10 ms·

Always assume that what you say could be on the front page of the New York Times.

CydeWeys 6y ago
This is literally part of Noogler orientation at Google, word for word, and I'm sure at many other companies too. I sure as hell don't write screeds at work, only design docs that would be completely uninteresting to national media.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago
  Hopefully every other part of your online life is under a difficult to guess pseudonym if you write anything even remotely controversial, because the social justice mob is only looking for scalps, not justice.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Not sure how that's relevant here. He published under his real name, at work.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      Maybe the lesson here, then, is "If a company really wants honest discussion of controversial ideas, they should provide a means for people to carry out those discussions with anonymity." A similar thing happened at a company I worked for, where the new COO wanted to make a name for himself by creating an "ask the CEO" email address which any employee could write a question to. Answers would then be shared (anonymously) with the whole company each week at a regular "town hall" meeting. Seeing the potential for the company to abuse this medium, I stayed late one night and whipped up a web page on a dev server which allowed people to write questions without giving their name or email address, and the page would then use a generic account to forward the question to the "ask the CEO" address. A spark of wisdom in my mind did prompt me to personally email the COO first with a link to this site, asking for permission, but after 24 hours passed without a reply, I decided to send the link out to everyone in the company... Shortly after that, a friendly colleague from the Ops team informed me that his boss (who saw himself as the enforcer of company discipline) had demanded that the dev server hosting the website be shut down and my access revoked. I took the hint and moved the files on the server so that the link 404'ed. From the tech support emails I received after that, it seemed that there were at least a few colleagues that were interested in making use of my anonymisation service. The COO did eventually email back with a short reply along the lines of "This wasn't what I was expecting", and later, at the next town hall meeting, he explained that his belief in "transparency" meant that the company was prepared to answer questions, but equally meant that they demanded to know the identities of the questioners.
      - CydeWeys 6y ago
        From your story it sounds like you already know this, but most companies really do not want broad discussions of controversial ideas, especially not ones entirely outside the remit of the employees participating in them.
pjc50 6y ago
Indeed. Never assume that anything you write at work on a work computer won't be seen by your manager or used against you. Even if it's supposedly confidential correspondence with HR or protected labour organisation, and theoretically illegal for them to access. Even if it's personal info under GDPR. And especially not if you post it to a huge internal mailing list. (I'm also curious as to what the overlap is between believers in "at-will firing is great and there should be no notice requirements on employers" and "Damore should have had far more process before being fired")
banads 6y ago
And also assume anything you say can/will be purposefully taken out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade, or to generate revenue for a dying industry which is incentivized to cater to the lowest common denominator just to survive.
- jlebar 6y ago
  Literally his whole memo was posted online, in full. I struggle to understand the context that was missing.
  - hackissimo123 6y ago
    The first website to publish his memo (Gizmodo) removed all the graphs and citations, meaning that a great many people who read the memo did not read it in full.
    - jlebar 6y ago
      And to you this constitutes reporting that was "purposefully out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade"?
      - hackissimo123 6y ago
        Well I wouldn't put it that strongly (I didn't write the post you're quoting), but it hardly demonstrates journalistic integrity. (But then what would you expect from a site that's just Gawker rebranded?) For an example of "reporting" that comes closer to what you describe in your quote, I'd point to the pile of hot garbage that former Google exec (and deranged lunatic) Yonatan Zunger posted on Medium.com, which was very widely shared and cited in the weeks following Damoregate.
        jlebar 6y ago
        Suppose we had data that we agreed was reliable showing that women software engineers who had read Damore's memo and Yonatan's post would overwhelmingly be unwilling to work with Damore and overwhelmingly be willing to work with Yonatan. I'm not saying I have this data, but just hypothetically, suppose we did. Would this at all influence your judgements (e.g. "deranged lunatic") of them? Why or why not?
humanrebar 6y ago
I'll point out that this aphorism concedes that certain categories of interesting discussion are not possible, and it's a little neutral about that prospect for my taste. It also concedes that "The New York Times" cannot be trusted to value that kind of discourse more than gotcha narrative chasing.
- pjc50 6y ago
  All sorts of discussion aren't possible unless the participants can be sure that the others are acting in good faith and not likely to engage in needless hostility or reprisals outside the discussion. The term for this environment is "safe space", but they're unpopular for some reason.
  - atq2119 6y ago
    I would rephrase that to say that "safe space" should be the term for such environments, but in practice that's problematic. The term was specifically invented to describe spaces where certain discussions are forbidden because they could be "triggering". It was not invented to describe a space where discussion is possible without unilateral escalation to unrelated third parties. I suspect that a healthy society needs both kinds of safe spaces.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    No, “safe space” has long been taken over to indicate spaces where people can be without worrying about being exposed to an idea that triggers a sensitive area for them regardless of intent or good faith.
roenxi 6y ago
Engineering is where most of the people go who care more about being right than about what people think of them. There is a reason for that - it usually matters if an approach is right or not in engineering work. Companies like Google need to be able to roll their eyes when engineers start stupid arguments, not sack them. The front-page rule is a technical impediment to people being able to figure out facts. The path to the truth often leads through patches of believing things that are wrong. Charging into a room trying to start an argument isn't the best way to work out what is true; but there are young engineers who are going to try it because they are under a lot of pressure to be technically correct and not under a lot of pressure to be socially savvy. They're in the process of learning that it isn't politically feasible. Even a full blown "Engineer holds crackpot opinion!" should never be front page news unless it is a risk of a building fallen down. Let alone "Young Engineer tries to start a Stupid Argument".
- wpietri 6y ago
  This wasn't emacs vs vi. Damore's goal was to materially affect who got hired and how they were treated. That's quite a lot of people, and at one of the world's most prominent companies. Nobody can reasonably expect that he should be able to play at that level and have it be consequence-free when it doesn't go his way. Damore is welcome to have crackpot opinions. He's even welcome to express crackpot opinions on his own time. But what he was doing was vigorous workplace activism. Activism that not only contradicted the goals of Google execs and the bulk of its employees, but was carried out in a way that actively damaged ongoing Google efforts and caused a significant workplace disruption. You could argue that Google's management made a mistake in allowing a young engineer this much power in the first place. Or by not reining him in earlier. But rolling their eyes was never an option here because Damore was having a significant negative effect on the company.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    Acknowledging that men and women are different, and that reverse discrimination is not an effective solution, is crackpot to you? I would contest that such a denial of reality is what is crackpot. It’s hilarious that you call what he was doing activism.
tootie 6y ago
Consider the recent kerkuffle with the CEO of Away. She didn't tread on any political or cultural landmines. Just decided to treat her workers like shit and do it on open Slack channels.
afiori 6y ago
While this is a good advice, it is a terrible response after the fact.

