‘Misogynistic’ Apple hire is out hours after employees call for investigation | Hacker News Reader

‘Misogynistic’ Apple hire is out hours after employees call for investigation

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77 pointsakalin148 comments

Outside of the main quote that keeps showing up, he was also fairly creepy writing about women he worked with.

> Unlike most women at Facebook (or in the Bay Area, really) she knew how to dress; forties-style, form-fitting dresses from neck to knee were her mainstay.

> There were few women one would call conventionally attractive at Facebook. The few there were rarely if ever dressed for work with their femininity on display in the form of dresses and heels

> If her look was supposed to disarm me, she needed either more cleavage or more charm.

Sounds like not someone you'd want around if you're a company that wants to make people feel at all safe and comfortable in an office.

Yeah, this is not acceptable behaviour in a workplace, and hasn't been for a long time. Calling his termination "cancel culture" is just buying into right wing conspiracy theories.

It's kinda sad seeing prominent VCs portraying it as "journalists throwing a hissy fit over someone who wasn't nice to them", when all you have to do is read direct quotes from his book to see why Apple employees might not want to work with him.

example VC: https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1392675012281315328

Lol, that tweet went private.

The only thing that should matter is:

Can he do the job?

Whether he wrote a book people get their panties twisted over does not appear to be a part of that job description.

When did this concept become so controversial?

How could he do the job if there were any female colleagues around? Clearly he's too busy thinking about whether they're attractive to focus on his work.

I guess we will never know since the mob made it clear that he does not belong despite claims of 'inclusive values' and 'diverse perspectives'. Its funny when those perspective and values include only those that are already acceptable to the mob.

By the mob you mean "the people who would have to work with him"?

By mob I mean people, who, in that order:

1. Learn there is a new hire 2. their first course of action is to scour his internet history for things to be offended by 3. find something 4. get a lynch mob going 5. complain to HR 6. get guy fired 7. start a party

This man was a public figure with an NYT bestselling book who, based on evidence elsewhere in this post's comments, publicly and privately harassed multiple women over years.

Is it possible people already knew of him prior to his hiring?

I will be perfectly honest. The way things are now, I would not be surprised if people just signed w/e petition was waved in front of them. Save the whales, kill the snails, can I go back to work?

You're going awfully out of your way to not engage with the arguments you're presented with by other people, dismissing them with sardonic one-liners, and making wild assumptions about the motives and thought processes of the Apple employees. If you're not trolling, I suggest you take a couple steps back and reassess the situation, because you're not coming across as a reasonable person.

It's hard to take your question as genuine based on how you are engaging those who respond.

For starters, you're making baseless assumptions about those involved without providing and receipts.

For example, how do you know people were looking for things to be offended by vs people simply googling their soon to be boss who found some very concerning things in the process and raise their (quite legitimate) concerns through the proper channels?

The language you use and the picture you paint make you come across as intellectually lazy at best, and a troll at worst.

I have karma to burn and I am annoyed by automatic downvoting and general idiocy I see around me. It is not intellectually lazy to challenge idiocy. In fact, it is necessary. It is intellectually lazy( and if not downright stupid ) to let hysteria and twitter mob dictate hiring practices.

It is not trolling.

So. Some god damn context since anyone with access to google COULD have pulled it if they were so inclined ( but we can't have reasoned discussion, can we now ).

One of the offensive passages with more context:

"When she was in her teens, her father decided to move the family to the United States, where they suffered a financial reversal she was unwilling to talk about. Suddenly not among the moneyed class, she hustled herself through the redbrick boondocks of the University of Vermont. Citibank internship led to a Deutsche Bank job, and after a few years she was an equity derivatives trader at Deutsche, holding her own against the toff sharks of the City of London.

She had wild green eyes, with unnatural red spots in her irises when you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic cover. Her personality was flinty and rough, and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels.

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work- be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast in someone's back- required doing. Long story short, you wanted to tie your genetic wagon to the backing horse of her bloodline. Which is why I was less nervous than I should have been on a random Saturday in July..."

You find that offensive and a fireable offense?

Good luck.

That's considerably more gross than the out of context version. You find human lives being described as "useless baggage" with the same worth as "a box of shotgun shells" inoffensive?

I am not sure why I am engaging since it is clear everyone already made up their minds.

Are we reading the same passage? He is saying, and I am paraphrasing here, when the zombie apocalypse comes DrCongo will be passed like currency, because he will have no skills to survive. The green eyed girl will survive on her own.

What is so offensive about that? I have zero chance believing that. 75% of US would die of hunger should a bigger disruption come.

