy family system. And that's fine for smaller companies or smaller teams but I don't think it works for 10s of thousands of people. A good middle ground solution I would try here is to break the company down organizationally into much smaller units which can transfer employees and collaborate but which don't march to the same social drum. A lot of what creates this Lord of the Flies type chaos is a sense that all the adults are dead and the children have to start over in the wilderness. That is sort of the message that gets sent when there is so little regimentation of what is going on. You get people breaking into tribes and then trying to dominate each other. That it is the tribe of tolerance and diversity doing it is just pathetic... but ultimately this is all on Google's senior management which appears to be asleep at the switch.
So unless google wants to degenerate into a lot of non-productive non-stop shitshows... I'd suggest they break the community up a bit and get middle management to refocus employees on their jobs rather than on whatever the hell all this is supposed to be about.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
His writings were broad generalizations without understanding of functional psychology. It's not like women are feelers thus less capable of doing technical work. It's not like every men is born with ability to systematize.
Men can be born as empaths lacking systematizing capability and analogously is with women.
The fact is, that more men is born with systematizing capability then women, so that's why it's easy to generalize that men are systematizing but it's not true for every one.
Thats why his assertions were abusive towards women, and every logical woman would object it, giving clear reasons to sack him.
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.
Nobody at Google told him this shit was wrong until it went public? That's messed up.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It is important that we all have the right to hold ideas that are inaccurate and also state them as being our beliefs. If not, we would have to condemn scientists who held to theories that got updated when new discoveries were made. So the court case will primarily test whether or not he should have been allowed to publish what he wrote without being punished by his employer AND whether or not an employer should be allowed to fire someone over beliefs they don’t want their employees to express.
Damore’s attorneys will argue that he is being discriminated against for exercising his constitutional rights, but that will fail because employment is at-will and it wasn’t some protected thing like race or religion that resulted in him being fired but instead his on-the-job “behavior." Google’s attorneys will attempt to argue that his ideas are harmful on the basis of their scientific merits, but that will fail since, there is no crime in expressing incorrect ideas. Damore’s manifesto also did not enter into the realm of hate speech, since he did not recommend harm against anyone, only that Google scale back “inefficient” programs that promote ideas of equality that Damore believes are not scientifically supported.
So it’s going to fall upon the journalists to pick apart the ideas he expressed. It will be educational for the rest of us to have some of these ideas about “genetic differences” retested. It’s not that we haven’t tested them before many times, but many people do not learn history and could benefit from a refresher.
He'd been called out at Harvard for his sexist views. He knew they were controversial and chose to use is workplace as a venue to express them. As the knight said, "He chose poorly." If he had vented on a personal blog, he'd probably still be employed. Remember Free Speech Warriors, you speech rights concern redress to the government. No private entity is obligated to allow you to speak in their venue.
Well, good. Don't bring tons of negative press down on your employer if you don't want to be let go for bringing the negative press. What he wrote were not official company positions, and Google letting him go is proof of that. Even if someone else in Google feels the same, that doesn't give him the right to make a screed into an official company memo. If circulating materials about HR, PR, marketing, or products is not your job you probably shouldn't be doing it.
The very self-centered audacity that he thinks everyone read his crap and that silence about it was a sign of approval shows just how little clue he actually has about this matter. He was more likely sliding by unnoticed until the PR storm brought it to someone's attention. The moment there were lots of complaints about it because people actually noticed it, his time at his employer was over.
Disclaimer and PSA: I certainly am not speaking for my employer in this post. Unless you're authorized to speak on such matters for yours, don't.
Clearly the guy is a f-ing moron. If he had stopped for 2 minutes to think about it clearly, he wouldn't have written it or sent it internally. Seriously, what kind of F-tard is this guy? I don't like or hate what google did, but regardless of what you think about google, what damore did was STUPID. Anyone that STUPID and egotistical deserves what they reap. As a software engineer that works in the consulting world, the first lesson you learn is to choose your words precisely. If you don't crap your words correctly, you'll get fired. It's that simple. Believing in stupid BS and backing it up with opinion doesn't make him right or bright. It just shows how dumb he is.
He brought statistics to a flame war.
He should have been fired. How could he possibly be expected to give them fair assessments after saying they are biologically inferior to males.
The execs were just being alpha. Maybe you just lack the biological capacity to understand dominance and leadership.
In my experience, usage of the word "shamed" often implies a narcissist.
