INTENSITY²
Politics, Mature and taboo => Political Pundits => Topic started by: Yuri Bezmenov on January 09, 2018, 05:19:34 PM
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... and I hope he takes their fucking asses to the cleaners!!
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/08/james-damore-just-filed-a-class-action-lawsuit-against-google-saying-it-discriminates-against-white-male-conservatives/
He's the original documents.
https://www.scribd.com/document/368692388/James-Damore-Lawsuit
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He should get a special award for being the world's most precious broflake.
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Didn't you know? Conservative white males NEED affirmative action. :M
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He should get a special award for being the world's most precious broflake.
Yes.
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Also, dunno if you guys knew this, but he is apparently on the spectrum.
Article that makes him look like a bit less of a jackass is below. Still gets limited sympathy from me. Also frankly he'd have better luck suing about discrimination against people on the spectrum than against people with dicks.
'I see things differently': James Damore on his autism and the Google memo
He was fired from Google for arguing that men may be more suited to working in tech than women. Now James Damore opens up about his regrets – and how autism may have shaped his experience of the world
by Paul Lewis in San Francisco
Fri 17 Nov ‘17 01.00 EST Last modified on Fri 1 Dec ‘17 09.10 EST
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James Damore conforms to the stereotype. He’s happy to admit he fits the mould of an awkward computer nerd and the moment we meet in a Silicon Valley coffee shop, he knocks a display stand of metal flasks that fall clattering to the floor. The commotion draws curious glances at the 6ft 3in software engineer, but Damore is used to strangers identifying him; he’s the guy who was fired by Google this summer after he argued that men are more psychologically suited to working in technology than women.
No one recognises the woman standing beside him. She is Damore’s girlfriend: a feminist and a data scientist who works in tech.
The couple make a surprising pair, as I discovered when we sat down and talked about some of the issues they usually avoid: the gender pay gap, whether boys are more suited to board games than girls, and the 10-page memo that turned Damore, almost overnight, into a pariah in their industry.
The document he circulated, titled Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber, argued that psychological gender differences could explain why 80% of Google’s engineers, and most of the company’s leaders, are men. In one of the most inflammatory sections, Damore wrote that women, on average, have “higher levels of neuroticism”, something that may “contribute to the lower number of women in high stress jobs”. The purpose of the memo, he said, was to question Google’s approach to improving diversity, and to argue that the company’s leftwing bias silences alternative views.
James Damore, Google, and the YouTube radicalization of angry white men
Read more
On 7 August, two days after his memo was leaked, Damore was fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes”. “I definitely didn’t think that it would explode like it did,” the 28-year-old says now. “I lost a lot of sleep and didn’t eat much.”
We are in Mountain View, home to Google’s headquarters. Damore’s girlfriend has agreed to meet only after being assured that, like her, I disagree with her boyfriend’s views. She does not want to be identified or directly quoted: she is keen to remain in the shadows. Damore, meanwhile, has appeared to bask in the attention; in the months since he left Google, he has become a commentator on political issues that extend well beyond the tech industry, becoming one of the most polarising figures in Silicon Valley.
At the same time, the experience has prompted some introspection. In the course of several weeks of conversation using Google’s instant messaging service, which Damore prefers to face-to-face communication, he opened up about an autism diagnosis that may in part explain the difficulties he experienced with his memo.
He believes he has a problem understanding how his words will be interpreted by other people. Even now, still out of work and coming to the conclusion he has in effect been “blacklisted” from any major tech company, Damore finds it hard to comprehend how his opinions sparked such intense controversy. “My biggest flaw and strength may be that I see things very differently than normal,” he tells me. “I’m not necessarily the best at predicting what would be controversial.”
•••
Words were never James Damore’s strong suit. As a child growing up in Romeoville, a suburb of Chicago, he took longer than usual to speak in complete sentences. His parents were concerned; it was several years before they discovered that their son’s verbal difficulties were accompanied by some extraordinary talents.
By the age of about 11, Damore was coding adventure games on his TI-83 calculator. He also discovered chess. Within a year he was able to compete in four games of chess simultaneously while wearing a blindfold. He came second in a national chess tournament at 14, and in his teens became the world’s highest-ranking player in Rise of Nations, a computer strategy game.
It wasn’t until his mid-20s, after completing research in computational biology at Princeton and MIT, and starting a PhD at Harvard, that Damore was diagnosed with autism, although he was told he had a milder version of the condition known as “high-functioning autism”.
I’m not necessarily the best at predicting what would be controversial
Psychiatrists, he says, assured him “it didn’t matter”. Yet one incident around that time suggests otherwise. Damore was on a two-day retreat for PhD students, which involved an annual tradition of inviting students to perform skits that lightly poked fun at professors. Damore’s performance included an awkwardly delivered masturbation joke that offended some female students. Two professors later wrote to students apologising for the “uneasiness, embarrassment or offense” he had caused. Damore still finds it hard to see why his skit was objectionable, but accepts he may view it differently, “because I’m on the spectrum”.
I ask if he finds interacting with people difficult. He replies: “It’s hard for me to say what’s ‘difficult’ because I don’t know what the average is.” But he finds small talk tiring and can see behavioural traits in himself that may be linked to the condition, such as “having fewer friends due to maybe social awkwardness”.
It was Damore’s outstanding performance in coding puzzles that attracted Google recruiters. He was offered a summer internship on a salary of more than $100,000 and, in December 2013, dropped out of Harvard to join the tech giant’s army of 25,000 mostly male engineers.
Damore excelled at Google. His performance reviews were excellent, and he was promoted twice in two years. By early 2017, he was a senior engineer at the company, helping lead projects related to Google’s search engine. It is a role that, once stock is taken into account, can come with a salary of as much as $300,000. Then in June, on a work flight to China, Damore opened his laptop and started typing. “Google has several biases and honest discussion about these biases is being silenced by the dominant ideology,” he wrote. “What follows is by no means the complete story, but it’s a perspective that desperately needs to be told.”
•••
The idea that any employee can challenge company orthodoxy is important in Silicon Valley, which eschews the hierarchies that dominate in other parts of corporate America. Nowhere is this more the case than Google, which cultivates open debate on thousands of internal discussion groups and online forums. Google also vigorously promotes a culture of “psychological safety” among its staff, believing it imperative that employees feel empowered to voice ideas without feeling embarrassed or judged.
Company insiders say most employees are savvy enough to know it is unwise to take that mantra too literally. But when the organisers of internal meetings about Google’s policies on diversity and inclusion invited feedback, Damore decided to relay his thoughts.
For some months, he had been harbouring grievances over the way Google was seeking to increase the number of minority and women employees, with mentoring schemes and hiring practices that Damore felt could be tantamount to reverse discrimination.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said Damore’s memo violated the company’s code of conduct.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said Damore’s memo violated the company’s code of conduct. Photograph: Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters
He had also been doing a lot of personal research about politics. He knew he was a centrist with libertarian inclinations but, he tells me, he “wanted to understand the world and why people seem to have such different perspectives and opinions”.
He had been reading writers such as Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist who argues people’s political beliefs derive not from reason but from their instincts and intuitions, and says more effort should be put into understanding opposing views. Damore also read more about evolutionary perspectives in psychology and anthropology, in books by academics including Steven Pinker and Avi Tuschman.
The Google engineer bought a copy of Warren Farrell’s controversial 1993 book, The Myth of Male Power, known as the bible of the men’s rights movement. He watched The Red Pill, a documentary released last year in which the presenter Cassie Jaye abandons her attachment to feminism after being persuaded by Farrell and other men’s rights activists.
But it was Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, who seems to have been particularly influential. Notorious in Canada for refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns for students who don’t identify as male or female, Peterson has acquired a huge following online by railing against political correctness. Damore watched his YouTube lectures and admired the professor. “He’s very good at articulating his thoughts,” he says. “Which I need to improve at.”
•••
Damore’s memo was a jumble of ideas and proposals for Google, which he argued should “de-emphasize empathy” and be more accepting of conservative viewpoints. The document contained citations that led to Wikipedia entries and opinion articles, as well as several peer-reviewed psychological papers. His principal argument was about gender. He did not argue that men were better at maths or coding than women, as others have done. Instead, he wrote that men and women “on average” have different psychological traits, and these might explain why so few women choose engineering, and why so many men rise to the top of Google.
Women, Damore argued, are generally more interested in “people rather than things” and have “more openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics”. Both of those factors, he said, could account for why women prefer jobs in “social or artistic areas” rather than, say, coding software.
Damore also described women as more agreeable and less assertive than men, which he said results in women “generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading”. Men, on the other hand, care less about work-life balance, he wrote, and are more likely to be motivated by status, driving them toward “higher-paying, less satisfying jobs”. Damore said these differences were “exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective” and played down the idea that they were the result of cultural or social influences.
He seemed at least somewhat aware he was entering a minefield, stressing he was only talking about average psychological differences: “So you can’t say anything about an individual … I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority,” he wrote. “My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology.”
Segregated Valley: the ugly truth about Google and diversity in tech
Read more
Damore emailed his memo to the organisers of Google’s diversity meetings in early July. When there was no response, he started sending the document to Google’s internal mailing lists and forums, eager for a reaction.
The document spread like wildfire. Some Google employees supported Damore’s ideas, and some defended his right to voice them. But many staff were simply aghast. “You’re a misogynist and a terrible human,” one colleague emailed him. “I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you.”
Leaked posts from Google’s internal message boards show that some of Damore’s most vocal critics were mid-ranking managers. “It has cost me at least two days of productivity and anger, and I am not even the target of its bigoted attacks,” said one manager, declaring he would never work with Damore again. Another said: “I intend to silence these views. They are violently offensive.”
Many women who work elsewhere in tech were appalled by Damore’s memo, written from the heart of an industry that is notoriously male dominated. It came amid a cascade of reports about sexual harassment in Silicon Valley and a class-action lawsuit brought by women employed at Google alleging the company systematically pays women less than men for similar work.
Damore’s girlfriend was overseas on 5 August, the day she received text messages from friends urging her to click on a link to the tech website Gizmodo, where the memo had been leaked under the headline “Here’s The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google”.
Damore had not told her about his document, and her initial impression was that it was horrible. But after reading it a few times, and discussing it with him, her position mellowed; she even came to agree with one or two of his points. She maintains Damore was, for the most part, naive and wrong, but in the process of defending him she lost friends. She believes there was no need for Google to fire him; they could just as easily have taken corrective action.
Google employees and visitors walk through the company’s headquarters in Mountain View.
Google employees and visitors walk through the company’s headquarters in Mountain View. Damore’s memo angered colleagues at the company and beyond. Photograph: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Damore is pursuing legal action against Google and has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. He points out his document was circulating for weeks, but he was only fired after the leak caused a public relations crisis.
Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, told staff that Damore was dismissed because parts of his memo violated the company’s code of conduct. “Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives,” he said. “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.”
•••
What do psychologists make of the memo? Richard Lippa of California State University, whose work the engineer cited, tells me it contained a “reasonably accurate” summary of the research on psychological differences between men and women. “I think there are ways of arguing against James Damore, from political viewpoints, for ideological reasons, and you can criticise the science, too,” he says. “But the immediate response – ‘This is fake science’ – I don’t think that is doing any of us justice.”
