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.

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.

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…

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 Apple promised him a job, he made some major life changes based on that promise, and now they've withdrawn their promise without any relevant new information or new bad conduct on Martinez's part.

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.

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?