For those of who haven’t I strongly suggest you read James Damore’s Google Memo. Don’t worry, the science is accurate and well-understood and James has only positive suggestions to make as to how diversity at Google could be increased in the future. No one with any sense whatsoever could possibly take exception to anything that he wrote in that memo.
But we are not dealing with people who have any sense. The HR department fired him without appeal for posting it to an internal discussion board where staff were invited to contribute their opinions on various aspects of Google’s working practices.
Since Human Resources itself is a collectivist term, (What else could it be when the title itself devolves the individual in all of his or her glory to an interchangeable commodity) it comes as no surprise that their response revealed them to be the fascists/communists that they are. Instant dismissal for wrong think.
Of course, for the intellectually challenged mobs of the left and right the Google Memo has become a cause celebre. This is unhelpful — the science is the science and we can’t move forward if people are simply going to entrench themselves further in already prepared ideological positions regardless of the truth. The suggestions James makes in the document are sound and at the very least are a good place to begin a discussion on the matter.
What makes all this unbelievably hypocritical on Google’s part is that their whole business revolves in parsing out the demography of its users on every possible vector in order to better target their ads. And yes, that means exploiting the differences in the likes and dislikes of men and women and the other patterns of behaviour that differentiate the sexes.
If James had worked for a pharmaceutical company he still may have been pilloried for his comments but perhaps with less of a stench of totally undeserved smug self-righteousness.
But the genie is out of the bottle. We now know what Google says and what Google does are two entirely different things. The prolonged effects of this cognitive dissonance can only ensure that Google will eventually have to crash and burn unless it changes its wicked ways. Steve Jobs was right when he said that Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ mantra was bullshit. I wish he had lived long enough to have gone ‘thermo-nuclear’ on them like he said he would.
If you ignore science, evidence and the myriad of other incontrovertible facts that we have to face on a daily basis (many of which we dearly wish weren’t so) and choose to live in a utopian, ideological, fantasy land of what feels right then there is only going to be one winner over the long term.
But as the history of the 20th century has shown the sheer amount of death and destruction that ideologies can cause in the short term can be a very high price to pay while we wait for people to come to their senses, stop lying and stop pretending that reality is something you can make up to suit yourself.
For practical purposes any chance (which truthfully, was close to zero anyway) of a career that I might have had in Silicon Valley or at any company dominated by collectivist HR policies is now over. All they would have to do is check my Twitter stream and simply not bother to call me in for an interview.
This applies to anyone else who has taken a public stance on this matter and has backed James or just the evidence contained in the memo. Ironically, the memo itself can also be weaponized by hiring departments to sift out the competent from the true believers.
The first question that they can now put to any candidate for any job is, “What is your position on the Google Memo?”
Careful how you answer - no wrong think allowed.