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Comment by Jonovono | Hacker News Reader

I never really saw too much issue with what he wrote. It seemed a lot of people were mad at him for things he never said. It's been awhile since I read his document, but I remember expecting it to be so bad from all the uproar I was hearing, but after reading it I couldn't find much to be angry about. Can someone enlighten me - i'll admit, this may be a highly ignorant topic of mine.

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I'm a former Googler (left before the memo) and I was upset by the memo because, in implying that the hiring bar was lower for women, it contained the thinly veiled corolloary that my female colleagues were less capable than my male colleagues. That did not match my experience at all.

And Google's own internal project confirmed that what makes an engineer at Google successful is their ability to communicate and empathize with other people. Traits which this "biological selection" narrative disfavors.

Discrimination of gender, race, and sexual preference is demonstrably real. This suit is a farce and I hope he loses.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...

Affirmative action is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who suffer or have suffered from discrimination within a culture[1]. Google is an affirmative action employer[2]. If women are favored over men, then wouldn't it make sense that a less skilled woman has the potential of being selected over a more skilled man?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

[2] https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/

I don't see any support for [2] in the page you linked (maybe because I am on mobile). There may have been efforts to recruit that were directed at women (e.g. sending employees to Grace Hopper), but ultimately the bar was the same for everyone.

It's at the bottom of the page.

> Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer.

I see it now. I believe that's something every major US Corp that sells to the federal government has to say: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...

No. They could just be spending 3 times as much to recruit women, for example. They could have recruiters dedicated to finding women. They could be funding women in tech programs at many levels. etc...

That's assuming that there's only a handful of people to pick from. But if your top choices are all top tier developers, then slicing it up by gender or ethnicity shouldn't make a difference.

Keep in mind that Damore specifically stated the false-negative rate was lowered for women. This is the full quote, "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate." In other words, Damore stated Google's diversity policies made more qualified non-diverse candidates get rejected - not that underqualified diverse candidate's get hired.

Many media outlets omitted the italicized portion.

The document went through multiple layers of abstraction. Very few people actually read it. Instead, some news outfit reported on it relatively accurately, then a less scrupulous outfit wanted clicks so they sensationalize it, then a third party reads both of those articles and averages their opinion on it somewhere in the middle. Repeat. As the information becomes more popular, we get sponsored snap stories and Facebook news box summarizations that are even more inaccurate, based on bad interpretations and abstracting away so much content that the information is useless. Radical leftists enter the picture and distort it even more to accomplish their own political ends. No one reads the actual article.

Its two problems our industry literally created: Sensationalist click farming and information overload. Our industry does not take these problems seriously enough. Damore was fired because of the outrage, not because of the article, but the outrage was manufactured by a sensationalist click machine and information overload culture literally championed by the company he was fired from.

> Very few people actually read it.

You need to learn that people can have a different opinion then you, having read the same document.

> Damore was fired because of the outrage, not because of the article, but the outrage was manufactured by a sensationalist click machine and information overload culture literally championed by the company he was fired from.

Correct, and that's why his lawsuit is BS. He caused outrage both externally and internally. You had an employee that others would refuse to work with.

Of course he was fired.

> Correct, and that's why his lawsuit is BS. He caused outrage both externally and internally.

How did he cause an external outrage? Did he leak the document to the press? Did he speak to the press at all?

There are quite a few people to blame for the external outrage, but he is not one of them.

There is nothing in my comment to suggest I hold the opinion that everyone who has a positive opinion about what happened didn't read the document. Rather, I just stated a fact: Very few people read it, relative to the number of people who have opinions on it.

His lawsuit is not BS; you should try reading the court filing. He has multiple examples of Google HR officially condoning systemic racism and sexism. Who knows how it will come out, but he has a case.

If you switch out words of gender with words of race, it may sound more offensive. That is what the Youtube CEO said and it immediately began to make sense.

"If you change what he said it sounds worse" lol, is that seriously your argument?

It's a very good argument. Behavior that is ok for one group should be ok for another group, and viceversa. That is a truth of equality.

I think there's a different point -- that we're willing to ignore certain avenues of discussion to maintain a civil society.

> It's a very good argument.

In the best case, that argument only has a little utility. However, it's a pretty bad argument now, since political correctness only allows you to make those kinds of swaps in certain cases. Nowadays, it can only be use to amplify the outrage against an already-identified villain.

If you turn "I only have sex with women" into "I only have sex with white people", suddenly it sounds pretty offensive. Can we judge those two statements equivalently? It's not a good argument at all.

