Why I Was Fired by Google | Hacker News Reader

Why I Was Fired by Google

wsj.com

293 pointsdpflan440 comments

I personally find the whole "Goolag" thing ridiculous. I've had relatives (great grandparents/uncles/aunts) in the USSR who were removed from their homes in the middle of the night by the government. One was even shot/killed.

Getting fired from your high-paying job to go off and get another high-paying job, after you spent numerous hours writing some controversial BS about women/hiring instead of, you know, doing your actual job, is not anywhere close to the type of persecution people have faced in the past - so let's please not pretend it is.

Alright, let me chime in:

For people that were less political danger, they usually were fired for "Political Incorrectness" and "Agitation and Propaganda", sent to re-education classes, and only given shitty job opportunities from now then. It was a convenient way to keep the less dangerous masses at bay.

If "being conservative" becomes a "fireable" offense in most large tech valleys, then we are in a path to similar stances.

Now, here where I disagree with the memo in general (it didn't seem constructive), I disagree with the way google handled the whole situation overall.

Anyway, this whole episode (if you are not a feminist you are the enemy stance and the black list that managers at google have) starts smelling more of a McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

For people that just want to do their job and don't want to get involved in these discussions you almost are forced to do something, otherwise you are an evil/enemy/suppressor/whatever else. That bothers me, as I lived under communism and have lived the results of blind ideology.

Why are we drawing the connection that he was fired for being a conservative? Tons and tons of people in the valley are their own special breed of techno-libertarian and they seem to be totally secure in their jobs. He was fired for being political at work. Don't be political at work. No one wants someone walking around their workplace talking about the evils of abortion. No one wants your coworker to ask if you'll sign an ACLU petition on trans rights while you're microwaving your pasta. No one wants to sit down at their email and see something like FW: My Thoughts on Women and the Workplace with Damore's pdf attached.

> He was fired for being political at work. Don't be political at work.

Well, more specifically, I think he was fired for being political in a way that caught outside attention and caused bad PR. Plenty of people are political at work, whether they be work politics or otherwise. This is a "You made the company have to weigh in on something that is way over your pay grade, and that's not something we're going to take a chance happening again with you." Executives and boards don't like when they have to stop what they're doing and put out a PR fire started by a low rank employee, whether that employee expected that outcome or not. That the firing of the employee causing problems at the executive level coincides with a way to combat the PR just makes the decision all that much easier.

Whoa, there - doesn't the fact that a low ranking employee, to use the phrase, can cause a global scale shitstorm, mean that just maybe, there are actually problems which were swept under the rug for too long?

Some of the later claims of the low-level employee absolutely justify the dumpster-fire: if diversity-related meetings go deliberately unrecorded to stop paper trails, if special second-chance privileges are given to diversity hiring candidates, .... that's pretty rotten stuff.

Would he have been fired if his position (similarly political) were for a stronger, more liberal diversity policy?

Of course not. That's the difference here. It was a work-provided place soliciting feedback on the company's diversity and hiring policies. Politics are already present in the existing policy.

If his liberal diversity policy was "white men shouldn't be hired, they are unfit to do the job" then yes he probably would have been fired still.

That would be the actual alt-left equivalent here.

> If "being conservative" becomes a "fireable" offense in most large tech valleys, then we are in a path to similar stances

It's not similar. It's not even remotely similar, that's what you don't get.

I wonder what your "credentials" are to speak on the subject. I grew up in the USSR. During 195x my grandfather and grandmother together with their 5 children did a number of years in a low security camp at the Russian North cutting timber.

>It's not similar. It's not even remotely similar, that's what you don't get.

It looks similar to me, very similar (and i'm ok with it because it is against conservatives this time).

I think a big difference between the USA and the USSR is that in the USA, everybody hates on their countrymen and thinks that the rest of the country is full of shit, while my understanding of the USSR is that you could only do this if you were relatively powerful. In the USA, no matter how offensive you are, you can find someone who agrees with you.

Mr. Damore has already been offered a job by Wikileaks. He's making the media rounds. He's being hailed as a hero by Breitbart and other right-wing talk shows. Chances are, he's not going to have trouble finding another job.

How is it similar?

I worked with a guy circa 2002 who emigrated from Russia in the 1990s. He was from a fundamentalist Christian sect who had _all_ his teeth knocked out by the butt of a gun in a Russian prison. This would have been sometime in the 1990s.

He was a good engineer but pretty abrasive, and ended up leaving on his own accord. But even _if_ he was fired for expressing his unorthodox political or religious ideas at work, I doubt he'd equivocate it with the treatment he received in Russia.

All these senseless equivocations do everybody harm. Supposedly liberal college students do something similar with their micro-aggression framing device; it's not reasonable in that context, either.

We can debate Damore's points endlessly. But at the end of the day plenty of women still suffer old-school sex discrimination across the board. As that disappears, I'm pretty confident we'll have less reason to discuss more abstract discrimination issues.

Basically, if you disagree with some of the approaches utilized by the left for addressing discrimination (and there's plenty that reasonable people could disagree with), then the most constructive reaction is to redirect the discussion to more concrete, historical manifestations of discrimination.

Most ideologies on the right and left are constructed of poor equivocations and metaphors. And the so-called culture war is just an endless escalation in the sophistication and depth of equivocation and metaphor.

It's like in programming. Most debate is pointless bike shedding once the discussion is divorced from a reproducible bug or well-articulated pain points. Which isn't to mean if it's not clearly reproducible that a problem can't exist; just that if the problem isn't yet empirically grounded you can't have productive discourse. Equivocation rarely helps in this regard. If you have to resort to equivocation you've all but conceded that the problem lacks the necessary qualities which make it amenable to solving.

If you can't have productive discourse, then there are better ways to spend your time. There's no dearth of reproducible bugs or well-articulated pain points, in programming or in society. And people are always free to put in the hard work of empirically grounding a debate. Unfortunately, discrimination research is inherently tendentious because of the nature of the problem, which compounds all the other shortcomings of economic, sociologic, and psychological methodologies. But it's not impossible and we should encourage people to take up the challenge. Part of that encouragement is to criticize pointless equivocations; to make it clear that they're not an acceptable substitute.

I was born in communist Eastern Europe and grew up in the years immediately afterwards. What's your point.

It's still not even remotely similar.

You're right of course, but in particular the "Goolag" thing was pretty ridiculous.

I have the same feeling, regardless of whether his claim makes any sense or not, "meme-fying" the company and the underlying subject only makes his argument less substantial IMO.

you underestimate the power of memes

But religious freedom, being applied as the ability to employ, be employed, or to provide service without fear of religious violation or indignity, is something American conservatives are arguing for at the moment, and that includes the ability to fire or not serve homosexuals.

How else am I supposed to create a Christian establishment, such as school for K-12 children? What if it's part of my wholesome Christian values and worldview to create a healthy environment where children can learn, free of homosexual influence?

BTW I feel the same about calling Trump a "Nazi". For people whose family members have been killed by the Nazi, it sounds like mockery.

I agree, calling Trump a Nazi is both egregious and it also lessens any coherent argument about similarities between the populism of Trump's base and the beginnings of the Nazi party (not to imply too much similarity, but there is some). The Nazi label should not be trotted out without cause, but should be called into intelligent discussion where warranted. It seems we currently vacillate between using it too easily and too conservatively (Godwin's law).

The real problem is that both those extremes contribute to a system in which we believe a similar thing could never happen again by viewing them and their actions as distinct from us and what we are capable of, when there is no distinction. Closely related to the maxim that those that do not know history are doomed to repeat it is that those that view themselves as distinct from history are also doomed to repeat it. :/

> (Godwin's law)

Does anyone actually know what Godwin's Law says these days? I rarely see anyone mentioning it correctly.

Also Mr Godwin himself has come out and said "Call them Nazis" which somewhat voids the whole "Ooh, Godwin" nonsense.

Well, I think it was never meant to stop people from calling out real parallels, just those egregious uses where it was inappropriate and used only for shock value.

Even the more benign uses of the term probably have some eroding effect on its potency, even if small. "grammar nazi" comes to mind. People sometimes refer to themselves that way somewhat affectionately. We don't see people using "pedophile" the same way. I can't say I think Godwin's original complaint was wrong.

Man everyone's a victim nowadays?

I have no problem with it. It spreads awareness about the atrocities of communists. People get compared to Nazis all the time, because Nazi=bad is something that almost everyone agrees on. Meanwhile there are a lot of unironic communists in tech circles and everyone's okay with it. So next time you compare somebody to Hitler, consider using Stalin instead.

> so let's please not pretend it is...

Was anyone actually pretending that it is?

There's a thing called hyperbole and it works really well when you take your fight to the media.

His take still seems a little tone deaf and defensive (e.g., repeated use of "echo chamber"). But he hits the nail on the head of why Google fired him:

  ... they really couldn't do otherwise.

No matter what you think about the memo, Google had absolutely no option but to fire Mr. Damore once this blew up into a firestorm (internally and externally).

They could've had a spine and supported intelligent discourse. Seems like a leadership problem.

"At Google, just as we strive for a diverse workforce, we also encourage the free flow of ideas and along with that, support the vigorous discussion around those ideas. We don't comment on specific HR issues." (EDIT: Minor grammar edits for my faux PR statement)

And that would've been the end of it, had they had the fortitude to ignore the witch hunt.

Except, as has been pretty well documented elsewhere, it was not intelligent discourse. Whatever productive content may have been present, it was overwhelmed by the senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense.

Endlessly, emphatically parroting what is ultimately discriminatory nonsense is an aggressive action against others, not "just an opinion". E.g. [1], and numerous other examples. My favorite, which I'm having trouble digging up the citation for, is a recent-ish study that compared test performance of various minority/gender groups based on social anxiety measures (e.g. "girls aren't good at math")... and found that it was literally possible to turn this difference on and off like a switch based on triggering vs disarming these anxieties as part of the test setup. This literally flies the in face of the schoolyard "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" mantra so ingrained in US culture. It turns out, we have increasingly good scientific evidence that humans just don't work that way.

Let's be clear about that: being a toxic jerk to {insert out-group here} actively harms those people, and can directly harm their performance orthogonally to their actual potential capabilities. "Yeah, I'm meritocratic in footraces, but only when I can stick thorns in my competitors' shoes."

[1] https://psychcentral.com/news/2010/03/19/negative-effects-of...

> a recent-ish study that compared test performance of various minority/gender groups...

You are referring to the idea of "stereotype threat" which, alas, did not survive the replication crisis.

