4 ms·

They did screw up. But this guy had to be fired. Not because they had to make an example out of him, but because by publicly sharing his biases, he's ensured th

They did screw up. But this guy had to be fired. Not because they had to make an example out of him, but because by publicly sharing his biases, he's ensured that a large part of Google wouldn't want to work with him. It's a team sport after all.

Houshalter 9y ago
There's an internal survey at Google that shows about 40% of employees agree with him. They are just rightfully scared of speaking out.
- empressplay 9y ago
  *Citation needed
- eagsalazar2 9y ago
  Now there are 40% of people at google who can't sleep tonight because their blood is boiling and won't stop boiling for a long time.
- zbraniecki 9y ago
  can you cite the source? Because this sounds very unbelievable to me. I work in a mid-size company structured in many ways similarly to Google and I cannot imagine a representative survey with results already coming up. Google has close to 70k employees. What was the sample? How selected? How representative? It sounds very questionable,
  - icelancer 9y ago
    Source data here. Who knows if it is representative, but 282 anonymous respondents have chimed in. The distribution looks like what I would expect. https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.html https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...
    - DannyBee 9y ago
      It's definitely not representative. For reasons that would be obvious if you knew the history of the document, but that i can't share, it consists almost entirely of a sample of people from certain mailing lists. It's definitely not valid to draw any conclusions about google as a whole from it.
      - icelancer 9y ago
        I believe you. I also believe the 2nd chart would basically look the same if you polled 10,000 representative people from inside Google. The 1st one, not so much.
        DannyBee 9y ago
        Maybe? Remember though, that groups that are underrepresented may also be disproportionately affected. IE women may feel the document is much more harmful than men, but by numbers, ... You'd have to break it down by a lot of variables, and once that happens, in practice, everyone will just draw whatever conclusion they want anyway :) Anyway, not gonna speculate on what it would look like, just gonna point out it's not valid data.
        zbraniecki 9y ago
        a) I'm not sure what you base your believe in. My gut feelings tells me the opposite. If you polled a representative sample of employees you'd get very different results in the 2nd chart but that's not important because: b) The idea that average people are good at understanding the consequences of such document is inherently flawed. It's my problem with a lot of aspects of American culture (I'm an European living in SV) - regular people are not in position to evaluate complex systems. Every time I see an article about, say, a shooting, that ends with "Joe Black, who lives nearby, believes that police should do X and Y to stop the increase in crime", my blood boils. Joe Black is in a terrible position to understand the crime dynamic in his city, to understand how the police operates and what does and doesn't work in the pursuit of lowering crime rate. Now, coming back to the topic, I'd argue that 95% of Googlers are completely not qualified to respond to the second question. At all. There's a bunch of people in the HR department, with degree in sociology, group psychology, organization behavior and design, maybe people who studied micro-discrimination, gender imbalances etc. that are qualified to answer it. But the idea that you can poll employees to learn about whether this document is harmful is completely nuts. Sorry for venting :) p.s. But yeah... while writing this comment I saw an article about the poll asking Americans if the US should attack North Korea [0]. I honestly believe that the culture of doing that, while pretends to stay close to the roots of the country of freedom, where citizens decide about their country, is in fact terribly harmful because it builds conviction in people that they're in the right position to make such judgements on topics they have insanely little knowledge about. [0] http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-threat-grows/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-...
  - ryan_lane 9y ago
    For real, it's hard to get 40% of people to even take a survey.
- odbol_ 9y ago
  40% of how many employees total? And which ones? Only the ones on certain discussion boards? That's a pretty biased sample.
  - eagsalazar2 9y ago
