100% agree. So much of the commentary on it reads like the writer either didn't read the memo or willfully misunderstood it. I don't agree with the memo either, but holy shit, people's reactions are so over the top.
Perhaps it's a failing of culture at Google that he didn't have a better way to express his concerns and have them addressed.
That is how it is and how it has to be in a big company.
He challenges unsupportable mental hangups with data and reason. Fuck yes I'd hire him (and if he lived in a different part of the world I could, because I am a hiring manager for a software engineering team at the moment).
Completely agree.
I mean, alright, so the guy had a politically incorrect opinion. He isn't a raging fanatic, just allow it.
I am absolutely stunned at how few sociologists are at Google that permit these sorts of toxic conceptual models to not simply exist, but come to fruition in such a crazy way.
It speaks volumes that someone would be so comfortable as to post such a destructive piece of poorly educated tripe.
You make the Bay Area sound like a somewhat dystopian, closed and repressive place. Is it really like that?
It's definitely a cultural bubble (as is california in general, to generalize for a second).
Whether you believe the bubble is closed and repressive or open and progressive depends on your point of view.
IE California considers itself open and progressive, and cultural bubbles in the US as closed and repressive. Those cultural bubbles consider California closed and repressive, and themselves open and progressive.
It's a team sport after all.
I'm mature enough to get past my views and work with people of different viewpoints as I've had to do all the way through college and my professional life. I was told this was the whole purpose of group exercises in high school and college but I suppose like many things, that applies to only privileged people such as I.
The difference is I actually have to practice what I learned from carrying other people's grades in college for every single day in my professional life for as long as somebody catches wind of my political alignment and threatens to quit if my company doesn't remove me. It's a team sport after all.
I'm Indian and a lot of Indian Hindus I know hold some messed up beliefs. Some of them work at top tech companies as well.
Yet, people don't seem to have a problem working with them. But they do with a guy who rails against diversity.
Why does a brown Hindu man who dislikes muslims, believes in matching horoscopes before getting married, and whose grandparents practiced and benefited from the caste system and who, if you get him drunk enough, might espouse for honor killings and homophobia get a pass?
Why are these "diverse opinions" valued and others are not?
Infanticide? Sure, cool. Homophobia because of religion (not Christianity)? We're fine with that. Honor killings? Its a pass. Killing goyim/kaffirs? We're down with that. Have a weird hangup or otherwise cultural thing that's completely disgusting, abhorrent, and/or unethical? It's obviously cultural, and it's OK!
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Wait, you want to talk about something white people do? We can't allow that! That's against our diversity training.
You're fired.
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It's because multiculturalism isn't about learning other cultures, their languages, their histories. Nope. It's about how evil Western culture is. I've sat in those classes, bemoaning how horrible and evil our ancestors were. And the only way to "win" the grade is to regurgitate what's said.
And in avenues like this, "Winning" is silence, and losing is saying anything against the current groupthink with your real name.
Social acceptance is largely a function of majority vote. Though some social values might be absurd, if the majority feels comfortable doing it, it does get a huge degree of acceptance.
Plus some absurd social values have acceptance for largely cultural reasons. Marriage among castes in India is one such thing. There are so many caste related things you do in everyday life, belonging to different castes can constantly lead to "My X values are better than your Y values" kind of friction. So people keep to their castes.
Horoscopes are one of those "Why take a risk?" kind of basic hygiene related rituals you do before Indian marriages.
None of this makes sense, but the majority of the people are perfectly happy doing it.
Indeed, a chief complaint in the manifesto is that Google is overwhelmingly liberal. Even the author of the manifesto recognized that his was a fringe position at Google.
Given the repercussions that's a surprisingly high number.
not 75k engineers right?
Google has close to 70k employees. What was the sample? How selected? How representative?
It sounds very questionable,
https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...
It's definitely not valid to draw any conclusions about google as a whole from it.
eng-misc?
Remember though, that groups that are underrepresented may also be disproportionately affected.
IE women may feel the document is much more harmful than men, but by numbers, ...
You'd have to break it down by a lot of variables, and once that happens, in practice, everyone will just draw whatever conclusion they want anyway :)
Anyway, not gonna speculate on what it would look like, just gonna point out it's not valid data.
but that's not important because:
b) The idea that average people are good at understanding the consequences of such document is inherently flawed. It's my problem with a lot of aspects of American culture (I'm an European living in SV) - regular people are not in position to evaluate complex systems.
