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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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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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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).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.