Read the many, lengthy direct quotes from his writing in https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h....

This is a guy who has made a writing/speaking career of knowingly saying crassly offensive and, at best, childishly naughty things about entire classes of people he would be managing at Apple (or anywhere else). He's a professional troll. It's not like someone dug up a single reddit post of his he made when he was in high school.

It's a genuine mystery to me how he got hired for any management job in the first place.

"Mr. García is not just a keen observer of corporate and social culture, but a thoughtful business and policy analyst armed with a highly refined detector for pretentious nonsense. "

See: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/review-...

I think people complaining here are full of it again.

I have some friends that are pretty sensitive on stuff like this, but they would never go that far like these people did.

Worth bearing in mind Chaos Monkeys came out 8 years ago – an age in cultural years. That same year Warren Buffett was quoted as saying this: “Credit worthiness is like virginity. It can be preserved but not restored very easily so it is crazy to play around with it.”

I'm not sure if he'd would say that now, but I'm not sure this was such uncomfortable syntax in the 2010s.

As a manager, as someone responsible for others' livelihoods and careers, he has to be held to a much higher bar. Even if it were purely in jest, is it fair to have his direct reports try to figure out the line between what he publicly writes and privately believes?

There is no dearth of douchebags in positions of power and responsibility. And they are happy to over ride "HR processes" not because they are incapable of recognizing another douchebag, but because they think the douchebag will be effective.

The problem with cancel culture is it doesnt address that belief. All I see is "cancelled" ppl and various douchebags afraid of being cancelled getting together and supporting each other reinforcing their "victimhood".

Sooner or later enough of them aggregate at one spot or the other and create new issues for everyone.

The only way to deal with douchebags especially in the corporate world, is to be more effective than them in delivering results. That makes the story simple.

Cancel culture just complicates it.

I don't see any reason to doubt that plenty of people at Apple had heard of him and read the book, other than a self-regarding faith that people you disagree with can't possibly know something you don't.

Examples of the background research they could have done:

1. talk to any of the employees who organized the petition

2. read his book! It's widely available! This is a guy whose hiring was literally a positive news story yesterday https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-hires-chaos-monkeys-au.... When you hire people who are going to be news you do a little background. It's a short book! Apple screwed up!

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h...

example VC: https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1392675012281315328

Can he do the job?

Whether he wrote a book people get their panties twisted over does not appear to be a part of that job description.

When did this concept become so controversial?

Everything else is noise.

As for "Part of it is because, it does not matter that manager thinks you a are worth less than nothing. Not to the real owners anyway. What matters is whether they deliver on what is needed."

That's straight nonsense. A bad manager can often make sure a top performer they don't like never gets the credit they deserve or has any internal opportunities.

That concept became controversial 57 years ago with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the controversial nature of it has been strengthened over the decades since through a multitude of hostile workplace laws building on the CRA.

What those laws mean is hiring an employee, doubly so for a manager like the man in question, who has published a high profile book disparaging a protected class of people opens up the company itself to lawsuits on the basis of discrimination relating to a hostile workplace if a single member of that protected class is (or even feels) mistreated in some way because it’s evidence the company should’ve known about the potential hostile environment and did nothing to prevent it.

And so it’s clear, no this is not the same thing as cancel culture based on a tweet or forum post or even on the scale of Amazon banning Parler. It’s not the same as James Damore and Google. Those all do not necessarily meet the standard of public speech while this guy went and published a book which very clearly does. This is a half a century plus of laws and cases establishing precedent and companies acting in a way to prevent costly lawsuits.

No well run company would open themselves up to the legal risk involved in hiring or keeping on someone like this for a management role, especially after it was clearly brought to light in this manner. Apple’s HR department is almost definitely currently trying to figure out what mistake resulted in him not getting filtered out earlier in the process so they can prevent this from happening again.

"Can he do the job?" has not been the only thing that matters, and in fact the situation described in this instance has mattered, for over a half century, I’m guessing longer than you’ve been alive. Not because of woke mobs or free speech or any other recent political talking points or even really about Apple caring about sexism. It’s about avoiding clear cut legal and financial risk period.

I was going to make a comment mentioning how the asymmetry in what is allowed in big companies frustrates me greatly. People who express disdain towards the current social structure and disparage groups like white men get hired left and right while people who vocally express support for older social structures get cancelled. Well your comment explains that asymmetry perfectly with something I had never considered: legal risk.

It is apparent to me that many people in the country still align with the old social structures, but they aren't allowed to thrive in modern corporate America. How will this affect society in the long term? What would it take for things to change?

Have you seen _any_ major tech company with close to 50% women or 40% non-hispanic white employees? In engineering roles? That's just aiming for parity with U.S. demographics, but when you consider how much of the world travels to the U.S. to work in tech, that 40% number should be much higher!

So if women and minorities are not being "hired left and right", and not all women and minorities ascribe to the viewpoint you describe, then that viewpoint cannot be being "hired left and right".

The "old social structures" may be on their way out, but their vestiges are clearly alive and well despite the moderate legal "risk" that has been added in the past few decades. The law may be an asymmetric tool, but as it stands, a tool that isn't up to the task it was designed for.

---

To reframe things, some questions:

How would you define "the old social structures".

Do you think they are good/bad/benign.

Do you they are still present/fast fading/already gone?

