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Silicon Valley Snowflakes
By now you’ve heard about the memo that circulated at Google excoriating criticizing the company for its politically correct corporate culture, mindless “Diversity uber alles” policies, and intolerance for people with different opinions. To demonstrate their commitment to diversity, Google hunted down and fired him. In Silicon Valley, it would seem opinions critical of political correctness and diversity are ‘violence’ because ‘ they make people feel afraid.
How glad I am not to be a mewling snowflake. But if one of the points alleged by the memo is that some women (and weak, effeminate millennial beta males) are so emotionally fragile that they are a detriment to the workplace, doesn’t skipping work because a memo hurt their feelings kind of prove the point?
Published in Science & Technology
As far as HR or the company as a whole is concerned, the very fact that this employee might land you in court is reason enough to exclude him. He can be right as rain, he can be the best guy in the world, but he brings baggage with him, and there are other candidates who don’t. He needs to go work for a company where his baggage is an asset, not a liability. Wikileaks has already offered him a job. Competitors to Google wishing to distinguish themselves in the marketplace for being truly open and unsullied by politics might want to hire him as well.
The problem companies like Google face is that they exist in Silicon Valley, the epicentre of SJW insanity, and their employees undoubtedly skew to the left. They are also young, which means they recently graduated from universities like Berkeley and UCLA, where no-platforming and flash mobs of indignant students are the rule of the day.
Google is most likely afraid of its own workforce, and felt like if they didn’t fire this guy, it would only take one viral tweetstorm before half their employees walked off their campus in ‘solidarity with women’ or some such foolishness.
They perhaps also decided that the storm they would get from the right for firing him was a tiny fraction of what they’d get from the left if they didn’t – and the left is the pool from which they draw most of their new hires.
SJW’s have a chilling effect on the behavior of Silicon Valley corporations, and that chilling effect is spreading to other large companies at a rapid rate.
FWIW, here’s my take. The problem here in the Valley, where I’ve lived and worked for 21 years, is manifold:
The reaction to Damore’s firing on an internal chat channel at the large tech company where I work drives his point home on that front.
Like @Valiuth, I’d prefer a “shut up and code” culture, which is pretty much how I manage my working life. Unfortunately, though, those on the left do not, and because of the aforementioned reasons, have the imprimatur of their company when they do so, most of the time.
If the Zero hedge quotes are accurate, it’s about to get much more interesting. He’s claiming that Google was illegally discriminating to increase diversity.
Oh, boy. If assertiveness is not a good thing, then we are all in trouble.
The world is nuts.
I’ve been told that expressing one’s opinion flatly without couching it in meek, weasel language like “this is just my opinion? okay? and you don’t have to agree with me? but I just was feeling like sharing? and it’s only just how I feel?” . . . is offensive. You gotta include the weasel words if you don’t want to offend anyone.
They probably were but as long as they are discriminating against white heterosexual males it is not an issue. By definition you can not discriminate against a white heterosexual male and if you do it does not matter, they have it coming for a history of something or other.
Hold on a minute. I read the papers enough to know that “undocumented” & “illegal” are synonyms. You must have this wrong.
I think this captures the memo writer’s problem. He will get hired somewhere but his opportunities have significantly narrowed, as well as his chances for advancement. From a large company HR department perspective they will be worried as much about other employee reaction to hiring this person, as about any intrinsic objective issues with the potential hire. Since they know SJWs will go wild on any company that hires him they are likely to screen out a resume like his before it even reaches a hiring manager. HR departments are very risk averse.
I doubt it.
I get this one a lot. I am a big man with a large character and a deep gruff voice. I can take a meeting away from many people with out even trying. I gather some of the Indian men do not like this. (though I was not “officially” told that) I have a following of Indian women that seem to be grateful because when they defer to the men in the meeting I can direct the the meeting and let the women speak. Weird how things work out.
Oh, um, I’m not sure about that. Maybe we should form a committee to look into it? :)
I’ve had to practice this myself, as I have a similar problem. I manage to avoid meekness by:
1. Feigning a certain sort of polite awkwardness without actually apologizing for anything. I basically say the same thing I would have said anyway, but in the form of a question because I’m confused about something. The implication being that you simply couldn’t be doing something this moronic, so I must not have understood.
2. Lead off with a tangentially related compliment. It doesn’t have to even be a particularly effusive one. I then say the flat thing exactly as normal.
3. Only use the flat neutral talk when describing how things work (or usually not work) as opposed to who wrote them. That means, even though the first thing I did was run the blame command to see who broke the code and if they still work here, I never mention this information when describing the problem. This works because our codebase is old and has many authors, quite a few of whom are no longer with the company and had a reputation for writing garbage.
So far I’ve never had to apologize in this job, and during my reviews I am consiststently rated as having above average communication skills with co-workers. Though I don’t think we have any snowflakes working here either, so I don’t know that I’d survive a place like Google.
In my particular case, it wasn’t “opinion”. I just pointed out the governing equations and asked the group to look at the terms in the denominator. That should have resolved the question, but I guess I was being too direct.
For the new ideas up for discussion, I always thought it was a group endeavor. Looks as if I was wrong again. I’m very glad I got out in time, with a nice severance package. Those who are still there tell me it is even more unpleasant now.
Just yesterday I offended a new member of our team (a man trained within more normal larger corporations) so deeply and inexcusably that he resigned on the spot. He would not even accept my apology.
I would never have a chance in “Corporate America”.
Sounds like your team is better off. What triggered him so massively?
I reminded him of our unique corporate culture, and that not sharing information internally is a fireable offense. It was my fourth reminder (the first three were not acknowledged or observed). It was during a team call.
After he resigned, the other members of the team reminded me that I had said the same to each of them, because nobody believes that I really mean it until I escalate. They seemed more amused than upset.
