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Comment by gameswithgo | Hacker News Reader

Google has fired a few people, liberal and conservative, for being politically insufferable. Multiple people in the news about this on various places in political spectrum. It doesn’t mean they were wrong.

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There's been endless discussion about Damore. In particular podcasts you'd think that the firing of a random engineer at Google ranked alongside 9/11 as a defining event in modern history. If I circulated a memo to my co-workers that not only opposed a new policy from management, but did obvious harm to the expressed intent of that policy, I might be fired. It doesn't matter if the memo I circulated would have gotten a passing grade in a college class. The fact that people use that as an argument tells me that they've never worked a normal job before.

I can't tell if you're trying to say that a policy from management is beyond all reproach or if "these things just happen in the real world". Either way, the former shouldn't be true and the latter should be wrong. Of course, correctness doesn't stop anyone from being terminated, but that's not the point.

There are appropriate and inappropriate avenues for disagreeing with corporate policy; publicly on a large mailing list is going to get you in hot water no matter what the policy is.

I guess I take issue with this. Google encouraged discussion and disagreement on large mailing lists, unlike most companies. It doesn't seem right that Google would simultaneously sollicit such feedback and then punish somebody for giving them negative feedback.

I think what you're saying is valid, but the point I've been making is that the entire James Damore affair is interesting for pretty much the opposite reason to that which people who tend to bring it up claim.

"It doesn't seem right" is one thing, but that's not why it's still brought up 3 years after the memo was written. A lot has gone on in the world in the past 3 years that doesn't seem right that we've forgotten about or didn't hear about in the first place. Damore is used as a data point (in fact, as a central data point) in the thesis that "political correctness gone awry" or "social justice warriors run amok" are problems that rank highly in a list of society's most concerning. I think it's absurd. That this random dev's firing is doing so much work in bolstering this thesis just highlights the absurdity.

That’s certainly a fair argument.

It’s unclear exactly what the limits of such a forum are; if I were to hypothetically respond with a pro-nazi screed, I think that most people here would be fine with me being fired. But there’s certainly a gray area.

I will say that it was extremely short sighted of google to setup such a forum in a public and non-anonymous manner. That was just begging for trouble.

Policy from management is not beyond all reproach, but what venue you have for expressing disagreement varies by company. Do you think the firing of James Damore warranted the attention it got?

Edit: removed a too snarky question.

Damore plausibly used those venues to circulate his paper.

> If I circulated a memo to my co-workers that not only opposed a new policy from management, but did obvious harm to the expressed intent of that policy, I might be fired.

Google had fostered a culture were it was expected to respond with to new policies from management that you didn't agree with.

Google wasn't a normal job where whatever management says gos. Although, it's certainly seems to be moving in that direction from the outsiders perspective.

I think that's because a lot of people think that some corporations now have much greater power than governments, especially when it comes to influencing / controlling social thought.

It's enough to say both can be oppressive without bothering to rank them.

My understanding is that it was "normal" for Google to have these kind of discussions on internal boards. A remnant of the libertarian message board and usenet culture of the early silicon valley.

They only fully cracked down on political speech like a big boring company last year:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/23/google_politics_cha...

It was never normal. The politically charged boards were always playing with fire. Damore also shared his ideas outside of these spaces where it was even less “normal”. What might be okay to say in an opt-in discussion board about politics may be less okay to say in a training session, for example. Time and place and all that.

Who are the high-profile liberals that got fired from Google; I can't think of any, but the only person I can recall Google firing for political views is Damore. I wouldn't be surprised if they had filed any liberals; but they certainly didn't get equivalent media coverage as Damore.

Several of the walkout organizers as well as people agitating against projects they didn’t agree with, including coordinating with perceived authoritarian states. It was all over the news.

Maybe not "liberal" but certainly "not-conservative"

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/25/20983053/google-fires-fo...

Sometimes the tallest blade of grass gets cut.

>for being politically insufferable

In other words for hurting their bottom line by demanding Google be better (each in their preferred way) for society and its employees?

> In other words for hurting their bottom line by demanding Google be better (each in their preferred way) for society and its employees?

Yes? If I hired someone to clean my apartment and instead of cleaning my apartment he or she spent the whole time writing up long diatribes demanding that I be better, per his or her understanding, for society and my employees you can bet I would not be hiring that cleaner again!

I may be misremembering, but wasn’t Damore’s post to an internal list Google specifically set up to solicit feedback on diversity?

To cut to the chase, I do think there’s a certain amount of dishonesty in the typical Silicon Valley corporate culture. But to my mind it is far more reasonable to ask that companies not engage in this dishonesty rather than asking that they live up to it. Bring your whole self to work is ridiculous and unworkable. No one can run a successful business if their employees are spending all day debating philosophy on internal message boards.

But that's beyond moving the goalposts now, just inventing arbitrary reasons to justify an already set view. That shouldn't be accepted either, otherwise it's just a "get out of jail free" card for bad actors - "I sacked you because you did something I didn't like. Wait, you did what I asked you to? But you should've known that in this case when I say to do something, I mean the opposite! In this case, and any other case I find convenient after the fact."

How would a geek with 0 real life experience outside Google know that? It is not what they told him about "internal discussions".

The people that want everything made explicit and all lies banished from human relations lost, have always lost, and will always lose.

I recognize that for some this imposes significant hardship but changing everyone else’s human nature is not a reasonable accommodation.

The kindest thing those of us that know young people of this type can do is pull them aside and explain how the world works. It is unkind to feed their delusions by vigorously agreeing with them online and then turning around and continuing to act pragmatically in our own lives.

Strongly disagree. I think it would be both feasible and good to change culture to be more tolerant of "tone-deaf" speech.

What happens if he wins the case? We do a 180? What happens when people with Asperger's start suing? They really need to learn how to keep things simple in modern hr. Here are the rules and that's it.

Bumbling geeks with zero real life experience can be a huge liability to large corporations generally, and often don't make for good employees solely for that reason.

He's an adult. He bears responsibility for his actions. Ignorance is not enough of an excuse to save him. But even that's not valid here because he repeatedly defended the same views in the media long after someone who was merely bumbling would have realized the error of their ways. He doubled down on it. What started out as bumbling, didn't end that way.

And you can bet without those people there would still be adults (and kids) working 12 and 14 hour shifts unpaid overtime with no workers protection, racial and sex based discrimination, no leave days, no workplace safety, no insurance, and without several other niceties gained in the late-19th early 20th century by exactly such people and such actions...

Of course in a place where everybody is imaginary temporarily inconvenienced millionaire, expecting to soon join the "employer" side and with no regards for those on the other side, the above might not be a problem...

Let's continue with your cleaner analogy:

You hired the cleaner to clean. They do their job as per agreement. You are satisfied and so are they. Then one day they find out that in addition to cleaning normal office mess, they are now cleaning blood. Blood from victims of the company's activities. Should they remain ignorant of the company's real societal impact? Should they voice their opinions to fellow cleaners? Should they take advantage of the purported freedom to speak their minds their companies advertised during their hiring?

Life rarely offers us an easy black or white judgment on complex realities.

Firing organizers was an example of that: https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/google-fired-us-for-organi...

I don't think firing Damore was?

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

I get a strong impression that there is some begging of the question going on in that line. If someone disagrees with them, then the generic activist doesn't get automatically get cast as trying to better society. Philosophically, without specific cases, their opinions can only be equal to their opponents.

"Bettering society" is supremely complicated. There are some weird legal traditions, eg, rules of evidence, which are better for society but they sure don't look like it in the small.

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