Comment by georgewsinger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgewsinger | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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.

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