Lippa argues there is compelling evidence that women on average tend to be more “people-oriented”, whereas men are more “things-oriented”, a difference he believes could be highly relevant to career decisions.
There’s every reason to think these gender differences in interests are caused by socialisation factors
Janet Hyde, psychologist
His research is similar to the “empathising-systemising theory” created by Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge University. He argues the female brain is “predominantly hard-wired for empathy”, whereas “the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems”.
These differences, he says, may explain why more men choose professions in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Baron-Cohen also proposes people on the autism spectrum have an “extreme male brain”.
However, the methodologies and assumptions underlying these claims have proven highly controversial. Many psychologists would take issue with Damore’s interpretation of personality traits he associates with women, such as “agreeableness” and “neuroticism”.
“Part of the issue is, he’s a software engineer,” says Janet Hyde, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin. “He attached himself to what is actually a relatively small chunk of the psychological research literature and was unduly influenced by it.”
Hyde is the author of a widely cited review of 46 meta-analyses of gender differences, which found that men and women are in fact similar on most, but not all, psychological variables, and concluded overinflated claims of gender differences “carry substantial costs in areas such as the workplace”. She adds: “There’s every reason to think these gender differences in interests are caused by socialisation factors.”
Unfortunately for Damore, even some of the academics cited in his memo take issue with the context in which he used their research. Catherine Hakim, a British sociologist based at the thinktank Civitas, says that while her research on gender preference theory was correctly referenced, she feels his attempt to link career outcomes to psychological sex differences was “nonsense”.
The Google campus in Mountain View, California. The tech company is known for promoting a culture of ‘psychological safety’ among its staff.
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Google is known for promoting a culture of ‘psychological safety’ among its staff. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP
Jüri Allik, an experimental psychologist from Estonia’s University of Tartu, says Damore went too far in making extrapolations from his own study into personality variations across countries; it is risky, he says, to link average personality traits to issues like career choices. Besides, Allik adds, the gender differences in his research were “very, very small”, if not “microscopic”.
Damore also applied arguments in evolutionary psychology to explain why men outnumber women in senior roles at Google. He cited a paper arguing that men place more importance on the physical attractiveness of a potential mate, while women value a potential partner’s earning capacity. Hence, he wrote, men may be motivated to seek higher-paying jobs.
Michael Wiederman, a psychologist at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine who conducted that research, tells me that Damore made a reasoned argument about why men could be more attuned to “climbing the hierarchy”: “The idea for evolutionary psychologists is that this is in our cognitive software.”
But it is not hard to dismantle this line of argument. Cordelia Fine, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, tells me these ideas fall into the common bias of assuming that “whatever we tend to see more often in males is what the job needs”. And while it is true, she says, that women tend to attach more importance to a partner’s resources, there are obvious reasons why. “Given that, not so long ago, women could be legally fired when they got married or became pregnant, it’s hardly surprising that women have historically cared more about a partner’s wealth.” Neither is it clear, Fine says, that any such psychological traits will be “set in stone for the rest of time”.
Despite authoring two acclaimed books on gender, Fine, a leading feminist science writer, feels “torn in many different directions” by Damore. She believes his memo made many dubious assumptions and ignored vast swaths of research that show pervasive discrimination against women. But his summary of the differences between the sexes, she says, was “more accurate and nuanced than what you sometimes find in the popular literature”.
Some of Damore’s ideas, she adds, are “very familiar to me as part of my day-to-day research, and are not seen as especially controversial. So there was something quite extraordinary about someone losing their job for putting forward a view that is part of the scientific debate. And then to be so publicly shamed as well. I felt pretty sorry for him.”
•••
I tell Damore what the psychologists told me about his memo: that there is no agreement among the experts about the extent to which men and women have different psychological profiles; nor is there any consensus about whether any differences can be attributed to nature, nurture or a complex mix of the two. The psychologists do not agree on what, if any, impact these differences might have on career outcomes.
Damore bristles when I accuse him of cherry-picking studies that support his view and ignoring the mountains of evidence that contradict it. “Even if I presented both sides equally, the very fact that I presented the ‘evil’ side would have caused controversy.” He still stands by the empirical claims in his memo, but regrets using the word “neuroticism”, a personality measure often used in psychological research but a term he now realizes has derogatory connotations. The psychologists’ critiques of his memo “have definitely added nuance” to his views, he adds.
If he could go back in time, would he write the memo differently? “Yeah,” he replies. “Probably.”
Damore also seems to question some of the decisions he took in the weeks after he was fired. One of his first moves was to take part in a YouTube interview with Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian psychologist who informed much of his thinking. Peterson dominates the conversation in the video, which mostly consists of long monologues from the professor punctuated by nods and short answers from Damore. Peterson urges Damore to take on a public profile to become a spokesperson for the cause. “Stick to your damn guns,” Peterson tells him. “You’re well-spoken, you’re quiet, you’re convincing, you’re rational, you come across as a decent guy.” He adds: “There’s no reason not to let people see who you are.”
Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist, talks with James Damore during a YouTube interview.
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Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist, talks with James Damore during a YouTube interview. Photograph: screengrab from youtube/screengrab/youtube
Two days later, Damore went to meet Peter Duke, a photographer who had offered him a free “professional shoot” to replace the poor-quality images being used by the media. Duke brought a T-shirt on which Google’s logo had been rearranged to form the word “Goolag”, which Damore put on; he also posed with a cardboard sign Duke gave him, with the slogan “Fired for truth”.
It was only later, Damore says, that he discovered Duke is known as “the Annie Leibovitz of the alt-right” for his sympathetic portraits of far-right activists and conspiracy theorists. Duke circulated the photos on social media under the caption “not all heroes wear capes”, fuelling a cascade of far-right memes and favourable Breitbart stories. Within a matter of days, the Washington Post had anointed Damore “one of the biggest celebrities on the conservative internet”. That reputation was compounded when, taking Peterson’s advice, Damore took part in interviews with several other YouTube stars, variously associated with contrarian, anti-feminist and “alt-right” movements.
Watching these videos, I notice that Damore has a strange habit: when he disagrees with something an interviewer says, he does not interject but instead moves his head silently from side to side. His girlfriend noticed the same thing, and feels Damore’s interviewers were often using him to project their own opinions.
Damore concedes now that he “wasn’t really skilled enough to push back on anything” in some interviews. It’s frustrating, he adds, that he’s now associated with the “alt-right” when he’s “more of a centrist”. He admits he did not look too deeply into Duke’s background when the photos were taken, and asks me not to publish the image of him in a “Goolag” T-shirt with this article. “I can definitely see how it was damaging, but it was a free professional photo shoot and I wasn’t really familiar with politics then,” he says. “I was pretty busy and ignorant.”
Was his interview with the “alt-right” personality Milo Yiannopoulos an error? “It’s hard to say,” he replies. “I don’t really know what the long-term consequences of any of my actions are.”
•••
In September, Damore tweeted: “The KKK is horrible and I don’t support them in any way, but can we admit that their internal title names are cool, e.g. ‘Grand Wizard’?” The tweet was accompanied by an online poll in which Damore invited other users to express their views.
There was an immediate outcry amid headlines such as “Fired Google Memo Guy Also Has Bad Opinions About KKK”. Damore deleted the tweet and acknowledges he badly misjudged how it would be viewed but has not stopped tweeting about controversial issues such as race relations and cultural appropriation. Wary of making another mistake, he now keeps a document of draft tweets that he refines before posting. His girlfriend implores him to show her these drafts, but he does not like to be told what to do and values using his 91,000 followers as a sounding board: “I try to leverage my Twitter following to hear other perspectives and correct me when I’m wrong.”
I don’t really know what the long-term consequences of any of my actions are
His tweets are not always provocative; sometimes they are more reflective. Recently, he posted: “Laughter is often used to show that even though a norm was broken, things are OK.” Another declared: “Like a bird, society needs a functional left and right wing. If one is too dominant, our trajectory will be biased and we’ll inevitably fall.”
Like many people in technology, and like technology itself, Damore explains a complex social world through seemingly logical systems, patterns and numbers. It can seem like a rational way of thinking but it can also lead to conclusions that lack subtlety or sophistication. The same cognitive patterns underlie the algorithms that power social media, where complicated issues around gender and psychology are reduced to simple shorthand.
Damore believes technology shaped the way he was judged. “Journalists and commentators were incentivised to distort facts to generate outrage,” he says. Meanwhile, on social media, Damore believes users wanted “to hear certainty, causing the most extreme voices to be the loudest”.
Platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter can be perilous places for anyone wanting to express a view on a sensitive topic. Damore’s experience suggests they may involve particular challenges for some people on the autism spectrum.
He does not once, however, use his autism to excuse his actions. He is fiercely resistant to portraying himself as any kind of victim, and says he never informed Google of his autism diagnosis. “I’m not sure you’re expected to,” he says, “or how I would even do that.”
James Damore in San Francisco. ‘Being on the spectrum means we’ll occasionally step on people’s toes.’
James Damore in San Francisco. ‘My biggest flaw and strength may be that I see things very differently than normal,’ he says. Photograph: Winni Wintermeyer for the Guardian
One in 68 children in the US has autism spectrum disorder, according to federal estimates. And while there are no reliable figures on the prevalence of autism in Silicon Valley, anecdotally, people in the industry say it is common.
Experts are wary of the harmful myth that all people on the spectrum are geniuses, not least when research in the UK indicates only 16% of autistic people are in full-time paid work. But there is no doubt that some autistic people have exceptional abilities and strengths that can attract companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
Bryna Siegel, a psychiatrist who runs the not-for-profit Autism Center of Northern California, says she has come across many engineers who have been fired by big tech companies after misunderstanding social cues or unwritten norms in an office.
“Employers need to be accommodating when they hire people who are on the autism spectrum,” she says. That includes, Siegel says, being more forgiving of autistic employees who inadvertently offend people. Company-wide debates of the kind Google encourages, she adds, can be especially difficult for some autistic people to navigate.
One such discussion appears to have contributed to the downfall of another autistic Google engineer who does not want to be identified because, like Damore, he is still looking for work.
He was fired last year in the wake of a dispute with a female colleague and unrelated comments he made at a company-wide gathering themed around LGBT rights.
Women say they quit Google because of racial discrimination: 'I was invisible'
Read more
The engineer queried the use of non-binary pronouns during the meeting and bluntly questioned whether gender is on a spectrum. After complaints from several employees, the engineer was given a disciplinary warning and banned from future gatherings. He alleges his dismissal is explained by Google’s failure to understand how autism causes him to talk or act in ways that others misinterpret. Google declined to comment on his dismissal.
“Fellow employees need to be educated that being on the spectrum means we’ll occasionally step on people’s toes,” the engineer tells me. “Being on the spectrum gives some of us unique experiences that lead us in unusual directions, ideologically. If Google can’t handle that, it needs to depoliticise itself.”
Damore argues that Google’s focus on avoiding “micro-aggressions” is “much harder for someone with autism to follow”. But he stops short of saying autistic employees should be given more leniency if they unintentionally offend people at work. “I wouldn’t necessarily treat someone differently,” he explains. “But it definitely helps to understand where they’re coming from.”
I ask Damore if, looking back over the last few months, he feels that his difficult experience with the memo and social media may be related to being on the spectrum.
