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Google is struggling to discuss the recent diversity memo controversy internally:
Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, canceled a scheduled all-hands staff meeting—moments before it was scheduled to begin—meant to address concerns over a controversial essay published by former employee James Damore.
In an email to staff, Pichai explained that questions from employees had been leaked and that, in some cases, specific employees' identities were revealed, exposing them to harassment and threats. Instead of today's large-scale meeting, which was to be livestreamed to Google's 60,000 employees worldwide, smaller groups will meet sometime in the future.
"We had hoped to have a frank open discussion today as we always do to bring us together and move forward. But our Dory questions appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally," Pichai said in the email.
Also at CNET.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FakeBeldin on Friday August 11 2017, @02:41PM (28 children)
Yes, I'm going to whine about this story.
No, not because I think it's taking SN in a "wrong" direction, or because it's not "techy" enough or any such thing.
I'm whining about the story because this is a charged issue which will result in many comments, which you could just as well read elsewhere.
(Including this one comment! :)
SN doesn't have to run this story. If we do, then -- just like everywhere else on the web -- it will be heavily discussed, but add little of value.
Most folks aren't going to change their minds, insightful +5 comments will not challenge your comfort zone, some folks will be vocal on one or another issue, but in the end, it doesn't really add anything to discuss it here on SN as opposed to elsewhere.
Basically, this is 1. genuinely news, and 2. "comment" bait.
If there was a spin on the story that would help give direction to the discussion, that might be interesting. But like this?
Arthur T Knackerbread can find the "insightful +5" comments elsewhere.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 11 2017, @02:52PM (2 children)
Well I just submitted a bunch of science stories. Go comment on them when they come out.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @05:54PM
Sadly there is just not much to comment on with most actual techie / science articles. Just the way it is.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday August 11 2017, @06:39PM
Thanks! I appreciate science stories (as well as political stories and others).
I will comment if I'm around and have something worth adding (in my opinion, that is ;-).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @03:07PM (9 children)
And where else would you suggest people discuss things? The reality is that just general discussion on the internet is in a pretty sad state. You end up with opposite extremes of Reddit which is completely useless for discussion of any event that could in any way be tied in any possible way to anything political largely because of manipulation, censorship, etc. On the other extreme you have sites like Voat which allow completely open discussion like the Reddit of a decade ago, but ends up being similarly useless for discussion due to its demographic composition. I enjoy discussion on Soylent largely because there's a wide array of viewpoints all engaging in discussion in an at least somewhat respectful manner, there's no censorship of anybody, and the average level of knowledge is higher than the average across most other sites.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Sulla on Friday August 11 2017, @03:18PM (8 children)
There is a difference in how articles are discussed across the various web platforms and soylent does bring something unique (i suppose the other green-site clones do as well) to the table. Here we have a fairly intelligent community of people with vastly different views that are much more likely than the general population to post citations for their views. I might post about this on /pol/, but how I might do it there would be vastly different than I do on soylent. I could post about it on some mainstream news site with discussion at the bottom, but that is nothing but standard waving.
If people aren't interested in an article they could just not read it or respond to it. An article like this being posted will not cause a real article that is tech related to not be posted.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday August 11 2017, @05:51PM (7 children)
ArsTechnica, The Register, Slashdot, Reddit, HackerNews, Tweakers.
For example.
True. What this article will do, is gather comments. Like mine, right now.
Part of my objection is indeed based on an assumption that people will not provide an infinite amount of comments.
I should have made that explicit, let me try to do so now:
It's a big assumption and I don't have anything to back it up except anecdotal evidence (me).
*IF* other people indeed act like this, then a story like this, which gains a lot of comments that can easily be found elsewhere on the net, has a negative effect on the number of comments other stories will receive.
If this assumption is false, then I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment of your quote: that there is no downside to posting a story like this.
I suspect there is, though, based on generalising from a way-too-small population (containing: me).
(Score: 2) by Tangaroa on Friday August 11 2017, @09:07PM (1 child)
Hacker News is censored. They banned me for saying that Ed Snowden had not released evidence of the NSA listening in on the content of everyone's phone calls when he hadn't according to every news article about him. The news said the NSA was saving metadata, not the complete conversations, but HN had a pro-Snowden party line to push and could not have it interrupted by appeals to accuracy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:25AM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:21PM (1 child)
The key problem for me is that you're calling for the reduction in engaging stories. I think that alone makes this idea a non-starter. It's not a good idea to make the site less interesting. Second, engaging stories pull in more readers. While a reader might, with the advent of more engaging stories, comment less on the less engaging stories, there are more people overall to comment. I think that will result in more comments overall on stories for good or bad.
