Either way both are completely unverifiable. Take both with a huge fistful of salt until both parties are interviewed and quoted and research is done into what happened.
The other 'side' is a post from Redditor 'dickbutt_md', who claims to have called up "a friend" who works at Google. In dickbutt's account, the friend claims not to know Joy personally, and not to have been involved in the events, but manages to describe Joy as "passive aggressive" and "not classy", and closes by saying "Google is fucking awesome and anyone who says otherwise is talking out their ass."
I kind of wish this were not the top-voted comment on an HN thread about pay equity.
The purpose of my comment above was just to share an opposing side of the story. It's good to question things.
Explaining how salary disparities might have happened is very different from saying she's making it up or calling them a rabble-rouser.
Some disparagement seems reasonable, unless she has some more evidence to back up her claims of discrimination.
Note that, unlike the unverifiable hecklers, deelowe did not claim that her experience was invalid or that the numbers in the spreadsheet were inaccurate but instead discussed the question of sampling bias or simply the sample size being small enough to be skewed by other known factors.
It's fair enough being upset about your peer bonuses being rejected. What is not okay is to just to some invalid conclusion about racism and then slander your company in public.
Also I can completely understand why the Googler on reddit chose to remain anonymous. There's a pretty vocal brigade of "rabble rousers"(for lack of a better term) at Google.
On the other hand he is basically spelling out all of the things that I noticed from the original tweets.
1) The tweets mentioned normalizing currencies. In every international company that I have worked in, pay ranges varied by geography. I'm not sure how you could do this accurately as the cost of living between many countries in which Google operates is not directly comparable.
2) In reading the tweets it seemed clear that peer bonuses were only being rejected when they appeared to be for the work on the spreadsheet. I haven't worked at many companies with peer bonus systems, but most of them would have frowned on sending bonuses for something like this. It is outside of the purpose of the system.
3) Yeah, this person likes to "stir the pot" a bit. That's not always a bad thing, but it is bound to have some impact on a person's career (politics are everywhere). It's hard to separate the signal from the noise about what actually happened here.
The reddit comment says management mentioned it openly in one of their scheduled all-hands weekly meeting.
Quote: "Friend says the sheet was addressed a company all-hands meeting (it wasn't the focus of the meeting, apparently they have an all-hands every week and it was mentioned. Can that be right tho? Aren't there like tens of thousands of people all across the world? How can you have an all-hands meeting the world over every week? anyway...)"
Once word got around about this spreadsheet, what else can management do? As management, you let everyone know that you know about it and you backpeddle from your problematic "we will fire you for your involvement" position. Someone from Human Resources affirms what everyone now knows (from doing a quick Google search), that this is not grounds for dismissal but that it makes things hard for management, so on and so forth.
Also:
(1) The fact that management can discuss something does not mean they do not object to it. There are many degrees of disapproval.
(2) Management is not a monolith, it's composed of many people taking many sometimes contradictory actions -- the fact that Joe was not harassed on Friday does not mean that Joe was not ever harassed.
Seeing the upvoted comments here makes me /sigh for HN, a bunch of BS, FUD and victim blaming.
All we have is a one sided report from a former employee.
Well, rigorous proof is possible within mathematics[1]. However, applying that measure to verifying reality is nonsense. Even within maths, rigorous proofs require decoupling of the abstract proposition (what you prove) from reality (your assumptions).
[1] and "theoretical X" for X in {"computer science", "physics", "chemistry", ...}, which all are essentially math as well.