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Comment by luckydude | Hacker News Reader

No, the right move would have been to take Damore aside, say "dude, you stirred up a mess. You aren't wrong but the mess is a PR disaster. How about we hand you a big pile of money, you go find your next job elsewhere, and we agree not to throw mud at each other?"

I can see not doing that when you are cash poor but Google is paying engineers as much as $600K/year in total comp, they could have landed $10M on Damore and never noticed it.

My personal opinion is much like Brook's - Pichai was pandering to the mob. That's not true leadership in my opinion.

Edit: don't understand the downvote, this is HR 101. Companies don't want this sort of attention and they'll pay to avoid it. I'm very surprised that a cash rich company like google didn't take that route. Are you suggesting with your down vote that it is better for google to be in the news cycle for months/years while this works its way through the courts?

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I'm pretty amazed how badly google dropped the ball on this. They could have easily made the problem go away, likely with a few conversations where they agree to sit down and listen to his concerns upon his first submission of them to the diversity team or as you suggested a check and NDA.

Whoever runs the diversity team should absolutely lose their job for letting this get to this point. Following that whoever decided that flying the CEO back to publicly fire someone and denigrate them was a good idea and the best way to proceed. A CEO of one of the worlds most powerful companies publicly firing and shaming an employee who simply presented an opinion through proper channels is just not a well thought out move.

Staggering amount of poor judgement all around.

I actually find that highly unlikely. Look how fast Damore has been involved with the conservative media. That aside, if he was really convicted in his opinion, do you think he would take the money?

My take, and it's worth what you paid for it which is nothing, is that he was genuine in his opinions. I didn't get that he had a conservative axe to grind (I did get a sense that he might lean that way) but it didn't seem like he was trying to move the needle to the left or to the right, he was trying to find a better way to do what google was trying to do.

What I'm trying to say is that I think the conservative media picked him, he didn't pick them.

So yes, I think he would have taken the money. Google could have made this go away for what was a rounding error to them but retirement money to him. Nobody says no to their retirement even if they don't want to retire. It's called fuck you money for a reason, you never have to put up with a crap job again if you have that backstop.

I'm not convinced. His repeated use of the words "echo chamber" seems fairly indicative of his views, and I don't think it simply leans conservative. This is all just conjecture though.

But either way, if he didn't take the money and went public it would turn out worse for Google, possibly even legally. They really took the only action they could, in my opinion.

It’s suspiciously alt-right in tone. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he posts or follows t_d

Using the phrase "echo chamber" doesn't make you alt-right, suggesting so just closes down an avenue of discussion which then leads to more division.

> they could have landed $10M on Damore and never noticed it.

Word would get around. Followed by many manifestos worth $10M.

Companies have been doing this for decades. They usually include an NDA in attempt to not let the word get around.

So far as I know, the NDA's mostly work.

If what I'm suggesting seems weird I'd encourage conversations with HR people at large companies. This is part of what a good HR person does, sadly.

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