Why Google Fired Me | Hacker News Reader

Why Google Fired Me

twitter.com

She writes "Google treats badly black, queer women", but the story is "Google treated ME badly, and I'm a black queer woman". Also, I'm not comfortable supporting or empathizing with anybody so certain about their "stellar, fantastic, greatest in history" profile.

It would be interesting to hear what were the performance/carrier paths of those 300 people she hired, to understand whether they really just needed a leg-up. That would validate her hunch about untapped potential. On the other hand I'm afraid that it's likely that if they were not promoted it would be again blamed on racism, because if you have that one differentiator, it can be used in any situation.

(Yes, I'm aware that this comment is not going to be palatable to politically correct majority).

> but the story is "Google treated ME badly, and I'm a black queer woman"

My take-away from it was "Google recruiting is essentially unaware of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs)"

That is the most shocking part, but it's not the emphasis of the rant - it's the added value that gives the author credibility.

Please note that I'm coming from a 3rd world country, Google probably has my university well below it's radar, and I know people from there hired by Google (in double-digit numbers). So not being on the "A list" is quite normal for a vast majority of the world, yet you can make it happen.

On a personal note - I interviewed and got reject by Google, but I'm a white male so I do think they actually rejected me because of my performance and not because of my other attributes.

She mentions that someone told her about being “intimidated” by her. Is this really something we shouldn't tell other people or should we work on it?

If someone has a tick accent that I can't understand or uses too much of slang that I cannot interpret without thinking about it or if someone acts as if they are simply a puppeteer of a persona(like if they bring up their identity all the time as if everything is about this persona definition but without personality) I also get very intimidated because I don't know what to expect at my encounters. I may intend to have a quick chat about something technical and it may end up me trying to understand what I did wrong to upset this person.

It's not about races or communities or genders, some people are acting as if they try to get upset, they are fishing for a chance to bring up their agenda or make everything about themselves.

In cases where there's no stigma to confront this kind of people, you can fight back but when this person is from a community that is ready to make it a big deal, it's really intimidating to confront people that make everything about themselves or their persona.

From the way she describes her standing point, I got the impression that she would be one of the people that I would try to avoid.

The new thing is that 'professionalism' is a "white" thing and so it somehow suppresses other races. Somehow brown people like myself, Asians, hispanics, and most black people don't have an issue with it but for others it's a hill they wish to die on.

So now you have to understand slang of about 10 different cultures because speaking correct English is apparently oppressive. Also, being polite and not aggressive is also racist to other cultures, but not really other cultures, just a vocal minority of one culture. It's pathetic and it makes it really hard to Just Get Shit Done.

> It's not about races or communities or genders, some people are acting as if they try to get upset, they are fishing for a chance to bring up their agenda or make everything about themselves.

Behavior is often determined by incentives. Today one of the quickest ways to get positive attention, affirmation, encouragement, etc is to be a victim. For real victims who would've been stigmatized in the past, like people with mental illness, this is great. However it also means everybody has a low-risk/high-reward incentive to portray themselves as victims in almost any scenario too.

> The reason Google never hired an HBCU student straight out of undergrad into one of their key engineering roles is because they didn’t believe talent existed at these institutions- until I showed up.

I pity white working class American males: no classic class privilege and no modern victim privilege.

Ironically, my understanding is they're also the most likely to vote against minimum wages, social security, universal health care, Pell Grants and so on, and to have bought into specious arguments about meritocracies.

Hat tip to this book[0] "issues of race point to underlying problems in society that ultimately affect everyone, not just minorities".

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Miners-Canary-Enlisting-Resisting-Tra...

Maybe they aren't looking for an easy way out like others.

Not ironic when you consider people don't always just vote for what will improve their present financial position. Wouldn't you agree that some vote based on their principles?

Reading this twitter thread, I am embarrassed. On one hand, as another user noted, I am reluctant to take too seriously somebody who present herself as a the best at her job and suggest the racist culture of the company led to her sacking. This is both generalizing and impossible to check at first glance.

On the other hand, the absence of any tech hires from HBCUs is a potentially verifiable fact that is deeply concerning.

Is there any way to confirm this assertion ? The other ones seems hard to investigate (although just as problematic if they are true).

I'm confused. Google had never hired from a HBCU and she increased it by 300%. Wouldn't that imply that it's still at 0?

THAT was your takeaway? That when she said she took it from 0 HCBU students to 300 students she also incorrectly said 300%?

I had a similar takeaway.

The overall poor wording - odd number(s), bad words and grandeur - support the impression that it's a rage post, rather than a (at least attempted) faithful, balanced, report of the fact.

