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The only thing that should matter is: Can he do the job? Whether he wrote a book people get their panties twisted over does not appear to be a part of that jo

The only thing that should matter is: Can he do the job? Whether he wrote a book people get their panties twisted over does not appear to be a part of that job description. When did this concept become so controversial?

ivraatiems 6y ago
How could he do the job if there were any female colleagues around? Clearly he's too busy thinking about whether they're attractive to focus on his work.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  I guess we will never know since the mob made it clear that he does not belong despite claims of 'inclusive values' and 'diverse perspectives'. Its funny when those perspective and values include only those that are already acceptable to the mob.
  - ivraatiems 6y ago
    By the mob you mean "the people who would have to work with him"?
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
      By mob I mean people, who, in that order: 1. Learn there is a new hire 2. their first course of action is to scour his internet history for things to be offended by 3. find something 4. get a lynch mob going 5. complain to HR 6. get guy fired 7. start a party
      - ivraatiems 6y ago
        This man was a public figure with an NYT bestselling book who, based on evidence elsewhere in this post's comments, publicly and privately harassed multiple women over years. Is it possible people already knew of him prior to his hiring?
        A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
        I will be perfectly honest. The way things are now, I would not be surprised if people just signed w/e petition was waved in front of them. Save the whales, kill the snails, can I go back to work?
        andreigheorghe 6y ago
        You're going awfully out of your way to not engage with the arguments you're presented with by other people, dismissing them with sardonic one-liners, and making wild assumptions about the motives and thought processes of the Apple employees. If you're not trolling, I suggest you take a couple steps back and reassess the situation, because you're not coming across as a reasonable person.
      - shostack 6y ago
        It's hard to take your question as genuine based on how you are engaging those who respond. For starters, you're making baseless assumptions about those involved without providing and receipts. For example, how do you know people were looking for things to be offended by vs people simply googling their soon to be boss who found some very concerning things in the process and raise their (quite legitimate) concerns through the proper channels? The language you use and the picture you paint make you come across as intellectually lazy at best, and a troll at worst.
        A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
        I have karma to burn and I am annoyed by automatic downvoting and general idiocy I see around me. It is not intellectually lazy to challenge idiocy. In fact, it is necessary. It is intellectually lazy( and if not downright stupid ) to let hysteria and twitter mob dictate hiring practices. It is not trolling. So. Some god damn context since anyone with access to google COULD have pulled it if they were so inclined ( but we can't have reasoned discussion, can we now ). One of the offensive passages with more context: "When she was in her teens, her father decided to move the family to the United States, where they suffered a financial reversal she was unwilling to talk about. Suddenly not among the moneyed class, she hustled herself through the redbrick boondocks of the University of Vermont. Citibank internship led to a Deutsche Bank job, and after a few years she was an equity derivatives trader at Deutsche, holding her own against the toff sharks of the City of London. She had wild green eyes, with unnatural red spots in her irises when you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic cover. Her personality was flinty and rough, and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels. Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel. British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work- be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast in someone's back- required doing. Long story short, you wanted to tie your genetic wagon to the backing horse of her bloodline. Which is why I was less nervous than I should have been on a random Saturday in July..." You find that offensive and a fireable offense? Good luck.
  - williamsmj 6y ago
    Correct, we'll never know because actions have consequences.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
      Your face will be so red, when 10 years from now, something your wrote on HN will be deemed unfit for the current social mores. We will discuss actions and consequences again from an amusingly differing perspective I am sure.
elil17 6y ago
Unless you don't interact with your coworkers at all, part of doing your job is behaving appropriately in the work place. If you can't do your job without writing creepy stuff about your coworkers, then you can't do your job.
williamsmj 6y ago
Can he do the job? Well, the job included managing people from groups he has publicly and repeatedly shown contempt for, and a bunch of people he'd be managing said that they wanted him fired. So I suspect the answer is no, if we're boiling this down a purely meritocratic question, he literally cannot do the job.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  How so? I had some bad managers before and this guy, who I never listened to before until now ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE0pIKV5Mlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE0pIKV5Mlc ) sounds ridiculously less bad than some of those managers. Part of it is because, it does not matter that manager thinks you a are worth less than nothing. Not to the real owners anyway. What matters is whether they deliver on what is needed. Everything else is noise.
  - williamsmj 6y ago
    I'm sorry you have such low standards.
  - Volundr 6y ago
    I've had bad managers to. The fact that bad managers exist is not a reason to shrug your shoulders and just hire shitty managers any more than bad coders existing is a reason to just give up on pupulate a team with them. As for "Part of it is because, it does not matter that manager thinks you a are worth less than nothing. Not to the real owners anyway. What matters is whether they deliver on what is needed." That's straight nonsense. A bad manager can often make sure a top performer they don't like never gets the credit they deserve or has any internal opportunities.
readonthegoapp 6y ago