Every time I see an article about, say, a shooting, that ends with "Joe Black, who lives nearby, believes that police should do X and Y to stop the increase in crime", my blood boils. Joe Black is in a terrible position to understand the crime dynamic in his city, to understand how the police operates and what does and doesn't work in the pursuit of lowering crime rate.
Now, coming back to the topic, I'd argue that 95% of Googlers are completely not qualified to respond to the second question. At all.
There's a bunch of people in the HR department, with degree in sociology, group psychology, organization behavior and design, maybe people who studied micro-discrimination, gender imbalances etc. that are qualified to answer it. But the idea that you can poll employees to learn about whether this document is harmful is completely nuts.
Sorry for venting :)
p.s. But yeah... while writing this comment I saw an article about the poll asking Americans if the US should attack North Korea [0]. I honestly believe that the culture of doing that, while pretends to stay close to the roots of the country of freedom, where citizens decide about their country, is in fact terribly harmful because it builds conviction in people that they're in the right position to make such judgements on topics they have insanely little knowledge about.
[0] http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/cnn-poll-north-korea-...
Just under 280 people (out of 72,000 google employees) responded to the poll at the time of the screenshot. No indication yet as to possible bias in how this poll was conducted. Not to mention, somebody could have whipped it up in MSPaint.
It's 2017, not 1417.
Or is there something else? Because that's a pretty mild question to get so upset about.
It's a team sport after all.
Something tells me that you aren't also going to defend the firing of anyone with open SJW beliefs for the same reason.
There was also clearly no winning externally no matter what they did. It would not have been dead and gone as long as their was a narrative to be used by someone!
Having said that yeah people mostly live in fantasy lands and this guy disrupted that suspension of disbelief at least in his one case which makes him a tough commodity to deal with internally. But firing him wasn't required and was grossly unethical. They should have just let him sleep in the bed he shit in and he probably would have been gone within a few weeks anyway.
Now the guy is a goddamn martyr to the butthurt-white-male party.
Gonna leave this one alone, but ...
"hey should have just let him sleep in the bed he shit in and he probably would have been gone within a few weeks anyway."
Again, this assumes a lot about what would have happened internally in that time period. If, for example, 1000 good engineers quit out of frustration with lack of response, ...
Somehow, I have a distinct feeling, based on what you've written in this thread, that your response would be "fuck'em, let them go whine elsewhere"
If 1000 good engineers quit the users wouldn't even notice. Google is grossly overstaffed and pointless rewrites that achieve nothing at all are rampant. Promotion-oriented development is the order of the day.
Google reached a fork in the road with this event. The Google I remember being a part of many years ago had strong, firm commitments to freedom of speech. It left China rather than continue to accept the PRCs bullshit, despite the business consensus being that leaving the world's largest market was commercial suicide. That sort of action defined who the company was. It led to a globally trusted brand.
Pichai is clearly nothing like the men Brin and Page were. He just set fire to the trust of the Google brand to avoid pissing off a bunch of staff who are very likely mostly recent grads churning crap from C++ to Go somewhere deep inside the bowels of an undifferentiated product, and thus the least experienced and most trivially expendable. Losing a bunch of engineers who throw a hissy fit because someone wrote a blog post with lots of references to scientific research would, if anything, do Google a world of good.
The consequences of this will be felt for a long time. Who can really trust Google's results for political queries now? There will always be a nagging suspicion that certain results ("lies") liberals would rather people not see might have quietly gone missing.
That would be even funnier if it wasn't so true, given the history of mailing list threads about the holiday gift.
Nobody attacked the shitty arguments, rather they started attacking the person making them.
This is just the start of the witch hunt that will follow.
Winston Churchill
Why? And where do you draw the line of what's non-violent or non-threatening? Because to you that line is, say, X=96 whilst the person sat next to you has it at X=45. Other desk over, Bill, with PTSD, has it at X=12. Where do -you- put the line?
That's what you're basically saying with "no one should feel threatened and if someone does then that is their line".
Had they just (as they should ethically have done) privately let the guy know "hey uh, independent of whether we agree with you, can you please cool it because this is USA, Bay Area 2017 and you just can't say shit like that" then just waited out the controversy, this would have all been dead and gone by next week. Now it has turned into all out rage fest on both sides.
Franky I see this as one Google's biggest screw ups. The worst anyone can say about his "scree" (give me a break) is that the guy was wrong and suffers from unconscious biases. Otherwise he was fairly civil and for this he is publicly and viciously crucified and demonized then thrown under a bus by Google. The butt-hurt right is going to have a never ending field day with this. It will be Benghazi of white male boo-hooing for the next 10 years.