Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59nmkx/google-employee-alleges-discrimination-against-pregnant-women-in-viral-memo

by jmsflknr • 7 years ago

226 185 7 years ago

squish783• 7 years ago

The memo, since it's not actually linked in this Vice article, for anyone who would rather read the source material than the editorializing:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6240022-I-m-Not-Retu...

phoe-krk• 7 years ago

It is linked there: literally the two first words of the article, "A memo", link to this URL.

cronix• 7 years ago

What do you mean? Literally, the very first 2 words in the article, "A memo", is a link to an article with all 6 pages of the document in question.

squish783• 7 years ago

That hyperlink goes to another Vice article: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbmqxq/heres-the-memo-cur...

Edit - Which apparently has the document embedded, but doesn't render in Edge.

qntty• 7 years ago

Changing internal Google policies isn't enough. America needs stronger worker protection laws.

jcomis• 7 years ago

Yes, this is not a "Google" problem. It's happening everywhere.

sanbor• 7 years ago

The United States, Suriname, Papua New Guinea, and a few island countries in the Pacific Ocean are the only countries in the United Nations that do not require employers to provide paid time off for new parents.[1]

Parental leave policies in the United Nations [2]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/10/06/495839588/countries-around-th...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Americas

aianus• 7 years ago

require employers to provide paid time off

This isn't phrased quite accurately; I know that in Canada maternity leave is guaranteed by law but it is not paid for at all by the employer (it is paid by government insurance schemes instead).

Osiris• 7 years ago

I've spent most entire career at relatively small companies (25-100 employees). I've never seen these types of issues (I can't say they've never happened, I'm just not aware of any).

In fact, reading these stories is probably why I've never had the desire to apply to work at any of the large tech companies.

I can't say for certain what the differences are, but I think smaller companies tend of have less office politics, less ambition as there is less opportunity for promotion, more shared goals (everyone works on one product), fewer layers of management, and more personal interaction with management.

kyrra• 7 years ago

Google has ~100,000 employees at this point. This is the story of a single manager within the company. When you have that many people at the company, there are going to be people that make bad choices, and then the story will fall under the umbrella of "Google" and make the news.

If this was a single small 25-100 person company, it would (likely) not get any notice.

hcnews• 7 years ago

How do you know if there are 1 or 100 or 1000s of such cases without actual data? Companies should be forced to reveal number of cases per year per geography. That'll allow me to make an informed choice when joining a company.

Also, its not clear to me why "HR will always help the company" has to be the status quo. This is an area where I would like the laws/judicial system to improve things.

teraflop• 7 years ago

This is the story of a single manager within the company.

No, it's a story of at least two different managers, and an HR department that supported them.

Raphmedia• 7 years ago

The same story from a smaller company would be just as appalling.

You should rejoice that Google is big enough that we take notice of this behavior and can then discuss of the issue as a society.

To dismiss this issue because it happened at a big company would be a mistake.

ocdtrekkie2• 7 years ago

My personal opinion is that fundamentally, upper management (but people, in general) will make decisions that positively impact the people they see and work with. In a small company (like where I work) where the CEO knows the bottom tier employees by name, they are going to have a very hard time making decisions that harm those people. In a large company, upper management works with middle managers, and therefore, will optimize decisions that work well for those people, and as they do not know people on the bottom tier, have little emotional ties to decisions that will harm them.

clairity2• 7 years ago

yes, exactly. the whole point of layers of management is to insulate upper managers from the decisions they make, particularly those that slight the customer or the front-line worker.

a more generous phrasing would be that insolation allows managers to take emotions out of a situation to make the most rational decisions for the business (and its shareholders).

in any case, direct relationships are a big deal for social creatures like humans, from how you treat people to who gets the benefit of the doubt to who gets the juiciest resources, like the best jobs. we employ the ideal of the meritocracy as the polar counterweight to that tendency, to varying success.

CoolGuySteve3• 7 years ago

It happened to me at Tudor Investment in NYC, which only has about 200 employees. I tried to quit when my daughter was born as I had found a better job anyways.

If I didn't stay an extra 3 months, my manager threatened to fire me 'with cause' so they could enforce my non-compete without paying me in New York.

So there I was working through some of the most incompetent shit from my dismal colleagues while my wife was trying to take care of our newborn baby while she couldn't walk due to delivery complications.

A week before I was supposed to go he mailed me a 25 item list of tasks to do before he would 'allow' me to quit, so I terminated my employment. After which, they claimed my non-compete was in force without pay.

Don't ever work for those fucking vultures at Tudor Investment.

