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by JuniperMesos 4mo ago
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- ashleyn 4mo agoConsidering they rolled back DEI along with everyone else after Trump's second victory, it's difficult to view those previous "values" as anything other than cynical kissing-up to the previous holders of power.
- toomuchtodo 4mo agoIt’s the cost of buying goodwill and lower regulatory burden from the administration in power at the time of implementation. DEI? Non DEI? Like an umbrella, just depends on the weather, its business as usual regardless.
- jordanb 4mo agoAnd it didn't even stop the antitrust suite so they threw in with Trump and then started sucking up to him. He's giving big tech everything they want so there is pretty much nothing he can do that will upset them.
- mystraline 4mo agoIve directly complained against the latte liberals screaming DEI. Ive had them demand my pronouns. I really dont care, but saying that is absolutely not acceptable. Ill use your pronouns. I really do not care. Ive been in meetings with 'land acknowledgements' with whatever former indians/native americans who were there. Its not like we're giving them the land back. DEI and what it turned into was a big for-public-show that you knew the buzzwords and the antiwords. And if you didnt, or woukdnt play along, theyd ruin you. The current MAGA MAHA meritocracy crap is also just the opposite, but the same games as DEI folks. They have their buzzwords and antiwords. Although, theyre a whole lot stupider and easier to manipulate and deal with.
- rayiner 4mo agoI agree with your broader point, but DEI versus no DEI is a bad example. That's not an example of companies sucking up to the preferred policies of whatever administration is in power. Instead, they are responding to decisive legal decisions. There is a clear legal principle at issue: the civil rights laws are symmetric as to race. The Supreme Court held that in SFFA in 2023, and again in Ames in 2025 (which was a 9-0 decision). Most "DEI" programs create unacceptable legal exposure because they involve literature or practices as to white people that would be held up as evidence of racial discrimination in a Title VII lawsuit if the races were switched.
- toomuchtodo 4mo agoThe clarification and specifics are welcomed. I did not have a better example at hand when I wrote the comment. Maybe ESG/climate change?
- rayiner 4mo agoYeah, Or crypto, AI, all sorts of things.
- rayiner 4mo ago> Considering they rolled back DEI along with everyone else after Trump's second victory, it's difficult to view those previous "values" as anything other than cynical kissing-up to the previous holders of power. The previous policies simply reflected the culture of employees and HR managers that had graduated from universities that openly practiced race-conscious admissions after Grutter v. Bollinger. The change in policy likely came not from the new administration, but the Supreme Court's SFFA decision in 2023 that reminded everyone the civil rights laws require race blindness.
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- CMay 4mo agoFor what it's worth, I think for an organization that size that needs the best talent from anywhere, It's probably much better to discourage political activism at work. It can tend to turn away the most logical and reasonable well grounded people who want no part of it. The people who _need_ work to be political can go get hired for explicitly political organizations where that is the job. Creating a distaste in people without like minds has been an intentional goal to cause exodus after exodus on various platforms, in companies and so on. If you let that get out of control, you can poison a culture almost unrecoverably. We can't let that happen to our critical tech companies for national security reasons.
- bryrei 4mo agoMost people don't force politics into work as much as they have it forced upon them by, you know, living in a society. And the idea of "political activism" causing "distaste in people without like minds" is a misattribution, putting it mildly. But yeah, keep people quiet and heads down so the work can get done, regardless of what the work is or what it will be used for.
- acdha 4mo agoYou have to remember that most companies _chose_ to setup DEI programs: it was a routine recommendation from lawyers because it gave them a string defense in lawsuits — the next time some manager abuses their position, they can cut that person loose and point to their various programs as evidence that whatever happened was limited to that manager and not company culture.
