ITT Bunch of people pretending to know the law
Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
111–120 of 863 posts
Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
#112The first thing everyone needs to know about this is what the case was about, because it implicates one of the most powerful and least known rights tech company employees have. According to Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA, employees can't generally be disciplined for exercising the rights provided under Section 7 of the NLRA. These rights are commonly understood to be about unionizing (ie, you can't be fired for trying r…
> absolute innate equivalence Is hacker aptitude some kind of conserved quantity that is conserved over sexes based on some natural symmetry ? Why not just say, absolutely pretended equivalence.
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Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
#113I looked up the Advice Memo [0] written by the NRLB (thanks tptacek for mentioning that document) so that I could try to see what exactly they found discriminatory about Damore's paper. This is the relevant section: > The Charging Party’s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct the Board found unprotected in these c…
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Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My point is that discrimination against conservative viewpoints is not a significant phenomenon in SFBA tech, unless by "conservative" you mean sexist or racist. Or don't think gay marriage should be legal, or are religious, or dislike welfare, or oppose the ACA, or think abortion should be illegal. EDIT: Or thinks having separate male and female bathrooms makes a lot of sense, or supports strict immigration polici…
Thinking gay marriage shouldn't be legal is not "conservative", it's plain discriminating. Denying abortions to others is a bit muddier, but somewhat similar - forcing your own, not universally accepted moral code on others isn't exactly the nicest thing to do after all. I don't know much about ACA, so can't say anything about it. With those three out of sight, I'm really interested in what kind of discrimination peo…
> Thinking gay marriage shouldn't be legal is not "conservative", it's plain discriminating
While I certainly agree it shouldn't be illegal, there is a long history of religious opposition to this that I don't think it's so simple to hand wave away. Just because we feel strongly that we are obviously in the right, doesn't absolve us from understanding why someone might feel a certain way.
> Denying abortions to others is a bit muddier
This one goes beyond muddy into clear political territory. For every one person you find that sees pro-life as "denying abortions" you'll find someone who see it as "denying murder". Pushing this debate into the workplace seems beyond a bad idea.
> I don't know much about ACA
As someone who's premiums more than doubled after the ACA, I think it's fair to say its value is debatable and no one should be fired for sitting on either side of that debate.
> forcing your own, not universally accepted moral code on others isn't exactly the nicest thing to do after all.
Everyone feels they are living to their own moral code. There is no universally accepted standard, but firing/shaming/blacklisting people for their beliefs is wrong (according to my own moral code).
Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
#115I looked up the Advice Memo [0] written by the NRLB (thanks tptacek for mentioning that document) so that I could try to see what exactly they found discriminatory about Damore's paper. This is the relevant section: > The Charging Party’s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct the Board found unprotected in these c…
You've lost the context of the Advice Memo. The NLRB isn't saying Damore himself violated EEO laws by writing the memo. The NLRB didn't fire Damore; Google did. The NLRB is saying that although the NLRA protects concerted action to improve working conditions, those protections do not extend to action that might discriminate against protected classes, and, crucially, that because employers are required by state and federal law to comply with EEO laws, the NLRB will tend not to second-guess them about how they do that.
The important thing to remember is that in most of the US, there's a presumption that employers can fire you for any reason. Employment is at-will. Damore was appealing to a specific exception to that rule.
Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very few people are able to put together a fact- and logic-based argument for why questions of morality like that should be questions of legality. E.g. why it's more like murder or theft or assault and less like lying or adultery. It's perfectly possible to think homosexuality is a sin and not think it should be illegal, and to treat homosexuals as perfectly decent humans who you would interact with in all the same w…
You are talking the legality of same-sex marriage. Point #3 is not talking about the legality of same-sex marriage. It is an opposition to compelling people to be complicit in same-sex marriage. Churches may still have some protection against being compelled to marry gay couples, but bakers sure as hell don't have any protection against having to make cakes for gay weddings, so it is reasonable to worry that the prot…
Why is being "complicit" in same sex marriage any worse than being "complicit" in a marriage for someone who has sinned, possibly grievously, in other ways? The difference is only in the obviousness, and it's not clear to me that that's a good reason.
