[JuniperMesos]

> The culture was transparent and open to diverse discourse, and from the start it was made clear that, as Googlers, we were not only welcome but expected to bring our own identity and values into the job.

Google management lost its moral compass in 2017 when they fired James Damore for writing a memo critiquing their gender diversity efforts. They were never serious that employees were expected to bring their own identity and values into the job, they only thought this with respect to identities and values they were already mostly-aligned-with.

[throwa356262]

That was a crazy period when Google first fired him, then fired people criticising him, and then fired people criticising the people that just got fired.

But let's be honest, the guy was kind of unhinged. I would not have fired him, but neither would I have kept him in my team.

[lokar]

I agree, internally, looking at a fuller picture of his activity, he was off. Constantly bringing the subject up out of context, starting fights, etc. but they should have just warned him.

[whatshisface]

I'm sure he's just overjoyed to be tried without representation or evidence in the court of public opinion, a big step up from being punished with no process at all.

[dpark]

> but neither would I have kept him in my team

Let’s be honest, though. That’s firing from your team.

[3adk1a]

He wasn't unhinged, he somewhat clumsily posted evolutionary biology literature fragments on a channel where it would offend parts of the readers.

In response to a "let a thousand flowers bloom and speak your mind" request from Google management snakes. The problem is that some tech people take these requests seriously.

Google of course has identified itself as Trump sycophants and hypocrites by now. Maybe they should invite Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad and Elon Musk to give keynote speeches.

[jensensbutton]

No he was kind of unhinged. That wasn't the first weird thing he did. Should've been fired.

[erq164]

That is hard for outsiders to know. Google however seems to foster cancel mobs.

Python core people like Thomas Wouters and Gregory P. Smith, since fired from Google, canceled and libeled people like Tim Peters. All that matters is having a mob on your side and preventing the other side from responding.

[tmoertel]

What other things did he do to make you believe he was “kind of unhinged”? I know about the memo thing, but I think it was covered in an inflammatory way because the press loves to play up a controversy. What else besides the memo incident did he do that merits his firing?

[UncleMeat]

Damore had been aggressively arguing about this stuff internally for some time in advance of his doc. The doc was consistent with a pattern of "makes a huge stink of things in every training and refuses to back down."

[Manuel_D]

By all means, explain what else he did. I've seen this claim made repeatedly on hacker news, but conspicuously noone seems willing to o substantiate those claims.

[NetOpWibby]

In my experience, Big Tech's billboard to "bring your best self" was just to get super eager people with great skills into their ranks to help accelerate business. Once you're on the inside, it's quite clear that's a farce and in fact, you should keep your mouth shut and your head down.

Alas.

[annzabelle]

Had a coworker at a bank that was trying to emulate Tech (Capital One - all in on AWS and PIPs) who bought into it. Ended up PIPed and then is doing a PhD in a completely unrelated field.

We had a mental health slack channel, and a racial politics one that rehashed Israel/Palestine daily.

[cucumber3732842]

>and a racial politics one

We had one of those. Not slack, self hosted internal stuff. Some "senior by tenure but not title" people decided the only thing that could come of it was people running their mouths to everyone's detriment and start trolling it until nobody took it seriously and then it was quietly "collateral damage" in a migration that was also arranged.

[annzabelle]

HR ended up nuking that channel in 2023.

I think they were afraid of touching what had started as an anti racism channel until the vibes had shifted a bit.

There were both Palestinian employees and an IDF veteran Israeli employee who were seemingly spending half the workday discussing October 7th and the Intifada.

[raincole]

Thank you. I was afraid that people will eventually forget about that point of inflection. I think for many of us, the specific event was what made us realize that you really can't separate technical issues from political ones.

[dekhn]

I think if Damore had limited his criticism to the corporate DEI (which I found to be a bit heavy-handed and prone to critical theory groupthink) in a short doc, he probably would have been a bit more successful (in helping Google rein back its DEI training).

One rarely stated thing I learned over time working there is that managers read eng-misc and will prevent you from transferring to their team if they didn't like what you said, or how you said it, or who you said it to.

