"I’ve kept silent on the Apple situation; they broke silence, so will I" | Hacker News Reader

"I’ve kept silent on the Apple situation; they broke silence, so will I"

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131 pointsjashkenas165 comments

Forgetting the context surrounding this quote (which makes it no where near as bad IMO but I also acknowledge other readings are reasonable), I wonder if this hypothetical would be a proper analogue:

> García Martínez describes [men] in the [Wall Street] area as "[douchey] and [egotistical], cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit.”

That's the sort of sentiment I've heard over a drink about any number of places/topics, but I don't think it should be a fireable opinion to publish. Bonus points if you can explain how above example is different without using the word 'power'.

Edit: I've also noticed others posting quotes from the book where he uses equivalently inflammatory language against men, himself, people he worked with at goldman sachs (aka: my toy example pretty much does also appear in his book), etc. My opinion is this paints the book as more of a gauche satire against everyone/everything in his life.

The two quotes differ in the amount of “punching up” vs “punching down”. Punching up is generally viewed as more acceptable.

That implies "power."

I read it exactly the opposite. A few years ago my wife was recommended Chaos Monkeys by somebody. It was stunning what he had willingly written down to share with the world. Every few minutes she'd explode in horror at the next even more outrageous thing in the text. Instead of being the expected book on silicon valley, it was fascinating because this person was so proud of being a tremendous asshole to everybody.

The book is not a satire. Not even a little. It is absolutely completely honest and the author is a complete jerk.

It's not satire, but it is a schtick. If you listen to an interview w/ the guy, he's not at all what I expected from the book (and I had the same response as your wife, though I've heard worse in SV many many times and sort of just appreciated the honesty even if it doesn't reflect my worldview). So does it still reflect a culture that's been problematic in SV that we want to get rid of? For sure, yes. But also, maybe people should be allowed to make mistakes - this kind of sexism was widely tolerated in SV even five years ago. That doesn't excuse it, but I sort of think we have to allow people to grow and change.

People should be allowed to make mistakes. If they change. It is clear that he is still proud of this writing. This isn't "wow, in my younger years I was really awful and I feel bad and have changed".

I think your example doesn't quite work. If one says "the guys/men in X", that can most likely be interpreted as "the people in X", particularly for male-dominated fields/areas. If someone specifies "the women in X" however, they're definitely talking specifically about women.

It would also be weird to me to specifically talk about how "the men" of wall street/bay area/etc as opposed to the women have any real shared traits. Gender is a factor in one's personality, but using that as your only feature is just bad stats.

Will the same group at Apple start going over everything Dr. Dre has published about women and end his relationship with Apple?

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/08/dr-dre-straight...

I won’t comment on this specific incident but I think this is one among many such incidents that are part of a new trend: what you say publicly has much more chance to bite you in the ass later. No matter how much you changed. This is especially dangerous for kids IMO as r/kidsarefuckingstupid.

I’ll add that I don’t necessarily think this trend will remain. I think there are two reasons that make the cancelling culture so powerful today:

- Internet amplifies social issues. Without internet and social networks my theory is that many oppressed minorities would never have gotten justice.

- On top of that America is realizing that most of the country is is still stuck in an embarrassingly dark past, and for many people a zero tolerance approach is the only way to fight this war. (Politics is war without blood.)

Forget politics, this man was a red pill ideologue who, among other things, would brag about the number of women he's impregnated [1]. If this is the hill anyone wants to die on - holy cow.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_g...

Edit:

* added citation

* changed "the hill you want" to "the hill anyone wants"

> this man was a red pill ideologue

What does a 'red pill ideologue' mean? Yes, I've seen the Matrix but I don't understand

But wow, that Reddit post is shocking

It is a movement glorifying the "alpha male" idea. The strongest man rules and get all the women.

It is called "red pill" because of the idea that it is the real truth of this world.

Pretty much end-game toxic masculinity - men blaming women for not wanting to sleep with them and promoting "pick-up artist" strategies like negging, gas-lighting, and other despicable behavior in an attempt to get laid. It grew into a fairly large subreddit.

Oh boy, be prepared to rage. Just check r/redpill

Not easy watching, interrogation of a young man who took it to the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGFWovUuWak

There's a sub-culture of men who identify as "The Red Pill" who harbor some, uh, non-mainstream, ideological beliefs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/

There's a documentary about one part of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Pill

Or you could look at the most extreme examples the other commenters are trying to present as the norm.

The goal, presumably, is to address the problem before people start feeling obligated to die on hills. This guy's made some very offensive comments, so I feel no pressure to defend him personally, but we've got to have a better process for deciding what's socially acceptable than "sometimes the eye of Twitter descends on you and you become unemployable".

[deleted]

Try pregnant.

the OP?

I'm on mobile right now, so I can't verify. But I don't think ctrl-f matches text in posts that are hidden due to low score. I would look in some of those.

