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One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
381–390 of 603 posts
Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those examples are not really political, but they are illegal.
They were commonplace and accepted twenty years ago. They're illegal now because of politics and political activism.
Pretty sure they have been illegal for way longer than 20 years, for example the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) of 1978 and discriminating based on sexual orientation has been illegal since 1992, at least in California.
The big political fights we are seeing in USA are not local reality. It is like me being in Sweden saying that we aren't progressive enough since Poland has a lot of conservative views, and that therefore we need to add even more protections for women and minorities in Sweden until they are properly accepted in Poland. If someone told me that I have to be engaged in their rights in Poland or I am a misogynist and homophobic then I'd just sigh and ignore them.
Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might this be the bigger problem of "bowling alone"? There s fewer and fewer places where small groups or people meet, and 1-to-1 socialization is not the same.
I think it goes deeper than that. Can't tell you how many times I've seen people boil down their identity to "I'm a Googler / Xoogler / ..." They go out in the pub around the corner after work with their company badge on display, they leverage having worked at Google in later jobs as if it has blessed them with infinite wisdom and knowledge. It's quite cringe worthy to see people fall into that trap. And yes, it's no…
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Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
#384What we are seeing are the consequences of "Employee Capture". Google captured the hearts and minds of its employees for workplace productivity. Its side effects are varied. The real world only sees highlights. Googled created a bubble from which its employees can socialize without ever needing to do so with the outside world. Why talk politics with the outside world? Stay with us, where it is safe, people are intell…
This is right out of the playbook. See this article for some very candid advice about how companies retain great employees.
Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
#385What we are seeing are the consequences of "Employee Capture". Google captured the hearts and minds of its employees for workplace productivity. Its side effects are varied. The real world only sees highlights. Googled created a bubble from which its employees can socialize without ever needing to do so with the outside world. Why talk politics with the outside world? Stay with us, where it is safe, people are intell…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch... >Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait) Imagine thinking that you can literally publish and circulate several revisions of an internal company memo telling 50% of your coworkers…
I'm not sure I see any part of that quote even suggesting "50% of your coworkers... should be paid less because they're genetically inferior to you".
And regardless of the correctness of firing him, him getting fired is a little stronger than "people tell[ing him] that [he's] kind of a dick".
Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
#386>> The tracking had made the staff in those departments feel unsafe It's very strange how often this idea of 'feeling unsafe' is coming up in the media now. It seems that either: - People have become more fragile/sensitive; or - People have become more aggressive. I think it may be both. I think corporations create extremely unnatural, oppressive and coercive environments which makes people more outwardly sensitive b…
A third possibility is that this has always existed and you weren't aware of it before.
As seen with the #MeToo movement among others -- there have been people, there are people, and there will be people whose voices are silenced. Not always explicitly.
Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you actually follow this? His rant was basically just of a list of stock arguments from the scientific racism era. After he got fired his fans started a fundraiser on a white supremacy website. His arguments were stock white supremacy and the people who adopted him as a hero were stock white supremacists. This isn't hard to figure out.
Totally wrong, his arguments were from the current era of science and not racist. They weren't even close to that.
He misapplied science to make a point that's not supported by science, so that he could try to argue he's talking science. I'm not sure whether it was out of malice or just poor scientific reason.
As the most base example: the candidate pool for a company like Google is self-selecting. Taking research about women (which I'm accepting uncritically just for the sake of argument in this post) as a population (research which showed a very small, minor difference in certain narrow traits) and implying this tells us anything at all about the women who have applied, let alone been hired, by Google is completely unsupported by science. Women candidates, or engineers, are very far from random samples of the women population.
It was the same kind of fallacious or dishonest thinking as pointing to research that shows that white men are more likely to be serial killers and concluding that the company needed to treat their white male engineers as a threat.
Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything is relative to the discussion and beliefs at hand. If you want to disagree about fried chicken, fine, have your beliefs even if I think you're wrong. If you want to disagree about, say, LGBT rights, then I will probably deem that you are the bad person. That's how strong, deeply held beliefs work. I'm sure if I tried hard I could come up with an example of a belief that would make you consider me a bad per…
I think it's both what you and the parent are saying. People in the younger generation (myself somewhat included in that) do feel extra entitlement toward saying what they want, when they want, in whatever forum they want. But it's a lot harder nowadays to keep one's personal and professional lives completely separate. I'd lean toward considering this trend a good thing; we don't work in a vacuum. Activism absolutely…
> making judgments about the parent's values is a bit out of line. Some people really do just want to go to the office, put in a full day of work, and go home where their "real" life happens.
My impression, from working in one of these progressive workplaces, is that nobody is forced to interject or defend their personal opinions, or be a part of those discussions at all. Indeed, just as we have employees bringing the latest from the social justice circus to work, we also have employees who sit it out entirely. We even have a dedicated #activism slack channel, which is obviously opt-in.
So when I see complaints like the parents, my impression is the true feelings are "I want to disagree and say X but my coworkers will think I'm a bad person." Obviously, the coworkers will only think you're a bad person if you're disagreeing with them on a strongly held, deeply personal value, hence my example of LGBT rights.
There are a such thing as bad opinions. If I share bad opinions, people will think I'm a bad person. Every person's conception of bad opinions is a little different - For example, most people here agree that mass surveillance and censorship is bad, but only some people here feel that deporting DACA immigrants is bad.
Thus, I concluded the parent probably just holds vastly different values from his or her more vocal coworkers. There's nothing wrong with having different values, in fact it's quite normal. I don't know why else parent would be concerned with being labelled a bad person.
Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
My empoyer doesn't have a lot of power over me. I'm a programmer not a coal miner. I don't want to be in a union. I don't want to join some club. I don't want to pay dues. I don't want to read newsletters or listen to speeches or be involved at all in the grubby, underhanded manuevering for power that would come with a union. And I'm tired of people condescendingly telling me that I'm wrong for feeling this way. I'm…
What if your punch in, put on the blinders, work 8 hours, punch out, go home; emotionally-deatched approach has you building tools to enable censorship in China? Or what if you end up working on [insert your personal morally objectionable issue of choice]? Your employer doesn't have power over you, but you have power over them. Organization is about choosing not to exercise that power by leaving for greener pastures…
> What if your punch in, put on the blinders, work 8 hours, punch out, go home; emotionally-deatched approach has you building tools to enable censorship in China?
If I thought that the company was doing something deeply unethical then I'd quit. I'm comfortable saying "I don't want to work for a company that is complicit in X bad thing". But we have to understand that "complicit" and "bad" are not easy to define. Each individual should decide what those words mean and collectivizing these decisions is a massive mistake.
> Your employer doesn't have power over you, but you have power over them. Organization is about choosing not to exercise that power by leaving for greener pastures and letting the company rinse and repeat with the next cycle of college graduates, but by staying and choosing to influence the direction of the company in a positive way.
I don't want to "influence the direction of the company" in the way that you mean. I want to influence its culture by speaking and writing precisely and being nice. But I don't want to make the kinds of decisions you're talking about. I don't know what a "positive direction" is (I don't think you do either). We are constantly acting into an uncertain future and the idea that "the laborers are the good guys who know what's positive" is infantile. I already said what I think about that: if labor gets too much power to "influence the direction of the company," labor will abuse that power (less work, more pay). If management has all the power, management will abuse its power (more work, less pay). The answer is a balance of power and I don't think we, in software, are doing too bad.
> You can choose to do your 8 hours every day and devote a full one-third of your life - the only life you get - to someone else's work that you don't have a stake in. But that just seems like the stupid, easy way out.
If I want to take the plunge and choose what I do with 8 hours a day, I'm sure as hell not going to choose "working for someone else". By "working for someone else" I am making a very clear decision to avoid risk. I'm fine with this decision. You're trying to have it both ways. You want the control without the risk and, sorry, but you don't get to do that.
Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
#390Tech worker unions are something that's probably been a long time coming. Rather than commit subversive outbursts putting your job in jeopardy, organize. You'll be much more effective in large numbers.