Slashdot Mirror
Google's 'Bro Culture' Led To Harassment, Argues New Lawsuit By Software Engineer (siliconvalley.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Mercury News:
As a young, female software engineer at male-dominated Google, Loretta Lee was slapped, groped and even had a co-worker pop up from beneath her desk one night and tell her she'd never know what he'd been doing under there, according to a lawsuit filed against the Mountain View tech giant... Lee's lawsuit -- filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court -- alleges the company failed to to protect her, saying, "Google's bro-culture contributed to (Lee's) suffering frequent sexual harassment and gender discrimination, for which Google failed to take corrective action."
She was fired in February 2016 for poor performance, according to the suit... Lee started at the company in 2008 in Los Angeles and later switched to the firm's Mountain View campus, according to the suit, which asserts that she "was considered a talented and rising star" who received consistently "excellent" performance reviews. Lee claims that the "severe and pervasive" sexual harassment she experienced included daily abuse and egregious incidents. In addition to making lewd comments to her and ogling her "constantly," Lee's male co-workers spiked her drinks with whiskey and laughed about it; and shot Nerf balls and darts at her "almost every day," the suit alleges. One male colleague sent her a text message asking if she wanted a "horizontal hug," while another showed up at her apartment with a bottle of liquor, offering to help her fix a problem with one of her devices, refusing to leave when she asked him to, she alleges. At a holiday party, Lee "was slapped in the face by an intoxicated male co-worker for no apparent reason," according to the suit.
Lee resisted reporting an employee who had grabbed her lanyard and grazed her breasts -- and was then written up for being uncooperative. But after filing a report, "HR found her claims 'unsubstantiated,' according to the suit. 'This emboldened her colleagues to continue their inappropriate behavior,' the suit says.
"Her fear of being ostracized was realized, she claims, with co-workers refusing to approve her code in spite of her diligent work on it. Not getting her code approved led to her being 'labeled as a poor performer,' the suit says."
She was fired in February 2016 for poor performance, according to the suit... Lee started at the company in 2008 in Los Angeles and later switched to the firm's Mountain View campus, according to the suit, which asserts that she "was considered a talented and rising star" who received consistently "excellent" performance reviews. Lee claims that the "severe and pervasive" sexual harassment she experienced included daily abuse and egregious incidents. In addition to making lewd comments to her and ogling her "constantly," Lee's male co-workers spiked her drinks with whiskey and laughed about it; and shot Nerf balls and darts at her "almost every day," the suit alleges. One male colleague sent her a text message asking if she wanted a "horizontal hug," while another showed up at her apartment with a bottle of liquor, offering to help her fix a problem with one of her devices, refusing to leave when she asked him to, she alleges. At a holiday party, Lee "was slapped in the face by an intoxicated male co-worker for no apparent reason," according to the suit.
Lee resisted reporting an employee who had grabbed her lanyard and grazed her breasts -- and was then written up for being uncooperative. But after filing a report, "HR found her claims 'unsubstantiated,' according to the suit. 'This emboldened her colleagues to continue their inappropriate behavior,' the suit says.
"Her fear of being ostracized was realized, she claims, with co-workers refusing to approve her code in spite of her diligent work on it. Not getting her code approved led to her being 'labeled as a poor performer,' the suit says."
TIL my coworkers are harassing me and I've been harassing them, every day too. In fact, one day I'm going to get as good at it as that guy with the really good aim who always seems to get me on the head.
This has become a nation of schizophrenics. I'm not able to believe that both this woman's sob-story and James Damore's sob-story are both true. At some point in the information pipeline, data is being distorted, or wholesale invented. And folks are surprised that Americans don't trust their media, and elect con-men celebrities to high office.
It strikes me as odd that James Damore was immediately fired for his writing, but other Google employees apparently engage in direct, physical harassment without consequence.
Perhaps the PC police fear the spread of wrongthink more than the actual crimes themselves.
Not saying it didn't happen, but if these actions were so pervasive why was she not able to gather any evidence at all? Doesn't she have a smartphone?
25 years ago someone in my office told a dirty joke. A female employee overheard it, reported it to HR, and we all went through harassment training.
In other words, there is no fucking way on this planet that Damore gets fired for suggesting in a memo that their diversity program is misguided, and all these events happened to one woman and nothing was done.