Depends on what you'd consider close. Apple, for example, reports 47% white non-Hispanic employees overall and 44% in engineering. (https://www.apple.com/diversity/) From my personal experience, I've never worked on a team where white people were a majority, although in one case I think the company as a whole was.

For comparison, many of the other FAANG companies fare much worse, and many of the smaller companies I saw when consulting and doing a startup looked even less diverse than big tech.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/12/six-years-into-diversity-rep...

They're social and cultural beliefs that used to be accepted by corporations and the media but are now not. For example, unequal outcomes doesn't imply discrimination. Some cultures are better than others. There are widespread physical and psychological differences between men and women. These are common beliefs that are still common, but people are afraid to voice them.

> Do you think they are good/bad/benign.

Any extreme ideology is bad. Requiring strict gender roles or saying whites are superior is extremely harmful. But so is flagrant discrimination against whites or other similar things. What is bad is allowing one extreme while suppressing the other.

> Do you they are still present/fast fading/already gone?

I read some studies somewhere that stated that conservatism and liberalism are inate character traits that never really go away in a population. This means that changes in the visibility of such traits is largely a function of how much power one side or the other can gain. This means that in the 50's, liberalism was just as popular as now but they didn't have the power.

Now its swapped. Liberalism has the power, the corporate support, the narrative. But that doesn't mean that conservatism is any rarer than before. This power asymmetry increases the chances of conflict. See the affect of the Culture Wars on our political system.

I want to emphasize that my personal opinions don't matter much at all here. But if corporations continue asymmetric political pressure, there will be pushback. What will the repercussions of such pushback be?

Because forcing companies to not allow discriminatory practices or hostile work environments for protected classes is kind of the entire point (of the business oriented portions of those laws).

I’m having difficulty interpreting a more charitable reading of your post.

Edit: just noticed "one of". I’m morbidly curious, what are the other evil ramifications of civil rights laws.

No, I said it had an evil ramification. Laws can have both evil and good ramifications.

> what are the other evil ramifications of civil rights laws

I would say that the current legal environment of allowing companies to be sued successfully for "hostile environment" actions of their employees that they had nothing to do with and no foreknowledge of is another.

You can take the your viewpoint to the extreme to prove a point: yeah that Himmler guy knows how to engineer and plan. all that matters right?

One's actions affect others, and even disregarding the (evidently not agreed upon fact) that we should actively be combating racism, misogyny, discrimination etc, it's bad for business when one persons behavior makes other employees less productive, less likely to work for your company in the first place, less likely for customers to buy, or open the company to liability or settling a suit since they now have reports of his behavior.

It is a power play. Pure and simple.

I don't get this worldview at all. It's a power play to try to combat the centuries of discrimination against women, sexism, racism, and more?

If part of the job is showing respect to all your coworkers, regardless of sex, then it seems obvious he is incapable.

Maybe his beliefs do not translate at all into his behavior, but I doubt it.

I am trying to be reasonable about it, but the reaction to my simple statement created ridiculous level of response I did not expect so I expect to defend it.

I repeat.

The only thing that matters is whether this person can do their job.

How does that make me sexist?

Especially if you want to defend some unpopular position, you have make sure you don't have logical holes in it, like universal absolutes that succumb to easy counterexamples.

The guy is an asshole, but it is hard to argue he does not know what he is doing.

Do you realize that the Civil Rights Act is also a law that companies have an interest in their employees not breaking?

He sounds like a 0.1x employee.

This is just another way of accusing someone of hysteria: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria

1. Learn there is a new hire 2. their first course of action is to scour his internet history for things to be offended by 3. find something 4. get a lynch mob going 5. complain to HR 6. get guy fired 7. start a party

Is it possible people already knew of him prior to his hiring?

For starters, you're making baseless assumptions about those involved without providing and receipts.

For example, how do you know people were looking for things to be offended by vs people simply googling their soon to be boss who found some very concerning things in the process and raise their (quite legitimate) concerns through the proper channels?

The language you use and the picture you paint make you come across as intellectually lazy at best, and a troll at worst.

It is not trolling.

So. Some god damn context since anyone with access to google COULD have pulled it if they were so inclined ( but we can't have reasoned discussion, can we now ).

One of the offensive passages with more context:

"When she was in her teens, her father decided to move the family to the United States, where they suffered a financial reversal she was unwilling to talk about. Suddenly not among the moneyed class, she hustled herself through the redbrick boondocks of the University of Vermont. Citibank internship led to a Deutsche Bank job, and after a few years she was an equity derivatives trader at Deutsche, holding her own against the toff sharks of the City of London.

She had wild green eyes, with unnatural red spots in her irises when you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic cover. Her personality was flinty and rough, and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels.

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work- be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast in someone's back- required doing. Long story short, you wanted to tie your genetic wagon to the backing horse of her bloodline. Which is why I was less nervous than I should have been on a random Saturday in July..."

You find that offensive and a fireable offense?

Good luck.

Are we reading the same passage? He is saying, and I am paraphrasing here, when the zombie apocalypse comes DrCongo will be passed like currency, because he will have no skills to survive. The green eyed girl will survive on her own.

What is so offensive about that? I have zero chance believing that. 75% of US would die of hunger should a bigger disruption come.

We will discuss actions and consequences again from an amusingly differing perspective I am sure.