Good for him. Google is now excluded from the "dream" companies I'd want to work for.
I was interviewed by engineers who were all just recent college grads, no managers, tech leads, or anyone I felt were probably more qualified to interview me. The environment felt toxic. Most people I talked to looked unclean, like they just got out of bed to work. Had red eyes like they were tired. And the workplace was just not as clean as I was hoping. There were a set of dirty plates in the conference room I was interviewed in, and no one bothered to remove them the entire time.
From people I have talked to, my experience was pretty unique, and most people have had good interviews there. But even as an outlier, I don't like the chance of it being exactly like my experience. Things like this really put stuff in perspective for me though. I still went through the entire process, but in the end, rejected the offer. I wouldn't want to work in an environment like Google's, it feels toxic, and engineers feel like they are overworking themselves to death.
I've come to the opinion that, unless you're a "famous" engineer, or very senior one, that can command a lot of respect and autonomy, most of these "dream job" companies are going to feel a lot more like a well paying sweatshop. At least, that's been my experience as someone with only several years in the field.
I really think you should stay in such a company for 1-3 years, build your cash cushion (i.e. stage 1 booster) and then lift-off (make your own startup using connections you made).
If only it were possible to access the data Linkedin has on employee flows. You could get an idea on which companies are actually enjoyable places to work at versus ones that people are fleeing.
I've just completed an onsite at Google MV and this stood out to me, too. This is Google's famed incredibly tough bar to pass? Out of six companies that I interviewed with in the area, Google's interview was the easiest.
I was also shocked at the lack of social skills from the interviewers. Most seemed to be 40-year-old college grads who had never left the Google campus. One interviewer arrived 20 minutes late, badmouthed the company and apologized in advance because I would probably get rejected.
It really lowered my opinion from "wow this is famous Google I'll be with superstars" to "oh maybe I'll tolerate it for childcare benefits and comp but with an expectation to shift offices in a few years".
I worked for a FTSE 100 company and unless you had passed a hard 3 day residential course you could not interview anyone.
I made it to the 3rd round of interviews with Google back in 2012. Maybe if I had told them I was black, I would have gotten the job.
In other fields, hiring can probably be done by ways that try to heavily reduce bias, and get similar increases in diversity without, from what I can see, the negatives of quotas. Some orchestras for instance have used "blind auditions" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_audition) for quite some time, with a noticeable increase in diversity as a result. I see in the Wiki that some tech companies are experimenting with this approach. I'd strongly prefer this sort of system over what Google has (if the details described in the lawsuit end up being true).
If I apply to Google in the future, I will probably include it.
I know my craft and I'm good at what I do. Code that I wrote as an intern was in use for many years (to the best of my knowledge, it still is) at a former employer.
It seems to me that ship sailed years ago. They are a giant corporation reliant on one monopoly product to fund everything else.
Employees usually are stuck with some tiny part of a component in a system. The office perks are nice, but are you really going to do interesting work there anymore?
So...I think it really depends where you work. That's true of all big companies as far as I can tell.
You'll pretty much never see a more one-sided presentation of a situation. It may bear out or it may not.
Yeah, reality probably falls somewhere in the middle, but the default narrative is already slanted incredibly far the other direction.
What is claimed sounds like a completely crass method. Whether you like Google or not they typically do things in a fairly data driven method even with their hiring.
It is also blatant discrimination that as others claim would be fairly easy to prove in court. This would be stupid.
For Google to be both crass and stupid seems unlikely.
Obviously, interviews aren't that great indicator of success, especially in a company that tries to hire the best according to their criteria, so the overall medium-term effect might be small, but they do risk losing those people that could knock them out of the ring in the future, and making those people forever negative towards them. But maybe that's already taken into account and weighted in their internal decision tooling and they are fine with that.
I think pretty much every company has employees who would say that there are definitely people who get promotions and bonuses for reasons that are not related to "world-class" work.
There's an obvious case of discrimination and OP said he no longer views Google as a dream job.
What kind of question is that? Maybe you should rethink it. Why would being discriminated against like this make me feel better if maybe some other white man gets a job? What are we fungible?
(1) A big if. I haven't seen any hard evidence yet.
If that's too far removed from the actual job for you, how about if someone at Walmart acted in a sexist way in an interview. Would you condemn all of Walmart? Would you automatically assume there is a culture of sexism? Or would you at least entertain the possibility that Walmart employs thousands of managers, so it's not crazy to imagine that some of them might sometimes act in sexist ways, even without such a corporate culture?
You need more than a few instances to prove a claim of "this must be a cultural thing", IMO.
If the recruiter's accusation is indeed true, then we should ask questions about whether it is endemic to the entire organization. Though given the company's size—especially its growth through acquisitions (such as YouTube)—it's likely that the behavior is constrained to a single manager or department.
In it, he argued that women were essentially worse at logical tasks than men, and further that this made them poor engineers.
That's not a diversity memo, that's a sexist screed.
No he didn't. He said they were inherently less interested in STEM, and speculated about a few personality characteristics from psych research that might explain why, but all of that is irrelevant. Damore explicitly said that you can't judge individual competence from a probability distribution, even if the distribution of competence of each gender were different (which they largely are not).
Here's a broad overview of the literature covering what Damore got right and wrong: http://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-re...
Turns out, he was right that women seem to have different interests. I suggest reading about the things vs. people hypothesis. You can get more women into STEM subfields that deal with people if you highlight those aspects. Hiring quotas and some of the other measures Damore was arguing against would indeed have no effect on gender diversity given these facts.
Keep in mind that this is only one side of the story. There is little evidence to support the complaint. It's too early to draw conclusions.
It appears it was more than one. Possibly it was two.
Based on Reddit stories for a while, it seemed that even settin foot in the US was a near guarantee one would then be tasered, have their money taken by police officers, and then detained by agents from an unknown 3-letter agency and shipped to Guantanamo.
It's possible, though we have no way of knowing, that what's in this story is a case of a lone manager with an axe to grind. It's also possible that the attitude is pervasive.
It's likely best to withhold judgement and keep asking questions.