Quote "After correcting for publication bias, this literature shows very little evidence that stereotype threat has a notable and practically significant effect on women’s math performance (Flore & Wicherts, 2014)."

Some analysis: https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/hidden-fig...

Direct study link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022440514...

> it was overwhelmed by the senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense.

This is why what Damore did is important and why having the discussion is important. People like you either mistakenly believe this or are being deliberately manipulative and misleading by claiming the science is settled. In fact, the science is not settled, and if anything it is leaning in Damore's favor. That you and people like you want to believe one thing very much is not a substitute for the actual truth to the rest of us, and never will be.

>if anything it is leaning in Damore's favor.

This isn't true.

The willful misrepresentation of the memo is one of the reasons he got more support than usual. Most people who argued on the scientific basis mostly concurred and a few disagreed. There is nothing "overly debunked".

> senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense

Could you provide some references for this claim? Because Damore did.

Even if what Damore wrote was "long-debunked", it's the sort of thing that a pretty big chunk of the U.S. population believes to be more-or-less accurate. Lots of people are wrong about things and don't know it. Them being wrong does not justify an attempt to burn them at the stake; it justifies an attempt to calmly yet firmly explain the errors in the subjects' beliefs (and then maybe burn them at the stake - figuratively, plesse, not literally - if they choose to ignore the counterevidence).

Having read the memo, I rather strongly disagree with the "toxic jerk" characterization you've given. Yammering fool, sure, but not (deliberately) malicious.

You know what is not intelligent discourse? Equating what was said in the memo as harassment by citing this:

> They asked 114 undergraduate female students to watch a video and imagine themselves as bystanders to a situation where a man made either a sexist catcall remark (“Hey Kelly, your boobs look great in that shirt!”) at another woman or simply greeted her (“Hey Kelly, what’s up?”).

Maybe you could provide a citation instead for this?

> the senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense.

Especially that few scientists are on record saying that the memo is solid on science, and the quoted research is not only not debunked, but also not even controversial in sociological circles.

> pretty well documented elsewhere

In a strange place no one can seem to name.. funny how the existence of this "documentation" is so often assumed, but not so often referenced..

> They could've had a spine and supported intelligent discourse. Seems like a leadership problem.

But that's not the job of the people involved, or if you believe it is their job, only tangentially and in a way that might help in the long run.

When you have a major PR problem on your hands and you're a public company, you make it go away before it can adversely affect the stock. That's the the job of the highest executives, and that's what will be delegated to those responsible for fixing it. Would we all be better off with reasoned discourse? Probably. Would Google benefit from being the company to push it? Possibly, but I give that slim odds. The responsible thing to do for your job is to fix the problem that is immediately threatening the company.

Google isn't the martyr you've been looking for.

>The responsible thing to do for your job is to fix the problem that is immediately threatening the company.

The problem is double talk. They pretend that they want open discussion and provide an internal forum for it, but when someone like Damore takes them up on it they see it as a problem. If you don't want controversy don't pretend that you do.

Do you think firing him made the problem go away? It looks like it made things worse.

They would have faced backlash either way, it is hard to say.

I hope they're willing to fire LGBTQ workers (or workers who are pro choice, or any other political third rail) when the right rages just as hard, if they're not a martyr and simply a business with no moral compass. If they're not prepared to perform those actions, they're picking sides, and should be prepared for the consequences.

> I hope they're willing to fire LGBTQ workers

This isn't about firing people with specific attributes, it's about firing people that have become associated with a particular cause publicly and drawn the company into that same discussion, whether purposefully or on accident. If enough of their workforce and enough of the public shared the opinion that LGBTQ workers should not be hired, and the company policy followed that, and someone became prominent in that discussion, I expect they would do the same.

I'm not saying I think this is how the world should work and it's the best situation, I'm saying our current mix social, political and economic systems make this the likely (but not required) outcome. It often takes a martyr to change that. We venerate those who make that sacrifice, but let's not pretend it's easy for them, or that everyone should make that choice all the time (depending on how egregious the offense being protested is).

> if they're not a martyr and simply a business with no moral compass.

There's a difference between no moral compass and picking your battles. Winning a war doesn't always require rushing the enemy with whatever is in hand immediately when sighted. You can call a strategic retreat cowardly all you want, but if it's part of a larger strategy it may not be indicative of the competency of the people involved or the future (not that Google's actions necessarily should be viewed in that light, I'm just pointing out that this is but one action and should not define them entirely).

Well, the government already said you can be fired for being queer: https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2017/08/f.... I feel like outrage from the right for firing someone for something they can actually choose (political ideology) would be intensely hypocritical.

LGBTQ is a status, not a political stance. There are LGBTQ people of all political stripes

If an LGBTQ employee publishes a 10-page diatribe about how straights are biologically less suited to working at Google, they'd have been fired too.

He wasn't fired because he was a conservative, and he wasn't fired because of his opinions. He was fired because he made hostile remarks about the majority of his co-workers that legally resulted in a hostile work environment under US law.

What side is Google picking again?

Are you familiar with the phrase, "false equivalency"?

As the other person said, that's a false equivalency. This memo directly affected the workplace environment by saying one group of people had less aptitude for working there. The examples you give are just groups who are seeking certain rights or equality in society have nothing to do with the workplace.

> They could've had a spine and supported intelligent discourse. Seems like a leadership problem.

That's not really how things work in companies. In a University? Sure. In a company that doesn't really make sense and is far too idealistic.

Regardless of whether you support the contents of the memo or not, he created a disruption within the company. A disruption that made some feel alienated and others vindicated. This is not where you have any type of discourse. This is a simple "fire the person disrupting business".

isnt disruption the whole point of Silicon Valley?

Capitulating due to media pressure, if that is the reason, is extremely weak leadership and only made the problem worse.

> isnt disruption the whole point of Silicon Valley?

I could stand next to your desk and smash two pots together thus disrupting your work; surely you see how disruption of a market is different than disrupting co-workers...

Simply because the word "disruption" can be used in a positive context to describe aspects of Silicon Valley doesn't mean it's always positive regardless of context.

> Capitulating due to media pressure, if that is the reason, is extremely weak leadership and only made the problem worse.

This was never stated as the reason as far as I can tell.

It would've been a week of impotent whiny tweets, then the outrage machine would've moved on to the next faux issue. What kind of insane world do we live in where leaders are too cowardly to withstand mean internet comments? Now they've got a lawsuit on their hands (which will surely open the floodgates) and an anti-science stigma that will stick with them for years.

To clarify: you are aware that, prior to the memo, Google already a lawsuit on their hands from the Department of Labor with regards to alleged gender discrimination?

And let's not forget their participation in at least one de facto cartel to suppress salaries.

https://phys.org/news/2015-01-apple-google-settlement-high-t...

Don't forget to mention Google wouldn't hand over the data the Department of Labor demanded.

Setting this particular issue aside, this really is a weird phenomenon that I don't quite understand, yet. So, a lot of people are condemning you on Twitter? I understand that as humans we don't like that feeling, but if you don't react to it nothing happens.

Why don't more people take that path?

Pick a topic that's really, really important to you. Let's say it's fishing.

You're known as someone who fishes a lot in your small circle on Twitter. Suddenly someone steps in and says "Fishing is stupid. Screw you, fishing people!". Maybe one of your followers explicitly tags you in it to bring it to your attention.

Ignoring it is the right thing to do but could you? You probably could since my example is extremely contrived but in general I gotta admit sometimes it's difficult to ignore something that's right in front of me that I staunchly disagree with. I try but I'm human and I fail at it sometimes. Other times if I don't respond others feel like I'm letting them down.

I hate Twitter. I also enjoy it at times, too, which keeps me on it but I really do hate it the majority of the time.

I guess a boycott could happen, or employees might get emboldened to quit or sue. Google would get lumped in with Uber and others accused of being brogrammer haven.

Dude, this is a massive, for-profit corporation, not some leafy liberal arts campus. Their cultures and priorities may align to a degree, but there are some fundamental differences between them in terms of whose interests they serve, how those interests are prioritized, and the way conflicts are resolved (something Damore discovered the hard way).

In this case, google is -both- a for-profit corporation AND some leafy liberal arts campus.

What intelligent discourse could there be had? Damore's essay is heavily premised on Google's current policies being illogical, unethical, and even illegal, and other statements of apparently self evident fact. The memo is basically a giant prompt of, "Have you stopped beating your mother?" In which engaging in a dialog forces you to implicitly acknowledge something that is a total non sequitur.

I'll give an example: (sorry, unable to copy paste from tablet)

https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso...

Under the subheading of Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap, his first example refers to how "Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things". That's one of the biological facts he cited and I'll accept it as true for the sake of brevity.

Damore then points out that this has a silver lining, because if programming is made more collaborative, then women can naturally benefit. OK, nothing objectionable about that, I believe some companies incorporate pair programming in their recruiting and onboarding.

And then he drops the other shoe: "unfortunately there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles a Google can be"

What the hell does that even mean? What exactly are these "certain roles" that Damore is referring to? How can this kind of assertion lead to intellectual and open debate when Damore's argument: there exists jobs are just not suited/optimal for women. I'm completely willing to meet him where he's at on biological gender differences, but Damore's memo just does not invite discussion because he makes self-evident assertions and avoids specific detail or proof that he had really looked into things.

Because after claiming that there Google jobs too technical for women's people-preferences, a Damore randomly shits on Google's female coding classes. Because there are jobs for which there's a ceiling to the effectiveness of women's people-skill..."we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise"

Does anyone have context for this? What is Google deceiving itself about? Why are students involoved? Darmore's phrasing is so sloppy and lacking in details that he leaves things open to the imagination. I'm imagining that there was an incident at Google in which a woman was diversity-promoted into a highly technical job that had been designated for men. This woman believed her people-skills would make up for her technical weakness but she ended up causing killing her entire department in a fiery explosion.

The cherry on top is Damore stating: "(some of our programs getting female students into coding might be doing this)"

Again, what the hell is he talking about? What are the Googl coding classes doing, tying girls to chairs until they master recursion? Is it an open secret that these coding programs are horrible, or has Damore actually observed classes. Can he describe an example of when a Google teacher forced coding lessons on a girl who was clearly not born to do it?

A charitable reading of what I quoted would argue that Damore believes: *as a population, women will fail to be the best they can be as programmers. Because only so much that work would benefit from women's people skills. Google has been in denial to the truth, to the point that Google's coding schools are deluding female students about learning to code.

There's a lot that bothers me about this paragraph on women's people-skills and how those skills do and don't apply to Googl's work. I'll just ask about this: why does a Damore think that Google is "deluding" itself with its female coding classes? Is the curriculum bad? Does the curriculum aspire (in vain) to teach the skills and work that Damore thinks aren't optimal for women?

