I agree, but I'm pretty sure political posts were already tolerated at Google. If employees are allowed to post to internal message boards that women are underrepresented because interviewers are sexist or suffer from unconcious bias and should adopt policy Y, then employees should also be allowed to post an argument that women are under-represented for some other reason X and argue against policy Y.

And even if the workplace does have a no politics rule, the proper response should be a reprimand and asking him to delete his post, not a firing.

If you say "interviewers are being sexist and so we should adopt policy Y", I think that would be acceptable. If you said "there is systemic bias against women so you should vote for Hillary Clinton", to me that would not be acceptable. Once you turn something into left/right liberal/conservative etc you are harming rational discussion and making a lot of trouble in a lot of different ways.

And I think this is the solution that the person who wrote the letter is ironically ruining. You can't have sane level headed discussions about these issues when its framed as left/right. You can if you take every issue on its merits individually. If you want people to be free to voice conservative opinions, then don't turn every issue into a 10 page manifesto dissecting the failures of marxism. Just discuss the policy.

No idea if this reasoning is shared by Google though. It's just my view.

I suspect that this memo wasn't any more political than much that gets shared in the message boards at Google. This issue was already politicized and the main gist of the politics stuff was, "Both sides bring insights and biases to the table, so we should do a better job making it comfortable for conservatives to speak up." By the standards of what I see going on the political discourse this was pretty tame stuff. The responses to the piece were 100X worse -- https://files.gab.ai/image/5986e3f03d1f1.jpeg

Just deleting the post won't magically fix those issues.

Sure, but if Google has already decided it is ok to discuss this issue on company message boards and that it wants to encourage debate and discussion (which it has), then it shouldn't then fire a guy just because he makes an argument other people don't like. The principled thing would be to stand for freedom of debate. Otherwise you are just ceding the company to cry-bullies, ceding the message boards to the faction that is more willing to self-modify to be offended at opposing viewpoints. If anything, Google should fire the employees who responded with personal invective against a fellow Googler.

By stating that he's OK with discriminating by gender, he put them in a position where they'd have to flag him as someone who couldn't manage a mixed-gender team.

He did not say this. He is against discriminating against gender and wants the same hiring and recruiting process regardless of gender.

He didn't "make an argument other people didn't like". An argument other people might not like could be "guys, I think everything in Google3 sucks and we should rewrite everything in Elixir." This was way beyond that.

I'll refer you to this article, because Yonatan puts it in way better terms than I ever could: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

> Otherwise you are just ceding the company to cry-bullies

While I was at Alphabet we dealt with plenty of cry-bullies, mostly in the form of conservative-leaning folk who thought they should be allowed to say whatever they pleased because "freedom of speech." Most of these self-styled Constitutional Scholars didn't realize that freedom of speech only applies to the government, not your employer. None got fired, as far as I can tell.

> Google should fire the employees who responded with personal invective against a fellow Googler.

And yet, this guy who is openly telling the world he doesn't trust females to be as interested as he is in the job should be applauded? Not sure I follow.

> He is against discriminating against gender and wants the same hiring and recruiting process regardless of gender.

Which is a completely specious claim to make, considering he most likely doesn't know the distribution of gender and ethnicity in the resumes the company receives and he's most likely not familiar with HR practices outside of interviewing. How can he claim there's an active conspiracy to discriminate candidates, when he doesn't know either of those things?

I don't ever recall seeing a diversity advocate say that the employee distribution should match the world 1 to 1. Diversity efforts have always focused on outreach, not on discarding resumes because the candidate is a white male. So he made up a straw-man, then he proceeded to attack it using cherry-picked science while making generalizations about political affiliations.

I read Zunger's article. Getting offended is in large part a choice. I apply the golden rule. If an Asian guy wrote a similar article for arguing why Asian people are over-represented at Google compared to white people, I would not take offense. Maybe he would be wrong, but if he wrote in the tone of the original article I would not call for his firing or say that I couldn't work with him.

mostly in the form of conservative-leaning folk who thought they should be allowed to say whatever they pleased because "freedom of speech."

A cry bully is someone who tries to get other people fired or de-platformed because they claim personal offense. Did these conservatives call for people to get fired? Did they succeed? If not, then good, I'm gladd their cry-bullying attempts were ignored.

And yet, this guy who is openly telling the world he doesn't trust females to be as interested as he is in the job should be applauded?

There is a enormous difference between noticing on average differences and direct personally targeted invective against a specific employee.

not on discarding resumes because the candidate is a white male

You are making up the straw man because that is not what he claims they are doing.

You were drawing a conclusion about how his comments are different from an Asian talking about how Asians are over-represented.

I haven't said anything else.

