Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on why he finally quit

https://mashable.com/article/google-engineer-manu-cornet-comics-critique

by TeMPOraL • 5 years ago

311 268 5 years ago

Apparently he has moved to Twitter due to “fewer ethical qualms.” Never mind his new employer has built one of the most polarizing and divisive platforms in the history of humankind.

Sometimes I don’t know where to begin processing people like this.

stavros• 5 years ago

Maybe his old employer was worse?

Loic• 5 years ago

I will quote him directly:

"The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing," Cornet said. "The thicker the gap is, the easier it is to point out that hypocrisy."

Maybe Twitter internally completely recognize the bad side of the platform and work accordingly.

I personally make a big chunk of my money from oil & gas, I recognize that oil & gas for transportation should die, but I know we need oil & gas for materials at the moment (but should reduce, reduce and reduce the use as fast as possible). Sometimes part of your work is not all unicorns, pink and friendly, having the honesty to deal with it and not being hypocrite about it is really important.

quicklime• 5 years ago

That doesn't really make sense to me. Isn't it better to be a hypocrite and be evil only some of the time, rather than be consistently evil all of the time?

I don't believe that Twitter has worked out how to act accordingly to the bad side of their platform. There's still a ton of misinformation, it's still incredibly polarizing, and IMO it has a worse overall impact than Google.

dojiav• 5 years ago

Yup pointing at hypocrisy and contradictions is much simpler than resolving them.

The more complex problems get, the less likely anyone in the room is going to solve them any time soon(Bounded Rationality) . So beyond a point laughing at that reality becomes counter productivs. It just gets people to spend more time and energy reacting, defending, justifying and hiding things.

Bottom line - if you want to do something about a very complex problem, pick a small sub problem within it to work on. That approach has better odds of producing outcomes than poking fun at people who have bit off more than they can chew.

Zababa• 5 years ago

I personally make a big chunk of my money from oil & gas, I recognize that oil & gas for transportation should die, but I know we need oil & gas for materials at the moment (but should reduce, reduce and reduce the use as fast as possible).

I've been thinking about that recently, and was wondering if not accepting a job in """bad""" industries (bad is a gross oversimplification here covering things like oil, gas, tobacco, weapons, these kind of things) is in fact running away from your duty. If you don't take a job in these industries, other people will, and these people may be worse than you. Maybe the best moral option is to in fact try as hard as you can to get an influencial position in the industry to promote energy transition, reduce harm from smoking, etc.

I apologize again for the oversimplification of grouping together these different industries, my point here is to group what people think usually as "morally bad", not to pass judgment on people who work in those industries.

Quequau• 5 years ago

I once met a man who worked in oil & gas who was a pretty vocal (and frankly, unpleasant) "young Earth creationist". As he was in a relationship with someone in my professional social-circle at the time I wound up coming across him on a regular basis for a couple of years.

I don't believe I have had a more uncomfortable, baffling, and frustrating conversation in my sixty years of existence than the one I had with him at social gathering where after him bringing it up, I asked him how he balanced his work and religion.

akudha• 5 years ago

We can't quit oil & gas overnight, the world will come to a standstill. But if Twitter were to disappear overnight, it would have zero effect on humanity, isn't it? In other words, he could have joined any number of good companies making good products, he chose to join Twitter. That is interesting to note.

ksec• 5 years ago

Sometimes part of your work is not all unicorns, pink and friendly, having the honesty to deal with it and not being hypocrite about it is really important.

Which is something sorely missing from the current discourse and media, no one is saint. But I guess the media or most public don't care,

"The public aren't interested in affairs. All they want to know is who are the goodies and who are the baddies."

- Sir Humphrey Appleby

"The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing," Cornet said. "The thicker the gap is, the easier it is to point out that hypocrisy."

I mean it has been there since Day one. The first time I read about "Do No Evil" in the early 2000s was when my hypocrisy radar on red alert. And the insane amount of PR shit / submarine articles [1] that came in the next few years before they IPO. They were so righteous to the point everything that was in their way was evil. Indeed, Most evil are created by those who think themselves as so righteous. They stopped talking about it from early 2010s and stopped using the tagline in 2015.