> How can this kind of assertion lead to intellectual and open debate when Damore's argument: there exists jobs are just not suited/optimal for women.

Truly: Is there any valid way to say anything about women in general, at a macro level, that won't be twisted as explicitly meaning all women like has been done here?

Like, if one suggestion were to start serving salads at the company cafeteria because that is likely to appeal more to women, would this prompt claims that all women only like salads, or that women aren't suitable for eating burgers?

We can discuss how to make a restaurant appeal more to women, or an apartment building, or a car. And we can do it without jumping down each other's throats, because we all acknowledge we're not talking about all women--we're targeting general preferences to apply to a general audience. Why is it that the same can't be acknowledged for software engineering or leadership roles?

First of all, I acknowledge that Damore premises his argument on populations and distributions. My example here was to point out that he jumps into assertions that make no specific reference to populations. In his criticism of Google's initiative to teach coding to females (students, employees), Damore says:

> "Unfortunately, there maybe limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this)."

How does population distributions apply here? Is Google attempting to push coding (and at what sophistication) onto far more women than is statistically sound? I had heard that Google had such classes, but that their enrollment was self-selecting and seemingly not at a scale that included the majority of girls/women. So what is the delusionary practice that Damore refers to?

I'm genuinely interested in the answers to these specific (albeit) minor questions. But I brought this up as one aggravating example of how open, intellectually honest discussion is difficult when the claims are unspecific and unsupported.

Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste.

> They could've had a spine and supported intelligent discourse. Seems like a leadership problem.

Why? What use is intelligent discourse to the work that Google does?

Google had a choice here. Piss off people who support intelligent discourse, or piss off the other set of people.

Personally for me I would choose to piss off the group who tends not to escalate things irrationally and let emotion drive the entire agenda until the bloody end. Not sure which group Google chose.

Which group is which? What's the group that doesn't tend to escalate things irrationally?

I'm not sure. I feel I am unable to elaborate because there are people on HN who support political correctness over intelligent discourse.

I disagree with your first sentiment... His take, is just that, his take. He did his own research and came to his own conclusions. They might have been flawed, but they were his own. He very well could have changed his mind, had anyone presented more convincing evidence that would lead to a different conclusion. That didn't even appear to be an option, though, and I think that is the more threatening issue.

It's remarkable how much of an uproar and distraction one fairly low level employee can cause.

Reminds me of an old Napoleon quote: "whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous." This individual conducted cursory research while thinking he was conducting in-depth research.

I fear his "echo chamber" argument will be construed to damage the diversity in tech movement.

Context is important. Maybe he can give his take on Hacker News and no one will care. But he can't say whatever he likes at work. Every company has some legal obligations. No sex discrimination is one of them.

Even if you think his take is not sex discrimination, that is a big topic in Silicon Valley right now. So to write something like this right now just says "hey everybody, I'm in my own world. I have no social intelligence, and I don't pay attention to what's going on out there."

> Context is important. Maybe he can give his take on Hacker News and no one will care.

I wouldn't even go that far. I work for a tech company and am extra careful, even outside of work — on public forums, talking about my company or even controversial issues regarding tech in general because someone might mistakenly believe I am speaking as a representative of said company. It just wouldn't be professional.

Yeah I agree, even posting on HN is fairly unprofessional. Afaik when you join certain corporations like Apple they limit what you can do online, because they don't want your comments associated with their company. Maybe Google is nice enough to not do that, but it is not uncommon.

So I'm surprised to see comments like this parent comment, saying "he should be free to say what he wants". No, that's just not how it works.

  Upper management tried to placate this surge of outrage by 
  shaming me and misrepresenting my document, but they 
  couldn’t really do otherwise: The mob would have set upon 
  anyone who openly agreed with me or even tolerated my views.

Actually, companies mostly exist to get work done and CA is an at will state. If you get in the way of getting work done then you likely will get fired. The document was readable by anyone internally and eventually everyone externally. So there was no misrepresentation.

Yes, there was misrepresentation.

Google's CEO said: “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not O.K.”

He said no such thing. This is a cruel smear. Google, including its CEO and VP of Diversity & Newspeak, acted like thugs.

And no, this has nothing to do with at-will employment. It has to do with hypocrisy. Google claimed they be open and tolerant, and then they proceeded to directly contradict that ethos by firing Demore and viciously lying about him on the way out the door.

From the paper:

At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership. Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story. On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because: ● They’re universal across human cultures ● They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone ● Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males ● The underlying traits are highly heritable ● They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.

I agree that he doesn't use the term "biologically suited" anywhere. I would instead say that he suggested: "men and women have biological differences, and those differences partially explain why where are fewer women in tech". Do you agree with that?

>Women, on average, have more:

>Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).

>These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.

...

>Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits."

I don't know how you can come away from reading his memo and not arrive at the conclusion he thinks men and women are different and those differences make them less suited to the Google workplace. His solution is that diversity efforts need to focus not just on evolving recruiting/training but the way work is structured and you can absolutely argue that's not a super-evil-misogynistic thing to say. But that's very different than pretending he didn't say women, on average, aren't well suited to the current environment.

> Yes, there was misrepresentation. > Google's CEO said: “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not O.K.”

Possible non bias causes of the gender gap in tech

...

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways.

Work your rhetorical magic on that.

No misrepresentation? Like Sundar Pichai and the media conveniently conflating neurosis with the completely unrelated theory of neuroticism? Search "Google memo neurosis" and see how many headlines contain "neurosis" when that word or concept was never referred to even once in the 10 pages.

Here's a direct quote from the "Personality Differences" section of the screed:

"Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."

So yeah, it was referenced, specifically, explicitly, and used in direct support of the central argument that the preponderance of men in Google's ranks was biologically determined, meaning a number of Google's D&I initiatives were misguided, at odds with scientific consensus, and should be discontinued.

I think he clarifies this. Two things are germane:

1. Google is "more than just a company." It is more like an old style company-town by now.

2. They are the gatekeepers of all information ever. Perhaps we should hold them to different standards, especially when it comes to opinions and ideologies?

I encourage folks to start surveilling Google employees in public who take part in civil disobedience for progressive issues, and demand they be fired. Companies exist to get work done, and CA is an at will state.

This won't get fixed ("its okay to fire someone if they don't align with my opinions") until everyone has had their proverbial nose bloodied.

Disclaimer: Progressive myself.

It sounds like you don't understand why he was fired. Hint: it wasn't because of his beliefs per se. It was more likely because of his repetition of gender stereotypes that impeded his ability to work effectively with his peers.

It is ok to fire someone if they don't align with the company's opinions in CA. It really is.

Advertisement: Progressive myself.

If they do it on company time perhaps, otherwise you have no case at all.

It's a real problem that you can't tell the difference between what people do on their own time outside of work, and what they do at work, in a work forum.

If JD had posted his diatribe online on his own personal blog, there'd be a lot of discussion about it but he'd probably still be employed at Google.

The problem is that he posted his diatribe on a company forum. Legally, he forced the company to fire him and refute his words or else be treated as adopting his words as their own. (And yes, that is how workplace harassment laws work in the US. If you have a problem with that, take it up with Congress, not Google.)

Definitely a sign of weak leadership.

> Upper management tried to placate this surge of outrage by shaming me and misrepresenting my document...

You are James Damore?

I have seen this argument a lot, but there is no hard evidence there were not two options. IMHO firing him created worse PR for the company. They could have scolded him and it would have blown over within a month.

Spoken like a dude who hasn't listened to a single response from women.

Anecdotally (fwiw), my wife, whose profession requires a high level of expertise in biology, agrees with the memo writer

Can you elaborate on this? What part does she agree with? What are her thoughts on this Quora answer? https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

> ... Google had absolutely no option but to fire Mr. Damore once this blew up into a firestorm ...

That's a bold statement. Care to explain? Why were all other options unacceptable?

You're Google. In a tech environment where Uber is literally falling about because of anti-diversity issues, you have employees and the public beating down your doors because one guy wrote a memo.

Let's enumerate your options:

1. Support him and try to foster a dialog. Untenable: everyone's riled up, you can't be seen to support a sexist white male, and "let's talk about it" is naive.

2. Do nothing. Probably the worst option, as it makes you look spineless and wil piss both sides off.

3. Reprimand him. What does that buy you? You still piss off the alt-right, and the left thinks you're "forgiving" it by letting him off with a slap on the wrist.

4. Fire him. Literally all you can do. The left is happy. The right expects it. It optimizes happiness, shows decisive action, appeases the status quo.

There really isn't an option once it got this far.

Meaning that they knew he would sue, they knew he had a case, they know they might lose and they're more than fine with paying him to make the problem go away because a few grand in his pocket is a lot less than a long-term depreession in your monthly average user rate (i.e. potentially less ad engagement)

I've heard it was illegal for Google to keep him on. Here's what I've found online:

> Explicit protections against ... sexually hostile work environments, ... discrimination against unlawful sex stereotypes

From https://www.workplacefairness.org/sexual-gender-discriminati....

I would love to see a response from a lawyer. My understanding as a layperson is:

1. He is saying that biological differences explain why fewer women go into tech. That is not true, here is the best point-by-point analysis I've seen on it: https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

2. If you are a manager, and you ignore this analysis and agree that there is a biological difference, you can use that to explain why you aren't hiring/promoting women: it's not you, it's biology!

> That is not true, here is the best point-by-point analysis

But that is pretty crappy analysis, throwing your conclusion into doubt.

> it's not you, it's biology!

What if that is literally true somewhere in the causal chain? Is it good to put managers into terror at having to justify hiring Top Men?

Exactly. People just fail to think in the shoes of Google, the company. They don't gain anything by keeping him there. Getting rid of him and preparing for a few weeks of unwanted scrutiny is the best thing they can do.

I partially agree, had this been kept as an internal firestorm they could have some other solution(offer placement somewhere else within the company or another company), I have personally seen this happen elsewhere.

I think the key new information is this:

> When I first circulated the document about a month ago to our diversity groups and individuals at Google, there was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored.

Apparently he published the memo about a month ago, and was only fired when it went viral externally.

The document seems to have moved in several stages. Distributed first narrowly, before eventually going viral to the entire company, and then spreading outward from there to the tech community as a whole before the media eventually picked up on it. It's hard to gauge what the internal opinion was on the issue without knowing how long it had actually been in circulation widely within Google. It's completely possible that it took management that long to catch wind of it.

It would be nice to have a complete timeline of the memo's life.