When you typed that there are "things you just don't say or do, even if you think it's true" you perfectly illustrated that the modern leftists have, indeed, "fundamentally transfom[ed]" America into a quasi-fascist state of thought police and thought crimes. This form of intellect-stunting freedom-oppressing totalitarianism is alien to America and needs to be flushed down the cultural toilet ASAP. This used to be a nation of people who could breathe free without looking over their shoulders in fear.
My biggest hope for the Trump era is that, whether one likes him or hates him, his willingness to "damn the torpedoes" and speak as he wishes will be both an example and a reminder to all that we are free to speak inthis land and that there is value in hearing contrarian voices. Sometimes society is better served by the little boy pointing out that the emperor is naked thn by all the idiots in the crowd pretending to see an amazing wardrobe.
And sorry if not wanting to keep employing someone who thinks women are biologically inferior and unsuited to working at Google is a bad thing.
So delicate. Hope he doesn't get hysterical...
We had one of these losers hired onto our team. Caused no end of trouble for the woman that was supervising him. For less than two weeks. Then he was gone.
Google is much better off without him. By the sounds of it they have big company problems - its easier to hide this kind of idiocy for longer.
The people who didn't read it and assumed it said things it didn't made the toxic work environment - by spreading their assumptions and making it appear as if there was a hostile employee among them, when there wasn't. These people did the equivalent of yellowing "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there wasn't any fire, then blamed him for starting a fire when there was no fire.
What I've seen personally that hurts women in many fields (not just or particularly tech) is the significant minority that take a job, get pregnant, and go on leave for the benefits with no intention of taking the job back at the end of their leave. Meanwhile, the employer is paying their benefits and the higher cost and lower production of a temp -- because they can't hire a replacement permanently, that job has to be there should the employee on leave wish to come back. This continues until the employee's leave ends and she announces she's going to be a full-time mom.
When you've seen this happen a number of times as a business owner, you would come to the conclusion that women of childbearing age are hazardous to your bottom line. You wouldn't come right out and say so, and you'd meet your diversity numbers in other ways such as women over 40 who are unlikely to pull this particular stunt, but it would make anyone hesitant to hire from a class that repeatedly takes advantage of the rules. Since it's illegal to ask if someone intends to get pregnant and quit, it just has to be assumed that some proportion of that demographic is going to pull this stunt.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
It's Managers culture.
Once you become a manager you care more for other managers options than your customers or employees. So whatever their private view as soon as they hear another manager criticising a memo, it spreads like wildfire. I've worked in big and small industries over the last 40 years.
Standard practise in any business sadly.
Are there gender differences between men and women on the type of jobs they go for?
Of course there is!
200 years of cultural learning has put that into place and changing the PC side of it will take a _couple_ of generations to filter down.
Just give it time for the women to come out of School and University and get jobs.
Stuart http://stuarthalliday.com/
Shaming, followed by smearing. My erectile tissue in three places is reacting to the thought.
dominated by women. Now that America is in decline and engineering has been hard hit. The men are suddenly better at CS than the women.
This is very reminiscent of the extreme success of American factories staffed with women in WWII followed by a big backlash from the men who came back from the war to find the women doing a better job than they ever had after the war.
https://youtu.be/XgqUQ17sYm0
Mod this up. Someone PLEASE!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
There is a scene in Zardoz in which the group of "Eternals" gangs up on one of its members and harshly punishes him for his crimethought.
The witchhunt of the Google engineer reminds me of this scene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
that this guy assessed while at Google.
How on earth can his evaluations of female work colleagues performance have any credibility now, after he will have presumably assessed them against male employees for promotions recommendations and such, based on them being biologically inferior, as noted in his manifesto?
And he wonders why he was fired? What an idiot.
RUSH: They can’t be open about what they think. They have to follow the Google groupthink or they’re going to be canned. They’re not allowed to dissent. And yet these are people claiming to be the greatest defenders of First Amendment free speech.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Yeah, expressing an opinion based on science should totally be suppressed at workplaces. Definitely no speaking back to your betters. That job is only yours because of the generosity of the corporation. Truth has no place at work. None at all. Google has spoken!
To quote Kate Bevan, "If you stand up and declare in public that you think a large number of your colleagues are unfit to do the job because of their chromosomes, you're telling your colleagues 'I don't think you're good enough'."
How on earth could any female Google employee that this guy assesses have confidence that he would be fair and judge them on merit, as opposed to their gender? They couldn't after he's admitted to this type of thinking.
