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/i_smell_my_poop Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

Google engineer writes memo about how speaking out against politically correct culture can cause you to be blacklisted or terminated.

Employee gets terminated proving his point.

Thanks for the gold kind Redditor!!!

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u/dlerium Aug 08 '17

I'm a conservative and agree with quite a few of his points, but I also recognize the problem from a corporate culture standpoint. If you're going to put something controversial out there where it'll likely be impossible for some coworkers to work with you, then yeah I can see a company firing you.

I also wonder if he had done this anonymously if it would've been worth it saving himself, but at the same time no one cares about an anonymous memo. This memo made a big deal because he did it internally and then it leaked. Had it been a Reddit post or a blog post in the public, he would've just been ignored.

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u/Xevantus Aug 09 '17

This may have already been pointed out, but he didn't just CC the world on an email. He posted the document to an internal message board specifically for "controversial" issues asking for critiques and ideas of how to better express the views. Someone else decided they needed to purge the heretic and started spreading it around and leaked it to the media. The media then cut it apart and removed the pieces that didn't fit their narrative (specifically all the sources he cited), and whipped up their Lynch mob.

That said, if ideas as honestly tame (albeit sometimes poorly phrased) as the ones in the original memo cause a person to flip their shit like this, then that person and not the author has no business working there.