James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google • Hacker News Board

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#431

Post by bzbarsky » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #210

Whatever you think of the memo, you have to be a little concerned about the precedent this would set if companies were not allowed to discriminate based on 'political' views. Should I be forced to hire a neo-nazi or a terrorist sympathiser so long as they're up to the job?

In California, by state law, companies are in fact not allowed to discriminate based on political views in hiring and firing. See http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...

> Should I be forced to hire a neo-nazi or a terrorist sympathiser so long as they're up to the job?

Just like you should be "forced" to hire a Greenpeace member, or a union organizer, or someone outspokenly pro-choice, or someone outspokenly pro-life, or someone running on the libertarian ticket, or someone running on the Communist ticket.

How this would play out in practice if someone "brought their politics to work" and the case went to court, I can't tell you; I'm not an expert in California labor law. But if people aren't bringing their politics to work, firing people for political views would be an even more concerning precedent, to me.

(In Damore's case, the politics was very much brought to work, and not just by him. I make absolutely no claims about what that means in terms of the above-cited law, or morality, for that matter.)

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#432

Post by richmarr » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

ng12 wrote: post #382

praestigiare wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claim that there is a pattern of bad diversity hires, but your anecdotes are just as easily explained by confirmation bias: You see an incompetent male engineer, and you write him off as an idiot and forget him. You see an incompetent woman, and she becomes evidence that there is a problem with diversity programs. You remember evidence that supports your narrative. Obviously my statement is not evidence either. I…

> you write him off as an idiot and forget him Not really. I have a lot of faith in our engineering staff so I wonder how he got hired and how he avoids getting fired. The uncomfortable truth is that if he was an employee that "looked good" I would know the answer to those questions.

Your faith in your engineering staff is beside the point. Bias is human nature. Unless you're actively structuring your processes to exclude or minimise it then you're certainly suffering from it, the only question is how.

It's not specifically gender or racial bias either. We ran a study of 700 candidates for a role, running regular hiring against blind assessment and found that the major difference for that role in that organisation was socio-economic... they'd been excluding great candidates who went to less prestigious universities.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#433

Post by nilkn » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

dvanduzer wrote: post #424

nilkn wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on whether the incompetent male engineers are just as incompetent as the incompetent female engineers. For instance, she mentioned a female developer who couldn't write SQL queries. Are the incompetent male developers at that same level of incompetence? Of course taking this into account cannot completely eliminate selection bias, and the sample size either way is probably too small to be all that meaningf…

Yes. In deep corporate America, there are plenty of people who have virtually no responsibilities beyond a few basic configuration tasks. They are still unable to perform many of these tasks without significant help from coworkers. And we cover for them. Every incompetent coworker I can think of was a man. I do not think this is confirmation bias, I think it's basic statistics, because most of the engineers those emp…

I meant for my question to be directed specifically towards the person making the claim about her specific coworkers at a specific company. This company has hiring practices that are not necessarily reflected across all of corporate America, and the claims being made are about those specific hiring practices and the effects that they have.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#434

Post by rhapsodic » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #160

john_moscow wrote: post #87

He doesn't have a choice really. With the PR mess he got himself into, no big company will ever hire him. Imagine the possible headlines "Microsoft hires the James Damore, the male supremacy advocate fired from Google". Nope, regardless the technical skill or his actual personality, his public image is forever ruined. So he realistically has a choice between becoming a paid speaker for fringe ultra-right organization…

No that just isn't how life does or should work. You make mistakes in an industry and you own the impacts to your reputation. He has done serious harm to the work of so many by his actions and absolutely deserves to own the consequences. And let's be serious here he has zero chance of winning against Google.

> And let's be serious here he has zero chance of winning against Google.

Don't be so sure of that. Federal law prohibits firing an employee who is trying to improve working conditions. And that's what he is claiming he was doing with his memo.

And there are a number female SJW Google employees who have made really vicious, public, anti-male statements and no one batted an eyelash. So I think his claim of gender-based discrimination is quite supportable.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#435

Post by FabHK » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

stevenwoo wrote: post #347

FabHK wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to know whether more liberal media/shows extended invitations to him (that he declined?), or whether it was only conservative platforms that allowed him to present his case.

The Guardian interviewed him. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-dam... When the memo came out, the Guardian reported that news outlets contacted him and Damore went with anti-feminist youtubers for a more friendly reception. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/09/james-dam...

