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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.
>provides a striking counterpoint
I don't think so, it looks more like managers have their idea of how they want "diversity" to operate (for diversity read tokenism, PR nonsense, and a complete obedience to management ideas at all times).
*ironic captcha == 'complied' :P
Altheide posted several articles and comments to internal discussion groups that promoted diversity in the workplace and was chastised for doing so, he wrote.
Given that was exactly the same as what Damore did, I don't see how it's a counterpoint. Or is it that Gizmodo only approves of Altheide's diversity and Damore's diversity is "wrong"?
Fortunately, there's a lawsuit by Damore and Gudeman against Google happening, so it's quite likely the matter will be explored fully and we can all enjoy finding out what's been going on.
There is a line between discussion and Trolling.
Yes, and he even agreed with google that some of the comments his discussions generated should not be tolerated.
Damores article essentially attempts to justify centuries old gender bias with "science." Most people in the scientific community, including myself, were reaching for the popcorn and fascinated to see just how deep he would go trying to prove a pretty tenuous point.
https://www.wired.com/story/th...
Damore makes a pretty sophomoric error several times, conflating gender and sex, but if that controversy isnt enough he starts flogging nature vs nurture. I myself being an evolutionary biologist nearly joked from laughter on my jiffy pop.
Im sure google would win this in court, however its cheaper and easier to settle out of court with the usual no-fault, no-deny and a litany of contractual boilerplate that keeps anyone from speaking of this ever again. Expect this guy to tour Fox news a few times and write a book in a few years, but the idea that he will ever face summary execution in front of a jury of actual scientists is unfortunately not going to happen.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Maybe Altheide was trying to discuss REAL diversity, and not the faux diversity that stops at the color of your skin and the shape of your genitals that's so fashionable at Google?
In other words, a REAL discussion?
You know, kinda like Damore did?
Take a look at Exhibit B in the filing and judge for yourself: https://www.scribd.com/documen...
Quite a few of the posts are saying if you support Trump -- or even Republicans in general -- you are a Nazi and deserve everything that comes your way, from demotion and firing to fists in your face, complete with instructions how to punch.
Very simple, if you're not completely with us, you are a Nazi, and it's your damn fault.
Ah yes, 'micro-aggression' like man-spreading or fartrape. Fartrape is "Farting louder the man is using passive-aggressive violence to position himself as dominant, this intimidates the woman to subconciously not release as much flatulence and thus the woman fearing for her safety doesn't far as loud as a sign of submissiveness, this in turn contributes to rape culture and women being opressed" - Ahsleigh Ingle, CUPE Leader & Teacher #fartrape was a trending tag on Twitter at one point. People were accused of it and then harassed for farting by people they didn't know online.
There is room for some legitimate discussion there, though, because Googles diversity policy wasn't working - they weren't meeting their quota.
There's one point in Damore's memo that I have first-hand experience with (for whatever an aneecdote's worth). The job of an SDE is technical in all aspects, but it's both abstract (coding) and interpersonal (design discussion, selling people on your ideas, creating consensus). When I interviewed with Google, the focus was more on the abstract than any other place I've ineterviewed (which is a wide sample). Even the design questions weren't design discussions, they were just me talking.
That experience convinced me to walk away from Google (well, there were other danger signs too), for fear the job might actually be like that. And I'm a very nerdy introvert.
If you want to recruit more women and meet your quota, change your damn interview focus Google! Sure, a chunk of the interview needs to be purely "prove you can code", but the rest should give both sides confidence that it will be fun to collaborate on problem solving, because that's at least half of the job.
Anyway, that sort of discussion would seem useful to have, since they aren't meeting their goals with their current approach.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The basic mistake he makes repeatedly is to assume that the variations the papers discuss have vastly more effect and influence than they actually do.
He actually states that the variations he discusses don't have a major effect, that the effect just causes that attaining the holy grail of a 50/50 split to not be quite possible to attain.
He also offers way to modify the work place so that those effects can be further diminished and thus promotes pro-women measures to put in place so that Google can get closer to said 50/50 split. AKA : He was FOR diversity. He just thought Google was going about it the wrong way.
And yet here you are, screeching at him.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
I get the impression that you're siding with Google management rather than with Cory Altheide on this one.
