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Context: News broke earlier this week that Apple had hired García Martínez for an unspecified role.
Apple did not say what exactly García Martínez' position was, but sources said he was hired for a lower-level engineering role and started last week.
In the petition, first reported by the Verge, employees write: "We demand an investigation into how his published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored, along with a clear plan of action to prevent this from happening again."
In one passage from "Chaos Monkeys," García Martínez describes women in the Bay Area as "soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit.”
This passage was also cited online when García Martínez started writing for Wired magazine.
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Why on earth would anyone put something like that in a book?!
You can look at the larger passage as important context. It’s easy to dismiss him still as a jerk, but what bothers me is the idea that one cannot have an authentic experience that isn’t totally whitewashed and ready to be used for an ad for a multinational.
Reading all of the selected quotes in that petition came off to me as thoughts he probably shouldn’t have published, but ones that many ordinary people have that aren’t total monsters. Yes he’s probably got a lot of toxic masculinity hold ups.. but so do millions and millions of people. If you read the minds of most employees at large companies and then put it into words, probably people would be fired left and right.
At some point we need to acknowledge personal thoughts aren’t always the same thing as professional interactions, and that people can also grow, learn and change.
He might not be the one for this, but I think the public response feels very snap for someone’s life. Probably almost no one signing that petition actually read his book or learned much about him in order to put things into context and perspective, yet they were easily wanting to ruin a man’s life.
NB Perhaps he deserves it, I don’t know. But I’m wanting to withhold judgement, and I don’t have enough time or cares to actually investigate him.
It's my opinion García Martínez thought he would capitalize on the trend and wrote a book describing his experience in a YCombinator company that was aquihired by Facebook.
He wrote himself as a character in that genre. His writing style in general, however, seems to give him away as a blowhard - which I don't think was was his intent.
Well, partly because the author begins with:
> I’m biased, because I know Antonio Garcia-Martinez and something like the same thing once happened to me…
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h...
Apple hired skeevy creep to work on ad-tech.
People got upset that Apple hired skeevy creep.
Apple fired/rescinded offer to skeevy creep.
Apple is likely about to pay a bunch of money to skeevy creep.
If he resigned from another job and relocated, there are damages here that are quite easy to document.
Yes, employees are nominally "at-will", but employers don't get to just do anything they want without consequence--especially in California.
I'm surprised Apple did actually say anything beyond "We have terminated his employment. No further comment." as they're on terrible ground here.
Finally, unlike most small fry, he's not going to have any trouble finding a lawyer for this. Lawyers will happily take this obvious a case on retainer. And, he's got lots of "wokeness crusade" lawyers who will be salivating over this case.
Both sides are at fault here: AGM said some nasty things, and Apple failed to do its due diligence before recruiting him.
Seems to be contradicted by the tweet?
>3. Apple was well aware of my writing before hiring me. My references were questioned extensively about my bestselling book and my real professional persona (rather than literary one).
I do think AGM's comments should disqualify him as a candidate to work in a diverse work environment. But I don't want hiring to be more exhausting than it already is on either side, so aren't situations like this the reason we have work at-will arrangements anyway? What could Apple really have done here to prevent this? "Sign here attesting that you haven't ever said anything that could point to you being a prejudiced person in the work environment". If it turns out you did say something pretty bad, then too bad you had to relocate for this job because the offer is withdrawn.
I'm sympathetic, I _know_ I've posted really stupid "edgy" things on social media some time between the ages of 12-15 that's likely buried in a set of redundant servers somewhere in the world. Stuff that would get me fired immediately if I said and believed them today. How do you convincingly demonstrate to an employer _and_ to your coworkers that the person from then isn't you anymore?
You make a good point about hiring, though. They could probably read reviews of his book, but I don't know whether the reviews would mention its sexist elements -- probably depends on when it was written.
Since he wrote that ages before being hired, the only one at fault here is Apple. This is just a knee jerk reaction because of the backlash they got.