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posted by martyb on Friday August 11 2017, @02:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the hurry-up-and-stop dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Friday August 11 2017, @06:29PM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Friday August 11 2017, @06:29PM (#552483)

    ... the buzz is about a tiny minority inside Google agreeing with the memo.

    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]

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 11 2017, @06:44PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday August 11 2017, @06:44PM (#552490) Journal

    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

      by looorg (578) on Friday August 11 2017, @07:16PM (#552514)

      I covered my ass in the next sentence, and I assume the (unscientific) poll was anonymous.

      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.