BS. Complete and utter crap. I do not believe her for one second.
Posting stories like this is irresponsible.
Good. You need to toughen up. You need to learn to defend yourself in simple social situations without calling in an authority.
Your emotions do not matter. You need to be more pragmatic. You need to undertake social sanctions against people who wrong you, not legal sanctions.
You are polluting our society with your self-centeredness. If you can't manage your own personal life, as you have already proven, you need to be expelled. You are rotten.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
I'm almost hesitant to describe this because it makes me wonder if former co-workers of mine read this site and will know what environment I'm talking about. Frequently, one co-worker who was eventually promoted to be a Director would often loudly ask questions like "Does it make you gay if _______?" and what went in the blank was always quite inappropriate and sometimes quite disturbing. There were also frequently mentions of sex acts like like Dirty Sanchez and Hot Carl's. If you don't know what those are, DO NOT look them up unless you want to be grossed out. Management knew this type of behavior was common as did HR and yet they looked the other way. In fact it was a running joke "Don't tell HR". The best part of it all is that you were compelled to join in this sophomoric behavior lest you be ostracized from the group, overlooked for promotions, etc. Absolutely filthy. Sometimes I wonder if Idiocracy is truly upon us.
We'll make great pets
I'm not a woman, and I wasn't sexually harassed, but I worked at a large biotech company in the SF Bay Area where for several years I had great reviews, I became the department's primary point of contact for one of the two segments of that business unit, I was given all of the projects that were large/complex/time sensitive because I always got them done... Then my manager's boss forced one of her personal friends on the department, a master manipulator, and true to form, it wasn't more than a couple of months before the complaints started rolling in as she set her sights on my job. Over the course of 6 months, I complain to my manager multiple times, alleging harassment on the part of my coworker, and his response is to retaliate against me. I was forced to sign a written warning, where he verbally told me he had made up a complaint from another employee in a different department. I go to the HR department, and they tell me not to worry about it and to just let it go. So I take it to the company's Ethics Office (sort of like an HR department that only investigates possible wrongdoing within the company) and despite being the one who brought the issue to their attention, I'm treated like the asshole and then fired two days later, in part because my complaint was considered "unsubstantiated."
I feel for this woman, and her mistake, like mine, was in going to the HR department instead of straight to California's DFEH. You file a complaint with them alleging some of these things, and make sure the head of HR, your manager, your manager's manager, and maybe even your manager's manager's manager, all know that you have filed this complaint, odds are they will be tripping over one another trying to resolve the problems quickly because they don't want a government agency sniffing around and finding any number of other illegal activities taking place that they turn a blind eye to.
Based on all the stories coming out recently about Google, it sounds like the company has definitely become a victim of its own success. Any time a company gets sufficiently large, these kinds of things happen. Employees aren't seen as human beings, just ID numbers in a database table, and any one of them is expendable if they start getting full of themselves, thinking silly things like they deserve to be treated like a human being and in accordance with state and federal law.
I got into programming as a kid in the 80s, university in the 90s and programming as a day job ever since. I absolutely love reading these insane words they come up with. "Bro culture", "brogrammers" and the like. It is the most insane goddamn thing in the world. But it's only that way to me and people I know, when I step out side my circle and profession I meet people who actually believe this tripe.
Remember the movie Revenge of the Nerds, it's like if they remade that now in 2018 and reversed the jock/nerd stereotype characters and the nerds are now the out-of-control womanising bully asswipes, and people buy it.
Hey google.
Do no evil bro.
*fist bump*
Interesting story.
Where is the evidence? Besides the circumstantial stuff?
What we know is:
* She was fired for poor performance
* Her code was typically not used
* She apparently didn't get along well with others
Is there a record of her documenting these things that happened to her to HR? If so, ok, that's an issue.
But if this is all stuff she claims happened but there's nobody to confirm it, and she didn't make reports, it seems like perhaps she thinks this is a great chance to get a significant pay raise.
