Google CEO Sundar Pichai Says He Does Not Regret Firing James Damore (theverge.com) 473
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded today to the firing of employee James Damore over his controversial memo on workplace diversity, stating that while he does not regret the decision, he regrets that people misunderstood it as a politically motivated event. Speaking in a live conversation with journalist and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher, MSNBC host Ari Melber, and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in San Francisco, Pichai said that the decision to fire Damore was about ensuring women at Google felt like the company was committed to creating a welcoming environment.
"I regret that people misunderstand that we may have made this for a political belief one way or another," Pichai said. "It's important for the women at Google, and all the people at Google, that we want to make a inclusive environment." When pressed by Swisher on the issue of regret, Pichai stated more definitively, "I don't regret it." Wojcicki, who has spoken publicly about how Damore's memo affected her personally, followed up with, "I think it was the right decision."
"I regret that people misunderstand that we may have made this for a political belief one way or another," Pichai said. "It's important for the women at Google, and all the people at Google, that we want to make a inclusive environment." When pressed by Swisher on the issue of regret, Pichai stated more definitively, "I don't regret it." Wojcicki, who has spoken publicly about how Damore's memo affected her personally, followed up with, "I think it was the right decision."
Epic bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course it was political. How stupid do they think we are?
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, a welcoming inclusive environment that excludes some people, heard 'you' the first time. Meanwhile the memo continues to be misconstrued in part or its entirety as necessary.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
"Yep, a welcoming inclusive environment that excludes some people"
You say that as if you were making a valid point?
I mean, you can get yourself thrown out and banned from a restaurant, theatre, or store for being a sufficinetly obnoxious assclown. And these are businesses just trying to sell things. They aren't on a mission to create a 'safe space for snowflakes' they just want things to be civil enough that their other customers aren't driven out.
Should the store be criticized for hypocrisy for kicking an
Regarding the right to not be offended (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is that Google firing Damore appears to have been illegal. He was asked to provide feedback, he wrote a memo describing non-discriminatory ways to meet Google's diversity goals, then the memo was leaked and he was hounded in the press and at the workplace. One of the emails in his complaint is from a supervisor at Google threatening him, after all.
Regarding the broader point, there are philosophical reasons [culturalanalysis.net] not to have a 'right to not be offended'. The fact that other people were trying to engage in the heckler's veto and make a big fuss to drive out people they disagree with is something that's often being missed her. There are large free speech concerns if people are allowed to silence others by throwing a big enough fuss.
Google is a hostile workplace--for people like Damore. The toxic people who cannot remain civil in the face of disagreement should be the ones who are removed & punished. Anything else will result in a race to the bottom.
Re:Regarding the right to not be offended (Score:5, Informative)
Just to illustrate that the other AC is not exaggerating about Google being a hostile workplace, I encourage everyone to read the indictment: https://www.scribd.com/document/368688363/James-Damore-vs-Google-Class-Action-Lawsuit#fullscreen [scribd.com] It has lots of quotes, screenshots and other examples how things are handled inside Google. It's absolutely damning.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the link, its 160 pages or so, have read most of it now. Hopefully we get some lawyerly opinions on it at some point.
Re: (Score:2)
Just to be clear, that's his complaint, not an indictment.
I tend to agree that it looks to me like Google created a hostile workplace, but we should, in all fairness, withhold judgement until Google weighs in as well and any additional facts come out.
Re:Regarding the right to not be offended (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
You do realize all legal complaints start out like that?
Re:Regarding the right to not be offended (Score:4, Informative)
Page 8, lines 5 to 7. You will not "win" this by steadfastly misrepresenting the facts, like you have been doing from the beginning.
Re:Regarding the right to not be offended (Score:5, Insightful)
The "right to not be offended" is not only not desirable, it must be vigorously opposed because it is impossible to implement for all people. The only way to implement such a right is to selectively decide who gets that right and who does not, which offending actions are sanctioned and which are not. In practice, what this right entails is the imposition of the views of those in power upon the controlled masses, along with the propaganda that such mind control is benevolent, that blessed views are correct, and that opposing views are incorrect.