Search just for "preg" or read at maximum 3 sentences from linked posts. "pregnant" is the 60th word.

It doesn't sound like he's bragging about it, he's mentioning shitty things he's done and how it's common among people in SV. I had to look it up, but calling yourself a "wastrel" doesn't sound like bragging.

n.One who wastes, especially one who wastes money; a profligate

n.An idler or a loafer.

n.Anything cast away as spoiled in the making, or bad; waste; refuse.

Do you think calling yourself a bad boy is self criticism?

He wants people to see him as a scoundrel with a heart of gold. Nothing I've seen from him has been regretful or contrite.

I’m kind of torn on this. I don’t know the guy or of his existence until now, but from his own into to that AMA he’s the kind of person that brags about having no loyalty or integrity so I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect any in return from his employer.

However this must all have been clear from day 1 so this can only be a PR move on Apple’s behalf which is not a great look either.

There are no winners in this story, only losers. Including society which got thrown yet another polarising piece of social media drama.

> If this is the hill anyone wants to die on - holy cow

Which hill do you think is appropriate? The line has to be drawn at least a standard deviation below average behaviour or there will be a lot of unemployed people. Especially with the context that nearly everyone has socially unacceptable views, most just usually try not to talk about them.

I'm sure it'll come out in the conversation, but none of the commentors are rushing to accuse him of doing anything. It takes 2 to get a woman pregnant.

This is not a debate about "cancel culture". This is about a awful person who should not be hired into a leadership role where he is directly responsible for people he has treated horrifically in the past. And, like most narcissists, the evidence is in his own public statements and actions - not applied by the media or any outside group.

> ...people he has treated horrifically in the past...

That is a bit of an escalation from being an ideologue. What are you actually unhappy about here? What do you think he's done?

> This is about a awful person who should not be hired into a leadership role...

Well again, being an awful person and being unqualified for leadership are different things and need to be argued separately.

There are lots of great business leaders who were awful people. Eg, Henry Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle by the Nazis. It isn't like the ranks of business have or ever will be made up of exclusively nice or praiseworthy people.

I’m tired of this trope. It excuses boorish behavior and ignores all the business leaders who haven’t acted like asses.

It doesn't appear he has "changed". He has an Amazon link directly to his book prominently as the first item in his Twitter profile.

Would you want to work with someone who considers you "useless baggage" because of how you were born? More importantly, would you want to work under someone who thinks you're useless baggage no matter what you do?

As long as that commentary doesn't interfere with his work life... I guess that would be fine. If everything we ever said on the internet was traced back to our name, we'd all have some pretty embarrassing blemishes. That's because failure is a part of learning, and social media has ultimately removed all of the nuance from failure. Instead of helping people up, we're more interested in kicking them while they're down for a little extra virtue to signal. We're all guilty of this to some degree: it's really just the human condition being exacerbated through the lens of the internet.

This guy sounds like a dick, but he doesn't sound like he's done anything wrong in this situation either. He had appropriate motivation to perform well in his position, and if Apple's human resources are worth their salt they'd be monitoring his performance very closely for the first month or two.

The problem with someone being a dick is when you're hiring them for a role with any sort of authority, particularly if their dickishness is in any way directed at specific groups.

I think there's a fairly reasonable concern that if he was in any sort of role with authority he couldn't be trusted to fairly deal with women.

Sure, lots of people have biases and are probably unfair. But this one wrote a NYT bestselling book where he loudly talked about his biases, and doesn't seem to have become contrite. HR complaints were very much guaranteed once this became known.

Related, The No Asshole Rule:

https://www.amazon.com/Asshole-Rule-Civilized-Workplace-Surv...

People don't compartmentalize anywhere near as well as some of the assumptions in this thread, and someone who is an asshole in private is going to be an asshole on the job. The "if it doesn't affect him doing his job" comments are either naive or completely disingenuous.

Nope.

To repeat something I said in a not entirely dissimilar discussion: I'm not gonna let Nazis into my car club because we have a single common shared interest. They're Nazis.

I'm also not gonna work with die hard mysogynists because they're mysogynists. Great engineers who are shitty people are shitty people first and they can go right back to gutter they crawled out of.

Don't compare blemishes to prideful hate. The stupid things I've said, the hurtful things, they are not the things I want to publish and stand firm on. They are mistakes for which I feel regret. If I glorified my abhorrent behavior, you'd be right to shun me.

But forever? We gotta give people the opportunity to change. The book is gross, but SV is gross and sexist a lot of the time - and much more so in the past. So IDK maybe some human sacrifice is worth it to change the culture - but I'm always confused because a lot of the folks clamoring for heads on stuff like this are also pro things like restorative justice (which I am super pro). So no d bags, but maybe if you were a d bag at some point it should be possible to redeem yourself?

> considers you "useless baggage" because of how you were born?

He considers people useless baggage because of how they were born? What are you basing this claim on?

