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Former Google Employee Files Lawsuit Alleging the Company Fired Him Over Pro-Diversity Posts (theverge.com)
According to court documents filed today, a former Google engineer is suing the company for discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination. "Tim Chevalier, a software developer and former site-reliability engineer at Google, claims that Google fired him when he responded with internal posts and memes to racist and sexist encounters within the company and the general response to the now-infamous James Damore memo," reports The Verge. From the report: Chevalier said in a statement to The Verge, "It is a cruel irony that Google attempted to justify firing me by claiming that my social networking posts showed bias against my harassers." Chevalier, who is also disabled and transgender, alleges that his internal posts that defended women of color and marginalized people led directly to his termination in November 2017. He had worked at Google for a little under two years. Notably, Chevalier's posts had been quoted in Damore's lawsuit against Google -- in which Damore sued the company for discrimination against conservative white men -- as evidence Google permitted liberals to speak out at the company unpunished. Chevalier's lawsuit alleges that his firing is, in fact, a form of punishment. The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco County Superior Court and Chevalier is seeking damages for lost wages, emotional distress, punitive damages, and injunctive relief against those alleged harmful acts. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Through Chevalier’s conversations with his manager and Human Resources, he learned that Google defines appropriate workplace speech by the standard of what someone with a cisgender, heterosexual, white, male, upper-middle-class background would say.
This is just the opposite end of the spectrum from James Damore. Apparently Chevalier feels that this kind of enforcing of stereotypes is ok because all cisgender, heterosexual, white, male, upper-middle-class people would say the same thing.
Regardless of you gender, race, beliefs, whatever, there are some unspoken but very obvious rules about what you say and don't say on company time. Especially in written form. But apparently some people didn't get the memo..
Of course they do real work. Someone has to find and demonitize all the conservative YouTube channels ...
I think the main issue here is that Google doesn't want people arguing this stuff on company time instead of working. Fighting against social ills like sexism and discrimination is a noble cause, but if employees are spending half their time doing so instead of working, the company will suffer.
Better to rid of toxic people on both sides than to allow them to rile up others and cause big social problems within the company. A lot of times a group of people will work quite well as a team until politics is brought up, then it's practically World War Three.
Just quickly post some things like these. Not saying this is what happened here, but seems to be a flaw in the system.
It is also quite possible the actual problem here is these companies having styled themselves too much as a "home" and "welcoming place" in order to attract talented people (and have them work long hours uncompensated) and people working there are less and less aware that it is a place of work. You know, one of those places were you keep politics out and are expected to behave professionally all the time ...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
this is getting magnified by two thing:
a). It's click bait. I predict 300+ comments on this post if not more.
b). These lawsuits are being funded by the Republican party. This is a major political issue for the Republican party. It's part of a larger narrative they're building that white males are under assault.
Now, the fact is white males are... by declining wages due to outsourcing, H1-Bs, economic crashes caused by widespread deregulation, vulture capital firms killing off their jobs, etc, etc); but they're no more so than any other member of the working class. It's basically the right wing version of identity politics. Something to distract from the broader issues and keep the various groups of working class people at each other's throats. A caste system.
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I know a dude who works there and he feels like he's undercover at this point, there's constant inane memos about excessive SJW stuff.
Sure, obviously they do actual work in the place, but the diversity and equality group or whomever they are, really seem to have their fingers in every pie, fussing over the most inane bullshit.
A while back I did some consultancy work for a company that made gaming machines. It was actually kind of interesting to go out to the companies who used them. Most of them still had a few engineers who were understandably fed up that their company had brought in an outside solution instead of the in house one they'd championed. However they had loads of executive types who spent their time having boozy pub lunches, usually ending in an angry political rant.
It reminded me a bit of the idea of a 'resource curse', the notion that 'that countries with an abundance of natural resources (like fossil fuels and certain minerals), tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources'.
It's possible that there's something analogous happening with Google - once they worked out how to make piles of cash from ads and not from developing new software it all started to stagnate.
Or look at Valve. Valve used to make some very interesting video games, peaking around the Orange Box with Half Life II and Portal. However now they've got an income from Steam they too seem to produce less than they used to.
In Google's case it seems like they've hired a lot of smart people fresh out of good universities but most of them get stuck in a profoundly stagnant environment. So the politics starts up. Interestingly in Google it's not normal company politics - trying to bring down your rivals at work - but rather the sort of identity politics you see at elite universities. And a few people on the other side pointing out how silly this stuff is.
So the sort of insanity that played out at Evergreen and Harvard and Yale now plays out at Google.
I think the reason Google can survive it for as long as it does is that it's profitable mostly because of ad revenues, not producing new software. Android and Chrome are free after all, and have become the default choice like Windows and Internet Explorer used to be.
I.e. the resource curse has allowed them to survive despite having a culture which is more about student politics than having to deliver anything to critical customers on time.
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One might think the unwanted attention from outsider interlopers has forced Google's hand and they're quietly trying to clean house. Then again, one George Wallace and one Bull Connor and for two generations most of America has been assuming automatically all white Southerners are racist to the bone. So maybe Google doesn't get out from under this one for a good long while either.
How the hell do you "identify" as disabled. You either are able-bodied or you aren't.
There can be literally hundreds of objective measures of physical performance that can screen for physical infirmity. Some of them are even codified into laws and regulations, like what criteria you have to meet to get a handicap placard for your car or whether you're capable of operating a motor vehicle at all.
This phrasing is retarded. And while I'm at it...what the hell is 'queer' exactly?
"Get back to work" and "it's not about your feelings" from a hardcore Leftist. Gosh, funny how things do a complete 180 when it's someone whose points you don't want to listen to.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You Googlers with your diversity over sanity screeds and pushes created a situation where someone like Tim could exist largely unchecked. I wouldn't care if this was some generic CaliCorp, but Google has substantial cultural impact on tech culture everywhere.
When diversity is a priority, being Trans and Disabled puts someone in an entirely separate class. Tim could get away with almost anything, and it is surprising he got fired at all even after very egregious and appalling behavior. Disadvantage person my ass, he is using his social privileged status to shit all over other people for no good reason.
This is inevitable consequence of abandoning merit to promote diversity - you end up with useless or worse people that get in the way of doing good work and getting along.