I read that more than half of Google employees are against the firing. It was in Yahoo News this morning. If I can find the link, I’ll post it.
Here is a link:
Well, is anyone surprised that Uber folks reacted in this way?
We do have one interesting method: a handful of transgender scientists who’ve worked in their fields as both a man and a woman. See e.g. https://newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people-can-explain-why-women-dont-advance-work
Then this proposed wording of Google’s response:
is a valid point, but it also has to be weighed against ensuring that the company . From the Zunger article I mentioned in post #26:
And it goes on from there. See https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788 if you don’t want to scroll back in the thread.
FWIW, daughter at Google says that even though fellow Googlers agree, disagree, or fall somewhere in between with regard to the “manifesto”, common thread is agreement that the CEO is handling this well.
Yes, the “Ben’s work is so much better than his sister’s” is one of the real classics in the field–and quite disturbing! Thanks for bringing it up, SlitheyTove.
The examples of being “talked over” or “interrupted” have nothing to do with male/female. In a top high tech company, everyone is good and knows it. They fight for their side of the issue and you fight for yours. People talked over me and I did the same to others. It’s not personal. I remember talking with some top devs about their meeting with the infamous big cheese and they all said, you better know everything about your project because he’ll study it before the meeting and ask detailed questions about a particular part of it – you’ll get your a$$ chewed off if you don’t have an answer.
Has no one here been through a code review? A group of people dissect your design/code (your baby) and point out every single flaw in it. It’s not pleasant … but it makes you a better developer.
That’s 56% of google employees who responded…NOT 56% of all google employees.
441 google employees responded which is a tiny fraction of the total number of google employees which numbers ~57000 according to one quarterly filing from 2015.
Incidentally, a HS classmate who worked for Google for a bit more than a decade before leaving to be a full-time musician and still receives calls to go back stated after reading that 10 page memo that he felt the illogical connections/arguments he made were such that Google should have stated they fired him on the basis of demonstrated inability to use critical thinking and logic.
Is that why training seminars are invariably so mediocre? It’s not really to train per se but to cover their bottoms? Does anyone else think lawsuits are making all of us bureaucrats? As well as cynics.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-fired-google-195400805.html
Damone’s response FWIW
Now he is trying to vilify Google as a gulag. Lol, that was his only real employer in his 4-yr career. What he will find out soon is that Title VIi is the law of the land, applicable to many other employees, so a good chunk of the US is a giant gulag. He can start his own company and keep it tiny, under 15 employees, to be able to discriminate as much as his heart desires. Or he can become a politician and try to repeal Title VII.
Find it interesting that Damone’s breaking one cardinal rule often taught to HS/college students regarding employment:
Don’t publicly badmouth one’s former employer before you’ve conclusively won your wrongful termination suit in court(settlements don’t count as many businesses/institutions settle for financial ROI considerations even if they have a strong case).
And even if you’ve won your wrongful termination case, many private employers will view the plaintiff as a possible loose cannon/litigious troublemaker not worth hiring.
@cobrat:
It is amazing to me that people think that somehow working for an employer is some sort of democracy or 'freedom of speech" and so forth apply, and they don’t, corporate America is and always has been the equivalent of Putin’s Russia. One of the cardinal rules is if your opinion will hurt the company, keep it to yourself, and there is no protection in labor laws other than whistleblower rules that apply to speech (and if this jerk tries claiming he is a whistleblower, good luck, not only are whistleblower laws some of the most weakly enforced, he likely doesn’t have grounds to sue, whistleblowing applies to illegal corporate behavior, and his opinion that diversity training and affirmative action hiring are wrong are not grounds, nor is his claim they suppress “conservative thought”, whatever that is these days.
I am sure the right wing will jump all over this and he will be a cause celebre on Fox News and the like, which of course will be gross hypocrisy since the conservative position on employment generally has been that employers should have the right to fire anyone for any reason they want to (sadly, including many conservatives who argue that Title IV and similar anti discrimination laws are illegal and employers should be able to fire anyone for any reason that want to), but when it comes to for example, a corporation firing someone claiming religious belief in violating company anti discrimination policy or this putz or the CEO fired by the board of Mozilla for his anti gay marriage stance, suddenly it becomes ‘how dare the company fire this person’.
The biggest problem with this clown wasn’t him explaining women not being in programming, that I could sort of in a twisted way attribute to naivete, but when he de facto insinuated that people were being hired and promoted because of affirmative action or whatnot who weren’t qualified, that right there is grounds for dismissal, and Google would have a pretty good case to blow that out of the water, if all these ‘incompetent’ people were truly being promoted simply because they were not male or whatnot and not because they were doing the job, I don’t think Google would be as successful as it has been. I suspect part of the problem is this guy sees things through the eyes of someone who is technically a super technologist, they often see things as being about clever alogorithms and cutting edge technology and the people who absolutely love that (like a Phd student would be), what they often don’t see (and don’t have perspective on) is the human skills that make up a lot of the business world, it is why there is the management dilemma in business, where technologically sharp people get promoted into management positions and often fall flat on their face, because technologically gifted is not necessarily a good manager (and IME, actually is often correlated the other way, for a number of reasons). Google themselves recognized that within the past 5-10 years, it is why they stopped the obsession about the 4.0 GPA techno geniuses from elite schools and all their clever puzzles and the like and realized that sometimes those not on that level might have things to bring, too, and this guy likely resents that.
Great points, @musicprnt. 
Haven’t read the thread, admittedly. Just saying that his memo goes to show that the women obviously are the clearer thinking of the species
What’s more ironic is that even by the standards of the highly educated set, he fell very short himself considering he flaked out on completing his PhD after only 2 years.
To a lot of friends in academia of who were academic grad students, that’s a sign one was either a serious academic laggard or he wasn’t seriously committed(With implications he took up a PhD place to get a free masters before bailing). Neither of which reflects well on him on the academic bona-fides or the ability to see through commitments he set for himself/integrity respectively.
There’s also the factor that the “consolation masters” aren’t regarded very highly by those who are aware of how they are awarded/given out. To them, it’s a strong signifier the holder either failed to come up with a viable dissertation proposal or a sign they lacked commitment by flaking out of the program. In some fields where one takes comps in their third or even 4th year, bailing after 2 years means they may not have even reached the comp stage or failed them badly enough that they were invited to leave with the consolation masters.
Incidentally, the HS classmate who was a longtime Google employee also made a snide crack about him publicly lying about having a PhD he didn’t actually earn.
I know several google employees. Not going to even ask what they think. Companies can fire idiots for sending out manifestos in their internal communication. First amendment doesnt apply. Hope the door didnt hit him in the platoon on his way out.
LOL autocorrect. The patoot.
I find the act that the guy perceives Google as a Silicon Valley echo chamber to be naive and ill-informed – and a glaring example of his overly narrow perspective.
This is Google: https://www.google.com/about/locations/
Obviously Google’s headquarters is in Mountain View… but it is certainly is not some insular echo chamber. Nor do all Google employees spend all their time at the Google campus or subsume their identities to Google. (The Google employees I know & have worked with weren’t in Mountain View).
This is for roethlisburger, in response to post #63, and also for anyone besides me hoping for more scientific input on the memo.
I found this most informative regarding the scientific claims made in the memo.