> “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.”

- His book.

> 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 to someone’s back—required doing.

- Also his book. So it's obvious both descriptions were written from experience, not gender-based prejudice.

But even without this passage, your quote only proves he has a low opinion of "most women in the Bay Area" - that does not translate to most women everywhere, and certainly not to all women.

Summarizing it as "considers people useless due to being born female" is a misreading so blatant I can only call it a lie.

Why include the word "women" at all, though? Replace it with "jews" or "gays" and see how it reads. The fact that he chose to single out Bay Area women, specially, implies he doesn't hold men to the same standard.

If I were a woman working for Apple who didn't happen to be into carpentry or animal husbandry, I really wouldn't want to work for this guy.

> Why include the word "women" at all, though?

Because that description was specifically to highlight how different his then-girlfriend was from them.

> Replace it with "jews" or "gays" and see how it reads.

"Most gays in the Bay Area are lame, but my current boyfriend is great." - seems fine?

This is a pretty childish perspective and doesn't fit what people that fight against discrimination want to convey at all.

You have constructed a strawman you are fighting against, perhaps to elevate yourself.

If you believe there are tons of uncivilized people around you, it is probably just imagination and exactly what people describe as moral panic.

I feel sorry for this guy, but not because he got fired. Anyone with such questionable morals is obviously not a good fit at Apple and ejecting him earlier rather than later is damage limitation.

No, I feel sorry for him, because he should never have been hired in the first place, and I cannot even begin to imagine the sequence of events inside Apple that led to this. It's utterly baffling, and I hope the explanation becomes available eventually because I'd love to know.

> Anyone with such questionable morals is obviously...

The entire corporate hierarchy is people of questionable morals. Companies go out of their way to hire lawyers too - while theoretically one can be a highly moral lawyer, in practice we can tell from the results that a very big chunk of the ones in corporations are moral-less negotiators.

One of the biggest benefits of modern corporations is we can put aside fiery debates on politics, morals and religions and work together on highly specific technical goals.

Technical goals are means to moral ends, so I think it's great that the stuff that matters, the big picture, the point of it all, is getting more discussion nowadays.

What's the moral outcome of an iPhone? What makes it more moral to all the other phones out there? Is Swift more moral than Javascript? Is Objective-C more moral than plain old C? How do you measure morality?

I'm guessing your questions are facetious, but in case you seriously care, the nature of morality has been the subject of intensive research for thousands of years, including today. It predates even the concept of measurement, in fact.

A bit of both facetiousness and seriousness. I bring those questions up because your claim of there being a moral end to technical goals is vague and lacking in substance. Technology has no more of moral charge than atoms or stars do. In almost all cases, morality or lack thereof is incidental to the technology itself, not a direct consequence. If morality was the end of technological goal, then it could be measured. That morality predates measurement is irrelevant. Astronomy and agriculture predate human civilization by thousands of years and yet humanity today has been able to measure interstellar distances and complicated logistics of food production. If morality has yet to be discerned through an adequate metric, that is a failure of morality itself.

I don't see how you can possibly justify that view. That atoms and stars are not human creations, technology is.

Denying the existence of things because you can't measure them objectively is lunacy that if you follow to it's logical conclusion will take you to nihilism and epistemic surrender.

Astronomy and agriculture are celebrated because their advances make the world better in some broader sense. That broader sense, good as such, is the scope of morality.

I mean if I'm hiring someone who has listed a book on their resume I'm not going to read the entire thing before hiring them.

Maybe you should. Autobiographies at least.

How long can a hiring manager at Apple give to evaluating a candidate? Reading a book will take 10+ hours. In this case it would obviously have been a good idea for everyone (although an emotionally well-adjusted hiring manager might read it and not realize that it would create such a shitstorm).

Let's be clear here, this isn't some minor technical book - his autobiography was on the New York Times best-seller list for business books and was reviewed in the paper.

Apparently you won't even read the dust cover synopsis, either. That's the legendary "Apple pedigree" that you hear so much about.

Steve Jobs: "People Don't Read Anymore."

https://www.wired.com/2008/01/steve-jobs-peop/

Today, more than a decade after Steve's death, new Kindle models are still going into production.

His book was relatively well received. I think the key issue at play here is that he presents the book as a biography, but it's clear both reading the book (and from the author's own statements) that the literary persona and real person are different. I'm not sure if Apple understood that people would not make this distinction, and a massive group of people would take the writings as his own real opinions and start a massive petition calling for his firing.

You can never know whats in anothers heart. Yet you must try. This fella has given us ample reason, within and outside of the book, to think of him as a misogynist. His self-defenses are lacking wherever I've read them. I don't think this is a case of "the people are stupid". This is a case of justice.

And because he’s a misogynist he deserves any and all bad things that happen to him?

There is a lot of people with stupid ideas in the world. You cannot punish them all just for their ideas.

