There's a lot to be said about this approach (and I had a good conversation about this with someone I know who works at Google and leans conservative / Republican but not alt-right, and is unhappy that internal social media is tied to business-related communication - blocking someone who posts a lot of partisan political stuff apparently means that you can't communicate with them in an emergency, if they maintain one of your dependencies, which seems like a pretty bad design).
But I think there are two reasons it's not a completely simple solution.
The first is that Google, as the article says, encourages you to "bring your whole self to work." Heck, Google even encourages you to bring your dog to work. Google encourages you to stay for lunch and probably dinner. Google encourages you to form bands with your coworkers, go on hiking trips with your coworkers, etc. There's a lot of deliberate attempts at promoting social cohesion beyond just normal traditional professional relationships, and by all accounts, that's a lot of why Google is as successful as it is. Requiring "Don't talk politics at the workplace" involves not talking politics over meals, on weekend team trips, and so forth, which is unlikely to be enforceable and also seems like it would hurt the genuine social bonds these things are trying to promote.
The second is that "politics" includes things like "Is it valid to be trans" or "Are certain races inferior to others." I'm not going to deny that this is "politics;" the generalized question of whether whole swaths of people are deserving of recognition under their claimed identity has been part of politics since basically the first empire captured its first nation. But it's unavoidable for a large company to pick an answer one way or another. A hypothetical Google running at the time of Cato the Elder, with Roman and Carthaginian employees, could not avoid the "political" question of whether Carthage should be destroyed and its residents sold into slavery.
Something that always rubs me the wrong way when reading about these issues is that people in (for now) mostly American spheres use both the word and the concept "race" so uncritically [1], with no reflection at all. Heck, if we consider the US Government, then "race" is an official property of humans (see e.g. bop.gov Inmate Locator, which literally has a drop-down labelled "race" with choices like "White" and "American Indian").
[1] It should go without saying that using a different word for the same concept means you're still using the same concept. It's essentially the same as the good-old-fashioned euphemism treadmill.
My past job, I would have political discussion with coworkers but they were people I had formed extremely close and trusting bonds with. We may have disagreed at times but it came from a place of respect and knowing someone a little.
After the US presidential election, the lead execs of the office sent out emails about the results and commiserating with the staff (we had people call in sick, crying, etc.) but, despite the office being 99.9% on their side, lunch conversation later that day revolved around how most didn't think what they did was appropriate because, if there was that .1% that could feel alienated, why do so from on high?
As for the second reason, I think it comes down to professionalism. We can politicize anything if we try hard enough. But if our employer says "no politics, just get the work done", then both sides must adhere to whatever policies are provided, within the law. Don't like the bathroom rules or workplace guidance? Work somewhere else.
That's certainly an incredibly common view, so I'm not going to say that it's wrong or irrational.
But I'm reminded of the bathroom subplot in Hidden Figures - all the restrooms in one building were for white people, and so the one black woman working in the building, who was extraordinarily technically competent, needed to go on extended break to another building every time she needed to use the restroom. "Don't like the bathroom rules, work someplace else" was absolutely the prevailing culture at the time, which had hefty rules about "professionalism" and not "politicizing" things. But it had a serious negative impact on the business, and the right thing to do (which a manager eventually did) was to change the bathroom rules.
The choice to adopt "professionalism," and to bring in no politics and leave the political decisions to whatever existing culture is in place, is a political choice of its own. There are a lot of arguments in favor of that choice, yes. But it remains a political choice.
Seems like you're overcomplicating the problem. Nearly all other companies seem to be doing just fine. Certainly not without incident, but by all appearances, companies aren't waging the sort of internal political wars that this article portrays.
In your opinion, did the google memo touch on similar topics? Many represented it as saying "women are inferior engineers to men", but a crux of the argument seems to be that many say this is not what the memo said.
Also, there are tangential topics that are often phrased similar to the above so as to make it seems like we're in a Carthaginian scenario when it isn't necessarily the case. For example, the main argument seemed to be about trans-people using certain bathrooms, that touched on the topic of "trans validity" (or dragged conversation into that), but was also also a separate, related argument about bathroom usage that precipitated that.
Those people are right. The full text of the memo is readily available. The author not only didn't say this, but repeated numerous times that this was explicitly not what he was trying to communicate. There is no reasonable, charitable way to interpret those who misrepresent him.
I think this brings up an important point. Some people insist on painting this as a "diversity champions vs blithering racists/sexists" issue, ignoring the numerous legitimate criticisms for the current approach to diversity.
The politics instantly put the memo squarely at one side of the current cultural / political wars. With the current binaries in American politics right now, such will never lead to sober discussion.
Note that it doesn't imply or conclude that a given female applicant is less qualified than a given male candidate nor that the pipeline of female applicants is less qualified in aggregate than the pipeline of male applicants (because there's no reason to assume that the pipeline has the same distribution as the overall population).
