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Google staff walk out over women's treatment

383 points by oneeyedpigeon 8y ago

SirLJ 8y ago
Should they ask for the immediate termination of all past abusers and how high they should they go in the company?
n4r9 8y ago
Interesting to contrast this story with Damore's claims of left-wing bias and overemphasis on diversity and inclusion. It's uncomfortable exercise to put myself in the shoes of a young woman considering applying to Google; the prospect of unwanted advances from higher-ups and suspicions from the occasional peer of being hired for my gender might be enough to put me off completely.
- kgwgk 8y ago
  On the other hand, your chances of being hired would be higher...
- sheepmullet 8y ago
  > overemphasis on diversity and inclusion. Perhaps Google is overcompensating for allowing sexual harassment.
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  The interesting thing is that the #MeToo movement naturally targeted a lot of liberals, because almost everyone in Hollywood is liberal. The right also has some issues with harassment, etc. but the left is far from immune to having it and in some ways has more trouble. I'm not sure why that is, but the "free love" and unrestrained sexual expression type culture of the left might have something to do with it.
  - tootahe45 8y ago
    It's called white knighting, you see it a lot with feminist men who are often the abusers.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Easily enough explained by Google talking a lot and not actually doing anything until something blows up.
xfitm3 8y ago
What can you do.
- devwastaken 8y ago
  Typically that kind of evidence doesn't just make itself available due to the nature of the crime. If employees themselves are orchestrating protests, they probably have information we don't. You can't just start dropping names and slandering.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - kaddio 8y ago
    A big mistake to believe those protestors are acting rationally. I'm not saying they are not, but assuming that they are is a mistake.
    - devwastaken 8y ago
      Those two lines of logic don't go together. If in your opinion it's a big mistake to believe they're rational, you are saying they're not being rational. There's no neutrality there. You can assume that there is unknown information being acted upon. Unless there's proof otherwise that the protest is lying you infact can and should assume it's authenticity. Or at the least not be involved without clear knowledge.
      - sheepmullet 8y ago
        > you infact can and should assume it's authenticity. Why should you?
        devwastaken 8y ago
        Because you treat others as you expect to be treated, and respect your fellow human kind. We do this because if we have an issue we want to raise to everyone there will be people to help empower that. Given that the individuals protesting are employees about their workplace there is information we may not know, and given the history of mega corps violating rights it would be unreasonable to automatically trust the company over the workers putting themselves out there. If you have reason or evidence against, then by all means don't support the protest, but you should look at this from their perspective and at workers rights in general.
slivym 8y ago
All of their demands seem pretty reasonable. It looks like the big gripe is that basically there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. To draw an analogy, this would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable, so why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website.
- YorkshireSeason 8y ago
  The salient difference is that outages are measurable. In contrast, "harassment" is an extremely controversial subject that nobody agrees upon, for example, in some legislations, calling a person with XY chromosomes "him" rather than "her" is considered a hate crime, a dramatic change from labelling conventions of just a few years ago. Indeed what constitutes harassment is a major point of contention between different parts of the political spectrum, and a core part of the culture wars. In addition, harassment is easily lied about. Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims? If I was a Google competitor, and Machiavellian in moral outlook, I'd feed those flames to weaken Google, and hope that nobody did it to my organisation. Divide et Impera!
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims? You think all harassment claims should be automatically dismissed as false instead?
    - sheepmullet 8y ago
      > Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims? Because it quickly becomes a witch-hunt. It is hard enough to have a fair investigation within a proper court system and legal framework - it’s far more likely any Google process will end up as a kangaroo court than the process leading to any justice.
      - cimmanom 8y ago
mike22223333 8y ago
Google should just fire all of the employee protesters. This is getting out of hand. There are plenty of other people who are in the line and wont make a drama for the company.
- rwmj 8y ago
  Shouldn't employees have the right to collectively strike to get better conditions at work? There's a lot more at stake here than "drama for the company".
  - mike22223333 8y ago
    No. If you are still a crybaby, you should not pursue the profession. Weak and entitled people have no position at the top. Your competitor will otherwise eliminate you. If you cannot solve the issue a bit of harassment without creating a drama, you cannot rise to the top where the world is even more cruel. Emotionally weak people have no place. If you cannot give favors or something when other are, no one will pick you. If someone is the CEO of a multi billion crop, and have 10 people on who could become the manager or VP, 5 are men 5 are women with everything being equal, who do they give the seat? The one who gives them a favor.
  - anon1252 8y ago
    > Shouldn't employees have the right to collectively strike to get better conditions at work? There's a lot more at stake here than "drama for the company". Doesn't the employer have the right to fire them for any reason in any "at will job"?
    - steve_g 8y ago
      They can be fired for any lawful reason. It would be unlawful to fire employees for striking - with some exceptions. Striking employees can be replaced in order to get the work done, but that doesn't make sense for a one-day walkout.
    - mattlondon 8y ago
      I dont think that "at will" exists in all countries - e.g. in Europe I have been told by managers I've had in various employments that it is almost impossible to fire someone in Europe without either some serious misconduct (e.g. sexual harassment), or without first going through a lot of steps to try and not-fire the employee (e.g. performance improvement plans). I am not sure if that is true or not or if it applies to google employees, but I feel like there is a ring of truth in it.
ChrisRR 8y ago
So the first demand is "A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequality" I'd like to see the actual data behind this constant inequality claim. I would be genuinely interested to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs. I've heard speculation that women don't argue for higher salaries as much as men, I've also heard that the data is never accurate because it doesn't compare the same jobs. I want to see some actual numbers so people can figure out where the issue actually lies.
- JacobJans 8y ago
  That's what they're asking for too: more data.
  - criddell 8y ago
    If any company has the data, it's Google. If they had a good story to tell, I think they'd be sharing that data.
    - rongenre 8y ago
      Google has refused and insisted "It's too hard" to release this data.
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  Time magazine, which doesn't exactly seem to be a bastion of conservatism, had an article about this http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/ http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/ , which had more hard-facts than anyone else I've seen, but the conclusion was that most of the claims made by the wage gap supporters are cherrypicked and false. Although, if Google specifically has a problem with it, I'd definitely be willing to listen. If they are protecting people like Rubin, it does seem plausible that other things could be going on.
  - ChrisRR 8y ago
    I feel if anyone has enough employees with similar roles, at similar levels to pull together this kind of data, it's a big company like Google
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
VBprogrammer 8y ago
Wouldn't it be easier to create an algorithm for compensation which clearly didn't involve gender (i.e. no deep learning stuff). Something which boils down to base salary + experience factor + google service factor. Honestly, I can imagine that being less troublesome even outside of attempting to be fair an equitable regardless of race / gender / sexual orientation.
- amiga-workbench 8y ago
  How do you quantify experience? It cannot be empirically measured in all the ways that it matters.
  - VBprogrammer 8y ago
    Do you think even the most basic measure, say number of years, is any worse than the current process?
    - gambiting 8y ago
      Of course! Have you never met a programmer who had ~20 years of experience but actually was extremely weak at programming? Even the most basic of interviews would disqualify them from the job, but an ML algorithm can give them huge points on the "experience" alone.
