Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo

My first job out of college was for the U.S. Army on behalf of a large military contractor. My team leader worked for a different contractor. In the first few weeks he built up an insane environment of paranoia and micromanagement.

Our customer was a government employee. Twice in my first few months, my team leader came back from her desk yelling things like "YOU ARE SO STUPID" loud enough that everyone in the office could hear. I brought this up to a coworker, and he said that this happened periodically for as long as he had been there.

In retrospect, I should have immediately reported this. Since it was my first "big boy" job, I was feeling out how to deal with it. I figured since the government was our customer, one word from the person he was berating and he'd be ejected into the sun, or maybe everyone knew and this was just how things in this office worked?

Some time later, the micromanagement reached a crescendo. I completed a learning module for an instructor as per their specification and asked to do a demo. Team Lead responded saying no, the simulator was all screwed up and he was going to personally help fix it.

For 3 days in a row my team lead spent all 8 hours of the working day sitting in a chair behind me saying things like "move that box one pixel to the right.. no.. one more.. keep going" as he "felt out" the way the UX should be. I suggested that he could take the source from perforce make these changes from his desk. Nope, he didn't want to do that.

The work product delivered by 2 salaries over 3 days was marginal changes to UI element positioning, misaligning almost all of them in weird ways. I felt like I was going crazy, was he making my projects worse on purpose?

We had an excellent CHI engineer on the team. He had a masters degree in the field. He confirmed that nothing I was being asked to do made any sense at all. Nothing about this made sense.

I asked to take some time and talk to him about his management style. This was a mistake. He started out telling me that I was incompetent, and he needed to "show me how to be a good designer" and that he was going to continue micromanaging me for as long as needed to happen to accomplish this. After about 2 hours of back and forth, he seemed to at least understand that I needed him to back off. As we parted ways, his final thought was "You know what? You need to just shut up and do what you're told."

Yeah, no. I went to my desk immediately and sent an email to the site chief, detailing my experiences with him, and all the stuff he shouted at other people in the office. Despite my belief that everyone must have known what he was doing, that apparently wasn't the case. Government employee was too scared to stand up for herself, despite the fact she had the power to make him disappear instantly. Team Leader was escorted out of the building within 30 minutes and never came back.

Working in a big-ish company many thousands of employees and this stuff just isn't there. You sign in, do you work, design cool stuff, test it, ship it, maybe have nice off-topic discussions about emerging technologies, or share a recipe with a one or two coworkers. Then 5pm hits, go home and enjoy all that other stuff like politics, hobbies, meetups, family time etc. It's really pretty simple.

I don't understand why Google and others can't be that way. It seems to me they've cultivated this stereotypical / superficial "share everything, we are one big family!" culture. And people, I am guessing mostly younger ones, really buy into it and take it at face value, then get disappointed with things go south.

The idea of an almost free-for-all internal discussion board sounds wrong and almost evil to me. It's a bit like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign - "Yes, please tell us what you disagree with so we can blacklist you easier". Out of all the executives, I can't believe nobody saw the potential issues from it? (That is why I inserted "evil" adjective there, and of course it's a jab their motto).

12-20 years ago, one of my largest life goals was to work for Google. (It's not anymore. I found other fun and rewarding jobs.)

I don't get why the Google management team allowed their team to get so... well, violently politicized.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but.. keeping politics out of the workplace worked very well for a very long time.

Yes, that is the real issue with these types of things. It's the 'boiling off' effect, or the 'elves leaving middle earth' effect. At first, it's not too bad, it was just one person that was average in many respects. It's that girl that got pregnant, it's that guy with a lot of political leanings in the break room. But slowly, you boil off even the reasonable and good people. It's that now your team is kinda all full of people you don't want a beer with. Now your boss really is a piece of work. Now HR really does take a long time to fix mistakes in your pay. It's slow, but it happens, and it's happened to Google.

Marry that issue with things like Project Dragonfly and that whole debacle. Now remember that the goog knows everywhere your phone has been at 4 am for the last 7+ years, a lot of your emails, and a lot of your photos too.

That 'private data' that you though was harmless is not looking to be so harmless in the hands of people that would do the kind of things that the article mentions.

Worth mentioning TFA is wrong about the Damore memo... it wasn't suggesting that women are less disposed to be "good engineers" only that they are less disposed to seek out a career in engineering to begin with. Quality isn't a part of it. But that doesn't fit an SJW narrative.