It's interesting to note that that was actually the structure of one of the arguments in the lawsuit - changing "men" to "women" to demonstrate the flaws in a Googler's reasoning. Check out points 166-169.

To be the devil's advocate, many things are a lot more offensive if you swap words of gender with race.

"Birth control for blacks", "we need more jews in STEM", "no blacks in the whites only bathroom".

They're more offensive because unlike race there are very real and relevant biological differences when it comes to gender. And whether or not that applies to STEM probably shapes your viewpoints on this subject.

I read it and it made me pretty annoyed, not so much for what he said, but how he chose to go about saying it.

He says he is only trying to start a conversation or discussion, but circulating a secret memo around your company and then going on a self-promotional media crusade really is not a great way to do that. It looks more like a political stunt, which is pretty much the opposite of a conversation.

>circulating a secret memo around your company

>then going on a self-promotional media crusade

If internally sharing a document within a company is bad, and externally talking about it once it was made public by another party who got you fired is also bad, what is in your opinion the acceptable and appropriate method to have this conversation?

Going privately to people who disagree with you and talking to them respectfully about the issue you disagree on is a start.

Everyone was publicly disagreeing with him though so why should he remain private?

My understanding is that this is a very inaccurate portrayal of what happened, and that makes me doubt that you gave the memo a fair chance. He published an internal memo, but not necessarily a "secret" one. Someone else published it externally -- not him -- and he only went on a media "crusade" after being very publicly fired.

Yes, I gave the memo a chance.

But you're right, though, now that I'm reflecting, my portrayal of him was too harsh. After all, the man did get fired for writing a letter. THAT is ridiculous and I hope he wins the suit just for that.

The whole thing is embarrassing, though. I mean, what was he complaining about? He worked at Google, which is like, the top of the heap for programming jobs. I didn't understand why he was upset over the company's efforts to include women more. Did he not understand why that would be seen as sexist?

The more I think about it, the more I realize the answer to that question might be no. Maybe Damore didn't realize that presenting his ideas in the form of a memo passed around the office would be insulting to some people. Maybe it was honestly the only way he knew how to initiate a discussion about it. And in that case, I do think he was mistreated and it's a shame he didn't have another way to voice his concerns.

I guess it's a lesson, but what to learn from it, I don't know.

But Google actively solicited this feedback from it's employees. He didn't publish a screed unwarranted. Maybe he was misguided in his attempt, but that is a character flaw and not a fireable offense, at least in my mind. Furthermore, IIRC, he had published it many months prior to it going viral in the media, and the ensuing moral outrage that followed, and when he had originally published it internally it was _almost_ entirely uninteresting. I say _almost_ because, in typical fashion, some folks started speaking up after it went viral that yes, in fact, it had originally made them "uncomfortable" but that they were afraid to voice their own opinions on the matter.

Personally, looking at this from the outside and from the vantage point of today, I think the entire thing is overblown and also extremely typical considering the state of the Western world today.

> Google actively solicited this feedback from it's employees.

I don't understand Google's internal culture at all.

> But you're right, though, now that I'm reflecting, my portrayal of him was too harsh. After all, the man did get fired for writing a letter. THAT is ridiculous and I hope he wins the suit just for that.

Thank god at least someone in this mess was capable of reflecting and changing their opinion. Thanks for restoring my faith in humanity.

I believe he was fired and subjected to outrage before he went on the "media crusade". Probably in order to clear his name.

Google, and a few other major tech companies, have turned diversity into a religion. It’s insane. We spend more time talking about it than anything technical or organizational. There is no dialogue about it either, just every day we’re bombarded with reminders about how much we’re failing at diversity and how all people everywhere must be considering diversity before anything else. ANYTHING else. At all times.

What he did was speak heresy. I’m sorry that it sounds like I’m a butthurt male but the fact is diversity is dogma in these companies and you either buy in wholeheartedly, constantly, to the exclusion of all other priorities, or you’re ex-communicated.

It was more about the timing. The memo came shortly after Trump was elected, when many women and minorities were feeling defeated. It was not the climate to try and hold reasoned debate.

In my experience the left was not capable of having reasoned debate even before the election. They prefer to shut it down.

On what topic?

That humans aren't blank slates.

If you're talking about Damore then I believe that's less about what was said and more about how it was stated.

The context was "the left .. not capable of having reasoned debate even before the election. They prefer to shut it down."

Pre-election a similar thing happened to James Watson and Larry Summers - eg here is shutting down conversation about humans not being blank slates:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/us/harvard-chief-defends-h...

"When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Dr. Hopkins said.

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