This is a straight up sexist remark. If part of the job is showing respect to all your coworkers, regardless of sex, then it seems obvious he is incapable. Maybe his beliefs do not translate at all into his behavior, but I doubt it.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  How so? Is it racist too? Please help me out here. I am trying to be reasonable about it, but the reaction to my simple statement created ridiculous level of response I did not expect so I expect to defend it. I repeat. The only thing that matters is whether this person can do their job. How does that make me sexist?
  - kazinator 6y ago
    Your position is illogical. The question "can this person do the job" can be a resounding, objective "yes", for someone who, say, also happens to embezzle cash from the company. If that's the "only thing that matters", then the thief should keep the job and continue stealing. Especially if you want to defend some unpopular position, you have make sure you don't have logical holes in it, like universal absolutes that succumb to easy counterexamples.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
      No. Can the person do the job includes their obvious drawbacks ( like tendency to steal ). I do not consider writing a book, however salacious and 'wrong' it may be, to be in that particular category. The guy is an asshole, but it is hard to argue he does not know what he is doing.
      - klyrs 6y ago
        If he wrote a book on how to embezzle from companies, would that be 'wrong' enough for you? Do you realize that the Civil Rights Act is also a law that companies have an interest in their employees not breaking?
dillondoyle 6y ago
Because it effects those around him and the business itself. Especially women who are already disadvantaged by inequalities in tech. You can take the your viewpoint to the extreme to prove a point: yeah that Himmler guy knows how to engineer and plan. all that matters right? One's actions affect others, and even disregarding the (evidently not agreed upon fact) that we should actively be combating racism, misogyny, discrimination etc, it's bad for business when one persons behavior makes other employees less productive, less likely to work for your company in the first place, less likely for customers to buy, or open the company to liability or settling a suit since they now have reports of his behavior.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  Right? And yet we are perfectly fine mandating social water cooler socializing despite effectively them reducing productivity. This has nothing to do with productivity. It is a power play. Pure and simple.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Productivity isn't everything. If what is produced is harmful, it is even negative value.
  - dillondoyle 6y ago
    Yeah we're giving women more power. GOOD. I don't get this worldview at all. It's a power play to try to combat the centuries of discrimination against women, sexism, racism, and more?
tomjakubowski 6y ago
The question before Apple was whether they'd lose more talent by retaining this guy or by firing him. The answer was clear enough that he was gone in hours.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  This is by far the only reasonable argument in the entire thread. I don't automatically accept it, but I can see its merit.
jsf 6y ago
He literally said "Most women in the Bay Area are ... generally full of shit". How can you work with someone that thinks that, specially if you are a woman, say, in the Bay Area? And how can he do the job if people can't effectively work with him?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  If it helps, men are full of shit too.. I m not even joking. Am I misandrist now and should lose my job?
- ako 6y ago
  According to a review of New York Times: "Mr. García is not just a keen observer of corporate and social culture, but a thoughtful business and policy analyst armed with a highly refined detector for pretentious nonsense." (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/review-chaos-monkeys-is-a-guide-to-the-spirit-of-silicon-valley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/review-...)
elliekelly 6y ago
> people get their panties twisted over This is just another way of accusing someone of hysteria: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  And what is your point here? Because it is absolutely a hysteria.
pr0zac 6y ago
I’m getting the impression you’ve never run a company before since you seem to think you’re making logical arguments so I’ll answer you earnestly regardless of the ad hominem attacks you’re making. That concept became controversial 57 years ago with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the controversial nature of it has been strengthened over the decades since through a multitude of hostile workplace laws building on the CRA. What those laws mean is hiring an employee, doubly so for a manager like the man in question, who has published a high profile book disparaging a protected class of people opens up the company itself to lawsuits on the basis of discrimination relating to a hostile workplace if a single member of that protected class is (or even feels) mistreated in some way because it’s evidence the company should’ve known about the potential hostile environment and did nothing to prevent it. And so it’s clear, no this is not the same thing as cancel culture based on a tweet or forum post or even on the scale of Amazon banning Parler. It’s not the same as James Damore and Google. Those all do not necessarily meet the standard of public speech while this guy went and published a book which very clearly does. This is a half a century plus of laws and cases establishing precedent and companies acting in a way to prevent costly lawsuits. No well run company would open themselves up to the legal risk involved in hiring or keeping on someone like this for a management role, especially after it was clearly brought to light in this manner. Apple’s HR department is almost definitely currently trying to figure out what mistake resulted in him not getting filtered out earlier in the process so they can prevent this from happening again. "Can he do the job?" has not been the only thing that matters, and in fact the situation described in this instance has mattered, for over a half century, I’m guessing longer than you’ve been alive. Not because of woke mobs or free speech or any other recent political talking points or even really about Apple caring about sexism. It’s about avoiding clear cut legal and financial risk period.
- baggy_trough 6y ago
  Turning businesses into the thought police is one of the more evil ramifications of civil rights legislation.
  - pr0zac 6y ago
    Did you just call civil rights legislation evil? Because forcing companies to not allow discriminatory practices or hostile work environments for protected classes is kind of the entire point (of the business oriented portions of those laws). I’m having difficulty interpreting a more charitable reading of your post. Edit: just noticed "one of". I’m morbidly curious, what are the other evil ramifications of civil rights laws.

