P2P-Zone - Google Essayist Fired for Failing to Cite Sources

The author of a company memo titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," in which he lamented of a corporate culture that shames voices of dissent into silence, was fired Monday for voicing his dissent. In his ten-page essay, software engineer James Damore expressed tacit support for Google's efforts to hire women and minorities but wondered why it is that so few women apply for jobs at Google to begin with. Could it be that women have different priorities when seeking employment?

Having thus stirred the pot, Damore could have left it at that, leaving it to others at the company to mull over the answers. But far be it from an engineer to leave the big hairy questions for others to answer, he proceeded to offer his own thoughts, answering those questions with statistics and theories supported by sociological and psychological science.

But today we learn that the people who ask the big hairy questions in Silicon Valley are answered with big hairy pink slips.

I would encourage everybody to read the essay for themselves. It isn't well organized our coherently written; having been penned by a software engineer it reads like an object-oriented programming language in which an argument, having once been made, need not be mentioned again. And yet he explains at least three separate times that he explicitly supports Google's efforts to increase diversity. His stated goal--buried in his very thick rhetoric and logic--is to justify Google's diversity hiring practices with science and reason rather than hiring women and minorities because social justice.

His mansplanations, such as they were, are (in part) backed by science. Women and men do seek tech jobs for different reasons, and those reasons are objectively quantifiable. The few women who do apply to work for Google are demonstrably good at math and science. And the ones who are hired are certainly qualified to work there, there's no doubt about that. But among the general populace, more men than women actually want to work for Google, and making the effort to figure out why very well could help Google diversify their workforce in the long run. But Mr. Damore himself did not only suggest as much, he suggested that women are inherently less interested in working for Google, as if genetically predisposed. He's right of course, most women avoid tech jobs because they are highly stressful, they are less likely to put food on the table in the short term, and the currency of the tech world is social status, something women value in their mates more than they value in themselves. Damore's only mistake was failing to cite the scientific studies which back his claims, and for that he was cited for violating company policy and summarily fired.

Despite public outage among Google employees on social media, at least half of Google employees in an anonymous poll agreed with the central arguments of the essay, suggesting that the dominant corporate culture in Silicon Valley has successfully silenced the voices of dissent. That this essay was written at all, let alone published internally on the Google network, is a miracle. Hear hear for free speech.

Links:
Latest article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/t...nder-memo.html
Full text of essay: http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-t...125.1499778227
Google's response: https://www.recode.net/2017/8/7/1611...ode-of-conduct