      - VBprogrammer 8y ago
        I too have encountered developers with many years of experience and little programming skill. But in those cases I'd not hire them; or if they made it through the net I'd put them on a performance improvement plan and begin the process of firing them.
        gambiting 8y ago
        I don't know where you live, but at least in EU the cost of hiring the wrong person is monstrous. Unless they were literally caught stealing and you can fire them for gross negligance, you are looking at months of "performance improvement plans", when both of you know that it won't actually improve anything. All while you are paying them full salary, national insurance, tax etc, and also sinking in the time of another employee who now has to deal with the situation. It's extremely critical to not hire those people in the first place, and I would not trust an algorithm to do that.
ddebernardy 8y ago
https://twitter.com/GoogleWalkout/status/1057804203895283712 https://twitter.com/GoogleWalkout/status/1057804203895283712 ^ Might be a better source article.
ryanmercer 8y ago
These people should be fired, not because they want equal pay but because they refuse to do the job they were hired to do. Different genders deserve equal pay, people of different races deserve equal pay, people with various disabilities deserve equal pay. HOWEVER, you want to walk out of work? You should be terminated. If I walked out of work, I would be fired. If I organized several people to walk out of work with me, we would be fired. This is the case at my current job and at every single job I've ever had. You don't change things by striking, in my book this is effectively corporate terrorism "hey we have demands, if you don't meet them we aren't working!" If someone strikes, you can never trust that employee again. Ever. You can not count on that employee in any situation because they've demonstrated that they will happily stop working when it serves their desires. What you do is you make the issue publicly known, you do it in a positive way, you do it in a polite way. You ask for change and if change won't be given, you find an employer that will even if that means moving or starting your own business. I'm all for equal rights, I'm all for equal pay, I'm not for people holding businesses hostage by refusing to do the job they were paid to do.
- maaaats 8y ago
  You are lucky that someone else risked their jobs to put you in a position where you can spout this. If it weren't for unions and strikes, the common worker would have been much worse off.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    You realize most of the labor unions that made meaningful reform were in factories yes? Factories that simply would not exist today because most of the work has been replaced with automation and equipment orders of magnitudes more efficient, yes?
- pjc50 8y ago
  > You don't change things by striking, Traditionally union action including strikes has been the only way to make changes in big employers.
  - 8y ago
qubax 8y ago
"A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity"? I'm confused here. Are they demanding that preferential hiring and advancement practices and programs for women and certain minorities be stopped?
- alexis_fr 8y ago
  As you can see, the divide is becoming greater between ones who “believe” and ones who “don’t”, and the audience is massively imposing a bias here in this thread. We’ve lost our ability to listen to each other, and it’s sad that it happened on a topic which is still very easy to judge using science.
  - debacle 8y ago
    Most reasonable people on HN stay out of these threads. You're not going to change anyone's mind at this point.
    - ergothus 8y ago
      I think it is true that you wont change most people's minds. (When I discovered the psychological concept of schema, I was literally horrified) But some of us are discovering that what we thought of as "normal" (and thus forms the basis of many of of our value judgements) is quite narrow, so we have to adjust our expectations and that changes a lot of things... getting perspectives from others is a necessary and tedious process. Im in my early 40s and despite thinking I was pretty liberal on most social issues I've spent the last 10 years discovering I've been wrong, poorly informed, and/or ignorant on a lot of details. At this rate, I dont expect to be done with these self-updates anytime soon, and reasoned arguments and shared experiences, fears, concerns, and hopes are essential for me to re-determine where I now stand, each and every day. Just as an example, another comment made an argument about why the market would theoretically prefer underpaid staff. (Which would then not make them underpaid). A good point, but irreconciable with pay gap data...how do I resolve that? Ah, someone replied with a decent response about the issue BEING perceived value. Armed with these positions I can now spend a few minutes of much more effective research, and have better chances of noticing details in my day-to-day life. For people who are tired of rehashing the same old arguments with data and answers that are out there for anyone serious to find...it's actually quite hard to find if you dont really know the question, and as unfair as it is, there is a limit to how much time and effort will people will spend grasping at straws about how they themselves might be reinforcing terrible systems. Implicit bias is IMPLICIT and thus it is hard to find out what your biased thoughts are. Effective arguments dramatically reduce that time and effort, and even if most wont take them for that final step, some of us are trying, and are grateful to those that are willing to once again rehash the "obvious" with those that are unlikely to change their minds.
StudentStuff 8y ago
There is no will from upper management to handle these issues appropriately, which is part of why Google as an organization is in its current state. Google has been able to paper over issues with copious amounts of money thus far, but that is breaking down as time goes on.
- geofft 8y ago
  I think it is more than that: there is a will from upper management to actively prevent such issues from being handled appropriately. > Larry and Sergey had like this gaggle of girls who were hot, and all become like their little harem of admins, I call them the L&S Harem, yes. All those girls are now different heads of departments in that company, years later. > Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around. > H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-excerpt-google https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-exc...
  - sidcool 8y ago
    This is pretty explosive. I had no idea of this. Is there an alternate source to the claims?
  - HillaryBriss 8y ago
    holy shit. i hadn't seen that before. HR seems to have been completely captured by the forces it was supposed to resist.
    - wombatpm 8y ago
      HR is never there for the employee. They exist to protect the Company. They give lip service to protecting and nurturing the employees and our people are our most precious asset BS. The only time HR will go after any of the big boys is when they are on the outs with the board. Example: Mark Hurd when he was forced out at HP.
rurban 8y ago
Sounds like pre-unionizing to me. Wonder where this will lead to...
- rwmj 8y ago
  Hopefully to more people in tech joining unions. Plenty of other well-paid professions are unionised (eg. doctors). For full disclosure I've been a member of Prospect, a non-affiliated union in the UK, for a few years. One of the advantages is free access to legal advice about employment issues.
  - kerbalspacepro 8y ago
    The unionisation of doctors in America is one of the reasons that the American healthcare system is so bad though. Maybe we shouldn't encourage any industry to increase its inefficiency by unionizing, and instead just offer a set of universal regulations that keep workers (both skilled and unskilled alike) from getting shafted?
    - nradov 8y ago
      Very few American doctors are unionized. If you're referring to the AMA, it is specifically not a union.
      - kerbalspacepro 8y ago
        If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... well, let me quote the Atlantic's Matthew Stewart: >You see, when educated people with excellent credentials band together to advance their collective interest, it’s all part of serving the public good by ensuring a high quality of service, establishing fair working conditions, and giving merit its due. That’s why we do it through “associations,” and with the assistance of fellow professionals wearing white shoes. When working-class people do it—through unions—it’s a violation of the sacred principles of the free market.
  - eqdw 8y ago
    Most tech offices (google included) already give all employees free access to legal resources. It's called an EAP (Employee Assistance Program)
readhn 8y ago
