I doubt google wants to open that can of worms, they seem to be doing everything in their power to avoid it. I don't blame them, picking sides will lead down ugly roads.
Nah. Picking the side that doesn’t call for oppressing people because of their gender, skin color, etc generally works out pretty well long term.
I think picking sides at all is a terrible idea from a business standpoint, it's something of a Pandora's Box and sets precedent they probably don't want to set.
Whether or not it's the morally correct thing to do is somewhat tangential.
If you're concerned about precedent it's way too late for that. "Picking sides" of this nature is *extremely* common in the corporate world.
It's possible I don't know enough about Corporate America, that's true. I don't know much about it, I haven't worked in it.
Is this kind of thing common? I guess I'm just comparing it to places I've worked myself, I know I'd feel extremely uncomfortable knowing holding certain political viewpoints of either flavor would be grounds for dismissal, and I can only imagine the lawsuits.
There are only two states where political beliefs are a protected class, iirc. No lawsuits to speak of.
Also "You are genetically inferior and should get fired." <- you'd be uncomfortable if someone saying that to you got fired?
I'd wager it's rarely said that bluntly. Usually it requires a certain amount of inference and reading-into and those steps bother me, yes.
Why does that bother you? I'm more bothered by the culture we have where women and minorities are supposed to just accept a level of soft bigotry in the workplace that casts them in a negative light. That needs to change.
I doubt google wants to open that can of worms, they seem to be doing everything in their power to avoid it. I don't blame them, picking sides will lead down ugly roads.
Nah. Picking the side that doesn’t call for oppressing people because of their gender, skin color, etc generally works out pretty well long term.
I think picking sides at all is a terrible idea from a business standpoint, it's something of a Pandora's Box and sets precedent they probably don't want to set.
Whether or not it's the morally correct thing to do is somewhat tangential.
If you're concerned about precedent it's way too late for that. "Picking sides" of this nature is *extremely* common in the corporate world.
It's possible I don't know enough about Corporate America, that's true. I don't know much about it, I haven't worked in it.
Is this kind of thing common? I guess I'm just comparing it to places I've worked myself, I know I'd feel extremely uncomfortable knowing holding certain political viewpoints of either flavor would be grounds for dismissal, and I can only imagine the lawsuits.
There are only two states where political beliefs are a protected class, iirc. No lawsuits to speak of.
Also "You are genetically inferior and should get fired." <- you'd be uncomfortable if someone saying that to you got fired?
I'd wager it's rarely said that bluntly. Usually it requires a certain amount of inference and reading-into and those steps bother me, yes.
You didn’t actually answer the question that was asked.
I’ve heard statements akin to that, especially whenever there’s a story about women gaining access to a particular military group.
Last time this thread resurfaced, I went on Glassdoor to checkout what issues people there noted Google might have.
It seemed like there was a serious problem in the company where everyone who worked there thought they were the smartest person in the room, because Google only hires the smartest people, and so those people previously were the smartest people in the room.
So while we could say that the alt-right people in the company are problematic, I rather think that their discussion boards around personal topics are always going to devolve into toxic cage-fights, regardless of viewpoint, because some Google employees will have a hard time admitting they might be wrong.
And in fact, this likely feeds directly into the original anti-diversity message, when highly talented, highly skilled individuals do not see any rewards for their efforts because they are surrounded by the same, and then are forced to look around for some other outlet.
This outlet could be a very poor work-life balance, stealing other people's work, or trying to explain why increasing diversity is stealing promotions from the people who 'deserve' them.
In all, I think it's a highly toxic workplace.
And I don't think that our side is necessarily immune to that environment.
People who become abusive because of Google's work environment are likely to continue being fired, and the underlying common factor will be that they believe that they are right.
Not any sort of shared belief, nor any targetting campaign by management.
So Google desperately needs more diversity, or at least hire not just on exceptional technical ability.
Last time this thread resurfaced, I went on Glassdoor to checkout what issues people there noted Google might have.
It seemed like there was a serious problem in the company where everyone who worked there thought they were the smartest person in the room, because Google only hires the smartest people, and so those people previously were the smartest people in the room.
So while we could say that the alt-right people in the company are problematic, I rather think that their discussion boards around personal topics are always going to devolve into toxic cage-fights, regardless of viewpoint, because some Google employees will have a hard time admitting they might be wrong.
And in fact, this likely feeds directly into the original anti-diversity message, when highly talented, highly skilled individuals do not see any rewards for their efforts because they are surrounded by the same, and then are forced to look around for some other outlet.
This outlet could be a very poor work-life balance, stealing other people's work, or trying to explain why increasing diversity is stealing promotions from the people who 'deserve' them.
In all, I think it's a highly toxic workplace.
And I don't think that our side is necessarily immune to that environment.
People who become abusive because of Google's work environment are likely to continue being fired, and the underlying common factor will be that they believe that they are right.
Not any sort of shared belief, nor any targetting campaign by management.
So Google desperately needs more diversity, or at least hire not just on exceptional technical ability.
Yup that is ultimately their problem. They need to spread out the kind of people they hire because the people who are top of their class don't want to spend time doing mundane work like adding features or bugfixing current stuff. They want to be on the next big project. Which also contributes to the toxic environment that is google.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Last time this thread resurfaced, I went on Glassdoor to checkout what issues people there noted Google might have.
It seemed like there was a serious problem in the company where everyone who worked there thought they were the smartest person in the room, because Google only hires the smartest people, and so those people previously were the smartest people in the room.
So while we could say that the alt-right people in the company are problematic, I rather think that their discussion boards around personal topics are always going to devolve into toxic cage-fights, regardless of viewpoint, because some Google employees will have a hard time admitting they might be wrong.
And in fact, this likely feeds directly into the original anti-diversity message, when highly talented, highly skilled individuals do not see any rewards for their efforts because they are surrounded by the same, and then are forced to look around for some other outlet.
This outlet could be a very poor work-life balance, stealing other people's work, or trying to explain why increasing diversity is stealing promotions from the people who 'deserve' them.
In all, I think it's a highly toxic workplace.
And I don't think that our side is necessarily immune to that environment.
People who become abusive because of Google's work environment are likely to continue being fired, and the underlying common factor will be that they believe that they are right.
Not any sort of shared belief, nor any targetting campaign by management.
So Google desperately needs more diversity, or at least hire not just on exceptional technical ability.
How much of this is directly from Glassdoor and how much of it is inference from what you read on Glassdoor?
0
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
It's strange hearing about Google having a toxic work environment. You read about Enron or Amazon and that's some top down, designed for misery, toxic environment stuff. Google's problems seem to be caused by hiring smart people and then letting them get bored. It's like a company full of Border Collies.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Last time this thread resurfaced, I went on Glassdoor to checkout what issues people there noted Google might have.
It seemed like there was a serious problem in the company where everyone who worked there thought they were the smartest person in the room, because Google only hires the smartest people, and so those people previously were the smartest people in the room.
So while we could say that the alt-right people in the company are problematic, I rather think that their discussion boards around personal topics are always going to devolve into toxic cage-fights, regardless of viewpoint, because some Google employees will have a hard time admitting they might be wrong.
And in fact, this likely feeds directly into the original anti-diversity message, when highly talented, highly skilled individuals do not see any rewards for their efforts because they are surrounded by the same, and then are forced to look around for some other outlet.
This outlet could be a very poor work-life balance, stealing other people's work, or trying to explain why increasing diversity is stealing promotions from the people who 'deserve' them.
In all, I think it's a highly toxic workplace.
And I don't think that our side is necessarily immune to that environment.
People who become abusive because of Google's work environment are likely to continue being fired, and the underlying common factor will be that they believe that they are right.
Not any sort of shared belief, nor any targetting campaign by management.
So Google desperately needs more diversity, or at least hire not just on exceptional technical ability.
I recall reading Harvard had a similar problem in the past. They were so highly renowned that all the best students applied there, and they could give admissions to the best of the best. Students that were used to being at the upper end of their classroom's bell curve distribution were placed in classrooms with others just like them... and found themselves in the middle, or even the bottom end, of their new classroom's bell curve distribution. They did not take to getting Bs and Cs and Ds well, and student depression rates went through the roof.
The solution was simply giving admissions to some less-than-the-best students. These students filled the lower end of the classrooms' bell curves, and they were happy there because they were used to not being the top and they were honoured just to be at Harvard. Meanwhile, best-of-the-best students still had people in class they could feel superior to, and they weren't dropping to the bottom rungs of their classes, so they were happy.
It's strange hearing about Google having a toxic work environment. You read about Enron or Amazon and that's some top down, designed for misery, toxic environment stuff. Google's problems seem to be caused by hiring smart people and then letting them get bored. It's like a company full of Border Collies.
Somehow, I doubt the problem with Damore and his ilk is that they're bored, rather than they're bigots. Why are we so quick to try to explain away bigotry when it happens in our own communities? Is it a "it can't happen here" reaction? Because it can, it does, and we need to clean our house.
It's strange hearing about Google having a toxic work environment. You read about Enron or Amazon and that's some top down, designed for misery, toxic environment stuff. Google's problems seem to be caused by hiring smart people and then letting them get bored. It's like a company full of Border Collies.
