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I agree with you in theory, but it’s a bit different. If he is making the workplace less comfortable for particular groups of people then I certainly would have
by glenda 6y ago
I agree with you in theory, but it’s a bit different. If he is making the workplace less comfortable for particular groups of people then I certainly would have no issue firing him.
You are free to hold any belief you want, but once you’re in my ear with some misinformed ideas that are potentially hurtful to a large group I am free to tell you to be quiet or leave. Of course, it’s your right not to listen to me... but if I’m your boss you can expect to be fired.
- Igelau 6y agoThat's why you wouldn't open the floor for political discussion. You're missing the point.
- wpietri 6y agoI am fascinated that on HN of all places people are suggesting that engineers should never be allowed to express opinions about workplace policy.
- rbanffy 6y agoThey are allowed. But they also need to take responsibility for the consequences of their message. If you alienate half of your colleagues, you'll probably get fired.
- ALittleLight 6y agoGoogle didn't fire Damore when he wrote the memo. They didn't fire him when he shared it for feedback. They didn't fire him when it was internal discussion. They fired him when it leaked to press and there was a social media furor. The idea that Google fired Damore for anything other than bad publicity is not supported by evidence. They asked him for feedback. He provided an intelligent and well researched document. They debated it. A social media mob got mad, and Google, being greedy cowards, fired Damore.
- Igelau 6y agoSo many truths shift on how we paint the timelines. This is a very important angle to consider.
- wpietri 6y agoCould you please show me your source for the claim that they asked him for feedback?
- ALittleLight 6y agoSure. Wikipedia has a description of it citing a Guardian article. "James Damore was spurred to write the memo when a Google diversity program he attended solicited feedback." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
- wpietri 6y agoThat's an article about Damore's POV, so I believe the correct way to express it is that Damore claims he wrote it in response to a request for feedback. And given that he put it up with a go link, it's pretty clear he didn't just submit this as an email to the D&I team. He published it internally, hoping to spark discussion. So I think it's disingenuous to talk about this as if it were something Google's managers ordered him to do. Damore set out to cause a stir and got one.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI said Damore was asked for feedback not that his managers ordered him to write the document and then fired him for it. Damore claimed he originally wrote it as feedback for a diversity meeting he attended and then shared it for broader feedback. To my knowledge this account has never been contested by Google or anyone else and is the agreed upon account. I agree it is possible that Damore is lying about why he wrote it, and that if Google said he wrote it under some different circumstances there would be ambiguity because Damore's own account could be self serving - but, just because it is possibly Damore is lying doesn't mean we should assume he is. There is no dispute about why he originally authored the memo, is there?
- Igelau 6y agoI'm not saying that. I'm saying that in the parent comment's particular case, knowingly inviting discussion and then firing people when you get butthurt is stupid.
- wpietri 6y agoNot at all. When companies give power to employees, they expect that it be used responsibly and roughly in line with the goals of the company. If I give somebody root access and they just rm -rf everything because it seems like fun, or because they're trying to prove some sort of point, then I'm going to fire them. Google correctly gave employees a lot of power to have internal discussions because they thought that would benefit them as a company. And the great bulk of people used that responsibly. Damore didn't and paid the price.
- Igelau 6y agoSomeone abusing root access to destroy data doesn't compare at all to punishing unpopularity in a falsely "open" forum. Analogies tend to suck in debates, but yours is particularly bad.
- wpietri 6y agoThe problem was not just "unpopularity". Many people at Google have surely said many unpopular things, and Google didn't fire them.
- M2Ys4U 6y agoWhy? A lot of people here want to be the boss of their own start-up, which means they won't want their future (perhaps hypothetical) employees organising against them.
- Consultant32452 6y agoWhat happens if two groups/sides are equally discomforted by the other? Do you silence/fire them both? Is it majority rule?
- glenda 6y agoI don’t have a good answer. But at that point some kind of outside discussion facilitation is probably necessary.
- Consultant32452 6y agoWhat's the most human narrative you're welling to place on Damore, that he might agree with? I'll try to think up a few... 1) Damore may have felt just as uncomfortable as his coworkers with what was being said, just in the opposite direction. 2) Damore, being a little spectrumy, attempted to derive an answer to a question about gender inequality in a cold and rational way, having no understanding that what he wrote would upset people. That's not the same as suggesting what he wrote is "correct." Correctness is irrelevant. As a person also on the spectrum, I can relate to this happening all.the.time. It's very difficult to understand what will upset people if you don't already have a mental rule about it. And rules are narrow.
- glenda 6y agoI can agree with #2 - I don’t believe he saw this memo as being particularly political or as an attack against anyone.
- JPKab 6y agoIn this case, you satisfy the group that spends disproportionate amounts of time weaponizing social media, activists, and blog journalists for their cause.