There is no difference whether such control is wielded by religions, dictatorships, or corporations. Each believes in its own benevolence and the evilness of those that do not adhere to incontrovertible truths.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if defining culture and etiquette are similar to defining values, there is a world of difference between voicing personal opinions and values and forcing those opinions and values upon financially dependent subordinates. It's that control that renders many normal relationships non-consensual. Sexual relationships and philosophical/religious/political discussions that are fine among friends have such a coercive potential in superior-subordinate relationships that they are legally prohibited in many si
Re:Regarding the right to not be offended (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is a hostile workplace--for people like Damore. The toxic people who cannot remain civil in the face of disagreement should be the ones who are removed & punished. Anything else will result in a race to the bottom.
Isn't this what Google at its very core represents... a race to the bottom? When everything is ad and cyber stalking supported ... when everything must be "free".
Re: (Score:3)
Under the at-will presumption, a California employer, absent an agreement or statutory or public policy exception to the contrary, may terminate an employee for any reason at any time.
Don't like anti-union, anti-labor "at will" laws? There are things you can do about that.
More here at CNBC- a decidedly non-liberal site.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/0... [cnbc.com]
And verification that Demore forced the CEO to cut short vacation.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/0... [cnbc.com]
Creating a shitstorm that forces the CEO to cut their vaca
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Your argument makes no sense. They didn't fire the people that spread the memo outside the forum where the discussion was SUPPOSED to take place.
The problem is the discussion was supposed to be an echo chamber, nobody likes the dude that breaks up a circle jerk. So the 'obnoxious ass clowns' removed the cites and posted the memo far and wide. They should have been fired for that.
After Damore gets done with Google, he has good cases against the 'journalists' that slandered him by editing his memo. Also against any Googlers that altered it then posted it. He should put them _all_ in the poor house.
Re: (Score:3)
In that case, they should probably can the person who publicly posted the memo which was originally posted to an internal only message board.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Interesting that Pichai responded (Score:2)
Pichai must be feeling some heat over this or he would have simply ignored it. As it is, he is putting it back on the news.
Good.
Sadly, Danmore is not naturally aggressive. I would have made very public statements that Prichai was a malicious liar. Google tells us what to read. We need to trust Google. You cannot trust a malicious liar. That would have got headlines. And if Prichai sued, he would have to attempt to justify his position publically. (The lie is that that Danmore denigrated women, or th
Re: (Score:3)
BTW. Try finding a link to this article by searching google
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... [nytimes.com]
Could find it on Bing.
Re:Interesting that Pichai responded (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Epic bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
Or you can fire the special snowflakes who have a meltdown any time they hear a fact they don't like.
Who's going to be more productive for you as an employee; the "asshole" who has the courage to speak about uncomfortable facts and challenge conventional wisdom with rational analysis, or the emotional disaster whose response to hearing inconvenient facts is to cry and take time off work?
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
You did not actually read the memo, did you.,
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
The majority of people did not read the memo. The actual content of the memo is not sexist, but it is challenging. People would rather round it down to a common category that they can definitively reject with full social support....than put forth the mental effort of understand what he actually said, what he actually meant, and how well-supported it actually is.
Pointing out to these people that they did not read the memo will not motivate them to read it. And even if it does, when they read it they will just skim it and zoom in on the catch-phrases, missing the actual meaning and instead seeing their own expectations reflected right back at them.
The ability to stay truly objective, in a domain like this, is rare. Most people simply cannot do it. Nor do they feel the need to try.
Re: (Score:3)
There's also the fact that you basically *can't* find an unedited memo with most simple Google searches. They promote a bunch of news articles offering opinions about it. I have to use non-Google search engines to find it.
You can find the memo here [firedfortruth.com] for anyone curious about it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The very first result in Google for "Damore memo" is this:
https://medium.com/@Cernovich/... [medium.com]
The content appears to be the same as your link.
