Ex-Google Employee Claims Wrongful Firing for Criticizing James Damore’s Memo | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Google Employee Claims Wrongful Firing for Criticizing James Damore’s Memo

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33 pointssprucely15 comments

It appears his "criticism" was name calling and attempts to shut down rational discussion. Sounds like grounds for dismissal to me.

@mesozoic: 'It appears his "criticism" was name calling and attempts to shut down rational discussion. Sounds like grounds for dismissal to me'

What are your sources for the above? Meanwhile we can read the original memo and make up our own minds:

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

'mesozoic is referring to Tim Chevalier, the subject of the article, not James Damore.

Yes I was referring to Tim the subject of this article

How many Googlers have to get fired before people learn to just not talk about this whole thing? Don’t they have, like... work to do instead?

"This whole thing" is how Google attracts, recruits, and retains the best people. For a company like Google, doing a good job at that is part of their identity and mythos (other companies look to Google's hiring approaches and "people ops" model). For anyone whose job includes interviewing, managing, or reviewing, "this whole thing" is part of their work. They could just follow what the industry standard is, yes, but they wouldn't be Google if they did that.

Think about it this way—you can certainly have a functioning company where people are just good at whatever programming languages exist. But you can't have a Google (or an Apple or Mozilla or Microsoft) if you don't have at least some people with opinions on how to develop programming languages, and talking / listening / reading / writing publicly about PL theory, and questioning the assumptions underlying all the common industry-standard languages, is part of their job.

During Some "Required Questions":

How do people like James Damore, including those who in some part feel and/or think like him, get past Google's vetting process? Obviously a number do. "Obviously" given companies want some semblance of culture-wide agreement; if not obviously, what id going on?

Why do companies want culture-wide agreement? Especially for one who values diversity, don't you want as varied of people as possible, so your company, in turn, sees things from as many angles as possible?

I work in an environment with both strong-leaning liberals and hard right Trump supporters, but it's never been a problem for my job, or how I interact with those people, because Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have surprisingly little to do with our jobs.

Most people work with people they disagree with, and most people even work with people they actively dislike. But most people also don't get fired because they don't treat the workplace like a warzone. Google chose to foster an environment of welcoming people to argue about politics at the office, something most workplaces know is best to avoid, and then was shocked at how badly that turned out.

I think the problem is that somehow we've reached the point where republican/democrat, liberal/conservative, has come to be the difference in the answer to "should [insert minority] be treated equally". Not fiscal, foreign, etc policy. Not religion.

The act of saying "you should not be able to fire someone just because they are [minority X]" has somehow become "divisive" or discriminatory.

There are plenty of things you can argue about (I mean my view is /obviously/ right ;) ) but I think at some point people have decided that specific classes of people should have fewer rights than others, and I'm hard pressed to say how that is valid in an objective sense.

I suspect the people who honestly believe that are far smaller. The chief debate seems to be whether or not certain minorities groups have inherent disadvantages compared to others, and whether or not we should, based on people's race, gender, or orientation, give them a manufactured advantage to try to reach some sort of socioeconomic "equality".

The majority of people who identify as Republican likely do not feel that black people or women or queer people "should have fewer rights", but do feel that their status as a minority group should not grant them special privileges.

I’m confused. By “this whole thing” I mean “the James Damore nonsense” and “political nonsense in general”. It is super hecka easy to just not talk about politics at work. For decades, people went to work and didn’t talk about religion, sex, politics, etc. Work is for work, and as a millennial, I am deeply concerned that my cohort does not understand that.

Do you think the Damore memo was about politics or religion or sex? It seems to me like the Damore memo was specifically about the underlying facts behind Google's hiring strategy, which is extremely work-related. (In the course of this memo he happened to veer into things the NLRB ruled were decent reasons to fire someone, but I think writing a memo about the hiring process, by itself, was perfectly legitimate.)

I mean, certainly you can interpret hiring strategy as a type of politics, but "companies should exist in the first place" is also a type of politics. What's your definition of political nonsense?

I agree that it's easy not to talk about the politics underlying your hiring strategy at work. But it's also equally easy to just not talk about your hiring strategy at all - which is a thing lots of companies do, but not a thing that a company like Google could do and remain Google.

What is your point, because it is actually hard to get..?

The Damore memo was not a problem for daring to talk about gender and race and hiring. Google both wants and needs its employees to talk about that.

The Damore memo was a problem for the underlying assumptions about gender and race it used in trying to make its (vague) point.

An analogy I've made previously on this site is that it's like a memo about which tech stack to use. Saying "Why can't engineers learn not to talk about tech stack and just use what they're told to use" is misguided - it might work at some companies, but it won't work at Google, and moreover, Google specifically wants you to talk about such things. The Damore memo, however, responded by saying "Let's do a long study on whether Classic ASP on NT 4.0 is the right approach, let's try rewriting some core components in Classic ASP and moving some services to NT 4.0 and see if things get better," and making questionable citations to papers (which do exist, and aren't inherently non-credible) about projects developed in Classic ASP. An engineer who seriously advocates that position and wants the rest of the company to spend time evaluating that position is in the wrong, and is wasting the company's time. Saying that their mistake is daring to speak about programming languages - and saying that other employees who say "Actually, no, your technology suggestions are obviously wrong" in response are equally mistaken - is misunderstanding the mistake.

By the way, so-called 'diversity' should also protect right-wing conservative views, not only left-wing supposedly-liberal views; otherwise it's a crap. It should protect everyone's freedom as long as those views respect the law.

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