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Google has fired a few people, liberal and conservative, for being politically insufferable. Multiple people in the news about this on various places in politic
by gameswithgo 6y ago
Google has fired a few people, liberal and conservative, for being politically insufferable. Multiple people in the news about this on various places in political spectrum. It doesn’t mean they were wrong.
- coldtea 6y ago>for being politically insufferable In other words for hurting their bottom line by demanding Google be better (each in their preferred way) for society and its employees?
- jefftk 6y agoFiring organizers was an example of that: https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/google-fired-us-for-organizing-were-fighting-back-d0daa8113aed https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/google-fired-us-for-organi... I don't think firing Damore was? (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
- rendall 6y agoJeff, I work for Google HR. Let's have a chat on Monday morning, please. Edit: It is a joke. I am joking. I don't work for Google HR, and poor Jeff is not up for an HR "chat". Even if the poor fellow were actually in trouble with a spectacularly uptight HR person, I doubt they would contact him through HN.
- bradleyjg 6y ago> In other words for hurting their bottom line by demanding Google be better (each in their preferred way) for society and its employees? Yes? If I hired someone to clean my apartment and instead of cleaning my apartment he or she spent the whole time writing up long diatribes demanding that I be better, per his or her understanding, for society and my employees you can bet I would not be hiring that cleaner again!
- ak39 6y agoLet's continue with your cleaner analogy: You hired the cleaner to clean. They do their job as per agreement. You are satisfied and so are they. Then one day they find out that in addition to cleaning normal office mess, they are now cleaning blood. Blood from victims of the company's activities. Should they remain ignorant of the company's real societal impact? Should they voice their opinions to fellow cleaners? Should they take advantage of the purported freedom to speak their minds their companies advertised during their hiring? Life rarely offers us an easy black or white judgment on complex realities.
- tzs 6y agoI may be misremembering, but wasn’t Damore’s post to an internal list Google specifically set up to solicit feedback on diversity?
- bradleyjg 6y agoTo cut to the chase, I do think there’s a certain amount of dishonesty in the typical Silicon Valley corporate culture. But to my mind it is far more reasonable to ask that companies not engage in this dishonesty rather than asking that they live up to it. Bring your whole self to work is ridiculous and unworkable. No one can run a successful business if their employees are spending all day debating philosophy on internal message boards.
- AzzieElbab 6y agoHow would a geek with 0 real life experience outside Google know that? It is not what they told him about "internal discussions".
- roenxi 6y agoI get a strong impression that there is some begging of the question going on in that line. If someone disagrees with them, then the generic activist doesn't get automatically get cast as trying to better society. Philosophically, without specific cases, their opinions can only be equal to their opponents. "Bettering society" is supremely complicated. There are some weird legal traditions, eg, rules of evidence, which are better for society but they sure don't look like it in the small.
- jacobmoe 6y agoThere's been endless discussion about Damore. In particular podcasts you'd think that the firing of a random engineer at Google ranked alongside 9/11 as a defining event in modern history. If I circulated a memo to my co-workers that not only opposed a new policy from management, but did obvious harm to the expressed intent of that policy, I might be fired. It doesn't matter if the memo I circulated would have gotten a passing grade in a college class. The fact that people use that as an argument tells me that they've never worked a normal job before.
- martin_bech 6y agoThe fact you wrote this comment, tells me, that you never read his memo.
- CydeWeys 6y agoI did read the memo and this synopsis of it reads true to me in broad strokes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jacobmoe 6y agoHow so, I didn't say anything about the content of the memo? Or you disagree that it did obvious harm to Google's policy on gender? We know that female employees received the memo and stated that it made them feel excluded, which did harm to the intent of the policy. That's not really debatable is it?
- humanrebar 6y agoThe phrasing implied that Damore willfully created that harm. It's a simpler explanation, at the time of authorship, that he did not expect the reaction it got. It seemed to be an attempt to explain his logic in an inoffensive way, in fact.
- 6y ago
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoWho are the high-profile liberals that got fired from Google; I can't think of any, but the only person I can recall Google firing for political views is Damore. I wouldn't be surprised if they had filed any liberals; but they certainly didn't get equivalent media coverage as Damore.
- michael_j_ward 6y agoMaybe not "liberal" but certainly "not-conservative" https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/25/20983053/google-fires-four-employees-memo-rebecca-rivers-laurence-berland-union-busting-accusation-walkout https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/25/20983053/google-fires-fo...
- UncleMeat 6y agoSeveral of the walkout organizers as well as people agitating against projects they didn’t agree with, including coordinating with perceived authoritarian states. It was all over the news.
- ashtonkem 6y agoSometimes the tallest blade of grass gets cut.