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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.
>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.
This isn't exactly a "counter-point". From an article about Damore's case:
“We want to be inclusive of people not ideas” one employee identified as Alon Altman wrote in a message included in the lawsuit. Damore says that sentiment was backed up at an Inclusion and Diversity Summit he attended in June, when he was told by Google employees the company does not value “viewpoint diversity,” but actively strives for “demographic diversity.”
This new memo seems to reinforce this perspective. It might not be illegal or anything, but this memo definately doesn't "counter" the claims included in damore's suit.
This whole diversity/gender debate thing is getting and more into an absurd territory of epic proportions. It's quite some time ago that I've been able to take larger parts of mainstream contributions to this debate seriously.
To me a very welcome addition of reason and level-headedness was the open letter of ~100 women of influence and fame in France speaking out against #MeToo, it's totalitarianism and a false pretense of feminism published two days ago in Le Monde (basically the French nyt) that went largely unnoticed/uncovered by mainstream media. These ladies deserve a medal or something and they deserve to be heard, despite mainstream media trying to ignore them.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
We know exactly what Damore's memo said. There are no quotes from Altheide's posts in the article, except thread titles (“If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention" and "Just Asking Questions").
Why do I have the suspicion that these posts weren't as well reasoned (and backed up by cited scientific research) as Damore's memo?
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.
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?
FTFA:
Over the course of several months, employees engaged in a debate about gender representation at Google in an internal thread titled “If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention.” The debate became contentious, Altheide said in his memo, and had to be shut down by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president of ads and commerce, and Urs Holzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure. . . .
Ramaswamy wrote: “Google is not a debate club or a philosophy class. We are a workplace and we have an obligation to make sure our discussions remain respectful. Debates around topics like product excellence can support a wide variety of viewpoints and are great to have. I don’t think the same can be said for debates around sensitive issues such as gender, religion, race, or sexual orientation.”
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
There is always someone who has to complain about how they are treated. It's a job, and if you don't like it move on. What I do find really interesting is the image Google is showing to the world. It appears Google wants their employees to fit their mold and not question. In the case of diversity, if you question for or against it doesn't matter. What matters is what Google HR is pushing. Remember: HR is there for the company, not the employee. I would be worried for Google and this image as the best talent doesn't want anyone telling them how to think. That's the whole point. Allow your employees to think big and out there. This will hurt Google either way. Need to do some triage.
Damores article essentially attempts to justify centuries old gender bias with "science."
Except it did nothing of the sort. What he ATTEMPTED to do was say, if females and males are biologically different, what we can do to improve the workplace environment for females? He may have been ham-fisted about it but that was the obvious intent. It was a paper focused on perceived environmental issues that he thought worked against women, and how he thought might be corrected... a great place to start a discussion on where he was right and wrong, not such a great place to start a series of violent threats followed by immediate termination.
Im sure google would win this in court, however its cheaper and easier to settle out of court
*I'm* sure that Damore will win, and it's refreshing to see that deep down even the most obtuse SJW inherently recognizes the obviousness of his case and thew wrongness of Google for immediate termination over it, thus also predicting victory... how many millions do you think he will get to further his efforts on recognition of gender differences, I wonder.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually it is. Freedom of speech means exactly that: Freedom from consequences. At least freedom from consequences from the government.
It has never meant anything else.
Anything else is like the old joke:
Is there freedom of speech in the USSR?
In principle, yes. But there may not be much freedom after the speech.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How much money did you pay for that brainwashing?
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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Sex is a trait of people, gender is a trait of nouns or pronouns.
No, wait, those are the 20th century definitions.
Gender is what you feel you are, sex is what other people feel when they feel your body.
No, wait, that's offensive and patriarchic.
I give up. What is the difference between the two, as recently redefined by identity activists?
As a scientist myself:
There are entire fields dedicated to studying the psychological and neurophysiological differences between men and women. Denying that there may be biological differences with regard to behavior between the two sexes because it's not politically correct in the current climate is ignorant and unscientific.
However, I think Damore pinned too much emphasis on the nature argument; it didn't help that the media went berserk on that point because it makes for a more controversial headline.
Beyond the controversy, there are many competing hypotheses that could explain why women aren't represented in tech beyond oppression and discrimination.
The major points in this issue ought to be: why is it necessary to discriminate against certain groups to promote others? Are there alternative explanations as to why there isn't gender parity in tech, when there is in e.g. chemistry, medicine, stats, and some engineering fields? To what extent should a hiring process go to correct real or perceived imbalances in the workplace?
This is very reminiscent of the Ivy League debate going on right now, where Asians are claiming that there is discrimination against them for being too successful.
And here is the actual document, so you don't have to scroll thru the Gizmodo clickbait. https://www.documentcloud.org/...
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
The right have controlled America since Clinton took office by moving the Democratic party right to forge the alliance that won him the election. They own the State legislatures, the House, Senate and Presidency. Even Obama was pretty right of center. I think you're mistaking "Seeing a lot of left wing social issues on TV and in movies" with real political power. The only thing the left hasn't lost ground on in the last 30 years is gay rights. Every other issue (Abortion, Gun Control, Healthcare, minimum wage, the Wars, economic regulation, etc) they've been beaten back. Even the ACA was a desperate and lousy compromise and the left giving up on Single Payer once again.
Part of the trouble is when Clinton moved the Democratic party right the Republicans had to follow suit in order to maintain their brand. That's a big part of where the hard right shift came from. It's why you see folks like Roy Moore winning primaries and only losing the election because of a sex scandal (and even then only by 1.5 points).
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> the only way to be just is to account for the historical oppression that whites have inflicted on people of color.
Who cares about being 'just'?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Unfortunately he was brainwashed by the U.S. public education system - so that means that you and I paid for his brainwashing.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
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.
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).
This is what is cause "plausible deniability". We didn't TELL them to use quotas, but we would sure as hell have used those statistics against them in any lawsuit that came around. How do you provably show that you do not discriminate against minorities? You show that you hire and promote minorities just like majority. You can't just say, "but...but...we have some black managers and female engineers." The SJWs will immediately turn to the statistics.
The same problem exists when declaring that one is not a racist. Somehow it is a negative to proclaim that you have close associations with minorities. But, how else do you fight back against the claims of racism?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The right own virtually all forms of government in this country. And don't kid yourself, Google is a mega corp. They're not terrible left wing themselves. Not being homophobic does not not make you left wing.
And the media has a strong right wing bias on economic issues. There was never any serious discussion about the wars and they colluded with the Government to avoid showing soldier's caskets coming home. They worked hard to sell the Walstreet bail out and they're working hard to sell Republican tax cuts for the wealthy while ignoring Paul Ryan going around talking about entitlement reform (read: ending SS & Medicare for anyone under 55). The Media is hard right on the economy, and we shouldn't be surprised. Look who owns them.
Reality denial is a strange thing to witness.
You're saying the media was complicit in working for the OBAMA administration for years and then you pretend that they are "selling the tax cuts" when they have been constantly misrepresenting them as precisely "tax cuts for the rich" when they are in fact tax cuts for everyone. The poor being ALSO recipients of them.
If anything, you're just further proving the media's liberal and left wing bias here. They were willing to work with the Obama administration, to hide any and all moral and ethical wrongs from a Democrat presidency, while attempting to sabotage a Republican one. That's clear left wing bias.
You're either blind to your own biases or you're being malicious in trying to hide your side's biases. We have eyes. We can see. Also : Big corporations are major actors, moreso than actual governements. Who do you think really bank rolls DC and policy ? Big pockets with big lobby groups.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM