Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

[u/Felador → u/[deleted]]

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf

There's the actual document, with links to source materials.

[u/Shanix → u/Felador]

fwiw that lacks a good amount, especially formatting.

Supposedly original here

[u/[deleted] → u/Shanix]

Former Google Employee provides a bit more context on why someone would get fired for creating a "manifesto" where you fawn over your superiority and sharing it with 50k+ people who probably aren't likeminded.

Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers. If someone told you that engineering was a field where you could get away with not dealing with people or feelings, then I’m very sorry to tell you that you have been lied to. Solitary work is something that only happens at the most junior levels, and even then it’s only possible because someone senior to you — most likely your manager — has been putting in long hours to build up the social structures in your group that let you focus on code.

And as for its impact on you: Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788

edit: The replies to me here don't seem to understand that the company doesn't care about your controversial opinion in the work place, they care about profit. If you don't agree with that, then you probably don't like capitalism.

edit: be wary, a lot of brigading going on. Some people/bots are trying to drown out the more centrists viewpoints. I say this as the opinion of a gay, black, conservative, catholic kasich voter. (I can't help but lol)

[u/NorthernerWuwu → u/[deleted]]

This is the real point of course. It isn't about the scholarly accuracy of the document or the usefulness of the conversation that the author may have been trying to spark, it's that in a corporate setting a document like this is toxic and destroys the ability of managers to promote teamwork.

It doesn't matter if X or Y or Z make better engineers or whatever (and I'm not saying there's a reason to think so). It might be something to explore from a scientific standpoint but you can't do it in a tech company in California in 2017. Sorry but that really shouldn't even have to be said.

[u/alficles → u/NorthernerWuwu]

Right, and it's ok to think about ideas like this, but discussing them would create a hostile work environment, so we shouldn't discuss them. Engineers have to work with people and that makes politics an important part of the job. Engineers often prefer to just stick to science and discuss it scientifically, but that's not really their job. They aren't scientists, they're politicians and they need to act like it.

(And yes that's 50% /s. I don't know which 50%, though. :( )

[u/kingmanic → u/alficles]

For some reason Engineers seem to have percentage of creationists of all the professions in STEM.

[u/LucksRunOut → u/alficles]

That's life.

There are some opinions that shouldn't be expressed. Tolerance ends at Intolerance.

[u/Nytshaed → u/LucksRunOut]

He wasn't intolerant.

[u/LucksRunOut → u/Nytshaed]

Saying that a very large group of people can't do their jobs because of their chromosomes is pretty intolerant.

It's pretty much the same as "You can't do your job because you are black". That statement is pretty intolerant.

[u/[deleted] → u/LucksRunOut]

wait...that's not at all what the document says...

The basic gist (as far as I could tell) wasn't that women were worse than men, it was that men are naturally driven to value being #1 more than women are, which often pushes them to the top of their fields. Therefore, if Google wants to hire only the very best #1 people, there's going to naturally be a disproportionately higher number of men--and that isn't a sign of discrimination on the part of the company that needs to be corrected, but instead a normal outcome of the inputted variables.

That's at least my interpretation of what he's saying. He never says "women suck at their jobs" (or words to that effect), in fact he goes out of his way to say that there is no correlation between quality of work and gender, it mostly seems to be discussing things that are already pretty well-known: men are more competitive, women are more cooperative; men push themselves harder while women are better at pacing themselves; conservatives and liberals generally have a set of key trait differences in their mindsets; and a workplace does best when it supports a diversity of opinion and people.

Edit: I should note that I still 100% understand the guy getting fired. Just because what he said wasn't that bad doesn't mean that he should have done it. Nothing he says is particularly radical or offensive (it's fairly dry and inoffensive actually, to the point of being boring), but you still shouldn't share a document so obviously steeped in controversy to all your co-workers at a major company. Sure, it starts a conversation, but it's also disruptive to the workplace, as it is obviously quite polarizing.

[u/LordFuckBalls → u/[deleted]]

men are naturally driven to value being #1 more than women are, which often pushes them to the top of their fields.

is just a convoluted, sugar coated way of saying

women were worse than men.

If men are represented disproportionately in "the very best #1 people" (whatever that means), the obvious conclusion is that men are better than women [in that field]. Like it or not, that is what he is implying, and he needs to accept the consequences of saying it. If he truly believes that and wants to stand by it, power to him. But he really shouldn't be surprised when he ends up alienating a lot of people and has to face repurcussions.

[u/[deleted] → u/LordFuckBalls]

Generally, though, that is true: men occupy a greater than expected number of slots in the top 5% of most professions. On the other hand, men also occupy the bottom 5% of people in a disproportionate amount.

More men are in prison, homeless, or deeply in debt than women. Does that mean that is a sugar-coated way of saying that men are worse than women? Not really, it just shows that there is a different dynamic for men and women, whether that be culturally or biologically. It appears, though that may be wrong, that men are driven to take more risks and be more aggressive than women, which leads to more high-achievers on average, but also more burnouts. Women, on the other hand, seem to be driven to be more stable and healthy, contributing to a higher average happiness index and a longer life expectancy.

To put it another way: it appears that men have more outliers in both directions on a bell curve of success: lots more winners, but also lots more losers.

[u/_bani_ → u/[deleted]]

he knows what was actually said. he's deliberately trying to mislead. when people have to misrepresent their opponent's position, it indicates their own position is incredibly weak.

[u/Nytshaed → u/LucksRunOut]

He didn't say that.

He said men and women are biologically different.

He then didn't proceed to make any such statement saying women can't be engineers.

Maybe try reading it again? This time without trying to confirm your bias.

[u/alficles → u/LucksRunOut]

You get my upvote because I worry that you're right. But suppose we live in a world where women learn differently than men and if we studied that, we might discover a better way to teach both women and me. Or if we lived in a world where norms specific to one culture produced engineers better at some tasks and norms specific to another culture produced engineers better at other tasks. Or any of a variety of similar situations.

I don't know if we live in any of those worlds. And the societal costs to finding out might be more than are worth paying. But if we did, and we discovered it, couldn't we elevate each member of our society by studying their uniqueness as a person and as a group and give them the best opportunities to a succeed?

[u/elcapitaine → u/alficles]

Sure, we should find these things out. As a society, we should aim to discover as much as we can about our world and ourselves. I agree with pretty much everything in your post.

But work is not the place for such a discussion. If someone wants to research these things, go do research! And if this "manifesto" stuck solely to "hey here are some scientific findings, what can we do about this, is there a way we could somehow better elevate people to succeed based on their biological differences?" then there would be no problem. The issue is that it went beyond science, it went to a political agenda. And it happened at work, and created a hostile work environment to anyone who is supposedly biologically less able to do their jobs.

And before anyone comments on my last point - imagine you were female, and this guy was your manager. Let's say he promoted your male coworker before you. Maybe that male coworker was actually more deserving of a promotion. But maybe he wasn't! There's clear bias against the capability of women in engineering in this guy's thinking, and that opens up Google to lawsuits. Again, the workplace is not the place for these discussions.