TAForObvReasons4• 7 years ago

Never tested but I've heard from colleagues that noncompetes without payments at the base salary level are not considered "reasonable" and would be not be enforceable in New York state. Of course that's the whole schtick with hedge funds and the like, keep the base salary lower and pay bonuses.

neosat• 7 years ago

Sorry to hear about your experience and naming the company - no one should have to go through that. I had no perception of the company you mentioned but now when I hear someone mention it or consider joining, I know what to say.

not_a_cop75• 7 years ago

I can voice the same. One company I started to work for stated a zero tolerance policy towards x,y,z. For me, that means even if I'm not guilty of x,y,z the accusation is enough to get me fired. I've seen enough investigations done to know that companies don't care if people are wrongly fired. They have enough valid reasons to let people go that they can always claim it was really one of those, even if it was not.

wil421• 7 years ago

I’ve spent my entire career at Fortune 250 companies. Never seen or heard of something like this personally. Neither has my wife who works in sales (high turnover) and is currently pregnant.

rdtsc• 7 years ago

Working in a big-ish company many thousands of employees and this stuff just isn't there. You sign in, do you work, design cool stuff, test it, ship it, maybe have nice off-topic discussions about emerging technologies, or share a recipe with a one or two coworkers. Then 5pm hits, go home and enjoy all that other stuff like politics, hobbies, meetups, family time etc. It's really pretty simple.

I don't understand why Google and others can't be that way. It seems to me they've cultivated this stereotypical / superficial "share everything, we are one big family!" culture. And people, I am guessing mostly younger ones, really buy into it and take it at face value, then get disappointed with things go south.

The idea of an almost free-for-all internal discussion board sounds wrong and almost evil to me. It's a bit like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign - "Yes, please tell us what you disagree with so we can blacklist you easier". Out of all the executives, I can't believe nobody saw the potential issues from it? (That is why I inserted "evil" adjective there, and of course it's a jab their motto).

mieseratte3• 7 years ago

Spent my entire career in <100 companies, I've worked with one pregnant woman in that time. She had a complicated pregnancy and was hassled almost exactly as in TFA, the head of HR allegedly played the "Well I've had two kids without needing extra leave" card.

Was definitely dumbfounded when I heard that one, but then I realize I've run into programmers with a "Well I learned [esoteric thing], why hasn't he?" Sad that people lack that level of empathy and introspection, we're all different in different ways. Your easy thing is someone's Mt. Everest.

lrem3• 7 years ago

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but this kind of stories reach me mostly via memes.

Google has about 100k employees and this kind of shite seems to happen a couple times a year. Let's assume once a month. This gives an incidence rate of 0.000012 per person per year. Meaning that at 100 employees, plugging into [1], after a 100 year career in a place as bad as Google you would have a 10% chance of that happening at your company.

Assuming only 1% of what happened is known, you would get a 36% chance.

[1] https://planetcalc.com/5390/

lazyasciiart5• 7 years ago

What's the incidence rate per pregnancy?

asdfasgasdgasdg4• 7 years ago

I've spent my entire career at the big tech company named in this article, and I've also never seen anything like this happen to anyone I worked with. The closest I got was hearing about such an incident second-hand (a friend in another org had a spouse in a third org who was witness to an incident).

Smaller companies, from what I've heard, have tons of office politics problems. You hear about it less because most small companies have no national importance, and thus do not excite the press the way a large company would.

I would almost be willing to guarantee you that an incident of gender or sex discrimination has happened at one of the companies you've worked at, at least supposing you've been working more than a year or two. Just because you didn't hear about it doesn't mean it didn't happen. These things are generally kept pretty quiet -- splashing them across the headlines is the exception, not the norm.

zadkey• 7 years ago

I wouldn't say for sure that smaller companies have less politics.

Some smaller companies are fine. But the ones that aren't very profitable and are older, or are a child company of a parent company, no guarantees.

But I have seen the bad kind. You think you are in a work-hard play-hard environment and it turns out it is really a "good old boys" setup.

I've seen people play football outside for over an hour some days, but then someone else gets fired for pulling out a bed and resting for 15 minutes during their lunch break. And yes there was a bed in the closet at the office.

balaksakrionon• 7 years ago

It's always gamble to go to HR

hundt2• 7 years ago

I'm wondering, does anyone have any stories of involving HR in a situation like this (less-than-overt discrimination or harassment from a person more senior/important than you) and getting a positive outcome? At this point whenever I read that someone "reached out to HR to ask for help in navigating the situation" I assume that the main outcome will be to put the company on notice that they need to start working on their paper trail for when you inevitably quit or get fired. But I suppose I wouldn't hear the happy stories as often as the unhappy ones.

TAForObvReasons4• 7 years ago

HR exists to protect the company, full stop. They are only interested in the workers insofar as they reveal potential legal liabilities for the company.

It is almost always better to first talk to outside legal representation to understand the landscape. If there are actual law violations, they will help properly document and possibly start preparing a case, and if not then you know you should prepare to leave the company.