And on the face of it, based on what I've seen from particular (and blessedly former) coworkers, I believe this woman. But, with this lawsuit, I have some problems because of this paragraph:
"Lee’s superior and the firm’s human resources department learned of that incident and repeatedly tried persuading her to officially report the alleged groper, but she resisted out of fear of being ostracized as an “informer,” she claims. After she was written up for being uncooperative, she relented and reported the man, but HR found her claims “unsubstantiated,” according to the suit."
So the impression I get is that she wasn't reporting any of these incidents.
I do understand why someone might be uncomfortable reporting these problems... but, if you're not at least documenting them at the time they occur or - better - filing complaints as they happen... then you should be SOL.
#DeleteChrome
It's funny how the comments here mostly seek to minimize and dismiss her complaints (or outright accuse her of lying) while the comments on the James Damore story were mostly supportive.
I wonder what the difference could possibly be.
Basically this one team leader decided he didn't like me and wanted me off the team so he set me up for failure by tasking me with finding a memory leak in code the source of which I wasn't given access to, and even though the previous team leader had given me glowing reviews I was eventually let go because I couldn't find the leak anywhere outside of the code I suspected.
HR was worse than useless.
This sounds like a ridiculous bullshit story but I assure you it is true. I only had that experience once in my career but it stuck with me as an example of how office politics can just spontaneously cost you your job if someone higher up gets a whim up their ass.
I'm very curious what her code looks like, and why it was rejected. If this goes to trial, do you think examples will somehow be publicly released?
Although I do totally believe her when it comes harassment accusations (I've seen it happen at a number of companies), one particular part of her story that caught my attention was code reviews. She said that her code was not getting approved because of the bro-culture. What if her code was really shit and the only excuse she could come up with was some sort of an internal conspiracy against her? Bad programmers are equally likely among men and women. Show us her code and let us be the judges.
Not sure this is a legal matter. Quit. There are other jobs out there and you're not required to work for Google. Unlike say when your younger and you have no choice in what school you go to. In the later situation it is totally reasonable for a sane person to explode in one way or another.
She worked at google for 8 years. Kind of makes your assertion crash and burn.
They live off of ad words, quite well.
So now with all that profit, it's easy to take your eye off the ball. If you take both Danmore suit (huge amount of time talking about fucking diversity and not actually *working*) and Lees report as fact (Nerf, etc) it's not a leap to imagine that folks 'working' at Google aren't focused on actually working.
IMO, you were fired because either (a) you hadn't ever heard of Valgrind, or (b) you didn't know how to use Google. Either way, you deserved to be fired.
My wife has worked at one of the big tech firms in Silicon Valley since 1992. She has NEVER had anything like what is described happen. Despite working with literally thousands of people.
I am not saying it couldn't happen. But, the number of times it supposedly happened to this lady put everything into the suspicious category for me.
I worked in consulting in the Silicon Valley for 11 years myself. Never saw anything like that at the firm I was at, never even heard of it.
Caution: Contents under pressure
The desk-bro is the best. I picture the raised data-center flooring inside Google crawling with sexually-charged brogrammers. Like Spidermans, crawling around beneath the desk of vulnerable women. Detecting the last remaining genetic XX-chromosome women by their feminine odour. Its a tough world beneath the floors at Google; a dog-eat-dog Spiderman world where brogrammmers compete for the last true-gender women at Google. Scurrying about under the cool white panels. Popping up between the beefy lady thighs to remind them "Girl, you'll never know wtf happens down in Spiderland". Or maybe just to slap them in the face.
"I was eventually let go because I couldn't find the leak anywhere outside of the code I suspected." You should have looked inside the place you suspected. I suspect my socks are in the drawer, I'm not going to look in my closet. Failure to communicate?
Did you know that Valgrind isn't magic? Valgrind doesn't grant access to source code that a programmer is forbidden to access.
Sounds like yet another attack on heterosexuality. Feminism is cancer.
Back when I lived in that great sewer of humanity, the Bay Area, I met quite a few Googledouches at social events. All of them had a really very high opinion of themselves, often to the point of being bores. Snobby, yes. Politically correct, yes. Capitalist dogs, yes. Drug addled, yes. Cultish, yes.
But exactly ZERO of them were anything remotely similar to the "bro" stereotype that's being flogged so damned hard by the Financialist propaganda organs. Look at my posting history, all of it - I'm definitely not a fan or defender of Google. But this charge strikes me as OBVIOUSLY false.