Somehow, I doubt the problem with Damore and his ilk is that they're bored, rather than they're bigots. Why are we so quick to try to explain away bigotry when it happens in our own communities? Is it a "it can't happen here" reaction? Because it can, it does, and we need to clean our house.
It's being explained as a lack of diversity in general because "we only hire the best" kind of just focuses a laser pointer deep on the kinds of people that have those opportunities.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
It's strange hearing about Google having a toxic work environment. You read about Enron or Amazon and that's some top down, designed for misery, toxic environment stuff. Google's problems seem to be caused by hiring smart people and then letting them get bored. It's like a company full of Border Collies.
Somehow, I doubt the problem with Damore and his ilk is that they're bored, rather than they're bigots. Why are we so quick to try to explain away bigotry when it happens in our own communities? Is it a "it can't happen here" reaction? Because it can, it does, and we need to clean our house.
It's being explained as a lack of diversity in general because "we only hire the best" kind of just focuses a laser pointer deep on the kinds of people that have those opportunities.
Yeah. A self-taught computer engineer who had absolutely no help from his/her poor family and went to a local community college due to lack of money might be a real shit-hot coder but his/her resume is going to look mediocre.
Last time this thread resurfaced, I went on Glassdoor to checkout what issues people there noted Google might have.
It seemed like there was a serious problem in the company where everyone who worked there thought they were the smartest person in the room, because Google only hires the smartest people, and so those people previously were the smartest people in the room.
So while we could say that the alt-right people in the company are problematic, I rather think that their discussion boards around personal topics are always going to devolve into toxic cage-fights, regardless of viewpoint, because some Google employees will have a hard time admitting they might be wrong.
And in fact, this likely feeds directly into the original anti-diversity message, when highly talented, highly skilled individuals do not see any rewards for their efforts because they are surrounded by the same, and then are forced to look around for some other outlet.
This outlet could be a very poor work-life balance, stealing other people's work, or trying to explain why increasing diversity is stealing promotions from the people who 'deserve' them.
In all, I think it's a highly toxic workplace.
And I don't think that our side is necessarily immune to that environment.
People who become abusive because of Google's work environment are likely to continue being fired, and the underlying common factor will be that they believe that they are right.
Not any sort of shared belief, nor any targetting campaign by management.
So Google desperately needs more diversity, or at least hire not just on exceptional technical ability.
I recall reading Harvard had a similar problem in the past. They were so highly renowned that all the best students applied there, and they could give admissions to the best of the best. Students that were used to being at the upper end of their classroom's bell curve distribution were placed in classrooms with others just like them... and found themselves in the middle, or even the bottom end, of their new classroom's bell curve distribution. They did not take to getting Bs and Cs and Ds well, and student depression rates went through the roof.
The solution was simply giving admissions to some less-than-the-best students. These students filled the lower end of the classrooms' bell curves, and they were happy there because they were used to not being the top and they were honoured just to be at Harvard. Meanwhile, best-of-the-best students still had people in class they could feel superior to, and they weren't dropping to the bottom rungs of their classes, so they were happy.
This sounds more like these students need to be taught some life lessons about what intelligence means, and less like they need to have their particular superiority complexes catered to. The idea that the students with lower grades means they're less intelligent, or that the student themselves getting lower grades means that they're less intelligent is something they should be shaken out of by that point in their education.
This was also the kind of superiority complex that led to the tech field getting into the stock market with algorithm-based stock trading and then causing several high visibility crashes. They need to learn that being good at one or a few things does not make them the best at everything, and they should listen to others regardless of their perceived skill level.
Especially as things like the "rigid" skills Google hires for are a lot less rigid than they get sold as. There's a lot of ways to reach a particular outcome with coding, not all of them are straightforward, and the simplest is not always the best. You need to be open to listening to new perspectives on a problem and not trying to line people up in a rigid hierarchy before you'll accept their opinion.
Basically I mean that they should probably have already learned that they're not superior by virtue of being top of the class and that they can always learn something from someone else regardless of how they perceive that person's educational achievements.
Last time this thread resurfaced, I went on Glassdoor to checkout what issues people there noted Google might have.
It seemed like there was a serious problem in the company where everyone who worked there thought they were the smartest person in the room, because Google only hires the smartest people, and so those people previously were the smartest people in the room.
So while we could say that the alt-right people in the company are problematic, I rather think that their discussion boards around personal topics are always going to devolve into toxic cage-fights, regardless of viewpoint, because some Google employees will have a hard time admitting they might be wrong.
And in fact, this likely feeds directly into the original anti-diversity message, when highly talented, highly skilled individuals do not see any rewards for their efforts because they are surrounded by the same, and then are forced to look around for some other outlet.
This outlet could be a very poor work-life balance, stealing other people's work, or trying to explain why increasing diversity is stealing promotions from the people who 'deserve' them.
In all, I think it's a highly toxic workplace.
And I don't think that our side is necessarily immune to that environment.
People who become abusive because of Google's work environment are likely to continue being fired, and the underlying common factor will be that they believe that they are right.
Not any sort of shared belief, nor any targetting campaign by management.
So Google desperately needs more diversity, or at least hire not just on exceptional technical ability.
I recall reading Harvard had a similar problem in the past. They were so highly renowned that all the best students applied there, and they could give admissions to the best of the best. Students that were used to being at the upper end of their classroom's bell curve distribution were placed in classrooms with others just like them... and found themselves in the middle, or even the bottom end, of their new classroom's bell curve distribution. They did not take to getting Bs and Cs and Ds well, and student depression rates went through the roof.
The solution was simply giving admissions to some less-than-the-best students. These students filled the lower end of the classrooms' bell curves, and they were happy there because they were used to not being the top and they were honoured just to be at Harvard. Meanwhile, best-of-the-best students still had people in class they could feel superior to, and they weren't dropping to the bottom rungs of their classes, so they were happy.
This sounds more like these students need to be taught some life lessons about what intelligence means, and less like they need to have their particular superiority complexes catered to. The idea that the students with lower grades means they're less intelligent, or that the student themselves getting lower grades means that they're less intelligent is something they should be shaken out of by that point in their education.
This was also the kind of superiority complex that led to the tech field getting into the stock market with algorithm-based stock trading and then causing several high visibility crashes. They need to learn that being good at one or a few things does not make them the best at everything, and they should listen to others regardless of their perceived skill level.
Especially as things like the "rigid" skills Google hires for are a lot less rigid than they get sold as. There's a lot of ways to reach a particular outcome with coding, not all of them are straightforward, and the simplest is not always the best. You need to be open to listening to new perspectives on a problem and not trying to line people up in a rigid hierarchy before you'll accept their opinion.
Basically I mean that they should probably have already learned that they're not superior by virtue of being top of the class and that they can always learn something from someone else regardless of how they perceive that person's educational achievements.
The problem is that our society is happy to teach them that they are superior because of their class ranking. It's a huge problem, exactly because it becomes self-reinforcing. It takes active pressure to push back on that, and too often, that pressure isn't given.
It's strange hearing about Google having a toxic work environment. You read about Enron or Amazon and that's some top down, designed for misery, toxic environment stuff. Google's problems seem to be caused by hiring smart people and then letting them get bored. It's like a company full of Border Collies.
Amazon spends a lot of effort on making significant portions of the company pretty comfortable. It's a very varied environment with a looot of healthy stuff. That doesn't negate the stuff that you'll hear in the news, but on *average* it doesn't come close to the pure tech companies in toxicity. The variety of people is definitely immensely advantageous.
Last time this thread resurfaced, I went on Glassdoor to checkout what issues people there noted Google might have.
It seemed like there was a serious problem in the company where everyone who worked there thought they were the smartest person in the room, because Google only hires the smartest people, and so those people previously were the smartest people in the room.
So while we could say that the alt-right people in the company are problematic, I rather think that their discussion boards around personal topics are always going to devolve into toxic cage-fights, regardless of viewpoint, because some Google employees will have a hard time admitting they might be wrong.
And in fact, this likely feeds directly into the original anti-diversity message, when highly talented, highly skilled individuals do not see any rewards for their efforts because they are surrounded by the same, and then are forced to look around for some other outlet.
This outlet could be a very poor work-life balance, stealing other people's work, or trying to explain why increasing diversity is stealing promotions from the people who 'deserve' them.
In all, I think it's a highly toxic workplace.
And I don't think that our side is necessarily immune to that environment.
People who become abusive because of Google's work environment are likely to continue being fired, and the underlying common factor will be that they believe that they are right.
Not any sort of shared belief, nor any targetting campaign by management.
So Google desperately needs more diversity, or at least hire not just on exceptional technical ability.
I recall reading Harvard had a similar problem in the past. They were so highly renowned that all the best students applied there, and they could give admissions to the best of the best. Students that were used to being at the upper end of their classroom's bell curve distribution were placed in classrooms with others just like them... and found themselves in the middle, or even the bottom end, of their new classroom's bell curve distribution. They did not take to getting Bs and Cs and Ds well, and student depression rates went through the roof.
The solution was simply giving admissions to some less-than-the-best students. These students filled the lower end of the classrooms' bell curves, and they were happy there because they were used to not being the top and they were honoured just to be at Harvard. Meanwhile, best-of-the-best students still had people in class they could feel superior to, and they weren't dropping to the bottom rungs of their classes, so they were happy.
