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> "Are certain races inferior to others."

Something that always rubs me the wrong way when reading about these issues is that people in (for now) mostly American spheres use both the word and the concept "race" so uncritically [1], with no reflection at all. Heck, if we consider the US Government, then "race" is an official property of humans (see e.g. bop.gov Inmate Locator, which literally has a drop-down labelled "race" with choices like "White" and "American Indian").

[1] It should go without saying that using a different word for the same concept means you're still using the same concept. It's essentially the same as the good-old-fashioned euphemism treadmill.

A better approach might be "don't talk politics on chat channels" ie at the pub, over lunch sure but not on company wide official communication channels. We have a semi-unspoken rule at my work around this, partially due to having offices in Scotland and Barcelona (independence movements). No one expects you to not be political or to not discuss politics, but we understand that having these conversations on text systems everyone can read (slack for instance) isn't a great idea. There's a time and place, normally at the pub or a team day out etc.

Yes, this.

My past job, I would have political discussion with coworkers but they were people I had formed extremely close and trusting bonds with. We may have disagreed at times but it came from a place of respect and knowing someone a little.

After the US presidential election, the lead execs of the office sent out emails about the results and commiserating with the staff (we had people call in sick, crying, etc.) but, despite the office being 99.9% on their side, lunch conversation later that day revolved around how most didn't think what they did was appropriate because, if there was that .1% that could feel alienated, why do so from on high?

I think your first reason is, itself, a controversial approach and might actually justify the no-politics idea. It's all fun and games when we integrate ourselves into a company past the "business-only" level. Until we get fired/leave and end up losing our company-provided social network, friends and meals. Maybe the presence of politics in non-work activities is simply more evidence that employers should avoid socializing their workplaces beyond what's required for business.

As for the second reason, I think it comes down to professionalism. We can politicize anything if we try hard enough. But if our employer says "no politics, just get the work done", then both sides must adhere to whatever policies are provided, within the law. Don't like the bathroom rules or workplace guidance? Work somewhere else.

> As for the second reason, I think it comes down to professionalism. We can politicize anything if we try hard enough. But if our employer says "no politics, just get the work done", then both sides must adhere to whatever policies are provided, within the law. Don't like the bathroom rules or workplace guidance? Work somewhere else.

That's certainly an incredibly common view, so I'm not going to say that it's wrong or irrational.

But I'm reminded of the bathroom subplot in Hidden Figures - all the restrooms in one building were for white people, and so the one black woman working in the building, who was extraordinarily technically competent, needed to go on extended break to another building every time she needed to use the restroom. "Don't like the bathroom rules, work someplace else" was absolutely the prevailing culture at the time, which had hefty rules about "professionalism" and not "politicizing" things. But it had a serious negative impact on the business, and the right thing to do (which a manager eventually did) was to change the bathroom rules.

The choice to adopt "professionalism," and to bring in no politics and leave the political decisions to whatever existing culture is in place, is a political choice of its own. There are a lot of arguments in favor of that choice, yes. But it remains a political choice.

That's why I said "within the law" - to ensure that it isn't the job of the business to determine what is political and/or allowed. What you describe would be illegal, would it not?

This happened in the early 1960s, when it was legal to have both segregated bathrooms and unsegregated bathrooms, as the workplace pleased, and segregated bathrooms were more common.

> The second is that "politics" includes things like "Is it valid to be trans" or "Are certain races inferior to others." I'm not going to deny that this is "politics;" the generalized question of whether whole swaths of people are deserving of recognition under their claimed identity has been part of politics since basically the first empire captured its first nation. But it's unavoidable for a large company to pick an answer one way or another. A hypothetical Google running at the time of Cato the Elder, with Roman and Carthaginian employees, could not avoid the "political" question of whether Carthage should be destroyed and its residents sold into slavery.

Seems like you're overcomplicating the problem. Nearly all other companies seem to be doing just fine. Certainly not without incident, but by all appearances, companies aren't waging the sort of internal political wars that this article portrays.

> "Is it valid to be trans" or "Are certain races inferior to others."

In your opinion, did the google memo touch on similar topics? Many represented it as saying "women are inferior engineers to men", but a crux of the argument seems to be that many say this is not what the memo said.

Also, there are tangential topics that are often phrased similar to the above so as to make it seems like we're in a Carthaginian scenario when it isn't necessarily the case. For example, the main argument seemed to be about trans-people using certain bathrooms, that touched on the topic of "trans validity" (or dragged conversation into that), but was also also a separate, related argument about bathroom usage that precipitated that.

> but a crux of the argument seems to be that many say this is not what the memo said.

Those people are right. The full text of the memo is readily available. The author not only didn't say this, but repeated numerous times that this was explicitly not what he was trying to communicate. There is no reasonable, charitable way to interpret those who misrepresent him.