[hintymad]

Did Googlers give lots of pressure to the management? I was wondering which side the management is closer to: being cowards, or being hypocritical

[DashAnimal]

I always hate the James Damore discussion because it's like the least interesting part. You have a company dealing with internal political mayhem trying to find the least disruptive, not only internally but now externally because this shit has leaked. It's a workplace, and youre trying to keep people effective and working. And some googlers got too comfortable with what they were sharing on a work machine, not just to their coworkers, but tens of thousands of employees.

The support of war efforts is clearly a change in moral compass that is much more fascinating though.

[pryce]

100% agree. The James Damore flag was immediately taken up by major figures in transphobia (like Singal, Soh, etc) and pro-fascism campaigners (like Molyneux), both of which are political programs are absolutely incompatible with maintaining a non-hostile workplace environment for employees. (and not incidentally, both of which a premised on discredited bioessentialist pseudoscience)

I find it is a deeply cynical move, to be asked to place the James Damore "was it employer overreach-or-not?" episode in similar proportion to critiquing a company's actions regarding issues such as mass surveillance and/or assisting war efforts, especially when the accusations about those broader issues are tied to complicity in the 2020s resurgence in fascist politics. It is so cynical that I can't believe it isn't intentional.

[Manuel_D]

What is the "bioessentialist pseudoscience" you're referring to?

[pryce]

One of them I refer to is "race essentialism" [1] which led to the long-discredited pseudoscience known as scientific racism[2], and its political associated program of eugenics,

and the other is "gender essentialism"[3] which has also been rejected by mainstream scholars across fields from biology to medicine to sociology to gender studies, and which acts in culture as a similarly pseudoscientific popular rationale for organizing society in ways that harm women and gender minorities.

The study of the field of racism is absolutely fascinating in that very quickly, the simple, obvious "commonsense" theories like "race exists as a meaningful biological category" turn out to be quite false.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism#Racial,_cultural_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_essentialism

[Manuel_D]

What sorts of scientific racism (or gender essentialism) have Jesse Signal and Deborah Soh propagated? To be clear, I'm not asking for a primer on scientific racism, I'm asking you to substantiate the allegations you made against specific individuals.

[pryce]

You ought to read my comment carefully. Singal (not Signal) and Soh are "major figures in transphobia", and Molyneux is a pro-fascism campaigner. The former two (Singal, Soh) are advocates of "gender essentialism", and the latter travels internationally campaigning for the "race essentialism" and policies based on that. As you're aware of both of their first names already, is it a fair guess that you're already familiar with some of their transphobic work? Perhaps than, that is a good place to start. As just one example, Soh is actually so committed to gender essentialism that it's led her to advocate the approach that: your assigned male at birth teenager who tells you that they're trans and requests to transition is actually gay in my opinion so being affirming to them about that is homophobic ( from her article in reactionary online journal "Quillette").

Soh will of course try to dress that horrific construction up in professional-sounding language, but our duty is in fact to address the thrust of her argument, not whether she attempts to frame it in polite language. You might also recognize Soh from her work in the atrocious Matt Walsh "documentary" that pretends to be about women but is entirely about invalidating trans people.

[ashleyn]

Considering they rolled back DEI along with everyone else after Trump's second victory, it's difficult to view those previous "values" as anything other than cynical kissing-up to the previous holders of power.

[CMay]

For what it's worth, I think for an organization that size that needs the best talent from anywhere, It's probably much better to discourage political activism at work. It can tend to turn away the most logical and reasonable well grounded people who want no part of it. The people who _need_ work to be political can go get hired for explicitly political organizations where that is the job.

Creating a distaste in people without like minds has been an intentional goal to cause exodus after exodus on various platforms, in companies and so on. If you let that get out of control, you can poison a culture almost unrecoverably. We can't let that happen to our critical tech companies for national security reasons.