I think this particular story has a lot of merit because it details not just an important business's tribulations, but a potential sea change in the social dynamics of the high tech industry. Way back in the mid 2000s after Google had IPOed, it could do no wrong. On the Green Site, every little bit of information was blown way out of proportion with posters peering at the tea leaves and seeing their favorite science fiction fantasy. Somewhere along the years, the bloom fell off the rose and Google just became another big tech company though still with some interesting ideas.
This new stuff is crazy with apparently a fair number of mid-level managers taking it upon themselves to police their employees, some apparently doing little else, and maintaining blacklists of employees they wouldn't take on. The key problem with all this is that these managers are generating a considerable amount of liability for Google. And where's HR in all this? Handling bigotry behavior in employees is one of their key reasons for being. Regular managers shouldn't be touching that at all.
What I think brings this from a company problem to an industry problem is that a manager has allegedly bragged [hotair.com] about circulating these blacklists outside of the company.
Among other things, blacklisting and hiring collusion between employers are both federal-level illegal (I think they're civil not criminal though) and Google has already been caught before, along with Apple and some other high tech firms, engaging in hiring collusion (though that time it was "no poach" agreements to avoid bidding for each others' top talent). So that's an indication that something is deeply wrong that a manager would brag about such an activity when the company was already under scrutiny and eventually fined significant money for the activity.
But if the allegation is true, it means that there's a network out there spanning multiple businesses, not just some out of control Google bureaucrats.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Saturday August 12 2017, @10:15PM
1. Thanks for your insightful comment (no mod points currently)
2. Thanks for proving me wrong with the on-topic part of your comment, that I hadn't read elsewhere :)
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday August 15 2017, @12:58PM (2 children)
Eh, in my case 95% of the comments that I type get deleted instead of being posted, but the ones that actually do get posted seem to come in spurts. I'll post a lot one week, then nothing at all the week after. So I think the act of posting something makes me more likely to actually post the next one. Inertial engagement ;)
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:03PM (1 child)
Also on other stories? For me it tends to focus for one story, but I get all my inertia to posting back once I switch stories.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 16 2017, @12:13PM
Yeah, the inertia can last up to a week or so for me. Although I might just be more likely to comment on similar topics...haven't thought about it that much! :)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday August 11 2017, @04:07PM (11 children)
I disagree, this is more than just comment bait.
Allow me to digress. I'm a geezer in IT, and I have always held the same attitude on diversity: treat everyone as an individual. I don't care about plumbing, eye color, hair length, or anything else. Is this person, as an individual
So...30 or 40 years ago, treating people as individuals, not caring about gender or whatever, was considered rather liberal. Today, it's considered practically reactionary.
That's why I find articles like this useful. Even five years ago, almost every tech forum read like the ArsTechnica comments do today: horror at the idea of the Diversity Memo, bowing to the SJW principles. Few would have dared comment positively, few would have dared criticize the holy (holey?) principles of diversity.
The pendulum is swinging, and we see that it is swinging because many tech forums - like the green site, like Soyment - now have open discussions about the problems of diversity politics. SJW has become a pejorative. Progressive politics may still dominate the management and HR departments, but we can see progress.
For the next few years, the desperate defense of SJW positions will get ever more strident, as the barriers continue to fall. In a few more years, writing a Diversity Memo will no longer get you fired. In another decade, I do believe that affirmative action will be seen for the evil it actually is.
We will be able to follow this progress through the tone and content of the comments on articles and on sites like this one. And those articles and comments will influence the next generation, by helping to set the general atmosphere in which we do our work.
Of course, in 20 years, the pendulum will have swung to far in some other direction. We won't get a meritocracy, we won't get people treated as individuals. Instead, we will get...something else. Some other way for some other group of unqualified people to gather and exert personal power over those of us who just love technology and want to get the job done.
The fight will begin all over again. By then I'll be long retired, but I'll still be here and elsewhere, reading and commenting, hopefully applying some pico-newtons of force to re-center that damned pendulum...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by OrugTor on Friday August 11 2017, @05:30PM (1 child)
I don't think I am in complete agreement with your position but I appreciate your taking the time to write a lucid, reasoned response.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday August 11 2017, @05:53PM
Ditto!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 11 2017, @06:12PM (4 children)
I think that will not happen. These companies are not going to get rid of diversity ideals. And indeed, the buzz is about a tiny minority inside Google agreeing with the memo. If there is opposition, they are either self-censoring themselves into silence or being marginalized by the press and Google's leadership.
