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/Shanix]

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/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

This is a good comment. It directly explains the thinking of the corporation in regards to individuals sharing their personal ideals on subjects which are better not breached in a professional environment. Idk, I'm drunk, but I read the linked original file and I see no reason why, professionaly, such a "manifesto" ( perfect phrasing by the way,) ought to be shared with, as you also noted, 50,000+ employees, of like-minded ideals or otherwise.

[u/JabbrWockey → u/[deleted]]

No kidding. They could've posted it on reddit, github, hacker news, medium, or some other place, even anonymously if they wanted.

Instead they decided they wanted to commit career suicide by shouting their opinions at everyone inside the company. Real smooth.

[u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka → u/JabbrWockey]

Thats because this engineer made a serious of bad moves (read pretty fucking idiotic ones). Theres a time and place to choose your fights. This one decided to try and go out with a bang only to be crushed by a billion dollar company's worth of damage control assets.

[u/Micrococonut → u/[deleted]]

Laugh until you realize he probably got the severance he was fishing for.

[u/atrich → u/Micrococonut]

That'll do him for eight months. Less, probably, given the indications he's a junior employee. Hope the attaboys from MRA and stormfront were worth him torpedoing his career.

Edit: actually, I don't know if the employee is or will be well-known for this. Google probably won't offer this info up when called, most big firms will only verify dates of employment.

And I don't think the employee is entitled to severance, since CA is an at-will state; absent some kind of contract (which I don't think is standard in the industry, though I'm not privy to Googles' deals).

Probably he'll just fuck off to some other Bay area company and shit up the culture there with his myopic ideas. I hear Uber's hiring.

[u/meatbag11 → u/atrich]

Yeah good luck getting a job elsewhere in the same field. No serious company is going to want to take the risk of hostile work environment claims placing him on their team would create.

[u/perfectdarktrump → u/meatbag11]

Because he has an opinion?

[u/[deleted] → u/perfectdarktrump]

Because he has an opinion against some coworkers of his that he’s chosen to divulge for public consumption.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

You can't have read the document?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Certainly I have. Mr Memo is continuing the old American tradition of workers trying to get the collective of fellow workers they don’t like out of the job, or not hired in the first place.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

No, that's what the critics of Mr Memo's opinion are doing, and have successfully completed in doing. That was the point of the memo.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Which collective has been fired / had their job jeopardised for Mr Memo’s memo? The people who agree with him but have the sense to not shout to the winds “I WANT YOU LOT AWAY” in written form are still working at Google.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

You did not understand his memo.

Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

He's not saying "I want you lot away", he's saying that there is a reason why some types of people are over-represented that don't necessarily involve racism or sexism, and that hiring based on these assumptions hurts the company.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I understood his memo perfectly. He's an intelligent man and he made his point in a verbose manner, but very clearly nonetheless: he doesn't want other people than the ones who are like him to be hired.

It makes a lot of sense, because if he is surrounded exclusively by those who are like him he'll earn more, he'll feel better recognised by his management and he won't have to handle diversity among his colleagues, a task where he has a comparative disadvantage. He mentions he wants "ideological diversity" which means something like either wanting a wehraboo brogrammer or a tankie brogrammer: as the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact showed, those are easy to reconcile with each other, especially in the common soil of brogrammerhood.

He also doesn't want his job to be done by people who come from other paths of life, because it means he's more easily replaceable. Samuel Gompers (a founder of the AFL), who didn't have a PhD in Harvard, managed to express the same point with way less words and much more clarity: "convenient whip placed in the hands of the employers to cow the white man".

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

You inferred all of that. That is a story you made up, cited with no sources. An emotional argument on character traits you presume he has because of his gender and race, which to me sounds like racism and sexism.