This has been true for 30-50 years in tech.
Go ask around. From Fairchild to TO, Intel, to AMD, and beyond.
The nerds may start the company. Maybe even have a nerd/bro staddler who is also good with closing deals make the first few scores for the company.
Then you start getting the dedicated Marketing/Sales guys/girls in. And then it all goes to shit.
Your sentence doesn't have a predicate.
The Damore case with the NLRB was not handled though normal channels.
Interestingly, it was grabbed from the local office and taken up by the Washington DC office where the people are political appointees (in this case nearly all are Obama holdovers). Rememer that Google's top people were in so tight with the Obama admin that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was in the White House more often than a bunch of Obama cabinet officers, and over 250 Google employees cycled back-and-forth between being employed at Google and being employed in the Obama administration.
Something mighty fishy at play here. Normal cases should be handled by normal processes, and when they are not, something is not normal (this should be obvious).
Assuming the article accurately represents how she was treated, this is completely absolutely off the curve not OK. I don't know how common this is, but there are enough reports from enough different people at different companies that I believe its pretty widespread.
I've found that workplaces that have a larger percentage of older workers tend to do a lot better. Maybe the older workers who act like adults at work serve as role models for younger workers. In my (second hand) experience even the defense industry is far better than high-tech.
I would not tolerate anything like this sort of behavior in my group. I'm paying people (generally quite well) to do really interesting, really difficult work. I need all of them, and the last thing I want is some immature idiot making it more difficult for someone else in my group to do their work.
If only half of these allegations are true, this is a problem. And while I think the lady may be a bit sissy about a few things and perhaps herself socially inept/inexperienced at dealing with more than one man at a time, I can't entirely dismiss these allegations as improbable. Especially with prudish/bigot societies like the US or - in parts - Germany.
Curiously I don't think this can be all a Google/Company problem, but it must be a society problem. And from my own experience as a heterosexual man and a successful software developer I can attest that we as a society do have a problem, and it is related to sex. There are measurable amounts of bullshit coming out of the #met00 debate, and ladies and society as a whole need to turn on their brains before speaking and learn the difference between criminal behaviour and bad manners (once again praise to mature feminists like Catherine Deneuve for bringing back some sanity into the debate - this is the type of woman we need as opinon leaders), but we also have to have a public discussion about male sexuality. And it's heterosexual males who need to have it!
Nearly all incidents described in the article are instances of behaviour that can only be called infantile and notably immature. The people - I'm not sure they would qualify as 'men' - doing this sort of thing need to catch up on their upbringing and learn some manners and basic common decency. And they need to learn to get a handle and a perspective on their own sexual desires - which, of course, also amounts to standing up for them in the appropriate situations. And if truckloads of useful/good male developers have a problem with this aspect of their manhood, then companies such as Google truely are in a dilemma.
We need to grow the fuck up, put the kid-girlies and their excess #met00 / gender-studies bullshit nonsense into perspective and have a grown up debate about how men and women can get along and keep their mating habits in check while at the same time being able to express them where appropriate. If this doesn't happen, if todays society can't find a method of once again formalising the encounter and courting of heterosexual males and females, this is only going to get worse.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Could we please cut down on the bullshit. All sides of the debate. Thank you. "Identitarian" and "Sexism" have been so overused as terms that they are by now objectively meaningless catch-all ideological "combat-terms" ("Kampfbegriff" in German). Anyone using them shouldn't be surprised if they are dismissed as a douche (male or female) who has nothing meaningful to contribute. ... Please avoid these terms wherever possible.
Just a modest request.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
... or maybe not!
This awful outcome could only be expected. Nerd culture is rape culture: sexist, mysogynist, chauvinist. Nerds hate women because women make them confront their own inadequacy. Women do not need or want to be working with unprofessional, socially inept, immature and repulsive man-children. The industry does not need this kind of aberrants. Do not hire them and if you have them in your workforce, replace them with balanced and respectful professionals. Or face the legal and social consequences. Make no mistake: the business WILL be purged and it's better you clean up your business or have it purged by force.
Back when I lived in that great sewer of humanity, the Bay Area, I met quite a few Googledouches at social events. All of them had a really very high opinion of themselves, often to the point of being bores. Snobby, yes. Politically correct, yes. Capitalist dogs, yes. Drug addled, yes. Cultish, yes.
But exactly ZERO of them were anything remotely similar to the "bro" stereotype that's being flogged so damned hard by the Financialist propaganda organs. Look at my posting history, all of it - I'm definitely not a fan or defender of Google. But this charge strikes me as OBVIOUSLY false.
Google is a HUGE company. Once a company gets sufficiently large the culture starts to vary etween divisions and different parts of the company have a very distinct flavour relative to the others.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I have worked in places where man talked a lot about going to strip joints and where I once saw a man telling a woman something like "I don't want to argue design with another guy in front of you, you are a woman and are sensitive to seeing arguments". Idk, my assumption is that most companies are the same so I would guess that some parts of Google are like this too. Maybe I'm naive and google is really this place for chosen people only where everyone are pure.
(And yes, I understand you are not pro google, but I think you are still buying into the whole "google are different from everyone else", which I don't)
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Other people's opinions ain't your problem.
If they are harassing you, THAT'S DIFFERENT.
This narrative is annoying, presented in a 'oh, we need to train these savages, they clearly are uncivilized'.
Fuck that.
but I think you are still buying into the whole "google are different from everyone else", which I don't)
Nope. I've never seen any "bro culture" anywhere in the software industry. So far as I can tell, it's a complete fabrication by propagandists with an agenda to push.
Now maybe you've seen something different. Or maybe you work in a different industry? I've never worked with programmers who talked about going to strip clubs. Salesmen, sure, but not actual tech people.
I hope she dies in a fire
Human Resources, above all other departments, contain the largest percentage of 2-faced, manipulative, lying scum than I have ever encountered in all my years of working in multiple companies, multiple countries. The payroll and pension people are usually pretty cool, but the "HR Business Partners" are typically fuckwits, sometimes deliberately, and if not, their managers are absolute fuckwits and so no one can not be trusted.
Last company I was at, the HR department had the highest staff turnover in the whole 500-strong workforce on site.
My receptionist friend was bullied and harrassed out of the door by her direct boss, the HR director, directly in front of other staff.
And she was punished overtly for reporting the abuse.
Without robust, transparent and independent processes, everything that HR says is pure bullshit.
Of course, don't get caught saying so, because that's being "disloyal".
Fucking Stockhom sydrome sets in amongst the workforce, and you can barely even touch the subject internally.
Google fire's a guy for a memo that offends people. A female employee is groped, harassed and even physically assaulted but "bro-culture" prevents them from doing anything. Sorry that's a hard pill to swallow.
As many are observing, we are coming apart at the seams. People are finding it harder than it should be just to get along with neighbors, coworkers, etc. This is unfortunate, but not unexpected, when you rapidly (in just a generation or two) throw off all social convention as being evil. I'm not arguing that things were perfect back in the good old days, but some aspects of social life may have been easier to get through than they are now.
Now to say something uncomfortable: When there are some defined boundaries in society, then it's more obvious to everyone when someone is going outside them. But the existence of boundaries means that people have their "place". As soon as you put it that way, everyone screams (--and I can hear you), "Nope, we gave up all that crap, and we're not going back to those unenlightened, un-liberated days ever!"
OK, then live with the harassment, because you won't be able to fix the harassment by itself. It's just one manifestation of the general tendency today to behave in whatever way our instincts propel us to act. ("If it feels good, do it!") Until you fix _that_, any particular manifestation will remain out of control.
(Just for the record, I'd prefer an environment where people were encouraged to have more self-control, not less.)
Do they misbehave at work talking about bangkok and going to mexico to buy a child bride?
That would be highly unacceptable jocular behavior that makes women uncomfortable in the workplace.
Why the frat house atmosphere?
I have worked in firms that were *not* startups nor dot-com megacorps, where there was a healthy mix of genders, and management did nothing out of the ordinary. We had cubicle farms too but nerf wars would have been juvenile, and brazen come-ons were reserved for the bars -- and Miami had plenty. Etiquette was observed as well in the office, and immigrants would have a fair chance of making it out there, before his own job got outsourced.
What do I know, I was probably the only one that thought,But surely LaGuardia already has a bus terminal! when I came across LGBT for the first time.