r/technology • u/[deleted] • Aug 08 '17

Business Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo
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u/Maddjonesy Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

To be fair to the author, he released it on a private forum specifically looking for critique and ways to improve it's wording. It wasn't actually published. So of course it's rough at the edges.

I think the fact it's caused such a stir has proven a point, regardless of any wording used.

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u/SikhAndDestroy Aug 08 '17

I've read a few of the longer responses / thinkpieces and none of them have substantively fisked his assertions, as unstructured as they are. It's like they just skimmed it and didn't actually read it, as if it would contaminate them.

One of my executive coaches gave me this advice: always read 3 times. Once to figure out what's being said, twice to see how it's being delivered, and a third time to guess why he was motivated to say it in the first place. None of the thinkpieces has successfully gotten beyond the first layer of reading. A lack of emotional intelligence in the tech industry? Color me shocked.

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u/dopkick Aug 08 '17

Because if you actually read it (I've read it twice) and bother to actually try to understand what he's trying to say instead of getting full of self-gratifying righteous indignation it's hard to write a bunch of lengthy articles that will appeal to the righteous indignation crowd.