If her take is accurate -- and Google is free to tell their side, too -- why shouldn't she feel rage?

Of course it's a rage post, she feels awful, she even says it herself that she is still coping. That doesn't mean that it's any less credible, if you discredit it for those reasons the issue will just remain and keep going.

You are correct, of course. It doesn’t make it less credible, but it also doesn’t make it automatically credible.

I have not yet had a chance to read the letter and all commentary, but I hear echos of Max Howell’s “google didn’t hire me because I cannot invert a binary tree”.

It was obviously a rage post; it was obviously his impression of the interview (even though “inverting a binary tree”, being an ill-defined operation, is unlikely what they asked him to do).

And following that affair, my impression was that he wasn’t hired for reasons other than his programming abilities - being a team player (and specifically not being a loose cannon) matters at least as much.

I have no idea what the story is here, but taking one side or the other based on a single post (and prejudice) is not really helpful.

It makes her post less credible, since it significantly raises the likelihood that she got fired for being toxic at work instead of whatever reason she didn't even mention.

"Tone policing is an ad hominem (personal attack) and anti-debate tactic based on criticizing a person for expressing emotion. Tone policing detracts from the validity of a statement by attacking the tone in which it was presented rather than the message itself."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing

Well, yes and no.

This isn't a post about, say, lock-free algorithms, which are, in nature, decoupled from human behavior.

Her attitude _is_ part of the contention itself; for example, there's mention of a career block because she was perceived as intimidating, there's frequent self-flattery, there's an unprofessional insulting of the employer, and so on. Her position is supposed to be covered by a people's person.

Of course, there is also at least one mention of colleagues' behavior that is, I suppose, straight illegal, and this is alarming.

As I wrote, verbatim, this supports an impression. I didn't write she's wrong.

When a person complains in a toxic way about being unfairly fired then I'll believe that they got fired for being toxic rather than whatever thing they want to tell you. It isn't tone policing, it is just common sense.

In other words, in this scenario her tone adds extra information, discussing it is therefore not an ad-hominem.

Yes but OP is not tone policing to hide the truth.

It's literally trying to understand the truth from the messages

LMAO — spot the programmer!

Really, even in the comments of the thread the fact that so many people are hung up on that is absolutely baffling. Of all the awful stuff that is said in there, that's the comment they want to make?

Trying to understand the facts should never be attacked.

yes 1000% we have both had this experience recently

Yes. In her Twitter thread she implies that she was able to judge the HBCU curriculums to be equal to that of white universities while also not understanding the basics of percentages. Maybe I've got outrageous demands but I expect any making decisions on a CS curriculum to understand percentages.

Or maybe this is a twitter rant and not a peer reviewed journal article.

The other takeaway is that she hired 300 students that usually don't meet the required skill levels.

I thought that perhaps she was the first one.

Could be correct, technically she says before her role existed Google had hired zero from HBCU and that she hired 300 increasing the number by 300%.

In other words timeline is: Google hires nobody from HBCU, she joins, Google hires 100 apart from and she hires 300. Now, both statements are true. Google hired none before her and she tripled Google's HBCU hiring.

Odd that she both hired 300 and increased by 300% so maybe she misstated something, but it's not logically impossible.

something doesn't add up! :D

I do find it humorous that someone thought their Baltimore accent was a disability. It can be quite difficult to parse, I don't think it would be too out of bounds to consider it a speech impediment.

This sounds like someone I would not want anywhere near my business either. What a disgracefully unprofessional reaction. And what an awful person to have to try to work with.

Imagine you land a well-paid cushy job at one of the best employers in the world, with the explicit task of recruiting other members of your race to also enjoy that prestigious privilege to the exclusion of others (not to mention the social prestige you gain with that power), imagine being informed that you intimidate coworkers and blaming them, imagine being told that you're difficult to understand and becoming irate rather than considering improvement, imagine being put on performance improvement plans and having your generous pay reduced and managing to blame racism rather than even considering you may have some shortcomings, and imagine after they've put up with this behaviour for years before finally having enough, you go and unleash a highly damaging expletive-laden rant on social media. I can't.

I don't want to hear about 'white privilege' ever again.

That's not what white privilege is. From the thread:

> Before my role existed, Google had NEVER, and I mean fucking NEVER hired an HBCU student into a tech role-

_thats_ white privilege. Even if the number isn't correct, if google isn't even looking in these places, by virtue of going there and graduating even top of your class, you have little to no chance.

There's definitely two sides to this story, but that doesn't mean you should dismiss systemic issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com