291–300 of 600 posts
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This is a deeply disingenuous interpretation of events, to the extent of being a lie. Damore, Woods, and that other dude who went on a misogynist Twitter tirade for a full day, were all deliberate assholes in public. There were consequences for that. This is just and correct.
Which part is a lie?
I wonder if companies like Google and GitHub that actively courted activists are now regretting their decision. For a long time it was common knowledge that you would try to keep stuff like that out of the workplace. The past 10 years have been an about face to that strategy and now we're seeing more or less complete chaos internally at these previously pro-politics (some kinds of politics) workplaces. My guess is th…
I think it's more that they actively courted assertive people with opinions and then created a culture where you can bring your whole self to work. They did this so that they could get the benefits of creativity, which inherently requires emotional engagement, which requires that you not repress your emotions. (It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about po…
I don't believe this. I can tune out whatever random BS my coworkers a few desks over are talking about and still be engaged in technical discussions about what we're building.
It just requires some discipline and an expectation of that discipline.
As an Xoogler (left in 2015) I find that news highly disappointing. I think that without honest, regular Q&A at events like TGIF, the company will become more and more out of touch. When I was there, TGIF was watered down, but we still asked uncomfortable questions of management. I remember asking a question of Sundar when he was head of Android when the Nexus 6 came out questioning our chasing Apple into the high en…
Having left more recently (mid 2019) - TGIF had been increasingly sporadically scheduled from 2016 onwards, to the point that many of us had thought it was cancelled a few times between then and now. In my local office, snacks got rescheduled and shuffled around to be further away from where the live stream happened and sometimes start at the same time as the broadcast. The writing was on the wall for a long time. A…
Sounds like Googlers spoiled the well. I'm not sure exactly why but Google employees always seem to be in the news about something and have leaked conversations that management had with them. In some instances the controversy is warranted (Rubin Payout, etc.) but it must be annoying from a management perspective.
I think it’s interesting that people absolve management from blame, when they actively hid details of military contracts with employees.
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Can you link to where he said that as specifically as possible? I have read his paper and it doesn't say that.
Is it simpler but less civil to just to call out an entirely false representation of Damore’s position, than to entertain it asking for evidence?
I turned down an offer from Google (cloud) because I didn't want to work for a company that was so focused on politics internally. This was just after they fired Damore, not that I agree or disagree with his opinion, but because Google seems promote internal fighting. That type of culture doesn't appeal to me.
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Well, Google and GitHub built fantastic engineering departments with that decision, beating the pants off several companies that followed "common knowledge." It was (and still is) a cliche that you get better results by hiring like Google than by hiring like everyone used to hire. What they're now learning is that this decision is incompatible with certain forms of revenue like military or immigration-enforcement con…
Nah, there's a much simpler and more factually correct explanation. Google developed a natural monopoly using smart people. It then had very high hiring standards and higher salaries, and hired more very smart people in order to wrap its tentacles and create more competition crushing apps and features. It gave these smart people more freedom and money compared to what they were used to, and allowed them to freely inn…
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Well, Google and GitHub built fantastic engineering departments with that decision, beating the pants off several companies that followed "common knowledge." It was (and still is) a cliche that you get better results by hiring like Google than by hiring like everyone used to hire. What they're now learning is that this decision is incompatible with certain forms of revenue like military or immigration-enforcement con…
This is historically revisionist. Google was a money-making behemoth with its tentacles in many areas of innovation before it became the politicized entity we know it to be today. Google only really became politicized a couple of years ago when certain media publications started making demands for diversity numbers within the organization and publicly shaming them for not meeting some imaginary bar in the area. Githu…
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You didn't actually address my question, and I made no mention of the state. I'm going to quote you again: you claimed that > When you protest against it publicly in the workplace and shout down others for as little as not vehemently agreeing with you, then we have a problem. I'm asking if you think that's generally true. For example, if you actually believe this, you would presumably make no attempt to silence me if…
> the second is just an excuse to let your values implicitly bias the local Overton window without acknowledging that I can't speak for the original commenter, but I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that. Banning politics is a difficult and inevitably biased rule. But the alternative seems to be that politics invades every minute of everyone's life, and that's completely intolerable unless you're fortunate enough t…
> but it's miles better than the scenario where politics is allowed to invade every minute of everyone's life.
I just want to note that, as someone who works at Google, its very easy to turn politics "off", so to speak. There are mailing lists and group chats I just don't access. I'm privileged enough to be able to do that because there are very few political issues that directly affect me. That isn't true for some of my coworkers. Those who are, to take one example, immigrants are directly affected by "politics" on the daily. And so avoiding discussion or interaction with politcal issues isn't possible for them. The same is true for coworkers who are Muslim, or who have undocumented family members. The political realities are inescapable for them. Asking them not to discuss those issues at work is like asking me not to discuss, say, a parent being hospitalized. They're real issues that affect and weigh on people. Forcing people to keep those things bottled up, especially when the company may be taking action that negatively impacts those people, isn't nice.
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Obviously nothing is absolute, that doesn't make anything contradictory. The majority political stance is left/far-left. The company is massive and sometimes will do things people consider right-wing, but usually those things are not actually "right-wing" but just normal behavior of a giant corporation seeking to maximize profit and shareholder value. Corporations and capitalism are not antithetical to left-wing poli…
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Your account has also posted thoughtful comments that have contributed to good conversation. That is good.