But the "Do No Evil" disease or ideology still managed to spread across Silicon Valley and Tech Industry. These PR shit managed to dialled to a whole new level, Uber, Snapchat and even Apple once Steve Jobs' RDF was no longer there to shield them. ( And became more apparent once Katie Cotton retired ) I sometimes wonder if those PR people managed to jump from one company to another.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

the_dune_13• 5 years ago

They were first social media to respond to January insurrection. The key word is fewer, not zero.

formerly_proven• 5 years ago

I don't like Twitter but I suspect the effects of Twitter are often exaggerated because everything is public by default, whereas in other networks a lot of stuff happens in groups/channels by default, where it is not immediately visible, so it is simply less amenable to OSINT, scraping and media analysis.

In any case, between Twitter and Google it is quite obvious who is doing more harm to more people in more places and more ways. Twitter may still be a net-negative overall (in fact I believe it is) - a lot of stuff is.

concordDance• 5 years ago

it is quite obvious who is doing more harm to more people in more places

To me it's "obviously" Twitter, so I'm quite curious how you came to the conclusion it's Google.

vosper• 5 years ago

Twitter is actually under-rated, IMO. It’s public, popular, and all the data is for sale for custom analytics. So journalists are in there amplifying tweets into other media. Companies (many/most of the medium and big ones) are desperately monitoring Twitter (Reddit is gaining) because it’s the only window they have into what people say about them. Government agencies are doing the same, for reasons ranging from vaccine disinformation research to protecting senior politicians (and post offices).

fatjokes• 5 years ago

Yeah, obviously Twitter for me.

Twitter is a clout machine. It is purely for brand building and very little else. After all, there's only so much you can do in a hundred-or-so characters/words/whatever it is now. The result is a huge incentive to take extreme positions to generate as much noise and controversy as possible.

jsbdk• 5 years ago

Some people are absolutely rotten and obsessed with politics.

billllll2• 5 years ago

I'm always a bit baffled at people ascribing morals to these big companies.

I'd be willing to bet that many Twitter execs would kill to switch places with Google, ethical quandary and all. In that case, it's not that Twitter is more "ethical" than Google because of superior morals, it's because Twitter has not had the same opportunities to trade morals for profit.

I'm not saying this out of moral superiority (I worked for Google), I just think it's silly to expect companies to do the right thing without a strong incentive to.

mns• 5 years ago

Because these companies are pretending to be moral, usually until it affects the financial side of things, after that, anything goes, if people don't find out.

bjourne• 5 years ago

It seems to me that this guy has spent years thinking about ethical and moral workplace questions and that you have spent a whole two seconds coming up with a sappy zinger. He may have had good reasons to prefer Twitter over Google, these reasons may have been clearly explained, and they may have been glossed over by you.

Mentoio6• 5 years ago

From an ethical point of few, twitter doesn't matter and didn't add anything real to our socieity.

Google did: Maps, Android, gmail (yes gmail gave free https email accounts when others not even enforced https), skin cancer research, Alphafold, co2 neutral datacenters, pushing now for 24/7 reneweable.

Google literally changed the world.

In my personal opinion, Google would be worth to stay and try to change google 'back' or whatever is going wrong.

What has twitter changed for anyone? Srsly? The reacted when Trump became president they didn't forsee or work on mechanism to fix sharing and multiplying fake news. Other companies like Facebook for example are a global net negative as well. I'm seeing much more fakenewes and uneducated people on facebook commenting as antivaxer than anything else.

I can't understand why you would go to twitter and rant about ethical and moral workplace questions.

blub• 5 years ago

If took them years to figure that out, perhaps they weren't interested in finding it out in the first place. A good paycheck, plenty of perks and the thrill of working on products with hundreds of millions of customers at global scale can go a long way towards suppressing moral qualms.

But one can't dismiss the fact that Twitter and Google are cut from the same mass surveillance cloth, with the former just being smaller.

Aunche• 5 years ago

It seems to me that this guy has spent years thinking about ethical and moral workplace questions and that you have spent a whole two seconds coming up with a sappy zinger.