[bryrei]

Most people don't force politics into work as much as they have it forced upon them by, you know, living in a society. And the idea of "political activism" causing "distaste in people without like minds" is a misattribution, putting it mildly. But yeah, keep people quiet and heads down so the work can get done, regardless of what the work is or what it will be used for.

[acdha]

You have to remember that most companies _chose_ to setup DEI programs: it was a routine recommendation from lawyers because it gave them a string defense in lawsuits — the next time some manager abuses their position, they can cut that person loose and point to their various programs as evidence that whatever happened was limited to that manager and not company culture.

[rayiner]

> Considering they rolled back DEI along with everyone else after Trump's second victory, it's difficult to view those previous "values" as anything other than cynical kissing-up to the previous holders of power.

The previous policies simply reflected the culture of employees and HR managers that had graduated from universities that openly practiced race-conscious admissions after Grutter v. Bollinger. The change in policy likely came not from the new administration, but the Supreme Court's SFFA decision in 2023 that reminded everyone the civil rights laws require race blindness.

[toomuchtodo]

It’s the cost of buying goodwill and lower regulatory burden from the administration in power at the time of implementation. DEI? Non DEI? Like an umbrella, just depends on the weather, its business as usual regardless.

[rayiner]

I agree with your broader point, but DEI versus no DEI is a bad example. That's not an example of companies sucking up to the preferred policies of whatever administration is in power. Instead, they are responding to decisive legal decisions. There is a clear legal principle at issue: the civil rights laws are symmetric as to race. The Supreme Court held that in SFFA in 2023, and again in Ames in 2025 (which was a 9-0 decision). Most "DEI" programs create unacceptable legal exposure because they involve literature or practices as to white people that would be held up as evidence of racial discrimination in a Title VII lawsuit if the races were switched.

[toomuchtodo]

The clarification and specifics are welcomed. I did not have a better example at hand when I wrote the comment. Maybe ESG/climate change?

[rayiner]

Yeah, Or crypto, AI, all sorts of things.

[jordanb]

And it didn't even stop the antitrust suite so they threw in with Trump and then started sucking up to him. He's giving big tech everything they want so there is pretty much nothing he can do that will upset them.

[mystraline]

Ive directly complained against the latte liberals screaming DEI.

Ive had them demand my pronouns. I really dont care, but saying that is absolutely not acceptable. Ill use your pronouns. I really do not care.

Ive been in meetings with 'land acknowledgements' with whatever former indians/native americans who were there. Its not like we're giving them the land back.

DEI and what it turned into was a big for-public-show that you knew the buzzwords and the antiwords. And if you didnt, or woukdnt play along, theyd ruin you.

The current MAGA MAHA meritocracy crap is also just the opposite, but the same games as DEI folks. They have their buzzwords and antiwords. Although, theyre a whole lot stupider and easier to manipulate and deal with.

[Tuna-Fish]

They were not cynical kissing up to previous holders of power, they were desperate attempts to cover their asses against EEOC lawsuits. And they didn't end because of Trump's second victory, they ended because the Supreme Court defanged EEOC (and half the rest of the federal regulatory agencies).

The actual reason for the "corporate DEI" in tech was that since Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), EEOC could sue companies that had lower minority proportion than population norm for discrimination, and could could prove the discrimination in court using nothing but the racial makeup of the employees, and some policy at the company that could in theory have disparate impact. And under their standards, literally any policy has disparate impact.

This hit other sectors first, to which they responded by hiring more minorities. But tech had the problem that schools were consistently producing fewer minority engineering grads than the population proportion, and in a world where approximately every engineer got employed, some US tech companies would have to have lower minority representation than the population no matter what they did. And because the disparity between engineering grads and racial population proportion was so high, in fact most large companies would fail to meet the necessary minority proportions.

But EEOC would not instantly file suit against every offender, instead they would file ~40 such suits per year, targeting large companies that they considered particularly bad. And so companies that felt they might get hit soon started doing DEI programs, at first to attract more minority engineers (from other companies in the same sector, which would then fall under the limit, making it zero-sum), but then they realized that the EEOC didn't really sue the companies that were the loudest at touting their DEI credentials, and it all became extremely performative, no longer trying to attract minority talent but to be the loudest company talking about the subject. Iterate over that for a few decades and it got really weird.