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
but you *can* fire the biggest assholes and keep them from making women feel like they don't belong there.
Advocating firing the person who in good faith is attempting to offer suggestions for getting more women into the field makes *YOU* the biggest asshole.
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
In Jet Li's "The One", they had the two prison break scenes in alternate universes - one with Bush as president, the other with Gore.
FFS it feels like we're in an alternate universe now. Going from judging people by the "content of their character" rather than the "color of their skin", we've now institutionalized "diversity" initiatives that insist we diversify and include people based on their immutable characteristics, but exclude people based on their thoughts and ideas.
Sucks to be a gay black conservative nowadays.
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a big part of why so many of us on the left aren't thrilled about the progressives are doing... "equality" now means simply switching which groups get preferential treatment, as punishment for past wrongs. It's a completely untenable position. And part of the reason why Trump won... a lot of Democrats just stayed home. Your whole life you advocate for everyone to receive equal treatment, now that makes you a right-wing racist because equal treatment isn't good enough... that alienates people.
Re: Epic bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was growing up, we were heavily indoctrinated in school with MLK-style antiracism. That is, if you judge someone based on the color of their skin then you're both a scumbag and an idiot. That was uncontroversial at the time and remains a core value for me and a whole lot of other people.
How times have changed! Now the fake progressive media establishment, backed by powerful factions of the corporate and juridicial oligarchies, DEMAND that everyone be racist. To them, anyone who follows the teachings of MLK is an "asshole", or perhaps literally a Nazi. Who deserves to be silenced, fired, assaulted, and possibly tossed in the Gulag or murdered.
One way to look at this is a shibboleth. If a man can take an obviously false statement and proclaim it loudly and energetically as the one and only TRUTH - well, that man has real faith.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
That sounds awful, but it's not got anything to do with the Damore case. If you read the actual memo and ignore all the people misrepresenting it, you can see pretty clearly how he created a situation where Google had no choice but to fire him.
Anyway, I think we need to wait for the lawsuit to progress before we can really make a final judgment. The material filled so far is pretty damming, it's clear that both of them were in an untenable position.
Re: (Score:3)
I did read the actual memo. It was a concise and accurate summary of the current state of research.
If simply stating that there is indisputable evidence of sex-based differences in inclinations is a situation where a company has no choice but to fire someone, then we're in pretty sad shape.
What google should have done is established a zero tolerance policy for blacklists, ideological harassment, and insisted that tolerance for diversity means tolerance for diversity of opinion.
Instead, they let SJWs run wi
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
> as punishment for past wrongs.
Worse, it's punishment for past wrongs committed by OTHER PEOPLE, whom in many cases are already dead, and usually have been since before the people being attacked were even born. And it somehow comes as a surprise when resentment and pushback happens.
Example: No one in my generation, or the next generation, or the next generation, had anything to do with Jim Crow laws. They were ended in 1965, the very same year GenX is considered to begin. So only a very tiny portion of my own generation was even alive, and they were all drooling on themselves in cribs at the time. The previous generation (boomers) was contemporary to Jim Crow, but had no power yet. You have to go all the way back to the "greatest generation" of the WW2 era to get to the youngest generation that had political power to maintain those laws and do any oppressing of anyone. But then, that was also the generation whose better examples dismantled Jim Crow. And most of them are already dead anyway. To get to the people actually to blame, the ones who set it up, you have to go back two or three more generations, with zero living members. But oh, does the SJW wing of the left want to blame and punish me and mine for Jim Crow and even slavery.
Well. The hell with that. I'm not going to mistreat anyone who doesn't mistreat me first. You want to promote yourself, lift yourself up, devote yourself to whatever cause, more power to you. All I ask is to be left in peace: I mind my business you mind yours. But if your idea of lifting yourself up includes tearing me down then yes, I'll protect my own interests and, to use the SJW's own parlance: resist.
Re: Epic bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Our group? We're not a fucking hive mind. We're hundreds of millions of individuals from all around the world, most of whom are not billionaires or presidents.
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FFS it feels like we're in an alternate universe now. Going from judging people by the "content of their character" rather than the "color of their skin", we've now institutionalized "diversity" initiatives that insist we diversify and include people based on their immutable characteristics, but exclude people based on their thoughts and ideas.
I'm not exactly sufre what you're saying here. Isn't excluding people based on their thoughts and ideas precisely juding people by the content of their character?
And
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
White privilege
Nope
Re: (Score:3)
Not just that, but Pichai had to end a vacation and return to Google early to deal with the fallout. California being an "at will" state; "pissed off the CEO by ruining his vacation" is a perfectly legit reason for a termination.
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it was political. How stupid do they think we are?
The level of outrage generated by Damore's memo is not just about Google and their hiring practices, the memo pokes huge holes in the group/identity politics used by the Left. That's why the outrage is so out of proportion and shrill to the point of apoplexy on the Left and why they want Damore pilloried.
Strat
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
That's why the outrage is so out of proportion and shrill to the point of apoplexy on the Left and why they want Damore pilloried.
Have you considered the possibility that's just how they have meetings? [pilloryhistory.com] ;)
Re:Epic bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
The outrage and apoplexy about the Damore situation is on the left? Seriously?
Yes, I remember all the calls for Damore to be fired and all the angry screeds from conservative groups and others on the Right and the REEEE!! that echoed across all the conservative/Right-leaning blogs, social media, networks, etc...Oh, wait...
Strat
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Epic bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Pichai said that the decision to fire Damore was about ensuring women at Google felt like the company was committed to creating a welcoming environment.
That is very much a political reason...
Re: (Score:2)
It seems like you're reading something into that sentence that isn't there.
Re: Epic bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Creating a welcoming environment for everyone is a laudable, non-political goal.
Making women "feel" like you are "committed to" creating a welcoming environment specifically for them is bullshit politics.
I suspect that you don't see the difference between those two things, but it's pretty glaring.
Re: Epic bullshit (Score:2)
Mr Pichai could not publicly describe the firing as political, else he would be next to be purged.
Re: (Score:2)
Especially since you can just pay them 77 cents to the dollar. They should be aiming to have all female workers.
Facts are irrelevant to politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Amonst other things, Danmore said that women in general are more prone to neurosis.
You will disagree, because that statement is politically incorrect. It does not matter what the actual evidence is. We deny what we do not want to hear.
When engineers deny what they do not want to hear, things do not work. Bridges fall down. So there is a different psychology between an engineer and most other people. Facts actually matter in engineering.
Details also matter. Danmore never said that all women are more prone to neurosis. Just that more are. Those are two different statements. But to a non engineer, they both mush to the same thing "Women...neurosis".
Hence the disconnect.
You can't get an ought from an is. (Score:2)
It's funny how often people say "that's racist" or "that's sexist" but don't actually even try to refute whether or not the statement is true.
Then again, most people probably think that Hume's fork is something you'd use to eat a salad.
Re: (Score:2)
The scientific or historical truth of isolated statements is not necessarily important.
It is very easy to be abusive by insinuating via carefully chosen facts to bring to the discussion, by implying linkages from context while avoiding stating the linkage outright.
Let me give you an example. Not serious. All for illustration.
I see your words and note that we should keep in mind that most rapists are men. That is undeniable fact. It does not surprise me so many men rush to defend Damore, obviously.
My example is a bit silly, but it illustrates the principle. By mixing fact, weirdly stated opinions and juxtaposing them carefully, it is easy to make ugly insinuations, including i
Re:You can't get an ought from an is. (Score:5, Informative)
Damore is talking about a big 5 personality trait [wikipedia.org] with neuroticism, not a mental illness.
The reason for bringing up different preferences and saying they lead to people developing different average skill levels in groups was to find a non-discriminatory way to make Google more woman-friendly, not to write a bunch of sneaky insults. That is, instead of trying to reject more male candidates, they could try to make the job less isolating than sit in a cube for 60+ hours with minimal interaction.
But people were introduced to it as an "anti-diversity screed" which causes an anchoring bias, even though Damore's goal was to present ideas on how to help women be better represented in tech by making the job nicer. Somehow that point continually gets lost and many stories don't even bother to link to Damore's memo [firedfortruth.com].
Re: (Score:2)
That is, instead of trying to reject more male candidates...
Really now, isn't that obviously a Male Victimhood Fantasy that is unlikely to apply here?
Companies like Google are always hungry for excellent talent and they are not rejecting any such candidate due to gonads.
It is true that Google is making more effort to get target minorities to apply and go through the full interview process. But the intention still appears to be to not hire unqualified candidates. (Of course, intentions and implementation do not always jibe.)
Whether that is exactly fair and whether
Re: (Score:3)
That's what I get from reading Damore's complaint. They are alleged to hold segregated events and even hold blacklists of various types, up to and including security alerts when someone with dangerous opinions arrives on a Google campus.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. We've reached an age where, enabled by idiots like Google's CEO, truth doesn't actually matter. Well, maybe according to Oprah, "your truth" matters...whatever the hell that means.
Here's a simple fact for instance: the distribution of intelligence among women is "taller" than that of men. That means that women's average intelligence clusters around the mean and that men have more outliers. In English, geniuses are much more likely to be men than women. Also, severely retarded people are more
Re: (Score:2)
The basic idea is that a classification of ideas ("this statement is sexist") tells us nothing about the state of the real world ("this statement is true/false.").
But you don't have to take my word for it [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
The question on hand is a matter of rhetoric, not truth: What are the reasonable interpretations of what Damore wrote? What were his intentions? What might a reasonable reader think were his intentions?
In fact, Damore's intentions could be innocent enough, and he still could be justly discharged if he chose his words poorly and a reasonable person interprets his words as a purposeful insult.
I would further note that insinuating insults while purposefully hiding behind a thin veneer of ambiguity is a very
The Jenner Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
We could have 100% women in tech tomorrow, if every man would just identify as a woman. After all, being a woman is all in the mind - because reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
Now that would be hilarious, even if just to watch the mental gymnastics.
I wonder if that could become some kind of national event, see which people have the most amazing mental backflips, we may need to train up some judges to score it.
Political? Uh, yeah. (Score:5, Insightful)
When facts meet politics, politics win. All it shows is that Google is more concerned about optics than making decisions based on facts.
Re: (Score:2)
When facts meet politics, politics win. All it shows is that Google is more concerned about optics than making decisions based on facts.
It is much worse. Google, being a dominant search engine, can largely decide what the facts are.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
What it shows is that Google has become a social justice media company rather than a top tier search engine company.
I can get most everything now from Bing quite well and I'm needing google less and less as time goes by.
Re: (Score:2)
Literally, from TFA:
"The first question they had about it [was], âIs that true?â(TM)â Wojcicki said on the latest Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. âoeThat really, really surprised me, because here I am â" Iâ(TM)ve spent so much time, so much of my career, to try to overcome stereotypes, and then here was this letter that was somehow convincing my kids and many other women in the industry, and men in the industry, convincing them that they were less capable. That really up
Memo to all employees from Google's Legal Dept. (Score:5, Funny)
Gang:
Please do not discuss, or comment in any way, about ongoing issues we have in the courts.
Kthnxbye.
"welcoming" and engineering do not mesh (Score:5, Insightful)
Engineering is hard-core. If you mess up, tons of money is lost and people may die. It is not a role for anybody that needs to be "welcome". It is a role for people that do understand things, see past the bullshit and can get things to work. And also for people that leave when the bullshit gets too much. Of course, any actual engineering set-up worthwhile working for will cherish and treasure its engineers, whether male, female or anything else. It just does not matter. Skill, insight and capability do.