Ironically, these are the exact same objections I have with the Goomics. They take complicated issues and reduces them to "DAE think corporations evil?"

thinkingemote3• 5 years ago

these reasons may have been clearly explained

they were not. the "zinger" was a quote from the article

thinkingemote3• 5 years ago

To understand it just look at the complaints of tech workers. The majority of them consider internal actions as grossly more important than any outside effects. Thus, if the hiring policy is progressive and if they have good HR, and a happy working life and if the managers don't trip up with certain internal political issues this far outstrips any negative actual real world effects. Walk outs of employees happen due to internal drama, not any external actions. Twitter therefore is a great, comfortable, safe and inclusive place to work even if history might prove it to be more damaging to mental health and physical security of the world than Google.

Now, the new tech unions that are occurring in a few companies give some hope against this hypocrisy as they all seem to have a line or two in their mission statements which speak up about shaping the direction and action of their employers. I hope they live up to their promise.

thwower234234• 5 years ago

Never mind his new employer has built one of the most polarizing and divisive platforms in the history of humankind.

Pretty much all the FAANGs operate in pretty much the same way. Google just has a very benign image, even while they ban people left, right and center on Youtube, censor search results, and delete adsense accounts of inconvenient news orgs.

It's a bit ironic that I've to now use Yandex, from "repressive" Russia no less, in order to access sites and information not approved by the Ministry of Truth in the "freedom-loving" lands of the yee United States.

If you know your "banned, unapproved, history" (the kind even Chomsky would admonish you for), you'd also know this is not new for either the US, or its predecessor, the British Empire.

Hypocrisy, you tempt us, and protect us so.

peteretep• 5 years ago

How do Apple, Amazon, and Netflix operate like this?

pdimitar5• 5 years ago

Simple, he doesn't want to let go of a big wage so makes some ethical compromises. As if we all don't do the same, and I am not sure what value does your comment bring to the discussion because almost none of us can afford to bring 100% of their ethics into their work.

If you actually can, I am happy for you, but do recognize that then you'd be in a tiny minority.

sebzim4500• 5 years ago

I think the impact of Twitter on public discourse is massively overstated. Facebook and Youtube are both way more significant.

In general I think platforms where you the user explicitly indicates their interest are less socially destructive than ones where an algorithm guesses. At least that way you are aware of what bubble you are in, and can relatively easily see what other people are seeing. On Facebook there is basically no way to do this.

Unfortunately social networking sites in the latter category are much more profitable, hence why e.g. reddit is moving in that direction.

afavour2• 5 years ago

If your concern is polarising and divisive platforms I don’t know how you could ever give Google a free pass for YouTube. Its recommendation algorithm is a radicalisation program that targets divisive videos by design because they get higher engagement. It’s not something they intended but they’ve done near nothing to stop it. And in terms of number of people it reaches YouTube eclipses Twitter easily.

viztor• 5 years ago

There is a huge gap between building weapons and building conversational platform...

pessimizer• 5 years ago

Twitter is just a bad website. Google terrifies me on surveillance, freedom of speech, and the general destruction of the internet. Twitter just annoys me. The problem with twitter is too much freedom of speech, and that's not a problem that I'm concerned about.

If your ethical compass is just bad/good, I could see how this would be confusing.

leesec2• 5 years ago

Sometimes I don't know where to start with people assuming outright that a social media platform is evil.

ryan93• 5 years ago

A lot of people in this sub thread who feel entitled to only speech they like being on the internet.

radmuzom• 5 years ago

Down-voted. Twitter has built a platform which has allowed me, a nobody, to connect with people who are famous or experts in their field and directly interact with them. Earlier efforts to use e-mail had 0 success as most likely my mails would go to their spam.

It has allowed me to discover people who would find it very difficult to make themselves heard if there was no central platform where they could post their views and allow any random person on the internet to follow them. Using Twitter, I have discovered a lot of communities which I did not know even exist.

It is probably the only useful platform in existence today. Just because some people use it for hate means nothing to me.

jmcgough• 5 years ago

As mentioned in the article, they're available on https://goomics.net/

Super cute comics, though there's a lot of references to internal Google culture or figures that I had to look up at times to get the joke.

jrhouston• 5 years ago

I like how it starts out as quirky jokes about tech minutiae and slowly mutates into bitter social criticism directed at the company and its leadership, presumably as the old systems of power crept in and eroded the idealism that was present when they joined the company.

raxxorrax5• 5 years ago

Heh, it certainly visualized his decline in hope very well. Google was a cool company once and some of its products and tech still are, but you simply have to manage your expectations when a companies goes public. It stops belonging to the people working there.

