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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

It isn't a question of whether it's the right place to have it.

A corporation may not be the best place to bring up these topics, if your goal is to avoid getting fired. Otherwise, it is a place full of smart engineers and the guy probably had some fantasy that he can have a constructive conversation in a corporate setting about a policy which Google as a corporation faces external and internal pressure about.

But as far as receptiveness, yes Google was a great venue for this, given who works there. Do you think hacker news is a better venue in that respect?

Even on this very board, that same exact seemingly harmless claim, given and elaborated on in a talk about men and women given by a professor of psychology at FSU, was downvoted and bashed in a TL;DR manner:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844777

It fared better a year ago, but not by much:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8909954

EDIT: curious, why the downvotes?

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"A corporation may not be the best place to bring up these topics, if your goal is to avoid getting fired"

Agree. In fairness to James, however, I believe HR solicited feedback.

"[T]he guy probably had some fantasy that he can have a constructive conversation"

Seriously, what a let down. The "Sergey" and "Larry" who created Google would not have stood for this. Either they have lost control of their company, or they have changed.

Working proactively to address racism/sexism/n'ism: Good, not evil Demanding orthodoxy of thought (or enabling those who do): Bad; EVIL

Google was being already investigated/accused of extreme gender pay discrimination. I'm not sure how anyone could think they'd want to engage in any kind of discussion that could be interpreted as discriminating to women while being under investigation for discriminating women. sigh

Exactly!

Why did more people not mention this fact? The guy wrote on a topic that the corporation could not afford to indulge him on.

Shutting down an honest discussion of something because there is an investigation and it might be revealing is pretty high up there on the immoral scale.

I think your mixing two separate things here. The discussion was shut down not because it "might be revealing". It's plain and simple because they think is more harmful to have the discussion at a point when they're in legal trouble (with the corresponding financial penalty) than the argued loss of honest discussion (whatever exactly that means for you). It's because work is not a frigging politics/social debate club. You go to work to do whatever it is you were hired to do, not to discuss topics that may actually reduce productivity on your diverse work force for feeling discriminated.

I understand there's an inevitable social/political aspect of working together, but is not the focus and if you don't agree with the political views/decisions of a company, and you can't get them (through proper channels, your manager, HR) to change, no one grants you the right to say whatever you want in the work place, especially when what you say is widely considered (by the company) as harmful to their interests.

That implies that google just keeps a large branch of useless employees around to avoid public discussions. Can this make sense financially?

No. I think you're jumping to conclusions. It only implies they may need to look harder to find equally skilled people in a smaller talent pool (e.g minorities interested in tech). Sure, it'd be somewhat cheaper to not worry about those constraints (if the laws were different), but I think in the grand scheme of things the different in cost is largely irrelevant.

"Google was being already investigated/accused of extreme gender pay discrimination"

Being "investigated" implies government intervention. Being "accused" implies lawsuit.

Which is it?

Big companies like Google are likely engaged in litigation over personnel matters on a constant basis, a majority of which are settled privately.

I'd like to coop your "sigh" ... i'll trade you a <headslap>

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