Engineer says he quit Google after order to stop pro-diversity posts | Hacker News Reader

Engineer says he quit Google after order to stop pro-diversity posts

arstechnica.com

31 pointsAndrewDucker10 comments

I think these two parts sum it up nicely:

> "Where Damore had argued that Google's diversity policies went too far, Altheide argued that Google was doing too little to promote workplace diversity."

> "I respectfully ask that everyone stop engaging on this thread," Ramaswamy wrote. "Google is not a debate club or a philosophy class. We are a workplace and we have an obligation to make sure our discussions remain respectful."

Does it seem bizarre to anyone else for a company to have an internal social network?

I thought the general concessions was that on social networks, people are more likely to treat each other as jerks than when face to face.

If your company has a social network, would you engage with it? If you run a company, would you make your social network more than just an auxiliary function for management?

> Does it seem bizarre to anyone else for a company to have an internal social network?

It seems like a good way to engage employees and organize discussion and collaboration but how good probably depends on the company and its culture.

I work (low-tier FC drone) at Amazon, and they have an internal Twitter clone that I stumbled across while browsing the internal wiki one day. Nothing very interesting happens on it.. mostly managers and developers posting, but it seems to serve some need that isn't being met by email.

Lots of people will suggest that Altheide was disruptive in the workplace, regardless of the merits of his arguments. And he will likely experience career consequences for his actions.

But things don't change without people like Cory Altheide.

Sure they do. Things change all the time, often for complex reasons that are emergent properties rather than the motivated action of individuals.

People like Cory Altheide are an emergent property of injustice. :)

(If you want to debate philosophy, I volunteer to take the position that freewill is an illusion, and that if it were possible to know everything about the past it would be possible to know everything about the future.)

> But things don't change without people like Cory Altheide.

If google ceases to hire the best to focus on hiring the diverse, things will change in Google due to people like Cory Altheide.

Remember when all quarterbacks and coaches in the NFL were white? We got past that.

Hiring the best means hiring diverse.

I pretty much only read the comments and far better than I would expect.

Lots of comments why are employees not focusing on actual work versus all of the politics.

One was from someone who indicated he has no idea who the guy in one cube over voted for and the way it should be at work.

All of this Google stuff of late with Damore and this one just stresses why that is how it should be today in the US.

Work is for work.

I count that as a +1 for Amazon, where in my experience it's far more work focused. At least compared to my buddies at Facebook or google, where these conversations seem to be somewhat common. (Could also be team specific. My team is mostly Chinese and foreign, where the politics separate from work norm seems more resolute)

But they also get meals and maybe a more chill atmosphere? I sometimes wonder if there are relations between these cultural styles

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