"there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. ...why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website." there is an interesting tendency that many psychologists pointed out: in many professions for some reason psychopaths tend to get to the top an stay there. Specifically CEOs tend to be people with most psychopathic traits: https://www.businessinsider.com/professions-with-the-most-psychopaths-2018-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/professions-with-the-most-ps... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisdom-Psychopaths-Saints-Killers-Success-ebook/dp/B007NKN9U8?tag=skim0x70967-21 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisdom-Psychopaths-Saints-Killers-S... Now consider for a second, if you have psychopaths with money running the companies - why would they be interested in well being of their employees? I am not saying every CEO is a psycho, but many are (as research shows): https://hbr.org/2004/10/executive-psychopaths https://hbr.org/2004/10/executive-psychopaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-disturbing-link-between-psychopathy-and-leadership/#2e2a21734104 https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dis...
rustcharm 8y ago
How do these protestors know the facts of the matter better than the people who investigated?
- sridca 8y ago
  If you haven't noticed humans are yet to value facts over emotions.
- ummonk 8y ago
  The facts are not in dispute by the people who investigated. They found the allegation credible.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > The facts are not in dispute by the people who investigated That is not established. > They found the allegation credible. “Credible” is not “true”; it is quite possible to find both a claim and it's negation to be credible.
    - ummonk 8y ago
      Yes, but even if the specic allegation was not true, his whole relationship with someone he had power over was highly inappropriate. Unfortunately though, given that the senior leadership had a history of engaging in such inappropriate relationships, Google’s action here is to be expected.
duxup 8y ago
To clarify I'm not disagreeing with the walk out. I do wonder if any reporting process at a company can ever really be trusted to have the employee's interests in mind. HR, legal, and etc all are there to protect the company. They're not there for your standard employee. Again, not disagreeing with having a process, I just wonder if a process handled by the typical parties really can be trusted. I've never felt that HR, legal, or any of those departments are there FOR me. Rather they are there to prevent any problems the company may have, and that is not likely to be in my interests if I were to make a complaint about something.
- sjg007 8y ago
  They aren't there for you but for the company. They are really only there for you in any way that protects the company. Having a neutral third party would be one idea. It would have to be funded by employee and employer contributions though. Outside of that you have the EEOC in the US that has some authority.
justaguyhere 8y ago
How is this handled at other biggies in the valley - Apple, Microsoft etc? Do they also have the arbitration thing? There was an awesome site on the front page yesterday, that compared career levels in the companies. Someone should make one comparing these companies on things like - treatment of women/minorities, age discrimination, side project policies, access to upper management etc
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  Microsoft used to require arbitration but got rid of it earlier this year after the deserved outcry. Apple still has it AFAIK.
- shareometry 8y ago
  I have never understood why employees accept the restrictive clauses which assign ownership for any side projects to the employer. I am not a lawyer, but this has always struck me as amounting to a type of serfdom. If you are seen as a 24/7 unit of the company, and anything at all that you creatively produce can be claimed by the company, then your working capacity and creative capacity is essentially owned entirely by the company while you are employed there. You are not being paid just for your time and the work product you produce during that time. Rather you are literally selling an aspect of yourself. Does that sound reasonable at all? (of course, California has some protections against this. but that's just one state) I would really like to see people rallying against many more things like this.
  - dev_dull 8y ago
    They tolerate it because it’s largely unenforceable.
    - justaguyhere 8y ago
      That is one reason. Many people aren't even aware of such draconian policies they are signing up for. And companies are probably counting on it too. It is also possible that even the owners of the company (especially small, family owned companies) aren't aware of these dumb policies. They just trust their lawyers to write up the contracts. There was a comment recently on HN - employee reads up the contract, goes to the owner to ask about some clause, and the owner himself is surprised and calls the lawyer to sort it out. Big companies that spend shit ton of money on lawyers have no excuse - they're likely doing all this intentionally.
vynyl 8y ago
Google needs to stand firm against these policies. Making the "chief diversity officer" answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations to the board of directors is an absurd demand. They would open themselves up to huge amounts of foreign manipulation and political sabotage.
- drdeadringer 8y ago
  > They would open themselves up to huge amounts of foreign manipulation and political sabotage. I'd like to know how you envision this happening. Like, China calls Google's CDO and says "We'd love to see more Chinese hires, we might consider sending you a welcome-back invitation"?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    >I'd like to know how you envision this happening Botnets of fake social media accounts for starters. You think if they are currently manipulating political elections they won't ever try and use similar tactics to tank a company? China: "Google give us user data!" Google: "No way!" China: "PLA Unit 61398, hurt the Google! Make accusations! Lots of accusations! Many many many accusations!" ---- China: "State media, run articles about how the evil uncivilized Google makes a hostile environment for female/gay/green cardigan wearing employees!" --- China: "Movie studios, make this romantic comedy but be sure to vilify a company identical to Google!" --- China: "People's Worker, scour the internet for any controversial quote from any corporate member of Google, great, yes, that! PLA Unit 61398, have an account 'discover' this quote and use the botnet to get it trending!"
    - drdeadringer 8y ago
      ... but some of these examples happen already. How is a CDO reporting to the CEO going to amplify any already magnified negative PR and force action?
shados 8y ago
Something Ive never understood (not in the sense of I dont agree. What I really mean is I'm uneducated on the topic and would like to find out more, but my searches returned little, since it's a pretty heated topic), is why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this. Maybe for light cases where someone just need a stern talking to, but a lot of the cases are downright criminal acts. Having a private entity that has a vested interest in the events seem...unwise. Shouldn't it be better to have law enforcement handle it, and have companies forced to cooperate instead? Like, if it's someone who said something slightly inappropriate/gray area to another and just needs a stern talking to, sure. Have a process/HR deal with it. But so many occurrences are so much worse than that... Not the same situation at all, but similar reasoning: I once had a colleague corner me in the office because of a disagreement in a meeting earlier in the day, where they threatened to "meet me outside to settle things". I mentioned it to my boss/HR/etc, and sure enough, they told me to just talk it out with them and were generally useless. I ended up having to quit. In hindsight, it wasn't my boss I needed to talk to, it was the freagin cops. (Not, of course, cops are frequently useless too, and that's a separate problem...but if we have to change the world somewhere, maybe pushing it all on private entities isn't the best thing to do in this case).
- kiliantics 8y ago
  As you point out, the cops are often useless too. Now imagine you call the cops on your boss and they show up to talk with him/her. How might your boss be treating you after this?
  - kazagistar 8y ago
    The same is true for HR; that's why there is additional rles around retaliation.
- notyourwork 8y ago
  Sadly the police don’t have the resources to go “investigate” every time someone said let’s settle this outside. Where do you drawn the line for stern talking and police investigation. Your idea sounds good in theory but in practice doesn’t work.
Kiro 8y ago
I support this but I also wish other companies would be under the same scrutiny as Google. I've been at companies where women not only were paid much much less but also more or less objects that were openly treated as such. There would be management meetings about rating the sexiest coworkers and who could lay down the most (obviously not a single woman in whole of management and they had no chance of moving even close to it in their career). All sanctioned from the highest level and not a single person would dare to question it. I was not actively participating but also part of the problem since I didn't say anything. This was not even done in secret and more or less public knowledge. The communication from management had a lot of sexist jokes and pictures and anyone questioning it "had no humor". Mind you, this was not a tech company per say and I believe the further you get from tech the worse it gets. I think it's sad that the huge problem affecting 99% of women gets reduced to a single company which probably is one of the few in the world that even has a code of conduct against this stuff.