ivraatiems 6y ago

How could he do the job if there were any female colleagues around? Clearly he's too busy thinking about whether they're attractive to focus on his work.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
I guess we will never know since the mob made it clear that he does not belong despite claims of 'inclusive values' and 'diverse perspectives'. Its funny when those perspective and values include only those that are already acceptable to the mob.
- ivraatiems 6y ago
  By the mob you mean "the people who would have to work with him"?
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
    By mob I mean people, who, in that order: 1. Learn there is a new hire 2. their first course of action is to scour his internet history for things to be offended by 3. find something 4. get a lynch mob going 5. complain to HR 6. get guy fired 7. start a party
    - ivraatiems 6y ago
      This man was a public figure with an NYT bestselling book who, based on evidence elsewhere in this post's comments, publicly and privately harassed multiple women over years. Is it possible people already knew of him prior to his hiring?
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
        I will be perfectly honest. The way things are now, I would not be surprised if people just signed w/e petition was waved in front of them. Save the whales, kill the snails, can I go back to work?
        andreigheorghe 6y ago
        You're going awfully out of your way to not engage with the arguments you're presented with by other people, dismissing them with sardonic one-liners, and making wild assumptions about the motives and thought processes of the Apple employees. If you're not trolling, I suggest you take a couple steps back and reassess the situation, because you're not coming across as a reasonable person.
    - shostack 6y ago
      It's hard to take your question as genuine based on how you are engaging those who respond. For starters, you're making baseless assumptions about those involved without providing and receipts. For example, how do you know people were looking for things to be offended by vs people simply googling their soon to be boss who found some very concerning things in the process and raise their (quite legitimate) concerns through the proper channels? The language you use and the picture you paint make you come across as intellectually lazy at best, and a troll at worst.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
        I have karma to burn and I am annoyed by automatic downvoting and general idiocy I see around me. It is not intellectually lazy to challenge idiocy. In fact, it is necessary. It is intellectually lazy( and if not downright stupid ) to let hysteria and twitter mob dictate hiring practices. It is not trolling. So. Some god damn context since anyone with access to google COULD have pulled it if they were so inclined ( but we can't have reasoned discussion, can we now ). One of the offensive passages with more context: "When she was in her teens, her father decided to move the family to the United States, where they suffered a financial reversal she was unwilling to talk about. Suddenly not among the moneyed class, she hustled herself through the redbrick boondocks of the University of Vermont. Citibank internship led to a Deutsche Bank job, and after a few years she was an equity derivatives trader at Deutsche, holding her own against the toff sharks of the City of London. She had wild green eyes, with unnatural red spots in her irises when you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic cover. Her personality was flinty and rough, and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels. Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel. British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work- be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast in someone's back- required doing. Long story short, you wanted to tie your genetic wagon to the backing horse of her bloodline. Which is why I was less nervous than I should have been on a random Saturday in July..." You find that offensive and a fireable offense? Good luck.
- williamsmj 6y ago
  Correct, we'll never know because actions have consequences.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
    Your face will be so red, when 10 years from now, something your wrote on HN will be deemed unfit for the current social mores. We will discuss actions and consequences again from an amusingly differing perspective I am sure.

