
Wilberg v. Google – Recruiter that was fired for refusing to discriminate - DeusExMachina
https://www.scribd.com/document/372751852/Wilberg-v-Google-Recruiter-that-was-fired-for-refusing-to-discriminate
======
merricksb
Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16498586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16498586)

------
smarnach
I think the title is misleading. The recruiter was fired for a bad
satisfaction score, and only _claims_ he was fired for other reasons. The
title makes this sound like a fact.

------
misterbowfinger
Relevant bit:

 _13\. In April of 2017, Google 's Technology Staffing Management team was
instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience)
software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either
female, Black or Hispanic, and to purge entirely any applications by non-
diverse employees from the hiring pipeline. [The recruiter] refused to comply
with this request._

Another bit:

 _In response to Plaintiff 's complaints, Google on occasion would circulate
e-mails instructing its employees to purge any and all references to the
race/gender quotes from its e-mail database_

~~~
AstralStorm
Not to mention said HR boss was openly hostile to the person refusing to
adhere to these policies - retaliating with bad reviews in direct violation of
other Google policies...

Big old mess. Probably some illegal company policy and they will only burn the
HR boss for it...

------
emadehsan
Can someone tell the crux of it?

~~~
martin_bech
As I understand it, recruiters where told to stop all recruiting of white and
asian males, and ramp up hiring of women and people of color. This was at
YouTube. The recruiter objected, was fired, and is now suing.

~~~
tzahola
It’s fascinating how Americans put all “white” and “asian” people in the same
bucket.

~~~
eesmith
You mean the "highly overrepresented in tech jobs when compared to the general
population" bucket?

I agree, the history is quite fascinating. We've got white men who come from a
culture that for centuries had an explicit pro-white and more specifically
pro-WASP bias.

Part of the bias was to prevent Asians from immigrating to the US. This only
changed in the 1960s when the National Origins Formula was abolished. The new
policy allowed for skilled people, and people with family ties to the US
(including war brides) to come in.

As a result, many of the new Asian immigrants came in with an education and
skills. Many of them also come from a tradition with an emphasis on education.

In this way it's similar to the quotas that many colleges used to have on
admitting Jewish students, many of whom come from a culture that emphasizes
education. The idea of a "well-rounded student" and the SAT were put into
place to bias the selection process towards educated WASPs, who could afford
the prep schools the included topics like Latin and sports.

Now, I have to say "many" because "Asian" is more a term of geography than of
culture. There are many different cultures in Asia. The Hmong people, for
example, have a very different history in the US than the Japanese people.
Many of the Hmong were poor hill farmers or war refugees with very little
education, and in the US they have a high dropout rate and low levels of
college completion. A policy which promotes cultural diverse representation
but which rejects a Hmong man as being "Asian" because there are too many
Chinese applicants suffers from its own sorts of built-in American prejudice
of what culture means.

I also find it fascinating how women and Native Americans are also placed in
the same bucket, to use your term.

~~~
tzahola
Yes.

The American interpretation of “diversity” considers a Ukranian immigrant and
an upper-class WASP part of the same “privileged” cohort.

~~~
eesmith
What you regard as an "American interpretation" is simply not true.

I think you have over-simplified the issue such that the result doesn't give a
useful understanding of what's going on in the US.

There are far more than two cohorts, and there are multiple levels of
privilege, not all of which are hierarchically arranged.

No long-time Bostonian is going to place Boston a blue blood (an example of an
upper-class WASP) in the same cohort as a Ukrainian immigrant.

In a test for "is there hiring discrimination on the basis of skin color?"
then certainly a Ukrainian immigrant and upper-class WASP would be categorized
together ... in the current US context. (I say "current US context" because
Finns were once considered non-white because of a presumed Mongolian heritage;
Italians and Greeks of course were also considered not-white, even though most
now consider them "white".)

But the US also makes it illegal to discriminate based on religion (a majority
of Ukrainians are Orthodox) and national origin. For that they would be in
different cohorts.

Certainly some Americans might only use a single, simple ranking system where
all white men are put together. This lawsuit alleges just such an example.

But it is not the general American interpretation of diversity.

Note also that the alleged focus on "Women, Blacks, and LatinX" does not even
consider that Native Americans might apply, so it sounds like this is a rather
naive policy to start with.

Also, this lawsuit says nothing about the Google hiring practices involving
non-Americans. It may be that a Ukrainian immigrant might have faced different
obstacles than an American-born applicant with Ukrainian-born parents.

What I think you're seeing is that race and gender (however constructed) have
been the most significant forms of discrimination in the US -- and of course
in other countries as well. So those are the ones which are talked about the
most.