EDIT: surprised at the downvotes here, this is common knowledge for workers in all industries, not just tech, and this has been discussed at length every time a similar issue arises.

MegaButts• 7 years ago

It is almost always better to first talk to outside legal representation to understand the landscape. If there are actual law violations, they will help properly document and possibly start preparing a case, and if not then you know you should prepare to leave the company.

Assuming you have already agreed to legally binding arbitration as is pretty much standard in all employee contracts (although thankfully a recent law banned this practice in California for employees hired in 2019 or later), how useful is it to go to a lawyer? It just seems like the system is designed to work against you.

I have never actually gone through the binding arbitration process, so my knowledge of this is very limited.

hundt2• 7 years ago

Yeah, that appears to be the "Hacker News wisdom" on this topic and it certainly seems plausible to me. I was just wondering if this is a basically universally held opinion, or if some people with relevant experience have a different view.

dang2• 7 years ago

this has been discussed at length every time a similar issue arises

That's probably why it was downvoted. Repetition is tedious, and HN is for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jedberg2• 7 years ago

I don't know of any cases where the aggrieved person reported something to HR and was helped, but I know of a few cases where a third party reported something to HR on the aggrieved person's behalf and it turned out well.

I personally witnessed a woman at work getting harassed, and she was too afraid to say anything. I reported to HR on her behalf as a witness and the harasser was quickly removed.

I think the best way to get HR to help you is to find an ally and make them aware of the wrongdoing so they can be a witness and then report it to HR for you. Then it's no longer just the word of the two people involved, and they are more compelled to act to remove the liability of the aggressor.

hn_throwaway_994• 7 years ago

The same thing happened to me. I was a manager at the company, and an employee came to me saying he had witnessed harassment against someone else on his team. As a manager, after I heard that news, I literally had no choice in the matter - the only course of action was to directly report to HR (The HR team specifically put all managers, at all levels, through training saying they must report any known or suspected cases of harassment or else they put the company at grave liability risk).

While I think it's unfortunate that this is usually a more successful route, I agree with you that it's no longer a "he said-she said" case (or, in the case of the article, a "she said-she said"), and since HR also has to deal with people who do (even if rarely) use the complaint process as a weapon, coming off as a "reluctant witness" seems to help. Again, want to emphasize that it's unfortunate that is the case, but I also think that's human nature.

JoshTriplett• 7 years ago

It's true that a third party report helps, but also, always make sure that you have the permission of the person you're reporting on behalf of.

dymk• 7 years ago

Yes, I have been in situations where I've reported harassing behavior to HR, directed at both myself and between other people, and gotten a positive outcome.

MrLeap• 7 years ago

My first job out of college was for the U.S. Army on behalf of a large military contractor. My team leader worked for a different contractor. In the first few weeks he built up an insane environment of paranoia and micromanagement.

Our customer was a government employee. Twice in my first few months, my team leader came back from her desk yelling things like "YOU ARE SO STUPID" loud enough that everyone in the office could hear. I brought this up to a coworker, and he said that this happened periodically for as long as he had been there.

In retrospect, I should have immediately reported this. Since it was my first "big boy" job, I was feeling out how to deal with it. I figured since the government was our customer, one word from the person he was berating and he'd be ejected into the sun, or maybe everyone knew and this was just how things in this office worked?

Some time later, the micromanagement reached a crescendo. I completed a learning module for an instructor as per their specification and asked to do a demo. Team Lead responded saying no, the simulator was all screwed up and he was going to personally help fix it.

For 3 days in a row my team lead spent all 8 hours of the working day sitting in a chair behind me saying things like "move that box one pixel to the right.. no.. one more.. keep going" as he "felt out" the way the UX should be. I suggested that he could take the source from perforce make these changes from his desk. Nope, he didn't want to do that.

The work product delivered by 2 salaries over 3 days was marginal changes to UI element positioning, misaligning almost all of them in weird ways. I felt like I was going crazy, was he making my projects worse on purpose?

We had an excellent CHI engineer on the team. He had a masters degree in the field. He confirmed that nothing I was being asked to do made any sense at all. Nothing about this made sense.

I asked to take some time and talk to him about his management style. This was a mistake. He started out telling me that I was incompetent, and he needed to "show me how to be a good designer" and that he was going to continue micromanaging me for as long as needed to happen to accomplish this. After about 2 hours of back and forth, he seemed to at least understand that I needed him to back off. As we parted ways, his final thought was "You know what? You need to just shut up and do what you're told."

Yeah, no. I went to my desk immediately and sent an email to the site chief, detailing my experiences with him, and all the stuff he shouted at other people in the office. Despite my belief that everyone must have known what he was doing, that apparently wasn't the case. Government employee was too scared to stand up for herself, despite the fact she had the power to make him disappear instantly. Team Leader was escorted out of the building within 30 minutes and never came back.

jrockway• 7 years ago

I feel like "you should take medical leave" is Google HR's answer to everything. Is that normal?

ben77994• 7 years ago

I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time.