Neither, that is in FTA. I am not sure how to take the supposition: "Employee's Memo Says Executives Shut Down Pro-Diversity Discussions" when said Employee agrees that part of the discussion that resulted should not be tolerated. It seems that Google and Altheide agree with the course of action: "should not be tolerated". It seems the only difference is that he seems to want a scalpel, banning individuals, while google used a grenade, stopping the discussion.
I am still looking at the situation to make an opinion.
If you read my comment history I am not a fan of censorship in any regard and recognize that there is a point in which we force private companies to protect the rights of individuals. I err on the side of caution because if the culture rejects free speech in their capacity then the law will soon follow.
He didn't assume the magnitude and influence of the effect. The difference has been measured for decades in observed data over thousands of studies. If those opposed to Damore could only find two paper authors on the topic who disagreed with him, then that sounds like a pretty strong validation of his claims, not a rebuttal. Heck, I could throw a rock blindfolded and hit two climate change denying studies.
Why is stating that women have a higher rate of neurosis a fireable offense. But stating that men have a higher rate of schizophrenia is not?
The problem Damore's case shows us is that too many people are judging the merits of these statements based on which group they portray in a negative light. Not upon the objective validity of the statement. If you wanted to counter Damore's statements on neurosis and gender, the logical (quickest and easiest) way to do it would be as I've done above - showing that there are other psychological gender differences which work against men biologically dominating an occupation. Then you can claim that perhaps these effects cancel out so a 50/50 gender distribution really should be expected.
But that's not what Damore's opponents do. They instead try to debunk measurable, objective data that's well-established science. They cannot stand to hear anything negative said about a group they care for (i.e. non-white, non-male, non-conservative, non-religious). So their gut instinct is that the statement that neurosis is more common among women "must be" wrong, and they conclude disproving it will be the quickest route to disproving him.
This is the problem with affirmative action. It creates an atmosphere where certain types of discrimination (e.g. against males, whites and asians) are acceptable, when the actual goal is to eliminate discrimination. Don't get me wrong, affirmative action has a valid mathematical basis - in engineering (underdamped system) we use it to force a system to change states more quickly. But it comes at the cost of a twitchy response and overshoot, resulting in taking longer to settle down to a steady state.
Basically affirmative action lowers (or eliminates) the inhibition against discrimination against white males to force the system away from being white male-dominated more quickly (underdamped). The things in Exhibit B (a lot of anti-white, anti-male vitriol) are a natural (albeit undesirable) result, which is going to push the system to eventually overshoot. At which point there's going to be a pushback, which will cause the system to swing back the other way, overshoot again, repeat. This is what you get when you try to fight discrimination with discrimination (aka affirmative action). One type of discrimination which used to be tolerated (discrimination against non-whites and women) gets replaced by tolerance for a different type of discrimination (against whites and men), until it overshoots and we'll eventually go back to tolerating discrimination against non-whites and women again, repeat over and over until the oscillation dies out and we finally arrive at our goal of equality.
As an alternative, a comprehensive non-discrimination policy (critical or overdamping - i.e. all types of discrimination are bad, so both discrimination and affirmative action are banned) takes longer to reach the desired level (equality), but it doesn't suffer from oscillations and reaches a steady state more quickly. The time constant here is people's lifetimes. By having affirmative action policies, we've taught a generation from the time they were kids that it's OK to discriminate against whites and men. They will hold those opinions and attitudes until they die, and are replaced by a younger generation which was taught differently. So when the system eventually overshoots, it'll take another generation to correct for that, and so on with each overshoot. And after a few dozen generations we'll stabilize at the desired steady state. Whereas the comprehensive non-discrimination policy would stabilize at the desired steady state somewhere between 1-2 generations.
I know which one I prefer, but this is something we as a society have to decide which path we want to take.
All the AA regulations say/do is that a company has to keep records of it's hiring decisions. At no point in time did AA have quotas. That was a myth. This isn't to say individual institutions might not have done quotas, but it wasn't AA that made them do it. It was a private decision (and also one that, had anyone bothered, could be challenged and ruled illegal. Yes, being a White Male is a protected class).
You're fury is being directed towards Affirmative Action so you'll ignore the real reason why you're not getting ahead: That your productivity no longer keeps pace with your wages.
The point is to divide the working class into castes of some kind. America does it with race. India does it with a literal caste system. Japan used Buddhism to create an underclass deemed 'unclean' and the UK had classes. It's the same pattern over and over and over again. The aristocracy is few but they claim anywhere from 50%-80% of the wealth. You can't do that unless you divide and conquer. Don't fall for it.
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