Google Fires Engineer Who Wrote Memo Questioning Women in Tech - Page 4 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

News stories of lesser political significance, but still of international interest.

Moderator: PoFo Today's News Mods

Forum rules: Please include a source with news articles. No stupid or joke stories. The usual forum rules also still apply.
#14831825
Are all middle class people this naive? Do you all actually belie you are allowed to write huge essays slagging off your bosses without loosing your job? No shelf stacker or labourer or warehouse worker would be this dense but you all seem to see what he did as a normal thing that would not get you fired? Have none of you ever had jobs? Igor is a business owner of course so he gets a pass, he wouldn't understand anything about being employed as a worker but what about the rest of you? Have you never been employed? Do you really think this guy is going through some sort of terrible unique suffering?
#14831828
Much of the discussion is less about whether he deserved to be fired and more about whether the content was actually sexist or not. The moment he criticized the diversity policies of Google (he mentions classes that exclude males and white employees but doesn't elaborate further, etc) he lost his job. Since it was an internal memo, he didn't need to elaborate on what exactly those policies are, so it's unclear what he meant and whether he was simply not wording himself very well. As Pote pointed out, he was stupid enough to not go for total anonymity. He was basically asking to get fired.
#14831830
Does it matter if it was sexist or not? :?: Anyone thick enough to actually believe you can publish essays slagging off your employer without there being any consequences really can't be helped. He would have got fired for something before long. If I were to publish an essay slagging off the main contractor of a site I was working on I would be kicked off the site and would possibly face legal action for publishing the essay it wouldn't make any difference if it was full of unfounded bigotry or if it was a reasoned critique of their way of running jobs. You don't do that kind of thing and expect to keep your job. Middle class people really do live the most sheltered lives imaginable.
#14831831
You can view it as hubris, but it is normal behavior. He was important enough to the company to be paid well. He was important enough to be sent to China for the conference. There is nothing unusual about him thinking he should be important enough to express his opinion, without getting fired.
#14831832
I can assure you it is not normal behaviour. 99% of the population would understand why publishing essays slagging off your boss is a bad idea. It would not even occur to any working class person to do such a moronic thing. They guy must have learning difficulties or something.
#14831838
Decky and Potemkin's arguments run parallel.

There is a culture, especially amongst the elite, that is focused on how great they are more than being accurate. Part of this probably is, to some degree, a persistent case of old relics.

But another part has to do with everything, even people, being made into a commodity under capitalism.

Ivy League schools do not give out grades. It would hurt their brand to do so. Simply saying, "I went to Yale," is supposed to be enough to ensure a privileged life and trump and dissent. Into such privilege, the best minds are often plucked from here and there to support the claim. But in the end, the governor's dimwitted son that spent four years playing tennis and drinking champaign with prostitutes, essentially gets the same grades, prestige, and rewards as the Chinese scientist shipped over to do work in the most expensive laboratory humanity has ever created.

Even if this engineer wasn't Ivy League (and I don't care to find out), the same case is made. He lives in a specific place with specific conditions, and the prestige of the capital invested in him and that which surrounds him is different from that of a bricklayer or 99% of other jobs.

The Bourgeoisie and their fickle morality about universal rights was always something made on a sliding scale. Even in this case, there are ideological rightwingers pointing out that they think the fickle notion of an alienated conception of universal right is not being adhered to.

Of course it isn't. It never was adhered to. In the other thread about this I alluded to leftists, let's say minors, getting gunned down by the military for saying they need higher wages. Incidentally, the same issue that happens today just out of our vision.

But, like the governor's son drinking champaign while getting blown by a coed in a Yale frat house, here we endure to hear how rough he has it because a girl--a girl!--was his lab partner and he was told not to complain about it.

You can try to concoct a universal morality and how it applies to your place in it anyway you please. But the reality of the situation still exists no matter what mental gymnastics are made.

Choose Marx.
#14831841
Decky wrote:Does it matter if it was sexist or not? :?: Anyone thick enough to actually believe you can publish essays slagging off your employer without there being any consequences really can't be helped. He would have got fired for something before long. If I were to publish an essay slagging off the main contractor of a site I was working on I would be kicked off the site and would possibly face legal action for publishing the essay it wouldn't make any difference if it was full of unfounded bigotry or if it was a reasoned critique of their way of running jobs. You don't do that kind of thing and expect to keep your job. Middle class people really do live the most sheltered lives imaginable.