This sounds more like these students need to be taught some life lessons about what intelligence means, and less like they need to have their particular superiority complexes catered to. The idea that the students with lower grades means they're less intelligent, or that the student themselves getting lower grades means that they're less intelligent is something they should be shaken out of by that point in their education.
This was also the kind of superiority complex that led to the tech field getting into the stock market with algorithm-based stock trading and then causing several high visibility crashes. They need to learn that being good at one or a few things does not make them the best at everything, and they should listen to others regardless of their perceived skill level.
Especially as things like the "rigid" skills Google hires for are a lot less rigid than they get sold as. There's a lot of ways to reach a particular outcome with coding, not all of them are straightforward, and the simplest is not always the best. You need to be open to listening to new perspectives on a problem and not trying to line people up in a rigid hierarchy before you'll accept their opinion.
Basically I mean that they should probably have already learned that they're not superior by virtue of being top of the class and that they can always learn something from someone else regardless of how they perceive that person's educational achievements.
The problem is that our society is happy to teach them that they are superior because of their class ranking. It's a huge problem, exactly because it becomes self-reinforcing. It takes active pressure to push back on that, and too often, that pressure isn't given.
They're also examples of "smart" Dunning-Kruger, where their excellence at one task leads them to believe they will experience similar excellence in other, unrelated tasks. Basically Dunning-Kruger embodied as unrecognized personal privilege.
It's strange hearing about Google having a toxic work environment. You read about Enron or Amazon and that's some top down, designed for misery, toxic environment stuff. Google's problems seem to be caused by hiring smart people and then letting them get bored. It's like a company full of Border Collies.
Amazon spends a lot of effort on making significant portions of the company pretty comfortable. It's a very varied environment with a looot of healthy stuff. That doesn't negate the stuff that you'll hear in the news, but on *average* it doesn't come close to the pure tech companies in toxicity. The variety of people is definitely immensely advantageous.
And Amazon isn't that great, with, you know, cities competing with each other on how much they can screw the people that live there in order to get to be the place where the Amazon Duchy is installed.
It's strange hearing about Google having a toxic work environment. You read about Enron or Amazon and that's some top down, designed for misery, toxic environment stuff. Google's problems seem to be caused by hiring smart people and then letting them get bored. It's like a company full of Border Collies.
Amazon spends a lot of effort on making significant portions of the company pretty comfortable. It's a very varied environment with a looot of healthy stuff. That doesn't negate the stuff that you'll hear in the news, but on *average* it doesn't come close to the pure tech companies in toxicity. The variety of people is definitely immensely advantageous.
And Amazon isn't that great, with, you know, cities competing with each other on how much they can screw the people that live there in order to get to be the place where the Amazon Duchy is installed.
Yeah, the effect of a given company on its surroundings is a whole topic of its own. And probably pretty divisive.
As someone who works in a related field, and has worked in other, unrelated fields the idea that tech companies somehow have a 'worse' relationship to white supremacy, politics, gender, or workers rights than say GE or Ford is pretty ridiculous. None of the companies, whether tech or classic, do a great job at managing interactions between their employees about their personal beliefs because from the companies perspective the best thing you can do is "Both of you shut up please, neither of you are actually helping with our goals by arguing". Tech companies just APPEAR worse because they allow more discourse between their employees, and allow things like "Diversity Advocacy Groups" which then naturally call attention to the problem elements of their own company from the perspective of those advocacy groups.
As someone who works in a related field, and has worked in other, unrelated fields the idea that tech companies somehow have a 'worse' relationship to white supremacy, politics, gender, or workers rights than say GE or Ford is pretty ridiculous. None of the companies, whether tech or classic, do a great job at managing interactions between their employees about their personal beliefs because from the companies perspective the best thing you can do is "Both of you shut up please, neither of you are actually helping with our goals by arguing". Tech companies just APPEAR worse because they allow more discourse between their employees, and allow things like "Diversity Advocacy Groups" which then naturally call attention to the problem elements of their own company from the perspective of those advocacy groups.
No. It may seem like that because it solves the immediate problem of the conflict, but all it does is suppress the larger problem. There's a reason I called this sort of issue a cancer - having a contingent of employees who are attacking other employees because of their race/gender/etc. is corrosive to employee morale and can very easily lead to something that leaves the company legally liable. Bigotry should not be tolerated, period.
Tech companies just APPEAR worse because they allow more discourse between their employees, and allow things like "Diversity Advocacy Groups" which then naturally call attention to the problem elements of their own company from the perspective of those advocacy groups.
Tech companies are also directly plugged into the toxic discourse on the web, because that's their bread and butter. If you are designing a car-making robot for Ford, you are probably not on the internet 100% of the day. But an engineer for Google needs to be.
As someone who works in a related field, and has worked in other, unrelated fields the idea that tech companies somehow have a 'worse' relationship to white supremacy, politics, gender, or workers rights than say GE or Ford is pretty ridiculous. None of the companies, whether tech or classic, do a great job at managing interactions between their employees about their personal beliefs because from the companies perspective the best thing you can do is "Both of you shut up please, neither of you are actually helping with our goals by arguing". Tech companies just APPEAR worse because they allow more discourse between their employees, and allow things like "Diversity Advocacy Groups" which then naturally call attention to the problem elements of their own company from the perspective of those advocacy groups.
No. It may seem like that because it solves the immediate problem of the conflict, but all it does is suppress the larger problem. There's a reason I called this sort of issue a cancer - having a contingent of employees who are attacking other employees because of their race/gender/etc. is corrosive to employee morale and can very easily lead to something that leaves the company legally liable. Bigotry should not be tolerated, period.
Clearly bigotry should not be tolerated, but, high quality employees are rare and bigots are common. Being a bigot is no barrier to having skill at your job, and in addition, not all bigots are incapable of getting through the workday without BEING bigoted to people they meet. Bigots are like any person with a belief structure. Some are VERY excited to let you know about their views, others just prefer to not talk about it at work.
So, you can't fire someone for BEING a bigot. But you can (and should) fire them for bigoted behavior at work. From the companies perspective, what it would like is for its bigots to shut up, because their bigotry pisses everyone off and then they have to fire them. The easiest way to achieve that is to just tell everyone to shut up about politics and social issues. Because, until recently, just having a general understanding that everyone should just keep their political views at home was the best way to make sure you stayed out of the news on this sort of thing.
I'm not saying this is ideal. But I am saying that this is how almost all companies will behave. Classic companies too. You really think the ford assembly line is some hotbed of social progressiveness? Or that the middle management structure at MMM isn't riddled with doddy old racists? That the new york times doesn't have men on staff who pick their interns based on how attractive there are. The way companies get around this is by telling their employees (often in 'subtle' ways) to shut the hell up.
This is not a 'tech companies' issue. This is a 'companies' issue, and the tech companies are neither paragons nor villains in the piece.
edit - And, to be clear, you should only fire someone for being a bigot at work, unless that person is a public face of your company. If Jason from Accounting never says a word against anyone at work, and works well alongside Srivatsan from Budget, then the company should not give a monkeys if they find out that Jason is the chapter president of the NRA.
As someone who works in a related field, and has worked in other, unrelated fields the idea that tech companies somehow have a 'worse' relationship to white supremacy, politics, gender, or workers rights than say GE or Ford is pretty ridiculous. None of the companies, whether tech or classic, do a great job at managing interactions between their employees about their personal beliefs because from the companies perspective the best thing you can do is "Both of you shut up please, neither of you are actually helping with our goals by arguing". Tech companies just APPEAR worse because they allow more discourse between their employees, and allow things like "Diversity Advocacy Groups" which then naturally call attention to the problem elements of their own company from the perspective of those advocacy groups.
No. It may seem like that because it solves the immediate problem of the conflict, but all it does is suppress the larger problem. There's a reason I called this sort of issue a cancer - having a contingent of employees who are attacking other employees because of their race/gender/etc. is corrosive to employee morale and can very easily lead to something that leaves the company legally liable. Bigotry should not be tolerated, period.
Clearly bigotry should not be tolerated, but, high quality employees are rare and bigots are common. Being a bigot is no barrier to having skill at your job, and in addition, not all bigots are incapable of getting through the workday without BEING bigoted to people they meet. Bigots are like any person with a belief structure. Some are VERY excited to let you know about their views, others just prefer to not talk about it at work.
So, you can't fire someone for BEING a bigot. But you can (and should) fire them for bigoted behavior at work. From the companies perspective, what it would like is for its bigots to shut up, because their bigotry pisses everyone off and then they have to fire them. The easiest way to achieve that is to just tell everyone to shut up about politics and social issues. Because, until recently, just having a general understanding that everyone should just keep their political views at home was the best way to make sure you stayed out of the news on this sort of thing.
I'm not saying this is ideal. But I am saying that this is how almost all companies will behave. Classic companies too. You really think the ford assembly line is some hotbed of social progressiveness? Or that the middle management structure at MMM isn't riddled with doddy old racists? That the new york times doesn't have men on staff who pick their interns based on how attractive there are. The way companies get around this is by telling their employees (often in 'subtle' ways) to shut the hell up.