He doesn't deserve all bad things. But he specifically shouldn't be in a powerful position at Apple. Their firing of him was good (i agree with others that their hiring of him was bad).

People's ideas do matter. Ideally misogynists should not be in charge of women.

Seems the guy isn't really a misogynist and his account of a romance was taken out of context though. Not that I agree with what he says, but there seems to be malice in his portrayal by some journalists (https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-the-hypocrites-at-apple-who...)

Everyone has a right to work (irrespective of position), to live freely, own property, etc..

Justifying the opposite because of someone's ideas is a very slippery slope. And the fact that politics is a game of perception makes it all the more dangerous. If the mob rules, the true rulers are the people who control the mob (an even smaller amount of people)

The petition included a larger excerpt. I read it and did not think his words were taken out of context. I suggest you read the original work, as it contains other excerpts from other writings of his. Also, I don't believe the fact that he was using this sexist generalization to complement his love interest changes the sexism in the original quote.

People who make shitty public statements mocking large social groups (in this case women) probably shouldn't be surprised if (more than just) members of those social groups don't really want to work with them. Or that others who don't share those views don't want to be publicly associated with them.

In particular, he made a bunch of statements which would make me concerned about him being in any sort of managerial role over women. He doesn't seem to have tried to walk them back or show some sort of change of heart (or "c'mon guys, it was all just a bit"), so I think his almost-coworkers had a point when they started that petition against him.

Wait wat? You can't punish people people for their behavior? Day that aloud. You sure about this?

The claim that the book is part fiction part truth, and these statements are part of the former isn't justification?

Having read the book, it doesn't read out of place at all. He makes similar disparaging remarks to other groups. He even calls developers & hackers animals in the title. This is the overall tone the book is written in, he doesn't single out women for a particular rant. I'm sure it seems that way when all you read is a short quote. The notion that this except is a clear indicator that Antonio will inevitably harass, discriminate, or otherwise do something that gives good cause to avoid employing him is a long stretch.

The real answer, were I Antonio's boss, is that I'd talk to him and see what his views really are. I'd ask around and see if he's treated women poorly.

He claimed the real person is different. Where is the evidence?

Did his literary persona harass Heidi Moore?[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/moorehn/status/1392533753768128513

I'd certainly look at this situation differently if Apple based their firing on claims of harassment. Antonio's email is definitely strongly worded. Though I'd want to look at the series of "unhinged tweets" sent by Moore - my perspective on this is that a lot depends on what Moore sent before this. If it was civil, then Antonio's email goes beyond the pale. If it was comparable, then I see it in a different light if he was met with similar vitriol beforehand.

Contacting her after she blocked him was harassment irrespective of anything she said.

Strongly worded puts it mildly. It was strikingly nasty. Like his literary persona. Good luck convincing a jury they're 2 different people.

It likely won't even be charged, let alone go to a jury, since you have a vastly different understanding of what harassment is than exists in reality. Though if he actually does get convicted, feel free to message me and I'll admit I was wrong.

I didn't say criminal harassment. And the jury would be for the discrimination suit against Apple any woman he reviewed negatively might bring.

Your link doesn't work for most people. Moore's tweets are only visible to approved followers.

It was public then. The Internet Archive has a copy.

I mean, have they looked at the current social justice landscape before deciding that nobody would care?

They must have had a lot riding on just not understanding exactly what would happen.

> Apple

> Hoping the explanation becomes available eventually

Choose one.

Accepting the hypothesis that he adopted an abrasive public persona in which he says crude things as a personal marketing technique, and doesn't actually believe the things he said about the value of women, the failure here is that neither he nor Apple predicted the fairly-obvious need for him to pivot away from that persona.

A bit of public commentary along the lines of "I was trying to exaggerate what I saw as the flaws of this system, to draw attention to them; I know now that this approach didn't work for many people, and I'm sorry about that", and the upset of his imminent coworkers might have been diverted.

But just being caught by surprise by it? Definitely someone screwed up.

(The email to that journalist linked elsewhere is evidence that said hypothesis might be flawed. Certainly, the apparent unwillingness to make anodyne "I'm sorry for my past actions" comments is suggestive on that front.)

This is my take as well.

Apple messed up by recruiting him, and then severely messed up by ripping his job away at the last minute. That has a real human cost, and I think despite his obvious social toxicity in the workplace, Apple owes him something for jerking him around.

Going by his tweet it sounds like at this point he’s mainly riled up about how Apple is presenting the case in public, rather than whatever settlement they reached in private.

From the tweet, it's not clear if he reached a settlement. You're usually not allowed to talk about settlements, but it likely would have had a non-disparagement clause. His last statement, "Apple has issued a statement that clearly implies there was some negative behavior by me during my time at Apple. That is defamatory and categorically false" is the closest to disparaging, but it's limited claiming defamation.