Also, companies have proven to be inept to tackle social problems, even if they genuinely wanted to.

allenu3• 5 years ago

I would love if it was possible to just track general industry sentiment over the same time period. As someone who was working at another big tech company nearly over the same duration he was at Google, I myself noticed it became "less fun and exciting" to be in tech within that large company. However, some of that is undoubtedly just a part of getting older and becoming less naive about the world.

bruckie• 5 years ago

Manu's printed books have commentary that explains all of the culture/context in each included Goomics episode. https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AManu+Cornet&...

Mentoio6• 5 years ago

I have to say, that plenty of those videos describe already a level of quality a lot of people probably never get.

Complaining about taking a paycut of 10-30% when you want to move while some topshot person is allowed to move without issues, might not be 'fair' but holy shit is that life far away from normal reality.

And this discord is what makes it very hard to read for me.

Traubenfuchs• 5 years ago

Maybe Google (and other companies in general) should take better care of checking for cultural fit before ending up with those "timebombs". There are plenty of Google level engineers out there who'd be proud to work for the military, consider strong border protection a good thing for themselves and their country and don't view everything from the gender angle.

akomtu• 5 years ago

For a reason unknown to me, Google (and other big tech firms), has to pick a political camp and strictly follow their agenda, key points of which you've just enumerated. I don't really know what would happen if Google said "we support strong borders and military from now on", perhaps an antitrust suit?

knownjorbist2• 5 years ago

"Strong borders" aka "preserve the needlessly byzantine immigration process". Untold suffering has been imbued upon those lacking the fortune to bypass it and we are all poorer as a result.

Cipater• 5 years ago

You want Google and the like to run ideological tests when hiring?

Seriously?

If their tests selected for a differing ideology from the points you state, would you be happy?

fleddr• 5 years ago

You're not getting it, they already do.

He's saying that there may be centrists or conservative people with Google level engineering skills that have no issue with things like ICE or military contracts.

I'd imagine such characters would not be popular inside the company, and best shut up. Hence, you could argue the culture already pre-selects for progressive ideology.

The "women in tech" memo is a perfect example of it. Sure enough, it was clumsy and likely full of inaccuracies. But the core thesis is hardly harmful or controversial. It was saying that women have less "tendency" to be interested in hardcore tech, therefore aggressively enforcing quotas on this representation is something you could at the very least debate.

The memo doesn't even classify as specifically right-wing. It's just a counter point against how to achieve diversity and how far to take that goal, and which method to use.

The consequence is that he's fired on the spot.

So that proves the point. Centrists and conservatives, or anybody challenging the most progressive views can work at Google yet best shut up. Ideological selection is already in place.

dudul• 5 years ago

Isn't it already the case at many companies? I thought that was what the magical umbrella term "culture fit" was for.

At my 2 previous jobs, I was explicitly asked during interview what my position was on "diversity" and "equity". To this day, I still don't know what that had to do with me writing code.

shadowgovt5• 5 years ago

That's the tension Google is facing internally right now. Having traded on "Don't Be Evil" for over a decade, Google has already established a culture.

It's not the employees that are a bad culture fit; the employees are the culture. It's these projects.

This problem will resolve itself over time though. If Google continues to lean into these projects, it will self-select for people who have no ethical qualms with them. But for over a decade, such selection was unnecessary.

notacoward2• 5 years ago

This is not a cultural-fit issue. Over 14 years, both the company culture and the employee's attitudes change quite a lot. Even an absolutely perfect fit at time of hire is likely not to be that way for long. It would be amazing if this didn't happen, especially with the kind of growth Google has had during that period.

I'd go even further and say that the FAANGs plan for this "time bomb" effect. They hire mostly impressionable kids, and the rate at which they hire is based on an expectation of short tenures (even by the historical standards of this young industry). Their famously high compensation levels are not just about attracting talent but also about keeping that tenure from being even shorter. They know that people's misgivings and frustrations will add up over time. They know that the "price of their souls" in Cornet's graph will keep increasing. Everything from their onboarding processes to their review/promotion processes to their engineering standards are designed to reduce and/or make up for this kind of attrition.

Hiring people with a particular kind of politics doesn't make any sense at all for them, whether that kind is enlightened or yours. The only kind of culture they select for is around non-political issues such as technical approaches and work/collaboration styles.

tayo42• 5 years ago

I wish I was ballsy enough to criticize my employer and workplace like this.

premium-gecko• 5 years ago

If you feel any need to do that, you should probably consider looking for some different job. There's a karmic burden for making a living in an immoral way.

VRay• 5 years ago

Yeah, man, fire up the last "Who's Hiring" thread and jump ship. This industry is so friggin hot, it doesn't make any sense to stay in a job you hate

Talking shit about management and rousing the rabble isn't really a great move in any case. They might have legitimate reasons for doing what they're doing, and you're just going to hurt everyone's morale

Kosirich2• 5 years ago

Sorry if it's not thread related, but a while ago someone posted some kind of "comic" where the author tried to explain all the elements a good project visual/war room should have. If someone has a link I would really appreciate it.

frou_dh• 5 years ago

Possibly this: http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/

Kosirich2• 5 years ago

That's it! Thank you very much.

dshpala• 5 years ago

I'm interested to know about his engineering contributions.

shadowgovt5• 5 years ago

He worked on Gmail at one point.

https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/03/faces-of-gmail-manu-cor...

everyone2• 5 years ago

I'm frankly amazed he quit and wasn't fired, and that google allowed him to be openly critical.

I guess he already had a following early on? and if they dissapeared him later it would have looked bad?

It's like there is literally no developer support from google when your app gets taken down for no reason, unless you have a big twitter following and complain there, then they fix it.

billllll2• 5 years ago

From my experience, there is plenty of room for open dissension at Google. One of the reasons they stopped doing all-hands (aka TGIF) is because people kept bringing up unrelated controversies in protest (Maven, Dragonfly, etc).

The flip side is the execs are really good at dodging and ignoring you. It doesn't matter if it's an ethical decision or if it's something as simple as "why the hell are we making another messaging app?" you will be allowed (within reason) to scream your head off because you will be ignored.

neilv• 5 years ago

If Cornet has spent 14 years at Google, his basis for comparison might be mainly to time earlier at Google.

While perspectives on change over time can be very valuable, is it harder to assess where the grass is greener?

Industry outside Google isn't the same as when he left. And he's also been at one place long enough, that some goodness might be so familiar that he doesn't realize it.

mft_• 5 years ago

His point about the hypocrisy of leaders strikes a chord with my experiences of my employer.

It almost seems like an unavoidable aspect of seniority: as though one day after a promotion you get taken into a dark room and taught the new corporate language, and how to not answer questions directly.

raxxorrax5• 5 years ago

People think CEOs are kings of publicly traded companies. They aren't, they are employees themselves that are most exposed to market and government demands.

You have the responsibility for economic success in the name of all other employees. That severely limits your ability to just be nice for a moment.

Andrew_nenakhov• 5 years ago

Kings are generally much less free in their decisions than most people think. Even the absolutist monarch like Louis XIV had to consider a lot of factors in his decisions to simply keep his head on the shoulders. Being king is dangerous: his grandfather was assassinated, and his grandson's son literally lost his head on a guillotine.

salawat• 5 years ago

It's all fun and games until you're the one who has to pick up everyone else's slack.

Self-determination is the luxury of the responsibility-less, the foolish, or the oblivious. The more and more of business I get exposed to, the more I realize the level of interconnection and constraint propagation is so high, it really does require an eyes fully open approach. That means making some seriously hard decisions sometimes.

trhway2• 5 years ago

as though one day after a promotion you get taken into a dark room and taught the new corporate language, and how to not answer questions directly.

remove the dark room and that is exactly what happens, at least according to my manager friends from several BigCo-s. And not only "how to not answer questions directly", there is a lot of what can be summarized as how to manipulate the employees, etc.

underwater2• 5 years ago

From a different angle: why do almost all people who assume power change the way they communicate? Alternatively, why do candid people not attain power?

The answer is probably that being candid makes you vulnerable. This is a guy who would systematically attack management for their decisions. Yet he failed to connect the dots between his actions and theirs.

In the real world you'll frequently find situations where there is no unequivocally good answer, but a decision needs to be made. In new companies leadership has more blind trust from employees that they can rely on. In mature companies where staff frequently challenge decisions it is easier for management to just present a smaller target and give non answers.

allenu3• 5 years ago

Regarding changing the way they communicate, I think some of it is just a natural filter that gets applied to people who move up. At some point, you notice that the people who move up the management chain are more "diplomatic" and don't really reveal what they actually think, at least not in public. They toe the company line.