This is literally part of Noogler orientation at Google, word for word, and I'm sure at many other companies too. I sure as hell don't write screeds at work, only design docs that would be completely uninteresting to national media.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago
Hopefully every other part of your online life is under a difficult to guess pseudonym if you write anything even remotely controversial, because the social justice mob is only looking for scalps, not justice.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Not sure how that's relevant here. He published under his real name, at work.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    Maybe the lesson here, then, is "If a company really wants honest discussion of controversial ideas, they should provide a means for people to carry out those discussions with anonymity." A similar thing happened at a company I worked for, where the new COO wanted to make a name for himself by creating an "ask the CEO" email address which any employee could write a question to. Answers would then be shared (anonymously) with the whole company each week at a regular "town hall" meeting. Seeing the potential for the company to abuse this medium, I stayed late one night and whipped up a web page on a dev server which allowed people to write questions without giving their name or email address, and the page would then use a generic account to forward the question to the "ask the CEO" address. A spark of wisdom in my mind did prompt me to personally email the COO first with a link to this site, asking for permission, but after 24 hours passed without a reply, I decided to send the link out to everyone in the company... Shortly after that, a friendly colleague from the Ops team informed me that his boss (who saw himself as the enforcer of company discipline) had demanded that the dev server hosting the website be shut down and my access revoked. I took the hint and moved the files on the server so that the link 404'ed. From the tech support emails I received after that, it seemed that there were at least a few colleagues that were interested in making use of my anonymisation service. The COO did eventually email back with a short reply along the lines of "This wasn't what I was expecting", and later, at the next town hall meeting, he explained that his belief in "transparency" meant that the company was prepared to answer questions, but equally meant that they demanded to know the identities of the questioners.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      From your story it sounds like you already know this, but most companies really do not want broad discussions of controversial ideas, especially not ones entirely outside the remit of the employees participating in them.

pjc50 6y ago

Indeed. Never assume that anything you write at work on a work computer won't be seen by your manager or used against you. Even if it's supposedly confidential correspondence with HR or protected labour organisation, and theoretically illegal for them to access. Even if it's personal info under GDPR. And especially not if you post it to a huge internal mailing list. (I'm also curious as to what the overlap is between believers in "at-will firing is great and there should be no notice requirements on employers" and "Damore should have had far more process before being fired")

banads 6y ago

And also assume anything you say can/will be purposefully taken out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade, or to generate revenue for a dying industry which is incentivized to cater to the lowest common denominator just to survive.