Maybe they reached a settlement, but Apple released a statement he disagrees with, and the settlement didn't cover future libel? Maybe they couldn't reach a settlement, so both he and Apple are trying to do damage control?

This is not someone I would hire for a leadership position. Chaos Monkeys, autobiographical in nature, is by his own admission enough insight into his character and integrity to show he is unfit to lead a diverse group of employees.

If the position he was hired for was in fact that of a low level engineer conceivably who ever hired him did not think it would present too much of an issue? Just doesn't sound like a good cultural fit and I can understand the pushback from folks who would have to work with him as part of a team.

I have always considered my professional reputation to be something that took my entire career to cultivate, but can be tarnished inadvertently with one misstep. Probably why I haven't published a book of my personal escapades, and definitely why I don't tweet every thought that pops into my mind.

> Probably why I haven't published a book of my personal escapades, and definitely why I don't tweet every thought that pops into my mind.

Congratulations! You have confessed to being as awful a person as AGM! Enjoy your cancellation!

Yeah, that's hyperbole. Apple shouldn't have hired AGM. But soon things that are acceptable today, like admitting as you did that you have a filter, may not be.

Counterpoint: Having a filter and not oversharing every fleeting thought with the entire world decreases the likelihood of getting cancelled (which is really nothing but good old fashioned ostracism, though I believe the way it's currently being weaponized will diminish over time, lose it's effectiveness and again be reserved for the truly repugnant).

Hmm? I didn't say having a filter is bad. No, having a filter is good. You missed the joke.

> which is really nothing but good old fashioned ostracism

Indeed. We have a mega ostrakon nowadays, and the penalty is worse than ten years' exile.

Agreed.

The online outrage cycle has got really good at that ten years' exile penalty phase, we haven't quite sorted out how to allow for individual growth or redemption.

As a species I feel we are still adjusting to this instantaneous global connectivity, and "cancel culture" is an over-correction as we try to define what it means to be part of a polite digital-first society.

Are there any examples of redemption? Or just moving on?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

An ostracon (Greek: ὄστρακον ostrakon, plural ὄστρακα ostraka) is a piece of pottery, usually broken off from a vase or other earthenware vessel.

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

Not sharing every fleeting thought will work unless not having enough of a track record of righteousness fleeting thoughts becomes a point of suspicion.

As a German I think it's really interesting to see how America's comparatively weak labor laws, especially around firing workers, are used in this instance in a purportedly justified way.

I wonder if there's any dissonance among those who argue for 'cancelling' someone's employment while also trying to advance workers rights in America. Maybe that intersection isn't very large?

> I wonder if there's any dissonance among those who argue for 'cancelling' someone's employment while also trying to advance workers rights in America.

This is basically the rhetoric of the current Democratic party in America. It's still a better dialogue than what the RNC is working with ("Keep giving celebrities money and we'll fix it eventually!"), but the amount of people who blindly lead where their peers follow is staggering.

Is there any dissonance though? No, not really. Most people have been bullied into worrying about their image more than anything else, so speaking up is a particularly risky move. The intersection is significant, but most people just don't care enough to do their own research or have actual conversations about theory outside of Twitter.

German equivalent: Being fired with two weeks notice during the trial period (or 4 in first 6 months), no reasons needed or given. Not that much different, unless you got the employer to agree to give you full protection from day 1? (which I guess might be possible in a "they headhunted that dude specifically" contract)

My guess is there isn’t dissonance because people advocating for both don’t view their enemies as human. This is what politics and Twitter have done to the US. If you’re the enemy you don’t have rights.

Are we saying that an unpleasant (sexist, bigoted) person can't be an engineer now? What can he be? Can he be a janitor?

Management, PR, ethics oversight board - I can see the problem. This, I don't understand.

Whether the line should be drawn there or not, there is a distinction between someone that’s a bigot and someone that’s a published bigot.

Isn’t that on the publisher more than the person?

I haven't seen any concrete information on what his role was going to be, but given that his references were "prominent valley VCs and execs", it's likely it was a pretty senior role and not just a random IC.

Apple is saying that he can not be an engineer at their company, yes. He would have been required to work in a large organization that is filled with people he considers "useless baggage" no matter what their accomplishments may be.

He is free to be an engineer anywhere else if he manages to find a company that, for some inexplicable reason, doesn't care about that. I can't imagine any sane organization wanting to bring someone like that into their midst.

Sounds like a good reason for UIB....

iPhones are being built with slave labor.

Some guy wrote a satire of Silicon Valley in an exaggerated tech bro literary persona.

Guess which one triggered the strenuous denunciations of woke tech activists?

Both? I've seen plenty of outrage over Apple's labor practices.

The difference isn't that one produced outrage and one didn't. The difference is Apple was willing to change course on hiring this guy. The cheap labor is too valuable and they are keeping it no matter how upset it makes people.

