[raclage]

I don't understand why Damore is the hill people are always trying to die on. He didn't publish that in the marketplace of ideas. He sent it to his coworkers, using company resources, on company time. Your workplace has never been a free speech bastion.

Any person may or may not like that but it's been true forever so I'm not sure how it indicates that free speech is now in some sort of novel danger.

[ravel-bar-foo]

Have you read the Damore memo? It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity, given the data showing that most women are choosing to not go into engineering-like fields, rather than being forced out of them.

It's a corporate policy proposal, and it was posted to a private internal board of people interested in how to shape Google corporate policy to increase diversity. Sort of a workgroup. In a sane world, that's exactly the sort of workplace discussion one would want.

[jellicle]

> It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity

Well, it was fundamentally about how Google should stop all efforts to recruit or promote women or non-white men, because Damore believed those efforts were "discrimination" against himself.

[ryeights]

Come on now.

[jellicle]

Huh? My description is completely accurate. I feel like a lot of people didn't actually read Damore's document, or perhaps read it and were shouting "YES! YES!" so loudly as they read about Google's supposed left-wing bias that they can't actually perceive the words written.

Damore says straight up and in so many words that Google should end all of its "diversity" hiring initiatives because he believes they're discriminatory against himself, this is just not an arguable issue.

[ravel-bar-foo]

I can see how you could get that Google should end "diversity" hiring initiatives as one of the core messages, but not "all" of them, and "he believes they're discriminatory against himself" is quite uncharitable. Having reread it just now after five years, the theme seems to be that he wants to find the intersection of Google being a good workplace for women and Google being successful as a company.

From the memo:

> Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap

> Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:...

He goes on to list interventions like more pair programming, changing performance evaluations to encourage collaboration over competition, allowing more part-time work, and reducing the stress of the job.

He says Google needs to reduce hiring initiatives which are not backed by evidence, and which are themselves likely illegally discriminatory, like hiring quotas (likely illegal) and implicit bias training (debunked).

[dgs_sgd]

It's because he published a memo pertinent to a hot topic at the company and rather than engage him on the merits of his ideas leadership decided to fire him. Is it unsettling that the employees at a company with a global monopoly on information retrieval seem to not tolerate dissent within their ranks?

[lmm]

It was very much within the scope of his job duties. Many of his colleagues were encouraged and rewarded for making presentations on the same topic using company resources on company time (with the opposite conclusions).

The idea that you can investigate something and present your good faith effort at the truth, with evidence, and be fired for that, is pretty scary. Like imagine several of your colleagues do comparisons of PostgreSQL and MongoDB on your internal blog, showing some benchmark results; you think that's not the whole picture and do your own comparison showing some other benchmarks. And then you get fired, not because your benchmarks were less rigorous or your writeup was poor, but because they don't like your answers. That's not an environment that's going to lead to good technology choices and an effective company.

[TeeMassive]

> He didn't publish that in the marketplace of ideas.

If a forum isn't a "market place of ideas" than it's not a forum.

> He sent it to his coworkers, using company resources, on company time.

All of which were not reasons he got fired. And Google actually encourages its employees to do such things, by the way.

And those are all things we have done and is considered normal in most sane workplace. We all posted something not work related to your coworkers on internal forums, including politics.

> Your workplace has never been a free speech bastion.

Which was never the argument in the first place. Nobody is arguing that Google violated the 1st amendment by firing him. But let's not pretend that Google's size doesn't make it a major non-elected influence on our society. We have seen the consequences of that when it came to potential Covid-19 treatments and its origins. The "it's a private company", which hypocritically used by self-described socialists but I digress, doesn't negate the consequences of their actions or their responsibilities.

> Any person may or may not like that but it's been true forever

That's just an appeal to tradition fallacy.

> I'm not sure how it indicates that free speech is now in some sort of novel danger.

I'm the owner of a big corporations and me and my buddies form the largest group of employers in the country, I don't like your stance on free speech and who you support politically. Yeah but!? No, I'm a private company.