On the "evil point haired boss" level it seems these types of things like their internal message boards cause a lot of trouble for the company.

On the less evil side it seems like employees waste a lot of time on these internal sites and all the internal social justice stuff.

Maybe Google just seems to get it's dirty laundry aired out. I've been working in this field for 20 years not including my internships in college and I've never worked any company that seemed to have as much of this weirdness as Google seems to.

Maybe it's an artifact of them having a money printing machine and then a ton of employees who seem to work on items other than the money printing machine which don't really matter to the company's bottom line.

From the outside it just seems like a never ending series of stories about ultra-toxic management.. all of which greatly exceed anything I've seen in my career.

takeout• 7 years ago

What do you mean by "internal social justice" stuff?

ben77994• 7 years ago

This current story does not sound like anything weird is going on but some of the stories it sounds like some employees spend a majority of their time setting up protests internally.

It is hard to understand how someone can spend significant time in the office fomenting internal protests (even if they are for a good cause) and actually be getting their job done.

cj• 7 years ago

https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com...

grape_eater2• 7 years ago

I work for Google, can confirm many of the points you've made. While I haven't experienced any toxicity at Google, your analysis of the internal communication culture raises really good points.

On one side, the internal social justice campaigns are incredibly pervasive due to large usage of internal message boards. On the other side, Google is one of the few companies that allows this level of internal airing of dirty laundry. I've heard stories of similar incidences at Microsoft which were swiftly shut down.

The problem is that when you encourage internal dialogue and communication at a huge company like this, you'll never have people with different opinions pitching in. You'll mostly get people with the most 'acceptable' opinions, the others being silent as they value their jobs. It's a huge risk to be singled out as someone who thinks Damore was right or that Maven should've been continued. As a result, you'll get a constant stream of one-sided social justice campaigns which inevitably leak to the press.

Encouraging internal dialogue and communication but not understanding its limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes Google has made. Google was built on principles of open company-wide communication and sharing of information, and while it clearly doesn't work as intended anymore, there's too much inertia to change the course.

buboard• 7 years ago

Isn't that forum huge legal liability for the company if employees start suing each other?

stcredzero• 7 years ago

As a result, you'll get a constant stream of one-sided social justice campaigns which inevitably leak to the press.

Encouraging internal dialogue and communication but not understanding its limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes Google has made.

It's not just scale in numbers of people. It's also scale in terms of the potential value which can be captured by viral campaigns and media attention. When a "scene" is out of the way and non-mainstream, there can be a high degree of trust. However, when the "scene" gets hot, and there's some serious money and power to be gained, the sociopaths and other bad actors start coming out of the woodwork.

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

ben77994• 7 years ago

Should have added, I worked one place we got acquired by a giant company that most here would say is really f*cking evil (TM) and even there I never detected any of the toxic stuff these Google stories talk about.

That place was actually Evil enough I quit within a year to go back to another small company but it was nothing like what you read about Google. A different axis of evil.

ssivark• 7 years ago

Encouraging [internal] dialogue and communication but not understanding its limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes [Google] has made. [Google] was built on principles of open company-wide communication and sharing of information, and while it clearly doesn't work as intended anymore, there's too much inertia to change the course.

Couldn’t the same basically be said of Google/Facebook/Twitter’s public communication platforms too? :-)

rainyMammoth• 7 years ago

It seems to me that Google also attracts more far-left employees than any other big company.

I find it extremely ironic that those employees accept to be employed by the biggest censorship machine ever made, being paid close to the highest salaries in tech and then complain and plan walkouts in order to virtue signal and feel good about themselves.

malandrew• 7 years ago

It's not really that ironic. Censorship can come from both the far-left and far-right. Both ends of the political spectrum tend towards authoritarianism.

antepodius• 7 years ago

Censorship's not really partisan. Whoever's in power has a motive to censor. Right now, the gatekeepers of the internet tilt left-wing; so it's left-wing censoring you see more of on the internet/in colleges. Back when the institutions were right wing, it was reversed.

ocdtrekkie2• 7 years ago

Is it possible that having a way to internally air grievances has, up until recently, made it less likely for people to air their grievances outside the company?

nostrademons• 7 years ago

I think the theory behind it is that when you're dissatisfied with an organization, you have two options: Voice (speak up and hope to change things from within) or Exit (leave the organization and find or found a new one).