Hmm, say he doubles down on his last tweet and sues Apple for defamation. Would Apple’s plans for its ad network expansion be made publicly available through discovery?

Facebook has every incentive now to highlight anti-competitive behavior. Maybe it would it be worth helping an old pal out with the his lawyer fees?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker

A bit tangential, but I've wondered about how courts feel about "leaks" from corporations that ultimately violate the terms of a separation agreement.

Hypothetical: Apple HR and Martínez agree to 1 years severance with a confidentiality cause. Word around the org spreads he was let go after employees complained. Business Insider reports the story after speaking confidentially to Apple employees.

Has Apple broken the terms of their agreement? If Martínez starts a media campaign against Apple to defend his reputation, will they have a good case to claw back the cash?

Apple 1997: “Think Different”

Apple 2021: “Think Tame”

Thinking different these days is punishable by joblessness.

Being different has long been punishable by joblessness.

Women, people of color and the LGBTQ crowd all see their income suffer merely because they are different. The LGBTQ crowd experiences high rates of unemployment because of it and women seem to manage to stay off the street often be sleeping with some guy who can afford to pay the rent, basically.

Edit:

I blog about homelessness. The LGBTQ crowd sees high rates of homelessness. Homeless people die on average something like two decades younger than housed people.

Do with that info what you want. I see it as not a good thing.

I am part of the LGBTQ crowd, and I gotta say I haven't heard of anyone I know getting fired because of their sexuality before. On the contrary, (my N+1 anecdata) I actually was introduced to a former employer at a gay bar.

Where do you live? Actually that's a rhetorical question, especially considering that

> at a gay bar

already says enough.

what do you mean with 'says enough'?

The prevalence of gay bars and the prevalence of employment where being queer can get you fired are rather inversely correlated.

I am in crowed as well, and I saw a colleague harassed because they were trans and upper management worried that a conservative client we were selling to wouldn’t like them as the face of the product. They weren’t immediately fired, their role was just continually reminisced each time we had to interact with this client until it became obvious that the choice was to either utterly hide their transgender status (hard to do if you are in the middle of the transition) or be relegated to worse and worse work until they quit.

Was homeless and a homeless activist while LGBT. Can confirm.

Jobslessness is what led them to punishing thinking different.

Kind of stupid of him to sell his property in Washington before moving to Apple. You hear of so many stories of people quitting new jobs on their first day, first week, or first month... sometimes you just get to a place and realize you've made a big fuckup.

What's the context?

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22433437/apple-hire-anton...

This one has excerpts from the book:

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

He's made a number of inappropriate (including some incredibly misogynistic) comments in his writings and online. A lot of Apple employees complained, and so he was fired before he even started.

Both sides are at fault here: AGM said some nasty things, and Apple failed to do its due diligence before recruiting him.

>and Apple failed to do its due diligence before recruiting him.

Seems to be contradicted by the tweet?

>3. Apple was well aware of my writing before hiring me. My references were questioned extensively about my bestselling book and my real professional persona (rather than literary one).

By "references" does he mean "cherry-picked people from my life who will say only good things about me"? No one I provide as a reference to a job at Apple is going to say something mean about me or a book they may or may not have even read. The only "due diligence" that seems to be demanded here is reading candidates' books (imagine a recruiter actually going through the effort of picking up a book and combing through all of it for just a single candidate) or looking through public social media posts (but the problematic ones may have likely only been shared in a private network).

I do think AGM's comments should disqualify him as a candidate to work in a diverse work environment. But I don't want hiring to be more exhausting than it already is on either side, so aren't situations like this the reason we have work at-will arrangements anyway? What could Apple really have done here to prevent this? "Sign here attesting that you haven't ever said anything that could point to you being a prejudiced person in the work environment". If it turns out you did say something pretty bad, then too bad you had to relocate for this job because the offer is withdrawn.

I'm sympathetic, I _know_ I've posted really stupid "edgy" things on social media some time between the ages of 12-15 that's likely buried in a set of redundant servers somewhere in the world. Stuff that would get me fired immediately if I said and believed them today. How do you convincingly demonstrate to an employer _and_ to your coworkers that the person from then isn't you anymore?

There's a difference between edgy social media comments from early adolescence -- which shouldn't be used to "cancel" anyone -- and passages from a book that this guy wrote and published when he was an adult (especially since he still hasn't retracted or apologized for anything that I'm aware of).

You make a good point about hiring, though. They could probably read reviews of his book, but I don't know whether the reviews would mention its sexist elements -- probably depends on when it was written.

> Both sides are at fault here: AGM said some nasty things, and Apple failed to do its due diligence before recruiting him.

Since he wrote that ages before being hired, the only one at fault here is Apple. This is just a knee jerk reaction because of the backlash they got.

There was a public outcry against Apple hiring him, as he wrote misogynistic things as part of some book. I only read the excerpt, which wasn’t great towards women. No idea if it was serious or what the whole book was about.