My guess of the sequence of events is:

1. First sent to the groups in charge of diversity: "I first circulated the document about a month ago to our diversity groups and individuals at Google"

2. Their reply was something along the line of "thanks, but no thanks": "mostly I was ignored"

3. He forwards the memo to a wider group? (My guess)

4. The memo goes viral inside and outside Google

5. Execs have no option but to fire him under the internal and external pressure

If my guess is correct it, I don't think Google execs were left with a choice. There is a time, place and way to discuss controversial topics.

If on the other hand (3) didn't happen or it was not done by Damore, then Google does seem to not be able to tolerate different opinions and does have a problem indeed.

Not really new information, that has been known for a few days now actually -at least for myself it has.

His presentation and the way he is representing himself appears to have hit an interesting cultural middle ground. He clearly has the alt right supporting him, but he also has scientists and professors from prestigious and relatively liberal colleges publicly supporting the science of his argument. Even commentators on NPR and the Times are supporting him and blaming google.

He does not come across as vengeful, just disappointed, appearing to have just genuinely wanted to have a conversation about what he say as flaw/injustice in the way Google approached hiring.

He is well spoken for the most part and decent looking, that in itself will give this story legs and the media will want to have him on.

Google really made a mistake in their approach to this. I believe that if they had just spoken to him and heard him out in the beginning after he submitted his memo to their diversity department this never would have happened. As another poster said, they could even have just paid him off and have had him sign an NDA to go away.

This is a monumental failure of PR on Googles part.

A monumental failure of PR would've been Google getting sued for gender discrimination if this guy was ever put in charge of a mixed-gender team and someone in the team thought they were being put at a disadvantage.

This guy clearly wanted to stir controversy, that's why the memo kept doing the rounds (he says he submitted it to several diversity groups inside of google himself.) I doubt he would've put up with having a "sensible discussion" with Google HR and let it go.

Google could easily have blacklisted him from any future management positions. This would have been essentially cost-free to them.

And employee evaluations? Everyone takes part in those.

Sure. Again, costs nothing.

Alternative title: why I will probably never get a job in a number of companies by stringing along political controversy.

In all seriousness, he knew the climate; made a prediction about that climate and chose to prove it correct - even string it along after being fired. It is almost a tragic irony that despite his biology background, he failed (or perhaps intended to be fired) to see the evolutionary case for collective altruistic punishment. In a data oriented climate like Google, there are other approaches that could of been taken to address the individualism-collectivism/relational scales by actually conducting and collection data from employees.

The principle prediction boils down to: it is likely that I will be fired for saying these things, here is some conclusions I came across, watch as the community proves me correct.

Based on this approach and his appearance in alt-right videos/blogs, I can only conclude he wanted to instigate chaos rather than have a data driven discourse by conducting surveys and opinions from collegues. As such, it is not unlike calling your friend up and prefacing an insult by saying: you are likely to be hostile from what I am about to say. That's not being fired for group think, that's being fired for instigating chaos.

If he had done alternative approachs, it is likely things may of been better received given that a number of people within and out of the community appear to have some lines of reasoning to agree with. Heck, even Sundar saw merit in discussing some points.

It's worth mentioning (if it fancies interest) that the individualism-collectivism and relational scales vary across cultures. Conclusions about these scales and overlaps as it relates to gender and culture in and of themselves fall prey to cultural bias.

"Culture, gender and self. A perspective from individualism-collectivism research" http://www.gelfand.umd.edu/Kashimaetal1995.pdf

Why should he have to?

He doesn't, but he made a prediction and was proved correct and thus was fired as a result of the nature and dynamics of altruistic punishment. I claim that his observations and claims about the diversity policy were merely a footnote in a much more pointed argument. That is to say, the diversity policy was not really what he intended to gain from this controversy but rather make it a point to focus on politics, which is toxic enough in this society. We don't need another talking head (left or right)

I didn't get that impression from reading it. There seemed a "political" (if you want to call it that, but really it was more just what a person thinks is right vs wrong and voicing that to try to convince people of it - ie altruistic) part of it - his motivation had a color of mild/repressed outrage, which showed up, but it was fairly broad and illustrated with lots of points/considerations about the diversity controversy. I don't think a person can downplay the 'politics' part just because its 'toxic' in society, because that is the whole point, impetus, and the only reason readers will pay attention to a thing.

Second, do you have some jumping off point for learning about 'collective altruistic punishment'? After seeing you use that term I want to learn more about it, but Google search doesn't show results that relate to the type of situation we're talking about here (blind punishment of a wellmeaning member who actually doesn't do anything wrong other than put the majority in a position they don't want to be in and possibly confront their own 'wrongthinking' or 'wrongdoing'). I really want to learn more about the concept if you have a link or some?

Some research will attribute group cooperation as a fundamental necessity in human progress (given that it is almost impossible that we got anywhere without specialization of tasks and an inherit need to cooperate between groups). Other research points to egalitarian motives that deal with equality between people. For instance, high earners at the expense of the lower earners. Perhaps the egalitarian motives have to due with concentration of power over others. That typically access to survival becomes increasingly limited as power is concentrated. These attributes are different than the evolutionary concern of competitiveness and a will to survive; but certainly there is evidence of both being the case.

I should note that there is no way that biology will simply distinguish between a well-meaning deflector and one who is antagonizing a group (such that there is another way to explain it).

There is a lot of history of great thinkers who challenged conventional thinking and were persecuted to the fullest extent of the time. I claim that the way most groups justify moral perception and punishment inequalities can be attributed to this evolutionary concept. From justification of slavery (indeed even the repercussions of standing up against slavery was met with changes in laws, and increase deterrents). What is particularly telling is the impact of having this content go widespread in modern society on the internet in the form of social media. It truly brings all of the subgroups that participate online in this discussion to be motivated (from an evolutionary standpoint) to make their case heard in an effort to persuade the group or general direction of behavior between people (whether in small social communities like HN or larger in Twitter, or between small teams...etc).

https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v415/n6868/abs/415137a...

https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7021/full/nature...

The base of the argument is that it doesn't really matter if it's well-intended or not; whether the content of the article is factual or deliberately bias or filled with hateful rhetoric. The only thing that matters is collective moral perception and the emergent properties of social structures (from the smallest group to the largest society). This is evident in fact by how a smaller group of people were not as hostile towards the author but the large viral group was. This merits the idea that approach to varying groups dynamics is an important factor to consider when challenging the norm.

Thought provoking indeed!

Notes: __ Muhammad ibn Zakariyā Rāzī or Rhazes was a medical pioneer from Baghdad who lived between 860 and 932 AD. He was responsible for introducing western teachings, rational thought and the works of Hippocrates and Galen to the Arabic world. One of his books, Continens Liber, was a compendium of everything known about medicine. The book made him famous, but offended a Muslim priest who ordered the doctor to be beaten over the head with his own manuscript, which caused him to go blind, preventing him from future practice.

__ Servetus was a Spanish physician credited with discovering pulmonary circulation. He wrote a book, which outlined his discovery along with his ideas about reforming Christianity – it was deemed to be heretical. He escaped from Spain and the Catholic Inquisition but came up against the Protestant Inquisition in Switzerland, who held him in equal disregard. Under orders from John Calvin, Servetus was arrested, tortured and burned at the stake on the shores of Lake Geneva - copies of his book were accompanied for good measure.

The Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei was trialled and convicted in 1633 for publishing his evidence that supported the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun. His research was instantly criticized by the Catholic Church for going against the established scripture that places Earth and not the Sun at the center of the universe. Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy" for his heliocentric views and was required to "abjure, curse and detest" his opinions. He was sentenced to house arrest, where he remained for the rest of his life and his offending texts were banned.

Somewhere between 30-40 (rough estimate) percent of the people I know support Damore. Hardly a majority, but also an indicator that these are not the ideas of a lone heretic. I am not as concerned with the fact that Google fired an employee for having an opinion, but more concerned with the fact that they only fire people with opinions that do not match those of the majority. Even if Damore's opinion's were wrong (which, according to several scientists, they are not), it should be ok to pose a theory without subjecting yourself to a potential witch hunt.

I think that's what a lot of people are most concerned about: not the gender science but the new information about Google's culture.

Google isn't a normal company of normal importance. It runs the dominant search services in the western world on which over a billion people rely on for information. Bing hardly comes close.

Old media hasn't picked up on it yet, but a series of Googlers are giving anonymised interviews. They are making a lot of very disturbing allegations:

Google is manipulating recommended content on YouTube to suppress conservative videos and viewpoints. That the voices pushing to manipulate web search are very loud. That Google Research ran a programme to investigate why people who get very good interview scores do worse in their career than people who get more mixed feedback, discovered it was due to bias in hiring towards Ivy Leaguers and under-represented minorities that caused them to have a lower bar. That YouTube systematically punishes channels that cover right wing politics. Senior management being on the verge of tears after Trump won. Conservatives getting punched. Replies to people like "isn't it nice to be white" or "congratulations on your white penis". People sabotaging each others performance reviews for not being on board with social justice wars.

Google makes a lot of money because people search there and because they have little incentive to go anywhere else. Bing and other well funded search engines aren't dramatically worse than Google, they just aren't better, so they can't build up a userbase. If people stop trusting Google's results, if they start believing they're manipulated and unreliable, suddenly they have an incentive to check out the competition. That would lead to more ad clicks, more money to invest in the search engine, better results, etc.

So that seems like a problem for both Google and its users.

If you aren't allergic to Breitbart you can read the interviews here:

http://www.breitbart.com/tag/rebels-of-google/

Google is a global company. What might pass for "right wing" in the US is lunatic fringe in many other countries. Do yes the search engine of the works should be biased towards fact based sources and away from sites like BB that preach hate and not science.

> they only fire people with opinions that do not match those of the majority.

No, they only fire people that boiled media. For Sundar, it doesn't matter what the guy actually wrote, what matters is what media wrote about it. And they pictured him as a misogynist. So that is the new truth, now deal with it.

> "...that is the new truth, now deal with it."

I'd want my employer to have a spine and defend me, not kowtow to the flash-in-the-pan media opinions...

> which, according to several scientists, they are not

Good thing that's enough for a quorum. /s

There is absolutely no evidence that there is a biological imperative that prevents women from being as effective as men at software development. None. Zero. Zilch. Just about every disparity you can imagine can be categorically dismissed by upbringing and cultural side effects.

It doesn't even pass the sniff test: do you really think there's something inherent to the Y chromosome that allows better rote analysis?

I'd just like to share, for those who didn't study psychology and don't know of the sex differences (ON AVERAGE) between men and women, it IS a scientifically established phenomenon, even at a few months of age (i.e. pre-culture).