“Yeah, there’s definitely been some self-reflection,” he says. “Predicting controversies requires predicting what emotional reaction people will have to something. And that’s not something that I excel at – although I’m working on it.”
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He comes off as pretty clueless.
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Also, dunno if you guys knew this, but he is apparently on the spectrum.
Article that makes him look like a bit less of a jackass is below. Still gets limited sympathy from me. Also frankly he'd have better luck suing about discrimination against people on the spectrum than against people with dicks.
Perhaps in the court of public opinion in Lefty Looney Land, AKA the greater San Fransico Area, but according to California law, there is no gradation of discrimination based on sex or race. All forms of discrimination are equally against the law.
Speaking of which, I find your lack of sympathy for him on the basis of his race and gender...
... disturbing.
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The way I see it, there was no discrimination. He was being an obnoxious cunt and Google had enough of him. We should all sue him for giving our dx a bad reputation.
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No, I find the whole attitude as strange.
I do not have much time for precious snowflakes be they men or women BUT blatant discrimination and gender bias regardless of whether you are a man or woman without some pretty compelling reason. NOT "well he is a man he is therefore more privileged and therefore he should suck up all misfortunes at the hands of people who are biased against men, otherwise he is a precious snowflake and to be dismissed from mind...oh and he should check his privilege". In fact, those that think along these lines are fucking idiots and need to be run naked through the streets being pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables.
I hope none of you take these kinds of fucking stupid positions.
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He might have a case if he was sacked on the basis of his gender.
But he wasn't. He was sacked for being an asshat.
There are standards of behaviour set by our employers that we all need to follow.
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Also, dunno if you guys knew this, but he is apparently on the spectrum.
Article that makes him look like a bit less of a jackass is below. Still gets limited sympathy from me. Also frankly he'd have better luck suing about discrimination against people on the spectrum than against people with dicks.
Perhaps in the court of public opinion in Lefty Looney Land, AKA the greater San Fransico Area, but according to California law, there is no gradation of discrimination based on sex or race. All forms of discrimination are equally against the law.
Speaking of which, I find your lack of sympathy for him on the basis of his race and gender...
... disturbing.
I think he'd have better luck saying he was discriminated against for being on the spectrum because I don't think he's going to end up having much of a case based on race and gender, based on the current demographics of employees at google:
http://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-valley-google-diversity-black-women-workers
He may have a case based on the political part. However, the fact that he was really more fired for making a horrible social mistake than anything else is why I think if he has a case, it would be working the austim angle.
And you can be disturbed and dislike my views all you want. I don't especially like his views and attitude either. And you can't be that much of a raging dick at work and not expect to have it affect your employment. That's just reality. *shrug*
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That is a little bit of bullshit. When you see what was touted by others there against white men and such, without fear of ANY repercussion it is pretty clear none of these contentions stand up to any examination. I would have left long before had I have been him.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/women-and-men-in-stem-often-at-odds-over-workplace-equity/
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That is a little bit of bullshit. When you see what was touted by others there against white men and such, without fear of ANY repercussion it is pretty clear none of these contentions stand up to any examination. I would have left long before had I have been him.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/women-and-men-in-stem-often-at-odds-over-workplace-equity/
Unclear why you then quoted an article that seems to more support the side that workplace discrimination against women and minorities is real than that it's not.
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No, I find the whole attitude as strange.
I do not have much time for precious snowflakes be they men or women BUT blatant discrimination and gender bias regardless of whether you are a man or woman without some pretty compelling reason. NOT "well he is a man he is therefore more privileged and therefore he should suck up all misfortunes at the hands of people who are biased against men, otherwise he is a precious snowflake and to be dismissed from mind...oh and he should check his privilege". In fact, those that think along these lines are fucking idiots and need to be run naked through the streets being pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables.
I hope none of you take these kinds of fucking stupid positions.
Who is? What are you on about?
Damore is a spazzy asshat with little clue about social norms and the idea that he was being discriminated for being a white conservative male is bizarre. As pointed out by El, he'd stand a better chance if claiming that he was discriminated for being a spazz. Too late now, I think.
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I think he'd have better luck saying he was discriminated against for being on the spectrum because I don't think he's going to end up having much of a case based on race and gender, based on the current demographics of employees at google:
http://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-valley-google-diversity-black-women-workers
:facepalm2: :facepalm2: :facepalm2: :facepalm2: :facepalm2:
Actually, the number of whites at Google is about proportional to the general population. Asians are *gasp* overrepresented while other minorities are underrepresented. This is entirely explicable by culture. No racial discrimination there.
Women are arguably overrepresented too, given that few women find tech to be particularly interesting which was the whole point of his memo, which was backed up by the bulk of science (evolutionary psychology) on the subject.
And you can be disturbed and dislike my views all you want. I don't especially like his views and attitude either.
So because you don't like his opinions, then he doesn't deserve legal rights or sympathy?? That's borderline sociopathic.
And you can't be that much of a raging dick at work and not expect to have it affect your employment. That's just reality. *shrug*
He wasn't a "raging dick", he was just standing up for himself because he was sick of being bullied at work on the basis of his gender and race.
GOD you have a distorted view of reality.
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And you can be disturbed and dislike my views all you want. I don't especially like his views and attitude either.
So because you don't like his opinions, then he doesn't deserve legal rights or sympathy?? That's borderline sociopathic.
Did I *say* that?
I think that anyone sending out an email that inflammatory (whether they were views I agree with or not) would reasonably expect to have it cause problems for them, especially sending it all over the damn company. If something like that landed in my inbox from a fellow employee I would literally assume they were having some kind of mental health problem or were on drugs- not because he wrote it like a crazy person (he didn't, he wrote it like a research article), but because the act of just sending it out willy-nilly was extremely fucking stupid.
And the fact that he clearly didn't grasp that sending any kind of politically-charged, controversial email all over your place of work, is a terrible idea, was probably because he's on the spectrum. The fact that the way he wrote it- while it could have been a lot worse- also did have him coming across as a dick, was probably also partly due to him being on the spectrum (because you can see him trying not to, but also see it still happening, the way he wrote).
There's ways to have that kind of conversation. That wasn't the smartest way.
This would be a different story if this was just something he posted on his own social media- then he'd have a better case for discrimination based on political views. As it is, this was behavior in the workplace, and that behavior happened to involve political views that were unpopular (and went against the company's philosophy and at best didn't exactly jibe with its stated policies; the way it was interpreted, they decided it actually went against their policies, and fired him).
I legitly think his case would be better if he played the autism card. The political views card is a lot weaker. The gender and race cards are nonexistent for him, in this case. I actually am not seeing in any of this him being bullied due to gender and race.
I fail to see how that means I think he doesn't deserve legal rights. The right to have an express an unpopular opinion is important. But to expect that you can just send a companywide email with a manifesto without having any consequences takes that to a ridiculous and unreasonable place.
Am I personally less sympathetic to him as a person because I think he's kind of a dick? Yeah, you got me there; that's how sympathy works. :dunno:
But, to quote the memo that got him fired in the first place:
*De-emphasize empathy.
I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.
:dunno:
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Was he sacked for being a member of a "minority" group, white conservative males?
Or was he sacked for being an asshat, saying offensive shit, and violating company policy?
It looks like Google has a very strong case that the latter is true.
James Damore displayed a surprising lack of judgement and common sense in sharing and promoting his opinions in the way that he did. If he has a formal diagnosis of autism and his employers were aware of that diagnosis then IMO he would have a strong case that accommodations were not made for his "disability".
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James Damore displayed a surprising lack of judgement and common sense in sharing and promoting his opinions in the way that he did. If he has a formal diagnosis of autism and his employers were aware of that diagnosis then IMO he would have a strong case that accommodations were not made for his "disability".
Unfortunately, according the article, he hadn't made Google aware of his diagnosis, so he hasn't a leg to stand on there.
Of course, autisic people are at a big disadvantage in the workplace, and often lose their jobs for behaving like autistic people, not because they have a dx of autism . It's not the label that pisses people off. Undiagnosed spazzes have all the same problems that diagnosed spazzes do...with knobs on, because without the dx, other people see no reason to make allowances.
Might be a good reason for going all-out to get a dx? and yet I've heard teachers and others advise that it 's better not to stick a label on a person. just as if they actually believe that the label is the main cause of prejudice. I n Britain it's getting ever -harder to get diagnosed under the NHS (Yeah, mostly because mental health is drastically underfunded, but "ooh . he might face prejudice if we label him" will do as an excuse) and,. of course. impossible to pay for a private dx, if you're unemployed (as most autitic people are)
So anti-discrimination legislation fails to address the problem in most cases. And t's the wrong tool for the job anyway. Discrimination against autistic people isn't usually based on some prejudice against the target grioup as such , just the tendency to write us off as "asshats" in the absence of any kind of obvious disabilty. If some genetically "black" person looked white, passed for white and kept their heritage secret, but then suddenly accused their white employers of racism against them , would we take that seriously? of course we wouldn't. We're in a closely analogous position.
I think that whenever we do take advabntage of anti-discrimination legislation, we're feeding that misconception that the label is the real problem, bercause that does effectively assume that the label is the problem .
I don't know what the answer is. Maybe wider tolerance for socially inept asshats is the only thing that could realistically address the problem? Because that's the thing that peopl;e actually see and react against, not the "autism" pigeonhole.
For my own ,part I would love to see more tolerance for socially inept asshats. And not just because they're probably autistic, but also because they're nowhere near as harmful , IMO, than the kind of people who hide their real opinions , and will happily spout any glib BS that will serve get them liked and/or promoted.
Anyway, WTF are we doing on this board if not tolerating a bunch of socially inept asshats? Hmm? I couldn't help noticing that the guy would totally fit in here :LOL: Heck, he might actually be one of us, for all we know.
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For my own ,part I would love to see more tolerance for socially inept asshats. And not just because they're probably autistic, but also because they're nowhere near as harmful , IMO, than the kind of people who hide their real opinions , and will happily spout any glib BS that will serve get them liked and/or promoted.
I've got to agree 100% with that.
Working in technology I've encountered a lot of people who were obviously on the spectrum. All the ones I've noticed are socially inept to some degree, but most of them are not asshats and are open to suggestions re appropriate behaviour. Perhaps those on the spectrum need to be given a handbook specifying the things that they probably shouldn't talk about at all in a work or work-related environment. Sharing opinions on the inadequacies of colleagues of certain races or gender would be near the top of that list.
And yes, there are nasty people who hide their real opinions and attitudes. So while they might appear to respect everyone their decisions and actions (including when it comes to hiring) will reflect their biases.
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The biggest problems I've had at work involve cultural clashes: I'm close enough to the norm of American social behavior in the workplace
(and probably closer to Aussie or Israeli) that I come across as just a wee bit blunt. Asian cultures however are far from this in the other
direction. Pretty sure I've stepped on some toes by just calling things as I see them.
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Actually, the number of whites at Google is about proportional to the general population. Asians are *gasp* overrepresented while other minorities are underrepresented. This is entirely explicable by culture. No racial discrimination there.
Women are arguably overrepresented too, given that few women find tech to be particularly interesting which was the whole point of his memo, which was backed up by the bulk of science (evolutionary psychology) on the subject.
Er, no.
(http://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_10640_google_s_current_employee_demographics_n.jpg)
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When your sewer break, how many times will you have a woman come to fix it? What about when you need your high rise window washed? What about when you someone to build your home? Now it MAY be that the reason you do not see many women is because they are pressured not to and the over-representation of males in this area is due to discrimination.
