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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

Where was this woke inquisition happening that you saw directly? I’ve seen people complain about this much more than I’ve actually seen it happening.

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I lived it. It sucked. Only the dumb ones got cancelled. The smart ones kept their heads down or got new jobs. The team was defined by mediocrity. Mediocrity in hiring, in execution, in quality. But oh were they ever so woke.

What kind of company was this? I do contracting and have worked a lot of places, big and small, but have never seen anything remotely like this.

Perhaps it's a matter of perspective? Would you say e.g. James Damore was "cancelled", rather than being fired for discriminatory statements that an NLRB lawyer described as "so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected"?

This is a venture backed enterprise software company.

Cancelling was never so straightforward as being fired. It was social ostracism and the soft understanding that no promotions were going to come their way, because the whole HR team was against it and their managers were never going to spend the social capital to fight that fight.

Their offense was objecting to a specific point being made in “implicit bias training”.

I was high enough in the org chart that I was privy to these conversations.

Damore was cancelled and a woke NLRB lawyer making things up to ensure his cancellation stuck doesn't mean anything beyond the NLRB being just one more corrupted organization on top of so many others. Obviously, if you think Damore is actually a terrible person then you're a part of the problem, and not going to perceive anything as woke regardless of how many other people find it crazy.

Damore was canned by Google for exactly one reason: he had become a liability to the company. If he became a manager with a report who was a woman, or even worked on a team with women, any negative feedback would be suspect. He had literally written a treatise stating that women were not as predisposed to working in tech as men. Any woman could challenge him as biased. And Google would have to deal with the fallout of that, which would be a huge time sink and PR disaster for them.

Is this satire? The over usage of woke is funny.

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