Following the memo’s publication, multiple executives shared an article from a senior engineer who recently left the company, Yonatan Zunger. In the blog post, Zunger said that based on the context of the memo, he determined that he would “not in good conscience” assign any employees to work with its author. “You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment,” he wrote. He also said in a email, “Could you imagine having to work with someone who had just publicly questioned your basic competency to do your job?”
My best guess: He was asked by the higher ups and HR to make a public apology and he refused, and was fired. It is also conceivable that there was a history as well.
On the flip side, I could see him angling for a book deal - the folks who slurp up Palin and O’Reilly’s books will eat this up.
I doubt they even bothered asking him for an apology, public or otherwise. What good would it do? The PR damage to Google is done, and as your link points out no one would work with him without knowing how he really felt. Google had to get rid of him, no hesitation, and do what they can to repair their reputation as a fair and diverse employer.
I don’t doubt it. I used to work in HR (though at a public institution, with a lot of union employees), and firing someone was viewed as a last resort. He expressed this on an internal board, and I think that if he acknowledged the problems and apologized publicly to the employees at google (not necessarily to the world at large), and went to some counseling sessions, he could have kept his job. He obviously had value before, and it could have been a teachable moment to everyone at Google, as well as him.
Maybe I’m just too liberal however. The thing is, Google could have made a lot of this PR and turned it around,but it would have required an effort on behalf of the employee, which I’m not sure he wanted to make.
The Bloomberg article is misleading. Zunger is a former Google employee who blogged about what he would have said to this employee, had Zunger himself not quit working for Google a week or so ago. So all the quotes are basically (informed) speculation about what actually went down.
I’ve known a lot of people at Google in the last five years or so. They always talk about how they’d rather “not hire anyone at all instead of the wrong person”. It’s apparently an ingrained part of company culture. This looks to me like that thought mode taken to its extreme- “why are we having diversity initiatives if we’re only hiring the best/right people?”.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s complete bullshit, internal propaganda to make their employees feel special, work harder, and not defect to another company. I’m sensitive to that sort of crap from being in the cooking industry for 20+ years. Only difference is they get paid a reasonable wage for their devotion.
I dunno, that’s exactly our thought when hiring… Hiring someone who doesn’t fit, or doesn’t live up to the standards set by the other engineers, drag everyone down.
Now, we’re much smaller, so we can perhaps afford to be more picky.
This story makes me cringe because every conservative or libertarian that manages to float into the mainstream is always clueless and awkward. We have the worst intellectuals, folks.
Now, Damore has told the New York Times he intends to sue Google for illegal dismissal, and that he has already filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. But any case would be complicated, in part due to Damore’s identity as a white man and the nature of his complaints—he says he faced retaliation for espousing conservative views.
Does he have a case? The short answer is maybe. Here’s an overview, based on interviews with legal scholars, of three laws Damore could use to bring a lawsuit—and how he might fare.
A money line for Google however:
A Google spokesperson said the company does not comment on specific employee cases. The spokesperson added, however, that if the stereotypes raised in Damore’s memo had turned on race rather than gender, few would be questioning the decision to dismiss him.
Honestly, I find mandatory Union dues kind of bullshit. If a Union wants folks to join it, it should make itself useful enough to those people to justify them voluntarily paying dues.
There are situations where Unions benefit workers… but there are situations where they harm them. No one should be forced to pay money to an organization like that, just so that they can work.
And then you’ve got the whole fucked up world of paying to work (e.g., buying uniforms or pyramid schemes), but that’s not liberal stupidity, so I’ll stop thread-crapping!
Union dues are mandatory because of the free rider problem. When unions negotiate improvements to working conditions, all workers benefit. And if they tried to negotiate benefits exclusively for union members, e.g. higher wages, then workers would have an incentive to only be part of the union until negotiations are completed. It’s really the same justification as for the health insurance mandate.
I don’t think it’s bullshit. If Pepsi can write a contract that requires a venue to exclusively stock Pepsi soft drinks, then a union can write a contact that requires a business to exclusively use union labor. And if workers think the union isn’t earning its keep, they can vote in new leadership.
As an FYI - Ohio also has “right to work” laws in that any contract which mandates union membership is null and void. The only difference being that the unions can still represent those who don’t pay into them.
But the reality is that “right-to-work” really means “fire you for anything”. There isn’t any strong upside for workers.
And some people are just freeloaders. I knew union guys who worked at John Deere, they bitched about those sorts all the time, but they were happy to pay for them at the end of the day because the alternative was dogshit.
Not being forced to be in a union seems fine in the big picture. But often public servants who happen to trend Republican are exempted (like police), and those tend to be the only unions with any real power anymore.
States with right-to-work have workers with lower wages, less healthcare and fewer pensions. Not to mention zero job security most of the time. You can be fired because it’s a Friday and your boss doesn’t like your middle name. Or your girlfriend. Or literally anything that can’t be proven is because of a protected class (he could fire you for being black, but he’d have to say something else… like he didn’t like your shoes).
