3 ms·
High price to pay? I don't think so. Writing and circulating that memo was a colossally stupid thing to do. Stupid on a level that basically puts you into the c
by PopsiclePete 9y ago
High price to pay? I don't think so. Writing and circulating that memo was a colossally stupid thing to do. Stupid on a level that basically puts you into the camp of "nobody wants to work with you anymore". You're now that guy. A liability for any company and obviously an unpleasant human being. I wouldn't want him at my company either, that's for sure.
Computer programmers often make the mistake of treating other humans like cold, calculating machines. But they're not. They have emotions. Emotions, and past experiences, and history. And, unless you're in the extreme Asperger's spectrum of being unable to deal with other human beings, you should know, by age 15 or so, that there are certain subjects that are sensitive and that a company environment is not the place for them.
To help other potential programmers from destroying their careers, I'll post a short list of risky topics here:
* Politics
* Race
* The Holocaust
* Sex
Any one of those could land you in hot water for creating a hostile work environment.
Nobody cares if you have scientific evidence that Jews make for inferior doctors, you don't post a memo claiming that in the company you work at. You just don't. Because you're working with other humans, not with machines, and you have to be smart enough to know what's acceptable office talk and what's acceptable poker night talk.
This Google Engineer is an idiot. I don't care whether he can "out-prgoram" me and code a complete OS in 2 hours. He's still an idiot. And deserves to be fired, because Google doesn't want to employ idiots.
- Caveman_Coder 9y agoI'd agree with your opinion if Google wasn't a place where political discussion is seemingly "welcomed" (eng-misc, Memegen, TGIFs). It's okay to express an opinion that is targeting a group of people (conservatives/Republicans/Trump supporters/etc.) if you belong to the right ideological group (progressives). Don't think for an instance that this is the first case of controversial content posted internally. It happened all the time when I worked there, just that the group getting targeted wasn't in the majority in the social dominance and power hierarchy.
- PopsiclePete 9y agoThere's welcoming political discussion, and then there's saying that all gay people need to be euthanized because god wills it. You could say that it's just another "political opinion" and I shouldn't face blow-back for expressing it in an open environment, but, no, that's just not the case. If I say something like that, I will (rightly) become a social pariah immediately and nobody would want to be around me. Same thing with that guy. Yeah, you can joke about Trump, and you can joke about Hillary's emails, but saying that women are inferior due to biology makes you an unpleasant human being to be around and I don't want to be in the same room as you, much less on the same team or the same company as you. If they hadn't fired his dumb ass, it would have sent a very bad message to all of Google's women employees.
- Caveman_Coder 9y ago> "Yeah, you can joke about Trump, and you can joke about Hillary's emails" There was more than just "joking." There was a hostile atmosphere for a lot of my peers who voted for Trump, akin to how women might have felt after this latest memo. The thing was, that it was perfectly "acceptable" (within the larger "Google culture") to create an environment hostile towards conservatives, with no Management backlash (probably because a lot of them felt the same way). The point was they didn't find that kind of "harassment" towards conservative employees problematic at all.
- neuronexmachina 9y agoYeah, the impression I got from the manifesto is that he seemed like a poor person to work on a team with, even if you weren't a woman.