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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

Google infamously fired a male engineer for speculating on such things.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Ch...

I have found it extremely strange, mostly of "anti-right" crowds, to never see an educational moment in anything. Its just "if you weren't exposed to our views by this point in your life and don't accept them uncritically then you are ostracized"

is that useful?

That's because if you actually start digging at some of these moments, you will quickly find that their arguments fall apart. The only way to prevent this is with the assumption "oh well if you don't already understand then you never will"

Emphasis on some

which is indistinguishable from people open to other perspectives that simply haven't been articulated well, or could be discussed amicably, or perspectives that really shouldnt be accepted uncritically yet

The message is clear then, avoid all conversations about this very topic at your work place and let the chips fall where they may.

I completely agree. But there was hypocrisy: Google allowed (maybe still does) conversation on that topic -- but the views he had on that topic didn't agree with the narrative that was/is popular. Those chips fell quite unfairly.

The common theme I see is that people keep thinking they are comfortable on Google’s message boards when they should just ignore it for their duration at Google

Yup. And at the time I thought he was wrong.

But even though he was an ass, studies have proved him absolutely right.

Studies have "proved him right" because he used studies in his memos! He wasn't really talking out of his ass, he referenced tons of studies irrc. Whether you agree with those studies or not is a different story. (not you personally)

He was fired because many employees refused to work with him. How can you employ someone who can't communicate with his coworkers?

> He was fired because many employees refused to work with him. How can you employ someone who can't communicate with his coworkers?

No, Google is huge, they could have put that guy in another team or whatever. He was fired because someone leaked his memo and the press managed to make it bad PR for google. He was fired for PR reasons nothing more, in an era that was all about "girls in tech" in a patronizing fashion.

Teams have to work with each other. If he needs help from someone who is disgusted by his manifesto google has a problem.

> If he needs help from someone who is disgusted by his manifesto google has a problem.

This is mostly a cultural issue. Being professional is being able to work with people you fundamentally disagree with from a political perspective. But maybe Google shouldn't be a space where people discuss wedge issues to begin with, or write memos about anything on the matter.

Sure, but the fact still remains. There absolutely are people who would behave this way within google, so google's choices are fire hundreds or maybe thousands of people or fire him. It was an easy choice.

People who publicly talked about views far more extreme views than Damore are still working at Google. People can work with each other even if they don't like their views, the only reason Damore was fired was because he was dumb enough to write his thoughts in an easily shareable format rather than just a string of chat messages.

seems to be a good reason to remove discussions of politics, race, gender from work and focus exclusively on the product. Most people have at least one closely held belief that would alienate others. If everyone stops working with everyone they disagree with the company dies. Coinbase had the right idea.

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