Apple employees petition demanding investigation into ‘misogynistic’ new hire

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-hiring-antonio-garcia-martinez-chaos-monkeys-facebook

by champagnepapi • 5 years ago

50 59 5 years ago

Calvin02• 5 years ago

Apple hiring a former Facebook ad products product manager, expanding its ads product suite, and expanding ads slots says more about how they see Facebook than the privacy changes they've made.

Ads is a services market that is growing fast and as the phone market saturates, services will become more important for Apple. This will also help reduce the margin pressure on iPhone hardware.

Traubenfuchs• 5 years ago

How can anything ad related still be growing if most people either trained their brain to ignore/close ads instantly or use adblockers?

SirSourdough• 5 years ago

Because good advertising still impacts you even if you “know to ignore it”, and there’s lots of ways to advertise to people that aren’t ads in the classic sense.

I suspect that adblocker usage is also a lot lower than you expect, with a quick Google showing less than half of people worldwide using adblockers on desktop and adoption below 20% for mobile devices in the US. So there’s still a broad market to target.

sanity31415• 5 years ago

His hiring “calls into question parts of our system of inclusion at Apple, including hiring panels, background checks, and our process to ensure our existing culture of inclusion is strong enough to withstand individuals who don’t share our inclusive values,” they write.

So they want to exclude someone for having different opinions to them, in the name of inclusivity?

Clown world.

MyHypatia3• 5 years ago

I think the clown world is hiring someone who wrote:

“Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”

It's especially ironic after an epidemic plague where 70% of health care workers are women. But I guess they're mostly useless baggage who are full of shit. Unlike this guy. See, he really understands how the world is and is just "telling it like it is". Let's trade all these useless women for shotgun shells, and hire people like this guy instead.

CheezeIt• 5 years ago

Yet I see companies like Cisco announcing mental health days for their utterly broken employees.

kbelder• 5 years ago

Yeah, he should have included Bay Area men in that assessment.

Udik2• 5 years ago

This is a wider excerpt:

"When she was in her teens, her father decided to move the family to the United States, where they suffered a financial reversal she was unwilling to talk about. Suddenly not among the moneyed class, she hustled herself through the redbrick boondocks of the University of Vermont. Citibank internship led to a Deutsche Bank job, and after a few years she was an equity derivatives trader at Deutsche, holding her own against the toff sharks of the City of London.

She had wild green eyes, with unnatural red spots in her irises when you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic cover. Her personality was flinty and rough, and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels.

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work- be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast in someone's back- required doing. Long story short, you wanted to tie your genetic wagon to the backing horse of her bloodline. Which is why I was less nervous than I should have been on a random Saturday in July..."

So it's a passage in a (novel? Definitely a literary piece anyway) where, in order to better sing the praise of one particular woman, she is compared to another common type in the same environment. All clearly point of view of a narrator (who might or might not be the author). If these are the parameters, we should throw in the bin almost all literature, from men and women alike.

mc32• 5 years ago

It’s weird for people of Latin descent. If they’re on your side, they are people of color, if they are not, then, by magic, they are no longer. This happens to Hispanic cops as well. If they are on the other side of the progressive equation, then they’re also people of color.

zem2• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

olliej2• 5 years ago

Yup

zoeysaurusrex3• 5 years ago

How so? People can have all the opinions they want but saying things such as "women are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit." isn't okay. Please convince me how that is employable behavior?

olliej2• 5 years ago

Different opinions in this case is that women and PoC are inferior.

That’s a reasonably difference of opinion to make choices over.

I wouldn’t trust performance assessments from him.

zozbot2343• 5 years ago

When the "different opinion" involves proclaiming that a whole class of your fellow workers are "soft, weak and full of $#!+" then yes, you should be resolutely excluded from positions of authority since you have willingly forfeited the kind of trust that's required for any such role. Let this guy stay in a pure engineering/IC role if he wants, but he should not be in a management position.

chubbyish3• 5 years ago

He is comparing to Eastern European women.

thu2111• 5 years ago

This is out-of-context quoting. The passage in question is actually about a woman he met and how she was not these things. The very next sentence says:

"British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back— required doing"

In other words he is comparing personalities and attitudes, not making generalisations about literally all women. But the subset of women he is generalising about are exactly the sort who are now trying to make him unemployable by quoting him out of context (i.e. being "full of shit") and demanding that Apple shield them (i.e. "cosset") by getting rid of a guy who finds other kinds of women more attractive. They also appear to be objecting to a passage that states something about the murder rate and naming of high schools in a particular area, which is presumably factual? So, they're kind of proving his point for him.

zoeysaurusrex3• 5 years ago

Who is "they"? Don't be shy.

Saying things like "women soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit." is more than just a difference of opinion. You cannot hold that opinion and be a fair leader.

chubbyish3• 5 years ago

You are deliberately misquoting.

mgamache4• 5 years ago

It's not like Apple is making money from misogynistic music or supports a regime that enforces female sterilization. As long as Apple employees to have a safe space from offensive ideas and people all is okay.

zoeysaurusrex3• 5 years ago

So you think women should feel okay working alongside someone who thinks they are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit?

It's not about safe spaces or offensive ideas. It's about enabling sexism and racism to freely propagate while telling minority groups that it isn't harmful despite past experience.

mgamache4• 5 years ago

I was just pointing out the myopic hypocrisy of the complaint. Also, women are not a minority group, but I would say that if he's hired to do a job at a company he should be held to the same standards as any other employee. If he acts in ways that are outside the standards set by the company he should be fired. If the company rules don't allow for sexism, there will be none enabled. I think pre-screening employees based on their speech is a road to nowhere. I don't know where the racism part came from did I miss that in the article?

legostormtroopr• 5 years ago

This was buried in the article, but James Danmore is racist now.

notorious ex-Googler James Damore, who suggest this is because women and people of color lack the innate qualities needed to succeed in tech.