That is one theory BUT I would hazard a guess that it has FAR more to do with the fact that men and women are different and make different choices when it comes to work-life decisions. Look I will even go one step further I will say that MOST of the women that rail against over-representation both have NOT EVER seriously considered working in the roles they say are over-represented by men (or roles over-represented by men generally) AND were it to be mandatory that THEY take on these roles or ANY women HAVE to take on these roles to make up numbers on some enforced representation tally, they would baulk.
I think MY theories have far more legs than the Patriarchial over-representation theory.
Progressivism is bullshit virtue signalling. It is all about feelings and no substance. "It's about social justice!".....really? Isn't it a whine by people that cannot embrace realities? Isn't it a disingenuous to cherry pick their offences without having to back their commitments with any reasonable alternatives? See it all sounds nice and reasonable and righteous until It has to stand up to actual reality. The fact is IF anyone wants to allow choice then the outcomes are reflected by choices and the outcomes good or bad are a result of the choices made. If a lady wants to be a teacher or a nurse, that is a choice and she is free to make that choice BUT she cannot then gripe if her husband earns more than her because he chose a field that pays more. They both had choices. She also has no reasonable leg to stand on if she makes broad claims about her female friends and colleagues about their lack of earnings if they by and large make less pay-centric choices.
It is not about social justice or righting a wrong.......it is a whinge.
Society sure as shit should not pander to this kind of unfettered bullshit.
This is my humble opinion.
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I didn't think that Google was a particularly unsafe work environment. I mean there was that guy why got his arm stuck in a search engine, but Google managed to hush that up.
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Nor, of course, did I say that Google was an unsafe workplace. In fact, it would require the comprehension of a chimpanzee to suggest that I was saying that. You are not a chimpanzee are you Minister of Silly Walks.
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Hang on, let me check:
(http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/anth1602/images/chimp_mirror1.jpg)
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Hang on, let me check:
(http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/anth1602/images/chimp_mirror1.jpg)
Makes sense
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Actually, the number of whites at Google is about proportional to the general population. Asians are *gasp* overrepresented while other minorities are underrepresented. This is entirely explicable by culture. No racial discrimination there.
Women are arguably overrepresented too, given that few women find tech to be particularly interesting which was the whole point of his memo, which was backed up by the bulk of science (evolutionary psychology) on the subject.
Er, no.
(http://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_10640_google_s_current_employee_demographics_n.jpg)
This appears to agree with the first articles claim 80% male engineers, but that's also an accurate reflection of the hiring pool. Females represent 20% of engineers, and 20% people who even seek out engineering degrees. If females are or aren't innately inferior as engineers, and the reasons why they do or don't seek engineering degrees, is irrelevant. Promoting gender equality in a specialized field gets tricky when the qualified applicant base isn't equal, regardless the reason. It doesn't seem promote equality to expect 80% of engineers to compete for only half the jobs.
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When your sewer break, how many times will you have a woman come to fix it? What about when you need your high rise window washed? What about when you someone to build your home? Now it MAY be that the reason you do not see many women is because they are pressured not to and the over-representation of males in this area is due to discrimination.
That is one theory BUT I would hazard a guess that it has FAR more to do with the fact that men and women are different and make different choices when it comes to work-life decisions. Look I will even go one step further I will say that MOST of the women that rail against over-representation both have NOT EVER seriously considered working in the roles they say are over-represented by men (or roles over-represented by men generally) AND were it to be mandatory that THEY take on these roles or ANY women HAVE to take on these roles to make up numbers on some enforced representation tally, they would baulk.
I think MY theories have far more legs than the Patriarchial over-representation theory.
Progressivism is bullshit virtue signalling. It is all about feelings and no substance. "It's about social justice!".....really? Isn't it a whine by people that cannot embrace realities? Isn't it a disingenuous to cherry pick their offences without having to back their commitments with any reasonable alternatives? See it all sounds nice and reasonable and righteous until It has to stand up to actual reality. The fact is IF anyone wants to allow choice then the outcomes are reflected by choices and the outcomes good or bad are a result of the choices made. If a lady wants to be a teacher or a nurse, that is a choice and she is free to make that choice BUT she cannot then gripe if her husband earns more than her because he chose a field that pays more. They both had choices. She also has no reasonable leg to stand on if she makes broad claims about her female friends and colleagues about their lack of earnings if they by and large make less pay-centric choices.
It is not about social justice or righting a wrong.......it is a whinge.
Society sure as shit should not pander to this kind of unfettered bullshit.
This is my humble opinion.
The tides may be starting to turn a bit on that, by the way:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/21/americas-manliest-industries-are-all-competing-for-women/
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Also, brief but interesting article that discusses some of the legal issues including free speech and labor laws:
Google Memo Raises Questions About Limits Of Free Speech In The Workplace
Google moved quickly to fire the software engineer who criticized the company's diversity programs. The engineer, James Damore, told The New York Times he has a right to express his concerns and that he will likely sue Google over the issue.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The software engineer who wrote a leaked memo titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber" is out of a job at Google. The company quickly fired him after the memo criticizing the company's diversity efforts went viral over the weekend. The engineer, James Damore, told The New York Times he's considering legal action. NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports, the controversy raises complex questions about what employees can say at work.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: What a person can or cannot say in the workplace is governed by a thicket of laws. It is not the case that First Amendment free speech rights extend to private workplaces. Employers have broad leeway in setting rules, but there are exceptions. Labor laws protect workers' rights to share complaints about working conditions. At the same time, anti-discrimination laws require employers to protect against a hostile non-inclusive work environment. Damore's memo potentially touches on both.
It first circulated over an internal Google message board, citing biological reasons why women might be less suited to work in tech. Google responded saying his views propagated harmful gender stereotypes and violated the company's code of conduct. So which law prevails?
WILMA LIEBMAN: It's always a question of line drawing.
NOGUCHI: Wilma Liebman is a former Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board. She says this case seems to pit labor law speech protections against anti-discrimination laws. Liebman says it's not legal for employers to require their workers to act respectfully or civilly toward one another because that is thought to limit disagreement and heated discussion among workers. Depending how it's worded, she says, Google's code of conduct might itself face problems, in which case, so would its justification to fire Damore.
LIEBMAN: So the question would be whether the particular rule under which he was discharged is considered to be unlawful under the National Labor Relations Act.
NOGUCHI: David Lopez looks at it another way. Lopez is former general counsel for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces anti-discrimination statutes. He says Google could have found itself in legal trouble if it had not fired Damore.
DAVID LOPEZ: I think the company has an obligation to make sure that it does not have a hostile work environment for its employees.
NOGUCHI: According to reports, Damore says he had filed a complaint with the labor board before he was fired. Damore did not respond to requests seeking comment. Lopez says Damore's own memo might undercut any discrimination claim he might bring.
LOPEZ: Generally, the company views his comments as discriminatory and really contrary, I think, to the values of Google.
NOGUCHI: Jeff Hirsch teaches employment law at the University of North Carolina. He notes that labor law protects conversations between workers. So it matters whether Damore was trying to line up supporters to challenge a workplace policy or was simply venting his own frustrations.
JEFF HIRSCH: Just because something is about workplace conditions, doesn't mean it's always going to be considered protected.
NOGUCHI: Hirsch says Google also has a strong case to make in its defense of its business.
HIRSCH: You can at least understand where they're coming from - that they're worried about this getting out of hand and getting shellacked in the press and not ultimately hurting their bottom line.
NOGUCHI: In a letter to employees, Google CEO Sundar Pichai referenced a difficult balancing act the company faces. Quote, "people must feel free to express dissent," he wrote, "however, parts of the memo crossed the line." Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
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When your sewer break, how many times will you have a woman come to fix it? What about when you need your high rise window washed? What about when you someone to build your home? Now it MAY be that the reason you do not see many women is because they are pressured not to and the over-representation of males in this area is due to discrimination.
That is one theory BUT I would hazard a guess that it has FAR more to do with the fact that men and women are different and make different choices when it comes to work-life decisions. Look I will even go one step further I will say that MOST of the women that rail against over-representation both have NOT EVER seriously considered working in the roles they say are over-represented by men (or roles over-represented by men generally) AND were it to be mandatory that THEY take on these roles or ANY women HAVE to take on these roles to make up numbers on some enforced representation tally, they would baulk.
I think MY theories have far more legs than the Patriarchial over-representation theory.
Progressivism is bullshit virtue signalling. It is all about feelings and no substance. "It's about social justice!".....really? Isn't it a whine by people that cannot embrace realities? Isn't it a disingenuous to cherry pick their offences without having to back their commitments with any reasonable alternatives? See it all sounds nice and reasonable and righteous until It has to stand up to actual reality. The fact is IF anyone wants to allow choice then the outcomes are reflected by choices and the outcomes good or bad are a result of the choices made. If a lady wants to be a teacher or a nurse, that is a choice and she is free to make that choice BUT she cannot then gripe if her husband earns more than her because he chose a field that pays more. They both had choices. She also has no reasonable leg to stand on if she makes broad claims about her female friends and colleagues about their lack of earnings if they by and large make less pay-centric choices.
It is not about social justice or righting a wrong.......it is a whinge.
Society sure as shit should not pander to this kind of unfettered bullshit.
This is my humble opinion.
The tides may be starting to turn a bit on that, by the way:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/21/americas-manliest-industries-are-all-competing-for-women/
And? What does this actually say? See the thing is I could not care less. I will tell you why. Free marketplace is exactly that . Employers can employ whomever the Hell they like and reap the rewards or failures get from doing so. I think if you are hiring with any bent to appease a moral supposition rather than a business/financial one, you are an idiot BUT it is your business and you can do as you please.
Put in simplistic terms, if you manage a highrise window washing service and you get 100 applicants for 20 positions and of those 100 applicants 10 are women and you hire 10 women and 10 men, it may give you more social capital and you may feel a sense of moral sense of moving the Progressive barometer for women but effectively you have hired 100% of the applying women and 10% of the applying men. I do not feel that 100% of any race, gender or religion is better than another but Progressives like to view things in such ways. It may well boost the numbers and lay strong foundations or whatever the Hell else Progressives may think but I think it is BS.
At the end of the day I could not care less. The end result will be the same and those same companies will eventually be viewed as part of the oppressive patriarchal regime because in the long term despite any efforts I doubt they will ever reach any meaningful outcome parity of gender. The people whinging will NOT be the ladies in those jobs.
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Actually, the number of whites at Google is about proportional to the general population. Asians are *gasp* overrepresented while other minorities are underrepresented. This is entirely explicable by culture. No racial discrimination there.
Women are arguably overrepresented too, given that few women find tech to be particularly interesting which was the whole point of his memo, which was backed up by the bulk of science (evolutionary psychology) on the subject.
Er, no.
(http://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_10640_google_s_current_employee_demographics_n.jpg)
This appears to agree with the first articles claim 80% male engineers, but that's also an accurate reflection of the hiring pool. Females represent 20% of engineers, and 20% people who even seek out engineering degrees. If females are or aren't innately inferior as engineers, and the reasons why they do or don't seek engineering degrees, is irrelevant. Promoting gender equality in a specialized field gets tricky when the qualified applicant base isn't equal, regardless the reason. It doesn't seem promote equality to expect 80% of engineers to compete for only half the jobs.