It merely suggests that (assuming pertinent biological causes) we shouldn't expect a fair process to result in parity of outcomes.
Whether or not there are pertinent biological causes is a question I leave to scientists, but I do want to note that (contrary to Damore's critics), science has established biological sex differences that may be pertinent, and lots of scientists have validated Damore's position (that biological differences may explain some of the gender distribution in tech). https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201711/the-truth-ab...
The latter, yes (in the sense that the question was relevant to the memo, not so much that the memo coherently attempted to address it), but it wasn't the memo I was referencing here here—it was other posts, either in internal social media or on external forums with clear links to employees.
China has similarly dominant tech companies and I'm sure they do not share SV's political opinions.
You could just as easily say they were successful despite this or that aspect of their company culture.
Majority of US companies have 'diversity advocates' among the ranks of non HR employees?
Except that if your whole self is not within the established pc, liberal standard, you'll be fired.
[0] - I realize the lawsuit would obviously want to make it look as bad as possible.
I'm not sure which is worse, that there are people at Google who (and I know the lawsuit is using extreme examples) have these extreme left-wing views who are in positions to force their views on a large unsuspecting populous, or Google for not fixing the problem.
If you've ever been an online forum mod, or similar, you'll know that the larger the "board" gets, the more out of whack it gets. When a company, or forum, is small, and most people know each other, at least a bit, they tend to stay civil. Past some point, that goes out the window.
Not talking about politics is a good idea, but it's very hard to specify what is "politics" and what is not.
The problem is that there is a small minority of people who don't/can't see things from other people's perspectives, so they either make blatantly offensive comments without realising it, or they get offended and their feelings hurt when no reasonable person would have taken a comment to be offensive.
Perhaps there could be a peer-based mediation panel within Google to make non-binding, non-public rulings on these cases without them going to HR (if both parties agree on the outcome). If these panels were make up of reasonable people (think wikipedia admins), then it might work quite well.
They should put up a big banner of the question the employees should be asking themselves about their work activities: "Is this good for the company?"
And I'm not being totally unserious.
[0] If everyone involved has an implicit mutual respect for the other person, which seems unlikely.
That discussion is unlikely to go well if any of your co-workers are immigrants. You can't discuss "should you be in this country or should you and your family be deported" in front of someone dispassionately.
Edit: the last few times I've discussed "heavy handed immigration policy" at work it has been because co-workers have had to deal with the Home Office and I'm commiserating how difficult it is. One guy got tripped up by "the middle initial on your ID wasn't present in the name field of this form" (or vice versa).
> Gudeman further stated that at the suggestion of another Googler, he searched Gilani’s story of being profiled, and found “zero evidence for the claim that [Gilani] was targeted just for being a Muslim.” Gudeman posed more questions about the FBI’s motives for looking into Gilani such as the fact that Gilani had recently visited Pakistan, and that the FBI could have possibly found something interesting about Gilani’s trip or the region that he visited.
If you're going to have a rule about not discussing politics in order to uphold a productive workplace culture, it seems like a very good place to start is that your coworkers should not be able to say something with the subtext "Maybe the FBI had a reason to investigate you for being a terrorist."
Aside from the feeds of a few dozen Twitter edgelords, the discussions you're imagining (or want us to imagine) do not exist and are a strawman argument.
I'm afraid demands for people to be deported are very common in UK immigration discussion, and very few people seem to be fussy over the legality of it.
But then, I'm a European, living in another European country, so the same racial sensitivity might not exist?
EDIT: and what I mean by that is, you can discuss with a close coworker whatever you want, but people seem to want "open texted based communication" in a way that invites argument.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/passion-...
> We share everything we can. We have a weekly all-hands meeting called TGIF, hosted by our founders, Larry and Sergey. In the first 30 minutes, we review news and product launches from the past week, demo upcoming products, and celebrate wins. But the second 30 minutes is the part that matters most: Q&A.
> Everything is up for question and debate, from the trivial (“Larry, now that you’re CEO will you start wearing a suit?” The answer was a definite ‘no’), to the ethical (“Is Google going in the right direction?”).
I assume it's been a net positive for them in the past, I wonder if this TGIF policy will get changed.
> at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you [...] a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face [...] You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.
TL;DR - Yeah I mean, violence against you is totally justified because of what you said -- but if there is violence, it's your fault.
Nothing in Damore's memo justifies violence as a response. Zunger just stops short of advocating a violent response. I don't think he's someone I'd ever want to work for, or pay heed to.
1 - https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
He says people may want to be violent against you because of what you said. He makes no claims about the justification of that violence. He makes a statement of fact, not of judgement.
A famous Indian political leader quoted Newton's third law "Every action has a reaction" in regards to an incident which further lead to unprecedented violence. All leader did was to quote a scientific law but he was widely criticized in media, it also lead to death of many more people.