It ended because Trump named 3 SC justices on his first term, and in a few important cases between 2023 and today, the new SC tore the whole thing down, and suing a company for disparate impact is now considered unconstitutional.

[jensensbutton]

Nah, James Damore just did a stupid thing at work and wasn't talented enough for it to be overlooked. He deserved to be fired. Morals don't need to come into it.

They lost their moral compass a while ago, but it had nothing to do with Damore.

[4MOAisgoodenuf]

Google exists to make money and is happy to change their opinions to suit the current force in power.

But that “critique” of gender diversity efforts said that the lack of women in CS was due to some innate difference in women (rather than a social division that is neither innate nor universal across time or cultures) While also decrying the lack of affirmative action for conservatives.

It’s neither the tipping point for Google, nor is it a hill worth dying on

[mempko]

[flagged]

[JuniperMesos]

I think there's a lot more political will now than there was a decade ago for explicitly repealing the sections of American civil rights law that define what a "hostile workplace" is, in order to make sure that something like Damore's memo would not count. Certainly, this is something I think about when evaluating political candidates.

[pryce]

What are the major historical examples where protecting employees from a "hostile workplace" is important? Racism? Misogyny? Homophobia? Do protection from these things look expendable to you?

I'm sure either of us could quickly find a bunch of people who would like to one or several of those acceptable again, yet us finding that such people exist would not tell us a damned thing about whether dismantling those protections is a good idea. Or supposing it does, then one might even make the case that those people existing is an excellent reason for having such a law in the first place.

[tmoertel]

> James Damore was a poorly educated person. He didn't understand how to use statistics and decided to use them in a hateful way.

What statistical argument did Damore make?

[danpalmer]

[flagged]

[socalgal2]

Sounds like you're responding to incorrect summaries? He was not intolerant of woman in the workplace. His memo was specifically in support of women in the workplace.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170813080340/https://www.theat...

[danpalmer]

No, I read the memo. What I was not doing is taking him at his word that he "values diversity and inclusion", I was reading his actual words and the sexist dogwhistles. Stating acceptance does not absolve other intolerance.

We must also look at the effect of his memo, which was to alienate many, and which caused a backlash that led to his firing. The company did not make a big deal of it just to fire him, it was individuals who were personally impacted and offended by it who made it what it was.

[Manuel_D]

"dog whistles" are, more often than not, a thinly veiled way of putting words in other people's mouthes.

Damore's thesis amounted to "maybe women are 20% of software developers not because they're being discriminated against, but because they're exercising their own agency and choosing other fields."

Given that about 20% of CS grads are women, it seems like a pretty reasonable stance.

[danpalmer]

In isolation, it's a very naive, oblivious, and incurious stance.

Taken alongside the rest of the content, it's a rejection of the idea that there is systemic bias, and much of his memo is dedicated to ways in which that bias can be propagated and solidified.

At best, the memo paints Damore as someone who is radically uninformed and parroting old and invalid talking points that others have given to him. At worst it implies that he knows what he's doing and is trying to dismantle processes and culture that are improving women's access to the workplace.

[Manuel_D]

So merely contesting the notion that systemic bias is the main driver of the gender disparity in tech is grounds for instant termination? Well, that's rather troubling given that the empirical evidence on the bias in tech company hiring doesn't support the narrative of anti-female bias: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484

Hn discussion of the paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644

[Jensson]

Google did fire a lot of people when this happened on both sides, seems like they were just tired about the whole thing and wanted political fights out of the company. Damore since he started it, and anyone that got too upset about it and said things they shouldn't have was also fired, as were the people who got too upset about those that got upset.

[sgentle]

Would the National Labor Review Board's legal opinion count as an incorrect summary?

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4380791-NLRB-Advice-...

> statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding effort to cloak comments with “scientific” references and analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers.

[dekhn]

That is not a remotely accurate representation of what he wrote.