Absolutely. Have a virtual plus :plus:
Scap made a good point essentially, but then he went and spoiled it by seizing the opprtunity to bang on his Evolutionary drum. .
It bugs me that statistics are repeatedly misinterpeted and misappropriated to support some simplistic social narrative. Prejudice does exist, but if you're gonna find it in all the wrong places and throw out wild accusations, that's only gonna increase peoples' prejudice against SJWs and every "minority"group they get behind. Oh! and enhance grudges, left , right and centre.
I was recently told by two different women, both of asian extraction that they thought the Benefits system was discriminating against them. I asked for details , and in bioth cases it transpired that the sysrem was treating them in the exact same way that it treated everyody else. That is appallingly, inhumanly and unreasonably. But without a shred of racial discrimination.
They remained dubious, in spite of my assurances. ( i was tempted to tell them my experiences, which easily capped theirs. But that would have been too much like playing trumps with misery) Fact is, it's just a very hunman thing for people to think that they are more hard-done-by than the next man. And it's fucking irresponsible to enccourage that belief, which is what these SJW's unthinkingly do, all the time. Meantime, you also have underprivileged white Brits who feel that they are more hard-done-by, of course. And they (convincingly) cite so-called positive discrimination as evidence.
Simplistic analysis and positive discrimination are both wonderful tools for turrning up the screws on racial tension (as well as gender relations etc, ofc ) if that's what you want. And these SJW jerks intend to have the oppsite effect, do they? I very much question that assertion. Either they are dumb as fuck, or else their unconscious motivations are diametically opposite to their stated intent. My money would be on the latter, though that doesn't exclude the former of course.
Discrimination surely exists, but there's got to be a better way of dealing with it.
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When your sewer break, how many times will you have a woman come to fix it? What about when you need your high rise window washed? What about when you someone to build your home? Now it MAY be that the reason you do not see many women is because they are pressured not to and the over-representation of males in this area is due to discrimination.
That is one theory BUT I would hazard a guess that it has FAR more to do with the fact that men and women are different and make different choices when it comes to work-life decisions. Look I will even go one step further I will say that MOST of the women that rail against over-representation both have NOT EVER seriously considered working in the roles they say are over-represented by men (or roles over-represented by men generally) AND were it to be mandatory that THEY take on these roles or ANY women HAVE to take on these roles to make up numbers on some enforced representation tally, they would baulk.
I think MY theories have far more legs than the Patriarchial over-representation theory.
Progressivism is bullshit virtue signalling. It is all about feelings and no substance. "It's about social justice!".....really? Isn't it a whine by people that cannot embrace realities? Isn't it a disingenuous to cherry pick their offences without having to back their commitments with any reasonable alternatives? See it all sounds nice and reasonable and righteous until It has to stand up to actual reality. The fact is IF anyone wants to allow choice then the outcomes are reflected by choices and the outcomes good or bad are a result of the choices made. If a lady wants to be a teacher or a nurse, that is a choice and she is free to make that choice BUT she cannot then gripe if her husband earns more than her because he chose a field that pays more. They both had choices. She also has no reasonable leg to stand on if she makes broad claims about her female friends and colleagues about their lack of earnings if they by and large make less pay-centric choices.
It is not about social justice or righting a wrong.......it is a whinge.
Society sure as shit should not pander to this kind of unfettered bullshit.
This is my humble opinion.
Sorry but WTF are you on about?
The matter at hand is not difficult to grasp. A spazz violating a bunch of social boundaries and company policy but lacking the brains to sue for the right thing. But discrimination against white conservative males? Seriously, FFS?
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Nor, of course, did I say that Google was an unsafe workplace. In fact, it would require the comprehension of a chimpanzee to suggest that I was saying that. You are not a chimpanzee are you Minister of Silly Walks.
It would require the intellect of an amoeba to suggest something along these lines.
Sorry, Al, just using your argumentation style. Surely, you can do better.
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Actually, the number of whites at Google is about proportional to the general population. Asians are *gasp* overrepresented while other minorities are underrepresented. This is entirely explicable by culture. No racial discrimination there.
Women are arguably overrepresented too, given that few women find tech to be particularly interesting which was the whole point of his memo, which was backed up by the bulk of science (evolutionary psychology) on the subject.
Er, no.
(http://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_10640_google_s_current_employee_demographics_n.jpg)
This appears to agree with the first articles claim 80% male engineers, but that's also an accurate reflection of the hiring pool. Females represent 20% of engineers, and 20% people who even seek out engineering degrees. If females are or aren't innately inferior as engineers, and the reasons why they do or don't seek engineering degrees, is irrelevant. Promoting gender equality in a specialized field gets tricky when the qualified applicant base isn't equal, regardless the reason. It doesn't seem promote equality to expect 80% of engineers to compete for only half the jobs.
My only point is that Scrap is talking out of his ass. You, OTOH, are talking about expectations. The stats above are facts as of 2017. There are no expectations given.
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Why are they hiring so many non-tech asians?
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The matter at hand is not difficult to grasp. A spazz violating a bunch of social boundaries and company policy but lacking the brains to sue for the right thing. But discrimination against white conservative males? Seriously, FFS?
Having trouble identifying the company policy broken. He was part of a workshop and asked to contribute a viewpoint which he did. The rest is where it gets tricky. His contribution received no reaction from the workshop, so he started emailing it to other company associates. Do believe he wanted a reaction; only maybe not as severe as the one received. Agree with what he said in the second article; it wasn't a company problem until someone leaked it outside of the company and the news latched onto it. He had an excellent track record at work, so this would be more appropriate as some sort of reprimand and blemish on his record. Firing seems extreme when the company specifically asked for his viewpoint in the first place. Will agree on the point of suing for discrimination; wrongful termination seems sufficient.
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Why are they hiring so many non-tech asians?
It says that "Ethnicity data is US only"
If it were Brirain, I'd hazzard a guess that they have an "ethnic minority" quota to fill , and they mostly fill it up with Asians, cos asians are highly-regarded as employees, and also highly motivated to "improve themselves" as a rule ,
Well, so it's been said *shrug* . Can't say I've checked the stats, but I first heard that theory (20 years -or- so ago) from a black bank manager who was looking to move to the Midlands (from London) and was having a hard time getting a job . He said "If a black man walks into a bank up here, they think he's come to rob it, not apply for a management position". He might have had a valid point. But that prejudice is based -in part, at least- on genuine cultural differences, so it;'s hard to judge it's influence from statistics, just the same as with women.
Back then, we had a whole load of second- generation Afro-Carribean youths, floating around and groping for a sense of cultural identity. They weren't exactly projecting the right sort of image on the whole. But they were not all the same , ofc. Oh! and neither was I projecting the right kind of image to get myself a decent job, come to that, so please don;t read that as disparaging, on my part.
The black population here is a lot more diverse nowadays, but, well... I'm not gonna go into that cos it's complex, and it really is hard to access the truth behind the stereotypes and to enquire into it without offending anyone. But there probably still is some truth in what he said.
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If it were global, it might be where they have support centers.
It may just be that Silicon Valley has a huge Asian population. Or people applying where someone they know works.
Dunno.
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It may just be that Silicon Valley has a huge Asian population.
That was awesome.
http://www.siliconvalleyoneworld.com/2015/04/20/demographers-asians-now-outnumber-whites-in-silicon-valley/
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^ Yep! gotta plus Cal for hitting the nail on the head.
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...but hang on. That doesn't reflect the demographic very well. Where are all the Hispanic people? Ahh, i dunno, I was assuming that all of Google's premises are in Silicone Valley wasn't I? And I actually haven't a clue about that. Hmm, Also assuming that the ratio would change as fast as the population changes, which is silly , unless they have a scarily fast turnover of staff (heck, could that be why they;re sacking the white guys? to adjust the ratio ? :LOL:)
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assuming that all of Google's premises are in Silicone Valley
No, but the Asian percentage of employees at their headquarter location might be much greater than the US overall percentages shown.
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I would assume that a lot of people in non-tech roles at a company like Google would have a tech background. A friend of mine recently made it to the final 2 candidates for a senio management position at Google and he is a former software developer. His plan was to get me a non-tech role there as well and I am a former software developer.
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I would assume that a lot of people in non-tech roles at a company like Google would have a tech background. A friend of mine recently made it to the final 2 candidates for a senio management position at Google and he is a former software developer. His plan was to get me a non-tech role there as well and I am a former software developer.
I'm not sure what things like tech management qualify as. Technically, they could be non-tech,
given what they actually do, but I suspect they still get rated as tech.
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Thinking those would be seen as tech jobs.
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I would assume that a lot of people in non-tech roles at a company like Google would have a tech background. A friend of mine recently made it to the final 2 candidates for a senio management position at Google and he is a former software developer. His plan was to get me a non-tech role there as well and I am a former software developer.
I'm not sure what things like tech management qualify as. Technically, they could be non-tech,
given what they actually do, but I suspect they still get rated as tech.
Tech lead roles would be classified as tech. My friend was going for a senior management role overseeing tech and non-tech functions. Definitely non-tech. My current role is business analyst. Definitely non-tech by any stretch.
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How about business analyst in a tech team? :zoinks:
Was part of a setup like that recently.
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Actually, the number of whites at Google is about proportional to the general population. Asians are *gasp* overrepresented while other minorities are underrepresented. This is entirely explicable by culture. No racial discrimination there.
Women are arguably overrepresented too, given that few women find tech to be particularly interesting which was the whole point of his memo, which was backed up by the bulk of science (evolutionary psychology) on the subject.
Er, no.
(http://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_10640_google_s_current_employee_demographics_n.jpg)
And you accuse others of lacking reading comprehension.
I figured that you, of all people on this board, would be aware of the Scandinavian Gender Paradox.
Women will never comprise anything close to 50% of the tech workforce. The only way to get numbers that high is to force them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70
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I liked that video (honestly I’m not following you around!!). I took part in Simon’s research when I was a kid, though that particular research didn’t add up to much. I have an “unusually long” ring finger, indicating I’m autistic, plus had a little extra testosterone while in the womb. I was never into dolls, preferred stuffed animals. Always liked trains, and art. Not sure my interests were typically masculine or feminine, I guess more feminine. Wasn’t into games except Tetris. I was addicted to Tetris. I always liked jigsaw puzzles, and sliding puzzles. I was in the 99th percentile with those block design puzzles you get in IQ tests.
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How about business analyst in a tech team? :zoinks:
Was part of a setup like that recently.
These days with the Agile methodology being popular it is not unusual to have BAs embedded into tech teams. It is also not unusual to get rid of BAs altogether and have tech people interface directly with the business - that is more the strict Agile approach.
Business Analyst is not a tech role. A lot of Business Analysts have no tech background whatsoever. A BA embedded into a tech team might come under a tech cost centre though.
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Actually, the number of whites at Google is about proportional to the general population. Asians are *gasp* overrepresented while other minorities are underrepresented. This is entirely explicable by culture. No racial discrimination there.
Women are arguably overrepresented too, given that few women find tech to be particularly interesting which was the whole point of his memo, which was backed up by the bulk of science (evolutionary psychology) on the subject.
Er, no.
(http://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_10640_google_s_current_employee_demographics_n.jpg)
And you accuse others of lacking reading comprehension.