Correct, we'll never know because actions have consequences.

Your face will be so red, when 10 years from now, something your wrote on HN will be deemed unfit for the current social mores.

We will discuss actions and consequences again from an amusingly differing perspective I am sure.

Unless you don't interact with your coworkers at all, part of doing your job is behaving appropriately in the work place. If you can't do your job without writing creepy stuff about your coworkers, then you can't do your job.

Can he do the job? Well, the job included managing people from groups he has publicly and repeatedly shown contempt for, and a bunch of people he'd be managing said that they wanted him fired. So I suspect the answer is no, if we're boiling this down a purely meritocratic question, he literally cannot do the job.

How so? I had some bad managers before and this guy, who I never listened to before until now ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE0pIKV5Mlc ) sounds ridiculously less bad than some of those managers. Part of it is because, it does not matter that manager thinks you a are worth less than nothing. Not to the real owners anyway. What matters is whether they deliver on what is needed.

Everything else is noise.

I'm sorry you have such low standards.

I've had bad managers to. The fact that bad managers exist is not a reason to shrug your shoulders and just hire shitty managers any more than bad coders existing is a reason to just give up on pupulate a team with them.

As for "Part of it is because, it does not matter that manager thinks you a are worth less than nothing. Not to the real owners anyway. What matters is whether they deliver on what is needed."

That's straight nonsense. A bad manager can often make sure a top performer they don't like never gets the credit they deserve or has any internal opportunities.

This is a straight up sexist remark.

If part of the job is showing respect to all your coworkers, regardless of sex, then it seems obvious he is incapable.

Maybe his beliefs do not translate at all into his behavior, but I doubt it.

How so? Is it racist too? Please help me out here.

I am trying to be reasonable about it, but the reaction to my simple statement created ridiculous level of response I did not expect so I expect to defend it.

I repeat.

The only thing that matters is whether this person can do their job.

How does that make me sexist?

Your position is illogical. The question "can this person do the job" can be a resounding, objective "yes", for someone who, say, also happens to embezzle cash from the company. If that's the "only thing that matters", then the thief should keep the job and continue stealing.

Especially if you want to defend some unpopular position, you have make sure you don't have logical holes in it, like universal absolutes that succumb to easy counterexamples.

No. Can the person do the job includes their obvious drawbacks ( like tendency to steal ). I do not consider writing a book, however salacious and 'wrong' it may be, to be in that particular category.

The guy is an asshole, but it is hard to argue he does not know what he is doing.

If he wrote a book on how to embezzle from companies, would that be 'wrong' enough for you?

Do you realize that the Civil Rights Act is also a law that companies have an interest in their employees not breaking?

The guy seems clueless how he affects people he manage, so is unfit for the job.

He sounds like a 0.1x employee.

Because it effects those around him and the business itself. Especially women who are already disadvantaged by inequalities in tech.

You can take the your viewpoint to the extreme to prove a point: yeah that Himmler guy knows how to engineer and plan. all that matters right?

One's actions affect others, and even disregarding the (evidently not agreed upon fact) that we should actively be combating racism, misogyny, discrimination etc, it's bad for business when one persons behavior makes other employees less productive, less likely to work for your company in the first place, less likely for customers to buy, or open the company to liability or settling a suit since they now have reports of his behavior.

Right? And yet we are perfectly fine mandating social water cooler socializing despite effectively them reducing productivity. This has nothing to do with productivity.

It is a power play. Pure and simple.

Productivity isn't everything. If what is produced is harmful, it is even negative value.

Yeah we're giving women more power. GOOD.

I don't get this worldview at all. It's a power play to try to combat the centuries of discrimination against women, sexism, racism, and more?

The question before Apple was whether they'd lose more talent by retaining this guy or by firing him. The answer was clear enough that he was gone in hours.

This is by far the only reasonable argument in the entire thread. I don't automatically accept it, but I can see its merit.

He literally said "Most women in the Bay Area are ... generally full of shit". How can you work with someone that thinks that, specially if you are a woman, say, in the Bay Area? And how can he do the job if people can't effectively work with him?

If it helps, men are full of shit too.. I m not even joking. Am I misandrist now and should lose my job?

According to a review of New York Times: "Mr. García is not just a keen observer of corporate and social culture, but a thoughtful business and policy analyst armed with a highly refined detector for pretentious nonsense." (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/review-...)

> people get their panties twisted over

This is just another way of accusing someone of hysteria: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria

And what is your point here? Because it is absolutely a hysteria.