Here's a really fun example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml [requires flash though]

Now I'm not going to say anything about engineering or anything like that. All I believe is that you can't rewrite science to align with your politics. Science has no political leaning.

The existence of some differences is pretty well established. The relevance of those differences to software engineering is less so. As one example, here's a pretty thorough take-down of the Baron-Cohen experiment that Damore cites as part of his evidence.

https://www.recode.net/2017/8/11/16127992/google-engineer-me...

Then there's the fact that even in the presence of persistent individual differences greater diversity might be beneficial to the group as a whole. After all, if you're putting together a football team you might want more than one kind of player. Why should that same "different people for different roles" principle apply among software engineers at Google? People who harp on "the science" of Damore's memo should consider that there are plenty of scientific points involved other than the one about infant cognition.

Sure.

And I think what you're bringing up here is the debate I'd like to see.

I was lamenting that I'm not seeing that debate, but rather a blanket dismissal which seems disingenuous -- which I can only attribute to misguided, but well-meaning intentions.

Appreciate the addition to the conversation, but since it doesn't say anything about efficacy in engineering, I'm afraid it's just noise.

The memo didn't claim anything about efficacy in engineering, period.

It claimed some contribution of biology to career preference on average, which is absolutely supported by research :

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/

"We explored the contribution of sex hormones to career-related interests, in particular studying whether prenatal androgens affect interests through psychological orientation to Things versus People. We examined this question in individuals with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), who have atypical exposure to androgens early in development, and their unaffected siblings (total N = 125 aged 9 to 26 years). Females with CAH had more interest in Things versus People than did unaffected females, and variations among females with CAH reflected variations in their degree of androgen exposure. Results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with Things versus People."

I don't think the author specifically claimed that men are better at engineering (if he did, I'd love if you could point me to where).

I think he said that biological mental differences on average are one possible component of why engineers tend to be men.

> There is absolutely no evidence that there is a biological imperative that prevents women from being as effective as men at software development.

The memo doesn't make this claim.

The memo literally lists the biological/psychological traits of men and women that may have caused the gender gap in tech. (He tries to clarify that he is talking on a population level and not talking about individuals)

He is not talking about raw programming skills, but the tech environment. And then he goes on to point out how the tech environment could change so that more women would want to be a part of it, or to stay in it longer once they were in.

In other words, he was saying there is something in tech culture which is inherently less palatable for the average woman than the average man. He never claimed that the culture was good and the women were deficient. Instead he said the culture should change instead of artificially trying to fill it with equal ratio hires.

Then in a pure meritocracy, why would they not succeed? Ergo the memo itself is a straw man.

Did you read the thing? It was very clearly about statistics. The message of the memo was not "women are biologically unfit for tech," it was, as a biological tendency, women are more likely to have traits which disincline them to have an interest in tech-related things, and therefore end up in tech.

To me this says very obviously that women can and are intellectually superior to men on individual cases. But we would not expect an even 50/50 distribution of tech interest among genders.

Feel free to refute that as a separate claim, but if your take from the memo was "all women are biologically inferior and cannot match or be better than men," then I would say you were not being intellectually honest when reading it.

It doesn't make that argument either. It makes the argument that since less women (will on aggregate) be interested in CS then men, less women will be in CS.

And that less women being interested in CS has _some_ basis in biological differences.

Whether you agree with that or not (the research does support it pretty strongly, but is certainly not settled), it is a reasonable argument.

Can you cite where Damore explicitly states that? Or are you just regurgitating second hand information that was processed by a blogger that didn't read the memo?

> "There is absolutely no evidence that there is a biological imperative that prevents women from being as effective as men at software development."

straw man when applied to individuals

begging the question when applied to groups

twofer

> it should be ok to pose a theory without subjecting yourself to a potential witch hunt.

That theory is that a large portion of your coworkers are unfit for the job because science. And they were only hired because of misguided politicking.

> "When I first circulated the document about a month ago to our diversity groups and individuals at Google, there was no outcry or charge of misogyny."

Kind of meaningless though, could be he only sent it to people who agreed with him or who were men.

"Goolag" shirt is pretty on the nose, I guess true hardship in Silicon Valley is losing your well paid tech job for... another well paid tech job?

It's funny that he refuses to admit any fault in what he said even in a limited way when ideological rigidity and refusing to entertain other people's ideas in good faith is exactly what he's complaining about in others. Doesn't seem like this experience has resulted in him rethinking much of anything. Suppose it's true that whatever you accuse the other side of is exactly what you actually do.

> It's funny that he refuses to admit any fault in what he said

Fault as in he regrets it?, or would have done it differently another time? If his goal was to get people to discuss this topic, how could he have done much better?

> ideological rigidity and refusing to entertain other people's ideas in good faith is exactly what he's complaining about

I don't think you can fault him for the rigidity or not entertain other people's ideas. It wasn't perfect or even great in either direction, but it surely made more effort than the many internet discussions, which we don't find fault with.

> it surely made more effort than the many internet discussions, which we don't find fault with.

I wouldn't say he made significantly more effort, and people certainly (and correctly IMO) find fault with them.

> Fault as in he regrets it?

I don't think he should regret publishing it, but I also don't think it led to much productive discussion about the issues here. People on both sides just chose to ignore and distort what other people said.

I don't think it's fair to say he made a good faith attempt to engage with the other side's position and fit it into the context of his beliefs. Instead he just presented his ideas and I don't think that does much on its own to advance the discussion. Predictably led to both sides digging in rather than finding some common ground.

To be frank, after all this, I wonder what tech company would want to hire him and the baggage that entails. I'm not saying he's wrong or right but he now brings with him a lot of unwanted attention. More than anything else, he was fired for bringing unwanted attention to Google. If the media never caught on or fan the firestorm that resulted, I'm not sure if he would have lost his job. I think he recognized as much even in the WSJ article.

Then again, maybe some daredevil startup could find a way to exploit his fame.

Gab founder has already offered him a job

What should he apologize for?

"I'm sorry for telling the truth."?

He doesn't have a monopoly on truth, that sort of presupposes that he was completely right and handled the situation perfectly. Perhaps he'll feel differently when the dust settles as another commenter suggested.

He handled the situation poorly IMO. Didn't consider the consequences of what he was saying true or not and didn't present it in an appropriate way for how sensitive the issue was. Ultimately that's a self defeating way to get your points across.

Showing up to a photo shoot in a Goolag shirt also just undermines him as a person. It's totally hyperbolic and ridiculous and will further discredit him in other people's minds because it's an insane overreaction to make that comparison.

Again, what should he apologize for?

You seem to really want him to repent for something. What is it?

How about for the things in his memo that were not truth? Sure, there's a bit of truth in it. There's much more that's debatable at best, and some that's pretty clearly false. How about for the totally off-topic nastiness toward the left, and diversity advocates, and others? Even in a memo about the driest of technical minutiae, comments like "honest discussion is being silenced" and "X tends to deny science" (with not even an attempt at proof on either point) would be worthy of censure. The memo was clearly written in a style more likely to escalate conflict than to create any positive outcome, so the reaction when Damore or one of his cronies leaked it beyond its supposed original distribution was entirely predictable. If you do something that simple diligence and common sense say would lead to a massive productivity-destroying flame war, you have something to apologize for.

"Telling the truth" <- that's the problem, you've just made the jump to a conclusion: he's 100% right, and everyone saying he might be wrong is just an angry liberal who doesn't want to accept reality.

Maybe there's way too much socially driven discrimination right now to jump to conclusions about him being "right"?

What would be the fault in what he wrote? Can you provide some examples?

We should cut him some slack. Let the dust settle and he might reconsider the situation. Right now he's probably in defensive mode due to the backlash this whole situation created.

Archive http://archive.is/nc8Ij

"In my document, I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment."

If that is why Mr. Damore thinks he's being lambasted, he really doesn't get it.

Not sure what you mean, because plenty of people lambasting him ARE indeed lambasting him over the suggestion that it's incorrect to insist that anything short of a 50-50 gender ratio at Google is because of discrimination against women.

Of course they are not lambasting him in those words (that would be charitable). They are saying ridiculous nonsense like "Google employee claims women are inferior than men" or "Google employee claims women are not suited to be software engineers".

> Of course they are not lambasting him in those words (that would be charitable). They are saying ridiculous nonsense like "Google employee claims women are inferior than men" or "Google employee claims women are not suited to be software engineers"

Things he wraps around in cozy wording, but essentially suggests to be true. If not, what's the point of him complaining about outreach efforts? It's not like right now we are in a scenario where, say, 45% of the engineering workforce at Google is female, and Google is trying to force a 50/50 split. It's not even close. Right now the number is 20%, are you telling me it's settled science that should be the ratio? Because if you have hard numbers proving that's the case, then by all means, Google is wasting money in outreach efforts. You should tell them right now.

I don't work there nor do I know anybody that works there personally, but I can think of at least 1 Googler who has ignited firestorms over "fringe" beliefs on personal social media before. She's still at the company.

As much as I disagree with his viewpoint I seriously doubt this would have been terribly big deal if he had approached the issue with more tact, at minimum.

Is he being lambasted for being held up as a martyr by the anti-diversity crowd, despite his memo plainly stating he values diversity wholeheartedly?

Or is it because he is able to make a cogent argument against blind dogma and fanatical ideology?

The basis of his argument is that, with regards to hiring processes, we should treat people as individuals rather than just another member of a group. Furthermore he squarely targets neo-Marxist social constructivist ideology that divides society into oppressors and oppressed, claiming it is a flawed methodology to base your company's business on.

Well obviously. He's not a politician. He won't come out and debase himself in a false apology for his views.

His worldview is fundamentally different from that of his opponents, and he makes no bones about it.

The weird thing is that there isn't a document, anywhere, that says it's a "Google value" that all "people are equal in every capacity." Sure, Google is for diversity - as they should - but the only person making a point of bringing in biological variance or equality is Damore.

He doesn't get what? Do most people attacking him not have that belief?

The point of diversity isn't to force everyone to think men and women are identical in every capacity. The point of diversity is to create a desired environment with different kinds of people.

> The point of diversity isn't to force everyone to think men and women are identical in every capacity.

I don't think he thinks that. At least not if we are to believe the memo.

However I do think many of the responses took offence with the idea of biological differences between men and women. And maybe rightly so, since some of them referred to seemingly good research showing that he at least overstated his claims.

What many of the responders don't seem to get, is that a good reply shouldn't dependent on whether differences exist or not. Instead it should tackle the question of how we treat different people equally. When should we try and level the playing field, and when should we accept that gender gaps (and other kinds of gaps) appear?

