If I hear a manager fires them at such a moment, it already gives me an idea of what kind of manager we're talking about.

If a manager sends a text message half an hour before the talk starts to not give the talk, I definitely know what kind of manager it is.

You have 2 kinds of managers: The ones that think ahead of the time, and the ones that don't think ahead of the time. It's pretty easy to distinguish the two.

Let's say Employee A comes up to Manager three months before Defcon, saying he'd like to do such and such. Manager doesn't like it, but he doesn't want to upset A at that time because Reasons. He says "sure bud, you go ahead, I'll check with the lawyers just in case and let you know if there is any problem". Then he waits, and half an hour before the talk, through an indirect medium like email or text, he goes "sorry man, I only just got a message back from the lawyers that you can't talk about that. Totally gutted! Oh well, better luck next year, uh?"

30 mins before the presentation, after they've all flown to the conference, is not incompetence; it's malice.

Incredibly bad leader. Ask away.

Edit: I guess I don't have much experience with HR at large companies - I use the term to refer to aspects of management related to maintaining employee wellbeing, workplace culture etc.

Really? I've always seen HR as a sort of "union for un-unionised employees". They help you get stuff out of the business, and help the business get the most out of you.

Perhaps I've only encountered the good kind of HR.

Back in the day, the term 'anti-personnel department' was often used.

And don't get me started on the use of the term 'human resources'

[Edit] - more detail. I'm a techie but have occasionally had line management (in addition to tech lead) responsibilities. The first time I took on these duties, I had to do the relevant HR training and was amazed at the attitude: a little bit of 'duty-of-care' and a lot of 'follow-this-process-to-make-sure-the-law-is-on-our-side'

I had an interesting experience a couple of years back when everyone in our office was called to a surprise meeting with HR except me.... I had already resigned, everyone else got the bullet in that caring way that HR departments are famous for.

In other news, for a bunch of smart people, engineers are spectacularly underunionized.

Because they will be involved in recruiting, they will also have a keen understanding of how much that increases their workload, which is otherwise pretty flimsy in a lot of cases. The more churn, the more they can justify their headcount.

Which isn't to say HR won't want him gone. Just not yet.

Nope; they help the business get the most out of you without getting sued. That's the alpha and omega of HR.

Their obligations are to the company, not to you. When they answer your questions, they do it so you can't claim later on that the company didn't tell you such and such or that the procedure XYZ was unclear, and sue them. They are nice so that you won't see the company as adversarial and sue them. And so on and so forth.

I doubt it will make even a dent in Salesforce's profits or that anybody of their clients will even blink about it.

As for their PR, that's paid for (and customers might even like the drastic action).

Except if you mean PR to prospective security hacker hires.

1) The PR backlash is going to be gigantic.

2) If you fire someone on the spot (I have), you'd better have a damn good reason (I did--repository sabotage) as the company is now going to have to pay money to defend/payoff this.

3) Suddenly firing important people disrupts daily business functions for weeks or months.

4) Unless you think they are going to actively sabotage something, you can wait until they get home to reprimand or fire people.

All told, some manager is getting thrown under the bus for this.

The Google thing was gigantic. This is a blip.

(I'm only half joking. People don't talk about how poor the layout of that document was, but it was my first and lasting impression)

It's unbelievable that it was only the memo. And quite likely just the last straw.

I can easily imagine someone that produces poor quality once publically probably did so many times privately and likely more of a symptom of underlying inadequacy than the actual reason for firing.

But you know, headlines..

And yes, have no previous experience or knowledge about this so sorry if I'm armchairing a bit.

Larry Summers (a leading economist with often controversial opinions) got fired from his position as the president of harvard for effectively making the same point [1] except, you know, well argued unlike in the Google manifesto.

If Larry Summers gets fired for that, a random engineer is definitely getting the boot.

[1] http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/nber....

Everyone agrees it was polite, but well-argued and coherent is where not everyone does agree.

I've seen people with advanced degrees host debates where they legitimately advocated creationism as the truth against evolutionary biologists with equally advanced degrees. They were polite, and their supporters would say well-argued and coherent. But anyone who knows anything about the topic would see that the creationists weren't actually adding to the discussion or making strong points at all. Those creationist debates are always unsatisfying and exhausting to listen to, and after a while, that schtick becomes old and non-creationists stop engaging because it's just boring. But creationists will attend and be excited every time because having a debate against a real scientist legitimizes them.

That's how this memo thing felt. Nothing new was added to the discussion (at least not to those of us who have had this discussion before) and it just seemed like an opportunity that some less savory folks jumped on to promote some out-dated views (and more importantly, for mainstream media to jump on to paint all of tech as a place where those views are the norm. That story sells despite how wrong it is).

FWIW, I do hate impoliteness though. I understand why people felt defensive for the author after watching the internet freak the hell out (in rude or dismissive ways) about the memo which was not impolite in itself.

At the risk of perpetuating the disagreement, IMO if anything is similar to the creationinst debaters, it's the voices against the memo.

Going through the few recent HN discussions on the topic, I found that on the one side, you had people (including an actual scientist in the domain) telling that the memo basically got the science (even if not ultimate conclusions) right, as supported by _even more_ research people linked to, vs. the other side saying he presents "outdated" views of "biological determinism", etc., with no counter to the research cited by the memo itself (not to mention others) - just unsubstantiated accusations and dismissals.

Instead it wanted to connect that research to a) company policy and b) American-specific political divides. And to do that required a battery of assumptions regarding intention, merit, aptitude, worth, values.

That's where the wheels came off and everyone started projecting their own ideological interpretations, and you've been arguing past each other ever since.

You don't have any evidence to substantiate any of what you are writing and this individual has no opportunity to respond to what you are writing.

This is highly unprofessional behavior no matter what you think the justification is.

Statements from witness ARE evidence. What do you think evidence is?

The "individual" could create an account here and respond if he wanted to. It would be stupid, but he definitely has an opportunity.

And who told you anybody had to be professional on here?

They had executive signoff until half an hour prior to the talk, and they didn't see the text revoking permission until after the talk. I'm not sure what else they were supposed to have done.

It sounds so extreme that either the exec is unusually unaware of the consequences of his action or there is more to the story.

Does the story they are presenting make sense to you? It doesn't to me!

All that's left is to assume there is more to the story than what is written.

Seriously - the guy above you would support anyone in power and talk down to anyone not in it.