jlebar 6y ago
Literally his whole memo was posted online, in full. I struggle to understand the context that was missing.
- hackissimo123 6y ago
  The first website to publish his memo (Gizmodo) removed all the graphs and citations, meaning that a great many people who read the memo did not read it in full.
  - jlebar 6y ago
    And to you this constitutes reporting that was "purposefully out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade"?
    - hackissimo123 6y ago
      Well I wouldn't put it that strongly (I didn't write the post you're quoting), but it hardly demonstrates journalistic integrity. (But then what would you expect from a site that's just Gawker rebranded?) For an example of "reporting" that comes closer to what you describe in your quote, I'd point to the pile of hot garbage that former Google exec (and deranged lunatic) Yonatan Zunger posted on Medium.com, which was very widely shared and cited in the weeks following Damoregate.
      - jlebar 6y ago
        Suppose we had data that we agreed was reliable showing that women software engineers who had read Damore's memo and Yonatan's post would overwhelmingly be unwilling to work with Damore and overwhelmingly be willing to work with Yonatan. I'm not saying I have this data, but just hypothetically, suppose we did. Would this at all influence your judgements (e.g. "deranged lunatic") of them? Why or why not?

humanrebar 6y ago

I'll point out that this aphorism concedes that certain categories of interesting discussion are not possible, and it's a little neutral about that prospect for my taste. It also concedes that "The New York Times" cannot be trusted to value that kind of discourse more than gotcha narrative chasing.

pjc50 6y ago
All sorts of discussion aren't possible unless the participants can be sure that the others are acting in good faith and not likely to engage in needless hostility or reprisals outside the discussion. The term for this environment is "safe space", but they're unpopular for some reason.
- atq2119 6y ago
  I would rephrase that to say that "safe space" should be the term for such environments, but in practice that's problematic. The term was specifically invented to describe spaces where certain discussions are forbidden because they could be "triggering". It was not invented to describe a space where discussion is possible without unilateral escalation to unrelated third parties. I suspect that a healthy society needs both kinds of safe spaces.
- kortilla 6y ago
  No, “safe space” has long been taken over to indicate spaces where people can be without worrying about being exposed to an idea that triggers a sensitive area for them regardless of intent or good faith.

roenxi 6y ago

Engineering is where most of the people go who care more about being right than about what people think of them. There is a reason for that - it usually matters if an approach is right or not in engineering work. Companies like Google need to be able to roll their eyes when engineers start stupid arguments, not sack them. The front-page rule is a technical impediment to people being able to figure out facts. The path to the truth often leads through patches of believing things that are wrong. Charging into a room trying to start an argument isn't the best way to work out what is true; but there are young engineers who are going to try it because they are under a lot of pressure to be technically correct and not under a lot of pressure to be socially savvy. They're in the process of learning that it isn't politically feasible. Even a full blown "Engineer holds crackpot opinion!" should never be front page news unless it is a risk of a building fallen down. Let alone "Young Engineer tries to start a Stupid Argument".

wpietri 6y ago
This wasn't emacs vs vi. Damore's goal was to materially affect who got hired and how they were treated. That's quite a lot of people, and at one of the world's most prominent companies. Nobody can reasonably expect that he should be able to play at that level and have it be consequence-free when it doesn't go his way. Damore is welcome to have crackpot opinions. He's even welcome to express crackpot opinions on his own time. But what he was doing was vigorous workplace activism. Activism that not only contradicted the goals of Google execs and the bulk of its employees, but was carried out in a way that actively damaged ongoing Google efforts and caused a significant workplace disruption. You could argue that Google's management made a mistake in allowing a young engineer this much power in the first place. Or by not reining him in earlier. But rolling their eyes was never an option here because Damore was having a significant negative effect on the company.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  Acknowledging that men and women are different, and that reverse discrimination is not an effective solution, is crackpot to you? I would contest that such a denial of reality is what is crackpot. It’s hilarious that you call what he was doing activism.

tootie 6y ago

Consider the recent kerkuffle with the CEO of Away. She didn't tread on any political or cultural landmines. Just decided to treat her workers like shit and do it on open Slack channels.

afiori 6y ago

While this is a good advice, it is a terrible response after the fact.