And at least when I was there, ~5 years ago, Google executives really, really wanted you to choose Voice. Because the history of Silicon Valley is basically built upon talented engineers choosing Exit and creating the company that eventually replaces you. Google itself was mostly built by people who did exactly that - its early (pre-2005) employees were practically a who's-who of alumni from Xerox Parc, Western Digital, Bell Labs, JPL, Netscape, Sun, and academia.

I dunno if it's the same today - I chose Exit 5 years ago (and my grievances were a lot smaller than most of what I hear in the press today - I generally enjoyed my time there, I just didn't feel like it was a place where my professional goals could be accomplished), and a lot of the people I see Exiting recently are folks I thought were very committed to exercising their Voice when I was there. As a Google shareholder this makes me a little uneasy, but perhaps it's the nature of a corporation that internal dissent just doesn't work when you get to 100,000 employees.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 7 years ago

Also, "Voice" comes in two variants: Internally, or externally.

Much more preferable for the company if employees complain on an internal board rather than Reddit, HN, or Blind.

paulcole• 7 years ago

it seems like employees waste a lot of time on ... all the internal social justice stuff

The nerve.

alexashka• 7 years ago

People will talk regardless. I have to chuckle at this mindset of time wasted. What do you think people at Google do, work at an assembly line and are given an extra break to discuss things on a message board?

Non-trivial work requires that you goof off at least half of the time.

Regarding 'it's never happened to me' arguments. Please realize that the world is varied and complex. Basic statistics will tell you that in a group of 100k people, chances are, somebody is getting harassed legitimately, let alone thinking they are being harassed or treated unfairly. Why is that at all hard to believe? Give me any 100k population and I can write articles ranging from 'great success' to 'great discrimination' indefinitely. It's just basic odds.

rifung• 7 years ago

On the less evil side it seems like employees waste a lot of time on these internal sites and all the internal social justice stuff.

I work at Google, opinions are my own.

If anything, having your employees spend their time on a internal site seems like a great idea because even their fun time is spent "within" the company. It's not like the alternative is they just don't do things besides work.. the alternative is they spend that time on HN, Reddit, or Youtube

compiler-guy• 7 years ago

There are also numerous third-party places one could hang out and discuss exactly the same things.

The infamous Border Patrol facebook group comes to mind.

At least Google leadership can see what people are saying.

groundlogic5• 7 years ago

12-20 years ago, one of my largest life goals was to work for Google. (It's not anymore. I found other fun and rewarding jobs.)

I don't get why the Google management team allowed their team to get so... well, violently politicized.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but.. keeping politics out of the workplace worked very well for a very long time.

lallysingh• 7 years ago

The whole country is rather politicized (some of it actually violent). Google doesn't force employees to pretend that's not the case. Maybe a good idea, maybe bad.

lclarkmichalek• 7 years ago

The workplace was always politicized. It's just being politicized in different ways now.

paulddraper7• 7 years ago

I agree.

Religion and politics.

Both super important. Both better discussed outside the workplace.

paganel• 7 years ago

The employees creating memes on the company’s time is not the issue here, the issue is active discrimination against pregnant women at said company.

jvagner• 7 years ago

Scrolled down pretty far to catch this point being elevated.

Alex3917• 7 years ago

I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time.

They have to by law. If they don't take active measures to prevent their employees from talking about non-work things during work, which they don't, then by law they aren't allowed to prevent them from organizing for better working conditions during work.

saagarjha• 7 years ago

I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time.

They're not the only large company that does this; I think companies allow this because they know that employees will end up making memes anyways and it's a lot better that they end up on an internal board than an ad-hoc external one. (Aside: I'm not sure some of the people making those "memes" understood how they're supposed to work. The puffin one is a misuse of the template…)

kaitai3• 7 years ago

I don't understand what the f(*& kind of message board this is where a person says, "Hey, I'm having concerning health symptoms & me & my baby might die" and her manager says, "You're not meeting expectations as a manager, all of a sudden!" and this is called "internal social justice stuff".

Complications of pregnancy involving hemorrhage and an early C-section are serious and not really a "management style" issue, and I don't understand why this discussion instead focuses on "dirty laundry", "internal social justice stuff", "wast[ing] a lot of time on these internal sites," "creat[ing] Memes on company time".

nitwit005• 7 years ago

Used to work at Salesforce, which has it's own social network thing called Chatter. The most popular group internally was Airing of Greavances (Seinfeld joke), which was entirely to gripe.

The management has been asked about the group a few times, and they've noted it all ends up on glassdoor anyways. Old article from 2012 where it is brought up: https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-chatter-airing-of...

They did seem to get a lot of value out of that group over time. They had some people monitoring it and legitimately tried to fix some of the complaints (not always successfully, of course).

JetSpiegel• 7 years ago

I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time.

See The Circle, the Emma Watson film.

