https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employers/i...
Edit: I would guess this passage is roughly the area he's claiming:
"Threaten employees with adverse consequences if they engage in protected, concerted activity...It includes circumstances where a single employee seeks to initiate, induce, or prepare for group action, as well as where an employee brings a group complaint to the attention of management. Activity is "protected" if it concerns employees' interests as employees"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fired-engineer-likely-to-face-o...
Though as a layman I have to say that passage makes it sound like he should be protected.
No matter whether you think he's a monster or a martyr, posting anything that even suggests a different capability of your female colleagues at your place of work is begging to be fired. I'd have a lot more sympathy if he was sharing his thoughts at a bar and was overheard, or if he posted this on his own non-work blog, but seriously, shouldn't the outcome have been pretty obvious to him?
edit: grammar
> A pattern, apart from the term's use to mean "template",[a] is a discernible regularity in the world or in a manmade design. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern
So using a lot of text to depict such pattern while on the other hand indicating such pattern cannot generalize feels like wrestling with yourself. Did he try to prove himself that this 'on average' model is a bad model?
So, would "Jews tend to be greedy" or "Italians tend to be lazy" be an acceptable statement in the workplace because they target (supposed) patterns rather than individuals?
Would someone espousing those statements be reasonably assumed to give Jewish or Italian candidates a fair hearing?
After all, the memo claimed a tendency amongst women towards neuroticism.
he was basically playing roulette politics in the wrong setting.
Even The Guardian labelled it as "anti-diversity".
To me, while I believe Google acted wrong by firing him and proved the validity of the arguments the author (of the memo) laid out, it seems that Google has every right to fire him if the terms of employment they laid out for him, which probably includes a reference to their internal guide about espousing ideologies, were broken by submitting that memo, but I'd love to hear from a more knowledgeable person.
The smart move here would have been to cool down, wait for the news cycle to move on to Trump's next gaffe and fire the guy later for misreporting PTO, poor performance or some other objective act if his behavior was truly disruptive. Now they have created a martyr and attracted a lot of attention... so the wackjob right-winger types will be on this like white on rice.
No, his "plan" was to have a discussion.
>He probably played it well
So, not only assuming ulterior motives, but taking them for certain too...
Well, he is an excellent Chess player @ 2300 ELO. He might have had a complex plan. Which might just have been to put up the memo while Google was being investigated, not necessarily to benefit from getting fired.
Besides that, is suing google a sure thing? I bet they have the best lawyers.
" Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs."
....discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done).....
If that's true, then he could bolster the case with Department of Labor - which directly has to do with the claims that Google is paying women engineers much less than their male counterparts.
This is going to get ugly, and fast. (err, wait, it already has)
If your adversary has unlimited resources, find a bigger fish to engage them.
Unequal treatment of employees? How ironic.
This "memo" was probably one of the more unprofessional moves I've heard about in a while.
My own feelings are that it was cretinous and stupid. The same argument has been made for hundreds of years and women keep blowing it to smithereens. It has no legs to stand on.
I hope Google wins. It seems like it could be a blow if he wins on such a specious argument.
However, that may not matter if the guy doesn't care about winning the case. By pushing himself back into the spotlight he asserts himself as an alt-right hero fighting against the "politically correct" culture. By martyring himself in this way he stands to gain a lot, even if his complaint has no merit.
That doesn't mean discrimination doesn't exist, because I've seen it a lot - Angels and VC's assuming a pitch meeting is a date and acting that way, unacceptable behavior in the workplace and women being harassed and shut out of opportunities for advancement in tech. All these must be dealt with.
It's just the methods we're all using to end perceived discrimination might not actually be directed at the real parts of the problem. That was the whole point of his essay in the first place, I think.
Maybe I should believe that too, and be completely ignorant about the contents of the actual document....
<insert rage, anger, mad flailing of arms>
ObOntopic: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
If what he claims is true, that women/minorities are being hired because of essentially affirmative action more than merit, wouldn't that be kind of a shock to people hired there that are in those categories?
Wouldn't they start to wonder if they were hired because of skills or because Google is trying to get percentages right for EEO purposes? Would they also start to wonder if they are underpaid and treated differently because they might be a "quota" job?
Yeah he probably went about it the wrong way. Probably would have got more positive traction to open a dialogue with senior management about the general topic and then bring his points up in a conversation instead of a written manifesto. Maybe he tried that already though, who knows.