It appears internally inconsistent in a way I've never heard a sufficient explanation for. And as someone who no longer believes, who does support the explicit non-theocratic nature of American government, I think that's a reasonable bar to hold others to. The major emphasis in Christianity as it was taught to me was never on "enabling," it was on one's own beliefs and fruit.
And to the sibling about "legality should reflect morality": I take a much more conservative stance on that. There you would have to do much more work to convince me that legality should merely reflect a particular snapshot of a particular group's morality, as the American founders - with very good reason based on their experience in Europe - explicitly rejected that. So I think you'll need to develop that thesis a lot before it convinces me to break with American tradition, there. I favor a view that enough concrete harm has to be demonstrated to justify more restrictions, more police, etc.
tldr: many religious Republican views like these are not actually all that conservative ;)
Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
but of course that is not what memo said...
>he said, "What separates this is its derisiveness and stereotypical characterization of one gender." Maybe not exactly, but the above quote pretty clearly outlines that the NLRB agrees that the memo was supporting a sexist viewpoint.
It wasn't that it was sexist, it was that it stereotypically characterized a gender in an effort to get Google to stop being so proactive in their compliance with EEOE laws.
I don't think it said anything about innate superiority - as I recall, it was mostly about innate interests and bell curves, and posited that the reason there were less women in tech than men was because there were less women interested in things than there were men interested in things (with the idea that more women are interested in people rather than things)
Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
#118The first thing everyone needs to know about this is what the case was about, because it implicates one of the most powerful and least known rights tech company employees have. According to Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA, employees can't generally be disciplined for exercising the rights provided under Section 7 of the NLRA. These rights are commonly understood to be about unionizing (ie, you can't be fired for trying r…
There are no good outcomes in the current noise. People on both extremes will misread and misuse it.
Silicon Valley's achievement in the last 10 years is to make sure ambiguity is profitable. Resolution of anything or even a path to resolution just produces less clicks, talking heads and outrage.
The proof is in the pudding. Who wants to bet 2-5 years from now the status quo wouldn't have changed? Replace the issue with gun control, climate change or universal health it hardly matters.
If you guys want to see change the noise levels have to reduce.
Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
#119The first thing everyone needs to know about this is what the case was about, because it implicates one of the most powerful and least known rights tech company employees have. According to Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA, employees can't generally be disciplined for exercising the rights provided under Section 7 of the NLRA. These rights are commonly understood to be about unionizing (ie, you can't be fired for trying r…
(for instance, any kind of official recognition that men are better suited to software development at Google than women)
This was where Damore's got his words twisted in his mouth: He never claimed that!
The problematic claims he did make are that women - on average - "have a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading" and are more prone to "neuroticism". Nowhere in the memo does he touch upon women's fitness for SWE jobs -- even though everybody seems to think so.
Whether he promoted stereotypes about women is another story (although most of his claims seem to have some backup by actual science) but the whole thing would have never blown so badly out of proportion if it wasn't for people who circulated a malicious and wrong summary of this memo, either intentionally or by being hanger-ons.
Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Despite "limiting language" like "studies show" or "on average", the NLRB found that the Damore memo's claims that women are susceptible to "neuroticism" and that they have lower variance in IQ constituted valid cause for Google to terminate. It's important I think to understand that the NLRB isn't saying that it's unlawful to write the Damore memo. They're not even saying that Damore's IQ and psychology claims…
"It's important I think to understand that the NLRB isn't saying that it's unlawful to write the Damore memo." Well, they did call what Damore wrote "sexual harassment" and "discriminatory", and sexual harassment is illegal and violates EEO, so that is basically saying that what he wrote is unlawful: "The Charging Party’s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be…
It is probably not generally unlawful for a rank-and-file employee to make discriminatory statements. You can be fired for doing that, but the government is unlikely to step in and do that for your employer.