HarryHirsch2• 7 years ago

So the author was managing a small team and was hold by her manager to get rid of one of her reports because she was pregnant. Now we know why management consists of psychopaths, those who are not evil quit in disgust.

bubblewrap2• 7 years ago

That's what the pregnant woman claims. The manager could have disliked her for other reasons or considered her unfit for leading people for other reasons.

notyourday2• 7 years ago

Here's a thing - the current legal framework means that manager's dislike to a pregnant woman is basically irrelevant.

HarryHirsch2• 7 years ago

According to HR, there was a documented history of inappropiate remarks on part of the author's manager. On the basis of available evidence, it's reasonable that those remarks are genuine, too.

ryanmercer• 7 years ago

It could have been a logical decision, something along the lines of "you said you're going to use maternity leave in a casual conversation, why don't you pass that report off now to so and so in case they need to ask you questions about it before you are gone for an extended period".

At my last job I was a contractor and took over a retired employee's desk/duties. She has apparently quit doing any actual real work months before and was just doing a small percentage of her work and not documenting what random bits she had actually been doing, I spent 2 months just trying to sort it out with the agency complaining to my employer that I wasn't doing anything, despite the fact I had literal boxes full of printouts and every surface in my cubicle covered, including most of the floor, with stacks of spreadsheets and records trying to figure out what she'd move from what account to which accounts going through highlighters like crazy highlighting stuff once i was confident a specific line for a specific office for a specific month for a specific bill had in fact been moved out of the field office account into the main GSA account for that type of entry, all while trying to keep up on the incoming stuff.

Balgair• 7 years ago

Yes, that is the real issue with these types of things. It's the 'boiling off' effect, or the 'elves leaving middle earth' effect. At first, it's not too bad, it was just one person that was average in many respects. It's that girl that got pregnant, it's that guy with a lot of political leanings in the break room. But slowly, you boil off even the reasonable and good people. It's that now your team is kinda all full of people you don't want a beer with. Now your boss really is a piece of work. Now HR really does take a long time to fix mistakes in your pay. It's slow, but it happens, and it's happened to Google.

Marry that issue with things like Project Dragonfly and that whole debacle. Now remember that the goog knows everywhere your phone has been at 4 am for the last 7+ years, a lot of your emails, and a lot of your photos too.

That 'private data' that you though was harmless is not looking to be so harmless in the hands of people that would do the kind of things that the article mentions.

sylvinus• 7 years ago

Maybe they expect better from a company like Google, but people need to be reminded that HR protects the company, not its employees. While still risky, it's often safer to complain about someone's behaviour to their manager instead of HR.

squish783• 7 years ago

Google's greatest PR move was convincing people that they're not a soulless billion dollar corporation like those other soulless billion dollar corporations

pjdemers• 7 years ago

Years ago, I worked at a big aerospace company (that no longer exists). I was hiring a small team of software engineers. I was flat out told not to hire anyone who was, or wanted to be, pregnant. Why? Health care cost. We were self-insured, and a baby born with severe health problems could bankrupt our plan.

cafard• 7 years ago

Odds are you had some male software engineers. Did management forbid you to hire any that were married, cohabiting, or considering the possibility? Or did the big aerospace company not insure families?

mieseratte3• 7 years ago

I've been asked in interviews about my familial status, even had one CTO flat-out tell me he wanted to know because of insurance costs.

hn_throwaway_994• 7 years ago

If a bad outcome of a single employee can "bankrupt your plan", I think the company should stop with the euphemism of they are "self-insured" and admit to the reality that they have no insurance. The entire purpose of insurance is to spread risk to a level that it becomes acceptable if there is 1 negative outcome, which obviously wasn't the case here.

As an aside, just another example of how our f'd up healthcare system causes all these additional negative follow on effects.

sjg007• 7 years ago

The CEO of AOL referred to million dollar babies once as a reason to cut benefits.

sokoloff• 7 years ago

It also seems unlikely that even a multi-million dollar birth with complications would bankrupt the plan of a "big aerospace company", except for fairly small values of big.

adrianmonk• 7 years ago

While you're not wrong, it's also possible that it wouldn't bankrupt the plan but would simply cost more, cutting into potential profit. It could just be a fear tactic to reduce expenses.

harryh3• 7 years ago

This story makes no sense:

- How could a single baby born with health problems bankrupt a big aerospace company?

- A man is just as likely to have a child with severe health problems as a woman even though he'll never be the pregnant one.

mieseratte3• 7 years ago

- How could a single baby born with health problems bankrupt a big aerospace company?

Lots of companies have self-funded groups, but join onto an insurance group for negotiating power. For instance, I have a plan like this and our partner-company is Cigna so I carry around a Cigna insurance card with the $FIRM plan.