I have no problem with what he says including veiled violence threats. It is his political positioning not some ethical advice.
In a vacuum, yes. Saying certain things may incite a violent response. But we're not in a vacuum. Let's look at three scenarios, and ask the following questions: Is violence expected? Is violence understandable? Is violence justified?
A - While drunk at a bar, a man repeatedly says derogatory things about another man's wife. A fight breaks out between the two of them.
B - While at a KKK rally, a young black man calmly discussing afrocentrism is jumped and beaten by a mob.
C - While at an LGBT rally, an old white man hostilely quoting Leviticus is jumped and beaten by a mob.
In the first scenario, this is targeted harassment. We should anticipate a violent outbreak. If you were to poll a diverse group of people, most people would say the violence was understandable, but not justified. This scenario bears the least similarity to our situation -- although I will make one comment. This is the only scenario where violence could be justified. If the provocateur becomes violent (or makes threats), a violent response MAY be expected, understandable, and justified.
In the second and third scenario, violence is an expected result. While some people within these groups may feel the violence was understandable, the real question lies with the groups organizers. I suspect that the LGBT group would denounce violence, even though the man had bad intentions. (I wouldn't expect as much from the KKK.)
To relate this to Google, Zunger is a leader. He excuses the violent response of the employees, and blames Damore for inciting the violence. (This is an INCREDIBLY poor position to take.) While it's fair to question whether Damore was the provocateur from example C, or the debater from example B, it's unfair to blame him for a violent response.
As soon as you say the word "justified" or "understandable", you're not responding to Zunger, you're responding to a strawperson. There is no excusing, justification, or blame in the article. There are statements of fact.
You're conflating causality and blame. Zunger only discusses the former, and there is a huge difference between them. You're transforming his statements on causality into ones on blame when they clearly aren't. Damore wrote a thing. That thing hurt people. Cause, effect. No blame. Hawaiian government employee pressed button. A million people were alerted of an impending missile by accident. Cause, effect. No blame. (To be clear, with Hawaii, the blame, imo, falls onto the design of the system, and not the guy who happened to misclick).
In another post you claim that Zunger uses the phrase "it's your fault" (an assignment of blame), But the word "fault" doesn't appear in the essay. Zunger specifically says that Damore's action "has caused a significant harm" to his colleagues. But that, too, is a statement of causality, and is not assigning blame. (I think this is telling by the way: to justify, to yourself, your disagreement with Zunger, you managed to invent things the essay didn't actually say, without even realizing it!)
To be very clear on this, I think that violence is potentially expected in all three cases you mentioned, and justified in none of them. The exact argument Zunger is making works in the reverse, by the way. "You came out as trans to the office, all of whom are staunchly on the religious right and as a result now refuse to work with you. This is...problematic for your employer, and makes you decidedly less valuable from the perspective of your employer. This is problematic.". Am I blaming the trans individual? I certainly don't think so.
Zunger's argument is almost entirely a utilitarian one: You have made yourself less valuable to the organization, and either we get rid of you, or we get rid of a lot of other people. The choice is, unfortunately for you, obvious. And that's the case irrespective of who is "at fault".
Your summary is misleading. He didn't "justify" violence. Saying that jaywalking is risky is not an ethical statement about cars.
If I'm assaulted in the workplace for a political viewpoint I anonymously posted, the fault is with the assaultee. Not with the assaulted. However, Zunger flips the blame.
Didn't you see this coming? You should have known opposing the majority viewpoint would be met with violence. For workplace safety, I have to fire you.
Ironically, he seems to blame tolerance on this. It seems the man doesn't understand what the word means.
Edit: > Saying that jaywalking is risky is not an ethical statement about cars
See my response above to joshuamorton.
Yonger is quite correct in that intentionally or not, for better or worse, Damore created a situation in which it would be very difficult to put him on a team anywhere. While work place violence is rarely the answer, and I sincerely doubt anyone at google would raise themselves to that level the fact of the matter is that even the risk of that puts Google in an impossible situation.
> See my response above to joshuamorton.
I didn't understand the connection between that response and my assertion.
Zunger's blog post is extremely obnoxious. Not only does Zunger write something like "everything you say is wrong, but I won't explain any specific way you're wrong, or link to any such explanation" he then goes on to explain engineering to a senior engineer, and grossly misrepresents Damore. In addition he clearly does assign fault to Damore for people wanting to punch him.
That's one thing about the number of folks who've publicly stated positions I find abhorrent: I've got a list of folks I won't work with in the future, because I don't wish to support them.
I don't know if that's a good thing, though. It doesn't seem wise for society to fracture into different polarised groups refusing to do business with one another. Seems like a recipe for recreating Lebanon's mess.
Why can't we go back to the rule of not bringing politics and religion into the office?
