5 ms·

The moral of the story is something most adults figure out by their mid 20s: if you like your job, keep your mouth shut about your political/religious beliefs.

The moral of the story is something most adults figure out by their mid 20s: if you like your job, keep your mouth shut about your political/religious beliefs. And despite what any employer will tell you about their workplace being an open forum, they are full of shit. What they mean is, it's an open forum to agree with management.

geodel 9y ago
I agree. This kind of righteousness has no place in modern corporates. I will add even CEOs/management is not safe from getting fired. The difference could possibly be huge severance in case of such incidence.
tedmiston 9y ago
> At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). Minority viewpoints in tech become silenced and their author(s) ostracized by the biases of a mob mentality. It doesn't even matter what you write because most people won't even read the original source, instead floating by on derivative tweets and extremely biased summaries (in whatever direction agrees with their existing views). Irrespective of the original memo, and this is something I've felt more strongly in the past couple years, it's just not safe to share dissenting viewpoints in tech anymore. We used to be the industry where anything could be discussed critically and the most objectively correct answer could win (logic! science!). Nowadays it's so political and heated, I've found it best to just stay out of the discussion and not share dissenting views anymore. I think the real problem we need to fix is being able to have rational critical discussion around topics we disagree with.
- uncletaco 9y ago
  > Irrespective of the original memo, and this is something I've felt more strongly in the past couple years, it's just not safe to share dissenting viewpoints in tech anymore. It is not safe to share your viewpoints anywhere where it is not considered germane: and the workplace is high on that list. A firm will fire someone who becomes annoyingly political or who makes a public ass out of themselves on social media. I work for a medium sized tech firm in the American South and we had one engineer that was very open and sometimes combative about her progressive viewpoints and people stopped wanting to talk to her, even those who agreed with her. She didn't last a quarter. Expecting firms to give their employees a forum to speak openly about anything not work related is a recent phenomenon across the board, and many still hold onto the view that if you want to engage in political discussions then do so outside of the workplace.
  - beaconstudios 9y ago
    part of the problem is that the organisations themselves have become extremely political. Google is known to be a very left-leaning company and I can imagine that working inside such a political organisation, especially one that talks a big talk about being logic and reason-driven, would cause one to want to express their views.
    - uncletaco 9y ago
      > organisations themselves have become extremely political This is not true if only for the fact that organizations have always engaged in politics. In one of the worst cases, the United Fruit Company lobbied the US President to overthrow the elected government of Guatemala. In one of the most benign cases, Subaru sponsored gay pride events and publicly supported LGBT groups in the 1990s. Besides that, everything else you've said is useless hyperbole. Get your history together before you go spouting nonsense.
      - beaconstudios 9y ago
        organisations have always been political, but the current political environment inside tech is at what I would consider to be an extremely high point. Politics right now are extremely divisive (I think much more so than say 10 years ago) and many tech companies have openly picked a side. Yes I am familiar with the UFC, and have read about their involvement in various Caribbean nations and the whole "banana republic" concept. > Besides that, everything else you've said is useless hyperbole. Get your history together before you go spouting nonsense. Why be so hostile? If you want to be a dick to strangers on the internet then piss off back to reddit. Feel free to point out which of these two statements is useless hyperbole: > Google is known to be a very left-leaning company > [Google] talks a big talk about being logic and reason-driven Everything else I said was conjecture.
  - Caveman_Coder 9y ago
    > Expecting firms to give their employees a forum to speak openly about anything not work related is a recent phenomenon across the board, and many still hold onto the view that if you want to engage in political discussions then do so outside of the workplace. But Google does this (Memegen and eng-misc), the problem is that you're only able to speak about certain things and entertain certain opinions...so naturally, conservatives will feel muzzled and want to not go against the dominant culture/power structures