tylerl 8y ago
This entire protest would have generally been a non-event if the company hadn't sent out a memo telling managers to accommodate people who want to participate, ensure there is no retaliation or penalty, be flexible with schedules, etc., effectively advertising the event to everyone in the process. So then it looks like employees are being unsupportive of their co-workers if they don't participate. Which sort of shuffles the understanding of a "walk out" to be a far cry from the sort of thing that happened in the union days, and puts this firmly in the Just Google Things category, where even protesting the company becomes an activity that the company officially supports.
- Animats 8y ago
  Oh. So they're not all going to be fired.
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  One view is that management knows that and did it anyway. Perhaps they felt it was worth letting it be a bigger event and taking a PR hit if in return what they get is that the employees feel that the company supports them.
  - Balgair 8y ago
    Good Machiavellian way to oust competing managers as well. Personally, that would be a horrible thing to do to another person, but then again, we know at least some of these managers kept silent during this whole fiasco; we're not talking about saints here.
thatgerhard 8y ago
this is why we are all going to be replaced by machines.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
tareqak 8y ago
Another article: We’re the Organizers of the Google Walkout. Here Are Our Demands https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-explain-demands.html https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-exp...
samstave 8y ago
I'd wager that the walkout was over the $2,000,000 a month paid to Rubin. Also, people claimed that the payment was to keep Rubin from working with competitors... But some others say that it was to buy his silence over what others might have been doing...
DoreenMichele 8y ago
I don't understand this at all. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has told staff he supports their right to take the action. "I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel," he said in an all-staff email. "I feel it as well, and I am fully committed to making progress on an issue that has persisted for far too long in our society… and, yes, here at Google, too." If someone at the top is sincerely interested in resolving this satisfactorily, why the walk-out? I don't get it. Are they saying they don't really believe him?
- solipsism 8y ago
  Words are cheap.
  - buboard 8y ago
    and so are walkouts
    - tomjakubowski 8y ago
      are they? I'm sure someone could put a dollar figure on the productivity lost to Google by this action.
      - manfredo 8y ago
        Whatever loss of productivity would be immensely offset by the optics of taking actions against such a walk out.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    So is grandstanding by people with well paid, cushy as hell jobs who are happy to point fingers. My mother always told me "When you point a finger at others, you have three fingers pointing back at you." What are these people personally doing to ensure that they are respecting women, creating the right kind of social climate at work, etc? Because all the policy in the world can't per se fix a shitty culture. Shitty culture is as shitty culture does and it is perpetuated by every single individual in the organization and their individual choices. I'm not impressed with people who point fingers. They are usually people wanting someone else to fix a problem so they don't have to actually change.
jiveturkey 8y ago
Very disappointed with mainstream media coverage here. The walkout is being headlined as a complaint against harassment. It's not. It's a complaint against the company (rightly so) valuing its corporate reputation in the world in which we live vs standing behind the victims as if they were family, and going medieval (eg excommunication) on the harassers. Certainly there's a balance and perhaps google is on the wrong side of it, but don't kid yourself, google isn't going to take your insignificant side of it when the other side is a $100MM liability to an executive. That a walkout like this only happens at Google and not, say, microsoft, where surely sexual harassment also occurs and is also brushed aside, is telling about the employee culture at Google. It's sad that the media coverage is so trivial and can't look deeper. And to the organizers: you should have recruited tech workers at all FAANG to support this walkout. You missed a moment.
- tomcam 8y ago
  How do you know sexual harassment at Microsoft is brushed aside? (I haven't heard reports either way.)
  - jiveturkey 8y ago
    I don't know it for fact, but let's not be naive. The last reported (2017) makeup of $MSFT in the US was 75% male, overall, and 81% for tech workers. 63000 employees in the US and 131k worldwide. Do you really think that in an org that size with a demographic overwhelmingly skewed male, that there isn't sexual harassment going on? And lots of it unreported and lots of it dismissed?
    - tomcam 8y ago
      I assume there is harassment going on. I have no idea how much of it is and reported or dismissed. I worked there and saw absolutely none for four years, although that is not dispositive. Being old and a citizen of the USA I believe in the old-fashioned notion of innocent until proven guilty.
- hueving 8y ago
trhway 8y ago
Write a contrarian opinion - get publicly fired zero tolerance style, coerce for sex using the force of your position - get quietly paid $90M. Looks like Google thinks that the former is much worse than the latter. Either that, or they apply different sexual harassment policies for rank-and-file employees and executives.
- sah2ed 8y ago
  The first (Damore) was an engineer. The second (Rubin) was an executive. To Google, executive >> engineer hence the outrage by rank and file.
  - casefields 8y ago
    Don’t act like most of those rank and file support Damore in any way. There was a mob abrewing within that very group right before he was fired.
sizzle 8y ago
"A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously" Can anyone help me understand the rationale behind the anonymous part, with respect to due process and how the framework for anonymous accusations can be abused by bad actors? Edit- I have a question about the anonymous nature of reporting to HR, with respect to due process for the accuser and accused, maybe some of you can shed light on how you've seen it work in your experiences. I've heard stories in the past, with details I'm not privy to, where coworkers were let go based on anonymous HR sexual misconduct allegations. I really hope that due process is involved for the accused and not just a "guilty until proven innocent" situation. What I mean is that evidence by the accuser is judged along the lines of probable cause that our police force uses to arrest or judges use to prosecute e.g. inappropriate advances caught on tape, unwanted email/text/chat messages in line with allegations, eye witness statements corroborated by fellow co-worker, etc. There are a lot of introverted, socially awkward personality types in technical roles (on the spectrum?) with traits that can be perceived incorrectly, even negatively by neurotypical individuals and I fear the power of anonymous, "guilty until proven innocent" allegations standard that HR might start using to police the accused and trample on their right to due process since employment is at-will and you can be terminated for any reason, at any time, but in this situation you are ineligible for unemployment if it's recorded as misconduct.
- Harvey-Specter 8y ago
  It's probably meant to alleviate fear of retribution.
  - tomcam 8y ago
    I guess you missed the part of the question referring to due process
- gingerbread-man 8y ago
  Maybe they're referencing something like Callisto (YC Nonprofit W18): "Founders will be able to use Callisto to securely store the identities of perpetrators of sexual coercion and assault. These identities will be encrypted in a way that not even the Callisto team can view. If multiple founders name the same perpetrator, they will be referred to an attorney who can then decrypt the founder’s contact info and reach out to provide them with free advice on their options for coming forward, including the option to share information with other victims of the same perpetrator." Source: https://blog.ycombinator.com/survey-of-yc-female-founders-on-sexual-harassment-and-coercion-by-angel-and-vc-investors/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/survey-of-yc-female-founders-on...
IlCano 8y ago
Allow people to defend their or their relatives honour without punishment and most of the harrasment will be ni more.
PopsiclePete 8y ago
The DeVaul guy from Division X actually made sexual advances towards someone being interviewed for a job where he'd have been the manager. Has called it "an error in judgement". I'm sorry, DeVaul, but that's not "an error in judgement", that is pure harassment, and I'd pay $2000 to watch you try your "moves" on someone who'd knock your teeth in for that.
Simulacra 8y ago
...and then they went back in, got a free massage, some lovely free gourmet food, and back to work.