From: https://www.axios.com/apple-severs-ties-with-antonio-garcia-...

*Snip*

Context: News broke earlier this week that Apple had hired García Martínez for an unspecified role.

Apple did not say what exactly García Martínez' position was, but sources said he was hired for a lower-level engineering role and started last week.

In the petition, first reported by the Verge, employees write: "We demand an investigation into how his published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored, along with a clear plan of action to prevent this from happening again."

In one passage from "Chaos Monkeys," García Martínez describes women in the Bay Area as "soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit.”

This passage was also cited online when García Martínez started writing for Wired magazine.

*Snip*

> García Martínez describes women in the Bay Area as "soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit.”

Why on earth would anyone put something like that in a book?!

Cause it makes the book sell.

Because there is an audience who will buy that book.

Because he was comparing the woman he was dating to his general experience.

You can look at the larger passage as important context. It’s easy to dismiss him still as a jerk, but what bothers me is the idea that one cannot have an authentic experience that isn’t totally whitewashed and ready to be used for an ad for a multinational.

Reading all of the selected quotes in that petition came off to me as thoughts he probably shouldn’t have published, but ones that many ordinary people have that aren’t total monsters. Yes he’s probably got a lot of toxic masculinity hold ups.. but so do millions and millions of people. If you read the minds of most employees at large companies and then put it into words, probably people would be fired left and right.

At some point we need to acknowledge personal thoughts aren’t always the same thing as professional interactions, and that people can also grow, learn and change.

He might not be the one for this, but I think the public response feels very snap for someone’s life. Probably almost no one signing that petition actually read his book or learned much about him in order to put things into context and perspective, yet they were easily wanting to ruin a man’s life.

NB Perhaps he deserves it, I don’t know. But I’m wanting to withhold judgement, and I don’t have enough time or cares to actually investigate him.

Personal thoughts and NYT bestseller published thoughts are very distinct.

This book came out at a time where people were lampooning the excesses of startup culture. (e.g Disrupted and HBO's Silicon Valley).

It's my opinion García Martínez thought he would capitalize on the trend and wrote a book describing his experience in a YCombinator company that was aquihired by Facebook.

He wrote himself as a character in that genre. His writing style in general, however, seems to give him away as a blowhard - which I don't think was was his intent.

"A lower level engineering role" doesn't sound like a good description of a position for Facebook's "former director of Ad Exchange." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Garc%C3%ADa_Mart%C3%AD...)

Latest storm in a teacup over a minor celebrity engineer getting let go from Apple after other employees discover his book has some misogynistic / ill-advised / heartfelt / probably-true (pick according to your convictions) opinions about SV women.

SV sure sounds like a hell hole to work in

People willing to work on ad-tech are skeevy creeps.

Apple hired skeevy creep to work on ad-tech.

People got upset that Apple hired skeevy creep.

Apple fired/rescinded offer to skeevy creep.

Apple is likely about to pay a bunch of money to skeevy creep.

why would they pay a bunch of money?

There's a legal theory known as "promissory estoppel" or "detrimental reliance" that probably applies if Martinez's story is accurate. Apple promised him a job, he made some major life changes based on that promise, and now they've withdrawn their promise without any relevant new information or new bad conduct on Martinez's part.

Apple can claim the information was new to them, such as for example believing the book was a work of satire only to find (based on post-hire discussion with AGM) it was actually a manifesto.

They can. I'm skeptical whether that'd be true - although I guess it's really academic, because high-profile employment disputes like this are almost always settled out of court.

Employment is a contract. Apple broke that contract without reason from the individual.

If he resigned from another job and relocated, there are damages here that are quite easy to document.

Yes, employees are nominally "at-will", but employers don't get to just do anything they want without consequence--especially in California.

I'm surprised Apple did actually say anything beyond "We have terminated his employment. No further comment." as they're on terrible ground here.

Finally, unlike most small fry, he's not going to have any trouble finding a lawyer for this. Lawyers will happily take this obvious a case on retainer. And, he's got lots of "wokeness crusade" lawyers who will be salivating over this case.

Under California law, because he moved for this job.

A take biased in favor of Garcia-Martinez which argues he's not the monster he's being made out to be: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-the-hypocrites-at-apple-who...

If that's biased in his favor....

That read like a reasonable summary to me. What makes you say it’s biased towards AGM?

The authour tends to write about this topic a lot. I found it more or less reasonable, but they no doubt have a bias.

> What makes you say it’s biased towards AGM?

Well, partly because the author begins with:

> I’m biased, because I know Antonio Garcia-Martinez and something like the same thing once happened to me…

He acknowledges this, but the article is hardly a hagiography.

Safe spaces have made their way into the corporate world, truly sad to see freedom of speech and diversity of thought getting destroyed being celebrated around here.

