News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by puranjay on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:04AM (#14955191)
They did screw up. But this guy had to be fired. Not because they had to make an example out of him, but because by publicly sharing his biases, he's ensured that a large part of Google wouldn't want to work with him.

It's a team sport after all.

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by JSONwebtoken on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:31AM (#14955362)
I know the people I wouldn't want to work with, and they plaster their names and beliefs all over social media for the world to see.

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.

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by puranjay on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @04:38AM (#14955779)
Interesting that you bring this up.

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?

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by occultist_throw on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @10:44AM (#14958248)
Because it's not politically correct to hate, denigrate, insult, or deride Non-white people.

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!

------------------------------------

Wait, you want to talk about something white people do? We can't allow that! That's against our diversity training.

You're fired.

------------------------------------

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.

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by kamaal on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @05:14AM (#14955948)
>>Why are these "diverse opinions" valued and others are not?

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.

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by Houshalter on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:07AM (#14955208)
There's an internal survey at Google that shows about 40% of employees agree with him. They are just rightfully scared of speaking out.
Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by jlebar on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:31AM (#14955370)
There is no way that that a survey indicating that 40% of employees agree with the document is representative of Google as a whole. Google has 75k employees, nearly all of whom are aware of this incident, and a comment below suggests that the survey had <300 responses.

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.

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by emanreus on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @05:46AM (#14956090)
> the survey had <300 responses

Given the repercussions that's a surprisingly high number.

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by ljk on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:35AM (#14955398)
> * Google has 75k employees*

not 75k engineers right?

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by zbraniecki on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:15AM (#14955245)
can you cite the source? Because this sounds very unbelievable to me. I work in a mid-size company structured in many ways similarly to Google and I cannot imagine a representative survey with results already coming up.

Google has close to 70k employees. What was the sample? How selected? How representative?

It sounds very questionable,

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by icelancer on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:19AM (#14955274)
Source data here. Who knows if it is representative, but 282 anonymous respondents have chimed in. The distribution looks like what I would expect.

https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by DannyBee on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:34AM (#14955389)
It's definitely not representative. For reasons that would be obvious if you knew the history of the document, but that i can't share, it consists almost entirely of a sample of people from certain mailing lists.

It's definitely not valid to draw any conclusions about google as a whole from it.

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by jsmthrowaway on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:59AM (#14955518)
> from certain mailing lists

eng-misc?

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by icelancer on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:36AM (#14955401)
I believe you. I also believe the 2nd chart would basically look the same if you polled 10,000 representative people from inside Google. The 1st one, not so much.
Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by DannyBee on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:38AM (#14955415)
Maybe?

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.

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by zbraniecki on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @11:20PM (#14965272)
a) I'm not sure what you base your believe in. My gut feelings tells me the opposite. If you polled a representative sample of employees you'd get very different results in the 2nd chart

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-...

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by Aunche on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @04:38AM (#14955780)
Voluntary response bias is definitely possible. People who feel the most wronged are more likely to respond to the survey.
Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by ryan_lane on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:19AM (#14955277)
For real, it's hard to get 40% of people to even take a survey.
Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by eagsalazar2 on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:11AM (#14955226)
Now there are 40% of people at google who can't sleep tonight because their blood is boiling and won't stop boiling for a long time.
Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by odbol_ on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:20AM (#14955281)
40% of how many employees total? And which ones? Only the ones on certain discussion boards? That's a pretty biased sample.
Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by manfredo on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:30AM (#14955354)
I don't know why, but the image isn't loading unless I view it directly: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGrQOrZUQAUrwcf.jpg

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.

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by eagsalazar2 on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:29AM (#14955350)
Yeah maybe the real % is a lot higher. Quit trying to convince yourself this guy is fringe. For better or for worse, he's not.
Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by empressplay on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:09AM (#14955218)
*Citation needed
Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by MatthewWilkes on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:40AM (#14955421)
40% of employees or 40% of memegen?
Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by s_kilk on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:25AM (#14955316)
If that's the case then that 40% should probably go too.

It's 2017, not 1417.

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by sjeohp on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:47AM (#14955459)
I only skimmed it but wasn't he just questioning the policy of positive discrimination?

Or is there something else? Because that's a pretty mild question to get so upset about.

Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo by TheGirondin on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @09:38AM (#14957671)
Sorry, that doesn't fly. Working with people who have different political views is part of being a professional.

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.