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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.
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.
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
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.