I take it from your somewhat insulting non-answer that you aren't sure if you agree with me.

This is factually inaccurate, for example the BBC recently advertised positions where white people were explicitly excluded.

Of course you were.

That's why you said "Diversity efforts have always focused on outreach" (my emphasis) and not "Diversity efforts have sometimes focused on outreach" or even "In this particular context, diversity efforts focused on outreach"

It's a disingenuous argument which doesn't take into consideration the whole history of why the program exists in the first place. Not only that, by trying to justify it on biological terms, the author introduces the supposed existence of an inherent bias that Google is supposedly trying to ignore.

How about we try to achieve 1-1 parity with society's distribution and if after 30 years of encouraging people of all genders to participate in all professions there's solid evidence that some people don't care for X or Y reason, then we let the problem take care of itself? I mean if we truly are aiming for non-discrimination, that should be the metric, right?

Unlike the guy from Google, I won't speculate on the reasons but there are many gender imbalances that are clearly not the result of a discrimination. For instance a large majority of med and law students (80% in the case of law) in France are women. These are not low skill/low pay/low prestige professions, and I am not aware that there is any discrimination against men in these schools (nor that anyone complained there would). In the school of engineering I went to, the proportion was the reverse (20% women). Selection is purely based on a math and physics exam, very little room for discrimination either. Naturally this male/female imbalance makes its way from university to the profession.

I can't say exactly why we have these imbalances, there might be many reasons, some may be cultural, some may be biological, I don't know, and I very much doubt anyone on HN can pretend to have an authoritative answer, but I also very much doubt it has to do with discrimination.

Can you point me to where he states this? The closest I found was

I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.

which is still very much in the "we don't understand, but maybe this is an explanation" camp.

Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.

Because he thinks the focus on cultural context ignores some aspects of the problem and leads to bad decisions? I mean, I disagree with his conclusions, but I don't think he is trying to be deliberately misleading.

Actually, he wrote exactly the opposite.

I do not understand how what he actually advocates could be considered discriminatory. It seems to me that it would indeed "disproportionately affect particular demographics", but in a good way by making sure that no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox could induce any skill/gender bias in the workforce.

[0] I have no particular knowledge about ukip

When you want them to go to company parties, the company gym, eat at the company cafeteria, and in the case of Facebook provide company housing, and generally spend a lot of time in the office, then at some point the company is going to discover that their employees have a diverse set of political beliefs as well as beliefs about gender/race/etc, and they will want to express these beliefs over lunch, and at the gym, and at parties, and in social media. They will also want to express those opinions to their friends, which happen to be colleagues. Now you have the big political debates that used to take place in bars and other recreational areas happening in the workplace. That's the cost of the all encompassing office.

Another ingredient in this toxic mix is that a lot of younger people blur the lines between social and professional, and this has been happening for a long time now. As soon as a critical mass lets their work life bleed into their personal life, this is going to end badly and lead to more oppressive workplace structures, as the company isn't going to suddenly democratize decision making. That's why management needs to be very circumspect about the scope of policies they mandate for their workers.

This tearing down of barriers is happening everywhere -- people do personal activities on their corporate laptops, they use their corporate phones for personal calls, they do personal projects on company time and company projects on personal time. They use their social media accounts to talk about company projects, etc.

The only viable option is for the company to retreat from these spheres and to focus on doing your job. They should not ask for social media accounts in the hiring process, nor should they focus so much on "culture". But that's inconsistent with also making the job a lifestyle and keeping the employees working long hours. If you are going to have people spend 50 and 60 hours working closely with each other, then things like political disagreements turn into HR concerns, and are addressed with the same intelligence and care for worker rights as you would expect from a typical HR department.

I think what you say is true about people searching for ways to express themselves when the lines between work and personal are blurred but fundamentally people have to attempt to be unbiased. It's pretty clear that this guy wasn't willing (or able) to do this and keeping him on would open up Google to a lot of bad PR and potentially lawsuits from people who's reviews/interviews etc that he was involved in.

Sure, why not?

I believe that the author is generally right, and that there are psychological differences between the sexes. And I have noticed that male bosses who believe that women are the same as men sometimes end up making their female subordinates cry a lot, because they don't realize the same harsh criticisms they would use on a guy are way too harsh for many women. They would be better bosses if they were aware of sex differences. For that reason, I believe knowing the truth is better even if that is "validating stereotypes."

(Worse, this then attracts the worst kind of attention from the internet as culture warriors join the fray, regardless of whether they're interested in what the debate was ostensibly about.)

Whether this takes the screed into firing territory I have no opinion on, but I definitely think that the guy's left/right posturing served to preclude any productive debate that he might have inspired.

> The workplace is no place for politics like this.

