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by makeitsuckless 3300 days ago
If you don't have a culture of such infantile frat-house behaviour, you don't distribute such memos.

It might surprise you, but this isn't how adults communicate, or want to be talked to. This is frat boys communicating to frat boys, making everyone else feel unsafe and unwelcome just by using this aggressively immature and tasteless tone.

Full disclosure: I've just been fired from a similar company partly because I didn't tolerate the CEO and fellow managers communicating to my team in such an offensive way. Which obviously made me a bad cultural fit, as a grown up over the age of 40.

2 comments

Google staff have sex after TGIF all the time. So do people at any company where staff spend a lot of time together.

Making sure the company talks honestly and openly about these things, and does more than what is legally necessary to prevent harassment and rape is a good thing.

I'll bet any honest and open talk around Google probably sounds more like adults talking to each other respectfully, not already-half-drunk frat bro's going "Whoa, dude, hold up a sec!"
I didn't find anything 'disrespectful' or 'half-drunk' about the memo.
making everyone else feel unsafe and unwelcome just by using this aggressively immature and tasteless tone.

Hey, speak for yourself please, don't drag me into this. I don't have a particularly high opinion of the personality of this Uber CEO, and I agree that it isn't a serious memo, and that it reflects "frat boys communicating with frat boys". However, it doesn't make me "feel unsafe" or "unwelcome".

I find it genuinely perplexing how people can "feel unsafe" because of some random fools' mutterings. I am sure and confident of my own place in the universe. I would never allow someone like this guy to negatively affect my self-perception. Even though I don't agree with the tone, this language doesn't threaten me in any way.

So please, cut it out with the appeal to a large support base - I am no frat boy, and as per your definition am thus part of the "everyone" you refer to, and that memo would not have made me feel unsafe and unwelcome.