    Yeah maybe the real % is a lot higher. Quit trying to convince yourself this guy is fringe. For better or for worse, he's not.
  - manfredo 9y ago
    I don't know why, but the image isn't loading unless I view it directly: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGrQOrZUQAUrwcf.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGrQOrZUQAUrwcf.jpg Just under 280 people (out of 72,000 google employees) responded to the poll at the time of the screenshot. No indication yet as to possible bias in how this poll was conducted. Not to mention, somebody could have whipped it up in MSPaint.
- s_kilk 9y ago
  If that's the case then that 40% should probably go too. It's 2017, not 1417.
- jlebar 9y ago
  There is no way that that a survey indicating that 40% of employees agree with the document is representative of Google as a whole. Google has 75k employees, nearly all of whom are aware of this incident, and a comment below suggests that the survey had <300 responses. Indeed, a chief complaint in the manifesto is that Google is overwhelmingly liberal. Even the author of the manifesto recognized that his was a fringe position at Google.
  - ljk 9y ago
    > * Google has 75k employees* not 75k engineers right?
  - emanreus 9y ago
    > the survey had <300 responses Given the repercussions that's a surprisingly high number.
- MatthewWilkes 9y ago
  40% of employees or 40% of memegen?
JSONwebtoken 9y ago
I know the people I wouldn't want to work with, and they plaster their names and beliefs all over social media for the world to see. I'm mature enough to get past my views and work with people of different viewpoints as I've had to do all the way through college and my professional life. I was told this was the whole purpose of group exercises in high school and college but I suppose like many things, that applies to only privileged people such as I. The difference is I actually have to practice what I learned from carrying other people's grades in college for every single day in my professional life for as long as somebody catches wind of my political alignment and threatens to quit if my company doesn't remove me. It's a team sport after all.
- puranjay 9y ago
  Interesting that you bring this up. I'm Indian and a lot of Indian Hindus I know hold some messed up beliefs. Some of them work at top tech companies as well. Yet, people don't seem to have a problem working with them. But they do with a guy who rails against diversity. Why does a brown Hindu man who dislikes muslims, believes in matching horoscopes before getting married, and whose grandparents practiced and benefited from the caste system and who, if you get him drunk enough, might espouse for honor killings and homophobia get a pass? Why are these "diverse opinions" valued and others are not?
  - kamaal 9y ago
    >>Why are these "diverse opinions" valued and others are not? Social acceptance is largely a function of majority vote. Though some social values might be absurd, if the majority feels comfortable doing it, it does get a huge degree of acceptance. Plus some absurd social values have acceptance for largely cultural reasons. Marriage among castes in India is one such thing. There are so many caste related things you do in everyday life, belonging to different castes can constantly lead to "My X values are better than your Y values" kind of friction. So people keep to their castes. Horoscopes are one of those "Why take a risk?" kind of basic hygiene related rituals you do before Indian marriages. None of this makes sense, but the majority of the people are perfectly happy doing it.
  - 9y ago
sjeohp 9y ago
I only skimmed it but wasn't he just questioning the policy of positive discrimination? Or is there something else? Because that's a pretty mild question to get so upset about.
SidiousL 9y ago
If you're a professional you should be able to work with people you disagree with as long as the disagreement is civil and reasoned. I'm astounded to see that you would say he "had to be fired" because "people wouldn't want to work with him". If so, I would place (at least part of) the blame on those people. Even if you think this guy is evil, if you're open-minded and open for debate you can achieve more than by shutting him down. I remember the story of a black guy who sat down with members of the KKK and, as a result, they quit. He had all their KKK costumes at home.
TheGirondin 9y ago
Sorry, that doesn't fly. Working with people who have different political views is part of being a professional. It's a team sport after all. Something tells me that you aren't also going to defend the firing of anyone with open SJW beliefs for the same reason.

