Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

I am sorry if I come across as a liberal who gets offended, but I completely support the decision of Google to fire him. In fact, I think that Google had no other choice than to fire him, and that's mostly because the engineer shot himself in the foot.

Memos are not meant to express debatable personal arguments, memos are meant to express a company position. By widely spreading a personal view, the author impersonated the company in a way that the company does not endorse. As a culture manager, you just cannot let this kind of things happen.

Regarding the content of the "manifesto", the author should have known better. Even if it was genuinely true that women's biology explains the gender gap in technology, it is not provable - as in, there is simply no way to quantify the effect, if any. And using unprovable causes to justify a societal bias is not acceptable. The problem is that you can use unprovable statements to justify anything.

The debate regarding whether it is good or not to intervene at company level to try and change an industry culture is a perfectly healthy debate. Widely sharing one's view which uses unprovable arguments and that will offense some people is simply a dumb thing to do.

> The problem is that you can use unprovable statements to justify anything.

This is exactly why we can't shut down conversations the way Google did. Saying line employees are unqualified but Google executives are qualified to judge truth is very stifling to rational thinking and, yes, diversity that actually means something.

But nobody really believe that Google leadership is the best arbiter of diversity. Otherwise, everyone would be telling those class action discrimination lawsuits to pack up and go home.

So what do you think? Does Google leadership have a monopoly on public thought? Do the employees release all expectations of fair treatment when they sign an employment agreements?

Do we want the Google execs to sit there and make line-by-line technical decisions? Would you want the head of HR to tell this guy what kind of sort algorithm he should be using, or get into arguments about Go's lack of generics? Or do we expect them to defer to the smart engineers they hire?

This guy is probably a very smart software writing dude, but why would that make us want to listen to what he has to say on any other subject, whether it's biology, evolutionary psychology, running a business, or hiring practices?

Should employees be allowed to raise concerns about practices that appear to waste resources or lower morale? (I'm thinking of things like compulsory diversity / bias training)

As I understand the situation, it was an internal memo to try and open up a debate within the organisation. It was never intended to impersonate the company or be externally distributed.

It contained nothing extreme or explicitly hateful.And even if his arguments are flawed, they should have been discussed and countered.

If it's forbidden to even propose a possible explanation, how can anyone ever seriously discuss the question of why engineering isn't 50/50 male/female?

But then, I suppose that's the point. No competition for the equally unprovable, unquantifiable theory that's currently dominant.

Here as a conservative, I do think Google had the right to fire him. I don't agree with the decision, but I don't need to. It's not my company.

On that note, I don't think the memo was intended to speak for Google, but rather _to_ Google. Was it even intentionally public? Or was it leaked?

I think Google legally had a mechanism to do this, but ethically is messed up big time. The saying was "don't be evil", not "don't be criminal". I don't know if Google leadership was evil but the underlying principle is that "don't be illegal" is a low bar. I expect everyone to strive to do much better than that.

I don't see a lot of calls in these comment threads for an employee bill of rights or something, so I don't know why this keeps coming up.

Ultimately employment comes down to a voluntary contract between the employer and the employee. Personally I don't feel that it is the responsibility of the government to dictate what those contracts look like.

Generally the thought is that laws correspond to morality. Anyone who has taken one look at some knows this is not the case, but that may be where the link between "don't be evil" and "don't be criminal" come in to play.

Like I said, laws correspond to the lowest bar of morality. As in, we will take your freedom or property if you do bad enough things.

There are plenty of deplorable things that companies can and should legally be able to do that they nevertheless shouldn't do.

>and that's mostly because the engineer shot himself in the foot.

No, it was shared outside of his control to a wider audience from the initial recipients, then to the press by an anonymous source, who then culled references, notes, and charts from the document which were important points.

The publicity was distinctly out of his control, and I think that publicity had a major part in his firing (if it didn't, Google should also be firing the people who agree with him and participated in discussions with him)

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