Highlighting what you wrote for your benefit. Compare that to the diagram.
I figured that you, of all people on this board, would be aware of the Scandinavian Gender Paradox.
Women will never comprise anything close to 50% of the tech workforce. The only way to get numbers that high is to force them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70
Not watching videos. If you want to say something, write.
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How about business analyst in a tech team? :zoinks:
Was part of a setup like that recently.
These days with the Agile methodology being popular it is not unusual to have BAs embedded into tech teams. It is also not unusual to get rid of BAs altogether and have tech people interface directly with the business - that is more the strict Agile approach.
Business Analyst is not a tech role. A lot of Business Analysts have no tech background whatsoever. A BA embedded into a tech team might come under a tech cost centre though.
I know.
Basically, having BAs in tech teams was a good idea. Few tech people were able to, or actually wanted to, interact with the business in a way the business wanted them to. This was a large-scale agile project so there needed to be a lot of interacting. Multiple scrum teams and so a scrum of scrums for the hapless scrum masters, too, every now and then.
Incidentally and IMHO, large-scale agile projects seldom work well.
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What do we think of this?
Google Fired and Disciplined Employees for Speaking Out About Diversity [Updated]
Kate Conger
Yesterday 6:14pmFiled to: GOOGLE
373.5K
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Photo: Getty
Last August, James Damore circulated a memo internally at Google in which he argued women were biologically less inclined to succeed in engineering roles at the company and that Google’s diversity efforts were misguided. In doing so, he set off heated debate among his co-workers—debate that, according to current and former employees who spoke to Gizmodo, led Google to ramp up its moderation of internal conversations and crack down on employees who speak up about diversity.
Google’s practice of formally reprimanding—and in at least one case, firing—employees for comments the company deemed discriminatory toward white men suggests that Google made an effort to moderate speech by its liberal employees as well as its conservative ones. These efforts have left some Google employees concerned that they will face professional consequences if they voice support for Google’s diversity and inclusion efforts and wondering if the company’s HR system is being gamed by employees who want to stamp out diversity initiatives.
Tim Chevalier, who was fired in November 2017 from his role as a site reliability engineer at Google after he made several internal posts calling out racism and sexism at the company, sued Google today for discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination. Chevalier, who is transgender, queer, and disabled, alleges that Google failed to protect its female, minority, and LGBTQ employees from harassment on internal forums—but was quick to crack down on those employees when they spoke out about their experiences with racism, sexism, and homophobia at work.
Chevalier is one of four current and former Google employees who said they were disciplined for speaking out internally against racism and sexism—speech that Google allegedly deemed discriminatory toward white men. One of them requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about their experiences at Google. The earliest examples documented by Gizmodo occurred in 2016, before Damore began working on his memo, but Google’s efforts appear to have escalated after the memo was published.
Google did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails from Gizmodo requesting comment prior to the publication of this story. In a statement provided after publication, Google spokesperson Gina Scigliano said, “An important part of our culture is lively debate. But like any workplace, that doesn’t mean anything goes. All employees acknowledge our code of conduct and other workplace policies, under which promoting harmful stereotypes based on race or gender is prohibited. This is a very standard expectation that most employers have of their employees. The overwhelming majority of our employees communicate in a way that is consistent with our policies. But when an employee does not, it is something we must take seriously. We always make our decision without any regard to the employee’s political views.”
Colin McMillen, a staff software engineer at Google who has worked at the company for eight years, said he was reprimanded by human resources for an internal post in which he stated he did not want to work with individuals who shared Damore’s beliefs. Bridget Spitznagel, an engineer who left Google last spring, said human resources demanded that she remove an internal post that linked to information about an upcoming racial justice workshop. Another former employee described being disciplined for a comment defending one of Google’s recruitment programs.
“They asked questions like, ‘Are you saying you won’t work with white people?’ and ‘Are you saying you won’t work with men?’”
Former Google security engineer Cory Altheide told Gizmodo in January that a senior vice president and the company’s human resources department discouraged him from discussing diversity and inclusion initiatives, conversations that motivated his departure from the company in 2016.
Damore and fellow former Googler David Gudeman filed a class action lawsuit against Google in early January. Damore and Gudeman were both fired for comments the company deemed discriminatory, according to their lawsuit—Damore for his suggestions that women were inherently less suited for engineering work than men, and Gudeman for internal posts that suggested one of his Muslim co-workers was a terrorist. Damore and Gudeman included screenshots of internal posts by McMillen, Chevalier, Spitznagel, and Altheide in their lawsuit in an attempt to prove the company routinely discriminated against white, conservative, male employees.
“We look forward to defending against Mr Damore’s lawsuit in court,” a Google spokesperson said after the suit was filed. Last week, the National Labor Relations Board released a guidance memo recommending Damore’s complaint to the agency, which is separate from his class action suit, be dismissed. The NLRB found that Damore’s memo constituted sexual harassment and that Google was within its rights to fire him.
Chevalier’s lawsuit and the fresh claims of his former colleagues, however, mean Google’s practice of disciplining employees for internal discussions around diversity—from both conservatives and liberals— will remain an unresolved issue for the foreseeable future, thanks in large part to an all-consuming company culture Google itself created.
“Company social networking forums can be incredibly useful, but employers have an obligation to prevent them from becoming a cesspool of bullying and harassment,” David Lowe, one of Chevalier’s attorneys, said in a statement. “Firing the employee who pushed back against the bullies was exactly the wrong step to take.”
Bruising Internal Politics
In August 2017, shortly after Damore’s memo was published by Gizmodo, Chevalier penned a blog post comparing the logic of James Damore’s memo to that used by domestic abusers to justify and perpetuate their abuse. The post, which Chevalier linked to on internal Google Plus, compared Damore’s memo to the manifestos written by mass shooters Eliot Rodger and Marc Lépine. Damore’s writing reflected similar feelings of entitlement and gender superiority to those on display in Rodger’s and Lépine’s manifestos and in the behavior of domestic abusers, Chevalier argued.
“What the manifesto-writer and domestic abusers have in common is feelings of entitlement,” Chevalier wrote of Damore’s memo. “Of course, the way they act on those feelings is different. But the effect is the same: to intimidate and control women, whether an individual wife or girlfriend or all of this person’s female coworkers. In both cases, making excuses for the abuser fails to identify and dispute the abuser’s sense of entitlement.”
Chevalier’s post heavily cited Why Does He Do That?, a book by the domestic violence researcher Lundy Bancroft that analyzes abusive behavior. Bancroft writes that young boys are often raised to believe that, when they enter romantic relationships, their partners will be solely dedicated to meeting their needs. When they discover in adulthood that their partners have fully formed lives of their own, they can feel cheated, Bancroft explains. Chevalier referenced this particular passage of Bancroft’s book in his blog post, and that was the section that Google’s human resources team said violated company policy, Chevalier said.
“White boys (not only white boys, but especially) are taught not just that they’re entitled to a perfect female partner/servant in the way Bancroft describes, but also that they’re entitled to high status because of their maleness and whiteness; that being white and male are precious gifts that no one can ever take away from them,” Chevalier wrote in the post. This line, he was told, violated Google’s harassment and discrimination policy.
Two posts Chevalier created on Google’s internal meme generator, Memegen, were also cited as reasons for his dismissal, according to his lawsuit.
In one instance, a black Googler wrote in an internal Google Plus post that she noticed she was being asked to present her identification badge more frequently than her white coworkers. When someone responded that her coworkers were just doing their jobs by asking her to prove she worked for Google, Chevalier made a meme using the privilege-denying dude format with the caption, “I have opinions about forms of oppressions that don’t affect me.”
The other meme cited by Google’s HR was posted shortly after the 2016 election. Chevalier’s caption was, “White men felt disenfranchised because their needs are no longer centered and people of color and women are getting a fair share.” He was fired in November 2017.
In his lawsuit, Chevalier says that his supervisor at Google criticized him for his political activism several times prior to his firing. He also alleges that Google’s HR department did not take action when he raised complaints about discriminatory comments from his coworkers.
“I don’t advocate for diversity and inclusion because it’s fun or because I would rather do that than think about distributed systems,” Chevalier wrote in an internal Google Plus post cited in the lawsuit. “100% of the time I spend on defending my right to be here and the rights of women, people in gender and sexual minorities, people of color, and disabled people to be here is time I would rather spend thinking about hard intellectual problems in engineering or science.”
In the aftermath of Damore’s memo, McMillen wrote on internal Google Plus that he would refuse to work with other employees who supported Damore’s views. In mid-September, McMillen was called into a meeting with HR and told that a complaint had been made about his post.
“They asked questions like, ‘Are you saying you won’t work with white people?’ and ‘Are you saying you won’t work with men?’” McMillen recalled. “I was saying, ‘If you believe women are inherently worse at engineering, I’m going to have a hard time working with you.’”
The HR investigation into his comment lasted about two weeks, he said. During that time, McMillen said his HR representative told him that the department was processing a number of similar complaints and would endeavor to handle them all similarly. At the end of the investigation, McMillen was told that he should excuse himself from all hiring and promotion decisions. “The stated reason was there were concerns about my ability to be impartial in evaluating other people,” he explained.
After his manager pushed back on the decision, McMillen said, he was told that he didn’t have to remove himself from hiring and promotion roles—it was merely a suggestion—and he would be welcome to resume those roles after one year.
“There were missed opportunities for stuff that I enjoy doing,” he said. “There’s also a social impact of knowing that myself and a bunch of other people who spoke up against the Damore memo got some sort of negative HR interaction for having done so.”
Another employee, who requested anonymity because Google typically requires its employees to adhere to non-disclosure agreements, told Gizmodo they faced a run-in with human resources after an internal conversation about Google’s initiatives to improve diversity in its hiring pipeline.
Google stepped up its recruiting efforts at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in recent years—an effort that was the subject of intense internal debate. The conversation heated up as several media outlets reported on Google’s recruitment from HBCUs, with some employees questioning why Google had selected these particular schools rather than other universities that had not historically served black students.
The former Google employee responded, calling those questions unequivocally racist. The employee received a formal reprimand from Google HR in 2016 for the comment—a copy of which was reviewed by Gizmodo—which called the statement “disrespectful and divisive.”
In a 2016 post on internal Google Plus, Spitznagel highlighted a racial justice workshop and noted it might be useful to white co-workers who were interested in becoming more involved in the cause. The title of the workshop, which Spitznagel herself didn’t reference in her post, was “Healing from Toxic Whiteness to Better Fight for Racial Justice.”
The phrase “toxic whiteness” triggered the HR complaint, and Spitznagel said she took her post down when instructed to do so.
Googlers that spoke with Gizmodo believe that the HR complaints against them aren’t isolated incidents, but part of a larger effort among some of their coworkers to shut down discussions about diversity. In addition to the seemingly spurious HR complaints, Google employees have had their internal conversations leaked to alt-right sites that then targeted them for online harassment, Wired reported.
The diversity debate inside Google might seem strange to outsiders who don’t have similar conversations at work. But Google has encouraged employees to engage in open discussion since its early days, and provided the forums for employees to do so.
Google’s Many Mailing Lists
Damore’s memo and the intense debate it incited weren’t born in a vacuum—vigorous internal discussion of professional and personal topics are a well-established part of Google’s culture.
