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New Book Paints Different Picture of Workplace Behavior At Google and Facebook
Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom), Adam Fisher paints quite a different picture of life at now-workforce behavior preachers Google and Facebook, revealing that the tech giants' formative days were filled with the kind of antics that run afoul of HR protocols. Google was not a normal place, begins an excerpt in Vanity Fair that includes some juicy quotes attributed to Google executive chef Charlie Ayers about Google's founders ("Sergey's the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.") And in Sex, Beer, and Coding, Wired runs an excerpt about Facebook's wild early days, which even extended to the artwork gracing its office ("The office was on the second floor, so as you walk in you immediately have to walk up some stairs, and on the big 10-foot-high wall facing you is just this huge buxom woman with enormous breasts wearing this Mad Max-style costume riding a bulldog. It's the most intimidating, totally inappropriate thing. [...] That set a tone for us. A huge-breasted warrior woman riding a bulldog is the first thing you see as you come in the office, so like, get ready for that!" So, what changed? "When Sheryl Sandberg joined the company is when I saw a vast shift in everything in the company," said Ayers about Google. Sandberg later became Facebook's grown-up face.
I expect that James Damore will never see a courtroom with his case against Google. He'll get a big fat pay-off out of court, and Google will make some kind of half apology where they say they did not fire anyone over comments over hiring practices and that they'll never do it again. After that I expect Damore to find work in his own company doing whatever it is he likes to do, and make appearances on TV shows and on the speaking circuit for most anyone that asks. Any other outcome will not be near as good for Google.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Sadly you have fallen into the same trap of perpetuating this myth that many others have. For example, the "x% of female students have been sexually assaulted while at college" claim was actually from a very well written paper (the original Campus Sexual Assault (CSA) survey). It was quite conservative, using a definition of sexual assault that was stricter than most legal ones (and definitely doesn't include "someone glanced at a woman in the elevator"), and actually breaks down the statistics even further into categories like violent and incapacitated assault.
Despite a number of caveats given in the paper, its results have been found by subsequent studies using very robust methodology (e.g. phone interviews with explanations of terms and the definition of sexual assault, limited to the past 6 months to avoid telescoping effects etc.) to be broadly representative.
The really sad thing is that some men are now scared to even interact with women or be in confined spaces with the, due to unfounded fears perpetuated by these myths. I'm sure someone will respond with a bunch of copy/paste links they prepared demonstrating that the threat is real, but a bunch of links isn't really in the same league as a peer reviewed study.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I acknowledged all that in my comment, pointing out that later studies using more rigorous methodology confirmed the findings. Not some random WaPo journalist, but actual peer reviewed studies.
The BoJ stats used a different, narrower definition of sexual assault and a limited time frame (six months), as I also pointed out. Thus, the numbers are not in any way directly comparable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC