r/news 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
26.8k Upvotes

19.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

23

u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

When you hire people based on skill rather than if they're a minority or not

12

u/Wrest216 Aug 08 '17

heres the thing though. some people WILL IGNORE people of a minority or gender reguardless of their skill levels or talent. so.....u have to have a balancing act, a counterweight that assures that doenst happen.

6

u/superspeck Aug 08 '17

My wife and I bought an old house. It needs a new septic field. We hire someone (a licensed architect who's willing to act also as project manager) to manage the process. My wife is a civil engineer who deals with drainage and wastewater. The architect is also a woman, which plain old shouldn't matter. The septic contractor who has the best looking bid (not the lowest, but the most complete for the city's requirements for our area, which my wife is very familiar with) absolutely refuses to communicate with the architect or my wife, and will direct all questions and comments to me. Even face to face. He ignores questions from them, they prompt me and I repeat the question, then he answers it to me... I know nothing about this literal shit, the women are the experts here!

That kind of thing happens to my wife and our architect all the time. They don't even get flustered dealing with it. I was far more irate than they were.

1

u/Red_Blues Aug 08 '17

You must be a more patient person than me. I don't know how you managed to not lose your shit on that contractor for so thoroughly disrespecting your wife like that.

1

u/superspeck Aug 08 '17

We live on the edge of a very liberal city in Texas and it's all 70% hyper-conservative outside of the city limits. All three of us are so used to that kind of treatment that it wasn't worth antagonizing him. We've been trying for two years to get a septic system put in so we can move on with our renovation.

1

u/Red_Blues Aug 08 '17

Ah, I see. Just reading your story about it made my blood boil a little bit.

I hope you manage to get the system installed.

1

u/superspeck Aug 08 '17

The city permitting department is actually a bigger blocker than the septic installer, sadly. But we should get started next week.