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Ex-Google Employee's Memo Says Executives Shut Down Pro-Diversity Discussions (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A memo written by a former Google engineer claims that the company's human resources department and a senior vice president pressured him to stop discussing diversity initiatives on company forums, interactions that ultimately motivated him to leave the company. The document, which was written in 2016 and shared publicly this week, provides a striking counterpoint to allegations made by former Google employees James Damore and David Gudeman in a discrimination lawsuit filed against their former employer. Cory Altheide, the former employee who wrote the memo, began work as a security engineer at Google in 2010 and departed the company in January 2016. He recently published his account in a public Google document. Altheide posted several articles and comments to internal discussion groups that promoted diversity in the workplace and was chastised for doing so, he wrote.
...we have another employee suing because he felt discriminated-against because of policies designed to increase diversity.
You can't satisfy all of the people all of the time.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Can you think of a bigger waste of time? I'd shut that shit down too. Do that garbage on your own time, at church, or your famous PTA meetings. Life's too short for this crap. Christ! You can't even flirt anymore. Fucking dementors taking all the joy out of life!
And please note, I am a zenophile. Fucking your own kind/race/nationality is almost gay.
The problem with these pro-diversity talks, is that we're hiring people because they're diverse, rather then if they're skilled and the right fit. If you see a development team who is all white and male, you have SJW's crying discrimination, when in fact, in 99.999% of cases, you have qualified people, the right people working together. People shouldn't be hired because they're diverse, they should be hired because they're the right fit.
If you RTFA what Google execs did was shut down contentious discussions about diversity. Altheide posted pro-diversity comments which apparently tended to spark big flamewars, and he was told to stop.
The fact is that this is a contentious topic in the tech industry, inside Google just as much as everywhere else (including slashdot, obviously). Google employees have lots of internal communications fora which are unpoliced and heavily used, and the employees are not closely monitored, which creates a risk that when contentious topics arise on these internal fora people get sucked in, wasting a lot of time and generating a lot of bad blood, both of which have significant negative impacts on productivity.
One of the core tenets of Google culture is that one should always assume good faith and competence on the part of their colleagues (unless proven otherwise, obviously), but that's a tenet that works much better in a small company that is highly selective in its hires. In most situations it works reasonably well in a big company that is highly selective in its hires... but as you grow the law of averages catches up with you and assholes and incompetents sneak in. This is particularly true around areas that won't come up in an interview, like attitudes about diversity.
As a Google employee, my takeaway is "This is why we can't have nice things." Open discussion fora with light oversight, and a culture of internal transparency and openness are really awesome, but they appear to be incompatible with being a large multinational corporation. Sigh.
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In a system tailored for white supremacists, denying diversity is effectively telling minorities that they should not exist.
Y'all pretend that being "neutral" is not inherently racist, I'm starting to think that's less stupidity and more maliciousness, I bet you KNOW you have white privilege and you're pretending you're all righteous and just only to maintain your white privilege.
White people have enslaved other races for centuries and enjoyed the benefits of doing so. Simply removing slavery doesn't magically undo the centuries of subjugation and abuse, white people today are still benefiting from past slavery and there is also the important issue of justice: white people never truly paid for what they did.
Sorry tech bros, but losing a few job opportunities is a pretty low price compared to the way white people enslaved, raped, massacred and tortured people of color all throughout history. You can complain about being oppressed by minorities when you're in chains, picking their cotton and with your backs full of scars.
Who do you think sold those black people into slavery - news flash - OTHER black people. White privilege indeed.
White people have enslaved other races for centuries and enjoyed the benefits of doing so. Simply removing slavery doesn't magically undo the centuries of subjugation and abuse, white people today are still benefiting from past slavery and there is also the important issue of justice: white people never truly paid for what they did
Assigning collective guilt is one of those bulletproof ways of showing what an asshole you are.
Ezekiel 23:20
the goal of these diversity talks is to get more skilled candidates by any means necessary. Tech Businesses are concerned that women and minorities don't enter tech because of a hostile work environment. Having worked in lots of all male tech shops yeah, they're right. There's a lot of casual sexual harassment that turns women off. What we men call 'locker room talk'.
Now, that said their goals are not noble. The point is to have more people to hire from to depress wages. Period. They're not doing this for diversity or SWJism, they're doing it for cheap labor. As always, follow the money.
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My impression from reading the posts in the filing is that left wingers in Google are not scared. They simply enjoy the power of being the majority that can bully the minority they despise. Like the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment.
(And FWIW where rightwingers have and enjoy abusing that power I find it equally abhorrent. But lately it's been predominantly the left that was lead to temptation.)
Funny how you don't have to talk to most social justice warriors for more than about 5 minutes to see that they're far less interested in achieving anything resembling justice than they are in just plain hurting white men.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
It bothers me that Americans don't understand what the term freedom of speech implies
It bothers me that so many liberals (of all people) don't realize that there's the first amendment, which describes freedom of speech from a legal perspective, and freedom of speech as a general concept, and that the two things can be discussed completely independently.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.