Houshalter 9y ago

There's an internal survey at Google that shows about 40% of employees agree with him. They are just rightfully scared of speaking out.

empressplay 9y ago
*Citation needed
eagsalazar2 9y ago
Now there are 40% of people at google who can't sleep tonight because their blood is boiling and won't stop boiling for a long time.
zbraniecki 9y ago
can you cite the source? Because this sounds very unbelievable to me. I work in a mid-size company structured in many ways similarly to Google and I cannot imagine a representative survey with results already coming up. Google has close to 70k employees. What was the sample? How selected? How representative? It sounds very questionable,
- icelancer 9y ago
  Source data here. Who knows if it is representative, but 282 anonymous respondents have chimed in. The distribution looks like what I would expect. https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.html https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...
  - DannyBee 9y ago
    It's definitely not representative. For reasons that would be obvious if you knew the history of the document, but that i can't share, it consists almost entirely of a sample of people from certain mailing lists. It's definitely not valid to draw any conclusions about google as a whole from it.
    - icelancer 9y ago
      I believe you. I also believe the 2nd chart would basically look the same if you polled 10,000 representative people from inside Google. The 1st one, not so much.
      - DannyBee 9y ago
        Maybe? Remember though, that groups that are underrepresented may also be disproportionately affected. IE women may feel the document is much more harmful than men, but by numbers, ... You'd have to break it down by a lot of variables, and once that happens, in practice, everyone will just draw whatever conclusion they want anyway :) Anyway, not gonna speculate on what it would look like, just gonna point out it's not valid data.
      - zbraniecki 9y ago
        a) I'm not sure what you base your believe in. My gut feelings tells me the opposite. If you polled a representative sample of employees you'd get very different results in the 2nd chart but that's not important because: b) The idea that average people are good at understanding the consequences of such document is inherently flawed. It's my problem with a lot of aspects of American culture (I'm an European living in SV) - regular people are not in position to evaluate complex systems. Every time I see an article about, say, a shooting, that ends with "Joe Black, who lives nearby, believes that police should do X and Y to stop the increase in crime", my blood boils. Joe Black is in a terrible position to understand the crime dynamic in his city, to understand how the police operates and what does and doesn't work in the pursuit of lowering crime rate. Now, coming back to the topic, I'd argue that 95% of Googlers are completely not qualified to respond to the second question. At all. There's a bunch of people in the HR department, with degree in sociology, group psychology, organization behavior and design, maybe people who studied micro-discrimination, gender imbalances etc. that are qualified to answer it. But the idea that you can poll employees to learn about whether this document is harmful is completely nuts. Sorry for venting :) p.s. But yeah... while writing this comment I saw an article about the poll asking Americans if the US should attack North Korea [0]. I honestly believe that the culture of doing that, while pretends to stay close to the roots of the country of freedom, where citizens decide about their country, is in fact terribly harmful because it builds conviction in people that they're in the right position to make such judgements on topics they have insanely little knowledge about. [0] http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-threat-grows/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-...
- ryan_lane 9y ago
  For real, it's hard to get 40% of people to even take a survey.
odbol_ 9y ago
40% of how many employees total? And which ones? Only the ones on certain discussion boards? That's a pretty biased sample.
- eagsalazar2 9y ago
  Yeah maybe the real % is a lot higher. Quit trying to convince yourself this guy is fringe. For better or for worse, he's not.
- manfredo 9y ago
  I don't know why, but the image isn't loading unless I view it directly: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGrQOrZUQAUrwcf.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGrQOrZUQAUrwcf.jpg Just under 280 people (out of 72,000 google employees) responded to the poll at the time of the screenshot. No indication yet as to possible bias in how this poll was conducted. Not to mention, somebody could have whipped it up in MSPaint.
s_kilk 9y ago
If that's the case then that 40% should probably go too. It's 2017, not 1417.
jlebar 9y ago
There is no way that that a survey indicating that 40% of employees agree with the document is representative of Google as a whole. Google has 75k employees, nearly all of whom are aware of this incident, and a comment below suggests that the survey had <300 responses. Indeed, a chief complaint in the manifesto is that Google is overwhelmingly liberal. Even the author of the manifesto recognized that his was a fringe position at Google.
- ljk 9y ago
  > * Google has 75k employees* not 75k engineers right?
- emanreus 9y ago
  > the survey had <300 responses Given the repercussions that's a surprisingly high number.
MatthewWilkes 9y ago
40% of employees or 40% of memegen?

JSONwebtoken 9y ago

I know the people I wouldn't want to work with, and they plaster their names and beliefs all over social media for the world to see. I'm mature enough to get past my views and work with people of different viewpoints as I've had to do all the way through college and my professional life. I was told this was the whole purpose of group exercises in high school and college but I suppose like many things, that applies to only privileged people such as I. The difference is I actually have to practice what I learned from carrying other people's grades in college for every single day in my professional life for as long as somebody catches wind of my political alignment and threatens to quit if my company doesn't remove me. It's a team sport after all.

puranjay 9y ago
Interesting that you bring this up. I'm Indian and a lot of Indian Hindus I know hold some messed up beliefs. Some of them work at top tech companies as well. Yet, people don't seem to have a problem working with them. But they do with a guy who rails against diversity. Why does a brown Hindu man who dislikes muslims, believes in matching horoscopes before getting married, and whose grandparents practiced and benefited from the caste system and who, if you get him drunk enough, might espouse for honor killings and homophobia get a pass? Why are these "diverse opinions" valued and others are not?
- kamaal 9y ago
  >>Why are these "diverse opinions" valued and others are not? Social acceptance is largely a function of majority vote. Though some social values might be absurd, if the majority feels comfortable doing it, it does get a huge degree of acceptance. Plus some absurd social values have acceptance for largely cultural reasons. Marriage among castes in India is one such thing. There are so many caste related things you do in everyday life, belonging to different castes can constantly lead to "My X values are better than your Y values" kind of friction. So people keep to their castes. Horoscopes are one of those "Why take a risk?" kind of basic hygiene related rituals you do before Indian marriages. None of this makes sense, but the majority of the people are perfectly happy doing it.
- 9y ago

sjeohp 9y ago

I only skimmed it but wasn't he just questioning the policy of positive discrimination? Or is there something else? Because that's a pretty mild question to get so upset about.

SidiousL 9y ago

If you're a professional you should be able to work with people you disagree with as long as the disagreement is civil and reasoned. I'm astounded to see that you would say he "had to be fired" because "people wouldn't want to work with him". If so, I would place (at least part of) the blame on those people. Even if you think this guy is evil, if you're open-minded and open for debate you can achieve more than by shutting him down. I remember the story of a black guy who sat down with members of the KKK and, as a result, they quit. He had all their KKK costumes at home.

TheGirondin 9y ago

Sorry, that doesn't fly. Working with people who have different political views is part of being a professional. It's a team sport after all. Something tells me that you aren't also going to defend the firing of anyone with open SJW beliefs for the same reason.