We had someone clearly trying to have a constructive discussion on a topic and he was treated as if he had written the manifesto for the Fourth Reich and was demanding all women be sent back to the kitchen.
These are hard lessons that everyone who works at a big corporation at a level above janitor has learned within the first year of working there, so to me arguments along the lines of "but they said it would be different this time, they promise" just seem ill-advised to me. As if you are sticking your head in the sand and proceeding as if you can't depend on your own good thinking.
I'd agree with you if he wasn't discussing it in direct reference to how Google approached things like hiring from a strategic perspective. However what he discussed was in the context of how google approaches something.
Secondly from what I've heard Google provided a space for precisely these kinds of discussions, so suggesting he should have known better than to discuss seems pretty unfair to me.
Even if what he said was wrong, wrong, wrong, it really seems to me like he was trying to engage in good faith and people didn't respond to it in good faith at all
There is a reason people who make actual strategic decisions speak as if they are eels covered in oil and it is to avoid situations like the one this person found themselves in.
> Google provided a space for precisely these kinds of discussions, so suggesting he should have known better than to discuss seems pretty unfair to me.
Yes, corporations embellish the truth (or lie, if you want to be that way). At this point, you need to understand this - especially if you work for a corporation that does as many questionable things as Google does. Everyone should be free to make their own decisions of course, this person decided to make an ill-advised argument at work and the consequence was that he cannot work there anymore.
> it really seems to me like he was trying to engage in good faith
Regardless of whether or not I believe this is true, "engaging in good faith" is not a shield against poor decisions.
I feel like 90% of people didn't read the drivel he wrote; I'd have fired him purely for the fact anyone that bad at stats (and proud of it) shouldn't be anywhere near a machine learning team.