Of course, most people, like this "CEO" are incapable of seeing this. If they take over, an engineering company becomes a has-been. Because while a good engineer will always find a reasonable job anywhere, these people depend on scamming people out of their money for sub-par performance and after a while, customers wake up to what is going on.
Re: (Score:2)
The downfall of Radio Shack began when they decided to fire all their engineers at their Texas HQ and become a cell phone reseller and equipment re-badging company.
Evidently they didn't need their engineers and the world really didn't need Radio Shack.
Not true (Score:2)
Hobbyists couldn't save Radio Shack because America's manufacturing base is g
Only a very small amount of google (Score:2)
That said, it goes both ways. If the Alpha male screws up and the beta finds the fuck up your hard-core environment can break down when the beta keeps his mouth shut to avoid conflict (or because he knows damn well nobody's gonna listen to him since he's not a jock).
Hell, on a smaller scale, who here reading this hasn't kept their mouth shut about some impending doom at work because it wasn't worth the hassle to
Re:"welcoming" and engineering do not mesh (Score:5, Interesting)
And fail. Most of the core activities in good engineering is solitary and can only be done that way. In fact, "designed by committee" is about the most negative thing you can say about an engineering product and that is no accident. The whole "team" nonsense was created by bad engineers that struggle to reach the level of a qualified technician and need the group to hide in. Of course, those then want all that "welcoming" bullshit and "safe spaces" and call every environment where their incompetence is actually called out "toxic".
Re: (Score:3)
Opinions can create a toxic culture that hurts collaboration and diversity.
So can actions and policies. As evidence, I give you Google. The insights into that company's working environment portray a very toxic environment, especially if you're unfortunate enough to be white and male.
Attempting to prove that individuals or a class within a company may be inferior helps contribute to a toxic culture.
Who did that? It sounds like Google management attempted to create an inferior class within the company by giving training and opportunities only to members of privileged classes, but I wasn't aware that anybody had tried to prove that individuals or a class may be inferior.
While Google may have made mistakes and may legally be in trouble, the memo reeked.
If we're lucky we'll get a c
Not Yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course he doesn't regret it at this time. Nothing has happened yet. Once this goes to trial he might be singing a different tune. It's the little things that tend to set big things in motion. I've been hearing talk of regulating google and facebook for several months now.
Once the trial starts everything that has happened will go on public record. That might be the tipping to make congress ether start regulating google or break up google. The latter being the most likely of the two.
So, he might not regret it now but the fat lady is far from singing on this issue
I don't think he's ever going to regret it (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, a better organization could have it's cake an eat it too. e.g. they could keep guys like Damore without driving out women. But I've been in IT for 20 years and I know what a boys club it is. Changing that is _hard_.
Re:I don't think he's ever going to regret it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't think he's ever going to regret it (Score:4, Interesting)
the largely untapped labor pool of female software engineers. There's a dirty joke in there somewhere
Yes, the joke being that this supposed pool exists.
Convince women to enter programming jobs instead of medical ones, or to become software engineers instead of teachers, and maybe that pool will exist.
As a side benefit there'll be a shortage of doctors, nurses and teachers so more men will enter those professions, reducing the male demand for programming jobs.
It's a win in both directions. Except for the poor fuckers now working in a job entirely unsuited to their individual needs and expectations.
I can tell you my kid never once considered IT (Score:2)
And my point is Pichai doesn't care how he gets his workers. But if he can poach ones that otherwise would have entered the medical field he'd be happy to. My kid's smart, and she's never going to work for Google or any other tech company. And her perception of IT work is a big part of that. Not that I would have encouraged it though. Way too much wage suppression and outsourcing. If Pichai and his ilk
Readers digest version (Score:5, Insightful)
B.S. (Score:2)
Good news for the competition (Score:4, Interesting)
Then look for the people with skills who can work and bring them over to your company.
Is that virtue signalling brand is a really slow, boring place to work?
Your band offers tech and more new tech. The other big brand has long boring meetings about telling the world about how good it is.
What to join a fun, new, dynamic, innovative tech brand? Want to sit in a meeting after boring meeting on the optics of branding and what words to use?
Welcome to an actual tech company that still considers merit and skill? Welcome to the big brand that tells the world about the brand?
Boring big brand meetings on using words all week? A boring big brand that has to stay on message?
Find that fun new tech company thats all about the tech?
Start your own company and get smart people by having no boring meetings
Of course he'd say that (Score:5, Insightful)
Admitting that he should have publicly fired the person who took the non-memo that was actually an internal G+ discussion item and waved it like a bloody flag to clickbait shitposters would be an admission that Damore has a case.
But that is precisely what he should have done. He should have called a town hall meeting, asked the person to come to the stage and publicly fired them without any severance with a stern warning that anyone who decides to go activist and take dirty laundry to the media instead of working through official channels will be punished even harder because now they know that Google won't tolerate it.
Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
He should step aside and let a woman take his job.
Re: (Score:2)
Man, it's shit like this that makes me view 0 score posts - AC, you're a fucking genius :)
Mod parent up.
Um... (Score:2)
Article slanders Damoore (Score:5, Informative)
The now-infamous “Google memo,” written by engineer James Damore, argued against diversity initiatives at Google and said that female engineers were less capable of leading others.
They must be talking about a different memo. Because his memo did not does say that female engineers are less capable of leading. The closest thing I can find is this:
Women, on average, have more...extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
James Damoore said nothing about women being less capable. Breaking it down, he is nicely say that women tend not to be assholes, and that assholes get leadership positions. Anyone looking at our current sitting president would be forced to agree with him.
If James Damoore gets 1 dollar for every every media outlet that slandered him like this, he could buy Google.
What I'm wondering: Has anyone at Google ... (Score:3)
... left after Damore was fired due to the fact? I know this might be slightly off-topic, but maybe some Googler could anonymously give a comment on this whole Damore semi-witchhunt thing and how it goes down at Google itself? Like, in real life?
Curious to know.
Idiot (Score:2)
Exactly how does this relate to his product performance at Google?
I work with a lot of people that say interesting things in memos, but our organization doesn't fire them. (You know....you might have heard about that thing called a constitution...or whatever...)
You might get a trip to human resources if you threaten people. But stating your views on gender issues or professional issues is not a firable offence.
The best thing that could happen here is to break google up into about 100 companies, maybe seiz
Slight update (Score:3)
Well, duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Under California law, it is explicitly illegal to fire someone for his political opinions, but perfectly legal to fire someone to avoid creating a hostile work environment (indeed, if no lesser measures suffice to prevent/cure a hostile work environment, it's effectively obligatory).
Therefore, whatever the actual motive for the firing, Google is going to say it was about a hostile work environment, not political opinions. There's a pending lawsuit, after all.
What about the person who leaked the memo? (Score:3)
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They know they will lose, have budgeted a few million.
The jury should punish them, hard, ghost peppers as lube. Using Odorous' stage gear.
They will likely settle, to control the press. Not get publically caught in lies.
Damore shouldn't settle for less than a public written apology, lots of cash and Google firing the people that made the decision.
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Re:Damore was wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't agree. He was naive thinking that any SJW scum actually wanted a rational discussion, but his points are mostly valid, at the very least as the starting point for an actually rational discussion.
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Re: Damore was wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just found the most stupid AC for today. Congrats.
The actual memo (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking of which, here's a copy of the memo [documentcloud.org] and a link to Damore's site [firedfortruth.com], both of which are quite hard to find on Google for some reason, even though other search engines find the site just fine.
It's amazing how many people call it an "anti-diversity screed" who either haven't read it or who badly misconstrue the part where he tries to say that Google could be more welcoming of women by making it so it's not expected to work 60-hour weeks with no human interaction and fail to realize that the overall thrust of the paper is to find non-discriminatory ways to make Google friendlier to women.
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He didn't use capable at all. That word isn't in his entire memo; you may need to read it as there is distressingly little accurate reporting of its contents anywhere on major news sites.
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