Looking at the paperwork, the most expensive plan is $67 per week, with an $8,500 max out- of-pocket. $FIRM has (rounding up slightly) 500 employees. So let's say 500 employees x 67 dollars x 52 weeks = 1.742.000 dollars into the insurance pool per year, so two $1.000.00 pregnancies in a year would be devastating. If the pool was low, possibly bankrupting(?) - I'm not actually sure what the failure mode is here, if Cigna has some obligation at that point... guess I have an HR question tomorrow.

whiddershins• 7 years ago

I dunno, I couldn’t read the entire memo (it just felt too long) and I’m uninterested in Vice’s editorializing.

That said, I just don’t love the way the original thing was handled. A manager made some comments, it was totally feasible to just ignore them, or to make a bit of a wisecrack or say directly “hey, that feels a little harsh, no?”

Instead you go to HR.

I don’t know, people say dumb or insensitive things all the time. I would be loathe to make it a formal issue unless I really thought something harmful was going on.

Edit: obviously I wasn’t there, and I possibly don’t understand the nuances. It’s just a gut reaction.

hn_throwaway_994• 7 years ago

I can't downvote you enough. This is horrible advice. People tend to view going to HR as "the nuclear option", but this is not the case. Most companies put their managers through training about how they put the company at immediate (potentially large) liability if you are aware of harassment, even a "gray area", and you don't report it.

ci5er• 7 years ago

I can't downvote you enough.

Why? The point of view seemed to be politely presented. You disagree. I tend to disagree with you (for the limited number (call it ~10) of large company HR departments I have seen). What are the downvotes for?

Now - to your second point - companies do train managers to report. Yes. I believe that this is a containment device. I am not marketing this here, so don't call me a shill, but I'm working on a better way for employees to get their individual complaints anonymously surfaced all the way to the board. The upside is: less layers of battle-hardened defence mechanism against employees. The downside is: loss of plausible deniability. We'll see how it works out.

sandino2• 7 years ago

The only support I received as the victim of my manager’s abuse was encouragement to take advantage of medical leave.

This statement is quite telling: first HR goes to lengths to deny that there's any seriously wrong. Then they pretty blatantly acknowledge that yes, things are so fucked up that you'll likely want to take medical leave.

cdumler2• 7 years ago

From first-hand experience, I cannot stress this enough: HR's job is to protect management. Period. Full stop.

Having going through this type of situation (high-performer until on the wrong side of someone in management), I really didn't understand things until someone pointed something out. I was asked: who hired the manager? The purpose of a manager is to handle the details of the goals of hirer.

A musician hires a manager to handle the details book gigs, vet contracts, etc. If the musician doesn't like the work being done, the manager is fired. If the manager thinks he or she can get a better result from someone else, they fire the assistants, caterers, etc. The musician doesn't care, only that results are generated.

The senior execs hire managers for the exact same purpose: deal with the details to get projects completed for them. If you play ball, you'll get the rewards. Mess with that agenda, you'll get canned.

The biggest disappointment I had was how I was treated. They make you feel like it's you letting them down. They dangle in front of you all the ways out: "we're inclusive, we want to you have a great work environment, we have these resources for you to grow". And, I was there for all of it: the manager who would tell you exactly how to handle things only to lie in a HR meeting the exact opposite.

The big hint should be the HR title: Human Resources. A resource is explored, extracted, and exhausted. HR's job is provide for management, not the employees.

aiyodev2• 7 years ago

It’s the human resource’s department’s job to protect the company from liability. If they’re not protecting the company from renegade managers they’re not doing a very good job.

ab_c3• 7 years ago

I have to agree. I learned the hard way that HR is not there to deal with grievances fairly. Their job isn't to shield employees from bad behaviour or absurd demands from management. Their job is to help and protect management.

Unions are the ppl there to protect employees from abuse, not HR.

trhway• 7 years ago

noticeably that both managers were women. One would naively think that that would lead to deeper empathizing and more understandable accommodation due to better mutual understanding and shared experience. Well, better mutual understanding and shared experience seems to be a double edged sword. Can you imagine a male manager trying to oppose, or even just question the necessity of, something like that bedrest:

"She says that she and her baby had potentially life-threatening complications toward the end of her pregnancy, and that she would need to go on maternity leave earlier than expected.

“During one conversation with my new manager in which I reiterated an early leave and upcoming bedrest, she told me that she had just listened to an NPR segment that debunked the benefits of bedrest,” she wrote. “She also shared that her doctor had ordered her to take bedrest, but that she ignored the order and worked up until the day before she delivered her son via cesarean section."

philwelch• 7 years ago

A lot of modern society is a bit stacked against women actually having children. Women managers have as much a vested interest in the system as anyone but, by virtue of being women, don’t have the same kind of awkwardness and shame that a man would have.

jayd16• 7 years ago

This is a pretty tough spot. You don't want to impede someone's career because of there reproductive choices but at the same time were the teams wrong in not wanting to introduce a new manager about to take a months long medical leave?

