> I don't think public, targeted statements like this are ever the right thing to do.
As a previous believer in this, I now strongly disagree. (even if I am too chicken to do it myself)
Tech nerds are usually nice and non-confrontational people. They get exploited to high heaven by those who are effective at navigating low-visibility & grey-area political spaces. When an org, leader, employee or associate taints every single private avenue for criticism, you are left without much recourse.
People quit bad managers. But bad managers are often amazing as appearing amazing. As long as management has zero accountability within the org structure, sub-optimal signals like these must do.
> Those who make private criticism impossible will make public tirades inevitable
The consequences of naming someone in such a manner, in an article that makes its rounds on the Internet, can be actually quite dire. Public harassment, etc. There are some pretty unhinged people out there, and in particular some rather ugly people who in particular get especially unhinged on the topic of women in tech at Google, etc.
And weirdly superfluous to the point he was trying to make. Did anyone really need the name of someone with whom he has an axe to grind in order to believe the larger point about Google's organizational ossification?
This wasn't a twitter tirade. This was on his niche blog post about someone's personal experience and towards someone who was making 10s of millions. Big difference.
With her budget, just her org is effectively bigger than the biggest tech company in most countries of the world. At that point upper leadership is not allowed to differentiate between private and public life. Public criticism is private criticism and vice-versa. It's likely a testament to her achievements that she has earned an enviable? level of success that makes public criticism acceptable.
> in particular some rather ugly people who in particular get especially unhinged on the topic of women in tech at Google, etc.
That being said I do agree with your point. With those risks in mind, I still think it should be socially permissible to make this kind of post.
> I think it's in very bad taste in this case.
I thought it was done as well as one could. I know the west coast prides itself for its 'niceness', but in a lot of parts of USA, plain expression of dislike is considered in better taste than the kind of passive aggressiveness that would result from softening the poster's language. It was meant to be a targeted question at her competence. Just because she is one of many incompetent people at the helm at Google, doesn't invalidate the poster's experience.
The anecdotal optics might be bad. But I for one rely on Occam's razor before jumping to conclusions about racial/gender angles in everything.
Do you honestly believe that somebody is going to be harassed by the public or harassed in public or harassed in private because somebody on a niche blogs wrote that they were a bad boss? Or are you inventing a false scenario to argue against some writing you consider to be in bad taste?
You know people can be evil or at the least they can be bad people. Do you think this person is bad or good? My point is that when you say something like "She's just a person, doing a job." you're defending the bad rather than calling it out.
This is exactly my point. There is no way the public has information about whether the person is bad or good, just 1 disgruntled employee's impression of their job performance.
There's more to life and a person than a job. That's all. Even the worst managers I've had have been good people. They're good dads and mums, enjoy hiking and camping.
Public statements like this one are easy to make, impossible to verify or challenge, and only cause hurt
What good does that do when they ruin a workplace? If I were bad at my job, it's not like I wouldn't get fired because I'm just such a great person outside of the workplace...
I guess it depends on how you view work. I can dislike someone's work as a colleague, but like them as a person. And vice versa. Work is just work - it's not our entire life. And someone being bad at a job (even if we accept that this person is truly intrinsically incompetent, and not just a byproduct of a dysfunctional org, as is often the case) doesn't automatically mean, to me, that they have some personal moral failing or personality flaw.
So, in that vein, I think I'd hesitate to publicly embarrass someone merely for being bad at a job, since that crosses over to affecting their personal life. If someone asked me about that person in a professional context (to make a hiring decision, for example), I'd be frank about their weaknesses. But I don't think the whole world has to know about it.
I don't know her (nor do I presume to know her), but if I take your definition of "bad" as in "morally bad" (you used it in the context of evil), that feels pretty presumptuous, and then fairly attacking to assume the commenter is "defending the bad". There are so many people who end up half-assing their jobs in various ways, I think it's a pretty slippery slope to start calling those people "bad". They may be bad at their job, but I wouldn't call them bad people.
I also don't have enough information to say she's "not" a bad person, but with the information given, I don't see anything that would indicate she is one.
As a previous believer in this, I now strongly disagree. (even if I am too chicken to do it myself)
Tech nerds are usually nice and non-confrontational people. They get exploited to high heaven by those who are effective at navigating low-visibility & grey-area political spaces. When an org, leader, employee or associate taints every single private avenue for criticism, you are left without much recourse.
People quit bad managers. But bad managers are often amazing as appearing amazing. As long as management has zero accountability within the org structure, sub-optimal signals like these must do.
> Those who make private criticism impossible will make public tirades inevitable
- John F. Kennedy reincarnated in 2023