I’m getting the impression you’ve never run a company before since you seem to think you’re making logical arguments so I’ll answer you earnestly regardless of the ad hominem attacks you’re making.

That concept became controversial 57 years ago with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the controversial nature of it has been strengthened over the decades since through a multitude of hostile workplace laws building on the CRA.

What those laws mean is hiring an employee, doubly so for a manager like the man in question, who has published a high profile book disparaging a protected class of people opens up the company itself to lawsuits on the basis of discrimination relating to a hostile workplace if a single member of that protected class is (or even feels) mistreated in some way because it’s evidence the company should’ve known about the potential hostile environment and did nothing to prevent it.

And so it’s clear, no this is not the same thing as cancel culture based on a tweet or forum post or even on the scale of Amazon banning Parler. It’s not the same as James Damore and Google. Those all do not necessarily meet the standard of public speech while this guy went and published a book which very clearly does. This is a half a century plus of laws and cases establishing precedent and companies acting in a way to prevent costly lawsuits.

No well run company would open themselves up to the legal risk involved in hiring or keeping on someone like this for a management role, especially after it was clearly brought to light in this manner. Apple’s HR department is almost definitely currently trying to figure out what mistake resulted in him not getting filtered out earlier in the process so they can prevent this from happening again.

"Can he do the job?" has not been the only thing that matters, and in fact the situation described in this instance has mattered, for over a half century, I’m guessing longer than you’ve been alive. Not because of woke mobs or free speech or any other recent political talking points or even really about Apple caring about sexism. It’s about avoiding clear cut legal and financial risk period.

Turning businesses into the thought police is one of the more evil ramifications of civil rights legislation.

Did you just call civil rights legislation evil?

Because forcing companies to not allow discriminatory practices or hostile work environments for protected classes is kind of the entire point (of the business oriented portions of those laws).

I’m having difficulty interpreting a more charitable reading of your post.

Edit: just noticed "one of". I’m morbidly curious, what are the other evil ramifications of civil rights laws.

> Did you just call civil rights legislation evil?

No, I said it had an evil ramification. Laws can have both evil and good ramifications.

> what are the other evil ramifications of civil rights laws

I would say that the current legal environment of allowing companies to be sued successfully for "hostile environment" actions of their employees that they had nothing to do with and no foreknowledge of is another.

I really hope this comment gets higher on the page, because I think it explains the situation really well.

I was going to make a comment mentioning how the asymmetry in what is allowed in big companies frustrates me greatly. People who express disdain towards the current social structure and disparage groups like white men get hired left and right while people who vocally express support for older social structures get cancelled. Well your comment explains that asymmetry perfectly with something I had never considered: legal risk.

It is apparent to me that many people in the country still align with the old social structures, but they aren't allowed to thrive in modern corporate America. How will this affect society in the long term? What would it take for things to change?

> People who express disdain towards the current social structure and disparage groups like white men get hired left and right

Have you seen _any_ major tech company with close to 50% women or 40% non-hispanic white employees? In engineering roles? That's just aiming for parity with U.S. demographics, but when you consider how much of the world travels to the U.S. to work in tech, that 40% number should be much higher!

So if women and minorities are not being "hired left and right", and not all women and minorities ascribe to the viewpoint you describe, then that viewpoint cannot be being "hired left and right".

The "old social structures" may be on their way out, but their vestiges are clearly alive and well despite the moderate legal "risk" that has been added in the past few decades. The law may be an asymmetric tool, but as it stands, a tool that isn't up to the task it was designed for.

---

To reframe things, some questions:

How would you define "the old social structures".

Do you think they are good/bad/benign.

Do you they are still present/fast fading/already gone?

> How would you define "the old social structures"

They're social and cultural beliefs that used to be accepted by corporations and the media but are now not. For example, unequal outcomes doesn't imply discrimination. Some cultures are better than others. There are widespread physical and psychological differences between men and women. These are common beliefs that are still common, but people are afraid to voice them.

> Do you think they are good/bad/benign.

Any extreme ideology is bad. Requiring strict gender roles or saying whites are superior is extremely harmful. But so is flagrant discrimination against whites or other similar things. What is bad is allowing one extreme while suppressing the other.

> Do you they are still present/fast fading/already gone?

I read some studies somewhere that stated that conservatism and liberalism are inate character traits that never really go away in a population. This means that changes in the visibility of such traits is largely a function of how much power one side or the other can gain. This means that in the 50's, liberalism was just as popular as now but they didn't have the power.

