Google HR reportedly advised mental health leave in response to compl | Hacker News Reader

Google HR reportedly advised mental health leave in response to compl

theverge.com

34 pointslladnar35 comments

To me, it seems reasonable to offer someone a paid leave after they encountered something that made them feel uneasy at work. I'm guessing this is a generic rule and not specific to sexual harassment, as the article attempts to imply.

Oh and then there's the usual Gebru mud throwing.

To me it seems reasonable to put a stop to the unprofessional behavior that's making people feel uneasy at work.

If somebody just looks at her tweets, it's clear why she was fired: https://twitter.com/RealAbril/status/1341135824730013696

She was probably acting unprofessionally, unlike James Damore who didn't say any of those words and always wrote respectfully (at least from what was public).

Google having a strong political bias backfired, I think it's too late to contain the damage.

Oh. Oh boy.

> Before my role existed, Google had NEVER, and I mean fucking NEVER hired an HBCU student into a tech role . . . I had single handedly increased Google’s black engineering hiring from HBCUs by over 300%. Meaning . . . 300 Black and Brown students . . . .

That whole set of tweets is incredibly unprofessional. If you seriously believe and have the proof that you were subjected to racism at work and were fired on the basis of race, sue. Spilling one-sided conjecture, unproven accusations and extremely rude denigration of your previous co-workers is a strategy that is petty and destined to fail.

Given her words in support of someone who was fired for giving unreasonable and unprofessional ultimatums to her employer, I wouldn't be surprised if she did that exact same thing.

You can't give out ultimatums without being prepared to walk away immediately. If you aren't prepared, then your bluff can be called and you'll be left with nothing.

Additionally, putting your diversity achievements on a pedestal as a reason you shouldn't be fired is entitlement. If you caused a toxic situation at work, it doesn't matter what your achievements are -- you should go. Given these toxic tweets, if her work behavior was anything similar then her firing is both not surprising and I'd argue inevitable.

Toxic employees poison culture.

The tweets have been made private, it seems. https://web.archive.org/web/20210227001627/https://twitter.c...

"In several cases, students were questioned IN INTERVIEWS about the quality of the computer science curriculum that they were receiving at their HBCU"

Dear god, it's almost like they're being interviewed for a tech job or something.

"I went to Stanford, how do you feel about the quality of the CS program at Howard? Why would you not apply to Stanford?"

... or any variation thereof is entirely a useless, antagonistic interview question. A school's relative "quality" holds little relevance to the applicant's merit. And the claimed comments that interviewers would imply, or outright state, that perhaps the applicant should have gone somewhere other than a HBCU are a varying combination of elitist, condescending, ignorant or racist.

“What was your favorite course?”

“Tell me about a course project where you did well.”

Are reasonable questions for someone directly out of undergrad, with no internships, etc.

"Did your computer science program cover X, Y, and Z" is not an elitist, condescending, ignorant, or racist question.

Going to a specific school, in this case Howard, and not knowing whether they cover the topics that you consider prerequisites for hire is pretty dumb.

How do you know Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, etc cover the necessary topics? Are all students ask? I doubt it because that's the most basic background research OF THE SCHOOL that Google would do before going there.

Most people only go to one school. How exactly do you propose an interviewer come to know the full curriculum of every school in the country while still being able to do their actual job? I doubt most school administrators are even aware of every course their school offers, let alone other schools.

They're sent by their employer with context? When employers make concerted efforts to recruit at particular schools, they typically do it with a background context of the school.

In a job fair at a university, it doesn't make any sense for an employer (Google, FB, Lockeheed Martin, whoever) to get to the school and then ask "does the school I'm currently at even offer the curriculum to make you (the student/prospective hire) eligible?"

But it is pointless, and distracts from quality signals in the interviewing process because it's often weighted disproportionally to its importance.

"There is no relationship between where you went to school and how you did five, 10, 15 years into your career. So, we stopped looking at it"

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-doesnt-really-care-any...

Interviews exist as a way to determine if the person who wants to work for you has experience with the things you need them to know. There's a point to asking whether they've had academic experience with something important to your company, and it still isn't racist no matter how you try to spin it.

> it still isn't racist

I said it was pointless, regardless of whether or not racism is part of the problem.

How is it pointless to ask a job applicant if they have experience relevant to the job? I thought that was, you know, the entire point of an interview.

Are those interviewers asking those same questions of the Stanford, Harvard, “regular suspects” group of elite schools? No? Then, why take away time from this particular candidates allotted time for answering the technical questions e.g. algorithms, systems design, systems architecture, data-modeling?

Is the Google interviewer curious about this new institution and its curriculum? Given that the interviewer works at the company whose name has now become so associated with search that a significant number of people use it as the verb to do so, why not fire up the company’s search engine and find out? Did they ask each of their peers whose education institutions they were unfamiliar with about those peers’ corresponding computer science curriculum? If no, then why not?