- xenadu02 9y ago
  This was only ever true in online discussion forums, Usenet, etc. I agree that there is a lot of mob mentality going on, it’s just difficult to get upset about this case because the original author was spouting debunked “biotruth” arguments. Twitter replies are mostly full of men who didn’t read the original memo or who are willfully pretending it didn’t claim women are less biologically suited to being engineers. I like Pichai’s memo and I think it sets the right tone: the offending employee could have raised these same arguments without falling back to debunked stereotypes. He could have done an hour of Googling on the topic and educated himself. Instead he trusted his own feelings in an area he had no experience or knowledge in. This seems to be a trait relatively common among really smart people: doctors who think they’re good at politics, mechanical engineers who think they’ve discovered a theory that overturns all of physics, or in this case a software engineer that thinks he knows better than thousands of scientists doing experiments and crunching the actual data. As far as I can tell we can have rational critical discussions in tech - we just can’t get away with spouting nonsense. If that nonsense reinforces old sexist or racist stereotypes then we can expect a backlash.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > the original author was spouting debunked “biotruth” arguments C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956592, where an actual scientist is quoted to say "The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right." See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... for plenty of good references on the topic. But generally, I mean, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I don't expect to see peace over this topic any time soon.
    - joshuamorton 9y ago
      I think the best way to summarize the memo is that he quotes a bunch of science, which is true. He also makes a bunch of unfounded claims that aren't really related to the science. And people argue that because he said a bunch of sciency things that scientists agree are correct, that everything he said was true.
- slantyyz 9y ago
  >> It doesn't even matter what you write because most people won't even read the original source I have to wonder if the artificial urgency that social media has created doesn't have something to do with this. Everyone these days wants to be the first to respond, which results in a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. You end up with a giant, unstoppable snowball of knee jerk reactions to other knee jerk reactions rolling down a bottomless hill.
- StephenMelon 9y ago
  Unfortunately, not everything has an objectively correct answer (aesthetics! ethics!) and so what you are saying kind of reinforces the point that diversity of viewpoints is vital to group problem solving. A group with the same blindspots will all make the same mistakes.
  - ryandvm 9y ago
    That is so beautifully ironic. "All hail diversity! But if don't think like we do, GTFO."
- darioush 9y ago
  It doesn't have to even be a politically charged opinion btw. Holding opinions like "let's not refactor this module right now" when everyone else thinks it's a great idea can quickly get you marginalized.
puranjay 9y ago
Which is how it should be. The owners of any business are free to create whatever business environment they want to create. The market is supposed to punish or reward them accordingly.
- sol_remmy 9y ago
  Government regulation is actually the culprit here. Google is being sued by the Department of Labor for violating a gender discrimination regulation: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pay-disparities-women-labor-department-lawsuit https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa... These companies behavior has nothing to do with the free market. It is a response to government regulation.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  By that logic, we should let companies have explicit policies against certain races cause the market will sort it out... I don't think I've ever heard that "the market" will deal with unfair internal HR policies.
  - puranjay 9y ago
    What tech company would be able to attract top workers if it had an explicit policy against a certain race? The job market, too, is a market.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      There's enough "top workers" available in pretty much any kind of social/racial/gender-based group you could delineate, that even companies with explicit discrimination policies can find the talent they need. The market won't give you the solution you seek; the issue does not impact profitability enough.
      - puranjay 9y ago
        A company staffed by racists will by boycotted by the majority of consumers. Its only customers will be other racists. Plus, most other companies will refuse to supply goods and services to it lest they feel the backlash of catering to racists. Not exactly a feasible venture.