elil17 6y ago

Unless you don't interact with your coworkers at all, part of doing your job is behaving appropriately in the work place. If you can't do your job without writing creepy stuff about your coworkers, then you can't do your job.

williamsmj 6y ago

Can he do the job? Well, the job included managing people from groups he has publicly and repeatedly shown contempt for, and a bunch of people he'd be managing said that they wanted him fired. So I suspect the answer is no, if we're boiling this down a purely meritocratic question, he literally cannot do the job.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
How so? I had some bad managers before and this guy, who I never listened to before until now ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE0pIKV5Mlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE0pIKV5Mlc ) sounds ridiculously less bad than some of those managers. Part of it is because, it does not matter that manager thinks you a are worth less than nothing. Not to the real owners anyway. What matters is whether they deliver on what is needed. Everything else is noise.
- williamsmj 6y ago
  I'm sorry you have such low standards.
- Volundr 6y ago
  I've had bad managers to. The fact that bad managers exist is not a reason to shrug your shoulders and just hire shitty managers any more than bad coders existing is a reason to just give up on pupulate a team with them. As for "Part of it is because, it does not matter that manager thinks you a are worth less than nothing. Not to the real owners anyway. What matters is whether they deliver on what is needed." That's straight nonsense. A bad manager can often make sure a top performer they don't like never gets the credit they deserve or has any internal opportunities.

readonthegoapp 6y ago

This is a straight up sexist remark. If part of the job is showing respect to all your coworkers, regardless of sex, then it seems obvious he is incapable. Maybe his beliefs do not translate at all into his behavior, but I doubt it.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
How so? Is it racist too? Please help me out here. I am trying to be reasonable about it, but the reaction to my simple statement created ridiculous level of response I did not expect so I expect to defend it. I repeat. The only thing that matters is whether this person can do their job. How does that make me sexist?
- kazinator 6y ago
  Your position is illogical. The question "can this person do the job" can be a resounding, objective "yes", for someone who, say, also happens to embezzle cash from the company. If that's the "only thing that matters", then the thief should keep the job and continue stealing. Especially if you want to defend some unpopular position, you have make sure you don't have logical holes in it, like universal absolutes that succumb to easy counterexamples.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
    No. Can the person do the job includes their obvious drawbacks ( like tendency to steal ). I do not consider writing a book, however salacious and 'wrong' it may be, to be in that particular category. The guy is an asshole, but it is hard to argue he does not know what he is doing.
    - klyrs 6y ago
      If he wrote a book on how to embezzle from companies, would that be 'wrong' enough for you? Do you realize that the Civil Rights Act is also a law that companies have an interest in their employees not breaking?