It seems that people just keep tacking on “sins” to see what sticks to people’s reputations regardless of the facts. Was there anything in Danmores article that even mentioned people of color?

mgamache4• 5 years ago

'notorious' is a Russell Conjugation unless it The Notorious B.I.G.

https://tomdehnel.com/what-is-russell-conjugation/

zozbot2343• 5 years ago

lack the innate qualities needed to succeed in tech

James Damore never said anything of the sort. He was concerned that women might feel excluded in an engineering-focused environment and be less likely to seek such a role because of the different aggregation of preferences and inclinations among women as opposed to men. He said zilch about quality or potential for success, or for that matter about any individual woman (as opposed to aggregate trends and their influence on 'big picture' stats).

ceph_3• 5 years ago

His doc repeatedly said programs that are aimed at a helping women and people of color should be ended. And that diversity of gender and race should not be a goal. I don't think it's a big leap.

rasputnik65023• 5 years ago

Many years ago a big tech company opened a new office in my city and started recruiting developers at my university. They wanted to be fair and treat both sexes equally so they decided on male/female parity (at least 30% women). But on my year (computer science) there were just 3 gals vs 30 guys, but there were groups with even worse ratio. So the company hired all female students they could and then started looking outside. Even hired some girls from biology (qualifications weren't that important) because they had to fill in female positions, so then they could give offers to male programmers. Felt pretty bad, this was certainly one of such programs you mentioned

imperfectcats2• 5 years ago

Can you point me to the section that says that: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

Being as generous with the interpretation as possible, I guess suggesting new programs to replace existing ones could be interpreted as "programs that are aimed at a helping women and people of color should be ended", as ending one and replacing it is kind of ending. Saying "repeatedly" seems a stretch though.

Can you explain what I'm missing that lead to your beliefs?

belltaco2• 5 years ago

Was there anything in Danmores article that even mentioned people of color?

James Damore's point was that diversity hires make for low quality hires. People who believe that may see a PoC working in tech and automatically assume they got hired for their skin color and not skill.

MyHypatia3• 5 years ago

A person who wrote that Bay Area women are "soft", "weak" "useless baggage" that "should be traded for shotgun shells" should not be entrusted with a position where he evaluates other people's job performance.

fortran77• 5 years ago

Unlike his critics, I read his book. I enjoyed it. I'd hire him.

meinfuhrer• 5 years ago

I think many are too quick to crucify the guy after reading a few quotes. I mean, I can see how some of those comments may be construed as misogynistic, but I would need to read the whole book to understand the context, and I'll definitely not pass judgement before doing that.

jollybean• 5 years ago

I'm generally wary of cancel culture, but I don't even understand how a person could even really say such a thing i.e. 'women are useless and full of crap' let alone publish it.

Forget the bigotry ... just the lack of self awareness is pretty crazy.

I don't like the infusion of Damore however, that's a different discussion, I wish people would stop crossing streams on such an important subject, full of nuance in every direction. This guy's statements are of a different kind than Damores.

string• 5 years ago

I really despise the term "inclusivity". This guy seems like a prick but I wish companies would be honest about what they are doing. "Inclusivity" means getting everyone to subscribe to a narrow corporate worldview. "Diversity" is similar, it's not about diversity of thought or experience, but rather of immutable characteristics which have no inherent value.

I was recently asked to participate in a "community diversity and inclusivity survey". Not one question was concerned with freedom of expression or diversity of thought. It seems immutable characteristics are of paramount importance, or rather cynically, perhaps just the optics of their proportions are a valuable commodity. In a corporate setting neither inclusivity or diversity are at all what they purport to be.

chubbyish3• 5 years ago

As usual, it’s taken out of context.

He is comparing Bay Area girls to a girl he was sleeping with whose family moved here from Russia when she was a teenager and who “had spent years backpacking through jobs in rougher parts of the world”.

This is the reference to “worldliness”.

Being raised in the Bay Area compared to the experience of a family descended from Russia is of course going to result in a different upbringing and personality.

I don’t think this is hard to argue with unless you are naive to history and have not spoken to those who lives through 20th century Eastern Europe.

Ironic, as the lack of “worldliness” that those refute, is the same quality that prevents them from appreciating the sentiment in the quote.

doopy1• 5 years ago

I haven't read the book, but the excerpts to me looks like someone writing some dark shit in a certain voice to entertain a certain type of reader. I see how people can think this stuff is in poor taste, but not sure I like a world where someone's "creative writing" (successful mind you) becomes grounds for dismissal from a completely unrelated job.

jpseawell• 5 years ago

I’m curious if they would petition Steve Jobs today if he were alive.

dang• 5 years ago

Under normal circumstances we might turn the flags off on this story because it's an incremental development in an interesting new phenomenon (employee activism influencing corporate decisions—is that a neutral enough way to put it?). In principle, it's on topic, as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html makes clear. But this thread is so wretched that it deserves every stigma we've got.

All: if you're posting to this site to smite enemies, you're abusing it. That's not what HN is for, and it destroys what it is for. Please review the guidelines and use the site as intended, lest it burn to a crisp. Scorched earth, as I've been trying to tell people here for years, is not interesting—nor is it in any of our interests. This forum is only valuable to any of us to the degree that it can remain interesting and unpredictable.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

nomdep• 5 years ago

Off topic, but your relentless efforts to make this site civil, even when I’m sure all of us consider ourselves to be that, makes me think about Basecamp.

A company’s internal chat should have a moderator or forbid off-topic (meaning work-related) discussions. Doing neither is naive. Basecamp was right

Apple employees petition demanding investigation into ‘misogynistic’ new hire

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