> When the whole episode finally became a giant media controversy

This is a bit self referential.

But seriously who cares. People get fired daily, many of them get fired unjustly... and you know what we don't write tons and tons of articles about them.

At first I felt a bit bad for the guy... socially awkward guy who jumps to some misguided conclusions based on quoted research. Ideally, he would get some kind of training maybe an explanation from a sociology researcher how he incorrectly jumped to conclusions.

But this woe is me shtick, reaching out to the alt-right publications, then continuing on to do an op-ed on the WSJ. I no longer feel bad for him; he got what he deserved.

> an explanation from a sociology researcher how he incorrectly jumped to conclusions

Here’s an explanation of 4 different psychology / neuroscience researchers. They all say the science is OK in that memo:

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

He didn't make this a national controversy. But since it is a national controversy, and he is at the center of it, why shouldn't he make the most of this opportunity?

That depends on what you mean by "most."

> jumps to some misguided conclusions

Yet as much as people keep saying this, few seem to be able to really make the case. Just "I'm sure someone can explain why he's wrong" - in this case some random "sociology researcher" is supposed to be able to do so.

> this woe is me shtick

He lost his job for expressing the "wrong" opinion. I think that is wrong. why are you downplaying this, and trying to make a show of your indifference?

> reaching out to the alt-right publications

Who should he have reached out to? WSJ seems fine to me.

> But seriously who cares. People get fired daily, many of them get fired unjustly... and you know what we don't write tons and tons of articles about them.

You can't dismiss fair trial for a case just because you know other cases that haven't received fair trials. I'm in the opinion that he was righteously fired, but he deserves to a chance to speak up.

If this was a trial then and I believed he was unjustly fired I'd be right there with you. But we're now in the court of public opinion and I'm not really sure it's in his best interest to speak up.

So the problem is this:

there are parts of his "manifesto" that are actually quite interesting, about the nature of diversity, its key importance for the health of a company. The supplemental implication that diversity should be able to be justified by its own terms, and not held on a pedestal, guarded by armed militia.

the problem is that he half-arsed the bit about biological differences. Firstly he didn't bother to find decent primary sources (I suspect because they didn't backup his initial point.) There are other assertions that are iffy, but they will be utterly forgotten, as they are not as simple as "he said women are Inferior"

The problem for google is this:

   o If they fire the author, they create a martyr

   o If they keep him on, he would have been de-anonymised

   o If they didn't fire him after being found out, they would have been accused of harbouring a malfeasant misogynist.

Basically its your standard loose loose situation for a company.

All of which masks the main point of this whole cerfuffle. what is the nature of diversity

I think Diversity is good. I want people from all walks of life in my company. However I also want Equality of access and treatment.

Hiring someone because they conform to a (non work skill based) target is discriminatory. discrimination is the enemy of diversity, be it positive or negative discrimination.

I'm not an expert on the subject. However, in his interview with Jordan Peterson [0], whom AFAIK is an expert on the field, the following claim was made: "I would like to state for the record that I believe that what you said in there, if not accurate, was at least representative of the current state of the art among well-trained psychometrically informed psychologists who are experts in the field of individual difference."

Peterson points out a few issues in his writeup as they go over it. Considering the author of the memo is not an expert, I think it's reasonable to be a bit more charitable with his writeup.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU

> Hiring someone because they conform to a (non work skill based) target is discriminatory. discrimination is the enemy of diversity, be it positive or negative discrimination.

Not sure about this one, companies hire based on whether or not they feel like people will be a cultural fit all the time (in the positive and negative sense). Is it discriminating to avoid hiring someone whom you perhaps could expect will not keep pace with what is required of their job? Or use company hours to stir up political controversy? I realize that some of this is a straw-man argument given the overlap of the discussion, but cultural fits are something companies do whether it is direct or indirect bias. Stirring up controversy is almost by definition the antithesis of a productive work environment; this is evident by all the time now wasted in the totality of Silicon Valley at this point. Is it a bad idea to stir the pot? Absolutely not, but these are definitely causal effects of it (good or bad). That being said, there is probably some evolutionary utility in generating such polarities as I would expect a social group to address the point of controversy where they vehemently disagree.

_this_ is the debate we should have been having.

Your observation is 100% correct, and the hardest part to overcome. How does one change practices, without imposing, or lowering standards, or deliberately introducing social 'sand' around which pearls must be built to maintain productivity.

Hiring for cultural fit is not intrinsically antithetical to diversity. Most cultural qualities that I've seen are based around universal human qualities. But you are correct that they can be an impediment. Especially as cultural fit is by its very nature difficult to define.

We must also tackle training, because we can't magic up highly skilled people out of nowhere.

Let's hope this doesn't get flagged and buried like the "Google CEO should be fired" link. This is clearly relevant to a large percentage of Hackernews readers and bears discussion. There irony of stories related to this getting flagged and hidden is rich.

I know nothing about the "CEO should be fired" link (nor does it sound like something I'd want to read).

But I can wholeheartedly agree that this is one of the deepest, most emotional divides I've seen in an otherwise fairly united community. I think it's been continually swept under the rug for years because companies don't want it associated with their name (remember the whole dongle-joke github thing?), nor should they really.

There was an op-ed in the New York Times saying Pichai should be fired. The discussion was flagged off the front page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14990494

Flagged. To be fair, if we give people too much information about this issue they might form accurate opinions and that'll really dampen cult membership.

Yeah I only found this by searching for it after hearing about its existence from another news source. Pretty sad

Looks like it's been removed!

What I find very dysfunctional is that rarely anything ever happens to the ones doing the shaming.

They are most toxic to an organisation's culture in the long run.

It is a failure of management that people fuelling the outrage cycles via public shaming, virtue signalling and grandstanding feel empowered to exercise mob justice.

Are you saying that the entire concept of shame should be disregarded? On the other hand, might he be guilty of something? Of creating a hostile workplace, of destroying his own credibility with regard to performance reviews and interviewing, or at least, at Google, supporting his reasoning with bad science? Even outside of his employment environment, there's something to be said about his skills as a scientist as they are illustrated by the essay, about whether he was a false positive that slipped through GOOG's hiring filters.

> about whether he was a false positive that slipped through GOOG's hiring filters.

IIRC he mentioned in an interview that he got the highest performance rating and a promotion last cycle.

There is a middle ground to shaming. People can overshame and instances of overshaming have been very toxic. For example, calling for violence or for a coworker to be fired. These instances are never punished.

Although many of the submissions to HN about the Google Memo have been redundant, this is new information.

It feels like it was a relatively 'quiet' scuffle when it comes to Hn discussion. I hope this post gets discussed without being buried.

Previous posts have been censored: They would appear in the most active list https://news.ycombinator.com/active and never be seen on the homepage.

You can use the word 'censor' if you like but it's the normal action of user flags, software, and moderation and it works much the same way regardless of the story. This tends not to be so visible during turbulent periods, but what can you do.

'Google memo' stories have been on HN's front page. Many more have been flagged off it. That is understandable because they didn't contain significant new information. Quantity isn't the criterion here. Hot-topic discussions tend to all be the same, and the substantiveness quotient declines steeply under repetition.

Many of the flagged stories have still been vigorously discussed (i.e. hundreds of comments each), so I wouldn't use the word 'censor' for those. The site goal isn't to hide them, it's to preserve the variety and substantiveness of the front page, which I believe is why most people come here.

This thread has disappeared from the front page, but it doesn't say it's been flagged. What's up with that?

That's understandable. The admins don't want the story to dominate the front page so they limit the number of threads.

Agreed. Seems as though he decided to go through WSJ to get his take published.

There's a lot of hypocrisy around this individual. If he were a woman facing termination for speaking out about something, then people would be referring to this media tour as "attention whoring." Instead this is being given the context of somehow speaking out against some kind of oppression.

No matter where you stand on the issue, he disseminated a company wide memo criticizing the company-wide hiring practices in a preachy way that didnt leave room for the company to answer back. In what company would that not be labeled insubordination?

"he disseminated a company wide memo criticizing the company-wide hiring practices in a preachy way that didnt leave room for the company to answer back."

Not true, he distributed the memo on a mailing list called "skeptics."

I would like to hear from someone at Google what kind of discussions happen on the "skeptics" list. Have there have been any negative stereotypes about Christians voiced on that mailing list, for instance? Was political discussion normal on that mailing list? Was criticism of Google normal?

I don't think that's true. Plenty of women spoke up against Uber, and they weren't called attention whores, they were lauded (rightly).

Of course, you can find instances of James being lauded and of Susan Fowler being called an "attention whore," if you really go searching for them. But neither are the majority, by far.

From my reading it actually left a ton of room for an equally well-measured rebuttal, which I have yet to see.

https://medium.com/@adljksbvkj/heres-your-point-by-point-ref...

It was submitted to an internal mailing list specifically requesting comments on Google's diversity programs

What media tour? I have yet to see any news organizations interview in him either in person or in print. Honestly, I have yet to even see a news organization publish verbatim excerpts from his memo.

This thread is about his article in WSJ. He did an interview on Bloomberg and a couple of YouTube channels

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/clareoco...

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technolog...

no, I think this is attention whoring even more so. This is a guy who wrote a document about a subject he was not at all qualified to write.

The horror. Where should people turn to get their approval stamps before they are allowed to write documents? Is it only bad to write about things, or should thinking about things also be frowned upon? Where can I get a list of safe, government approved topics to think about?

Susan fowler. If you want to bring up differences in response, the difference in media response is interesting.

Yes, because women speaking up about issues in tech never get any platform at all. "Attention whoring" is definitely the standard reaction.

You're arguing against his position using hypotheticals which is an unfair comparison.

Predictably dishonest.

> I suggested that at least some of the male-female disparity in tech could be attributed to biological differences

...and then said whole lot more. Sundar Pichai did not specify which parts of the memo were considered to have violated the code of conduct. Without that, it's disingenuous for Damore or anyone else to assume it was the one part they want everyone to focus on (because the rest are weaker).

> I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment.

OK, James, who was claiming all? Show us where that claim was made. Or is that just a strawman?

> Upper management tried to placate this surge of outrage by shaming me and misrepresenting my document

Who among Google's upper management misrepresented the document? Where, when, and how? Or is that just a Trumpian persecution complex?

Prepare for the downvotes. Nobody points out holes in Damore's arguments and survives the rage of the poor downtrodden males of HN.

Do you believe your own comments on the matter are "pointing out the holes"? I think "misrepresenting" and "spreading vitriol" is more accurate.