- Tuna-Fish 4mo agoThey were not cynical kissing up to previous holders of power, they were desperate attempts to cover their asses against EEOC lawsuits. And they didn't end because of Trump's second victory, they ended because the Supreme Court defanged EEOC (and half the rest of the federal regulatory agencies). The actual reason for the "corporate DEI" in tech was that since Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), EEOC could sue companies that had lower minority proportion than population norm for discrimination, and could could prove the discrimination in court using nothing but the racial makeup of the employees, and some policy at the company that could in theory have disparate impact. And under their standards, literally any policy has disparate impact. This hit other sectors first, to which they responded by hiring more minorities. But tech had the problem that schools were consistently producing fewer minority engineering grads than the population proportion, and in a world where approximately every engineer got employed, some US tech companies would have to have lower minority representation than the population no matter what they did. And because the disparity between engineering grads and racial population proportion was so high, in fact most large companies would fail to meet the necessary minority proportions. But EEOC would not instantly file suit against every offender, instead they would file ~40 such suits per year, targeting large companies that they considered particularly bad. And so companies that felt they might get hit soon started doing DEI programs, at first to attract more minority engineers (from other companies in the same sector, which would then fall under the limit, making it zero-sum), but then they realized that the EEOC didn't really sue the companies that were the loudest at touting their DEI credentials, and it all became extremely performative, no longer trying to attract minority talent but to be the loudest company talking about the subject. Iterate over that for a few decades and it got really weird. It ended because Trump named 3 SC justices on his first term, and in a few important cases between 2023 and today, the new SC tore the whole thing down, and suing a company for disparate impact is now considered unconstitutional.
- asadotzler 4mo ago[flagged]
- throwa356262 4mo agoThat was a crazy period when Google first fired him, then fired people criticising him, and then fired people criticising the people that just got fired. But let's be honest, the guy was kind of unhinged. I would not have fired him, but neither would I have kept him in my team.
- dpark 4mo ago> but neither would I have kept him in my team Let’s be honest, though. That’s firing from your team.
- lokar 4mo agoI agree, internally, looking at a fuller picture of his activity, he was off. Constantly bringing the subject up out of context, starting fights, etc. but they should have just warned him.
- whatshisface 4mo agoI'm sure he's just overjoyed to be tried without representation or evidence in the court of public opinion, a big step up from being punished with no process at all.
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- 3adk1a 4mo agoHe wasn't unhinged, he somewhat clumsily posted evolutionary biology literature fragments on a channel where it would offend parts of the readers. In response to a "let a thousand flowers bloom and speak your mind" request from Google management snakes. The problem is that some tech people take these requests seriously. Google of course has identified itself as Trump sycophants and hypocrites by now. Maybe they should invite Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad and Elon Musk to give keynote speeches.
- jensensbutton 4mo agoNo he was kind of unhinged. That wasn't the first weird thing he did. Should've been fired.
- 4MOAisgoodenuf 4mo agoGoogle exists to make money and is happy to change their opinions to suit the current force in power. But that “critique” of gender diversity efforts said that the lack of women in CS was due to some innate difference in women (rather than a social division that is neither innate nor universal across time or cultures) While also decrying the lack of affirmative action for conservatives. It’s neither the tipping point for Google, nor is it a hill worth dying on
- Manuel_D 4mo agoThe gender disparity in computing is largely universal across cultures, though. That's why the assumption that it's culturally determined is on shaky ground
- NetOpWibby 4mo agoIn my experience, Big Tech's billboard to "bring your best self" was just to get super eager people with great skills into their ranks to help accelerate business. Once you're on the inside, it's quite clear that's a farce and in fact, you should keep your mouth shut and your head down. Alas.
- annzabelle 4mo agoHad a coworker at a bank that was trying to emulate Tech (Capital One - all in on AWS and PIPs) who bought into it. Ended up PIPed and then is doing a PhD in a completely unrelated field. We had a mental health slack channel, and a racial politics one that rehashed Israel/Palestine daily.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago>and a racial politics one We had one of those. Not slack, self hosted internal stuff. Some "senior by tenure but not title" people decided the only thing that could come of it was people running their mouths to everyone's detriment and start trolling it until nobody took it seriously and then it was quietly "collateral damage" in a migration that was also arranged.