But in a way is also refreshing, we are near the bottom (or nearer), corporations have real stakes, they need to generate real profits so unlike college campuses where the performance of a university doesn't really matter, a company like Apple has very little room for underperforming, and the minute revenue starts to drop they'll realize it's not healthy for a company to cater to the woke mob and hopefully begin reversing course. Let's just hope not much damage is done before that.

Sounds like longing to return to the safe space where you can say what you want about others without consequences?

It is very very sad that this has to even be said, but freedom means tolerating things you don't agree with, diversity means tolerating viewpoints different than yours.

Is the US a nation of laws or a nation ruled by mob?

In my opinion, looking at the US anywhere in the previous 4 years, we already know the answer to that question.

Way to many people loudly whining about "safe spaces" tend to have a problem with tolerance too as soon as it comes to groups they don't like. (E.g. to take the dude here, are the reports about him harassing women that argue for being childless an example of them not "tolerating things they don't agree with" (they could just tolerate the harassment I suppose), or of him not "tolerating things he doesn't agree with"?) Which is why I describe the "before" as also a kind of "safe spaces", change just shifts who gets pushed out of them. (Still sucks for the one that gets the short end of the stick of course, but that's also not a new thing)

You don't seem to understand the difference between thought and conduct. If he was harassing "anyone", there are already many laws and many lawyers waiting to take everything he owns from him. The courts are there exactly for that reason.

If it's his viewpoints people have a problem with, as seems to be the case by the ample evidence directly from the people demanding his job citing the contents of his book even before having spent one day with the guy, then his actions were not ever in question.

So again I ask you in faint hopes you don't keep evading the question, are we a nation ruled by laws or a nation ruled by mob?

If that's the two options: ruled by laws. As you said, the courts are there if what Apple did was against the law. It's just a pretty useless dichotomy, because the law leaves lots of room for things to happen inside its boundaries. And that's by design.

And again, the original point is not about good or bad, but that this is not new. You got excluded in corporate places for the wrong thoughts (if you shared them too loudly) before people went on and on about "safe spaces". It just was different things. And as such I find complaints about them being some new horrible thing unconvincing.

I don't have a problem with what Apple did, they should be able to fire anyone for any reason without explanation at any time. Apple took the easy way out to avoid more short term damage, and that was their decision to make.

> because the law leaves lots of room for things to happen inside its boundaries.

Then we are not a nation of laws, because the room is there for a reason. Judges and juries are there for a reason, to decide how much room is necessary as we cannot police thought, and we shouldn't try.

> And again, the original point is not about good or bad, but that this is not new. You got excluded in corporate places for the wrong thoughts (if you shared them too loudly) before people went on and on about "safe spaces". It just was different things. And as such I find complaints about them being some new horrible thing unconvincing.

Why are you fine with lgbtq being excluded from jobs? You can't have it both ways, two wrongs don't make a right. The law should be the bar, the only bar, not mob anger.

Since when has "diversity" included having to keep bigots on payroll? Should we start an affirmative action program to keep sexist douchebags employed at major companies?

We'll know when Silicon Valley culture has been sufficiently reformed when an asshole getting fired isn't treated to a barrage of laments about "slippery slopes", "cancel culture" or "damn SWJs".

> Since when has "diversity" included having to keep bigots on payroll?

Since...always? That is what diversity means, aren't you employed? Diversity is not only about what you look like, or the color of your skin, and it doesn't mean to throw a tantrum every time your feelings get hurt either in case you weren't aware.

> We'll know when Silicon Valley culture has been sufficiently reformed when an asshole getting fired isn't treated to a barrage of laments about "slippery slopes", "cancel culture" or "damn SWJs".

In that you are correct, that is the bottom of the slope.

Thing that trips me out is that I've always thought of that book as being just a book about Silicon Valley

Which means everything I ever heard about it

from this site, HN, or The Internet, generally, or Wired, or wherever -- never mentioned that it had this crazy anti-woman stuff in it.

which makes it seem like, anyone who complains about rampant systemic all-encompassing misogyny in The Valley or Tech or the workplace, is probably onto something.

Perhaps Apple engineers should form a labor union to avoid being cancelled.

To me, it appeared a blatant conflict of interest for the Times to let its contract negotiators also discipline the union’s negotiators. It felt like an attempt to intimidate the union.

https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/nytimes-peru-n-word-p...

Looking at the replies, it seems that people's hatred for Apple as a company is benefitting him on Twitter court of justice

If there's anywhere on the internet practicing sympathy towards Mac users, it's Twitter alright.

Interestingly I have not seen any commentary on how few latinos are represented at Apple, and could that be the reason they summarily dismissed him even though they knew all his writings from before. Apple has many abusive (and perhaps some are misogynistic) white men starting with Steve Jobs.

I think he’s Spaniard, not latino.

He's Cuban

Many Cubans are Spaniards... there were hardly any indigenous people in Cuba it's all just Spaniards and Africans

Cuban

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