This is not a 'tech companies' issue. This is a 'companies' issue, and the tech companies are neither paragons nor villains in the piece.
edit - And, to be clear, you should only fire someone for being a bigot at work, unless that person is a public face of your company. If Jason from Accounting never says a word against anyone at work, and works well alongside Srivatsan from Budget, then the company should not give a monkeys if they find out that Jason is the chapter president of the NRA.
This is how Mozilla wound up with the Brendan Eich fiasco. They kept turning a blind eye to his pretty open bigotry, up till they promoted him to CEO and then suddenly found that they couldn't cover it up anymore, and people were asking uncomfortable questions about why an ostensibly progressive organization like Mozilla would appoint as its head a man who thought making gay Californians second class citizens was A-OK.
By the way, bigotry isn't something that gets "turned off", and thinking that it does is a privileged view. Which is why companies need to be aggressive about it, and not just push for the status quo - which more often than not means that minorities, women, and other dispossessed groups wind up on the short end of the stick.
And Mozilla immediately lost market share to....Google. Because actual talent is a scarce resource that will go to the place less likely to be damaging, which is why companies and employees sign NDAs in order to protect both the employer and the employee.
Ideally there should be an union that not only protects employees from unfair working conditions, but also can regulate employees on a non-biased way. But good luck with that on the tech sector aka ground zero for Libertarianism.
And Mozilla immediately lost market share to....Google. Because actual talent is a scarce resource that will go to the place less likely to be damaging, which is why companies and employees sign NDAs in order to protect both the employer and the employee.
Ideally there should be an union that not only protects employees from unfair working conditions, but also can regulate employees on a non-biased way. But good luck with that on the tech sector aka ground zero for Libertarianism.
Talent like...Tim Chevalier, who was one of the Mozilla insiders opposed to Eich as CEO, and who is currently suing Google for wrongful dismissal over his pushing for diversity.
The problem is that companies think that if they just get everyone to Not Talk About The Problem, then it goes away - not realizing that it just pushes things under the surface. Supporting diversity means that you have to have a "bigotry not acceptable" mentality, because that stuff goes deep, and manifests in a number of insidious ways.
And Mozilla immediately lost market share to....Google. Because actual talent is a scarce resource that will go to the place less likely to be damaging, which is why companies and employees sign NDAs in order to protect both the employer and the employee.
Ideally there should be an union that not only protects employees from unfair working conditions, but also can regulate employees on a non-biased way. But good luck with that on the tech sector aka ground zero for Libertarianism.
Talent like...Tim Chevalier, who was one of the Mozilla insiders opposed to Eich as CEO, and who is currently suing Google for wrongful dismissal over his pushing for diversity.
The problem is that companies think that if they just get everyone to Not Talk About The Problem, then it goes away - not realizing that it just pushes things under the surface. Supporting diversity means that you have to have a "bigotry not acceptable" mentality, because that stuff goes deep, and manifests in a number of insidious ways.
Sounds a lot like people thinking that voting for the black guy was magically going to Fix The Problem and would make it Go Away and (this is important) was going to get everybody to Shut Up About The Problem and then getting angry when it wasn't the case.
As someone who works in a related field, and has worked in other, unrelated fields the idea that tech companies somehow have a 'worse' relationship to white supremacy, politics, gender, or workers rights than say GE or Ford is pretty ridiculous. None of the companies, whether tech or classic, do a great job at managing interactions between their employees about their personal beliefs because from the companies perspective the best thing you can do is "Both of you shut up please, neither of you are actually helping with our goals by arguing". Tech companies just APPEAR worse because they allow more discourse between their employees, and allow things like "Diversity Advocacy Groups" which then naturally call attention to the problem elements of their own company from the perspective of those advocacy groups.
No. It may seem like that because it solves the immediate problem of the conflict, but all it does is suppress the larger problem. There's a reason I called this sort of issue a cancer - having a contingent of employees who are attacking other employees because of their race/gender/etc. is corrosive to employee morale and can very easily lead to something that leaves the company legally liable. Bigotry should not be tolerated, period.
Clearly bigotry should not be tolerated, but, high quality employees are rare and bigots are common. Being a bigot is no barrier to having skill at your job, and in addition, not all bigots are incapable of getting through the workday without BEING bigoted to people they meet. Bigots are like any person with a belief structure. Some are VERY excited to let you know about their views, others just prefer to not talk about it at work.
So, you can't fire someone for BEING a bigot. But you can (and should) fire them for bigoted behavior at work. From the companies perspective, what it would like is for its bigots to shut up, because their bigotry pisses everyone off and then they have to fire them. The easiest way to achieve that is to just tell everyone to shut up about politics and social issues. Because, until recently, just having a general understanding that everyone should just keep their political views at home was the best way to make sure you stayed out of the news on this sort of thing.
I'm not saying this is ideal. But I am saying that this is how almost all companies will behave. Classic companies too. You really think the ford assembly line is some hotbed of social progressiveness? Or that the middle management structure at MMM isn't riddled with doddy old racists? That the new york times doesn't have men on staff who pick their interns based on how attractive there are. The way companies get around this is by telling their employees (often in 'subtle' ways) to shut the hell up.
This is not a 'tech companies' issue. This is a 'companies' issue, and the tech companies are neither paragons nor villains in the piece.
edit - And, to be clear, you should only fire someone for being a bigot at work, unless that person is a public face of your company. If Jason from Accounting never says a word against anyone at work, and works well alongside Srivatsan from Budget, then the company should not give a monkeys if they find out that Jason is the chapter president of the NRA.
This is how Mozilla wound up with the Brendan Eich fiasco. They kept turning a blind eye to his pretty open bigotry, up till they promoted him to CEO and then suddenly found that they couldn't cover it up anymore, and people were asking uncomfortable questions about why an ostensibly progressive organization like Mozilla would appoint as its head a man who thought making gay Californians second class citizens was A-OK.
By the way, bigotry isn't something that gets "turned off", and thinking that it does is a privileged view. Which is why companies need to be aggressive about it, and not just push for the status quo - which more often than not means that minorities, women, and other dispossessed groups wind up on the short end of the stick.
I did not suggest that bigotry gets turned off. In fact, bigotry is literally hard wired into many peoples underlying 'function'. They literally cannot bring themselves to inherently trust and value people who they view as different from them. They can ONLY accept new people by adding them to their 'own' team, and deciding that they were actually always like them. People like that can however train themselves to keep their views at home and be functional employees.
So bigots will always be here, will never go away, and will always make up a large fraction of our society. If you allow people to express their views freely and without censorship then a fraction will always stand up and say "Everyone different from me is bad, and I wish they would go away"
These people exist, and will always exist, in too large a number for you to not hire them. These people include a subset who are good enough at hiding their views that you would never KNOW that you hired them. These people are an issue at every company, not just tech companies. Modern companies are just facing the problem that by encouraging employees to share their views, they are realizing that many employees have quite obnoxious and horrible views.
Companies need to adopt the same 'moderating' stance we see here on the forums. People are encouraged to share their views, but the moderators demand a higher quality of discourse and punish those who propose ideas which are fundamentally 'inarguable' (Women are awful coders and should never get jobs!). In addition, those who are the moderators (management) at a business should be those who have shown themselves to be most capable of presenting a strong argument for inclusion and ideas related to that, but also the most capable of selling those concepts to those who will not 'instinctively' agree with them and minimizing the friction of that.
A good poster is not necessarily a good moderator. The same is true of a business which wishes to encourage 'discourse' in the workplace.
Which is why most business go out of their way to avoid "discourse" on the workplace as much as possible. Because IS EASIER and makes sure that everybody just gets their damn paycheck without issue.
+1
Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
As someone who works in a related field, and has worked in other, unrelated fields the idea that tech companies somehow have a 'worse' relationship to white supremacy, politics, gender, or workers rights than say GE or Ford is pretty ridiculous. None of the companies, whether tech or classic, do a great job at managing interactions between their employees about their personal beliefs because from the companies perspective the best thing you can do is "Both of you shut up please, neither of you are actually helping with our goals by arguing". Tech companies just APPEAR worse because they allow more discourse between their employees, and allow things like "Diversity Advocacy Groups" which then naturally call attention to the problem elements of their own company from the perspective of those advocacy groups.
No. It may seem like that because it solves the immediate problem of the conflict, but all it does is suppress the larger problem. There's a reason I called this sort of issue a cancer - having a contingent of employees who are attacking other employees because of their race/gender/etc. is corrosive to employee morale and can very easily lead to something that leaves the company legally liable. Bigotry should not be tolerated, period.
Clearly bigotry should not be tolerated, but, high quality employees are rare and bigots are common. Being a bigot is no barrier to having skill at your job, and in addition, not all bigots are incapable of getting through the workday without BEING bigoted to people they meet. Bigots are like any person with a belief structure. Some are VERY excited to let you know about their views, others just prefer to not talk about it at work.
So, you can't fire someone for BEING a bigot. But you can (and should) fire them for bigoted behavior at work. From the companies perspective, what it would like is for its bigots to shut up, because their bigotry pisses everyone off and then they have to fire them. The easiest way to achieve that is to just tell everyone to shut up about politics and social issues. Because, until recently, just having a general understanding that everyone should just keep their political views at home was the best way to make sure you stayed out of the news on this sort of thing.