Now its swapped. Liberalism has the power, the corporate support, the narrative. But that doesn't mean that conservatism is any rarer than before. This power asymmetry increases the chances of conflict. See the affect of the Culture Wars on our political system.

I want to emphasize that my personal opinions don't matter much at all here. But if corporations continue asymmetric political pressure, there will be pushback. What will the repercussions of such pushback be?

> Have you seen _any_ major tech company with close to 50% women or 40% non-hispanic white employees? In engineering roles?

Depends on what you'd consider close. Apple, for example, reports 47% white non-Hispanic employees overall and 44% in engineering. (https://www.apple.com/diversity/) From my personal experience, I've never worked on a team where white people were a majority, although in one case I think the company as a whole was.

Apple's numbers here are a lot better than I expected!

For comparison, many of the other FAANG companies fare much worse, and many of the smaller companies I saw when consulting and doing a startup looked even less diverse than big tech.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/12/six-years-into-diversity-rep...

If anyone thinks this is a case of "cancel culture wokerati you can't say anything these days", I can only assume you've never heard of the guy.

Read the many, lengthy direct quotes from his writing in https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h....

This is a guy who has made a writing/speaking career of knowingly saying crassly offensive and, at best, childishly naughty things about entire classes of people he would be managing at Apple (or anywhere else). He's a professional troll. It's not like someone dug up a single reddit post of his he made when he was in high school.

It's a genuine mystery to me how he got hired for any management job in the first place.

I agree I've never heard of the guy, and that these quotes are pretty offensive. But had you heard of him before today? That's the "cancel culture" concern here - his status as a well-known offensive figure appears to have been created from scratch between lunchtime and now.

Yes, I had heard of him, and presumably so had the Apple employees who assembled a letter that quotes him extensively: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h....

I... do not see why we would presume that.

The guy wrote a literal NYT/WSJ bestseller, a justifiably noteworthy book about the tech industry. It was covered in the tech and mainstream press extensively. He's a well known public figure, not an anonymous engineer.

I don't see any reason to doubt that plenty of people at Apple had heard of him and read the book, other than a self-regarding faith that people you disagree with can't possibly know something you don't.

It was covered in the tech and mainstream press, yes. Did any of that coverage indicate that it was so shockingly offensive nobody should ever hire him, as these employees claim to find obvious?

The petition just implied someone should have read the book before Apple offered him a job.[1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h...

No, admittedly Apple needed to a little more background research to know in advance that if he joined them then they would be successfully sued by the first female report he had a problem with.

Examples of the background research they could have done:

1. talk to any of the employees who organized the petition

2. read his book! It's widely available! This is a guy whose hiring was literally a positive news story yesterday https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-hires-chaos-monkeys-au.... When you hire people who are going to be news you do a little background. It's a short book! Apple screwed up!

Or just Google him and read the first few sentences and top comments from years ago on his Reddit AMA…

He’s an author with a published book and a Wikipedia article. I’ve known about him for like five years. This isn’t some no name person.

I mean this is a country that made Donald Trump President. So why is it a mystery what type of men populate the rest of the food chain.

There is no dearth of douchebags in positions of power and responsibility. And they are happy to over ride "HR processes" not because they are incapable of recognizing another douchebag, but because they think the douchebag will be effective.

The problem with cancel culture is it doesnt address that belief. All I see is "cancelled" ppl and various douchebags afraid of being cancelled getting together and supporting each other reinforcing their "victimhood".

Sooner or later enough of them aggregate at one spot or the other and create new issues for everyone.

The only way to deal with douchebags especially in the corporate world, is to be more effective than them in delivering results. That makes the story simple.

Cancel culture just complicates it.

According to a review in the New York Times:

"Mr. García is not just a keen observer of corporate and social culture, but a thoughtful business and policy analyst armed with a highly refined detector for pretentious nonsense. "

See: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/review-...

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-the-hypocrites-at-apple-who...

I think people complaining here are full of it again.

Maybe apple should also be more inclusive towards people who can provide honest criticism, and different forms of humor...

Honest criticism of this is completely fine. I have difficulties if people demand firings. I honestly could't imagine working in that atmosphere. I just don't believe people that they get honestly offended.

I have some friends that are pretty sensitive on stuff like this, but they would never go that far like these people did.

"The key to comedy is to put a delicate idea indelicately or an indelicate idea delicately" – Cicero.

Worth bearing in mind Chaos Monkeys came out 8 years ago – an age in cultural years. That same year Warren Buffett was quoted as saying this: “Credit worthiness is like virginity. It can be preserved but not restored very easily so it is crazy to play around with it.”