dillondoyle 6y ago

Because it effects those around him and the business itself. Especially women who are already disadvantaged by inequalities in tech. You can take the your viewpoint to the extreme to prove a point: yeah that Himmler guy knows how to engineer and plan. all that matters right? One's actions affect others, and even disregarding the (evidently not agreed upon fact) that we should actively be combating racism, misogyny, discrimination etc, it's bad for business when one persons behavior makes other employees less productive, less likely to work for your company in the first place, less likely for customers to buy, or open the company to liability or settling a suit since they now have reports of his behavior.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
Right? And yet we are perfectly fine mandating social water cooler socializing despite effectively them reducing productivity. This has nothing to do with productivity. It is a power play. Pure and simple.
- loopz 6y ago
  Productivity isn't everything. If what is produced is harmful, it is even negative value.
- dillondoyle 6y ago
  Yeah we're giving women more power. GOOD. I don't get this worldview at all. It's a power play to try to combat the centuries of discrimination against women, sexism, racism, and more?

tomjakubowski 6y ago

The question before Apple was whether they'd lose more talent by retaining this guy or by firing him. The answer was clear enough that he was gone in hours.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
This is by far the only reasonable argument in the entire thread. I don't automatically accept it, but I can see its merit.

jsf 6y ago

He literally said "Most women in the Bay Area are ... generally full of shit". How can you work with someone that thinks that, specially if you are a woman, say, in the Bay Area? And how can he do the job if people can't effectively work with him?

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
If it helps, men are full of shit too.. I m not even joking. Am I misandrist now and should lose my job?
ako 6y ago
According to a review of New York Times: "Mr. García is not just a keen observer of corporate and social culture, but a thoughtful business and policy analyst armed with a highly refined detector for pretentious nonsense." (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/review-chaos-monkeys-is-a-guide-to-the-spirit-of-silicon-valley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/review-...)

elliekelly 6y ago

> people get their panties twisted over This is just another way of accusing someone of hysteria: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
And what is your point here? Because it is absolutely a hysteria.

pr0zac 6y ago

I’m getting the impression you’ve never run a company before since you seem to think you’re making logical arguments so I’ll answer you earnestly regardless of the ad hominem attacks you’re making. That concept became controversial 57 years ago with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the controversial nature of it has been strengthened over the decades since through a multitude of hostile workplace laws building on the CRA. What those laws mean is hiring an employee, doubly so for a manager like the man in question, who has published a high profile book disparaging a protected class of people opens up the company itself to lawsuits on the basis of discrimination relating to a hostile workplace if a single member of that protected class is (or even feels) mistreated in some way because it’s evidence the company should’ve known about the potential hostile environment and did nothing to prevent it. And so it’s clear, no this is not the same thing as cancel culture based on a tweet or forum post or even on the scale of Amazon banning Parler. It’s not the same as James Damore and Google. Those all do not necessarily meet the standard of public speech while this guy went and published a book which very clearly does. This is a half a century plus of laws and cases establishing precedent and companies acting in a way to prevent costly lawsuits. No well run company would open themselves up to the legal risk involved in hiring or keeping on someone like this for a management role, especially after it was clearly brought to light in this manner. Apple’s HR department is almost definitely currently trying to figure out what mistake resulted in him not getting filtered out earlier in the process so they can prevent this from happening again. "Can he do the job?" has not been the only thing that matters, and in fact the situation described in this instance has mattered, for over a half century, I’m guessing longer than you’ve been alive. Not because of woke mobs or free speech or any other recent political talking points or even really about Apple caring about sexism. It’s about avoiding clear cut legal and financial risk period.

baggy_trough 6y ago
Turning businesses into the thought police is one of the more evil ramifications of civil rights legislation.
- pr0zac 6y ago
  Did you just call civil rights legislation evil? Because forcing companies to not allow discriminatory practices or hostile work environments for protected classes is kind of the entire point (of the business oriented portions of those laws). I’m having difficulty interpreting a more charitable reading of your post. Edit: just noticed "one of". I’m morbidly curious, what are the other evil ramifications of civil rights laws.