- annzabelle 4mo agoHR ended up nuking that channel in 2023. I think they were afraid of touching what had started as an anti racism channel until the vibes had shifted a bit. There were both Palestinian employees and an IDF veteran Israeli employee who were seemingly spending half the workday discussing October 7th and the Intifada.
- danpalmer 4mo ago[flagged]
- socalgal2 4mo agoSounds like you're responding to incorrect summaries? He was not intolerant of woman in the workplace. His memo was specifically in support of women in the workplace. https://web.archive.org/web/20170813080340/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-most-common-error-in-coverage-of-the-google-memo/536181/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170813080340/https://www.theat...
- danpalmer 4mo agoNo, I read the memo. What I was not doing is taking him at his word that he "values diversity and inclusion", I was reading his actual words and the sexist dogwhistles. Stating acceptance does not absolve other intolerance. We must also look at the effect of his memo, which was to alienate many, and which caused a backlash that led to his firing. The company did not make a big deal of it just to fire him, it was individuals who were personally impacted and offended by it who made it what it was.
- Jensson 4mo agoGoogle did fire a lot of people when this happened on both sides, seems like they were just tired about the whole thing and wanted political fights out of the company. Damore since he started it, and anyone that got too upset about it and said things they shouldn't have was also fired, as were the people who got too upset about those that got upset.
- GlacierFox 4mo ago[flagged]
- Manuel_D 4mo ago"dog whistles" are, more often than not, a thinly veiled way of putting words in other people's mouthes. Damore's thesis amounted to "maybe women are 20% of software developers not because they're being discriminated against, but because they're exercising their own agency and choosing other fields." Given that about 20% of CS grads are women, it seems like a pretty reasonable stance.
- Ardren 4mo ago[flagged]
- GlacierFox 4mo ago[flagged]
- azinman2 4mo ago[flagged]
- raincole 4mo agoThank you. I was afraid that people will eventually forget about that point of inflection. I think for many of us, the specific event was what made us realize that you really can't separate technical issues from political ones.
- mempko 4mo ago[flagged]
- GlacierFox 4mo ago[flagged]
- JuniperMesos 4mo agoI think there's a lot more political will now than there was a decade ago for explicitly repealing the sections of American civil rights law that define what a "hostile workplace" is, in order to make sure that something like Damore's memo would not count. Certainly, this is something I think about when evaluating political candidates.
- pryce 4mo agoWhat are the major historical examples where protecting employees from a "hostile workplace" is important? Racism? Misogyny? Homophobia? Do protection from these things look expendable to you? I'm sure either of us could quickly find a bunch of people who would like to one or several of those acceptable again, yet us finding that such people exist would not tell us a damned thing about whether dismantling those protections is a good idea. Or supposing it does, then one might even make the case that those people existing is an excellent reason for having such a law in the first place.
- tmoertel 4mo ago> James Damore was a poorly educated person. He didn't understand how to use statistics and decided to use them in a hateful way. What statistical argument did Damore make?
- hintymad 4mo agoDid Googlers give lots of pressure to the management? I was wondering which side the management is closer to: being cowards, or being hypocritical
- jensensbutton 4mo agoNah, James Damore just did a stupid thing at work and wasn't talented enough for it to be overlooked. He deserved to be fired. Morals don't need to come into it. They lost their moral compass a while ago, but it had nothing to do with Damore.
- DashAnimal 4mo agoI always hate the James Damore discussion because it's like the least interesting part. You have a company dealing with internal political mayhem trying to find the least disruptive, not only internally but now externally because this shit has leaked. It's a workplace, and youre trying to keep people effective and working. And some googlers got too comfortable with what they were sharing on a work machine, not just to their coworkers, but tens of thousands of employees. The support of war efforts is clearly a change in moral compass that is much more fascinating though.
