Social conformity at Google

Last updated on: August 8, 2017 at 11:26 am by Jane the Actuary

Social conformity at Google 2017-08-08T11:26:32-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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from https://pixabay.com/en/hacking-hacker-computer-internet-1685092/

If you’re not living under a rock, you’ve likely already read about the Google software engineer who wrote a memo discussing the company’s diversity efforts and their unintended harms, a memo which was perceived as an attack on women, which upset some female employees to such a degree that they skipped work, which produced the statement by Google CEO Sundar Pichai that portions of the memo “violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace,” as well as countless demands on twitter that people with such opinions be blacklisted from ever working again, and which led, in the end, to that employee, James Damore, being fired.

A National Review writer calls this document the “95 theses of diversity and inclusion,” because the author was up against beliefs about diversity and gender that pretty much amount to a religion, which may not be questioned.

Breitbart published an interview (claimed to be first in a series) with an anonymous Google employee, who describes such a cult-like devotion to diversity that

The diversity gospel has been woven into nearly everything the company does, to the point where senior leaders focus on diversity first and technology second

and where conservatives are subject to “witch hunts,” being blocked from promotion or even losing jobs.

And this sucks.

It sucks from a Jane the Actuary perspective —

that is, I blog anonymously, but do have ambitions of someday having more published writing under my actual name, which means exposing myself and putting myself at risk of someone at my firm deciding that what I’ve written is “offensive.” The Google line of reasoning makes this a fireable offense. Is it probable? No. Do I have any idea how often this happens without the publicity of this case? No. But Google’s action shows that it’s possible.

And it sucks as a mom of (white) boys, especially since, of the older two, one of them likes to think of himself as flauting social conventions and the other struggles to understand them in the first place, and both of them are interested in the tech world. Maybe they’ll learn to keep their head down, and the only impact on them will be the loss of satisfaction in their job and workplace that they might otherwise have had. But they are both, for different reasons, at risk of not playing the game correctly, and finding themselves punished for it, in exactly that field which is supposed to be a refuge for people who wouldn’t otherwise fit in. What will their place in the world be?

I have the impression from reading the memo itself that the author was writing in a context of it being standard practice to circulate this sort of memo. It doesn’t read like someone who perceived of what he was doing as controversial, rocking the boat, causing a ruckus, fighting for justice on behalf of aggrieved men. It sounds like someone who thought he was playing by the rules, not breaking them.

I’m not saying that women aren’t at risk of sexual harassment. And, to my understanding, there’s a lot that’s wrong with tech culture in general, including massive age discrimination. And don’t get me started on their preference for H1-B visa types over Americans. But two wrongs don’t make a right, and destroying white men who don’t conform isn’t the right way to build up women and minorities.

UPDATE: Now I’ve looked a little more online. Here’s an account from Heavy, which specializes in these sorts of instant profiles and dug up his CV. Just a few years out of college, and Google is his first job. He looks like a major dork — he plays video games and chess and has probably never had a date in his life. But that’s not a reason to laugh at him, let alone turn him into a villain, is it?

Image: from https://pixabay.com/en/hacking-hacker-computer-internet-1685092/

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