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Google CEO Sundar Pichai Says He Does Not Regret Firing James Damore (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded today to the firing of employee James Damore over his controversial memo on workplace diversity, stating that while he does not regret the decision, he regrets that people misunderstood it as a politically motivated event. Speaking in a live conversation with journalist and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher, MSNBC host Ari Melber, and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in San Francisco, Pichai said that the decision to fire Damore was about ensuring women at Google felt like the company was committed to creating a welcoming environment.
"I regret that people misunderstand that we may have made this for a political belief one way or another," Pichai said. "It's important for the women at Google, and all the people at Google, that we want to make a inclusive environment." When pressed by Swisher on the issue of regret, Pichai stated more definitively, "I don't regret it." Wojcicki, who has spoken publicly about how Damore's memo affected her personally, followed up with, "I think it was the right decision."
"I regret that people misunderstand that we may have made this for a political belief one way or another," Pichai said. "It's important for the women at Google, and all the people at Google, that we want to make a inclusive environment." When pressed by Swisher on the issue of regret, Pichai stated more definitively, "I don't regret it." Wojcicki, who has spoken publicly about how Damore's memo affected her personally, followed up with, "I think it was the right decision."
When facts meet politics, politics win. All it shows is that Google is more concerned about optics than making decisions based on facts.
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Yep, a welcoming inclusive environment that excludes some people, heard 'you' the first time. Meanwhile the memo continues to be misconstrued in part or its entirety as necessary.
"Yep, a welcoming inclusive environment that excludes some people"
You say that as if you were making a valid point?
I mean, you can get yourself thrown out and banned from a restaurant, theatre, or store for being a sufficinetly obnoxious assclown. And these are businesses just trying to sell things. They aren't on a mission to create a 'safe space for snowflakes' they just want things to be civil enough that their other customers aren't driven out.
Should the store be criticized for hypocrisy for kicking an obnoxious ass clown who was driving away other customers; if they said it was done because they want their store to be welcoming to visitors.
Is that hypocrisy? Isn't kicking obnoxious jack asses out simply a necessary part of keeping ANY space welcoming?
(I say all that aside from Damore... writing a memo for discussion isn't aggressive, so I'm not siding with google for firing him. But I see your sentiment, implying hypocrisy every time anyone is kicked out of a 'welcoming' or 'inclusive' space no matter how obnoxious they are acting.
Engineering is hard-core. If you mess up, tons of money is lost and people may die. It is not a role for anybody that needs to be "welcome". It is a role for people that do understand things, see past the bullshit and can get things to work. And also for people that leave when the bullshit gets too much. Of course, any actual engineering set-up worthwhile working for will cherish and treasure its engineers, whether male, female or anything else. It just does not matter. Skill, insight and capability do.
Of course, most people, like this "CEO" are incapable of seeing this. If they take over, an engineering company becomes a has-been. Because while a good engineer will always find a reasonable job anywhere, these people depend on scamming people out of their money for sub-par performance and after a while, customers wake up to what is going on.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Of course it was political. How stupid do they think we are?
The level of outrage generated by Damore's memo is not just about Google and their hiring practices, the memo pokes huge holes in the group/identity politics used by the Left. That's why the outrage is so out of proportion and shrill to the point of apoplexy on the Left and why they want Damore pilloried.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The thing is that Google firing Damore appears to have been illegal. He was asked to provide feedback, he wrote a memo describing non-discriminatory ways to meet Google's diversity goals, then the memo was leaked and he was hounded in the press and at the workplace. One of the emails in his complaint is from a supervisor at Google threatening him, after all.
Regarding the broader point, there are philosophical reasons not to have a 'right to not be offended'. The fact that other people were trying to engage in the heckler's veto and make a big fuss to drive out people they disagree with is something that's often being missed her. There are large free speech concerns if people are allowed to silence others by throwing a big enough fuss.
Google is a hostile workplace--for people like Damore. The toxic people who cannot remain civil in the face of disagreement should be the ones who are removed & punished. Anything else will result in a race to the bottom.
Your argument makes no sense. They didn't fire the people that spread the memo outside the forum where the discussion was SUPPOSED to take place.
The problem is the discussion was supposed to be an echo chamber, nobody likes the dude that breaks up a circle jerk. So the 'obnoxious ass clowns' removed the cites and posted the memo far and wide. They should have been fired for that.
