We all know that men and women are different but under no circumstances can you club a large section of population and say they are inferior in some respect ... hitler did it with the Jews, whites did it to the blacks , Japanese did it to the Chinese and history is rife with extreme examples of the Dangers of generalization of a large section of population. Our job as human civilization is to evolve positively and to survive by dispersion of empathy - not by corroding it every day and making a certain section feel weak and vulnerable. No matter what your point of view is there is no doubt the author of the article had touched a raw nerve deliberately which he could have easily avoided. Therefor Google is right to fire him and the majority is absolutely within their rights to condemn him.
The company culture is really starting to fall apart. I wouldn't be surprised to see internal changes structurally to teams. Managers should manage but not be able to pick their team.
A junior employee publishes a memo, it gets leaked, there is a media shitstorm because anything one Google employee does reflects on the entire company. Now all of a sudden the culture is falling apart?
Managers certainly should have influence on who is on their teams but obviously not absolute control.
The reaction from the new director who started in June sets a tone, the firing sets a tone and the managers who are using their power to blacklist employees sets a tone. These events are changing the culture and image of what it means to work at google.
Except what he said was "some people are just biologically different". Its not a political statement, its a statement a fact. It is indisputable that different people have different hard-wired genetic predispositions. Its incredibly Orwellian and another sign of our societal decay that people not only deny this simple truth, but consider it as so utterly offensive that it cannot be discussed or considered. As much as you would like the universe to be a truly egalitarian place where we are all born with the same skills, abilities, and aptitude - that's not the universe we live in.
In the context of hiring why is this even brought up? You have a certain skillset needed for a certain job. Some people have it, some people do not. Why is there a need for attributing this to their genes, upbringing, psychology or anything else for that matter?
it is not a political statement or a statement of fact. the very strong implications you are making are clear statement of supremecist ideology, which is an idea so toxic that it should be shut down wherever it is seen. it is not orwellian to shut this down, and it is a sad indictment of our current culture that it only took around 70 years for us to collectively forget the lessons of WWII, and to begin again peddling these eugenics ideas as mere differences of opinion
that's not how evidence works. I have no interest in assessing or refuting whatever studies he might have cited to support his argument. the argument was that his coworkers were biologically inferior for the job of programming, which I can tell you up front is an unsupportable position. the studies might point out differences sure, but that is a far cry from the conclusion of inferiority or superiority for any particular task, and suggesting such a thing is morally and ethically repulsive.
It kind of is. He provided evidence for his claims (not your misrepresentation of them), and you get to provide counter-evidence.
> the argument was that his coworkers were biologically inferior for the job of programming
Could you point out where exactly he said that? I had trouble finding it.
Because from what I gathered, his argument was that, due to biological differences between groups of people, not all groups are on average equally suited and/or interested in all tasks, so expecting equal representation is foolish.
With the full, and, rather short, text of his available, I expect we'll clear up this difference in belief about what he said quickly.
I had a whole thing written out here, but I don't really think you'll understand it. summed up, this isn't an academic debate about logic and evidence. this conversation has real world consequences for real people. if you want to discuss biology there's forums for that. what this was, was not an evidence based debate. it was an employee sabotaging his employer, sobataging his colleagues, and utterly failing to understand the consequences of his actions.
there are places to discuss the sometimes uncomfortable facts an earnest pursuit of the truth may sometimes unearth. a circulated memo about how unfair you think your company's employment policies are is not the proper forum.
every political point of contention has real world consequences for real people. The whole point is that we try to approach fairness from a rational standpoint so that people aren't being treated badly based on their gender, sex or the colour of their skin - and this whole debate centers around whether diversity initiatives are fair because they counteract inherent systemic sexism or if they're actually countering natural gender predispositions and thus being unfair by giving one gender a leg-up over the other.
That's the part I don't really get. Google clearly desires equal representation (take this as exogenous), and believes it won't happen on its own, so puts these initiatives in place to dig up qualified candidates from currently-underrepresented groups. This doesn't mean that the chosen candidates will be worse at their jobs, just that Google needs to work harder to find them.
Say you have 10 job openings for which there are 5 qualified men and 1000 qualified women. But, you want your employee base to be 50/50. Is that desire "foolish", just because it s unlikely to happen naturally?
I guess you could say that the resources of the business should not be spent on recruiting to hit that 50/50 target when it will be difficult to do so. Or that, given human frailties, maybe the recruiters would be tempted to dip into the much larger pool of slightly-underqualified candidates to hit the target. I think both objections can be answered with: well, it's a business that is free to make its own choices, and the market will decide whether they are good ones in the long run.
> Say you have 10 job openings for which there are 5 qualified men and 1000 qualified women.
Notice how you already constrained the number of men so that it has to be 50/50 representation, because you only have 5 qualified mean in your example. In reality, there are a lot more than 5 qualified men. There may be as many qualified men as women. There may be more qualified men than women. There may be fewer qualified men than women.
The proportion of qualified men to women is irrelevant. It's illegal to make hiring decisions based on gender because gender is a protected class. You can't discriminate against women and you can't discriminate against men. You need to choose the most qualified candidates for those 10 position. It may be 50/50, it may not be. You don't know the distribution of the 10 most qualified candidates.
If the company wants to spend more money on outreach to increase the pool of applicants from a certain group, that's legal. However once, they are in the hiring funnel and competing with other candidates for a position, you legally cannot make hiring decisions based on gender.