You could argue that affirmative action, because that's what it is about, is essentially a political stance ,and business are totally free to engage into these recruitment practices, but it absolutely follows a specific ideological thus political framework.

IMHO When you introduces political activism in your work place you will transform your work environment into a political battleground. period.

Actually, it is, in California. Political affiliation is a protected class.

You have to make a different argument if you want him fired.

The key to large organization management is control: they are doing this quickly before anything else happens. His presence both legitimises his point of view, and acts as a rallying point. If others are sufficiently emboldened, they may also act out. If they start organizing together, this has the potential of rapidly turn into a long standing issue for google.

Is that so? Do the complaints of numerous other employees not demonstrate some level of toxicity?

Edit -- thanks for helping me earn my karma today. It's delicious the way y'all are so eager to downvote me instead of engaging. It's almost like you think I have an ulterior motive being masked by a veneer of good-faith engagement or something. I wonder where I might have gotten that idea from...

When you get laid off, they give you 30 days to find another department to work in. There's no reason why he wasn't afford the same, if his departure was due to co-workers not wanting to work with him any more.

Sadly, with the onsluaght of statism in the US, that's no longer the case.

Eric Schmidt (and a whole team from Google) played a crucial role in Team Hillary’s election tech.

https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-...

Given this context, the firing of the guy only confirms his point about Google not tolerating dissenting opinions.

All workplaces are political. The politics of founder/owners/executives are in every fiber of he workplace. Denying it is highly disingenuous.

Moreover, said denial is one of the root causes why we are having these issues. The tech industry likes to project an image of being "liberal", when in fact the culture is highly conservative. Until recently, people like the author felt perfectly at home in most tech companies, including Google, because its politics quietly aligned with their politics.

And now that he's making it explicit he is suddenly the one politicising the workplace?

To be clear, I vehemently disagree with the author. But until about ten years ago, most of the industry quietly agreed with these views, which is why we have these problems in the first place.

It was political then and it is political now. It took political resistance to put diversity on the corporate agenda in the first place.

The workplace culture is and will always be a primary political arena. Especially with a company like Google, that is actively involved in politics and shaping our society in general.

What people who claim that the workplace is no place for politics are basically saying is that the workplace is no place for politics they disagree with. (Ironically, the position that the workplace is no place for politics is a traditionally conservative position. Worker bees should keep their ideology at home, whereas corporations are free to politically indoctrinate workers through euphemisms like "culture" and "values".)

I applaud the author for standing up for his political believes as much as I applaud Google for firing him.

We have already accepted that de facto some speech is suppressed in the work place. That's why I think this story is a little hypocritical. Lots of people are arguing for this persons right to express his opinion that men are more suited than women to work in tech, but no one is defending workers rights to advocate for improved labor conditions.

Fwiw, I definitely don't think Google should be allowed to fire him. But I feel a little ambivalent about defending him, since "his side" wouldn't defend my rights to voice my opinion.

That's ironic. Because the politics that he criticizes are without a doubt left wing policies that ARE applied in Google, from top-down. I'm not saying they are bad policies, but they are political in nature.

Much of this seems to be about people in positions of power being personally offended at the views of someone with whom they disagree. The proof is in your saying this was "rude" - who was that statement being rude to, Marxist intellectuals? Are there a lot of Communists at Google?

I don't think this reaction has anything to do with keeping some kind of social decorum, or keeping a company running smoothly. In this case the effect is a real-life ideological echo chamber, where the people in power fire anyone whose views they don't like, and fear of reprisal from voicing alternate views creates a groupthink mentality.

Several people have brought up the idea that because the manifesto author has shown his bias, that means there is no way he could work with someone of a different gender. But this is illogical; tons of people have the same bias! Just because they didn't write a manifesto doesn't mean they don't think some of the arguments might be valid. So really, what difference is there in keeping this guy around, whose bias they know and can clearly identify if it ever affects his work relations? Is it worse than the secret biases held by everyone else?

--

Obviously, as a man, I am not going to be subject to the kind of discrimination a woman would be, so if someone's views annoy me and I dismiss them, that's much different than when discrimination against a woman affects her livelihood and state of mind. In this regard we have to consider women as a particularly vulnerable population (in this industry, anyway) and act to protect them from the disproportionate negative effects of bias in the industry.

On top of that, the lack of women in the industry makes it very difficult to have a fair discussion of the issues. We should be trying to help men understand why women need special treatment, in order to help the industry grow out of its biases. But you can't help the industry get better if you fire anyone who questions the process. It's the white-collar equivalent of shooting anyone who doesn't tow the party line. This prevents establishing a dialogue, enforcing culture through fear. And a culture built on fear is never a good thing. It'll end up setting back the whole endeavor.