383 points by oneeyedpigeon 8y ago

Should they ask for the immediate termination of all past abusers and how high they should they go in the company?

n4r9 8y ago

Interesting to contrast this story with Damore's claims of left-wing bias and overemphasis on diversity and inclusion. It's uncomfortable exercise to put myself in the shoes of a young woman considering applying to Google; the prospect of unwanted advances from higher-ups and suspicions from the occasional peer of being hired for my gender might be enough to put me off completely.

kgwgk 8y ago
On the other hand, your chances of being hired would be higher...
sheepmullet 8y ago
> overemphasis on diversity and inclusion. Perhaps Google is overcompensating for allowing sexual harassment.
brobdingnagians 8y ago
The interesting thing is that the #MeToo movement naturally targeted a lot of liberals, because almost everyone in Hollywood is liberal. The right also has some issues with harassment, etc. but the left is far from immune to having it and in some ways has more trouble. I'm not sure why that is, but the "free love" and unrestrained sexual expression type culture of the left might have something to do with it.
- tootahe45 8y ago
  It's called white knighting, you see it a lot with feminist men who are often the abusers.
pjc50 8y ago
Easily enough explained by Google talking a lot and not actually doing anything until something blows up.

xfitm3 8y ago

What can you do.

devwastaken 8y ago
Typically that kind of evidence doesn't just make itself available due to the nature of the crime. If employees themselves are orchestrating protests, they probably have information we don't. You can't just start dropping names and slandering.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kaddio 8y ago
  A big mistake to believe those protestors are acting rationally. I'm not saying they are not, but assuming that they are is a mistake.
  - devwastaken 8y ago
    Those two lines of logic don't go together. If in your opinion it's a big mistake to believe they're rational, you are saying they're not being rational. There's no neutrality there. You can assume that there is unknown information being acted upon. Unless there's proof otherwise that the protest is lying you infact can and should assume it's authenticity. Or at the least not be involved without clear knowledge.
    - sheepmullet 8y ago
      > you infact can and should assume it's authenticity. Why should you?
      - devwastaken 8y ago
        Because you treat others as you expect to be treated, and respect your fellow human kind. We do this because if we have an issue we want to raise to everyone there will be people to help empower that. Given that the individuals protesting are employees about their workplace there is information we may not know, and given the history of mega corps violating rights it would be unreasonable to automatically trust the company over the workers putting themselves out there. If you have reason or evidence against, then by all means don't support the protest, but you should look at this from their perspective and at workers rights in general.

slivym 8y ago

All of their demands seem pretty reasonable. It looks like the big gripe is that basically there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. To draw an analogy, this would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable, so why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website.

YorkshireSeason 8y ago
The salient difference is that outages are measurable. In contrast, "harassment" is an extremely controversial subject that nobody agrees upon, for example, in some legislations, calling a person with XY chromosomes "him" rather than "her" is considered a hate crime, a dramatic change from labelling conventions of just a few years ago. Indeed what constitutes harassment is a major point of contention between different parts of the political spectrum, and a core part of the culture wars. In addition, harassment is easily lied about. Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims? If I was a Google competitor, and Machiavellian in moral outlook, I'd feed those flames to weaken Google, and hope that nobody did it to my organisation. Divide et Impera!
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims? You think all harassment claims should be automatically dismissed as false instead?
  - sheepmullet 8y ago
    > Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims? Because it quickly becomes a witch-hunt. It is hard enough to have a fair investigation within a proper court system and legal framework - it’s far more likely any Google process will end up as a kangaroo court than the process leading to any justice.
    - cimmanom 8y ago

mike22223333 8y ago

Google should just fire all of the employee protesters. This is getting out of hand. There are plenty of other people who are in the line and wont make a drama for the company.

rwmj 8y ago
Shouldn't employees have the right to collectively strike to get better conditions at work? There's a lot more at stake here than "drama for the company".
- mike22223333 8y ago
  No. If you are still a crybaby, you should not pursue the profession. Weak and entitled people have no position at the top. Your competitor will otherwise eliminate you. If you cannot solve the issue a bit of harassment without creating a drama, you cannot rise to the top where the world is even more cruel. Emotionally weak people have no place. If you cannot give favors or something when other are, no one will pick you. If someone is the CEO of a multi billion crop, and have 10 people on who could become the manager or VP, 5 are men 5 are women with everything being equal, who do they give the seat? The one who gives them a favor.
- anon1252 8y ago
  > Shouldn't employees have the right to collectively strike to get better conditions at work? There's a lot more at stake here than "drama for the company". Doesn't the employer have the right to fire them for any reason in any "at will job"?
  - steve_g 8y ago
    They can be fired for any lawful reason. It would be unlawful to fire employees for striking - with some exceptions. Striking employees can be replaced in order to get the work done, but that doesn't make sense for a one-day walkout.
  - mattlondon 8y ago
    I dont think that "at will" exists in all countries - e.g. in Europe I have been told by managers I've had in various employments that it is almost impossible to fire someone in Europe without either some serious misconduct (e.g. sexual harassment), or without first going through a lot of steps to try and not-fire the employee (e.g. performance improvement plans). I am not sure if that is true or not or if it applies to google employees, but I feel like there is a ring of truth in it.

ChrisRR 8y ago

So the first demand is "A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequality" I'd like to see the actual data behind this constant inequality claim. I would be genuinely interested to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs. I've heard speculation that women don't argue for higher salaries as much as men, I've also heard that the data is never accurate because it doesn't compare the same jobs. I want to see some actual numbers so people can figure out where the issue actually lies.

JacobJans 8y ago
That's what they're asking for too: more data.
- criddell 8y ago
  If any company has the data, it's Google. If they had a good story to tell, I think they'd be sharing that data.
  - rongenre 8y ago
    Google has refused and insisted "It's too hard" to release this data.
brobdingnagians 8y ago
Time magazine, which doesn't exactly seem to be a bastion of conservatism, had an article about this http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/ http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/ , which had more hard-facts than anyone else I've seen, but the conclusion was that most of the claims made by the wage gap supporters are cherrypicked and false. Although, if Google specifically has a problem with it, I'd definitely be willing to listen. If they are protecting people like Rubin, it does seem plausible that other things could be going on.
- ChrisRR 8y ago
  I feel if anyone has enough employees with similar roles, at similar levels to pull together this kind of data, it's a big company like Google

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

VBprogrammer 8y ago

Wouldn't it be easier to create an algorithm for compensation which clearly didn't involve gender (i.e. no deep learning stuff). Something which boils down to base salary + experience factor + google service factor. Honestly, I can imagine that being less troublesome even outside of attempting to be fair an equitable regardless of race / gender / sexual orientation.

