They did screw up. But this guy had to be fired. Not because they had to make an example out of him, but because by publicly sharing his biases, he's ensured that a large part of Google wouldn't want to work with him.
It's a team sport after all.
It's a team sport after all.
I'm mature enough to get past my views and work with people of different viewpoints as I've had to do all the way through college and my professional life. I was told this was the whole purpose of group exercises in high school and college but I suppose like many things, that applies to only privileged people such as I.
The difference is I actually have to practice what I learned from carrying other people's grades in college for every single day in my professional life for as long as somebody catches wind of my political alignment and threatens to quit if my company doesn't remove me. It's a team sport after all.
I'm Indian and a lot of Indian Hindus I know hold some messed up beliefs. Some of them work at top tech companies as well.
Yet, people don't seem to have a problem working with them. But they do with a guy who rails against diversity.
Why does a brown Hindu man who dislikes muslims, believes in matching horoscopes before getting married, and whose grandparents practiced and benefited from the caste system and who, if you get him drunk enough, might espouse for honor killings and homophobia get a pass?
Why are these "diverse opinions" valued and others are not?
Social acceptance is largely a function of majority vote. Though some social values might be absurd, if the majority feels comfortable doing it, it does get a huge degree of acceptance.
Plus some absurd social values have acceptance for largely cultural reasons. Marriage among castes in India is one such thing. There are so many caste related things you do in everyday life, belonging to different castes can constantly lead to "My X values are better than your Y values" kind of friction. So people keep to their castes.
Horoscopes are one of those "Why take a risk?" kind of basic hygiene related rituals you do before Indian marriages.
None of this makes sense, but the majority of the people are perfectly happy doing it.
Infanticide? Sure, cool. Homophobia because of religion (not Christianity)? We're fine with that. Honor killings? Its a pass. Killing goyim/kaffirs? We're down with that. Have a weird hangup or otherwise cultural thing that's completely disgusting, abhorrent, and/or unethical? It's obviously cultural, and it's OK!
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Wait, you want to talk about something white people do? We can't allow that! That's against our diversity training.
You're fired.
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It's because multiculturalism isn't about learning other cultures, their languages, their histories. Nope. It's about how evil Western culture is. I've sat in those classes, bemoaning how horrible and evil our ancestors were. And the only way to "win" the grade is to regurgitate what's said.
And in avenues like this, "Winning" is silence, and losing is saying anything against the current groupthink with your real name.
Google has close to 70k employees. What was the sample? How selected? How representative?
It sounds very questionable,
https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...
It's definitely not valid to draw any conclusions about google as a whole from it.
Remember though, that groups that are underrepresented may also be disproportionately affected.
IE women may feel the document is much more harmful than men, but by numbers, ...
You'd have to break it down by a lot of variables, and once that happens, in practice, everyone will just draw whatever conclusion they want anyway :)
Anyway, not gonna speculate on what it would look like, just gonna point out it's not valid data.
but that's not important because:
b) The idea that average people are good at understanding the consequences of such document is inherently flawed. It's my problem with a lot of aspects of American culture (I'm an European living in SV) - regular people are not in position to evaluate complex systems.
Every time I see an article about, say, a shooting, that ends with "Joe Black, who lives nearby, believes that police should do X and Y to stop the increase in crime", my blood boils. Joe Black is in a terrible position to understand the crime dynamic in his city, to understand how the police operates and what does and doesn't work in the pursuit of lowering crime rate.
Now, coming back to the topic, I'd argue that 95% of Googlers are completely not qualified to respond to the second question. At all.
There's a bunch of people in the HR department, with degree in sociology, group psychology, organization behavior and design, maybe people who studied micro-discrimination, gender imbalances etc. that are qualified to answer it. But the idea that you can poll employees to learn about whether this document is harmful is completely nuts.
Sorry for venting :)
p.s. But yeah... while writing this comment I saw an article about the poll asking Americans if the US should attack North Korea [0]. I honestly believe that the culture of doing that, while pretends to stay close to the roots of the country of freedom, where citizens decide about their country, is in fact terribly harmful because it builds conviction in people that they're in the right position to make such judgements on topics they have insanely little knowledge about.
[0] http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-...
eng-misc?
Just under 280 people (out of 72,000 google employees) responded to the poll at the time of the screenshot. No indication yet as to possible bias in how this poll was conducted. Not to mention, somebody could have whipped it up in MSPaint.
It's 2017, not 1417.
Indeed, a chief complaint in the manifesto is that Google is overwhelmingly liberal. Even the author of the manifesto recognized that his was a fringe position at Google.
not 75k engineers right?
Given the repercussions that's a surprisingly high number.
Or is there something else? Because that's a pretty mild question to get so upset about.
It's a team sport after all.
Something tells me that you aren't also going to defend the firing of anyone with open SJW beliefs for the same reason.