- eloff 6y agoThey solicited feedback. He gave them feedback that was well reasoned and well supported with citations, regardless of whether it was true or not. They didn't warn him, they fired him and the outrage mob wanted to ensure he never worked again. If you're going to solicit feedback and then fire someone because you don't like it - at least specify that it must be non-dissenting feedback. Be honest here about the dishonest game being played.
- wpietri 6y agoThat not even vaguely what that memo was. It was a blatantly political argument. Its go link was "pc-considered-harmful". Its central thesis was that Google leans too far to the left.
- eloff 6y agoI think we're talking about the same memo, just a different take on it. To be clear, it was a response to a solicitation of feedback on a diversity program. If a company can't handle honest, carefully researched and presented feedback - they shouldn't ask for it.
- wpietri 6y agoYour notion is that whatever an employee does should be fine as long as it technically complies with a the wording of vague, general request made by a coworker? That would be one way to run a company, I guess. But I've never heard of one that actually works like that.
- eloff 6y agoIf you want to have an insightful discussion, one should refrain from making strawman arguments. I think Demore's memo has little place in a company, but neither does the diversity program that spawned it. Better to keep politics out of the work place. But given the context, it was fully justified, regardless of its merits or lack thereof and I think the person who leaked it committed a real sin here, as did the company for firing him.
- twomoretime 6y ago>but once you’re in my ear with some misinformed ideas How the hell do you expect to get anything done in a society if you presume that any hurtful idea is misinformed? How can you seriously pretend that gendered differences in humans magically stop above the shoulders? You're denying realty. It's black and white. You can bend over backwards and sweep rational arguments like Damore's under the rug, or you can accept that consistent inequality of outcome across the time and culture is very obviously indicative of at least some degree of intrinsic cognitive differences.
- xtreme 6y ago> If he is making the workplace less comfortable for particular groups of people then I certainly would have no issue firing him. Would you be okay with firing an LGBT person because they "made the workplace less comfortable" for some conservative employees?
- glenda 6y agoSure, if they are publishing documents about how straight people are less effective at their job then they’re causing unnecessary issues in the workplace.
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoBad analogy, because Damore didn’t do that. I don’t know why this falsehood lives on, the paper is public, and it clearly says not that.
- licebmi__at__ 6y agoYou're technically correct, still is not unreasonable to argue that accusing google of quote "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" might have a net effect of caste a shadow over certain groups being competent enough or being "diversity hires".
- oh_sigh 6y agoSo pointing out a mathematical fact about the hiring practices of your company is wrong? Google decided to implement the policy that minorities who almost passed the bar(but didn't) get special treatment.
- licebmi__at__ 6y agoA simple example: "On the current political climate, political platforms are being built around being "anti-pc". With the past evidence we have about astroturfing campaigns it's possible that there are some paid posters even here on HN peddling political right wing propaganda." I'm not saying anything false, but you can clearly see that this is not only a bad faith argument, but actually poisons the discussion, and still it can be argued that indeed we need to be wary about astroturfing and social network manipulations. I wouldn't have fired Damore, but let's not kid ourselves by saying "we're simply stating facts". Mainly because that's not really the conversation, the tacit implication of "minorities who almost passed the bar", but letting them in anyway, is that the "bar" might be wrong, and that the company might be getting more results with this kind of hires than just measuring "mad hack skillz". Damore rightly points out that "without evidence this is just veiled (left) ideology" the point where he misses is that there has been at least attempts to get this evidence, we can discuss the results and even if they're valid (reproducibility crisis), but Damore just plain ignore's it. The only extension he has to offer about this point is: "[7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”" which is just bullshit by the account of anyone who knows the basics and history of marxism or social science. So these are not even "facts", but youtube tier analysis.
- syrrim 6y ago>If he is making the workplace less comfortable for particular groups of people Not just any group of people, naturally, but particular groups. Politics necessarily makes certain groups uncomfortable. A discussion of wealth redistribution makes the rich incomfortable, should such things be impermissible? Politics enables certain groups to be favoured, and others to be disfavoured. This is a good reason to ban politics in general, but if you allow it, you need consistent rules regarding which sorts of views are permissible, rules that aren't themselves political.
- glenda 6y agoBeing rich isn’t a protected group in the workplace.
- eli_gottlieb 6y agoThere's a certain irony to saying that, considering the whole point of a workplace is to make someone richer, usually the already rich.
- M2Ys4U 6y ago>This is a good reason to ban politics in general, but if you allow it, you need consistent rules regarding which sorts of views are permissible, rules that aren't themselves political. It is impossible to have apolitical rules regulating which political discussions are allowed. Hell, just banning political discussion - any political discussion - is a political act. It's always a political act.
- JSavageOne 6y agoIf your company had a sizable portion of racists, and an employee said something anti-racist that made the racists feel uncomfortable, would you feel compelled to fire the anti-racist? I'm a big believer in the principle of freedom of speech. It's sad that employees don't have freedom of speech in the workplace.