
Ex-Google Employee Claims Wrongful Firing for Criticizing James Damore’s Memo - sprucely
https://www.wired.com/story/ex-google-employee-claims-wrongful-firing-for-criticizing-james-damores-memo/
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mesozoic
It appears his "criticism" was name calling and attempts to shut down rational
discussion. Sounds like grounds for dismissal to me.

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runciblespoon
@mesozoic: 'It appears his "criticism" was name calling and attempts to shut
down rational discussion. Sounds like grounds for dismissal to me'

What are your sources for the above? Meanwhile we can read the original memo
and make up our own minds:

[https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-
Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf)

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grzm
'mesozoic is referring to Tim Chevalier, the subject of the article, not James
Damore.

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mesozoic
Yes I was referring to Tim the subject of this article

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tachyoff
How many Googlers have to get fired before people learn to just not talk about
this whole thing? Don’t they have, like... work to do instead?

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geofft
"This whole thing" is how Google attracts, recruits, and retains the best
people. For a company like Google, doing a good job at that is part of their
identity and mythos (other companies look to Google's hiring approaches and
"people ops" model). For anyone whose job includes interviewing, managing, or
reviewing, "this whole thing" _is_ part of their work. They could just follow
what the industry standard is, yes, but they wouldn't be Google if they did
that.

Think about it this way—you can certainly have a functioning company where
people are just good at whatever programming languages exist. But you can't
have a Google (or an Apple or Mozilla or Microsoft) if you don't have at least
some people with opinions on how to _develop_ programming languages, and
talking / listening / reading / writing publicly about PL theory, and
questioning the assumptions underlying all the common industry-standard
languages, is part of their job.

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tachyoff
I’m confused. By “this whole thing” I mean “the James Damore nonsense” and
“political nonsense in general”. It is super hecka easy to just not talk about
politics at work. For decades, people went to work and didn’t talk about
religion, sex, politics, etc. Work is for work, and as a millennial, I am
deeply concerned that my cohort does not understand that.

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geofft
Do you think the Damore memo was about politics or religion or sex? It seems
to me like the Damore memo was specifically about the underlying facts behind
Google's hiring strategy, which is extremely work-related. (In the course of
this memo he happened to veer into things the NLRB ruled were decent reasons
to fire someone, but I think writing a memo about the hiring process, by
itself, was perfectly legitimate.)

I mean, certainly you can interpret hiring strategy as a type of politics, but
"companies should exist in the first place" is also a type of politics. What's
your definition of political nonsense?

I agree that it's easy not to talk about the politics underlying your hiring
strategy at work. But it's also equally easy to just not talk about your
hiring strategy at all - which is a thing lots of companies do, but not a
thing that a company like Google could do and remain Google.

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kunley
What is your point, because it is actually hard to get..?

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geofft
The Damore memo was not a problem for daring to talk about gender and race and
hiring. Google both wants and needs its employees to talk about that.

The Damore memo was a problem for the underlying assumptions about gender and
race it used in trying to make its (vague) point.

An analogy I've made previously on this site is that it's like a memo about
which tech stack to use. Saying "Why can't engineers learn not to talk about
tech stack and just use what they're told to use" is misguided - it might work
at some companies, but it won't work at Google, and moreover, Google
specifically wants you to talk about such things. The Damore memo, however,
responded by saying "Let's do a long study on whether Classic ASP on NT 4.0 is
the right approach, let's try rewriting some core components in Classic ASP
and moving some services to NT 4.0 and see if things get better," and making
questionable citations to papers (which do exist, and aren't inherently non-
credible) about projects developed in Classic ASP. An engineer who seriously
advocates that position _and_ wants the rest of the company to spend time
evaluating that position is in the wrong, and is wasting the company's time.
Saying that their mistake is daring to speak about programming languages - and
saying that other employees who say "Actually, no, your technology suggestions
are obviously wrong" in response are equally mistaken - is misunderstanding
the mistake.

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kunley
By the way, so-called 'diversity' should also protect right-wing conservative
views, not only left-wing supposedly-liberal views; otherwise it's a crap. It
should protect _everyone_ 's freedom as long as those views respect the law.