geodel 9y ago

I agree. This kind of righteousness has no place in modern corporates. I will add even CEOs/management is not safe from getting fired. The difference could possibly be huge severance in case of such incidence.

tedmiston 9y ago

> At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). Minority viewpoints in tech become silenced and their author(s) ostracized by the biases of a mob mentality. It doesn't even matter what you write because most people won't even read the original source, instead floating by on derivative tweets and extremely biased summaries (in whatever direction agrees with their existing views). Irrespective of the original memo, and this is something I've felt more strongly in the past couple years, it's just not safe to share dissenting viewpoints in tech anymore. We used to be the industry where anything could be discussed critically and the most objectively correct answer could win (logic! science!). Nowadays it's so political and heated, I've found it best to just stay out of the discussion and not share dissenting views anymore. I think the real problem we need to fix is being able to have rational critical discussion around topics we disagree with.

uncletaco 9y ago
> Irrespective of the original memo, and this is something I've felt more strongly in the past couple years, it's just not safe to share dissenting viewpoints in tech anymore. It is not safe to share your viewpoints anywhere where it is not considered germane: and the workplace is high on that list. A firm will fire someone who becomes annoyingly political or who makes a public ass out of themselves on social media. I work for a medium sized tech firm in the American South and we had one engineer that was very open and sometimes combative about her progressive viewpoints and people stopped wanting to talk to her, even those who agreed with her. She didn't last a quarter. Expecting firms to give their employees a forum to speak openly about anything not work related is a recent phenomenon across the board, and many still hold onto the view that if you want to engage in political discussions then do so outside of the workplace.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  part of the problem is that the organisations themselves have become extremely political. Google is known to be a very left-leaning company and I can imagine that working inside such a political organisation, especially one that talks a big talk about being logic and reason-driven, would cause one to want to express their views.
  - uncletaco 9y ago
    > organisations themselves have become extremely political This is not true if only for the fact that organizations have always engaged in politics. In one of the worst cases, the United Fruit Company lobbied the US President to overthrow the elected government of Guatemala. In one of the most benign cases, Subaru sponsored gay pride events and publicly supported LGBT groups in the 1990s. Besides that, everything else you've said is useless hyperbole. Get your history together before you go spouting nonsense.
    - beaconstudios 9y ago
      organisations have always been political, but the current political environment inside tech is at what I would consider to be an extremely high point. Politics right now are extremely divisive (I think much more so than say 10 years ago) and many tech companies have openly picked a side. Yes I am familiar with the UFC, and have read about their involvement in various Caribbean nations and the whole "banana republic" concept. > Besides that, everything else you've said is useless hyperbole. Get your history together before you go spouting nonsense. Why be so hostile? If you want to be a dick to strangers on the internet then piss off back to reddit. Feel free to point out which of these two statements is useless hyperbole: > Google is known to be a very left-leaning company > [Google] talks a big talk about being logic and reason-driven Everything else I said was conjecture.
- Caveman_Coder 9y ago
  > Expecting firms to give their employees a forum to speak openly about anything not work related is a recent phenomenon across the board, and many still hold onto the view that if you want to engage in political discussions then do so outside of the workplace. But Google does this (Memegen and eng-misc), the problem is that you're only able to speak about certain things and entertain certain opinions...so naturally, conservatives will feel muzzled and want to not go against the dominant culture/power structures
xenadu02 9y ago
This was only ever true in online discussion forums, Usenet, etc. I agree that there is a lot of mob mentality going on, it’s just difficult to get upset about this case because the original author was spouting debunked “biotruth” arguments. Twitter replies are mostly full of men who didn’t read the original memo or who are willfully pretending it didn’t claim women are less biologically suited to being engineers. I like Pichai’s memo and I think it sets the right tone: the offending employee could have raised these same arguments without falling back to debunked stereotypes. He could have done an hour of Googling on the topic and educated himself. Instead he trusted his own feelings in an area he had no experience or knowledge in. This seems to be a trait relatively common among really smart people: doctors who think they’re good at politics, mechanical engineers who think they’ve discovered a theory that overturns all of physics, or in this case a software engineer that thinks he knows better than thousands of scientists doing experiments and crunching the actual data. As far as I can tell we can have rational critical discussions in tech - we just can’t get away with spouting nonsense. If that nonsense reinforces old sexist or racist stereotypes then we can expect a backlash.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > the original author was spouting debunked “biotruth” arguments C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956592, where an actual scientist is quoted to say "The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right." See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... for plenty of good references on the topic. But generally, I mean, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I don't expect to see peace over this topic any time soon.
  - joshuamorton 9y ago
    I think the best way to summarize the memo is that he quotes a bunch of science, which is true. He also makes a bunch of unfounded claims that aren't really related to the science. And people argue that because he said a bunch of sciency things that scientists agree are correct, that everything he said was true.
slantyyz 9y ago
>> It doesn't even matter what you write because most people won't even read the original source I have to wonder if the artificial urgency that social media has created doesn't have something to do with this. Everyone these days wants to be the first to respond, which results in a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. You end up with a giant, unstoppable snowball of knee jerk reactions to other knee jerk reactions rolling down a bottomless hill.
StephenMelon 9y ago
Unfortunately, not everything has an objectively correct answer (aesthetics! ethics!) and so what you are saying kind of reinforces the point that diversity of viewpoints is vital to group problem solving. A group with the same blindspots will all make the same mistakes.
- ryandvm 9y ago
  That is so beautifully ironic. "All hail diversity! But if don't think like we do, GTFO."
darioush 9y ago
It doesn't have to even be a politically charged opinion btw. Holding opinions like "let's not refactor this module right now" when everyone else thinks it's a great idea can quickly get you marginalized.

puranjay 9y ago

Which is how it should be. The owners of any business are free to create whatever business environment they want to create. The market is supposed to punish or reward them accordingly.

sol_remmy 9y ago
Government regulation is actually the culprit here. Google is being sued by the Department of Labor for violating a gender discrimination regulation: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pay-disparities-women-labor-department-lawsuit https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa... These companies behavior has nothing to do with the free market. It is a response to government regulation.
MichaelGG 9y ago
By that logic, we should let companies have explicit policies against certain races cause the market will sort it out... I don't think I've ever heard that "the market" will deal with unfair internal HR policies.
- puranjay 9y ago
  What tech company would be able to attract top workers if it had an explicit policy against a certain race? The job market, too, is a market.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    There's enough "top workers" available in pretty much any kind of social/racial/gender-based group you could delineate, that even companies with explicit discrimination policies can find the talent they need. The market won't give you the solution you seek; the issue does not impact profitability enough.
    - puranjay 9y ago
      A company staffed by racists will by boycotted by the majority of consumers. Its only customers will be other racists. Plus, most other companies will refuse to supply goods and services to it lest they feel the backlash of catering to racists. Not exactly a feasible venture.