After Damore gets done with Google, he has good cases against the 'journalists' that slandered him by editing his memo. Also against any Googlers that altered it then posted it. He should put them _all_ in the poor house.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Of course he doesn't regret it at this time. Nothing has happened yet. Once this goes to trial he might be singing a different tune. It's the little things that tend to set big things in motion. I've been hearing talk of regulating google and facebook for several months now.
Once the trial starts everything that has happened will go on public record. That might be the tipping to make congress ether start regulating google or break up google. The latter being the most likely of the two.
So, he might not regret it now but the fat lady is far from singing on this issue
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I don't agree. He was naive thinking that any SJW scum actually wanted a rational discussion, but his points are mostly valid, at the very least as the starting point for an actually rational discussion.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
When you want to know who has power over you, look only to those who you are not allowed to criticize.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Pichai said that the decision to fire Damore was about ensuring women at Google felt like the company was committed to creating a welcoming environment.
That is very much a political reason...
Speaking of which, here's a copy of the memo and a link to Damore's site, both of which are quite hard to find on Google for some reason, even though other search engines find the site just fine.
It's amazing how many people call it an "anti-diversity screed" who either haven't read it or who badly misconstrue the part where he tries to say that Google could be more welcoming of women by making it so it's not expected to work 60-hour weeks with no human interaction and fail to realize that the overall thrust of the paper is to find non-discriminatory ways to make Google friendlier to women.
Admitting that he should have publicly fired the person who took the non-memo that was actually an internal G+ discussion item and waved it like a bloody flag to clickbait shitposters would be an admission that Damore has a case.
But that is precisely what he should have done. He should have called a town hall meeting, asked the person to come to the stage and publicly fired them without any severance with a stern warning that anyone who decides to go activist and take dirty laundry to the media instead of working through official channels will be punished even harder because now they know that Google won't tolerate it.
He should step aside and let a woman take his job.
And made him a martyr. Had they done nothing, we wouldn't be talking about him anymore
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
In Jet Li's "The One", they had the two prison break scenes in alternate universes - one with Bush as president, the other with Gore.
FFS it feels like we're in an alternate universe now. Going from judging people by the "content of their character" rather than the "color of their skin", we've now institutionalized "diversity" initiatives that insist we diversify and include people based on their immutable characteristics, but exclude people based on their thoughts and ideas.
Sucks to be a gay black conservative nowadays.
We could have 100% women in tech tomorrow, if every man would just identify as a woman. After all, being a woman is all in the mind - because reasons.
Or you can fire the special snowflakes who have a meltdown any time they hear a fact they don't like.
Who's going to be more productive for you as an employee; the "asshole" who has the courage to speak about uncomfortable facts and challenge conventional wisdom with rational analysis, or the emotional disaster whose response to hearing inconvenient facts is to cry and take time off work?
You did not actually read the memo, did you.,
Amonst other things, Danmore said that women in general are more prone to neurosis.
You will disagree, because that statement is politically incorrect. It does not matter what the actual evidence is. We deny what we do not want to hear.
When engineers deny what they do not want to hear, things do not work. Bridges fall down. So there is a different psychology between an engineer and most other people. Facts actually matter in engineering.
Details also matter. Danmore never said that all women are more prone to neurosis. Just that more are. Those are two different statements. But to a non engineer, they both mush to the same thing "Women...neurosis".
Hence the disconnect.
White privilege
Nope
but you *can* fire the biggest assholes and keep them from making women feel like they don't belong there.
Advocating firing the person who in good faith is attempting to offer suggestions for getting more women into the field makes *YOU* the biggest asshole.
Because his feedback wasn't required to be in APA format. If the Google/SJW response would have been along the lines of, "Hmm. Interesting arguments, let's develop these thoughts some more. What does the literature say?" then you'd have an argument. Instead, the double-plus-ungood-wrongthink was met with "Rabble! Rabble! Rabble!" and pitchforks.
Creating a welcoming environment for everyone is a laudable, non-political goal.
Making women "feel" like you are "committed to" creating a welcoming environment specifically for them is bullshit politics.
I suspect that you don't see the difference between those two things, but it's pretty glaring.