I'm not sure if he'd would say that now, but I'm not sure this was such uncomfortable syntax in the 2010s.

If he were a comedian, I believe he would be given more slack (assuming he changed the tenor of his jokes in the intervening years).

As a manager, as someone responsible for others' livelihoods and careers, he has to be held to a much higher bar. Even if it were purely in jest, is it fair to have his direct reports try to figure out the line between what he publicly writes and privately believes?

Most men make these observations in their mind or subconsciously. Let's not turn the workplace into adult kindergarten.

If you're saying most men do it... then is it really openness which turns things into kindergarten?

Have you ever read a book where an author describes his love affair? How she is special among women? Probably never read a book, eh?

"This is the same guy who flipped out several years ago when I said that child-free people have lives equal in value to parents, then chased me across multiple platforms posting that I was 'a barren bitch' or similar. Other women have similar stories. He's a monster, basically."

— https://twitter.com/moorehn/status/1392528812047544321

As with Reddit's Aimee Challenor controversy, I can't see why the hiring company did not do a simple google search of the candidate before moving forward in the hiring process.

In both cases, the hiring process is either broken if they did not bother to search, or they did search and the company initially did not care. The later, bowing to employee pressure and backtracking, would be spineless.

What would a Google search have revealed? As far as I can tell ("antonio garcia martinez before:2021"), neither he nor his book faced any significant controversy until today.

Here he is being told to his face that his writing is "very misogynistic" by Kara Swisher in 2016: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/9/12415696/antonio-garcia-martine....

This wasn't a secret, which is why it was so easy for these Apple employees to assemble a lot of quotes at short notice.

It certainly wasn't a secret that he wrote the book! But "very misogynistic" is only one part of a long and not particularly hostile interview. If you stumbled upon this interview without the benefit of today's context, would you really be able to conclude the guy's permanently unemployable?

Two things come across in that interview alone.

He seems temperamentally totally unsuitable to being a manager at a mainstream tech company. Bluntly, he seems like an asshole. Possibly the kind of asshole certain people find funny. But an asshole. To that extent, I'm surprised he got an offer. Possibly he's very good at pretending not to be an asshole in job interviews.

Secondly, the quote from his book in that interview is exactly the kind of thing that, yes, makes you unhireable for management jobs at mainstream tech companies. Hiring people who not only believe that stuff but say it in public, on the record is an insanely big risk. The first female or non-white report who had a bad experience with him would find it extremely easy to sue Apple for discrimination or hostile work environment or whatever and they would win, and Exhibit A would be that quote.

That quote alone is such an obvious and insoluble problem that I can only assume Apple HR is trying right now to figure out why none of this was caught before the offer. He wouldn't have gotten to the onsite if someone had been paying attention.

He's not unemployable. He's not been cancelled. He's a fabulously wealthy public figure. He'll be fine. He'll probably write a book about this experience. And no one has to work for him. Everybody wins.

Was he indeed going to be a manager? That's a very different story if so, but I haven't seen any coverage indicating that was the plan.

He was a prominent executive and manager with reports at Facebook (before he wrote the book).

I suppose it's possible Apple hired someone who can't code whose most recent accomplishment was a non-fiction book to be an IC with no reports, but it seems more likely he would have had reports.

Okay, that makes a lot more sense. I had thought this was thousands of employees filing a petition against some random IC, maybe a first level manager, which I hope we can agree would be a lot more disturbing.

I remember trying to read Chaos Monkeys because it sounded up my alley, and stopping a few chapters in because the author's tone, to be frank, made me think he was at least pretentious and at worst a psychopath.

I'm not sure that's worth a firing from Apple, but based on the book, Popehat's rule of assholes* might be in play here.

* Popehat's rule of assholes: From Popehat, https://twitter.com/popehat, roughly stating "Assuming equal guilt, the system treats people who are assholes worse than people who are not."

Edit to add: After reviewing his comments in parts of the book I didn't reach, and his apparent real-life behavior... yeah, no. Who would hire him?

I mean, seems like he was striving for being notable as as an asshole. Seems very much like he looked up to Edward Abbey and Hunter S Thompson.

If the company had let him stay, how should it respond to female employees who bring up "Hey, this person wrote that women are useless baggage and he's going to evaluate me, determine my salary, and career opportunities here. Why should I stay?"

Should all the women just quit? What's the point in staying?

If this were written about men instead, I don't think male employees would stick around to watch their compensation suffer.

This is pretty much what just happened at Basecamp - the owners made it clear who they did and did not value as people, and the people they didn't value (just over a third of the company) quit.