Do you think I don't know about the consequences of criticizing one's employer? :?: I literally mentioned that in my previous post.
#14831847
I think it is stupid to speak up when it will obviously and inevitably loose you your job and I think it is pathetic to then pretend it is anyone's fault other than your own. Actions have consequences, right wing people always go on about personal responsibility but they don't seem to understand it and they certainly don't ever display any.

I am very confused why Communists think it is stupid for a worker to expect to have the right to speak up


Sadly we do not live in some Communist utopia (unless we have any poster from the DPRK), we live under capitalism, anyone thick enough to expect a right to speak up in a profit making capitalist business is a fool.
#14831848
Gotta go, but one last poke. This seems a very individualistic attitude. Suffer in silence under the yoke of capitalism for individual benefits until someday....... :?:
Last edited by One Degree on 10 Aug 2017 12:57, edited 1 time in total.
#14831849
One Degree wrote:I am very confused why Communists think it is stupid for a worker to expect to have the right to speak up? :?: Are you only into martyrdom?


We have an understanding of what rights are to be expected.

Off the top of my head, this is what the capitalists did to workers in Argentina that questioned their bosses:

Image

Appealing to the boss's hypocracy or sense of moral fairness is not something that we really have had a lot of luck with.

Suffer in silence under the yoke of capitalism until someday.......


Oh please, the rightwing nutters aren't interested in overthrowing capitalism and establishing a Soviet in Google. The rightwing argument is that the ourgouis morality has to be strengthened and used to divide working people.

I'm pro gun, but I'm not for putting a gun into my mouth and pulling the trigger.
#14831850
One Degree wrote:Gotta go, but one last poke. This seems a very individualistic attitude. Suffer in silence under the yoke of capitalism for individual benefits until someday....... :?:


Who says you do nothing? :?:

The revolution is not an apple that falls from the tree when it is ripe, you have to make it fall.
#14831852
Change of plans. Got more time than I thought.

I actually agree and only started the argument to be mischievous. :) I believe we should be willing to sacrifice our selves for a better future, but it is silly to sacrifice if you have no hope of gaining from it. He made this mistake by believing Google would care what he thinks, but we all choose to believe things are better than they are.
But, since he did sacrifice himself, he deserves whatever support we can give.
#14831872
Bulaba is probably right and the guy just didn't mind if he loses his job. He may have had about enough of Google, and he's obviously not a conspirative type either. Also, as far as I know they expect people to think about whether how things could be done better at Google, and you can spend some time on writing memos and sharing them with colleagues. Google is not a construction company.
#14832250
Lol all of that dude whos gimmick on Infowars is being british and standing in front of a map has had all his videos demonetized by YouTube. This is the same retard who got interviewed by some newspaper guy and told them, "Yeah I eat paper bcause I have pica and also I'm dumb" and then acted surprised when the paper reported things he said as things he said.

Don't worry though. I'm sure there will be an alternate media substitute YouTube he can post videos to. And all the advertisers who didn't want themselves associated his particular brand of bullshit will surely support it.
#14832475
Potemkin wrote:You are asking too much from people. They are what they are, and seem incapable of changing their own nature, which for the most part is self-centred, obtuse and wilfully ignorant. Given our biological nature as primates with turbo-charged brains, this is hardly surprising. Regrettable, but hardly surprising. As Immanuel Kant once noted, "Out of the warped wood of human nature, nothing straight was ever made."

One of our most common self-delusions is the belief that the human race is progressing and is constantly improving itself. In fact, every advance is simultaneously a regression as our fundamental nature reasserts itself and sabotages our best efforts to transcend ourselves. The human race has never been wealthier, yet millions starve in the midst of plenty. We have never been more knowledgeable, yet people open museums showing Jesus and the prophets riding on the backs of dinosaurs. We have never been more free, yet people lock chains of ignorance and superstition around their necks and wrists. We are rising towards the heavens, yet we are falling back to Earth at the same time. Things can only get better, and things can only get worse.