I'm not saying this is ideal. But I am saying that this is how almost all companies will behave. Classic companies too. You really think the ford assembly line is some hotbed of social progressiveness? Or that the middle management structure at MMM isn't riddled with doddy old racists? That the new york times doesn't have men on staff who pick their interns based on how attractive there are. The way companies get around this is by telling their employees (often in 'subtle' ways) to shut the hell up.
This is not a 'tech companies' issue. This is a 'companies' issue, and the tech companies are neither paragons nor villains in the piece.
edit - And, to be clear, you should only fire someone for being a bigot at work, unless that person is a public face of your company. If Jason from Accounting never says a word against anyone at work, and works well alongside Srivatsan from Budget, then the company should not give a monkeys if they find out that Jason is the chapter president of the NRA.
This is how Mozilla wound up with the Brendan Eich fiasco. They kept turning a blind eye to his pretty open bigotry, up till they promoted him to CEO and then suddenly found that they couldn't cover it up anymore, and people were asking uncomfortable questions about why an ostensibly progressive organization like Mozilla would appoint as its head a man who thought making gay Californians second class citizens was A-OK.
By the way, bigotry isn't something that gets "turned off", and thinking that it does is a privileged view. Which is why companies need to be aggressive about it, and not just push for the status quo - which more often than not means that minorities, women, and other dispossessed groups wind up on the short end of the stick.
I did not suggest that bigotry gets turned off. In fact, bigotry is literally hard wired into many peoples underlying 'function'. They literally cannot bring themselves to inherently trust and value people who they view as different from them. They can ONLY accept new people by adding them to their 'own' team, and deciding that they were actually always like them. People like that can however train themselves to keep their views at home and be functional employees.
So bigots will always be here, will never go away, and will always make up a large fraction of our society. If you allow people to express their views freely and without censorship then a fraction will always stand up and say "Everyone different from me is bad, and I wish they would go away"
These people exist, and will always exist, in too large a number for you to not hire them. These people include a subset who are good enough at hiding their views that you would never KNOW that you hired them. These people are an issue at every company, not just tech companies. Modern companies are just facing the problem that by encouraging employees to share their views, they are realizing that many employees have quite obnoxious and horrible views.
Companies need to adopt the same 'moderating' stance we see here on the forums. People are encouraged to share their views, but the moderators demand a higher quality of discourse and punish those who propose ideas which are fundamentally 'inarguable' (Women are awful coders and should never get jobs!). In addition, those who are the moderators (management) at a business should be those who have shown themselves to be most capable of presenting a strong argument for inclusion and ideas related to that, but also the most capable of selling those concepts to those who will not 'instinctively' agree with them and minimizing the friction of that.
A good poster is not necessarily a good moderator. The same is true of a business which wishes to encourage 'discourse' in the workplace.
Lol wtf. This is milquetoast acceptance of the status quo af. People can change. Nothing about bigotry other than predisposition towards people that look like you is hardwired.
edit - And, to be clear, you should only fire someone for being a bigot at work, unless that person is a public face of your company. If Jason from Accounting never says a word against anyone at work, and works well alongside Srivatsan from Budget, then the company should not give a monkeys if they find out that Jason is the chapter president of the NRA.
I disagree with this sentiment. You absolutely should fire someone for being bigoted when purportedly not on the clock, because it will lead to bigoted actions at work. The fact of the matter is that bigoted actions have been normalized. Saying "We can't fire Jason for being chapter president of the local KKK branch because he works well with Srivatsan" is equivalent to saying that it's ok to be a bigot in some areas as long as you have a minority friend.
Bigotry outside of work also leads to unconscious bigotry at work. Maybe Jason gets along with Sri, but doesn't get along with Sarah or Shanequah.
Or maybe all of payments to companies with white accounts receivable personal are quickly paid, while all of those with minorities are slowly paid. This leads to supplier issues showing up on corporate level reports and an eventual change in suppliers to those not having payment issues.
There are a lot of ways bigotry can show up without being outright racist or obviously toxic.
And finally, Jason as an employee of ACME is a representative of ACME even when away from the office. Do you want to work for a company who's employee is also the head of the local KKK branch? I don't.
The status quo used to be rehabilitation. Perhaps now it is more expulsion and replacement.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The status quo used to be rehabilitation. Perhaps now it is more expulsion and replacement.
The problem is that "rehabilitation" in practice was too often "do something to make people think something was done, then go back to business as usual once the furor has died down." It was less about actually rehabilitating the person, and more about damage control.
The status quo used to be rehabilitation. Perhaps now it is more expulsion and replacement.
The problem is that "rehabilitation" in practice was too often "do something to make people think something was done, then go back to business as usual once the furor has died down." It was less about actually rehabilitating the person, and more about damage control.
And expulsion and replacement tends to mean in practice these kind of PR messes, where companies are between the shoots of the frogs vs. the progressives, and the whole Google thing so far is tame, given that is the same kind of forces that create mass shooters.
Which is why most business go out of their way to avoid "discourse" on the workplace as much as possible. Because IS EASIER and makes sure that everybody just gets their damn paycheck without issue.
To which the counterpoint would be that there are issues which we need to actually discuss and fix, but it's certainly not as easy as just saying "Tech companies are infested with Bigots and should fire them all!"
Tech companies tend to encourage discussion on these issues and attempt to 'have a corporate philosophy'. But this causes the bigots to speak up too, which is a challenge, because if you are going to let people speak up at work then you have to at least let the bigots speak a little bit.
Other companies 'seem' better, because their corporate philosophy is "Shut up, we donate to everyone on every side. Keep your politics at home"
Right wing companies also sometimes 'seem better', because while they have a corporate policy, their employees are told to shut their mouths if they don't agree 100% with it. Which silences left wing dissenters who might say, "Maybe our receptionists shouldn't all be hired because of their bra size", but also silences far right folks who might say, "The fact that any of our receptionists are non white is an outrage!"
Which is why most business go out of their way to avoid "discourse" on the workplace as much as possible. Because IS EASIER and makes sure that everybody just gets their damn paycheck without issue.
To which the counterpoint would be that there are issues which we need to actually discuss and fix, but it's certainly not as easy as just saying "Tech companies are infested with Bigots and should fire them all!"
Tech companies tend to encourage discussion on these issues and attempt to 'have a corporate philosophy'. But this causes the bigots to speak up too, which is a challenge, because if you are going to let people speak up at work then you have to at least let the bigots speak a little bit.
Other companies 'seem' better, because their corporate philosophy is "Shut up, we donate to everyone on every side. Keep your politics at home"
Right wing companies also sometimes 'seem better', because while they have a corporate policy, their employees are told to shut their mouths if they don't agree 100% with it. Which silences left wing dissenters who might say, "Maybe our receptionists shouldn't all be hired because of their bra size", but also silences far right folks who might say, "The fact that any of our receptionists are non white is an outrage!"
No, you don't. The problem with your argument is that you're applying a false equivalence to the viewpoints, and in so doing argue that we have to be tolerant of intolerance. But that's not how we should be viewing tolerance, and as such we are not obligated to let bigots spew bigotry.
edit - And, to be clear, you should only fire someone for being a bigot at work, unless that person is a public face of your company. If Jason from Accounting never says a word against anyone at work, and works well alongside Srivatsan from Budget, then the company should not give a monkeys if they find out that Jason is the chapter president of the NRA.
I disagree with this sentiment. You absolutely should fire someone for being bigoted when purportedly not on the clock, because it will lead to bigoted actions at work. The fact of the matter is that bigoted actions have been normalized. Saying "We can't fire Jason for being chapter president of the local KKK branch because he works well with Srivatsan" is equivalent to saying that it's ok to be a bigot in some areas as long as you have a minority friend.
Okay. But you're thinking about this as if your definition of 'bigoted' is the accepted and universal definition.
Dude X is the Grand Dragon (or whatever the fuck they call themselves these days) of the local KKK? Sure, that's an easy call.
But I guarantee you the first thing that's going to happen after you fire KKK man is that someone else is going to get fired for attending/organizing/supporting a BLM rally on their personal time. Then what?
It's just going to devolve into yet another "very fine people on both sides" BS-fest where the right gets to false-equivocate bigots with people protesting bigotry based on the fact that they're both angry and shouting in the streets.
This country needs less corporate dominion over employee's lives, not more.
Which is why most business go out of their way to avoid "discourse" on the workplace as much as possible. Because IS EASIER and makes sure that everybody just gets their damn paycheck without issue.
To which the counterpoint would be that there are issues which we need to actually discuss and fix, but it's certainly not as easy as just saying "Tech companies are infested with Bigots and should fire them all!"
Tech companies tend to encourage discussion on these issues and attempt to 'have a corporate philosophy'. But this causes the bigots to speak up too, which is a challenge, because if you are going to let people speak up at work then you have to at least let the bigots speak a little bit.
Other companies 'seem' better, because their corporate philosophy is "Shut up, we donate to everyone on every side. Keep your politics at home"
Right wing companies also sometimes 'seem better', because while they have a corporate policy, their employees are told to shut their mouths if they don't agree 100% with it. Which silences left wing dissenters who might say, "Maybe our receptionists shouldn't all be hired because of their bra size", but also silences far right folks who might say, "The fact that any of our receptionists are non white is an outrage!"