I think this brings up an important point. Some people insist on painting this as a "diversity champions vs blithering racists/sexists" issue, ignoring the numerous legitimate criticisms for the current approach to diversity.

The biggest issue with the memo is that James Damore attached politics to it. Basically a fair bit of the last part of the memo was an open accusation that Google is leftist and is "alienating conservatives", together with several standard tropes from the populist conservative realm that did not advance his argument very much ("universities are leftist" trope, a strangely oversimplified ding at communism / Marxism, mentioning "political correctness" and violent PC protesters, etc.)

The politics instantly put the memo squarely at one side of the current cultural / political wars. With the current binaries in American politics right now, such will never lead to sober discussion.

Granted, but I want to take care to point out that this doesn't validate the claim that Damore's memo asserts that women < men.

"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'm not sure how to interpret that as not sexist. Prefacing it with "Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are 'just.'" doesn't really help.

While I can see how that statement could be abused to sexist ends, nothing about it is sexist nor prescribes any sort of discriminatory treatment.

Note that it doesn't imply or conclude that a given female applicant is less qualified than a given male candidate nor that the pipeline of female applicants is less qualified in aggregate than the pipeline of male applicants (because there's no reason to assume that the pipeline has the same distribution as the overall population).

It merely suggests that (assuming pertinent biological causes) we shouldn't expect a fair process to result in parity of outcomes.

Whether or not there are pertinent biological causes is a question I leave to scientists, but I do want to note that (contrary to Damore's critics), science has established biological sex differences that may be pertinent, and lots of scientists have validated Damore's position (that biological differences may explain some of the gender distribution in tech). https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201711/the-truth-ab...

(In case you are referring to me, the commenter above, as "those who misrepresent him", I'd like to make it clear that I am not referring to Damore at all - and also that if I were, I'd be arguing that the questions he asked are absolutely work-relevant, and Google should not shut down discussion on the grounds that they're work-irrelevant.)

I wasn't referring to you :). There are lots of people who explicitly assert that Damore's memo claimed that women are inferior to men.

> In your opinion, did the google memo touch on similar topics?

The latter, yes (in the sense that the question was relevant to the memo, not so much that the memo coherently attempted to address it), but it wasn't the memo I was referencing here here—it was other posts, either in internal social media or on external forums with clear links to employees.

Lots of large, multinational, Google size companies have a culture of not discussing politics at work. Or if you do, it's with your friends at work, not random coworkers.

I am not sure if you can say "no discussing politics at work." while having "diversity advocates" at the same time.

Of course you can and how majority of the companies in the US operate. Usually you have no idea how the gal in the cube next to you voted. While most companies try to have diversity.

> how majority of the companies in the US operate.

Majority of US companies have 'diversity advocates' among the ranks of non HR employees?

But you can't have your cake and eat it too. Google and the recent crop of SV startups are what they are, we hear, because they don't have the culture of of the stodgy old multinationals, and Google got to where they are so quickly, and beat so many companies at their own game, with their more freewheeling culture. Lots of large, multinational, Google size companies have no tradition letting individual contributors spending 20% of their own time building a product in a market the company isn't in, and never would have invented Gmail.

This is a non sequitur. They were able to grow so fast because they're in non capital intensive industries with limited constraints on their ability to scale up rapidly and were able to leverage the birth of a new marketplace and an existing telecommunications infrastructure largely financed by the government and by other corporations. The impact of their internal culture with regard to politics is tangential at best and probably non-existent given that these issues have only come to a head in the last few years.

China has similarly dominant tech companies and I'm sure they do not share SV's political opinions.

Yeah, I'm certainly not opposed to the hypothesis that Google's culture had nothing to do with their success, it was just product-market fit and good timing. But it's a commonly told story - everyone praises (or praised, for a while) "Google-style" interviews, Laszlo Bock's Work Rules! was pretty popular, etc. And it's a selling point for startups that they have Xooglers who are bringing in that culture; if Google's success is just "launch the right product at the right time," the fact that you have a random former Google employee should be as relevant as having a random former Yahoo! or Alta Vista employee.

> But you can't have your cake and eat it too. Google and the recent crop of SV startups are what they are, we hear, because they don't have the culture of of the stodgy old multinationals

You could just as easily say they were successful despite this or that aspect of their company culture.

> The first is that Google, as the article says, encourages you to "bring your whole self to work."

Except that if your whole self is not within the established pc, liberal standard, you'll be fired.

This seems empirically untrue if the allegations in either this story or the Damore lawsuit are to be believed. The Damore lawsuit talks about the existence of a whole mailing list called conservatives@ - if what you're saying is true, how are there still active user accounts on that list?