Thanks for the info.

> Damore went with anti-feminist youtubers for a more friendly reception

Maybe understandable, but disappointing.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#436

Post by ng12 » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #418

dotnetisnotdead wrote: post #296

Honestly, this whole thing is just ugly. I read what he wrote. It was (mostly) ugly but contained a lot of truth. Before you downvote/call me a Nazi, I'm a mixed race woman in tech. I definitely see people hired just because of their minority status. I also see people hired who are minorities but also great at their job. It's not a binary pattern. But those who are hired just because they are a POC or female, yet are…

Diversity based on outward appearance is one of the most convoluted and ridiculous movements ever. We cannot spend decades trying to show that appearance is absolutely meaningless to talent, skills, and motivation, and then regress right back to it to show off "diversity". Also nobody ever seems to ask: diversity of what exactly? What's the target? Life experience? There is no qualitative score for that, nor is any s…

> diversity of what exactly is the target? Life experience?

Clearly not when every company recruits from the same 10 schools.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#437

Post by hsod » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

ryguytilidie wrote: post #324

vowelless wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. If the memo wasn't enough, him immediately going to right wing YouTubers like Stefan Molyneux, Jordan Peterson, Mike cernovich, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, etc. is suspicious. [1] Generally I wouldn't have minded if he went to right wing outlets, as long as he had also gone to left wing outlets. I was willing to listen to his reasoning. But it became clear after the memo came out that he didn…

Wait, Joe Rogan is considered a right wing youtuber? I listen to his show all the time and I'm a pretty big liberal and while he sometimes does the whole "everyone is sooooo PC now" thing, he also talks negatively about Trump, the GOP and right wing politics constantly. I also listened to the James Damore episode, and while I thought James did a good job of making his point and Joe did an AWESOME job of interviewing…

If you spend a lot of time railing on "SJWs", and comparatively little time advocating for an alternative path to a more egalitarian social order, I think you can be considered right wing. Supporting pot legalization doesn't erase that.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#438

Post by omegaworks » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #419

paulcole wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> due to a stupid political game he didn't even realize he was playing If he didn't know exactly what he was doing he deserves whatever happens to him for being so oblivious to the world around him.

Perhaps you should read up a little on Autism Spectrum Disorder. James Damore almost certainly tends to the autistic, and it can lead to both some insensitive statements not intended the way they were taken, and being unable to recognize some of the social situations he was put in.

Autism is not an excuse. Damore has openly sympathized with white supremacist groups. The common practice of diagnosing and pathologizing white men that have been radicalized by white supremacy and seek to shape institutional policies around white supremacy, prevents us from fully engaging with the harm they cause.

Autism does not cause you to be a bigot.

https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/931599879238967296

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#439

Post by ng12 » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 8:06 PM UTC

vowelless wrote: post #403

ryguytilidie wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, Joe Rogan is considered a right wing youtuber? I listen to his show all the time and I'm a pretty big liberal and while he sometimes does the whole "everyone is sooooo PC now" thing, he also talks negatively about Trump, the GOP and right wing politics constantly. I also listened to the James Damore episode, and while I thought James did a good job of making his point and Joe did an AWESOME job of interviewing…

As I mentioned, I don't disparage "right wing". I actually enjoy Joe Rogans podcast, and also Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson. All three of them are solidly classical liberal, which is probably right of center today (individualism vs. collectivism, equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome, etc). But AFAIK, damore never came to the young Turks, Chapo trap house, which are leftist podcasts. I could be wrong.

Would you go on the Young Turks if you were him? It'd be like walking before a firing squad.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#440

Post by AlwaysBCoding » Mon, Jan 08, 2018, 8:06 PM UTC

nashashmi wrote: post #60

Jonovono wrote: post #27

I never really saw too much issue with what he wrote. It seemed a lot of people were mad at him for things he never said. It's been awhile since I read his document, but I remember expecting it to be so bad from all the uproar I was hearing, but after reading it I couldn't find much to be angry about. Can someone enlighten me - i'll admit, this may be a highly ignorant topic of mine.

If you switch out words of gender with words of race, it may sound more offensive. That is what the Youtube CEO said and it immediately began to make sense.

"If you change what he said it sounds worse" lol, is that seriously your argument?