amiga-workbench 8y ago
How do you quantify experience? It cannot be empirically measured in all the ways that it matters.
- VBprogrammer 8y ago
  Do you think even the most basic measure, say number of years, is any worse than the current process?
  - gambiting 8y ago
    Of course! Have you never met a programmer who had ~20 years of experience but actually was extremely weak at programming? Even the most basic of interviews would disqualify them from the job, but an ML algorithm can give them huge points on the "experience" alone.
    - VBprogrammer 8y ago
      I too have encountered developers with many years of experience and little programming skill. But in those cases I'd not hire them; or if they made it through the net I'd put them on a performance improvement plan and begin the process of firing them.
      - gambiting 8y ago
        I don't know where you live, but at least in EU the cost of hiring the wrong person is monstrous. Unless they were literally caught stealing and you can fire them for gross negligance, you are looking at months of "performance improvement plans", when both of you know that it won't actually improve anything. All while you are paying them full salary, national insurance, tax etc, and also sinking in the time of another employee who now has to deal with the situation. It's extremely critical to not hire those people in the first place, and I would not trust an algorithm to do that.

ddebernardy 8y ago

https://twitter.com/GoogleWalkout/status/1057804203895283712 https://twitter.com/GoogleWalkout/status/1057804203895283712 ^ Might be a better source article.

ryanmercer 8y ago

These people should be fired, not because they want equal pay but because they refuse to do the job they were hired to do. Different genders deserve equal pay, people of different races deserve equal pay, people with various disabilities deserve equal pay. HOWEVER, you want to walk out of work? You should be terminated. If I walked out of work, I would be fired. If I organized several people to walk out of work with me, we would be fired. This is the case at my current job and at every single job I've ever had. You don't change things by striking, in my book this is effectively corporate terrorism "hey we have demands, if you don't meet them we aren't working!" If someone strikes, you can never trust that employee again. Ever. You can not count on that employee in any situation because they've demonstrated that they will happily stop working when it serves their desires. What you do is you make the issue publicly known, you do it in a positive way, you do it in a polite way. You ask for change and if change won't be given, you find an employer that will even if that means moving or starting your own business. I'm all for equal rights, I'm all for equal pay, I'm not for people holding businesses hostage by refusing to do the job they were paid to do.

maaaats 8y ago
You are lucky that someone else risked their jobs to put you in a position where you can spout this. If it weren't for unions and strikes, the common worker would have been much worse off.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  You realize most of the labor unions that made meaningful reform were in factories yes? Factories that simply would not exist today because most of the work has been replaced with automation and equipment orders of magnitudes more efficient, yes?
pjc50 8y ago
> You don't change things by striking, Traditionally union action including strikes has been the only way to make changes in big employers.
- 8y ago

qubax 8y ago

"A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity"? I'm confused here. Are they demanding that preferential hiring and advancement practices and programs for women and certain minorities be stopped?

alexis_fr 8y ago
As you can see, the divide is becoming greater between ones who “believe” and ones who “don’t”, and the audience is massively imposing a bias here in this thread. We’ve lost our ability to listen to each other, and it’s sad that it happened on a topic which is still very easy to judge using science.
- debacle 8y ago
  Most reasonable people on HN stay out of these threads. You're not going to change anyone's mind at this point.
  - ergothus 8y ago
    I think it is true that you wont change most people's minds. (When I discovered the psychological concept of schema, I was literally horrified) But some of us are discovering that what we thought of as "normal" (and thus forms the basis of many of of our value judgements) is quite narrow, so we have to adjust our expectations and that changes a lot of things... getting perspectives from others is a necessary and tedious process. Im in my early 40s and despite thinking I was pretty liberal on most social issues I've spent the last 10 years discovering I've been wrong, poorly informed, and/or ignorant on a lot of details. At this rate, I dont expect to be done with these self-updates anytime soon, and reasoned arguments and shared experiences, fears, concerns, and hopes are essential for me to re-determine where I now stand, each and every day. Just as an example, another comment made an argument about why the market would theoretically prefer underpaid staff. (Which would then not make them underpaid). A good point, but irreconciable with pay gap data...how do I resolve that? Ah, someone replied with a decent response about the issue BEING perceived value. Armed with these positions I can now spend a few minutes of much more effective research, and have better chances of noticing details in my day-to-day life. For people who are tired of rehashing the same old arguments with data and answers that are out there for anyone serious to find...it's actually quite hard to find if you dont really know the question, and as unfair as it is, there is a limit to how much time and effort will people will spend grasping at straws about how they themselves might be reinforcing terrible systems. Implicit bias is IMPLICIT and thus it is hard to find out what your biased thoughts are. Effective arguments dramatically reduce that time and effort, and even if most wont take them for that final step, some of us are trying, and are grateful to those that are willing to once again rehash the "obvious" with those that are unlikely to change their minds.

StudentStuff 8y ago

There is no will from upper management to handle these issues appropriately, which is part of why Google as an organization is in its current state. Google has been able to paper over issues with copious amounts of money thus far, but that is breaking down as time goes on.

geofft 8y ago
I think it is more than that: there is a will from upper management to actively prevent such issues from being handled appropriately. > Larry and Sergey had like this gaggle of girls who were hot, and all become like their little harem of admins, I call them the L&S Harem, yes. All those girls are now different heads of departments in that company, years later. > Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around. > H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-excerpt-google https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-exc...
- sidcool 8y ago
  This is pretty explosive. I had no idea of this. Is there an alternate source to the claims?
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  holy shit. i hadn't seen that before. HR seems to have been completely captured by the forces it was supposed to resist.
  - wombatpm 8y ago
    HR is never there for the employee. They exist to protect the Company. They give lip service to protecting and nurturing the employees and our people are our most precious asset BS. The only time HR will go after any of the big boys is when they are on the outs with the board. Example: Mark Hurd when he was forced out at HP.

rurban 8y ago

Sounds like pre-unionizing to me. Wonder where this will lead to...

rwmj 8y ago
Hopefully to more people in tech joining unions. Plenty of other well-paid professions are unionised (eg. doctors). For full disclosure I've been a member of Prospect, a non-affiliated union in the UK, for a few years. One of the advantages is free access to legal advice about employment issues.
- kerbalspacepro 8y ago
  The unionisation of doctors in America is one of the reasons that the American healthcare system is so bad though. Maybe we shouldn't encourage any industry to increase its inefficiency by unionizing, and instead just offer a set of universal regulations that keep workers (both skilled and unskilled alike) from getting shafted?
  - nradov 8y ago
    Very few American doctors are unionized. If you're referring to the AMA, it is specifically not a union.
    - kerbalspacepro 8y ago
      If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... well, let me quote the Atlantic's Matthew Stewart: >You see, when educated people with excellent credentials band together to advance their collective interest, it’s all part of serving the public good by ensuring a high quality of service, establishing fair working conditions, and giving merit its due. That’s why we do it through “associations,” and with the assistance of fellow professionals wearing white shoes. When working-class people do it—through unions—it’s a violation of the sacred principles of the free market.
- eqdw 8y ago
  Most tech offices (google included) already give all employees free access to legal resources. It's called an EAP (Employee Assistance Program)

readhn 8y ago

"there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. ...why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website." there is an interesting tendency that many psychologists pointed out: in many professions for some reason psychopaths tend to get to the top an stay there. Specifically CEOs tend to be people with most psychopathic traits: https://www.businessinsider.com/professions-with-the-most-psychopaths-2018-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/professions-with-the-most-ps... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisdom-Psychopaths-Saints-Killers-Success-ebook/dp/B007NKN9U8?tag=skim0x70967-21 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisdom-Psychopaths-Saints-Killers-S... Now consider for a second, if you have psychopaths with money running the companies - why would they be interested in well being of their employees? I am not saying every CEO is a psycho, but many are (as research shows): https://hbr.org/2004/10/executive-psychopaths https://hbr.org/2004/10/executive-psychopaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-disturbing-link-between-psychopathy-and-leadership/#2e2a21734104 https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dis...

