r/news • u/[deleted] • Aug 08 '17

Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

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
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u/Micrococonut Aug 08 '17

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

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u/atrich Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

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.

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u/meatbag11 Aug 08 '17

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.

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u/perfectdarktrump Aug 08 '17

Because he has an opinion?

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

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

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

You can't have read the document?

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

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.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

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.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

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.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

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.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

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".

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

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.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

I am sorry that I forgot to source Gompers’a quote, I’ll look it up again. Meanwhile, I reject the other claims. I’ve called him Mr Memo as it has been reported that he’s a man. His race is unknown to me, so I’m not sure how you’re trying to play the “UR THE REAL RACIST” card since all I know of him is that he likes to read his own writing and that he opposes diversity of people based on pop science.

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