People who are too candid can't be controlled and can't be trusted to do what may be in the company's best interests. If you don't agree with toeing the company line, you either leave or aren't promoted. At some point, a company needs its management to move in lock-step, otherwise it can't predictably meet its goals.

rutierut• 5 years ago

While Cornet's comics included plenty of critiques, he also found they were sometimes a way to have a positive impact within the company. After Google employee James Damore circulated his memo that included many sexist statements about the "natural abilities" of female vs. male engineers

I think this is misleading and to me makes it sound like James Damore is some sort of male supremacist, memo here: firedfortruth.com

corty2• 5 years ago

Damore is a taboo topic, just leave it be. Discussing it will only hurt your karma, on HN and even more so out there.

blacktriangle• 5 years ago

Pretty sure the whole point of imaginary internet points is so that you can pop people's happy little bubbles of denial when a chance comes along, and James Damore's letter is spot on in that regard.

realslimjd• 5 years ago

That's exactly what James Damore is.

d3ntb3ev1l• 5 years ago

Twitter cares and is honest about fixing a very hard problem. He’s right for moving. Google only cares when people call them out on it

jensensbutton• 5 years ago

A problem of their own making.

everyone2• 5 years ago

He comics seem to criticize giant wasteful stupid evil bureaucracies... But he worked for google for years and now moved to twitter.. If he's genuinely critical why does he continue working for mega-corporations?

andi999• 5 years ago

They pay well?

notacoward2• 5 years ago

Twitter's visibility might be high, but as a company they're tiny compared to Google (about 1/20 by headcount). They're also several years younger as a company. Those differences could have a pretty big effect on how far down the "mega-corp bureaucracy curve" they are, so maybe compare Twitter today to Google in 2013 (less than half way through Cornet's tenure there). Or maybe he sees a genuine difference in corporate culture, or in technical content, or in work from home policies, etc. How you feel about any one thing at a company can color how you feel about it in general, even if other aspects are actually the same.

jatins• 5 years ago

What I admire about Google is that you can openly publish these without fearing retribution (or at least the old timers could)

At most places I have worked, you'll be fired for this kind of snarky criticism.

commandlinefan4• 5 years ago

Well, they did fire Damore for what amounted to a lot less actual criticism. It seems like he just got away with offending the "safe" targets.

cauliflower992• 5 years ago

'After Google employee James Damore circulated his memo that included many sexist statements about the "natural abilities" of female vs. male engineers...'

Really? Do people (who actually read the study) really think it was sexist? It stated the obvious - that there are differences in interests in men compared to women by aggregate.

eloisant• 5 years ago

please don't start this again

sanity314154• 5 years ago

False narratives should be challenged.

textgel10• 5 years ago

No, we aren't going to just politely allow you to enable slander.

sanity314154• 5 years ago

I read his study at the time and it said no such thing, he was vilifed for questioning an orthodoxy that said any difference in representation must necessarily be caused by discrimination. Respected psychologists like Steven Pinker agreed with Damore.

This guy either didn't read it or he's easily influenced by cancel mobs.

mStreamTeam• 5 years ago

He left Google to go to Twitter, the HQ of cancel mobs

strangecyan• 5 years ago

Yes, both the tone and the words on paper were sexist. I would give it another look and try and read it in the most empathic light you can, you might reflect on it.

sanity314154• 5 years ago

I assume you don't mean empathy for its author. Can you quote the sexist part? Please be specific.

Here is the original memo for your convenience: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

thinkingemote3• 5 years ago

It's important to read the stated reason from the company for his firing. He was fired for spreading "unhelpful stereotypes". These differences might be obvious and natural to most of the world but they are unhelpful and not welcome in that company. The company wanted to fight against the stereotypes as they considered those a barrier. It's important to realise that the company in that episode never fought to properly and logically argue against the stereotypes and why they were factually false versus others arguing why they were true because that would have been much more troublesome. Much discussions on HN seem to get stuck around the logic and truth nature of the issue - where the actual stated reasons is all about what's "helpful" or not.

In other words, if enough people feel something is sexist then it's in a company's best interest to agree with them.

textgel10• 5 years ago

That...changes nothing?