Fatalism is not in my repertoire - at least not yet. We may never make something perfectly straight but we can always try and aim for more straightness. We have certainly made some headway and by historical standards we have leaped ahead in the last century. And as we have been to some extent successful in countering human nature, there is at least the possibility to do better in the future.

Potemkin wrote:In the long term, it seems to me that the human race is doomed. A paradoxical combination of cleverness and obtuse stupidity will destroy us in the end - our own creations will judge us, and condemn us to oblivion.

This is somewhat off topic, but I'm surprised by the pessimism. Don't you expect capitalism to inevitably evolve into communism at which point the world will be a better place?

B0ycey wrote:
Everyone has missed the point over this. Pichai even said most of the memo was up for debate. It was only the suggestion that members of their cooperation was not up for doing the job that got him fired (seems a weak argument when you read the memo actually).

Where Damore missed the point was that Google are trying to promote diversity and opportunity in their company, which is why these systems are put into place. Instead he was trying to imply that biology made these systems futile. Yet we have women in tech! So why not strive for more? At least promote the agenda.

Where Google missed the point is that they want to be an open and honest company. If they are going to fire someone because they make a criticism and then bogusly fire him without defending/explaining their policies, how can they advocate free speech?

And what is more surprising is 'supposedly intelligent' people have made decisions on emotion and not think logically when doing so.

I don't think Damore missed the point. He was specifically arguing against the way diversity is pursued at Google (although this is not a phenomenon restricted to only Google). He also pointed out that a 50-50 distribution in tech jobs may not be achievable (unless I guess we force it via quotas).

There is a lot of political pressure today to lift the percentage of women to 50% or higher in every academic field. A lower percentage is invariably taken as proof that women are victims of individual or systematic discrimination. Anybody with average intelligence should be able to recognise such a conclusion as the massive fallacy that it is. Further, if a company or university has some success they can expect to be showered with praise by the press. Companies have also sold diversity to their investors as a necessity for competitiveness and success, a claim that is quite likely baseless, and investors now expect that they do something about it.

Contrary to all the nonsense about women being oppressed and victimised, reality looks as follows.

1) Women in the US have for some time now earned the majority of bachelor and master degrees, and PhDs (see here and here).

Women Earn More Degrees Than Men; Gap Keeps Increasing

According to data from the Department of Education on college degrees by gender, the US college degree gap favoring women started back in 1978, when for the first time ever, more women than men earned Associate’s degrees. Five years later in 1982, women earned more bachelor’s degrees than men for the first time, and women have increased their share of bachelor’s degrees in every year since then. In another five years by 1987, women earned the majority of master’s degrees for the first time. Finally, within another decade, more women than men earned doctor’s degrees by 2006, and female domination of college degrees at every level was complete. For the current graduating class of 2013, the Department of Education estimates that women will earn 61.6% of all associate’s degrees this year, 56.7% of all bachelor’s degrees, 59.9% of all master’s degrees, and 51.6% of all doctor’s degrees. Overall, 140 women will graduate with a college degree at some level this year for every 100 men.


2) The "trouble" for the tech industry is that they choose to go into different fields (Source):
Image
The distribution of earned degrees looks similar. What's more, what is called the "people vs things" preference, where women prefer the former and men the latter, also seems to hold within fields such as medicine (see here for a rather lengthy article on this).

3) And then there is the vexing finding - and I actually didn't know this until I looked into it a few days ago - that in more egalitarian societies the gender gap on the people-things axis and other traits is larger than for less egalitarian societies.

Wiley wrote:
How big are gender differences in personality and interests, and how stable are these differences across cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I summarize data from two meta-analyses and three cross-cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender-egalitarian societies than in gender-inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.

Now, somebody explain to me why this is a bad thing and why we should influence women to want different things and make different choices.

@JohnRawls What if your assumption is wrong???[…]

Sure, but they are too stupid to understand, Trum[…]

Israel-Palestinian War 2023

This is the issue. It is not changing. https://y[…]

@annatar1914 do not despair. Again, el amor pu[…]