rustcharm 8y ago

How do these protestors know the facts of the matter better than the people who investigated?

sridca 8y ago
If you haven't noticed humans are yet to value facts over emotions.
ummonk 8y ago
The facts are not in dispute by the people who investigated. They found the allegation credible.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > The facts are not in dispute by the people who investigated That is not established. > They found the allegation credible. “Credible” is not “true”; it is quite possible to find both a claim and it's negation to be credible.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    Yes, but even if the specic allegation was not true, his whole relationship with someone he had power over was highly inappropriate. Unfortunately though, given that the senior leadership had a history of engaging in such inappropriate relationships, Google’s action here is to be expected.

duxup 8y ago

To clarify I'm not disagreeing with the walk out. I do wonder if any reporting process at a company can ever really be trusted to have the employee's interests in mind. HR, legal, and etc all are there to protect the company. They're not there for your standard employee. Again, not disagreeing with having a process, I just wonder if a process handled by the typical parties really can be trusted. I've never felt that HR, legal, or any of those departments are there FOR me. Rather they are there to prevent any problems the company may have, and that is not likely to be in my interests if I were to make a complaint about something.

sjg007 8y ago
They aren't there for you but for the company. They are really only there for you in any way that protects the company. Having a neutral third party would be one idea. It would have to be funded by employee and employer contributions though. Outside of that you have the EEOC in the US that has some authority.

justaguyhere 8y ago

How is this handled at other biggies in the valley - Apple, Microsoft etc? Do they also have the arbitration thing? There was an awesome site on the front page yesterday, that compared career levels in the companies. Someone should make one comparing these companies on things like - treatment of women/minorities, age discrimination, side project policies, access to upper management etc

Analemma_ 8y ago
Microsoft used to require arbitration but got rid of it earlier this year after the deserved outcry. Apple still has it AFAIK.
shareometry 8y ago
I have never understood why employees accept the restrictive clauses which assign ownership for any side projects to the employer. I am not a lawyer, but this has always struck me as amounting to a type of serfdom. If you are seen as a 24/7 unit of the company, and anything at all that you creatively produce can be claimed by the company, then your working capacity and creative capacity is essentially owned entirely by the company while you are employed there. You are not being paid just for your time and the work product you produce during that time. Rather you are literally selling an aspect of yourself. Does that sound reasonable at all? (of course, California has some protections against this. but that's just one state) I would really like to see people rallying against many more things like this.
- dev_dull 8y ago
  They tolerate it because it’s largely unenforceable.
  - justaguyhere 8y ago
    That is one reason. Many people aren't even aware of such draconian policies they are signing up for. And companies are probably counting on it too. It is also possible that even the owners of the company (especially small, family owned companies) aren't aware of these dumb policies. They just trust their lawyers to write up the contracts. There was a comment recently on HN - employee reads up the contract, goes to the owner to ask about some clause, and the owner himself is surprised and calls the lawyer to sort it out. Big companies that spend shit ton of money on lawyers have no excuse - they're likely doing all this intentionally.

vynyl 8y ago

Google needs to stand firm against these policies. Making the "chief diversity officer" answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations to the board of directors is an absurd demand. They would open themselves up to huge amounts of foreign manipulation and political sabotage.

drdeadringer 8y ago
> They would open themselves up to huge amounts of foreign manipulation and political sabotage. I'd like to know how you envision this happening. Like, China calls Google's CDO and says "We'd love to see more Chinese hires, we might consider sending you a welcome-back invitation"?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >I'd like to know how you envision this happening Botnets of fake social media accounts for starters. You think if they are currently manipulating political elections they won't ever try and use similar tactics to tank a company? China: "Google give us user data!" Google: "No way!" China: "PLA Unit 61398, hurt the Google! Make accusations! Lots of accusations! Many many many accusations!" ---- China: "State media, run articles about how the evil uncivilized Google makes a hostile environment for female/gay/green cardigan wearing employees!" --- China: "Movie studios, make this romantic comedy but be sure to vilify a company identical to Google!" --- China: "People's Worker, scour the internet for any controversial quote from any corporate member of Google, great, yes, that! PLA Unit 61398, have an account 'discover' this quote and use the botnet to get it trending!"
  - drdeadringer 8y ago
    ... but some of these examples happen already. How is a CDO reporting to the CEO going to amplify any already magnified negative PR and force action?

shados 8y ago

Something Ive never understood (not in the sense of I dont agree. What I really mean is I'm uneducated on the topic and would like to find out more, but my searches returned little, since it's a pretty heated topic), is why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this. Maybe for light cases where someone just need a stern talking to, but a lot of the cases are downright criminal acts. Having a private entity that has a vested interest in the events seem...unwise. Shouldn't it be better to have law enforcement handle it, and have companies forced to cooperate instead? Like, if it's someone who said something slightly inappropriate/gray area to another and just needs a stern talking to, sure. Have a process/HR deal with it. But so many occurrences are so much worse than that... Not the same situation at all, but similar reasoning: I once had a colleague corner me in the office because of a disagreement in a meeting earlier in the day, where they threatened to "meet me outside to settle things". I mentioned it to my boss/HR/etc, and sure enough, they told me to just talk it out with them and were generally useless. I ended up having to quit. In hindsight, it wasn't my boss I needed to talk to, it was the freagin cops. (Not, of course, cops are frequently useless too, and that's a separate problem...but if we have to change the world somewhere, maybe pushing it all on private entities isn't the best thing to do in this case).

kiliantics 8y ago
As you point out, the cops are often useless too. Now imagine you call the cops on your boss and they show up to talk with him/her. How might your boss be treating you after this?
- kazagistar 8y ago
  The same is true for HR; that's why there is additional rles around retaliation.
notyourwork 8y ago
Sadly the police don’t have the resources to go “investigate” every time someone said let’s settle this outside. Where do you drawn the line for stern talking and police investigation. Your idea sounds good in theory but in practice doesn’t work.

Kiro 8y ago

I support this but I also wish other companies would be under the same scrutiny as Google. I've been at companies where women not only were paid much much less but also more or less objects that were openly treated as such. There would be management meetings about rating the sexiest coworkers and who could lay down the most (obviously not a single woman in whole of management and they had no chance of moving even close to it in their career). All sanctioned from the highest level and not a single person would dare to question it. I was not actively participating but also part of the problem since I didn't say anything. This was not even done in secret and more or less public knowledge. The communication from management had a lot of sexist jokes and pictures and anyone questioning it "had no humor". Mind you, this was not a tech company per say and I believe the further you get from tech the worse it gets. I think it's sad that the huge problem affecting 99% of women gets reduced to a single company which probably is one of the few in the world that even has a code of conduct against this stuff.

tylerl 8y ago

This entire protest would have generally been a non-event if the company hadn't sent out a memo telling managers to accommodate people who want to participate, ensure there is no retaliation or penalty, be flexible with schedules, etc., effectively advertising the event to everyone in the process. So then it looks like employees are being unsupportive of their co-workers if they don't participate. Which sort of shuffles the understanding of a "walk out" to be a far cry from the sort of thing that happened in the union days, and puts this firmly in the Just Google Things category, where even protesting the company becomes an activity that the company officially supports.