No, you don't. The problem with your argument is that you're applying a false equivalence to the viewpoints, and in so doing argue that we have to be tolerant of intolerance. But that's not how we should be viewing tolerance, and as such we are not obligated to let bigots spew bigotry.
And again, notice how this forum functions. Right wing thought is not silenced by the mods as the 'thought police' as you are proposing a company should do. Instead, people are prevented from spouting ideas which cannot be supported by argument.
For example, the level of 'counter argument' that I would say you have to tolerate is...
"Women in Engineering is a distraction from the work we need to get done here at this company. They shouldn't need special groups to isolate them from the rest of the group and get special benefits"
whereas
"Women are incapable of doing engineering work. We should get rid of every woman on an engineering team"
would be grounds for dismissal. And yes, some people who would like to say the latter, will just dance around it by saying the former, but that's just the price you have to pay to actually have a discussion.
Which is why most business go out of their way to avoid "discourse" on the workplace as much as possible. Because IS EASIER and makes sure that everybody just gets their damn paycheck without issue.
To which the counterpoint would be that there are issues which we need to actually discuss and fix, but it's certainly not as easy as just saying "Tech companies are infested with Bigots and should fire them all!"
Tech companies tend to encourage discussion on these issues and attempt to 'have a corporate philosophy'. But this causes the bigots to speak up too, which is a challenge, because if you are going to let people speak up at work then you have to at least let the bigots speak a little bit.
Other companies 'seem' better, because their corporate philosophy is "Shut up, we donate to everyone on every side. Keep your politics at home"
Right wing companies also sometimes 'seem better', because while they have a corporate policy, their employees are told to shut their mouths if they don't agree 100% with it. Which silences left wing dissenters who might say, "Maybe our receptionists shouldn't all be hired because of their bra size", but also silences far right folks who might say, "The fact that any of our receptionists are non white is an outrage!"
No, you don't. The problem with your argument is that you're applying a false equivalence to the viewpoints, and in so doing argue that we have to be tolerant of intolerance. But that's not how we should be viewing tolerance, and as such we are not obligated to let bigots spew bigotry.
And again, notice how this forum functions. Right wing thought is not silenced by the mods as the 'thought police' as you are proposing a company should do. Instead, people are prevented from spouting ideas which cannot be supported by argument.
For example, the level of 'counter argument' that I would say you have to tolerate is...
"Women in Engineering is a distraction from the work we need to get done here at this company. They shouldn't need special groups to isolate them from the rest of the group and get special benefits"
whereas
"Women are incapable of doing engineering work. We should get rid of every woman on an engineering team"
would be grounds for dismissal. And yes, some people who would like to say the latter, will just dance around it by saying the former, but that's just the price you have to pay to actually have a discussion.
Except that it's not you paying the price. It's all the people who get targeted by that sort of comment. In the original thread on the screed, a few female posters talked about how dealing with the atmosphere that these comments create is draining on them, making them feel like they have to justify their position, over and over. So no, giving bigots cover is not the price to pay, because the starting point is that everybody here has worth.
Now, you'll say that means that certain discussions are off the table. To which my response is simply "Yes, and why should they be on it?" We should have a very high bar for allowing any sort of discussion which puts someone's worth on the table because of their race, gender, creed, or any other aspect of their identity.
Which is why most business go out of their way to avoid "discourse" on the workplace as much as possible. Because IS EASIER and makes sure that everybody just gets their damn paycheck without issue.
To which the counterpoint would be that there are issues which we need to actually discuss and fix, but it's certainly not as easy as just saying "Tech companies are infested with Bigots and should fire them all!"
Tech companies tend to encourage discussion on these issues and attempt to 'have a corporate philosophy'. But this causes the bigots to speak up too, which is a challenge, because if you are going to let people speak up at work then you have to at least let the bigots speak a little bit.
Other companies 'seem' better, because their corporate philosophy is "Shut up, we donate to everyone on every side. Keep your politics at home"
Right wing companies also sometimes 'seem better', because while they have a corporate policy, their employees are told to shut their mouths if they don't agree 100% with it. Which silences left wing dissenters who might say, "Maybe our receptionists shouldn't all be hired because of their bra size", but also silences far right folks who might say, "The fact that any of our receptionists are non white is an outrage!"
No, you don't. The problem with your argument is that you're applying a false equivalence to the viewpoints, and in so doing argue that we have to be tolerant of intolerance. But that's not how we should be viewing tolerance, and as such we are not obligated to let bigots spew bigotry.
And again, notice how this forum functions. Right wing thought is not silenced by the mods as the 'thought police' as you are proposing a company should do. Instead, people are prevented from spouting ideas which cannot be supported by argument.
For example, the level of 'counter argument' that I would say you have to tolerate is...
"Women in Engineering is a distraction from the work we need to get done here at this company. They shouldn't need special groups to isolate them from the rest of the group and get special benefits"
whereas
"Women are incapable of doing engineering work. We should get rid of every woman on an engineering team"
would be grounds for dismissal. And yes, some people who would like to say the latter, will just dance around it by saying the former, but that's just the price you have to pay to actually have a discussion.
Except that it's not you paying the price. It's all the people who get targeted by that sort of comment. In the original thread on the screed, a few female posters talked about how dealing with the atmosphere that these comments create is draining on them, making them feel like they have to justify their position, over and over. So no, giving bigots cover is not the price to pay, because the starting point is that everybody here has worth.
Now, you'll say that means that certain discussions are off the table. To which my response is simply "Yes, and why should they be on it?" We should have a very high bar for allowing any sort of discussion which puts someone's worth on the table because of their race, gender, creed, or any other aspect of their identity.
But having a discussion is the whole purpose of this. If you don't want to have a discussion then fine. Tell everyone to shut up and follow the corporate law, just like all of the 'big old companies' used to.
Tech companies just APPEAR worse because they allow more discourse between their employees, and allow things like "Diversity Advocacy Groups" which then naturally call attention to the problem elements of their own company from the perspective of those advocacy groups.
Tech companies are also directly plugged into the toxic discourse on the web, because that's their bread and butter. If you are designing a car-making robot for Ford, you are probably not on the internet 100% of the day. But an engineer for Google needs to be.
basically anyone who works an office job and has downtime is plugged into the internet all day, unless they have strict company policies against it
the alt right is hardly just 25 year old programmers
almost every corporation is just a vitriol engine of one way or another, corporate america as it exists today is horrific and needs to be reworked from the ground up
step 1: employees are humans and not profit cogs, without that, nothing else positive can happen
Which is why most business go out of their way to avoid "discourse" on the workplace as much as possible. Because IS EASIER and makes sure that everybody just gets their damn paycheck without issue.
To which the counterpoint would be that there are issues which we need to actually discuss and fix, but it's certainly not as easy as just saying "Tech companies are infested with Bigots and should fire them all!"
Tech companies tend to encourage discussion on these issues and attempt to 'have a corporate philosophy'. But this causes the bigots to speak up too, which is a challenge, because if you are going to let people speak up at work then you have to at least let the bigots speak a little bit.
Other companies 'seem' better, because their corporate philosophy is "Shut up, we donate to everyone on every side. Keep your politics at home"
Right wing companies also sometimes 'seem better', because while they have a corporate policy, their employees are told to shut their mouths if they don't agree 100% with it. Which silences left wing dissenters who might say, "Maybe our receptionists shouldn't all be hired because of their bra size", but also silences far right folks who might say, "The fact that any of our receptionists are non white is an outrage!"
No, you don't. The problem with your argument is that you're applying a false equivalence to the viewpoints, and in so doing argue that we have to be tolerant of intolerance. But that's not how we should be viewing tolerance, and as such we are not obligated to let bigots spew bigotry.
And again, notice how this forum functions. Right wing thought is not silenced by the mods as the 'thought police' as you are proposing a company should do. Instead, people are prevented from spouting ideas which cannot be supported by argument.
For example, the level of 'counter argument' that I would say you have to tolerate is...
"Women in Engineering is a distraction from the work we need to get done here at this company. They shouldn't need special groups to isolate them from the rest of the group and get special benefits"
whereas
"Women are incapable of doing engineering work. We should get rid of every woman on an engineering team"
would be grounds for dismissal. And yes, some people who would like to say the latter, will just dance around it by saying the former, but that's just the price you have to pay to actually have a discussion.
Except that it's not you paying the price. It's all the people who get targeted by that sort of comment. In the original thread on the screed, a few female posters talked about how dealing with the atmosphere that these comments create is draining on them, making them feel like they have to justify their position, over and over. So no, giving bigots cover is not the price to pay, because the starting point is that everybody here has worth.
Now, you'll say that means that certain discussions are off the table. To which my response is simply "Yes, and why should they be on it?" We should have a very high bar for allowing any sort of discussion which puts someone's worth on the table because of their race, gender, creed, or any other aspect of their identity.
But having a discussion is the whole purpose of this. If you don't want to have a discussion then fine. Tell everyone to shut up and follow the corporate law, just like all of the 'big old companies' used to.
Having a discussion doesn't mean tossing people up as a sacrifice to the deity of Freeze Peach. Bigots playing the "just asking questions" card is such and old, bad chestnut that it has a name - JAQing off. And if excluding the bigoted arguments means that the argument vanishes, then there never was one in the first place.