Acceptance comes through dialogue, and mutual understanding.
Sadly, there's a lot of "open minded people" who are pretty close minded to openly entertain a viewpoint that isn't their own, let alone be able to look in the mirror.
It can be easier (and lazier) to trivialize, dismiss, degrade the viewpoints of others, or be a crybully, rather than have a sincere look at yourself in a conversation.
Add into the mix reasonable themes of fragility, privilege that one group has been raised with (not entirely their choosing but a responsibility to work on), and in another experience at the expense of others, another group having an unfair go for a number of fair reasons.
The reality is bias exists. The best candidate does not win if the decision makers are not of the best and of the most open temperament.
I read somewhere that some of this may be a majority having the experience of a minority for once - and maybe that can help drive a better conversation and mutual understanding.
One thing is for sure, being quiet won't work, and freedom of speech without being thoughtful with your words won't help either.
Do you have any actual empirical evidence or research for this? This reads like window-dressing for thought-police. "You don't accept our views? Sounds like you need more dialogue (re-education)."
In a business setting at least, tolerance allows individuals with different beliefs and motivations to work toward shared goals.
Sorry another person's reality can be effortlessly maligned as window dressing to you. Happy to chat offline and you can report back here - email is in my profile. Happy to do a hangout too.
A reality is it's easy to marginalize and dehumanize those you haven't had to sit down, face to face and have an interaction with and have to consider that they might actually hold you to task as much as you are holding them to task.
Getting along with others doesn't only involve logic and the mind.
Interpersonal skills are not purely logical, they require a balanced ability to use one's emotions with intelligence and maturity.
In business settings, teams that practice deep horizontal loyalty generally outperform teams that borderline tolerate each other but would prefer not to. Similar effects happen on sports teams that have proverbial Cinderella runs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_reconciliation_commi...
In any case, I'm guessing I misread your original intent.
Normally I’d say “they’re ALL idiots for talking about this at the workplace, and ALL deserve to be fired,” but when your employer is making you attend discussions on this topic... well, it’s fair game, isn’t it?
I agree but hard to do when your company pays political lobbyist.
That used to be common sense. You don't talk politics or religion at work. It's even in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
But that's from the 1960's, and SV is compelled to re-invent anything older than 2002.
Note that the debates at Google are not about "is Trump an idiot?". They are about political issues affecting decisions made by Google. In these debates, not bringing up politics is equivalent to continuing the status quo.
That's not avoiding politics, it is simply accepting the politics underlying the status quo. It may sometimes appear to be "neutral" because people have grown accustomed to it, but it isn't.
You don't have to talk about politics to be political at work.
I'm not saying that talking 'politics' at work is wise thing to do, but in the US at least, all people have the explicit right to do so. There have been a fair few SCOTUS cases on this one.
[0] https://www.americanbar.org/publications/insights_on_law_and...
Depends if diversity is considered "politics". There are lots of diversity measures inside all companies and to say don't discuss these is a bit weird. Perhaps only certain HR professionals can be "allowed" to discuss diversity initiatives?
I honestly wish this was the law.
Like, honestly honestly, or jokingly honestly? What if I say "I wish I were allowed to speak about politics at work" at work? That's political. Do I get a fine? How about "am I allowed to talk about this?" If it's a gray area and we start debating it, which one of us gets shipped to the gulag?
Who gets to decide what's politics? Isn't even that question political?
I wish my coworkers (and my fellow citizens for that matter) would be interested in politics just a little more, so they would realize what is happening around them, and know what they are talking about whenever they touch politics and legislature. My opinion is gradually becoming a minority view all over Europe, with people fleeing to either extreme.
The thing is: We were once "politically uneducated" here in Europe. It made the "third Reich" as a mass phenomenon possible, because a lot of people joined this movement blindly and with enthusiasm and did not realize where this train was heading until it was way too late (and they were completely delusional).
When the allies took over they tried to make sure we would be and stay politically educated, so this would never happen again (spoiler: it did not work). How ironic that America is spearheading the movement to normalize extreme views.
Assuming you think coercion is a bad idea, your only tool left is discussion and consensus-building about rules. In other words, politics.
(To be fair, I understand the underlying sentiment: I, too, would like to live in a world where my personal desires were somehow the law of the land in such a way that everybody else were also happy with them. But after some long thought (and some good literature) I think that really falls in the "be careful what you wish for" category.)
We already do. C.f. laws, courts.
Politics easily being a fuzzy term which can be adapted to fit a very wide range of ideas gives those few in power who set the rules the ability to silence whatever they wish.
It would better if there were more initiatives to improve intellectual discourse so people could like actually talk to one another.
The less we talk, the further apart we will grow
To me, this could all be solved by HR releasing a document on what can and can not be discussed on company time and where the lines are. And if a document exists, enforce it on both sides.
Or you know, not talk about politics in the work place.