It just demonstrates a collective insanity at the organisation in question.

They're welcome to put their heads in the sand and claim whatever irrational bs they desire is "unhelpful" and "sexist" but that doesn't make it so.

flavius29663• 5 years ago

That was the whole point of the debacle, though. IIRC Google noticed that what they were currently doing was not bringing more women onboard, so they asked some of their employees for opinions. Damore wrote his, which circulated internally for a while with no issues. Then it was leaked and the cancel mob got to him. Only then Google fired him. It wasn't like he was trying to promote these opinions like a googler Alex Jones, at least not from what I know.

I think firing Damore for an opinion shows what cowards they are and everything that is wrong with the current woke movement: don't talk about new ideas or possible solutions, don't open up uncomfortable discussions, only bow to mob led slogans otherwise you're burned at the stake.

Chris20487• 5 years ago

My old accountant maintained that $1+$1=$2, which was very harmful to my finances. I fired them immediately for such unhelpful stereotypes.

My new accountant agrees that $1+$1=$3, creating a much less hostile work environment. S/He even practises intersectionality wrt profit vs debt - me and my employees have never been happier!

UncleMeat3• 5 years ago

Now we use the word “study” for it? The text preemptively claims that people will reject it because they are too politically correct. It was never presented as a neutral scientific analysis. From the beginning it was a slanted criticism of Google’s hiring practices.

textgel10• 5 years ago

I don't really get what you're arguing? This seems to be just semantics on a 3rd party comment on a forum.

The text preemptively claims that people will reject it because they are too politically correct.

The text was right.

From the beginning it was a slanted criticism of Google’s hiring practices.

Yes, how does this relate to the original point?

CRConrad4• 5 years ago

The text preemptively claims that people will reject it because they are too politically correct.

Yeah, so? You say that as if the fact that a lot of people did exactly that for exactly that reason somehow shows some flaw with the text.

ausbah• 5 years ago

I personally viewed the statement as verging-on-sexism because the I think the extent to which gender disparities are explained by "biological differences" is still much smaller than plain old discrimination

I don't think he's evil or sexist for writing what he did, but I strongly disagree with what he wrote and even more disappointed he went on to become a poster child for Fox News

derangedHorse• 5 years ago

Yeah but he was pretty liberal with his conclusions he claimed were derived from data. It's pretty easy to see flaws in his arguments like how he inflated the behavioral differences between genders, and his inability to thoroughly consider differences being caused by societal factors (nature vs. nurture).

I think the main issue with his memo is the implication that diversity efforts were, at the time, problematic. The truth is, with such low diversity numbers even with the diversity programs, it's likely that any subpar candidates admitted probably equaled the subpar candidates admitted into Google at large. The numbers for gender diversity are even more skewed when viewed through the lens of the engineering department (which is the one relevant to the memo), which is unfortunately not available from the google diversity site like it used to be.

You can see the diversity breakdown for yourself here: https://diversity.google/annual-report/representation/

You can also see a longer analysis Damore's liberal assumptions here: https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

textgel10• 5 years ago

Looks like the wired analysis and your own views can be summarised as "we don't understand everything about psychology", and that "biological differences barely matter, it largely comes down to nurture instead of nature." One is worthless noise, the other demonstrably false.

Whats more, this has had progressives crawling all over it with arguments including "Just allow the slander to go on unanswered", "its someone else's definition of sexist so he's sexist", "I heard he does other evil things" and attempts to distract from the point.

At this stage vaguery without clear examples can be dismissed as nothing at best or marked as evidence of bad faith debate driven by religious compulsion at worst.

commandlinefan4• 5 years ago

he was pretty liberal with his conclusions he claimed were derived from data

Well, ok, fair enough, but if that's the case then the correct response was, "I can see why you think that, but have you considered..." not immediate banishment.

Izkata• 5 years ago

and his inability to thoroughly consider differences being caused by societal factors (nature vs. nurture).

The goal was to find how to make the job more attractive to female developers. If the difference exists, then in this context the distinction does not matter.

rendall5• 5 years ago

I have come to the conclusion that we humans have a very difficult time perceiving reality once our tribe has decided something. I'm sure it saved our ancestors from ostracism and exile. I have no doubt that some people read that memo thoroughly and are sincerely convinced it is sexist while being unable to point to anything sexist in the memo. Scary. Humans are scary apes.