And if I was a female Google employee, or any female employee at any company where this guy has worked, and had been assessed for promotions, etc, I would be lawyering up to take legal action against him or the companies.
Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, also had it right when he said, ""To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK."
I'm dying to see this guy defend his position in court and face all the female employees from Google. If I was a female worker at Google I would be lining up to have him say this to my face in court.
If you disagree with your company&s policy the decent thing to do is to quit. I wouldn't work for the KKK for example. In addition I think companies should have the right to hire and fire whom they like. This used to be a position conservatives used to agree with. For example, conservatives want companies to be able to fire black people. Why do they get so upset when someone is fired for annoying their coworkers when they don't care if blacks get fired ?
He didn't publish it, he posted it to an internal forum. My understanding is that it was even a forum for this topic, though not from the particular angle he used.
If I had written that document, I would not expect to be fired. I might have expected no reaction at all, as that is a typical result from suggestions for improvement, of all types.
I think it is conspiratorial to suggest he deliberately martyred himself over this "cause". It is more likely he was just pissed off with working with people he thought were underqualified and he thought he had identified where those underqualified hires were coming from.
If I had been nearby when this happened, I would have expected a reasoned rebuttal and a restatement of policy, not the extreme overreaction that occurred. I think it is likely he was stunned by the response. In any other country he would be automatically protected from arbitrary dismissal of this sort. The USA needs to improve how it treats its workers.
"Prof Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist at Aston University in Birmingham, has studied extensively cognitive differences between men and women. She says that, while Damore pointed to scientific evidence for men and women having different aptitudes and personality traits, he “seemed to miss the point that, even if there were well-established sex differences at any level, they’re always very tiny. Certainly not enough to explain the gender ratios of Google programmers – even if you didn’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of arguing about the science.”
Rippon’s work suggests that, in many cases, the differences between male and female performance, if present, are very small, can disappear with training and are not consistent across cultures."
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are-there-so-few-women-in-tech-the-truth-behind-the-google-memo
If I was a female employee at Google, how could you trust this guy to assess you fairly when he believes you are biologically inferior to a male colleague?
Twisting facts used to be called statistics, now it's called disgruntled angry white male fired from Google.
I bet James Damore and his lawyer will be making lots of money.
Bigot says Bigot stuff at a Non-Bigot company and gets confused that no one sees his Bigot TL;DR email post about Bigot stuff.
Yo fellow honkey mofos, sorry for the double post -- here's the TL;DR segment from swillden's documentary recommendation. https://youtu.be/tiJVJ5QRRUE?t... which summarizes the gender preferences of ONE DAY OLD CHILDREN before the effect of post-birth culture. Also worth it to watch this segment https://youtu.be/tiJVJ5QRRUE?t... which informs us that gender roles are STATIC across ALL studied cultures, implying a biological basis. (Apologies to those who are not honkeys, mofos, or fellows. Especially the non mofos. Cuz it is GOOOOOD to be a mofo)
What if he happens to be wiccan? I could see the literal translation and taking offense at the same...
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Duh! Now, his *feelings* are hurt. No matter that he did not care about anyone else' feelings when he wrote his idiotic screed. Dumbass!!
No side is right on this. Both sides were crass and didn't think what they said through.
And Google is supposed to be the place where even the janitor has a PhD! Why can't anyone there look at this with a level head?
The social rifts in the US run so deep that a civil war seems like a real possibility.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
What's the cost of respect for the human individual?
As in an ACTUAL human being, not an imaginary corporate person?
There are no gawds but profits, and Apple, Google, and a bunch of huge banks are their prophets.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Saying he lied on his resume, he's not a PhD, etc: https://chess.stackexchange.co...
Let's see now. We have an employee who was fired for exercising his first amendment rights. He's been shamed and maligned, perhaps slandered, libeled, or both.
We have an organization which claims it's sole reason for existing is to enforce the human rights recognized by the US Constitution.
Whyin'ell has the ACLU not put their foot into this situation? Are they REALLY supporting the Constitutional rights of citizens or are they the feckless left wing liberals many of us see in them? I'm just wondering. But taking James Damore's obvious first amendment case might do their reputation some good.
{o.o}
Yeah...what do you think about the idea of posting a voice-over of that video in American English? We have access to talent & we operate a studio for our own product demos, so the vocals & mixing would be pro (or at least highly talented intern supervised by a pro). Thoughts? Anyone? This is an EXTREMELY VALUABLE documentary as it is fair, funny, and full of real science. But I need some feedback before I pour company time into this. Anyone have a higher def version? Even if we upload 360 to remain with what is probably Norway TV's copyright parameters for youtube it is better for us to work with a high-def file. Conversion-losses & such. (and there is always conversions at some point). I think this is a hot moment and we could concievably have an english version up by mid next week.