If the memo was against the code of conduct, why did they wait one month to take action?

A better response from HR would have been to tell him: "this may violate our code of conduct - could you please take it down for the moment while we discuss amongst HR".

This could have turned into a reasonable internal discussion than a media circus.

Agreed. They also have now unfortunately signaled to that they will make hasty personnel decisions if enough politically-minded individuals complain at once. This encourages people to find new things to be offended by in order to advance their social cause.

Corporations aren't all-knowing entities. Sometimes it takes time for them to learn what their own employees are doing.

I would also like to know this, Google should have fired him the same day. I have heard that it took a while to get all their legal ducks in a row before firing him.

I don't think he leaked the memo himself, did he? He showed it to coworkers, I don't think he expected viral sharing.

He didn't leak the memo but it was shared publicly within Google.

It's nice to finally hear the other side of the story. It has been a public execution for now, and I think, even if the way he formulates it might be better, that he has got a very good point: more and more the debate is cut short on some subjects, and some people rather keep their opinions to themselves by fear of being ashamed by the 'empire of the Good'. Not that I agree or not with their ideas, but it makes me sad to see self-limitation of free speech.

I think this is the problem:

Google is a particularly intense echo chamber because it is in the middle of Silicon Valley and is so life-encompassing as a place to work. With free food, internal meme boards and weekly companywide meetings, Google becomes a huge part of its employees’ lives. Some even live on campus. For many, including myself, working at Google is a major part of their identity, almost like a cult with its own leaders and saints, all believed to righteously uphold the sacred motto of “Don’t be evil.”

Google may ingratiate itself into all these parts of your life but really it only wants one thing: your work. Damore fell into the illusion that Google really was a way of life, that they ever really cared about a political debate. They don't. It's just a company. Keep your political opinions out of the workplace.

I think the inconsistency I see, is that those who wrote letters of complaint about him did so out of a political agenda. I see this argument being used unilaterally. You could just as easily say to those offended "Don't read things you are offended by. Shame on you for reading political stuff at work, keep it out of here."

[Seeing the tone of this thread I expect to lose a lot of karma for this, but it's just imaginary internet points]

>I think the inconsistency I see, is that those who wrote letters of complaint about him did so out of a political agenda.

You mean those outside of the company like on twitter and stuff? Sure I agree, but they're not bringing it up at their workplace. The people working at google who have complained I think is actually reasonable. Damore brought this issue into the workplace. When somebody brings an issue like that in, your solution is that everybody should ignore it? It has to be addressed at that point. Really I'd say if you go to your job and you bring outside political issues into your workplace you're creating a messy problem because you're piercing the work-veil so to speak.

You could just as easily say to those offended "Don't read things you are offended by

This is victim-blaming and poor reasoning that has been used for decades by spammers and their ilk. The problem is that the offense is only discovered by the thing you're suggesting they don't do. This is a Catch 22.

By the same logic, you'd advise a person in the Emergency Room, "don't stand in front a gun next time."

This piece is a huge missed opportunity for Damore. He could have used this chance to reach a wide audience and explain his arguments; instead he goes for a sensationalist tone (and image with the Goolag shirt).

a sensationalist tone does reach a wider audience. If nuance attracted eyeballs, none of this would be happening.

I really hate how right you are.

How does one vouch for this?

I don't think this article deserves to be flagged. I'm also unclear if whoever flagged it was trying to flag the article itself or the discussion it created.

You can only vouch for things that have been killed by flags (are [dead])

Oh. Does the flag penalize it in the rankings?

Can anybody please talk about the actual science here?

As far as wikipedia is concerned, yes there are biological mental differences between men and women. I see a lot of "This is so disgusting I won't even respond to it," which is a cop-out.

But here's wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans#Psyc...

I think the biggest mistake he makes is about magnitude of those effects and the specific outcomes.

We don't really know how much of a difference those biological differences make. There is a lot of research that show women (on AVERAGE) are more people oriented. But the percentage and distribution of women vs men that are thing vs people oriented isn't well settled. We have some data on outlooks in adults but that is obviously _not_ pre-culture.

When looking at [research on the matter](http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Men-and-thing...):

  Therefore, from the inter-individual perspective,the 
  individuals who pursue STEM careers are more likely to 
  be male than female. For example, assuming that 
  individuals within the highest 25% of a population 
  interest distribution are likely to make occupational 
  choices consistent with an interest type, the number of 
  women entering the engineering occupation, then, is only 
  19.5% of the number of men entering the field. This 
  percentage is very similar to the actual female–male 
  ratio of individuals employed in engineering. In science 
  and mathematics interest distributions, the female–male 
  ratios in the upper 25% asymptote are 0.60 and 0.64, 
  respectively. However, the actual female–male ratio of 
  individuals employed in the field of physical sciences 
  is only about 0.40 and, in mathematics, it is about 
  0.45. This discrepancy between interest data and real 
  employment composition indicates that there may be 
  reasons other than sex differences in interests that can 
  account for gender disparity in science and mathematics.

Considering Google pulls a lot from the Science and Mathematics fields (Dalmore is one such individual), I would expect Google's 83% male to 17% female engineering composition is somewhat skewed by sexism.

Wikipedia is not a scientific source, nor is it (at all) an unbiased source.

All due respect, wikipedia cites only published scientific articles. You're of course free to edit it if you think it has an anti-left bias...

So far most of the discussion has been around a. whether the facts in the memo were accurate and b. whether google was right to fire him.

Can we talk about whether putting out a memo like this is a good idea? What is the benefit of putting out a memo like this? Clearly James saw a problem and is trying to fix it.

Sexism does exist, even today, even in Silicon Valley. Why put out a paper saying that biological differences between men and women result in fewer women in tech? Women are already the underdogs in this fight. Even if it's true, what is being improved by him pointing this out?

It kind of feels like if someone was to put out a paper saying "The Koch brothers pays millions of dollars in taxes but my neighbor doesn't. That's not fair!" Why defend the side that already has too much power?

Another reasonable, fairly noninflammatory piece of writing from Mr. Damore. I'm sure this will be read carefully by his critics, so they can provide a rational, articulate rebuttal.

I think a lot of people struggle with the idea that how you say something matters as much if not more than what you say. And Damore definitely seems to suffer from that. He's focused on the fact that his document was to his mind well reasoned and factually supported (it has citations I guess), while ignoring the problem, that it was also incredibly tone deaf and to an uncharitable reader offensive. Assuming you take no issue with the evidence he cites, his reasoning is at best flawed, he ignores a lot of easily cited counter evidence, and worst of all uses a lot of strongly coded language. I'm fully willing to believe his intentions were as he stated but the fact is his memo doesn't present well unless you're already inclined to believe his argument.

Also generally speaking, upsetting a large number of people you work with is a good way to get fired. Sound arguments or not. People have been fired for repeatedly microwaving smelly food in the kitchen, and other comparably minor offenses. Releasing a document which criticizes the companies hiring practices and can be validly interpreted to call into question the credentials of many of your coworkers is a no brainer pink slip.

When has it ever been socially acceptable to demand that another individual discuss everything that you want? I would never go up to my friend and say, I want to talk about coconuts! If you don't want to talk about coconuts, then you're not really open and tolerant! You are intolerant of my affection for coconuts! Meanwhile, I'm willing to talk about coconut milk, but you require that the conversation include discussion of the shell.

Nobody would ever do that.

Damore stubbornly ignores Pichai's willingness to discuss some of what he wrote more deeply. Damore pretends that Google isn't willing to discuss any of the issues he raised, which isn't true. And, he really has no standing to demand his political beliefs be discussed at work. If people don't want to discuss them, including his managers, and they feel he's being a distraction, then he's out.

> I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored.

So as long as the memo was internal, nobody cared. It looks like he was fired because the memo went viral, not because he wrote and submitted it to the diversity groups (which happened a month ago).

Brilliant. At last Michael O. Church is not Google's silliest hire.

If only they had not fired this doofus and turned him into an alt-right martyr. They could just have assigned his silly ass to Special Projects and let him ride out the attendant humiliation.

It doesnt sound like he regretted what he wrote or wished he had a "do over"

Why would he?

Because his piece is filled with logical errors, makes a big noise about reason and logic while citing evopsych nonsense which isn't regarded as actual science?

I mean, beyond any discussion of his ideology, the memo is laughable trash.

Cause (im making this up) he never thought he would no longer work ot Google

Lesson 1: Don't talk about sex, politics, or religion.

Source: Very, very old stuff, I got from Mom. I wish I'd always followed it.

Lesson 2: Don't tell them ANYTHING!

Source: From an astoundingly, intensely socially cautious person, my mother in law. Some of the most intense brain activity I ever saw was by her anywhere in public. So, e.g., the woman I married found E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life easy reading and obvious! In part the mother's intensity came from some delicate, highly stressful circumstances of her mother in the Great Depression where in their small community just a single wrong word could wipe out the finances of the family, literally.

Lesson 3: "... keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody's health."

Source: My Fair Lady, advice to Professor Higgins who was socially crude!

Lesson 4: He who always calls a spade a spade is fit only to use one.

Source: Common from some parts of the English upper class.

I was very slow to follow this advice. So, I had to learn the hard way, pay "full tuition", from experience -- "Experience is the great teacher, and some will learn from no other."

So, Professor Higgins had to learn these lessons the hard way. Much of the theme of the movie Patton was that Patton also had to learn the hard way.

IMHO, basically the advice is good. I've been astounded at how eager some people, how many people, are eager to attack strongly against any violation of those lessons. My current working guess is, TOO MANY people are just wildly oversensitive to even small violations of those lessons. So, the simple solution is, when in doubt, which means nearly all the time, follow the lessons.

Yes, there is a downside: As in E. Fromm, The Art of Loving, four of the keys to intimacy (between the ears if not between the legs) are knowledge, caring, respect, and responsiveness. Here, for "knowledge" he meant, roughly from memory, "giving knowledge of one's self to the other."

So, the lessons above conflict with this part of Fromm's version of intimacy. So, if have a really good relationship with your spouse and work at a place where some wound up clique is running the place and has their war paint on and are on the war path, then express your true feelings -- blow your stack, blow off steam -- in private, at home, with your spouse.

For more examples, apparently in WWII, both the German army and the Japanese navy were very intense organizations. Victorious? No. Intense? Yes!

So, can remember the movie Tora, Tora, Tora where in the WWII Japanese navy apparently a subordinate needed an explicit "you may speak freely" to say much. And in the TV series Winds of War apparently a German officer was encouraged to voice whatever concerns he had until the superior issued a direct order at which time the subordinate would stop the concerns and just say "Immediately".