Which is why most business go out of their way to avoid "discourse" on the workplace as much as possible. Because IS EASIER and makes sure that everybody just gets their damn paycheck without issue.
To which the counterpoint would be that there are issues which we need to actually discuss and fix, but it's certainly not as easy as just saying "Tech companies are infested with Bigots and should fire them all!"
Tech companies tend to encourage discussion on these issues and attempt to 'have a corporate philosophy'. But this causes the bigots to speak up too, which is a challenge, because if you are going to let people speak up at work then you have to at least let the bigots speak a little bit.
Other companies 'seem' better, because their corporate philosophy is "Shut up, we donate to everyone on every side. Keep your politics at home"
Right wing companies also sometimes 'seem better', because while they have a corporate policy, their employees are told to shut their mouths if they don't agree 100% with it. Which silences left wing dissenters who might say, "Maybe our receptionists shouldn't all be hired because of their bra size", but also silences far right folks who might say, "The fact that any of our receptionists are non white is an outrage!"
No, you don't. The problem with your argument is that you're applying a false equivalence to the viewpoints, and in so doing argue that we have to be tolerant of intolerance. But that's not how we should be viewing tolerance, and as such we are not obligated to let bigots spew bigotry.
And again, notice how this forum functions. Right wing thought is not silenced by the mods as the 'thought police' as you are proposing a company should do. Instead, people are prevented from spouting ideas which cannot be supported by argument.
For example, the level of 'counter argument' that I would say you have to tolerate is...
"Women in Engineering is a distraction from the work we need to get done here at this company. They shouldn't need special groups to isolate them from the rest of the group and get special benefits"
whereas
"Women are incapable of doing engineering work. We should get rid of every woman on an engineering team"
would be grounds for dismissal. And yes, some people who would like to say the latter, will just dance around it by saying the former, but that's just the price you have to pay to actually have a discussion.
Except that it's not you paying the price. It's all the people who get targeted by that sort of comment. In the original thread on the screed, a few female posters talked about how dealing with the atmosphere that these comments create is draining on them, making them feel like they have to justify their position, over and over. So no, giving bigots cover is not the price to pay, because the starting point is that everybody here has worth.
Now, you'll say that means that certain discussions are off the table. To which my response is simply "Yes, and why should they be on it?" We should have a very high bar for allowing any sort of discussion which puts someone's worth on the table because of their race, gender, creed, or any other aspect of their identity.
But having a discussion is the whole purpose of this. If you don't want to have a discussion then fine. Tell everyone to shut up and follow the corporate law, just like all of the 'big old companies' used to.
Having a discussion doesn't mean tossing people up as a sacrifice to the deity of Freeze Peach. Bigots playing the "just asking questions" card is such and old, bad chestnut that it has a name - JAQing off. And if excluding the bigoted arguments means that the argument vanishes, then there never was one in the first place.
So what if someone wants to make the argument that...
"Women in Engineering gets too many resources compared to the group which helps me, Veterans in Engineering. We should get the same access to the main conference room and be allowed to send reps to recruit more Veterans even though there are 4 times as many women"
I just don't see how you can have a discussion when discussion is banned. How do you decide what is banned? Are you going to write some titanic corporate handbook saying what people can and can't say?
The world doesn't break neatly into liberals on one side with perfect truth and agreement and bigots on the other with nothing to add to any discussion ever.
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Why does that bother you? I'm more bothered by the culture we have where women and minorities are supposed to just accept a level of soft bigotry in the workplace that casts them in a negative light. That needs to change.
You didn’t actually answer the question that was asked.
I’ve heard statements akin to that, especially whenever there’s a story about women gaining access to a particular military group.
It seemed like there was a serious problem in the company where everyone who worked there thought they were the smartest person in the room, because Google only hires the smartest people, and so those people previously were the smartest people in the room.
So while we could say that the alt-right people in the company are problematic, I rather think that their discussion boards around personal topics are always going to devolve into toxic cage-fights, regardless of viewpoint, because some Google employees will have a hard time admitting they might be wrong.
And in fact, this likely feeds directly into the original anti-diversity message, when highly talented, highly skilled individuals do not see any rewards for their efforts because they are surrounded by the same, and then are forced to look around for some other outlet.
This outlet could be a very poor work-life balance, stealing other people's work, or trying to explain why increasing diversity is stealing promotions from the people who 'deserve' them.
In all, I think it's a highly toxic workplace.
And I don't think that our side is necessarily immune to that environment.
People who become abusive because of Google's work environment are likely to continue being fired, and the underlying common factor will be that they believe that they are right.
Not any sort of shared belief, nor any targetting campaign by management.
So Google desperately needs more diversity, or at least hire not just on exceptional technical ability.
Yup that is ultimately their problem. They need to spread out the kind of people they hire because the people who are top of their class don't want to spend time doing mundane work like adding features or bugfixing current stuff. They want to be on the next big project. Which also contributes to the toxic environment that is google.
How much of this is directly from Glassdoor and how much of it is inference from what you read on Glassdoor?
I recall reading Harvard had a similar problem in the past. They were so highly renowned that all the best students applied there, and they could give admissions to the best of the best. Students that were used to being at the upper end of their classroom's bell curve distribution were placed in classrooms with others just like them... and found themselves in the middle, or even the bottom end, of their new classroom's bell curve distribution. They did not take to getting Bs and Cs and Ds well, and student depression rates went through the roof.
The solution was simply giving admissions to some less-than-the-best students. These students filled the lower end of the classrooms' bell curves, and they were happy there because they were used to not being the top and they were honoured just to be at Harvard. Meanwhile, best-of-the-best students still had people in class they could feel superior to, and they weren't dropping to the bottom rungs of their classes, so they were happy.
Somehow, I doubt the problem with Damore and his ilk is that they're bored, rather than they're bigots. Why are we so quick to try to explain away bigotry when it happens in our own communities? Is it a "it can't happen here" reaction? Because it can, it does, and we need to clean our house.
It's being explained as a lack of diversity in general because "we only hire the best" kind of just focuses a laser pointer deep on the kinds of people that have those opportunities.
Yeah. A self-taught computer engineer who had absolutely no help from his/her poor family and went to a local community college due to lack of money might be a real shit-hot coder but his/her resume is going to look mediocre.
This sounds more like these students need to be taught some life lessons about what intelligence means, and less like they need to have their particular superiority complexes catered to. The idea that the students with lower grades means they're less intelligent, or that the student themselves getting lower grades means that they're less intelligent is something they should be shaken out of by that point in their education.
This was also the kind of superiority complex that led to the tech field getting into the stock market with algorithm-based stock trading and then causing several high visibility crashes. They need to learn that being good at one or a few things does not make them the best at everything, and they should listen to others regardless of their perceived skill level.
Especially as things like the "rigid" skills Google hires for are a lot less rigid than they get sold as. There's a lot of ways to reach a particular outcome with coding, not all of them are straightforward, and the simplest is not always the best. You need to be open to listening to new perspectives on a problem and not trying to line people up in a rigid hierarchy before you'll accept their opinion.
Basically I mean that they should probably have already learned that they're not superior by virtue of being top of the class and that they can always learn something from someone else regardless of how they perceive that person's educational achievements.
The problem is that our society is happy to teach them that they are superior because of their class ranking. It's a huge problem, exactly because it becomes self-reinforcing. It takes active pressure to push back on that, and too often, that pressure isn't given.
Amazon spends a lot of effort on making significant portions of the company pretty comfortable. It's a very varied environment with a looot of healthy stuff. That doesn't negate the stuff that you'll hear in the news, but on *average* it doesn't come close to the pure tech companies in toxicity. The variety of people is definitely immensely advantageous.
They're also examples of "smart" Dunning-Kruger, where their excellence at one task leads them to believe they will experience similar excellence in other, unrelated tasks. Basically Dunning-Kruger embodied as unrecognized personal privilege.
And Amazon isn't that great, with, you know, cities competing with each other on how much they can screw the people that live there in order to get to be the place where the Amazon Duchy is installed.
Yeah, the effect of a given company on its surroundings is a whole topic of its own. And probably pretty divisive.
No. It may seem like that because it solves the immediate problem of the conflict, but all it does is suppress the larger problem. There's a reason I called this sort of issue a cancer - having a contingent of employees who are attacking other employees because of their race/gender/etc. is corrosive to employee morale and can very easily lead to something that leaves the company legally liable. Bigotry should not be tolerated, period.
Tech companies are also directly plugged into the toxic discourse on the web, because that's their bread and butter. If you are designing a car-making robot for Ford, you are probably not on the internet 100% of the day. But an engineer for Google needs to be.
Clearly bigotry should not be tolerated, but, high quality employees are rare and bigots are common. Being a bigot is no barrier to having skill at your job, and in addition, not all bigots are incapable of getting through the workday without BEING bigoted to people they meet. Bigots are like any person with a belief structure. Some are VERY excited to let you know about their views, others just prefer to not talk about it at work.