Animats 8y ago
Oh. So they're not all going to be fired.
adrianmonk 8y ago
One view is that management knows that and did it anyway. Perhaps they felt it was worth letting it be a bigger event and taking a PR hit if in return what they get is that the employees feel that the company supports them.
- Balgair 8y ago
  Good Machiavellian way to oust competing managers as well. Personally, that would be a horrible thing to do to another person, but then again, we know at least some of these managers kept silent during this whole fiasco; we're not talking about saints here.

thatgerhard 8y ago

this is why we are all going to be replaced by machines.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

tareqak 8y ago

Another article: We’re the Organizers of the Google Walkout. Here Are Our Demands https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-explain-demands.html https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-exp...

samstave 8y ago

I'd wager that the walkout was over the $2,000,000 a month paid to Rubin. Also, people claimed that the payment was to keep Rubin from working with competitors... But some others say that it was to buy his silence over what others might have been doing...

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I don't understand this at all. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has told staff he supports their right to take the action. "I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel," he said in an all-staff email. "I feel it as well, and I am fully committed to making progress on an issue that has persisted for far too long in our society… and, yes, here at Google, too." If someone at the top is sincerely interested in resolving this satisfactorily, why the walk-out? I don't get it. Are they saying they don't really believe him?

solipsism 8y ago
Words are cheap.
- buboard 8y ago
  and so are walkouts
  - tomjakubowski 8y ago
    are they? I'm sure someone could put a dollar figure on the productivity lost to Google by this action.
    - manfredo 8y ago
      Whatever loss of productivity would be immensely offset by the optics of taking actions against such a walk out.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  So is grandstanding by people with well paid, cushy as hell jobs who are happy to point fingers. My mother always told me "When you point a finger at others, you have three fingers pointing back at you." What are these people personally doing to ensure that they are respecting women, creating the right kind of social climate at work, etc? Because all the policy in the world can't per se fix a shitty culture. Shitty culture is as shitty culture does and it is perpetuated by every single individual in the organization and their individual choices. I'm not impressed with people who point fingers. They are usually people wanting someone else to fix a problem so they don't have to actually change.

jiveturkey 8y ago

Very disappointed with mainstream media coverage here. The walkout is being headlined as a complaint against harassment. It's not. It's a complaint against the company (rightly so) valuing its corporate reputation in the world in which we live vs standing behind the victims as if they were family, and going medieval (eg excommunication) on the harassers. Certainly there's a balance and perhaps google is on the wrong side of it, but don't kid yourself, google isn't going to take your insignificant side of it when the other side is a $100MM liability to an executive. That a walkout like this only happens at Google and not, say, microsoft, where surely sexual harassment also occurs and is also brushed aside, is telling about the employee culture at Google. It's sad that the media coverage is so trivial and can't look deeper. And to the organizers: you should have recruited tech workers at all FAANG to support this walkout. You missed a moment.

tomcam 8y ago
How do you know sexual harassment at Microsoft is brushed aside? (I haven't heard reports either way.)
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  I don't know it for fact, but let's not be naive. The last reported (2017) makeup of $MSFT in the US was 75% male, overall, and 81% for tech workers. 63000 employees in the US and 131k worldwide. Do you really think that in an org that size with a demographic overwhelmingly skewed male, that there isn't sexual harassment going on? And lots of it unreported and lots of it dismissed?
  - tomcam 8y ago
    I assume there is harassment going on. I have no idea how much of it is and reported or dismissed. I worked there and saw absolutely none for four years, although that is not dispositive. Being old and a citizen of the USA I believe in the old-fashioned notion of innocent until proven guilty.
hueving 8y ago

trhway 8y ago

Write a contrarian opinion - get publicly fired zero tolerance style, coerce for sex using the force of your position - get quietly paid $90M. Looks like Google thinks that the former is much worse than the latter. Either that, or they apply different sexual harassment policies for rank-and-file employees and executives.

sah2ed 8y ago
The first (Damore) was an engineer. The second (Rubin) was an executive. To Google, executive >> engineer hence the outrage by rank and file.
- casefields 8y ago
  Don’t act like most of those rank and file support Damore in any way. There was a mob abrewing within that very group right before he was fired.

sizzle 8y ago

"A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously" Can anyone help me understand the rationale behind the anonymous part, with respect to due process and how the framework for anonymous accusations can be abused by bad actors? Edit- I have a question about the anonymous nature of reporting to HR, with respect to due process for the accuser and accused, maybe some of you can shed light on how you've seen it work in your experiences. I've heard stories in the past, with details I'm not privy to, where coworkers were let go based on anonymous HR sexual misconduct allegations. I really hope that due process is involved for the accused and not just a "guilty until proven innocent" situation. What I mean is that evidence by the accuser is judged along the lines of probable cause that our police force uses to arrest or judges use to prosecute e.g. inappropriate advances caught on tape, unwanted email/text/chat messages in line with allegations, eye witness statements corroborated by fellow co-worker, etc. There are a lot of introverted, socially awkward personality types in technical roles (on the spectrum?) with traits that can be perceived incorrectly, even negatively by neurotypical individuals and I fear the power of anonymous, "guilty until proven innocent" allegations standard that HR might start using to police the accused and trample on their right to due process since employment is at-will and you can be terminated for any reason, at any time, but in this situation you are ineligible for unemployment if it's recorded as misconduct.

Harvey-Specter 8y ago
It's probably meant to alleviate fear of retribution.
- tomcam 8y ago
  I guess you missed the part of the question referring to due process
gingerbread-man 8y ago
Maybe they're referencing something like Callisto (YC Nonprofit W18): "Founders will be able to use Callisto to securely store the identities of perpetrators of sexual coercion and assault. These identities will be encrypted in a way that not even the Callisto team can view. If multiple founders name the same perpetrator, they will be referred to an attorney who can then decrypt the founder’s contact info and reach out to provide them with free advice on their options for coming forward, including the option to share information with other victims of the same perpetrator." Source: https://blog.ycombinator.com/survey-of-yc-female-founders-on-sexual-harassment-and-coercion-by-angel-and-vc-investors/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/survey-of-yc-female-founders-on...

IlCano 8y ago

Allow people to defend their or their relatives honour without punishment and most of the harrasment will be ni more.

PopsiclePete 8y ago

The DeVaul guy from Division X actually made sexual advances towards someone being interviewed for a job where he'd have been the manager. Has called it "an error in judgement". I'm sorry, DeVaul, but that's not "an error in judgement", that is pure harassment, and I'd pay $2000 to watch you try your "moves" on someone who'd knock your teeth in for that.

Simulacra 8y ago

...and then they went back in, got a free massage, some lovely free gourmet food, and back to work.