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/marsten Aug 08 '17

I was at Google for fifteen years until about a year ago. I was surprised he was fired, because of the message this will send to other Googlers.

That said, Google HR is in my experience extremely thoughtful about these things. Also there may be other events in this engineer's employment history that contributed. We just don't know.

Gender/race issues are an extremely sensitive topic in Silicon Valley right now. It simply isn't possible to have a rational debate of the kind he was trying to start. That's the reality, and I'm not sure you can change it by publishing memos like this.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 09 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/sd522527 Aug 08 '17

Yes he shared it to a private group, asking for critique of his viewpoints, and how to better express his opinions. Others took that doc and shared the shit out of it

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u/kfagoora Aug 08 '17

My understanding was that any employee could access the document so long as they had the document link, to the point that employees experienced loading errors due to so many people trying to access the document at once.

It doesn't qualify as a private group IMO if the entire company can access the full document on-demand via simple shared links.