
Allegations: Google drastically rolled back diversity and inclusion programs - ingve
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/current-ex-employees-allege-google-drastically-rolled-back-diversity-inclusion-n1206181
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xiphias2
I had to take that program in Switzerland, designed in the USA, which was
telling me how I can date my coworkers even outside the company.

It may be OK in the US, but what it was asking from me was unconstitutional in
Switzerland.

Of course I didn't say anyting, as I liked the job. A coworker of mine just
clicked through the training without reading any of it.

Also diversity became the main topic (without being on the official agenda) of
big cross-team meetings, so I learned not to go there, which meant that I
didn't know after some time what other teams are doing.

~~~
trianglem
Why would talking about diversity in a cross team meeting cause you to dislike
attending them?

~~~
xiphias2
Think about a meeting of hundreds of people between 10 offices in the world
who I will never in my life talk to/meet. They are boring for me anyways as a
software engineer, as they don't discuss the engineering details, just
everything on the product level. They don't help me in my job, but I would be
there as a respect to other teams. But if the first 30 minutes is taken by the
diversity without it being written in the official meeting agenda, that means
a lack of respect from the company leadership.

Actually Larry Page himself said years ago (before the diversity trainings)
that if we think that a meeting is wasting our time from being productive,
we're allowed to go away from it.

For me the interesting meetings were about setting up production pipelines,
fixing training-serving skew in the models (it's a huge problem for online
training, when the training data is changing all the time), understanding the
production setup of the deep learning pipeline, understanding the tradeoff,
and planning capacity of the TPUs. But people in these meetings didn't talk
about these for me hard problems.

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ausbah
the funniest thing is how some people view simply discussing biases and such
as a form of oppression or discrimination in and of itself

~~~
benjohnson
I attended one program and I found it amusing that it assumed that I had a
deep-seated biases simple because my skin had a particular hue while
apparently other people with different hues didn't have biases.

~~~
happytoexplain
This sounds like a pretty dramatic exaggeration. I absolutely believe you
_felt_ that way, which is worth a lot. But I think the vast majority of
diversity programs do not state "you (yes you, individually, benjohnson) have
deep-seated biases, and it is because of your skin tone. Also, nobody with
skin tones other than yours have biases."

~~~
thu2111
Seems like at Google they did though.

"Sojourn, a comprehensive racial justice program created for employees to
learn about implicit bias"

I doubt this course dwelled on implicit bias of black people against
whites/asians.

"Two other diversity training programs at Google, DEI for Managers, a primer
to build skills around navigating issues of race on their teams, and Allyship
101, a program to learn about different types of oppressed groups and ways of
supporting them"

I doubt these courses spent time on the oppression of white/asian men.

"... a speaker event hosted by Google on the topic of how white people can
better navigate conversations about racism and privilege in the workplace"

"There was a meme going around that said white fragility shuts down
discussions of white fragility"

"Three current employees said they felt the newer programs introduced from
outside vendors lack the framework that previous training programs had to help
orient white people to conversations about racial justice"

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GenerocUsername
Good. I've never seen a non-emotional argument for diversity and inclusovity
programs.

A company has no need to represent society as a whole, or worse, a duty to
equalize societies inequalities.

Any attempt to do so inherently harms as many people as it helps, it just
moved the harm to groups unprotected by emotional arguments

~~~
bobbytherobot
There are studies that found that companies earn more when their boards and
management are 50/50 men and women.

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-08/more-women-means-
more...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-08/more-women-means-more-money-
for-companies-study/7228444)

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/02/why-companies-with-female-
ma...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/02/why-companies-with-female-managers-
make-more-money.html)

~~~
mimikatz
This is backwards thinking. Companies who have 50/50 male/female management
are likely smarter companies, picking up smart women who are looked over for
other roles and because they are smart enough to do that they likely do other
smart things. It is the effect of a well run company not the cause of it. If
your company is working working the other way they are dumb.

~~~
happytoexplain
I completely agree that you can't better a body of people by forcing it to
modify its constituents into a defined range of racial/gender ratios (and it
may even be the case that you will worsen it on average). However, there is
another goal: To help the individuals who would not have been hired. Of
course, there's an argument to be made that any harm you might do to the body
would then ultimately harm the individuals you helped to be placed in it, but
I tend to believe that these opposing forces balance out on the net good side
for the individuals.

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makomk
It's interesting that the article blame Google not wanting to upset
conservatives, because as far as I can tell the most recent public controversy
involving Google's diversity and inclusion exercises around implicit bias was
this, which had nothing to do with conservatives at all:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935706)
(Actually, that might even be the only public controversy about them. The
Damore stuff was more about recruitment if I remember rightly.)

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NN88
Turns out we were all right about James Damore. He was being endlessly catered
to and didn't even know it.