How do you then handle a worker that claims white men are inherently racist? Or a worker that posts red-headed men are ugly and stupid? Or a worker that claims almost ex-military people are ignorant and violent?

Do all workers who are men and ex-military have the right to demand their removal?

In the same way you handle all people who actively publish hateful comments about protected classes of people, by firing them so they cannot inflict their beliefs on other workers.

I feel like you think you’re posting some sort of gotcha. Do you not believe Apple would’ve done the same thing in those cases? Based on what? Do you have a single example of that happening?

I know Apple would not do the same thing in those cases, because those people are not “protected”. However, Why should they not protect those people too? I’d argue because society has decided that those classes can be subject to derogatory classifications without consequence and, therefore, Apple’s statement is typical corporate virtue signaling. Furthermore, if Apple were to apply this rule for every derogatory remark regarding a class of people, they would only have a few employees left when the dust settled.

You should probably do some reading on discrimination and hostile work environment laws and case history before speaking so confidently. Men are definitely a protected class, as are white people. Veterans are a protected class with regard to government contractors which Apple is.

You should also probably read up on the difference between private and public speech because it’s also applicable here. A derogatory remark does not open a company up to the same legal risk as the same words published in a best selling book.

Being an asshole to an asshole is working within their framework?

Thread with more comments that got flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27134993

Remember not to blame dang, y'all, it's due to users who are tired of culture war. I disagree with their views on acceptable discourse topics for HN, but it's nothing nefarious.

Looks like this one as well now.

There's a rule in politics and senior roles where your job is to not be the news. Apple didn't have a choice in this case. This guy's book was irritating, and it sounds like he crossed some personal lines outside of it. Examples of how awful other managers everywhere are guilty of the same and much worse don't justify anything he might have done to someone either. However, mobs cynically and disingenuously exploit this "don't be the news" convention. They're the stopped clock that found a vulnerability to leverage on this particular day and his conceits handed them the scalp they were looking for. He made himself the perfect straw man. So, Point: mob, but I don't think there is any moral high ground in this story.

The real issue is it looks like Apple has fair weather leadership, and it has made their brand vulnerable to scandal. They're at a stage where a single well timed joke or meme could wipe out billions in market cap. I like their products and a lot of what they do for privacy and security, but this episode suggests their leadership is misreading the zeitgeist and has lost sight of where growth comes from. It's not fun to defend personalities I don't like, but they're only principles when it's hard to apply them.

Here's a video of Antonio García Martínez actually explaining his book (dated 4 years ago): https://youtu.be/KE0pIKV5Mlc

The YouTube comments on this video seem stuck in time (4 years ago) before our current "PC" era. They're largely positive and have nothing to do with political commentary; e.g. the top two comments:

> This was one of the best interviews I have heard from TWIST. I've never listened to a single boring one but holy crap Antonio was such a pleasure to listen to.

and

> Love the insight; “radical candidness is endearing long term”

> At a visceral level, we respect the strength & stamina it takes to “suspend disbelief.”

> Excellent piece Jason.

I'm sure we can find some salacious quotes from this guy's book, but how many people in the latest cancel mob will take the time to read them in their full context before rushing to judgment? (I'm not rushing to judgment either way, but it does strike me that there's a good chance this guy is a blunt person who has some interesting things to say, perhaps some of it rough around the edges and offensive).

Plenty of women in tech did read it, and thought it was pretty sexist: https://huyenchip.com/2019/03/11/silicon-valley-misogyny.htm... https://openheroines.org/tell-me-about-your-books-and-i-will...

"Though I haven't read his work ... how many people in the latest cancel mob will take the time to read his book"?

Nice dunk, except I'm not accusing someone of heresy/trying to get them fired.

More of a layup than a dunk.

The people trying to get him fired have read his stuff. They quote from it extensively in the open letter: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h....

Your claim about the mob not reading his stuff applies to you, the person citing hearsay from YouTube comments (!!!). It demonstrably does not apply to the people who got him fired.

I'm glad the people who wrote the petition read his book, but did any of the 2,000 employees who signed it didn't? If your answer "maybe some of them?", do you think I have a point?

This story also reads:

> ‘Misogynistic’ Apple hire is out hours after employees call for investigation [emphasis mine]

I'm suspicious that ample due process can be afforded to someone when they are gone mere hours after a petition is circulated. It could signify that this person resigned immediately out of guilt, but it could also signify that they were immediately fired, or resigned out of fear.