Google maintains a vast array of internal mailing lists that cover broad topics like politics and sexuality as well as niche interests like experimental aircraft and specific team vacations. Any employee can create a new mailing list, and the lists are largely unmoderated by the company—although conversations on them are occasionally escalated to human resources if they become particularly heated or moderated by the employees who run the lists. At present, Google has more internal mailing lists than it has employees, although only some are active while many others are abandoned. Damore shared his memo on several mailing lists over the course of last summer and also created his own mailing list to solicit feedback. He called the list “pc-harmful-discuss.” Despite his firing last year, the list remains active.
“These lists were in large part free-for-all,” the former Google employee said. “Mailing lists like eng-misc were just kind of our playgrounds.”
Eng-misc, a list dedicated to wide-ranging engineering conversations, IndustryInfo, Politics, and other mailing lists became central parts of Google’s internal culture, and discussions on them had the potential to rattle large swaths of the company. One mailing-list debate that’s become something of an internal legend for racking up thousands of responses pitted supporters of the Tibetan independence movement against employees from China. The impetus? A dessert in a campus cafe that featured “Free Tibet goji berries,” according to a sign displayed next to the snack.
Forums like Google Plus and Memegen are also hubs for internal discussion at Google. When the company announced in 2015 that it would ban adult content on Blogger, Memegen went dark in a protest against the decision. In 2016, Googlers participated in an initiative nicknamed “Memegender” to increase the representation of women in the meme templates on Memegen.
These forums developed into integral parts of Google’s culture in part because of the company’s expectations of secrecy—employees aren’t supposed to discuss their work outside the office, and an abundance of caution led to mailing lists geared towards social topics as well as professional ones. Some employees felt the quality of discussion among their coworkers was higher than other, public forums like Reddit or HackerNews, and preferred to keep their discussions of the industry and their personal lives sequestered on internal forums. Google also promoted openness internally, encouraging its employees to debate decisions even if that meant challenging the CEO.
“Things are open to debate internally at Google, including decisions of the CEO, and people don’t get in trouble for that. That’s generally a good thing for the culture,” McMillen said. “HR and leadership don’t police these sort of discussions, and generally that’s a good thing. But they also have a blind spot that means they don’t know the person posting this comment has posted it 100 times.”
“The fact that we are able to openly criticize our product or leaders’ decisions makes our product better,” Liz Fong-Jones, a site reliability engineer who has worked at Google for ten years and is outspoken about diversity and inclusion at the company, explained. “The place where this runs off the rails is when people aren’t behaving in good faith.” Fong-Jones said she had not been reprimanded by HR for speaking in support of diversity and inclusion initiatives, but had received harassment after her posts were leaked online.
Over the last several years, conversations seem to run off the rails more and more frequently, Googlers who spoke to Gizmodo explained. That’s partially due to Google’s growth—mailing list discussions that once included a handful of people have ballooned to thousands—but the employees also noted that some of their coworkers dedicated significant time and effort to pushing back against diversity and inclusion efforts.
During the year leading up to the 2016 election and in its aftermath, internal conversations about Google’s diversity and inclusion initiatives had become consistently heated and confrontational.
‘I’m Just Asking’
If an employee posted on Google Plus or a mailing list about diversity, he or she would often be met with responses that seemed designed to draw them into an argument, according to the current and former employees. If the employee took the bait and responded angrily to the provocation, their response would be screen-capped and sent to HR or to an alt-right site. The interactions seemed tailor-made to get Googlers who spoke up in favor of diversity in trouble so they would speak up less frequently, employees who experienced it said.
“There was this small group of malcontents who like to play the ‘I’m just asking’ game and deliberately try to make issues, and then immediately claim to be the victims,” the former employee explained.
Altheide described this behavior in a 2015 internal Google Plus post, saying that the questions were “not coming from a position of good faith.” He published the post earlier this month in a longer document that described his reasons for leaving Google.
Chevalier’s lawsuit cites a May 2016 internal comment as emblematic of the problem: “If we have fewer Black and Latin@ people here, doesn’t that mean they’re not as good?” one Googler wrote.
“There are some people that object to [Google’s parent company] Alphabet and Google’s diversity and inclusion initiative and object to people who are trying to fulfill those objectives,” Fong-Jones added. “They ask questions all the time. ‘Can you describe for me why there aren’t just two genders?’ Or, ‘I don’t see why women have a problem working in tech; tech is a meritocracy.’ That started a couple years ago and it’s escalated since then.”
“It’s people provoking you, trying to get a reaction out of you. As soon as they get reaction, they can leak it to an extremist site that will get you harassed outside of work, or they will report you to HR.”
Some employees tried to answer the questions rationally, but doing so would quickly become overwhelming, they said. “One of these people will come into a thread and ask 20 questions, some of which are related and some of which are not. The amount of time investment to respond is ridiculous,” McMillen said.
It was in this environment—in which the concept that Google should diversify its workforce was regularly up for debate—that Damore wrote and shared his memo. Since he created his own mailing list for discussion of the document, he was the person most empowered to moderate that discussion. He apparently chose not to, and the conversations on the list quickly became heated. After Damore was fired, the flame wars continued without anyone to moderate them.
Responding to provocations about diversity sometimes led to more frightening situations than a lecture from an HR representative. Internal posts that Googlers made about Damore’s memo were leaked to alt-right websites, which in turn drove online harassment towards employees. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai canceled an August all-hands meeting about the memo after employees received violent threats.
“It’s people provoking you, trying to get a reaction out of you. As soon as they get reaction, they can leak it to an extremist site that will get you harassed outside of work, or they will report you to HR,” Fong-Jones said.
The escalation of debates over diversity, Google’s apparent willingness to crack down on employees who support corporate diversity goals, and the external harassment have all contributed to some Google employees worrying about their safety and wondering if sticking up for their principles is worth the backlash.
Google needs to do more to protect its employees and investigate misleading HR complaints, Fong-Jones said.
“The first and primary thing that the company should be doing is addressing this false report to HR, or the provocation-and-report-to-HR pattern,” she said. “I think HR thinks it’s just people saying mean words on a mailing list. It’s a lack of sophistication.”
Google’s response also led some employees to believe that the company was undermining its own diversity initiatives. Google has reportedly spent at least $265 million on its diversity and inclusion efforts. That funding goes to education programs, scholarships, grants for research, improving internet access in emerging markets, and policy advocacy. Google offers employee resource groups organized around race, gender, sexuality, age, disability, and other affiliations, and has published an annual diversity report since 2014. Despite its commitments to diversity, Google’s hasn’t significantly increased the number of women and people of color it employees since its first diversity report.
“It is a cruel irony that Google attempted to justify firing me by claiming that my social networking posts showed bias against my harassers. The anti-discrimination laws are meant to protect marginalized and underrepresented groups—not those who attack them,” Chevalier said.
Update 7:20pm: This article has been updated with a quote from Chevalier released following the lawsuit, a statement from Chevalier’s attorney, and a statement from Google.
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^^^
Well, since the first sentence is a lie...
How are we expected to believe the rest of it?? :dunno:
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What do we think of this?
It reads like Google employees have too much time on their hands to socialize, and think too much about crap like this. They should cut staff and impose heavier workloads to gear their work culture to be more work centric.
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It's not discrimination if they treat everyone badly. :orly:
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^^^
Well, since the first sentence is a lie...
How are we expected to believe the rest of it?? :dunno:
...did you read the rest of it?
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So you can't be anti-diversity and you can't be pro-diversity if you even imply some criticism of groups who may currently be considered privileged or over-represented in the google workforce.
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Everyone shut up and get to work. Problem solved.
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Everyone shut up and get to work. Problem solved.
These are thoughtful, intelligent, well-educated knowledge workers. There is always going to be dialogue between them, the sharing of ideas both progressive and regressive.
Google is trying to manage that dialogue by providing a platform. Otherwise it just becomes something embedded within the company culture. The sort of thing that employees talk openly about until someone from HR enters the room.
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^^^
Well, since the first sentence is a lie...
How are we expected to believe the rest of it?? :dunno:
...did you read the rest of it?
I glanced over it.
What would be the point of reading it if the author is an unreliable narrator??
S/H/It can't even get the basic facts of what James Damore said correct.
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Everyone shut up and get to work. Problem solved.
These are thoughtful, intelligent, well-educated knowledge workers. There is always going to be dialogue between them, the sharing of ideas both progressive and regressive.
Google is trying to manage that dialogue by providing a platform. Otherwise it just becomes something embedded within the company culture. The sort of thing that employees talk openly about until someone from HR enters the room.
Diversity hiring practices are a discussion matter for HR and hiring management, and discrimination or harassment is a discussion to be held with HR. If a company provides a platform and invites employee dialog about HR matters, then they deserve whatever they get. Firing people after inviting their opinion only creates unwritten rules about who is really allowed to contribute to the dialog. Employees only need to know the rules and the rules need to be clear. It doesn't matter what I think about co-worker's ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or how that impacts them having a job, unless I say something about it. If I shut up and do my job, then my opinions don't affect me or anyone else.
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Everyone shut up and get to work. Problem solved.
These are thoughtful, intelligent, well-educated knowledge workers. There is always going to be dialogue between them, the sharing of ideas both progressive and regressive.
Google is trying to manage that dialogue by providing a platform. Otherwise it just becomes something embedded within the company culture. The sort of thing that employees talk openly about until someone from HR enters the room.
Diversity hiring practices are a discussion matter for HR and hiring management, and discrimination or harassment is a discussion to be held with HR. If a company provides a platform and invites employee dialog about HR matters, then they deserve whatever they get. Firing people after inviting their opinion only creates unwritten rules about who is really allowed to contribute to the dialog. Employees only need to know the rules and the rules need to be clear. It doesn't matter what I think about co-worker's ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or how that impacts them having a job, unless I say something about it. If I shut up and do my job, then my opinions don't affect me or anyone else.
(http://www.movingimage.us/images/calendar/media/pinkfloydthewall_550x238-detail-main.jpg)
This is scary on so many levels.
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Everyone shut up and get to work. Problem solved.
These are thoughtful, intelligent, well-educated knowledge workers. There is always going to be dialogue between them, the sharing of ideas both progressive and regressive.
Google is trying to manage that dialogue by providing a platform. Otherwise it just becomes something embedded within the company culture. The sort of thing that employees talk openly about until someone from HR enters the room.
Diversity hiring practices are a discussion matter for HR and hiring management, and discrimination or harassment is a discussion to be held with HR. If a company provides a platform and invites employee dialog about HR matters, then they deserve whatever they get. Firing people after inviting their opinion only creates unwritten rules about who is really allowed to contribute to the dialog. Employees only need to know the rules and the rules need to be clear. It doesn't matter what I think about co-worker's ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or how that impacts them having a job, unless I say something about it. If I shut up and do my job, then my opinions don't affect me or anyone else.
Why would a company create a platform for discussing diversity issues, and then allow that platform to be used to promote views that are against company policy.
Providing a platform is a way for the company to have some degree of control over how these issues are discussed, and to intervene where employees are expressing attitudes that are damaging to company culture.
I know that in a place like intensitysquared where everybody loves unadulterated freedom of expression, that might sound like a nightmare. But it actually makes a lot of sense for a company to do that. Particularly when that company has a huge public profile and an image to maintain.
(I may be playing devil's advocate here - or maybe not).