The smart ones are leaving
This guy got exactly what he deserved.
He was brave enough to expose his persona inner fears in a corporate post and now must accept the consequences of his actions.
It seems so many so-called professionals fail to comprehend the basic law of cause and effect.
The effect of his posting non-scientific based personal feelings into the workplace was only those like him, intimidated by gender competition agreed with him while upper management did not.
Lesson 1: If you make the decision to pull down your pants in public, it's your fault if observers laugh and embarrass you for your, short comings. It's no one's fault but your own, so be a man and take responsibility for the results of your actions.
When you read the manifesto, he uses "facts" to defend his conclusions. The facts are indeed "facts." Nothing he describes about women vs men have anything to do with aptitude. I've seen enough crappy men programmers to know it has nothing to do with being male.
In the "black lives matter" movement, opponents site the fact that the biggest problem in black communities is "black on black" violence. OMG, that's horrible, "black on black" violence!! They say this as if it means something. Well, the number one problem in white communities is "white on white" violence!!! See that, statistics being used to make a point that they don't really support.
News flash!!! Men and Women ARE different. Some "men" have difficulty with women. Get over it. 99.9% of the time, the differences are unimportant. Most professions that require skill and dedication require just that, SKILL and DEDICATION. My first computer science teacher was a woman, she was brilliant! It NEVER occurred to me that I should think less of her skills because she was a woman.
Going back to my original statement which you complained about is I believe more pertinent to your complaint. I figured it would be best to lay out the events and ask the important question.
1. Person writes a paper questioning policies and pointing out favoritism and discrimination.
2. Former Google Exec works with Media agent to put out an edited version of that document which removed citations, footnotes, graphs, and sets the headline that translates roughly as Horrible person releases horrible paper inside Google.
3. Google then publicly fires the same horrible person for having such a horrible opinion.
Google knew damn well that items 1,2, and 3 damage this person's ability to find a new job. Not just at Google of course, but anywhere he goes there will be a slew of SJWs harassing the company for hiring the "horrible person with the horrible opinion" and demanding that they too fire the guy.
How are these actions Not Stalinist? Stalinist tactics are to discredit and destroy anyone who dissents and causes harm to your ideology. Prison and execution were part of Stalin's tactics, but certainly not the only part and not the majority. Firing squads are an exclamation point on fear and intimidation tactics, not the majority of them.
Google could have put a stop to this immediately had they simply stood up for their employee and said publicly that he was mischaracterized by the former exec, perhaps even releasing an non redacted version of the paper. Even better addressing a few of his points they felt worth discussion.
Instead, Google pressed the destroy button.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
After hearing from management and leads on their list creations I donâ(TM)t doubt it a bit.
Google owned websites like Blogger allow smear campaigns and stalkers to use their site to troll and harass innocent people. The lies and smear campaigns cause innocent lives to be destroyed and allows extortionists to target their victims unhindered. Google claims to have "report" buttons on tbese pages but anyone who has ever tried to get slanderous lies removed from Blogger knows that Google ignores every complaint! Google is an enemy of the American people and anyone who wants to live in peace and free from intrusion.
This was a measured and reasonable set of observations. Firing Damore was outrageous and immoral. It was just plain lousy google . It was evil.
Oh poor thing, he was "shamed" by Google. He should be "ashamed" of himself the sexist pig loser. Hope he is banned by the tech industry and has to live a troll like existence under a bridge. He also lied about his education, stating he has PhD from Harvard. A-hole!
A few years back, I stopped using Firefox after Brendan Eich was attacked and ultimately evicted from his role as Mozilla CEO just for having dared giving $1000 to proposition 8 a few years earlier.
I left Twitter and Facebook a few months ago after witnessing active censorship and speech control myself, and noticed that these companies were obviously using political orientation as a primary criterion for account suspension. Based on my experience, leaning right put your accounts more at risk than harassing or assaulting women on-line, or even blatantly recruiting for ISIS.
Now I have to consider replacing Google with alternatives too for the same kind of bullshit?
All these are attacks on freedom of though and freedom of speech, plain and simple. What's wrong with Silicon Valley? Do you think freedom is an option or what?
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net