BTW -- I don't know what I'd do if I were this person's boss. Those quotes don't look very flattering, and some people seem genuinely offended by his book after reading it in full. It just seems to me that not everyone who read his book thought it was, taken on the whole, deeply offensive (e.g. 800 Amazon reviews, 4 stars on average, in addition to my "YouTube hearsay"). And maybe this could be a premature rush to judgment. I'd personally want to spend more than "mere hours" to decide whether or not what this person wrote should merit a literal job termination.

The petition quoted paragraphs and even pages of the book.

Hours is enough time to download the book and verify he wrote those things.

He wrote one of the most quoted passages as a comparison to the mother of his kids. Most SV women don’t live up to this woman, whom he was lucky to get with, according to him. You need more than mere ‘hours’ to get the context.

Unless the only woman who works at Apple is his wife, it seems more relevant what that passage says about women who are not his wife.

Other men manage to praise their partners without calling other women full of shit. The petition quoted several paragraphs before and after to show there was no redeeming context. And there were other passages.

> If your answer "maybe some of them?", do you think I have a point?

If your point is that some people are more rigorous in their research than others then yes, that is true.

But if your point is "Apple should have taken longer to make the the decision", then no.

Apple has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to protect the company from legal risk. The problem (from Apple's point of view) isn't whether the book taken as a whole has merit, or the subtleties of whether it's fair to fire him.

It's that a new people manager is very prominently and repeatedly on the record as holding views that will absolutely be quoted in successful lawsuits against Apple by the first female or non-white report he handles badly. These quotes will be Exhibit A. Apple will lose. It won't even be close. This is basic stuff for HR and legal.

Reaching this conclusion doesn't require "ample due process". It takes 30 seconds to read any one of the many passages the petition carefully enumerates, and then another 30 seconds to verify the quote is real. Done.

HR's job is to protect the company. They failed by allowing him to be hired. Firing him within hours is the least they could do.

Is this the book? Chaos Monkeys, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28259132

Yes.

Wow apparently a NYT bestseller and NPR book of the year.

Bestseller in the publishing world is practically 'natural' in the food world.

There were 309 "NPR Best Books of the Year" in 2016. https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#view=covers&year=2016

Here is the NYT review. It's not exactly glowing. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/review-...

It seems the NYT review has an overall positive sentiment with statements like “irresistible and indispensable 360-degree guide to the new technology establishment.”

It seems like there’s almost 300,000 books published in the US each year [0] so being on NPR’s list is pretty distinguished. So a better way would be to say it’s in the 99.9th percentile.

[0] https://malwarwickonbooks.com/published-every-year/

I wonder how it compares to The Accidental Billionaires, which was the basis for Sorkin's The Social Network.

Wait, isn’t this the place where Steve Jobs was the founder?

Don’t they still ritualistically tell every new hire that they will be lucky not to get fired?

I dunno, I mean once this guy wrote this book, he should have known he was burning all bridges to corporate America (or at least the woke portion).

It's amazing that Apple even hired him in the first place. Maybe he was helping to hit a POC target.

The upshot is people are being held to account for public speech, and you have to be an idiot to not differentiate along the spectrum of private thoughts, private speech, and public speech.

> At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.

- Apple

Sounds amazingly like:

> This is an environment of welcoming, and you should just get the hell out of here.

- Michael Scott

In order to have a welcoming space you need to kick out people who are not themselves welcoming. Nobody is being hypocritical here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

You'll probably do very well at getting rid of people you obviously deem unwelcoming, but you're likely to welcome a lot of passive aggressive behavior unawares.

How many murals or paintings of Steve Jobs are still on the Apple campus?

Caltech cancelled Robert Millikan (the founder), so it wouldn't be unprecedented for Apple to cancel its founder(s) as well.

I'll be happy if it happens, but I'm not holding my breath. Abuse is literally in their corporate DNA. I guess if his vitriol was universal, maybe that makes it more palatable than hate targeted at one group? What a world.

And for the record, I'm not a fan of purity tests or waiting for Superman. Just because they haven't scrubbed Jobs doesn't mean they are unfit to have made this move.

And Albert Ruddock (a donor and trustee, I think), to the point that they're renaming Ruddock House. Some of us are very unhappy about this decision, given that the name "Ruddock" has a much stronger association these days with the House than the person.

How do you cancel someone who is already dead?

> How do you cancel someone who is already dead?

There’s thousands of years of “cancel culture” history of doing that:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae

I guess my point was more in the, "Are we actually calling everything 'cancel culture' now?" vein, but I'm still going to read the wiki article cuz history is cool.

wow you serious. What was Millikan's unforgivable sin?