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Everyone shut up and get to work. Problem solved.
These are thoughtful, intelligent, well-educated knowledge workers. There is always going to be dialogue between them, the sharing of ideas both progressive and regressive.
Google is trying to manage that dialogue by providing a platform. Otherwise it just becomes something embedded within the company culture. The sort of thing that employees talk openly about until someone from HR enters the room.
Diversity hiring practices are a discussion matter for HR and hiring management, and discrimination or harassment is a discussion to be held with HR. If a company provides a platform and invites employee dialog about HR matters, then they deserve whatever they get. Firing people after inviting their opinion only creates unwritten rules about who is really allowed to contribute to the dialog. Employees only need to know the rules and the rules need to be clear. It doesn't matter what I think about co-worker's ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or how that impacts them having a job, unless I say something about it. If I shut up and do my job, then my opinions don't affect me or anyone else.
(http://www.movingimage.us/images/calendar/media/pinkfloydthewall_550x238-detail-main.jpg)
This is scary on so many levels.
Sometimes reality is scary. People who make their job this personal are the ones who end up being a problem.
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Everyone shut up and get to work. Problem solved.
These are thoughtful, intelligent, well-educated knowledge workers. There is always going to be dialogue between them, the sharing of ideas both progressive and regressive.
Google is trying to manage that dialogue by providing a platform. Otherwise it just becomes something embedded within the company culture. The sort of thing that employees talk openly about until someone from HR enters the room.
Diversity hiring practices are a discussion matter for HR and hiring management, and discrimination or harassment is a discussion to be held with HR. If a company provides a platform and invites employee dialog about HR matters, then they deserve whatever they get. Firing people after inviting their opinion only creates unwritten rules about who is really allowed to contribute to the dialog. Employees only need to know the rules and the rules need to be clear. It doesn't matter what I think about co-worker's ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or how that impacts them having a job, unless I say something about it. If I shut up and do my job, then my opinions don't affect me or anyone else.
Why would a company create a platform for discussing diversity issues, and then allow that platform to be used to promote views that are against company policy.
Providing a platform is a way for the company to have some degree of control over how these issues are discussed, and to intervene where employees are expressing attitudes that are damaging to company culture.
I know that in a place like intensitysquared where everybody loves unadulterated freedom of expression, that might sound like a nightmare. But it actually makes a lot of sense for a company to do that. Particularly when that company has a huge public profile and an image to maintain.
(I may be playing devil's advocate here - or maybe not).
Then it's a trap, and people should recognize it as a such, shut up and do their work to avoid the trap. Sharing experiences of discrimination and harassment at work isn't a yammer topic, it's a discussion for HR and an attorney if needed. The article basically says the company is providing a platform that generates provocation and harassment, and these topics are generally heated and confrontational. Maybe is it a good thing, and they're not doing it very well.
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Regardless of whether or not he's in the right, he's not going to win. Google's worth billions and they probably have a lot of experienced lawyers for this kind of thing. :dunno:
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A strong company culture is not achieved by having employees hunched over a computer and afraid to discuss the issues that affect how they interact with others at work and affect who gets hired.
Productivity is achieved in a tech company through cooperation and sharing of ideas and knowledge, not through simply piling so much work on every employee that they don't have time to think.
The fact is that there will be dialogue between employees. Much of that dialogue will have a negative impact on company culture. Providing a monitored platform for dialogue permits the company to correct negative trends in company culture. This can be partly achieved by ousting small-minded broflakes like Damore.
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A strong company culture is not achieved by having employees hunched over a computer and afraid to discuss the issues that affect how they interact with others at work and affect who gets hired.
Productivity is achieved in a tech company through cooperation and sharing of ideas and knowledge, not through simply piling so much work on every employee that they don't have time to think.
The fact is that there will be dialogue between employees. Much of that dialogue will have a negative impact on company culture. Providing a monitored platform for dialogue permits the company to correct negative trends in company culture. This can be partly achieved by ousting small-minded broflakes like Damore.
Agreed. People will talk, regardless.
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A strong company culture is not achieved by having employees hunched over a computer and afraid to discuss the issues that affect how they interact with others at work and affect who gets hired.
Productivity is achieved in a tech company through cooperation and sharing of ideas and knowledge, not through simply piling so much work on every employee that they don't have time to think.
The fact is that there will be dialogue between employees. Much of that dialogue will have a negative impact on company culture. Providing a monitored platform for dialogue permits the company to correct negative trends in company culture. This can be partly achieved by ousting small-minded broflakes like Damore.
Agreed. People will talk, regardless.
Jack wont talk about it at work, and certainly not in writing at work. Some lessons don't need to be learned the hard way.
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A strong company culture is not achieved by having employees hunched over a computer and afraid to discuss the issues that affect how they interact with others at work and affect who gets hired.
Productivity is achieved in a tech company through cooperation and sharing of ideas and knowledge, not through simply piling so much work on every employee that they don't have time to think.
The fact is that there will be dialogue between employees. Much of that dialogue will have a negative impact on company culture. Providing a monitored platform for dialogue permits the company to correct negative trends in company culture. This can be partly achieved by ousting small-minded broflakes like Damore.
Agreed. People will talk, regardless.
Jack wont talk about it at work, and certainly not in writing at work. Some lessons don't need to be learned the hard way.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it still the case in the US that you can be fired on rather short notice for just about anything? That the workers' rights are still in their infancy, comparatively speaking? In most of the EU, firing somebody is a lot harder which results in an environment where it is actually possible to criticise your employer.
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A strong company culture is not achieved by having employees hunched over a computer and afraid to discuss the issues that affect how they interact with others at work and affect who gets hired.
Productivity is achieved in a tech company through cooperation and sharing of ideas and knowledge, not through simply piling so much work on every employee that they don't have time to think.
The fact is that there will be dialogue between employees. Much of that dialogue will have a negative impact on company culture. Providing a monitored platform for dialogue permits the company to correct negative trends in company culture. This can be partly achieved by ousting small-minded broflakes like Damore.
Agreed. People will talk, regardless.
Jack wont talk about it at work, and certainly not in writing at work. Some lessons don't need to be learned the hard way.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it still the case in the US that you can be fired on rather short notice for just about anything? That the workers' rights are still in their infancy, comparatively speaking? In most of the EU, firing somebody is a lot harder which results in an environment where it is actually possible to criticise your employer.
Really don't know how it compares, but haven't thought of worker's rights here as lacking. Didn't view this as being about criticizing an employer, but rather saying the wrong thing at work and being offensive. When I talk at work, genually try to limit it to only talking about the work. It's easy to get sucked into conversations irrelevant to the actual work, and those are the types of conversations that can potentially cause conflict. I recognize my potential for offending other people, so there are certain topics off limits with co-workers. If it's not about the work, then it better be the weather.
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A strong company culture is not achieved by having employees hunched over a computer and afraid to discuss the issues that affect how they interact with others at work and affect who gets hired.
Productivity is achieved in a tech company through cooperation and sharing of ideas and knowledge, not through simply piling so much work on every employee that they don't have time to think.
The fact is that there will be dialogue between employees. Much of that dialogue will have a negative impact on company culture. Providing a monitored platform for dialogue permits the company to correct negative trends in company culture. This can be partly achieved by ousting small-minded broflakes like Damore.
Agreed. People will talk, regardless.
Jack wont talk about it at work, and certainly not in writing at work. Some lessons don't need to be learned the hard way.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it still the case in the US that you can be fired on rather short notice for just about anything? That the workers' rights are still in their infancy, comparatively speaking? In most of the EU, firing somebody is a lot harder which results in an environment where it is actually possible to criticise your employer.
Very much depends on the job type, too, and even the specific company*. That said, I think there's also a discrepancy between what's technically legal and what's actually done, and there's a lot of space in between where shit is hard to prove.
*at my company it's amazingly difficult to get fired; if you know someone was fired, you know they REALLY fucked up, repeatedly and/or in a MAJOR way; this is a decidedly mixed blessing for all of us
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I suppose there are various cultural differences to consider, too. Working in the UK is very different from working in Sweden, for example.
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It appears as if this lawsuit is DOA.
Youtuber Law, who is a pretty good neutral source of internet legal info, explains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtFXGLRJhQY
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*at my company it's amazingly difficult to get fired; if you know someone was fired, you know they REALLY fucked up, repeatedly and/or in a MAJOR way; this is a decidedly mixed blessing for all of us
Tangent, but boy, has this been a month (and a year) to remember that.
Middle management is interesting. :zombiefuck:
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Middle management is interesting. :zombiefuck:
Are they like a Dilbert cartoon??
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Middle management is interesting. :zombiefuck:
Are they like a Dilbert cartoon??
Nowhere near that tame.
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Middle management is interesting. :zombiefuck:
Are they like a Dilbert cartoon??
Nowhere near that tame.
I find that difficult to imagine. What could be so valuable in a place like that that would encourage Machiavellian behavior??
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Middle management is interesting. :zombiefuck:
Are they like a Dilbert cartoon??
Nowhere near that tame.
I find that difficult to imagine. What could be so valuable in a place like that that would encourage Machiavellian behavior??
Who said anything about Machiavellian?
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Middle management is interesting. :zombiefuck:
Are they like a Dilbert cartoon??
Nowhere near that tame.
I find that difficult to imagine. What could be so valuable in a place like that that would encourage Machiavellian behavior??
Who said anything about Machiavellian?
You mean they're just... stupid??
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What makes you think that middle management is different from the rest of the population?
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What makes you think that middle management is different from the rest of the population?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
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Dilbert Principle is a clever but deliberately inaccurate interpretation of a very commonly observed phenomenon.
(Captain Obvious here).
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Dilbert Principle is a clever but deliberately inaccurate interpretation of a very commonly observed phenomenon.
(Captain Obvious here).
Jesus Christ!
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What makes you think that middle management is different from the rest of the population?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
While his version is funnier, I think people are stupid regardless.
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What makes you think that middle management is different from the rest of the population?
Posting response in elder's forum.
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Dilbert Principle is a clever but deliberately inaccurate interpretation of a very commonly observed phenomenon.
(Captain Obvious here).
There's different versions of it. Scott Adams, being a satirical cartoonist, is going to make a version of that that fits him. :M
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_selection_(politics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_management
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
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Incompetent employees, particularly in a technical environment, can (1) choose to be honest about their lack of competence, in which case they tend to be let go gently. Or (2) they can be dishonest about their lack of competence but fail at covering their lack of competence, in which case they tend to (eventually) be let go less gently.
OR (3) they can develop a certain swagger and a set of survival skills that enable them to hang onto a well-paid job despite really, really sucking at that job.
OR (4) they can actually be competent at the job and rely on their competence, not needing to develop that swagger and those survival skills.
OR (5) they can be really, really good at the job.
Now imagine a human experiment where there are 8 employees in a department that is responsible for delivering projects and supporting software. There is a (1), there are two of (2), one of (3), 3 of (4) and one of (5).
Allow this department to marinate for 6 or 12 months and then come back and see how the experiment went.
Most likely outcome? The (5) is actually performing a majority of the work done by the department. (1) was let go very early, one of the (2)s was also let go but the other is still somehow clinging on. The three (4)s are turning up for work every day and getting stuff done, making a few mistakes and missing the odd deadline. All of them now report to (3), who was promoted to middle management a couple of months ago.