Why not just get straight to testing the HBCU candidates directly with the technical questions that touch upon X, Y, and Z as they would a regular candidate from the elite schools? (Caveat: if the candidate is an intern/co-op student earlier on their studies, then asking a modified version of this question is fair e.g. “I see that you’re a second year student. Have you covered X, Y, or Z yet?”).

One thing that everyone really needs to understand is that it is possible to have biased outcomes without intentional bias. Something that is innocent as face value such as asking a question to satisfy one’s innate curiosity can result in a material change in an interaction as a whole because in answering that question, there is less time for everything else. In a technical interview, that can be less time for the candidate to think about the answer, less time to deliver it, less time to explain it, less time time to test, and so on. And guess what, as the interviewee, you go into the room with the expectation and the mindset to answer questions as well as you can.

As people who work closely with computers, we get to use copy-and-paste in our daily work to make things easier. What is being asked of each interviewer is similar: behave identically with each candidate as is reasonable.

Yes, there are dangers of blindly copy-and-pasting such as using the wrong name, or making an invalid assumption. However, that danger also exists when using copy-paste in computers, and we employ processes to overcome it some cases or create a bespoke version in others. We can do the same here as well, but only if we all really, really, really want it.

I can view the tweets fine and I don’t have a Twitter account at this time.

Ya, the truth is "People from elite schools think their education was better than a non-elite school would have provided" not some racist conspiracy. A white applicant from an average school in the Midwest or South would face the same uphill battle, but without the benefit of having anyone advocating for them on the basis of race.

Untrue. Google launched Engineering Residency to advocate for those people.

> it's clear why she was fired

>she was "probably" acting unprofessionally

(emphasis mine)

Those two statements are not congruent. Her statements on twitter are her own, YOU have no idea how she acted professionally.

As for James Damore, he pushed phrenological ideas as to why the disparity between men and women in tech/software engineering was ok. By his own written ideas he was displaying "right biases" (disparities between men/women or whites/racial minorities are natural and just)

You post implies your biases very clearly.

> As for James Damore, he pushed phrenological ideas as to why the disparity between men and women in tech/software engineering was ok.

Damore's writings were based on peer reviewed scientific literature. Quite the opposite of "phrenology".

The anti-science sentiments rising in society from anti-vaxers, anti-maskers, and disregard for biology (like the comment above) is somewhat frightening.

I don't disregard science, nor practice any of that nonsense. I believe in science fully. Trying to attach me to those anti-scientific ideas is kind of asinine.

I doubt you actually read what Damore wrote, you just agree with his idea. None of what Damore pushed was any more scientific in nature than phrenology. Take a look for yourself:

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

Whenever he points to a biological origin, it's followed by a single study that doesn't come to the point that he's trying to make. It's a lot of "men are this, and women are that" with no substance behind it. If you're google, you can follow the short links, but most are dead.

Your holding Damore to a far higher standard than th non-reproducible psych studies he was responding to, which were endorsed by the paid staff of a multi billion dollar corporation.

The are no "non-reproducible psych studies".

There is Google taking an approach to diversity and inclusion that they see fit, and then there's Damore vocally disagreeing and making an argument backed by pseudoscience.

Not everyone behaves identically as they do in work with how they behave in social media.

If the tweets were about hard core partying, getting drunk, having threesomes, showing off with sports cars....sure, I agree with you, that habing a private life should be accepted and celebrated. But these were work related tweets that show her unprofessional behaviour that will go with her to the next place.

Gosh, maybe she doesn't want to be hired by a company that prefers your version of professionalism over taking an interest in its mission.

Whenever I read a series of tweets like this I can't help but see someone with a Savior complex who has realized that all of their saving was not what their employer wanted. They also usually fail to mention all of the things the employer did want that they didn't do because they were too busy being a savior.

"Most successfully BLACK QUEER WOMAN recruiter" the author capitalized what was most important, her holier than thou, unproductive behavior protection labels. I bet she VEGAN, does CROSSFIT, and is an ACTIVIST as well.

Stories like this are getting flagged and buried in HN yesterday and today.

The tweeter has something solid going on - look at this thread [1] about Google and HBCUs. It got buried yesterday.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26374822

Another thread from today got flagged: [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26383977

Google already had grave issues regarding it's top brass in the past, who got off scot-free.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...

https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-...

Damore wasn't disrespectful?, that's some ignorance. That memo was a shame.

This is unfair. Probably acting unprofessionally. She’s made some serious accusations, let her go to court with them. Discrimination in hiring is not unfortunate, it’s illegal. Maybe she’s a nut. Maybe she’s a witness to illegal discrimination. Maybe both! But her claims should not be summarily dismissed. Bring your evidence to the court if need be.

Human Resources is there to protect the company, not the employee. It can never be said enough: HR is NOT your friend.

From what I understand Amazon doesn't even look at the school you attended during hiring nor do they confirm that you've graduated. I was told this is do to the lack of correlation between your school and indicators of success at Amazon. I wonder if the tweeter would have an easier or harder time creating a black employee pipeline there.

It pays to be sensitive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com