Well, he promoted and personally supported the forced sterilization of people. And he was, even by the standards of the time, a HUGE racist. Just some little stuff, no big deal. You can't say anything these days!

Millikan wasn’t the founder of Caltech.

> Shortly after the petition began circulating internally at Apple, Martínez’s Slack account was deactivated.

With Apple's level of secrecy I'm very surprised they use Slack instead of some in-house tool.

I remember reading some of a book about the psychology of pushing people into the far-(right|left) camps. It went something along the lines of "if you reject them, it crystalizes their opinions as being right". It offered advice on how to make them feel heard, and ways to guide them back towards a more mainstream opinion.

I can see why the environment is so polarised.

Was he a recent hire at Apple?

He started last week apparently.[1]

[1] https://www.axios.com/apple-severs-ties-with-antonio-garcia-...

“At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace …”

By excluding people that write passages in books outside of work that we don’t like.

You've forgotten the paradox of tolerance: you decide which tolerance is the right kind of tolerance, so you only tolerate the things you already agree with.

I'd suggest Popper's Paraphrase needs some deeper thought, as today it has been reduced to people trying to end arguments by yelling "KARL POPPER!" at people who step out of line.

It's a bit late for that now. The next step is deplatforming anyone open about their politics. Maybe that'll be good after all.

The tax rate is politics. Foreign policy is politics. Government spending is politics.

Denigrating women is not politics.

What you're doing is not political at all, right?

Denigrating women is not politics.

You might not care about politics, but politics cares about you.

Back in my days, people were judged by the value their work could could bring to the company, rather than based subjective assessments of subjective moral standards. This makes me feel old.

Do you think we will ever return to a world where a builder (for example) would be chosen based on their competence in being able to build a house rather than based upon some potential social media controversy one builder might trigger compared to the other one. Some people just want a nice house.

But a big part of just about anyone's work with the company is working effectively with other people, some of whom are women.

To continue your builder analogy, this is sort of like if you were going to hire a builder and you found that most of his social media posts were about how much he enjoyed building substandard houses and overcharging his customers.

> Some people just want a nice house.

And there are people who can just as competently build a house who happen to not be assholes!

And if the builder started making inappropriate comments about my wife or daughter, he would be immediately fired. Nothing new there.

(1) It was interesting to see Apple employees organizing on Twitter. They don't really have any companywide chat or email lists, but some groups have a Slack (only for that group).

(2) In the book he was comparing his pregnant British girlfriend to other women in the Bay Area, intended more to make her look good than others look bad. I don't think any malice was involved.

(3) I hope he's getting some sort of severance, or hopefully he got a good signing bonus when he joined.

Seems like a bad path we're on where you can only have a job if you put forward exactly the right political or social views publically.

But doesn't that go both ways? It's a bad path if you are only allowed to post your thoughts on Twitter if you put forward exactly the right (according to you) political or social views publicly.

Both are bad, yes.

I mean, he wrote a book for the world to consume.

This wasn’t a drunk tweet or post; nor some inappropriate if private email or message.

I don’t have much sympathy for the fella.

“She’s not like other girls” is a sexist thing to say and it isn’t a compliment. Even still, this:

> Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit

Is not really something that can be said “without malice” no matter the context.

Again, I'd urge you to read the context from where that quote was lifted. It's obviously written in an irreverent style, meant to exaggerate the contrast between this British Trader woman vs other women. I read this book when it came out and it was a good read.

If we can't have autobiographies written in an entertaining style, perhaps Balaji was right that we should all write pseudonymously to avoid being cancelled 5-10 years later.

  s/women/people/

If you want to favorably compare your girlfriend to the general populace, you can talk about her strength, the things she would do that others might not. You could praise her worldliness, her understandings of the ins and outs of business, politics, and high society. And you could honor how she's straightforward, to the point, and honest. You don't have to denigrate another group of women in order to make the point -- in fact doing so rather distracts from it.

I won't debate whether malice was intended because it's hard to know what the state of mind of a person is when they do a particular thing. I can definitely understand how a woman in the valley might suspect she would not get a fair shake from someone who would write these words.

Most people do denigrate their exes, and it's highly unlikely that all their exes have been two standard deviations away from the mean (for that quality) while their current partner is at the mean. Much more likely, if you have a partner who is great at playing the piano (or at politics, or whatever) but all your previous partners have not been, most likely the average person just isn't great at playing the piano.

In other words, if you're saying nice things about your partner, the implication is that it's not generally true of other people of their gender - whether or not you spell it out.

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