Once around DC I was in a part-time job working myself and my wife through our Ph.D. degrees. At one point the US Navy had a request: Evaluate the survivability of the US SSBN (missile firing submarines) fleet under a special scenario of global nuclear war limited to sea. They wanted the results in two weeks. Gads. Well, I found a continuous time, discrete state space Markov process and delivered something in two weeks, and apparently they liked it.

Then a few days later, some guy I'd never seen before was in the offices. He wandered back to my office and started making small talk. He did this for 1-2 hours a day, for about 2 weeks. Gee, it was no longer small talk! He got the conversation going to current political topics of US national security and defense. I answered like a well informed voting citizen with some reasonably solid, not very unusual, opinions. Dumb de dumb dumb, dumb. Looking back it was a high end security interview for some high position, and I missed out on it. Should have followed Mom's advice: Don't talk about politics. Certainly don't talk about national security politics in an office doing classified work for the US Navy.

Another related lesson: Limit all communications with co-workers to objective aspects of the work, and do not permit more than trivial instances of small talk. Such small talk can be the seeds of destructive office gossip, deliberate efforts to distract from the work, etc. Sure, the small talk should avoid sex, politics, and religion, but should avoid essentially everything else, too. So, limit small talk to, say, very short, obvious, trivial, innocuous remarks on the weather -- of course, NEVER mention "global warming" or "climate change"!

This is his biggest mistake. Even if your managers are calling for you to do so, don't break any of these rules.

And if you do, do it with careful preparedness about setting and context. Do not publish it. Oh and be prepared to be fired anyways.

I just read the memo: http://archive.is/5wD9x

I really don't think he should have been fired over this.

Let me guess: you are not a woman, or friends with women working in the field?

The former is correct; the latter is not.

Apparently many HN users still don't understand how flagging is supposed to work. This is a first-person account from the subject of the controversy, so it shouldn't have been flagged. Flagging is for spam and off-topic posts. The echo chamber, attacks on heretics, and attempts to enforce groupthink are strong on HN, which should not surprise anyone given how woven it is into SV culture.

does anyone really believe that google handling of diversity, will have any impact on its future

is it easy to copy google, to build a competitor can google competitors really beat it, by handling diversity differently

lets be realistic .. unless google breaks the law somehow in its handling of diversity .. anything they do is subjective ad of little impact on its future

> lets be realistic .. unless google breaks the law somehow in its handling of diversity .. anything they do is subjective ad of little impact on its future

Ad-words provides most of Google's revenue. As long at ad-words stays on top the rest of the company can be dedicated to summoning Cthulhu without endangering it's future.

Non-paywalled version go through here: https://twitter.com/fired4truth

Thanks for the link, but how cringe-worthy is this Twitter? I find memes to be very discrediting to one's claim and the Goolag bus stop felt like trying to meme out a serious issue.

South Park predicted this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXF8MIG_HQI

This was briefly on the frontpage but now I can't find it listed on HN. Did this violate some kind of rules?

A tinfoil hat would go great with that t-shirt.

How to read this through the WSJ paywall:

1. Go to http://drudgereport.com/

2. Open your browser's inspector (usually F12)

3. Modify a link to point to https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-was-fired-by-google-15024...

4. Click on the link

5. Voilà!

Visiting the Drudge Report is too high a price to pay.

What will happen next though?

Can someone post this. It's paywalled

prepend it with facebook.com/l.php?u= followed by the url and you should be able to see it

See here is the extension for Chrome https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock Technically you just need to set the location referer to something like Facebook's domain.

http://archive.is/Ltjzw

He is wearing a shirt that says "goolag" from Google's logo. I love it. One of the better corporate slave names.

Edit: This is more memeish if anything. Google is obviously not comparable to a gulag, its just the closest negative pun.

Seems a bit much to me. When the Soviets put undesirables and political prisoners into gulags they didn't give them fabulous salaries and incredible perks.

It's utterly ridiculous to compare Google to a "gulag" and just shows how disconnected from reality this guy is. You might enjoy this short piece https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16127968/fired-google-eng...

> That's your opinion. You've not made the case the memo has "no merit"

I just replied to your other comment clarifying why the memo is weak at best, and a stupid violation of the code of conduct at worst.

> No you aren't, you don't have a case.

Oh, yes I do. Males working in Silicon Valley complaining about their precious feelings have 0 of my sympathy. I'm a male and work in tech. You don't see me or any of my friends whining about "discrimination" because more women are coming into the field. It's beyond ridiculous. Only people who are not very sure about their skills would be complaining about that.

> quote it specificly.

Refer to my other comments. Essentially he tries to pass the biological argument as the One True Argument, completely ignoring that while the social arguments are still there the biological argument is unquantifiable and building a case around is bullshit.

> There are citations in the original memo

The citations don't quantify, they just quote. Nobody, ever, has put a number to the percentage of women that don't go into engineering for "lack of interest" derived from biological factors. It's literally unquantifiable.

> Just because you have none? Read the memo, that's a start.

I read the fucking memo. It reads exactly like the kind of shit I'd expect from a "disenfranchised" alt-righter. I'm surprised he didn't publish it on Breitbart.

> For me to read the memo to you?

No, for you to give me a number. What percentage of women are not interested in engineering because of genes. C'mon, can't be that hard!?

Please don't do this on Hacker News. This angry tennis match is uncivil between the two of you and boring for everyone else.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996030 and marked it off-topic.

>> you don't have a case

> You don't see me or any of my friends whining

ok, datapoint #1 - you and your friends. Have anything better? You think that's a case made?

>> quote it specificly.

> Refer to my other comments

The ones where you also don't quote anything specifically?

> No, for you to give me a number.

Show me the part of the memo that requires it? you are the one that suggested the memo said things that it didn't.

> Show me the part of the memo that requires it? you are the one that suggested the memo said things that it didn't.

What, exactly does the memo say in your opinion? Because so far I hear you complain about all kinds of things it allegedly doesn't say, but I haven't heard you explain what it does say. I understand that's the semantic game most alt-righters love to play, but c'mon, if you want me to take you seriously at least argue something instead of just saying "no, didn't say so."

Things look like they are turning around. Mainstream media wouldn't normally publish the "evil" side's story unaltered, although WSJ has always been respectable.

Please. The WSJ is owned by Murdoch, owner of Fox News, who brings you some brilliant totally not biased authors like Suzanne Venker who teaches women they are going to be way happier if they just give in and become doormats for their husbands.

That's the sort of mafia-style comment that makes people want to stand and fight. Nice career you've got there. It'd be a shame if you disagreed with us and we made you un-hireable, wouldn't it?

He was a software engineer at Google for five years, and not fired for being bad at programming. And lots of people think his firing was unfair. I think he'll be OK.

Well, I would say this particular step helped rather than hurt. It let him convey his side as other than sexist and misogynistic, which if you only go through second or third party sources could easily have been your impression. How a search for his name comes up with a WSJ article where he explains he was trying to have a reasoned intellectual discussion.

Sure, some companies will still not like his stance, but they wouldn't have hired him previously either. Some companies that would have passed will probably give him a second look with this to explain his side of the situation.

This WSJ piece is a far better look for him than his first interview on Stephen Molyneux

I don’t think he’s doing this media tour for fun.

He was publicly given job offers from Wikileaks and Gab:

https://twitter.com/JulianAssange/status/894834730461483008

https://twitter.com/getongab/status/893975352804028417

Maybe he believes his message is more important than his career.

1. There's a whole ton of people who will hire someone specifically on the basis on him having struck a blow at the PC culture thing.

2. If he wins against Google in court, he might not really have to care about his career.

3. Cashing in on your fifteen minutes can equal money. People will ask him to speak. People will ask him to do exclusive interviews, etc.

Tbh he could probably make a career out of this tbh.

Rosa's a fool if she thinks a bus will ever let her on now.

When I was a kid we used to take aptitude tests to figure out what we were good at. Isn't aptitude essentially what Mr. Damore was debating?

Yeah but it seems like Google was just a bad cultural fit for him anyway. He should have applied at Uber or something.

Edit: Too soon?

>My firing neatly confirms that point. How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument?

This statement leaves me divided. One could soundly argue that Google isn't the place for "scientific debate and reasoned argument" on that topic, and there is such thing as appropriate and inappropriate topics, and correct and incorrect channels to discuss those topics in.

To say that Google is simply "intolerant of scientific debate" misses the point. I'm sure Google has research divisions in which scientific debate occurs. The point is that they're not debating whether women are more predisposed to front-end development or not.

There's a time and a place; I'm not sure what made Mr. Damore think it was either the time or the place for his "scientific debate" (which, I may be wrong, didn't actually invite debate, it was more of a rant) such that now he has sound basis to say that the issue doesn't lie with his choice of words in the document, how he approached the matter, where he published and if it was in good faith or not, and it does lie with Google simply being "intolerant of scientific debate".

I wouldn't stand up in a high school (or any level of schooling) biology classroom, read from a list of even science-based points about gender or race, which genders or races are fit for certain tasks etc. with or without citations, and complain my conservative views are being silenced. Why? Beacuse it's not appropriate for the time and the place.

> which, I may be wrong, didn't actually invite debate, it was more of a rant

You are wrong. Why do people persist in commenting about a document they appear not to have read?

The memo can be found at https://diversitymemo.com/ .

I have no idea why people are giving this guy the benefit of the doubt in absurdum. Apparently if he quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, he is a cat.

I mean heck, among the first thing the guy did is to give interviews to dubious people (with slanted views matching the docs generalizations) and printing up a damn "Goolag" t-shirt?

So even now with the benefit of hindsight people seem still convinced that this was more or less a scientific doc with no ideological bias. The ability to read between the lines seems to blinded by vague links to academic papers.

Required reading for this discussion: https://medium.com/@adljksbvkj/heres-your-point-by-point-ref...

And, for those still outraged by his dismissal: Damore made a subset of his co-workers feel uncomfortable. That's all the reason any at-will employer needs in order to pull the trigger. End of.

There are constructive ways to discuss diversity in the workplace and potential ways to improve it. His memo (and the WSJ "open letter") is a great example of how not to conduct this conversation.

Oh lord that's note even close to a good rebuttal. Mostly because it starts off with a list of "sexist" assumptions, some of which don't even tangentially relate to the memo, or are directly contradicted.

What the article says:

> Sexist assumption 6: Gender bias is not a real issue. Anyone who thinks so is blinded by political bias.

What the memo says:

> Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.

Literally, can anyone argue against the guy without misrepresenting and demonizing his argument? I don't even agree with him and find this stuff head-ache inducing.

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