When I was growing up, we were heavily indoctrinated in school with MLK-style antiracism. That is, if you judge someone based on the color of their skin then you're both a scumbag and an idiot. That was uncontroversial at the time and remains a core value for me and a whole lot of other people.
How times have changed! Now the fake progressive media establishment, backed by powerful factions of the corporate and juridicial oligarchies, DEMAND that everyone be racist. To them, anyone who follows the teachings of MLK is an "asshole", or perhaps literally a Nazi. Who deserves to be silenced, fired, assaulted, and possibly tossed in the Gulag or murdered.
One way to look at this is a shibboleth. If a man can take an obviously false statement and proclaim it loudly and energetically as the one and only TRUTH - well, that man has real faith.
The memo embarrassed the company. Employees shouldn't embarrass their companies.
An employee who does it once, will probably do it again.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
> as punishment for past wrongs.
Worse, it's punishment for past wrongs committed by OTHER PEOPLE, whom in many cases are already dead, and usually have been since before the people being attacked were even born. And it somehow comes as a surprise when resentment and pushback happens.
Example: No one in my generation, or the next generation, or the next generation, had anything to do with Jim Crow laws. They were ended in 1965, the very same year GenX is considered to begin. So only a very tiny portion of my own generation was even alive, and they were all drooling on themselves in cribs at the time. The previous generation (boomers) was contemporary to Jim Crow, but had no power yet. You have to go all the way back to the "greatest generation" of the WW2 era to get to the youngest generation that had political power to maintain those laws and do any oppressing of anyone. But then, that was also the generation whose better examples dismantled Jim Crow. And most of them are already dead anyway. To get to the people actually to blame, the ones who set it up, you have to go back two or three more generations, with zero living members. But oh, does the SJW wing of the left want to blame and punish me and mine for Jim Crow and even slavery.
Well. The hell with that. I'm not going to mistreat anyone who doesn't mistreat me first. You want to promote yourself, lift yourself up, devote yourself to whatever cause, more power to you. All I ask is to be left in peace: I mind my business you mind yours. But if your idea of lifting yourself up includes tearing me down then yes, I'll protect my own interests and, to use the SJW's own parlance: resist.
Damore didn't leak the memo, so it wasn't him who embarrassed Google.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Exactly. We've reached an age where, enabled by idiots like Google's CEO, truth doesn't actually matter. Well, maybe according to Oprah, "your truth" matters...whatever the hell that means.
Here's a simple fact for instance: the distribution of intelligence among women is "taller" than that of men. That means that women's average intelligence clusters around the mean and that men have more outliers. In English, geniuses are much more likely to be men than women. Also, severely retarded people are more likely to be men as well. It so happens that flatter distribution works both ways.
At this point, the SJW crowd is screaming "sexist" for some reason (ignoring the 'both ways' part of all that in the same way they ignore women being under-represented in the field of garbage collecting) and as usual they're totally missing the point. It is not impossible for a woman to be a genius, and nothing about those statements even comes close to saying that it is. Clearly there are and have been women geniuses, as well as females who are severely developmentally retarded. There just aren't as many of them relative to the size of our population. The smartest person in the world right now may well be a female and nothing about the above statements precludes that because such statements are only applicable to large groups and not to small groups or individuals.
It does mean, though, that if you truly limit your hiring to people who are way above average intelligence, you are statistically likely to have a hard time populating your staff with a 50/50 mix of men and women while maintaining very high and equal qualifications, because the statistically natural mix of such a group would have 7 - 8 times as many men in it. Again, that doesn't mean it's impossible, just that it's less likely across larger groups repeated multiple times.
I must be really sexist for pointing all that out though. Guess Sundar would want to fire me, were I ever stupid enough to work for him. Actually, fuck Sundar because he's either being dishonest or he's an idiot. Since he's a CEO in modern America, either or both are likely to be true.
Under California law, it is explicitly illegal to fire someone for his political opinions, but perfectly legal to fire someone to avoid creating a hostile work environment (indeed, if no lesser measures suffice to prevent/cure a hostile work environment, it's effectively obligatory).
Therefore, whatever the actual motive for the firing, Google is going to say it was about a hostile work environment, not political opinions. There's a pending lawsuit, after all.
Our group? We're not a fucking hive mind. We're hundreds of millions of individuals from all around the world, most of whom are not billionaires or presidents.