- pryce 4mo ago100% agree. The James Damore flag was immediately taken up by major figures in transphobia (like Singal, Soh, etc) and pro-fascism campaigners (like Molyneux), both of which are political programs are absolutely incompatible with maintaining a non-hostile workplace environment for employees. (and not incidentally, both of which a premised on discredited bioessentialist pseudoscience) I find it is a deeply cynical move, to be asked to place the James Damore "was it employer overreach-or-not?" episode in similar proportion to critiquing a company's actions regarding issues such as mass surveillance and/or assisting war efforts, especially when the accusations about those broader issues are tied to complicity in the 2020s resurgence in fascist politics. It is so cynical that I can't believe it isn't intentional.
- Manuel_D 4mo agoWhat is the "bioessentialist pseudoscience" you're referring to?
- pryce 4mo agoOne of them I refer to is "race essentialism" [1] which led to the long-discredited pseudoscience known as scientific racism[2], and its political associated program of eugenics, and the other is "gender essentialism"[3] which has also been rejected by mainstream scholars across fields from biology to medicine to sociology to gender studies, and which acts in culture as a similarly pseudoscientific popular rationale for organizing society in ways that harm women and gender minorities. The study of the field of racism is absolutely fascinating in that very quickly, the simple, obvious "commonsense" theories like "race exists as a meaningful biological category" turn out to be quite false. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism#Racial,_cultural_and_strategic_essentialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism#Racial,_cultural_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_essentialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_essentialism
- dekhn 4mo agoI think if Damore had limited his criticism to the corporate DEI (which I found to be a bit heavy-handed and prone to critical theory groupthink) in a short doc, he probably would have been a bit more successful (in helping Google rein back its DEI training). One rarely stated thing I learned over time working there is that managers read eng-misc and will prevent you from transferring to their team if they didn't like what you said, or how you said it, or who you said it to.
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- tomhow 4mo agoEschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- JuniperMesos 4mo ago> Unfortunately, times have changed. Google management has quietly abandoned its goals to become carbon-neutral because of the AI model energy usage. Worse, Google management is now signing deals with the US Ministry of War—where “any lawful purpose” by the current US government has already been repeatedly demonstrated to be in violation of international laws. None of this is being debated or communicated within the company. It is just decided by top-level management (I was part of the management chain before, and I hadn’t heard of any of these changes through internal channels). With my moral and ethical principles, I cannot—explicitly or implicitly, directly or transitively—support the current and ongoing actions of the “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality” US Ministry of War. This entire article is already engaging in political and ideological battle - René Mayrhofer is explicitly saying that he's unwilling to work at Google because he has a political problem with some of the decisions Google is making, namely abandoning earlier stated carbon-neutrality goals and being willing to make deals with the US military. My contention is that if he considers this to constitute Google losing its moral compass but not the James Damore incident, which happened the same year he started working at Google; then there's no particular reason to think that his notion of a "moral compass" is any different from object-level agreement or disagreement (or simply not caring), about any particular decision that Google makes. Someone similar to Mayrhofer might well be willing to work for Google because they make a different judgement than he does about the political importance of AI model energy usage; and throwing terms like "moral compass" around is exactly equivalent to having an object-level disagreement about a political issue.
- tomhow 4mo ago> This entire article is already engaging in political and ideological battle Hence we don't really want articles like this on HN, and checking the stats now, I see it only spent about two hours on the front page, which was more than enough. Articles like this are bad for HN as they are mostly about the writer's own political grievances, and the discussion thread then becomes a vehicle for others to express their own alternative political grievances, many of which have nothing to do with the topic of the original post. So the whole thread just becomes a battle between people expressing their own conflicting political grievances, which is precisely what we don't want on a site whose primary reason for existing is to cultivate curious conversation. As I wrote in my first comment above, the guidelines specifically ask us to avoid using HN this way. Your comment counts as a generic tangent, because it introduces an issue that's only very tenuously linked to the central topic of the article, then sets off a whole new subthread debating that topic, taking the thread further and further away from the original topic. I understand this topic is important to you and I'm not telling you it shouldn't be. I'm upholding the HN guidelines and asking you to make the effort to observe them, because it's only by upholding the guidelines that we can have any hope of keeping this place from going up in flames.