So, you can't fire someone for BEING a bigot. But you can (and should) fire them for bigoted behavior at work. From the companies perspective, what it would like is for its bigots to shut up, because their bigotry pisses everyone off and then they have to fire them. The easiest way to achieve that is to just tell everyone to shut up about politics and social issues. Because, until recently, just having a general understanding that everyone should just keep their political views at home was the best way to make sure you stayed out of the news on this sort of thing.
I'm not saying this is ideal. But I am saying that this is how almost all companies will behave. Classic companies too. You really think the ford assembly line is some hotbed of social progressiveness? Or that the middle management structure at MMM isn't riddled with doddy old racists? That the new york times doesn't have men on staff who pick their interns based on how attractive there are. The way companies get around this is by telling their employees (often in 'subtle' ways) to shut the hell up.
This is not a 'tech companies' issue. This is a 'companies' issue, and the tech companies are neither paragons nor villains in the piece.
edit - And, to be clear, you should only fire someone for being a bigot at work, unless that person is a public face of your company. If Jason from Accounting never says a word against anyone at work, and works well alongside Srivatsan from Budget, then the company should not give a monkeys if they find out that Jason is the chapter president of the NRA.
This is how Mozilla wound up with the Brendan Eich fiasco. They kept turning a blind eye to his pretty open bigotry, up till they promoted him to CEO and then suddenly found that they couldn't cover it up anymore, and people were asking uncomfortable questions about why an ostensibly progressive organization like Mozilla would appoint as its head a man who thought making gay Californians second class citizens was A-OK.
By the way, bigotry isn't something that gets "turned off", and thinking that it does is a privileged view. Which is why companies need to be aggressive about it, and not just push for the status quo - which more often than not means that minorities, women, and other dispossessed groups wind up on the short end of the stick.
Ideally there should be an union that not only protects employees from unfair working conditions, but also can regulate employees on a non-biased way. But good luck with that on the tech sector aka ground zero for Libertarianism.
Talent like...Tim Chevalier, who was one of the Mozilla insiders opposed to Eich as CEO, and who is currently suing Google for wrongful dismissal over his pushing for diversity.
The problem is that companies think that if they just get everyone to Not Talk About The Problem, then it goes away - not realizing that it just pushes things under the surface. Supporting diversity means that you have to have a "bigotry not acceptable" mentality, because that stuff goes deep, and manifests in a number of insidious ways.
Sounds a lot like people thinking that voting for the black guy was magically going to Fix The Problem and would make it Go Away and (this is important) was going to get everybody to Shut Up About The Problem and then getting angry when it wasn't the case.
I did not suggest that bigotry gets turned off. In fact, bigotry is literally hard wired into many peoples underlying 'function'. They literally cannot bring themselves to inherently trust and value people who they view as different from them. They can ONLY accept new people by adding them to their 'own' team, and deciding that they were actually always like them. People like that can however train themselves to keep their views at home and be functional employees.
So bigots will always be here, will never go away, and will always make up a large fraction of our society. If you allow people to express their views freely and without censorship then a fraction will always stand up and say "Everyone different from me is bad, and I wish they would go away"
These people exist, and will always exist, in too large a number for you to not hire them. These people include a subset who are good enough at hiding their views that you would never KNOW that you hired them. These people are an issue at every company, not just tech companies. Modern companies are just facing the problem that by encouraging employees to share their views, they are realizing that many employees have quite obnoxious and horrible views.
Companies need to adopt the same 'moderating' stance we see here on the forums. People are encouraged to share their views, but the moderators demand a higher quality of discourse and punish those who propose ideas which are fundamentally 'inarguable' (Women are awful coders and should never get jobs!). In addition, those who are the moderators (management) at a business should be those who have shown themselves to be most capable of presenting a strong argument for inclusion and ideas related to that, but also the most capable of selling those concepts to those who will not 'instinctively' agree with them and minimizing the friction of that.
A good poster is not necessarily a good moderator. The same is true of a business which wishes to encourage 'discourse' in the workplace.
Lol wtf. This is milquetoast acceptance of the status quo af. People can change. Nothing about bigotry other than predisposition towards people that look like you is hardwired.
I disagree with this sentiment. You absolutely should fire someone for being bigoted when purportedly not on the clock, because it will lead to bigoted actions at work. The fact of the matter is that bigoted actions have been normalized. Saying "We can't fire Jason for being chapter president of the local KKK branch because he works well with Srivatsan" is equivalent to saying that it's ok to be a bigot in some areas as long as you have a minority friend.
Bigotry outside of work also leads to unconscious bigotry at work. Maybe Jason gets along with Sri, but doesn't get along with Sarah or Shanequah.
Or maybe all of payments to companies with white accounts receivable personal are quickly paid, while all of those with minorities are slowly paid. This leads to supplier issues showing up on corporate level reports and an eventual change in suppliers to those not having payment issues.
There are a lot of ways bigotry can show up without being outright racist or obviously toxic.
And finally, Jason as an employee of ACME is a representative of ACME even when away from the office. Do you want to work for a company who's employee is also the head of the local KKK branch? I don't.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The problem is that "rehabilitation" in practice was too often "do something to make people think something was done, then go back to business as usual once the furor has died down." It was less about actually rehabilitating the person, and more about damage control.
And expulsion and replacement tends to mean in practice these kind of PR messes, where companies are between the shoots of the frogs vs. the progressives, and the whole Google thing so far is tame, given that is the same kind of forces that create mass shooters.
To which the counterpoint would be that there are issues which we need to actually discuss and fix, but it's certainly not as easy as just saying "Tech companies are infested with Bigots and should fire them all!"
Tech companies tend to encourage discussion on these issues and attempt to 'have a corporate philosophy'. But this causes the bigots to speak up too, which is a challenge, because if you are going to let people speak up at work then you have to at least let the bigots speak a little bit.
Other companies 'seem' better, because their corporate philosophy is "Shut up, we donate to everyone on every side. Keep your politics at home"
Right wing companies also sometimes 'seem better', because while they have a corporate policy, their employees are told to shut their mouths if they don't agree 100% with it. Which silences left wing dissenters who might say, "Maybe our receptionists shouldn't all be hired because of their bra size", but also silences far right folks who might say, "The fact that any of our receptionists are non white is an outrage!"
No, you don't. The problem with your argument is that you're applying a false equivalence to the viewpoints, and in so doing argue that we have to be tolerant of intolerance. But that's not how we should be viewing tolerance, and as such we are not obligated to let bigots spew bigotry.
Dude X is the Grand Dragon (or whatever the fuck they call themselves these days) of the local KKK? Sure, that's an easy call.
But I guarantee you the first thing that's going to happen after you fire KKK man is that someone else is going to get fired for attending/organizing/supporting a BLM rally on their personal time. Then what?
It's just going to devolve into yet another "very fine people on both sides" BS-fest where the right gets to false-equivocate bigots with people protesting bigotry based on the fact that they're both angry and shouting in the streets.
This country needs less corporate dominion over employee's lives, not more.
And again, notice how this forum functions. Right wing thought is not silenced by the mods as the 'thought police' as you are proposing a company should do. Instead, people are prevented from spouting ideas which cannot be supported by argument.
For example, the level of 'counter argument' that I would say you have to tolerate is...
"Women in Engineering is a distraction from the work we need to get done here at this company. They shouldn't need special groups to isolate them from the rest of the group and get special benefits"
whereas
"Women are incapable of doing engineering work. We should get rid of every woman on an engineering team"
would be grounds for dismissal. And yes, some people who would like to say the latter, will just dance around it by saying the former, but that's just the price you have to pay to actually have a discussion.
Except that it's not you paying the price. It's all the people who get targeted by that sort of comment. In the original thread on the screed, a few female posters talked about how dealing with the atmosphere that these comments create is draining on them, making them feel like they have to justify their position, over and over. So no, giving bigots cover is not the price to pay, because the starting point is that everybody here has worth.
Now, you'll say that means that certain discussions are off the table. To which my response is simply "Yes, and why should they be on it?" We should have a very high bar for allowing any sort of discussion which puts someone's worth on the table because of their race, gender, creed, or any other aspect of their identity.
But having a discussion is the whole purpose of this. If you don't want to have a discussion then fine. Tell everyone to shut up and follow the corporate law, just like all of the 'big old companies' used to.
basically anyone who works an office job and has downtime is plugged into the internet all day, unless they have strict company policies against it
the alt right is hardly just 25 year old programmers
almost every corporation is just a vitriol engine of one way or another, corporate america as it exists today is horrific and needs to be reworked from the ground up
step 1: employees are humans and not profit cogs, without that, nothing else positive can happen
Having a discussion doesn't mean tossing people up as a sacrifice to the deity of Freeze Peach. Bigots playing the "just asking questions" card is such and old, bad chestnut that it has a name - JAQing off. And if excluding the bigoted arguments means that the argument vanishes, then there never was one in the first place.
So what if someone wants to make the argument that...
"Women in Engineering gets too many resources compared to the group which helps me, Veterans in Engineering. We should get the same access to the main conference room and be allowed to send reps to recruit more Veterans even though there are 4 times as many women"
I just don't see how you can have a discussion when discussion is banned. How do you decide what is banned? Are you going to write some titanic corporate handbook saying what people can and can't say?
The world doesn't break neatly into liberals on one side with perfect truth and agreement and bigots on the other with nothing to add to any discussion ever.