Shameful
Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting
11–20 of 181 posts
Re: Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting
#12I usually evaluate people based on how they behave by their own stated values and codes. It's been a good rule.
What's been amazing to me is how skin-deep the stated values across the tech industry were. Virtually every executive is behaving in ways they would fire their employees for just a few months ago. The executives have no moral compass as human beings. I believed this to be the case before, since the people I've interacted with who rose that high did so by being psychopaths, but what's amazing is how on display it is.
I don't mind the before or the after so much as the very, very transparent about-face.
Re: Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting
#13The AI items are concerning.
The DEI stuff though is gone and isn’t coming back. The concept was well intentioned but, quite ironically, these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior and it was becoming increasingly hard to paint them as anything else.
Re: Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting
#14I always wonder how they do it. These spineless corporate suits. One month they're shoving DEI down your throat ("underrepresented, marginalized"), next month they're killing these programs and writing that they have always hired the "best" people for the job. Obviously, some people of the organization are different, but not all.
How do they do it? Just treat it like a job and do whatever the bag full of money demands? Or do they double-think like in 1984 and convince themselves that they themselves also believe it?
Re: Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting
#15I usually evaluate people based on how they behave by their own stated values and codes. It's been a good rule. What's been amazing to me is how skin-deep the stated values across the tech industry were. Virtually every executive is behaving in ways they would fire their employees for just a few months ago. The executives have no moral compass as human beings. I believed this to be the case before, since the people I…
It's more-or-less impossible to become a sufficiently-senior executive at a sufficiently-large company without being a psychopath. You should have a baseline assumption that all executives at large corporations have no values whatsoever beyond doing what benefits them personally, you'll be a lot less surprised at their behavior if you do.
Re: Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting
#16> “What’s not changing is we’ve always hired the best person for the job,” she said, according to a recording of the meeting the Guardian reviewed. This is obviously a lie. Google’s more senior leaders had (and probably still have) quotas for hiring and promotions. If you didn’t hit quotas, not only did you face intense pressure to artificially skew things when HR reviewed numbers, but your performance (and compensat…
These quotas you speak of do not and have never existed. James was a below average engineer who wanted the special treatment of his daddy’s generation.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna835836
Seems like his firing was completely justified. But is also a knock against Google for hiring him in the first place.
Re: Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting
#17> “What’s not changing is we’ve always hired the best person for the job,” she said, according to a recording of the meeting the Guardian reviewed. This is obviously a lie. Google’s more senior leaders had (and probably still have) quotas for hiring and promotions. If you didn’t hit quotas, not only did you face intense pressure to artificially skew things when HR reviewed numbers, but your performance (and compensat…
These quotas you speak of do not and have never existed. James was a below average engineer who wanted the special treatment of his daddy’s generation.
What special treatment did he want?
Re: Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting
#18I always wonder how they do it. These spineless corporate suits. One month they're shoving DEI down your throat ("underrepresented, marginalized"), next month they're killing these programs and writing that they have always hired the "best" people for the job. Obviously, some people of the organization are different, but not all. How do they do it? Just treat it like a job and do whatever the bag full of money demand…
How did democrat politicians go from saying we shouldn't legalize gay marriage to then saying you are a horrible homophobe if you are against it in a couple of years?
The answer is the same, some people just say what they think will give them the most power and advantages. If denying gay rights gives them votes? "Of course they shouldn't have any!" Wait, no, gay rights give votes?? "Oh, yeah anyone who doesn't give them rights is the worst!"
Almost all leaders are like that in a large enough population, since if you say what people want to hear you tend to bubble upwards.
Re: Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting
#19Google used AI to summarize the ~200 questions its employees posed ahead of this meeting regarding its DEI and AI policies.
The final two paragraphs of the article are telling:
The third-most-popular question employees asked was why the AI summaries were so bad.
“The AI summaries of questions on Ask are terrible. Can we go back to answering the questions people actually asked?” it read.
I thought summarization was a task AI was considered good at. If their own tech sucks at this, what makes us think it's safe to use in the context of war?
Re: Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting
#20[flagged]
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I think it's definitely helpful to describe a source's political leaning to add context to a discussion. However, claiming that they generally "hate big tech, love DEI" seems a little disingenuous. I think, HN is best when it's nuanced and does not jump and feed on hyperbolic culture war topics primarily used as ragebait.
There surely are many articles supportive of diversity initiatives published by the Guardian. But they have also published critical and nuanced articles on the subject. Here are a two examples:
"Focusing on diversity means we miss the big picture. It’s class that shapes our lives" -> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/29/focusi...
"So your company uses diversity training. Does it even work?" -> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/10/workplace-dive...