Technically, he didn’t. The person who leaked his memo did. That person is the one Google should be concerned with, not the memo writer – unless the two are one and the same, and I haven’t heard of any indication that they are.
I realize that that isn’t how Google and many others are going to see, but I think it’s the way it should be seen.
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If it were me, I’d justify it by saying, “I checked into the situation and read the memo in question. The situation was not as it was portrayed to the public. Now whether the legal department would allow the hire or not, would be another question – assuming they have the power to veto potential hires. But that’s how I would justify my desire to hire the guy – assuming he was qualified for the position I was needing to fill.
I guess the deep voice is about all we have in common then. I’m approximately the size and build of Tony Zale, if anyone remembers who he is. I also realized that at least in my case, I wasn’t learning much when my lips were moving, so I typically kept quiet, took notes, and based on those, made what I hoped were perceptive comments and observations that would move the group in the right direction. I was surprised by the criticism. Still, I gave it all the consideration it deserved.
Hey buddy, this is a family site. Let’s keep it PG.
What if you state the opinion without qualifiers, but do it in an outrageously exaggerated yooper accent?
SJW will eat their own young. We can pray that such behavior will increase the overall sanity.
As for google guy: the person who shared his memo is the bad’un, but they think they get more SHW points by pushing the non-conformist out.
Google is like one of those ant bait traps. All the poison in the hive. Hopefully they will self destruct, because no one can completely confirm to their agenda forever.
No, he didn’t create a public embarrassment. Those who leaked the memo created the embarrassment.
But whatever the case, you may be a good guy, but you’re not the dissident I want sharing a cell with me in a Soviet prison. Damore, on the other hand, is. He’s more like Vladimir Bukovsky in rocking the boat by forcing the system to live up to its own rules.
I wonder if the diversity crowd was tasked with ruining Google’s “My Maps” project (or whatever name they’re giving it now. I can’t keep up.)
They’re either incompetent, or they hate their customers, or both. I imagine they think like this:
Let users select a map from a list of them? No, that’s too easy. Instead, let’s show we hate them by making them select the item from the list (and only one selection is allowed) and then doing an extra mouse click to actually open it. Hey, those users have nothing better to do with their lives than extra mouse clicks. They’ve been spoiled by all the other user interfaces, and they need to know who’s boss, anyway.
Oh, here’s a user who wants to customize line thicknesses and colors. Ha, ha! The idiot thinks we’re going to let him select several items and apply the change to all of them at once. Well, we used to do that, but these people needed to be taken down a notch. Make him select each one individually and apply all the changes individually. And rather than letting him select a color from a menu or enter an RGB code, we’ll make him use a slider so it’s difficult to make the same selection twice. Don’t want their work looking too nice.
And just for fun, let’s break the API so that we no longer honor offsets of coordinates of custom pushpin markers. That ought to break a few hundred maps on this Spokesrider/Reticulator guy’s web site, and give him no means of fixing them. Let him stew.
He created the memo so he created the embarrassment.
I have no intention of sharing a cell with anybody. Millions of dissidents have gone to cells, work camps and death for no avail. I have no desire to die or be hurt in a battle that I can not win and that will not matter. I have a family I need to protect, feed, nurture. Can’t do that stuff from a cell. You and your cell mate have a good time.
That’s understandable about your family, but it has always amazed me that there are dissidents whose wives and children are completely supportive of their efforts, and proud of their spouses and parents. Alexei Navalny is a case in point. Putin’s thugs keep putting him in prison and physically roughing him up, yet he’s doing it for his children so they will have a better country to live in, and he has a wife who is completely supportive. It was traditional for the Soviets to make lives rough for the spouses and children of dissidents — keep the kids out of good schools and make the spouses unemployed. I don’t know that Putin is any better than the Soviets, but Navalny still has the support of his family, and has a good sense of humor about all of it, too. (I try to keep up with his videos. He has a good command of English, and sometimes produces English subtitles for them.) And he has many hundreds of supporters in many cities all across Russia who stick out their necks for his anti-corruption campaign and suffer the consequences.
But it doesn’t always work that way. Ned Cobb was an African-American sharecropper in the south who had a large capacity for work and did fairly well for himself, but ended up spending ten years in prison for defending his private property rights. His family was not quite as supportive. His wife stood by him, but there was also some resentment of the ten lost years when he was away from his family. He had at least one brother who disapproved. Rather than accumulate wealth that could be taken from him by an unjust system, he thought the solution was to never have anything, and then it couldn’t be taken from him. It was partly because of family disapproval that pseudonyms were used in the book about Cobb’s life. But years later, the family members were all proud of him.
The only suggestion I would make in your case is to not make the assumption that what is right behavior for you is also right for everyone else.
And it is simply not true that what the dissidents have done has been to no avail.
I don’t know that I’m going to survive where I am. It isn’t as bad as Goolag, but it is trending that way.
You forgot to address xim properly?
Right. Don’t blame us when we don’t help when they come for you – we’ll all be in the camps already.
Why?
I’m not a lawyer, but it seems really hard to satisfy the legal requirements for discrimination in the case of an individual. In the case of white males as a class, indications are they they aren’t underrepresented, underpaid, or otherwise mistreated at Google. Google’s behavior may satisfy a conservative’s common-sense definition of discrimination, but it isn’t going to satisfy the legal definition unless his lawyers can convince the courts to judge by unconventional standards.
I think Damore has a better chance at a retaliation case since that seems to merely require that he acted in good faith and was punished for it. But even in that case I’m not sure that his memo is protected by the equal opportunity employment laws that prohibit employer retaliation. Based on the training I’ve received from my employer it doesn’t seem to, but I’m just a supervisor and not a specialist.
Of course California state law could be all kinds of flaky. I have no idea.