You can look at the suggested early medical leave as being pushed out (and it certainly could have been) but it also strikes me as a good option if you only want to work in a rock star position at a rock star pace.

sp3322• 7 years ago

I think those are different things. To start with, you can "discriminate" about a worker not being available to do their job. You're just not allowed to discriminate against someone for being pregnant specifically. The manager made comments "that the Googler was likely pregnant again and was overly emotional and hard to work with when pregnant." Secondly, there is FMLA leave which is supposed to guarantee that a person has their job when they get back, but I'm not sure if that was even relevant here or how it would affect the role changes that happened in the months prior to taking leave.

rolltiide• 7 years ago

I am genuinely open to understanding what reforms are possible that are compatible with running a business.

I don't like how she was treated, and I don't see how introducing a manager that leaves makes sense either.

My understanding is that we have an egalitarian ideal we want to reach - for career driven wage workers - but don't have a successful business structure that remains competitive here as it predates this need completely?

kaitai3• 7 years ago

Downgrading someone's performance review because they're pregnant, though, is just classically illegal.

tracker1• 7 years ago

Worth mentioning TFA is wrong about the Damore memo... it wasn't suggesting that women are less disposed to be "good engineers" only that they are less disposed to seek out a career in engineering to begin with. Quality isn't a part of it. But that doesn't fit an SJW narrative.

JSavageReal• 7 years ago

Was going to mention this as well. Vice deliberately misrepresenting the point of his memo and explicitly mentioning that it's "unscientific". Well no sh, it's a memo. I wonder if there's an agenda there?

fortran77• 7 years ago

It's interesting the internal memer used the "Unpopular Opinion Puffin". This meme image was banned from Reddit because it was frequently associated with racist ideas.

(See https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/26m7uq/why_ha... )

It almost seems like someone is trolling by using it. I wonder whose leg is being pulled here.

droithomme• 7 years ago

Exactly two years ago today, another, much different memo, went internally viral at Google. That one was written by the now infamous James Damore, an engineer who wrote a 10,000-word, unscientific memo attempting to argue that women are naturally less disposed to be good engineers compared to men. The purpose of that memo was to get Google to scale back its diversity efforts.

That's not what actually happened.

ab_c3• 7 years ago

"unscientific"

Technically, yes what he said is unscientific in the sense that he didn't conduct a long-term study. However, the guy has a degree in molecular biology so it's not as if he's pulling shit out of thin air to justify his stance -- that's grossly misleading.

While I don't agree with everything he said, there's a lot that I feel is very fair. It's sad the media wrote him off as a misogynist. Misogynist don't write pages of suggestions on ways to encourage women into STEM and into leadership positions.

notadoc• 7 years ago

Not specifically about Google or this article, but how many people here have seen or experienced some sort of discrimination against parents in general?

Like outwardly complaining that a man is asking for paternity leave (or insinuating job consequences if they take more than a few days)? Or more subtle approaches like deliberately scheduling unimportant meetings at obscure times to interfere with parenting and childcare schedules?

ab_c3• 7 years ago

Yes, there have been male parents being discriminated against because some companies don't feel that men could ever be considered a "primary" guardian -- that designation is reserved for women, only. Thus, men can't get the full allotted paternity leave time; only women can. Just recently did the courts decide this is unfair; both men and women can carry the title and deserve equal time off. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/business/fathers-parental...

That said, I've seen cases where the opposite is true. Parents are treated well but other groups aren't. I know several friends working at a large, well-known, evil gaming studio. They've had controversy in the past surrounding how they pushed employees to work insane crunch. When it became public, they (moderately) changed. Project managers would never ask women to work late, nor ask an employee who is a parent. For parents, this is great... however, they pushed all that work to others.

If you're male, single, a PM asks you to work overtime (without pay) and you decline, it will be a detriment to your career. After all, you have no kids therefore no legitimate reasons to say no. Be prepared to receive negative, nebulous feedback on your quarterly reviews.

"It doesn't feel like this employee is a team player."

"I question their commitment to the project."

"This employee seems dispassionate about their job."

I've worked with a project manager who carried a similar sentiment. In a candid conversation, he said to my face that he'd never ask women to work overtime. However, if you're male and under the age of 35, you should, "know better." If you're getting into the tech industry, you should expect to work at least 10hrs/day.

I'm very happy I don't work with him anymore.

augustarian• 7 years ago

Wonder if people in HR go through the same empathy-draining process doctors go through. Beyond a point, people's troubles/accidents/burns/cuts become objective things to take care v/s pain that people are going through

gojri2• 7 years ago

Can someone tell me what 'PA' stands for in the memo? Project Admin?

gojri2• 7 years ago

or perhaps 'Product Area'?

Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo

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