Do we know anywhere in all of this the exact words and context used by Altman?
(I note that Linus seems to manage at least one "people who do X should be fired"-equivalent email every week)
(I note that Linus seems to manage at least one "people who do X should be fired"-equivalent email every week)
> If you want to increase diversity at Google fire all the bigoted white men.
I would put the above statement at about the same as
> If you want to increase productivity at Google fire all the lazy black people.
I will let the reader decide if the two statements should be treated the same by HR.
That is, the first statement does not require the assumption that all, or even many, white men are bigoted in order to make sense, and the mention of race and gender is directly relevant. (It would also be true that firing white men at random would accomplish the same goal; the meme author is trying to say, why don't we fire the bigoted subset of this group, because we want to fire bigots anyway.)
I think it's a defensible position to believe that the statement isn't acceptable anyway - but I don't think the two statements are analogous by any means.
If someone in my choir kept going on about how the basses are too loud no matter what they objectively do, I would tell them to cut it out, and I would hope that the choir director would get rid of them if they persisted; it's pretty demotivating to be told that you're doing something wrong no matter what you do. But if we actually have a problem with auditioning too many basses and it's hurting the sound of the choir, and some of them are just not good at singing quietly, getting rid of them is the right thing to do (unless this is a school choir or something where participation is a more important goal than sounding good).
Fired for poor programming practices. The two situations are in no way comparable.
There's a distinction between saying unflattering things about people who do unflattering things (like submit broken or low quality code) and making hostile statements about people who simply have some physical attribute.