And despite what any employer will tell you about their workplace being an open forum, they are full of shit. What they mean is, it's an open forum to agree with management.
Minority viewpoints in tech become silenced and their author(s) ostracized by the biases of a mob mentality. It doesn't even matter what you write because most people won't even read the original source, instead floating by on derivative tweets and extremely biased summaries (in whatever direction agrees with their existing views).
Irrespective of the original memo, and this is something I've felt more strongly in the past couple years, it's just not safe to share dissenting viewpoints in tech anymore.
We used to be the industry where anything could be discussed critically and the most objectively correct answer could win (logic! science!). Nowadays it's so political and heated, I've found it best to just stay out of the discussion and not share dissenting views anymore. I think the real problem we need to fix is being able to have rational critical discussion around topics we disagree with.
It is not safe to share your viewpoints anywhere where it is not considered germane: and the workplace is high on that list. A firm will fire someone who becomes annoyingly political or who makes a public ass out of themselves on social media. I work for a medium sized tech firm in the American South and we had one engineer that was very open and sometimes combative about her progressive viewpoints and people stopped wanting to talk to her, even those who agreed with her. She didn't last a quarter.
Expecting firms to give their employees a forum to speak openly about anything not work related is a recent phenomenon across the board, and many still hold onto the view that if you want to engage in political discussions then do so outside of the workplace.
This is not true if only for the fact that organizations have always engaged in politics. In one of the worst cases, the United Fruit Company lobbied the US President to overthrow the elected government of Guatemala. In one of the most benign cases, Subaru sponsored gay pride events and publicly supported LGBT groups in the 1990s.
Besides that, everything else you've said is useless hyperbole. Get your history together before you go spouting nonsense.
> Besides that, everything else you've said is useless hyperbole. Get your history together before you go spouting nonsense.
Why be so hostile? If you want to be a dick to strangers on the internet then piss off back to reddit.
Feel free to point out which of these two statements is useless hyperbole:
> Google is known to be a very left-leaning company
> [Google] talks a big talk about being logic and reason-driven
Everything else I said was conjecture.
But Google does this (Memegen and eng-misc), the problem is that you're only able to speak about certain things and entertain certain opinions...so naturally, conservatives will feel muzzled and want to not go against the dominant culture/power structures
I agree that there is a lot of mob mentality going on, it’s just difficult to get upset about this case because the original author was spouting debunked “biotruth” arguments. Twitter replies are mostly full of men who didn’t read the original memo or who are willfully pretending it didn’t claim women are less biologically suited to being engineers.
I like Pichai’s memo and I think it sets the right tone: the offending employee could have raised these same arguments without falling back to debunked stereotypes. He could have done an hour of Googling on the topic and educated himself. Instead he trusted his own feelings in an area he had no experience or knowledge in.
This seems to be a trait relatively common among really smart people: doctors who think they’re good at politics, mechanical engineers who think they’ve discovered a theory that overturns all of physics, or in this case a software engineer that thinks he knows better than thousands of scientists doing experiments and crunching the actual data.
As far as I can tell we can have rational critical discussions in tech - we just can’t get away with spouting nonsense. If that nonsense reinforces old sexist or racist stereotypes then we can expect a backlash.
C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956592, where an actual scientist is quoted to say "The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right."
See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... for plenty of good references on the topic.
But generally, I mean, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I don't expect to see peace over this topic any time soon.
He also makes a bunch of unfounded claims that aren't really related to the science. And people argue that because he said a bunch of sciency things that scientists agree are correct, that everything he said was true.
I have to wonder if the artificial urgency that social media has created doesn't have something to do with this. Everyone these days wants to be the first to respond, which results in a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. You end up with a giant, unstoppable snowball of knee jerk reactions to other knee jerk reactions rolling down a bottomless hill.
"All hail diversity! But if don't think like we do, GTFO."
The owners of any business are free to create whatever business environment they want to create. The market is supposed to punish or reward them accordingly.
The job market, too, is a market.
The market won't give you the solution you seek; the issue does not impact profitability enough.
Plus, most other companies will refuse to supply goods and services to it lest they feel the backlash of catering to racists.
Not exactly a feasible venture.
See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Coca-Cola#Investm...
Actual experience has proven beyond doubt that boycotts don't work, and even if a company has blood on its hand, their deeds are quickly forgotten.
But you can't bring up the Apartheid and not dig through a huge history of companies, countries and people explicity or implicitly supporting it.
Doesn't justify anything of course but Coca-Cola wasn't the only company doing it
Didn't change much.
> Doesn't justify anything of course but Coca-Cola wasn't the only company doing it
That's my point, though. Plenty of companies have engaged in abhorrent acts, with little meaningful consequences to them. The market is not good at solving these types of problems.
Really cause that's a boilerplate libertarian argument.
That said, don't expect the market to give you a solution that's fair to people - the only one you'll get is the one of maximum profitability under implicit rules of the current culture. Those are very much not the same things.
People get easily outraged - which can and does end up with individuals getting hurt - but they also quickly forget and move to next issue. See also the arguments why boycotts generally don't work.
Google is being sued by the Department of Labor for violating a gender discrimination regulation: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa...
These companies behavior has nothing to do with the free market. It is a response to government regulation.