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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."
Of course it was political. How stupid do they think we are?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When facts meet politics, politics win. All it shows is that Google is more concerned about optics than making decisions based on facts.
Gang:
Please do not discuss, or comment in any way, about ongoing issues we have in the courts.
Kthnxbye.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
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.
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.
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.
Encourage the big boring brand to become totally fixated on telling the world about how good it is.
:)
Then look for the people with skills who can work and bring them over to your company.
Is that virtue signalling brand is a really slow, boring place to work?
Your band offers tech and more new tech. The other big brand has long boring meetings about telling the world about how good it is.
What to join a fun, new, dynamic, innovative tech brand? Want to sit in a meeting after boring meeting on the optics of branding and what words to use?
Welcome to an actual tech company that still considers merit and skill? Welcome to the big brand that tells the world about the brand?
Boring big brand meetings on using words all week? A boring big brand that has to stay on message?
Find that fun new tech company thats all about the tech?
Start your own company and get smart people by having no boring meetings
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
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.
The now-infamous “Google memo,” written by engineer James Damore, argued against diversity initiatives at Google and said that female engineers were less capable of leading others.
They must be talking about a different memo. Because his memo did not does say that female engineers are less capable of leading. The closest thing I can find is this:
Women, on average, have more...extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
James Damoore said nothing about women being less capable. Breaking it down, he is nicely say that women tend not to be assholes, and that assholes get leadership positions. Anyone looking at our current sitting president would be forced to agree with him.
If James Damoore gets 1 dollar for every every media outlet that slandered him like this, he could buy Google.
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.
BTW. Try finding a link to this article by searching google
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Could find it on Bing.
... left after Damore was fired due to the fact? I know this might be slightly off-topic, but maybe some Googler could anonymously give a comment on this whole Damore semi-witchhunt thing and how it goes down at Google itself? Like, in real life?
Curious to know.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
worst case he pitches a few million to Demore and his lawyer. Pichai is after bigger fish, to wit: the largely untapped labor pool of female software engineers. There's a dirty joke in there somewhere, but my consideration of it is one of the reasons that labor pool remains untapped.
Now, a better organization could have it's cake an eat it too. e.g. they could keep guys like Damore without driving out women. But I've been in IT for 20 years and I know what a boys club it is. Changing that is _hard_.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Exactly how does this relate to his product performance at Google?
I work with a lot of people that say interesting things in memos, but our organization doesn't fire them. (You know....you might have heard about that thing called a constitution...or whatever...)
You might get a trip to human resources if you threaten people. But stating your views on gender issues or professional issues is not a firable offence.
The best thing that could happen here is to break google up into about 100 companies, maybe seize the boards/CEO's assets.
Put those assets to work in seed startups on power, energy, food, transportation and of course computing and bring back the free market.
All of this money thats being locked up and hid offshore by these CEO's and boards is a waste of human potential really.
We of course have laws that recognize this, but they are not being enforced.
So then next thing after we break up google is to start looking at the judges, political class that broke those laws by not enforcing them.
(Democrat, Republican or otherwise.)
Strip them of their US citizenship. Then let the immigration ICE people handle it. :-)
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Yeah. He needs a publicist to make those points on his behalf, especially Google censoring the story. It'd be fun if they crafted some collectivist doublespeak about Google's power/privileged as a media gatekeeper and that they're the oppressor spreading a false narrative.
Have you worked at any other field? My experience is that IT locker room is not worse than any other non woman controlled filed, except, maybe, academia.
He didn't use capable at all. That word isn't in his entire memo; you may need to read it as there is distressingly little accurate reporting of its contents anywhere on major news sites.
he regrets that people realized it was a politically motivated event. ---------------- FTFY
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Damore is talking about a big 5 personality trait with neuroticism, not a mental illness.
The reason for bringing up different preferences and saying they lead to people developing different average skill levels in groups was to find a non-discriminatory way to make Google more woman-friendly, not to write a bunch of sneaky insults. That is, instead of trying to reject more male candidates, they could try to make the job less isolating than sit in a cube for 60+ hours with minimal interaction.
But people were introduced to it as an "anti-diversity screed" which causes an anchoring bias, even though Damore's goal was to present ideas on how to help women be better represented in tech by making the job nicer. Somehow that point continually gets lost and many stories don't even bother to link to Damore's memo.
That's what I get from reading Damore's complaint. They are alleged to hold segregated events and even hold blacklists of various types, up to and including security alerts when someone with dangerous opinions arrives on a Google campus.
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.
No, not at all. Ironic perhaps. Mostly rather Orwellian and scary. This type of situation is far from uncommon, this is just a high-profile one that made the news. The western world was for a long time a bastion for freedom of thought and expression. With certain opinions being suppressed like this, we seem to be on a path to the type of repression last seen on the other side of the Iron Curtain. His opinions here weren't even hateful or particularly controversial, but to the minority group of people who instigated his firing, they are to be stamped on at all costs. That isn't equality, and that isn't freedom. It's tyranny and suppression.
He's being defended because he was responding to an internal request for increasing diversity, and making a better working place, by doing research (inside his field), and coming up with a very rational piece that fit the bill of the request entirely. Now the internal SJW brigade decided to troll him, creating the hostile environment (this would still just be in the area of "people being told to calm down" and suspension of thread. Except one or more of the SJW brigade decided to _alter_ the memo, then send the edited version out to clickbait journalists, which made the headlines and got the CEO to come back. Nothing Damore did caused that level of problem, the entire thing was a classic antifa style action (spin a circumstance so you make yourself out in the press to be a victim, and make it all emotive, with few facts, and have people hounded by the masses; it's a tried and tested propaganda tactic). The leakers should have been fired (as it wasn't whistle blowing on anything, it was just pure spite) as they caused the whole mess. The lawyers would quite possibly have been wrong if they'd advised HR to get rid of him (thus the lawsuit that's coming Google's way). He definitely wasn't radioactive internally and externally, and certainly woudn't have been a problem if it hadn't been for SJW spin and mob rousing tactics. Have you read the proper memo, or one of the edited ones? The real, original one is well worth reading, as he's saying that women may not want to work in certain environments because as a statistical set, they tend to work better in a different environment, and be happier in said other environment. He put proposals for how to set up such environments as part of the general workplace, so making it more female friendly. Now this is a population set, not an individual; the standard SJW tactic is to conflate population sets with individual behaviour and vice versa, which is an extreme logical fallacy (i.e. you can say as a population set, 99.999% of the human population that has ever lived is now dead. Therefore you're 99.999% dead, and it's ok if I put you in an incinerator for cremation right now). The obvious jerks where are the SJW brigade, for getting in the way of learned discussion (his research was supported by men and women in that particular field who were at the top of the game; the SJWs just had politics and mob rousing on their side, no rational argument) that could have made the world better. I see it so many times that people would prefer to rant and raise mobs because their opinion isn't supported by rational discussion. Much easier to tear down enlightenment that actually work for it. The bullies are the SJW crowd. Trump seems to me to be a right wing version of the left wing rabble rousers. We already have millions of loud-mouth zero-filter trump clones, but lots of them just aren't where you think they are. And the new bullying is not the playground style "I'll beat you up"; people have got cleverer. Much easier to cry "they offended me because of " and have other people do the bullying of your target for you. That SJW variant of PC is the most uncivilised environment I can think of, and they form the biggest jerks in any conversation (I know quite a few of them, and I find them exactly the same as the strong right that I know; tiring to talk to and very difficult to educate on a whole world view).
The question I'd like to hear Google CEO Sundar Pichai answer is "If you learned today the identity of the person who leaked James Damore's internal message, would you fire him (or her)?
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.