Instead, it will be a lot like it is today, except tech bros and sisters will automate large sectors of the economy out of their jobs, and then automate themselves out of their own jobs. We will achieve a rainbow of diversity in unemployment. The elites will institute universal basic income. Then bored and unemployed individuals will be driven insane until they use their skills to destroy the planet with diseases, AI, fusion bombs, x-ray weapons, etc. Fermi Paradox fucking solved.
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(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday August 11 2017, @06:29PM (2 children)
I didn't really care about the leaks all that much to begin with but I looked for them today. Since most normal news outlets don't mention the actual information or link to it one had to visit other sites, such as Breitbar (1), they seem to be mostly just try to put another source in context or whatever you should call what they do. But from those leaks it seems like there are a lot of people in Google-middle-management (or similar) that are now compiling blacklists of people with divergent opinions and refuse to work with them. These are I assume the same people that are not in fear due to it becoming public knowledge.
At the second link (2), a bit down the page there is a diagram showing a poll about the memo, it has at the time of the image being captured not that many respondents (only 278) but out of them it seems that about half disagree with the memo (mostly + strongly disagree 48,5%) while the "tiny" minority in agreement makes up about a bit over a third of the respondents (almost + strongly agree 36,3%). So there seems to be a bit more then a tiny minority inside the company that did agree with him, if we are to extrapolate out from this small number of respondents. It would be one thing if there was just a tiny percentage or two that had agreed with him. But it's somewhat different now that it seems to be 48.5 vs 36.3. Turns out there might be quite a few people that are "evil" or have divergent and undesirable opinions about "diversity" and affirmative action type programs.
(1) http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/07/revealed-inside-googles-sjw-cabal-blacklists/ [breitbart.com]
(2) http://voxday.blogspot.se/2017/08/suppressing-dissent-at-google.html [blogspot.se]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 11 2017, @06:44PM (1 child)
I covered my ass in the next sentence, and I assume the (unscientific) poll was anonymous.
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(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday August 11 2017, @07:16PM
It's a very problematic poll, but it's all there is at the moment. The size is small, for all we know thousands voted later and the numbers shifted dramatically. Then there is anonymity or not. I would gather it came from some internal G+ discussion. Is there really anonymity on G+ or their other debate systems? There might be the illusion of anonymity but I doubt it actually exists if someone with backend access wanted to know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @09:06PM
Stop!, Stop! I can only get so hard!
I will not matter though We are much further along to nuclear war than when we had Reagan
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday August 11 2017, @06:47PM (2 children)
Exactly. As I pointed out already, nobody should give a fuck about anything except job performance. Can that midget code? Then give him a desk and throw his ass on a bar stool and let him get to work. Having worked for the military industrial complex, I have seen many bro-tier gay dudes and dykes who are strictly business and no-bullshit -- both of which could kick my ass in a split second.
Interviewing somebody with pink or blue hair? Give 'em a chance. If they are strictly business, that's good. If they throw out a lot of bad dog-whistles out there like "diversity" and "tolerance" then reject. Because we're discussing business, not politics. Do you code? Let's see it. What kind of shit did you fix in the past, what kind of bathrooms did you clean or what kind of shrubbery did you trim? Oh, a joke about a sports team? That's a harmless distraction and totally acceptable.
What needs to be done is to start a major technology firm catering to bros. Women and trannies will be welcome as long as they subscribe to the bro culture and be able to not only receive trash talk, but to dish it out. Parking lot fights will not be forbidden, but rather "team-building" exercises. Women, when given the ability to talk trash, have the upper-hand in calling a bro a micropenis'd limp-dick motherfucker.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday August 11 2017, @10:51PM
So basically you're saying that people should be evaluated on job performance, as long as they don't mess up the workplace culture?
"work well, don't mess up our club"...sounds reasonable to me.
The devil is, of course in the details: what is "work well", and when are you "messing up the club"?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:29AM
I think there's a difference between saying your code sucks and telling a person deserves to die etc. Same goes for parking lot fights.
Because, how will good code survive if sucking snowflake code gets to stay because.. diversity in bugs & core dump.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @07:01PM
So when are the Swiss going to return all that Nazi gold to the original owners?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 11 2017, @04:34PM (2 children)
Personally, I doubt this one will hit 100 comments, being the second follow-up. I could be wrong though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:01PM (1 child)
I guess it went further than you expected?
(yes, only replying to push the post count closer to 100. Considering self-replying to this reply just to push it further ;-)
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:05PM
Naah, that'd be very small of me. Moreover, it would only push the count up to 99, which still doesn't invalidate TMB's assumption.
So let's not pollute SN with such comments.