How much the company spends on outreach to recruit under-represented groups is up to debate. I personally think that budget should be decided like any other budget. It should be evaluated as an investment. What are estimated benefits relative to the amount of money invested worth it relative to other ways that money could be spent?
it doesn't look like he's suggesting his female colleagues are genetically inferior - more that men are more inclined towards programming than women on average, and that this will lead to a gender disparity. There are plenty of areas where men or women are more commonplace due to different gender averages of capability or interest, and that does not in any way mean that one is superior to the other. As the old saying goes, men and women are equal but they're not the same.
Suppose you decide not to hire someone. That might be OK. What if a coworker recommends not hiring them because they don't like the person? Again, that's probably OK.
But now consider if you read a list created by various people, many of whom you've never met. The person you want to hire is on the list. You neither have the full feason the person is on the list nor the personal relationship with the perso who added the name to the list. Unlike in the previous cases, names can be added for no reason other than a personal vendetta or a political disagreement unrelated to work performance.
And that's why blacklists are far more than jist "not liking to work with some people". You can't know whether you like working with that person if you don't even know why theu're on the list or if the person who added them is lying.
From the worker's perspective, they get into an argument one day with a supervisor, get fired, and suddenly can't find work at any company they apply for. That's a chilling effect.
I see what you're saying, but if in one interview someone is throwing a million red flags that show they are not and likely will never be fit to working there, then why not make the blacklist to ensure they don't interview again and fake their way through it?
Employee gets sexually harassed by manager, tries to retaliate but can't prove anything. S/he leaves the team, but now they can't find any work in town because the manager put them on the blacklist.
"A Google spokesperson told Inc. that the practice of keeping blacklists is not condoned by upper management, and that Google employees who discriminate against members of protected classes will be terminated."
Yikes! Actually terminated.
Grammar jokes aside.. they can't really choose to not protect the protected classes eh? But everyone has their blacklists, whitelists, etc. No rocket science.
These unconscious biases make it even more important that 'members of protected classes' join management, rather than people with discriminatory beliefs.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 85.2 ms ] threadManagers certainly should have influence on who is on their teams but obviously not absolute control.
Or was that not the point you were making?
He cites quite a few sources under the "Personality differences" section. Care to refute them?
For your convenience, here is the memo in its entirety, links to sources included: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
It kind of is. He provided evidence for his claims (not your misrepresentation of them), and you get to provide counter-evidence.
> the argument was that his coworkers were biologically inferior for the job of programming
Could you point out where exactly he said that? I had trouble finding it.
Because from what I gathered, his argument was that, due to biological differences between groups of people, not all groups are on average equally suited and/or interested in all tasks, so expecting equal representation is foolish.
With the full, and, rather short, text of his available, I expect we'll clear up this difference in belief about what he said quickly.
there are places to discuss the sometimes uncomfortable facts an earnest pursuit of the truth may sometimes unearth. a circulated memo about how unfair you think your company's employment policies are is not the proper forum.
That's the part I don't really get. Google clearly desires equal representation (take this as exogenous), and believes it won't happen on its own, so puts these initiatives in place to dig up qualified candidates from currently-underrepresented groups. This doesn't mean that the chosen candidates will be worse at their jobs, just that Google needs to work harder to find them.
Say you have 10 job openings for which there are 5 qualified men and 1000 qualified women. But, you want your employee base to be 50/50. Is that desire "foolish", just because it s unlikely to happen naturally?
I guess you could say that the resources of the business should not be spent on recruiting to hit that 50/50 target when it will be difficult to do so. Or that, given human frailties, maybe the recruiters would be tempted to dip into the much larger pool of slightly-underqualified candidates to hit the target. I think both objections can be answered with: well, it's a business that is free to make its own choices, and the market will decide whether they are good ones in the long run.
Notice how you already constrained the number of men so that it has to be 50/50 representation, because you only have 5 qualified mean in your example. In reality, there are a lot more than 5 qualified men. There may be as many qualified men as women. There may be more qualified men than women. There may be fewer qualified men than women.
The proportion of qualified men to women is irrelevant. It's illegal to make hiring decisions based on gender because gender is a protected class. You can't discriminate against women and you can't discriminate against men. You need to choose the most qualified candidates for those 10 position. It may be 50/50, it may not be. You don't know the distribution of the 10 most qualified candidates.
If the company wants to spend more money on outreach to increase the pool of applicants from a certain group, that's legal. However once, they are in the hiring funnel and competing with other candidates for a position, you legally cannot make hiring decisions based on gender.
How much the company spends on outreach to recruit under-represented groups is up to debate. I personally think that budget should be decided like any other budget. It should be evaluated as an investment. What are estimated benefits relative to the amount of money invested worth it relative to other ways that money could be spent?
But now consider if you read a list created by various people, many of whom you've never met. The person you want to hire is on the list. You neither have the full feason the person is on the list nor the personal relationship with the perso who added the name to the list. Unlike in the previous cases, names can be added for no reason other than a personal vendetta or a political disagreement unrelated to work performance.
And that's why blacklists are far more than jist "not liking to work with some people". You can't know whether you like working with that person if you don't even know why theu're on the list or if the person who added them is lying.
From the worker's perspective, they get into an argument one day with a supervisor, get fired, and suddenly can't find work at any company they apply for. That's a chilling effect.
Or insert trait here_____ Woman Gay Right-wing Omnivore Muslim
Yikes! Actually terminated.
Grammar jokes aside.. they can't really choose to not protect the protected classes eh? But everyone has their blacklists, whitelists, etc. No rocket science.