Chris20487• 5 years ago

But it isn't "our tribe" - it's specifically the "blue church" pushing a very intentional narrative against an easy target.

That's to say: This isn't just the chaotic whisperings of twitter, but many complicit media outlets repeating this.

fareesh• 5 years ago

Came here and CTRL+F Damore, glad I wasn't the only one disappointed with that framing.

We are now living in an age where it is simply not possible to discuss some topics without someone twisting the discussion into one of the various deadly sins, and everyone who engages becomes guilty of it by association.

For example, in the USA if you are in favor of less immigration, the assumption is that you are operating from a place of xenophobia and racism, because there is no other possible explanation in the universe from having those views. If you state your views coherently, demonstrated that the concerns are rooted in other factors entirely - then the bogeymen of subconscious and unconscious biases and inability to confront deeply rooted bigotry and revealed as the causes, much like the spirits of evil who possessed you when you said things to criticize orthodoxy in the past.

Likewise if one wants to discuss topics like representation across groups, one is inevitably branded a heretic for a heterodox view, regardless of the reasoning.

It's really terrible that this kind of attitude is so widespread in the west.

cauliflower992• 5 years ago

EDIT: Someone rightfully pointed out that it was a memo, not a study.

ggggtez2• 5 years ago

"study"

It wasn't a study, it was basically a MGTOW chain letter. Anyone who has experience in science knows that the arguments it purported to show were cherry picked nonsense. A conclusion looking for evidence.

And yes, obviously people read it that way. He was fired because he wouldn't stop arguing about it, remember?

People acting like sharing a "study" that [minorities] are intellectually inferior is just normal behavior for an engineer. Who the hell does that?

textgel10• 5 years ago

And yes, obviously people read it that way. He was fired because he wouldn't stop arguing about it, remember?

Various people keep claiming that but there doesn't appear to be any proof of it.

People acting like sharing a "study" that [minorities] are intellectually inferior is just normal behavior for an engineer.

Quote the part where he says this.

elzbardico3• 5 years ago

We are not supposed to discuss this. Please just accept it as a taboo topic, not only here on HN but elsewhere too. Probably even Damore would like to be forgotten

potamic• 5 years ago

I'm sure it was a massive decision after 14 years. I wonder if he thought about whether his comics have surpassed his career in importance. He was in a unique position to criticise and publicise mis-doings of the most powerful company in the world and he appeared to have the patronage to do so. It's a very privileged position with the potential to really influence many things. In a way, I feel sad for this loss, but it is a very personal decision in the end and one must respect it for whatever it is. Hope someone else will continue the torch because - "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to say nothing."

noisem4ker2• 5 years ago

It seems to me the author's divergence of views may be due to his increasing focus on politics, with a particular orientation that explicitly shows through the comics. It may just be a reflection of what's happening at scale in Silicon Valley's tech world, a movement which Twitter, which the author joined most likely not coincidentally, is at the forefront of.

proto-n• 5 years ago

As someone from a different continent and not really familiar with the topic, are you willing to be a bit more specific? What particular orientation?

noisem4ker2• 5 years ago

Sure. Referring to the topics mentioned by the article: the one that is anti-military, pro-labour, anti-sexism/misogyny, pro-migration. On the 1-bit political spectrum of the USA, this would be the left. I'm convinced, though, that this is a special breed of progressivism and political activism, especially popular on the west coast. I'm not from the USA either and this is just what I understand from the outside of it.

sentinel2• 5 years ago

Surprised they didn't fire him.

trhway2• 5 years ago

Not about that specific case. If i remember correctly some people mentioned what Google may not give a refresher, and that is like cutting your comp several times down, a very clear message removing the reason to stay there without any need to actually fire.

sentinel2• 5 years ago

Makes sense. I guess from a legal standpoint that's less risky than outright firing someone and getting slapped with a "retaliation" lawsuit...

teddyh• 5 years ago

His comics: https://bonkersworld.net/

wombatmobile• 5 years ago

Software engineer Manu Cornet says Google went from being "like Disneyland" to like any other profit-driven company.

Presumably he means the fantasy of Disneyland, and not the corporation that owns it.

He raises a larger question, which is how these soulless, ethically barren profit seeking entities are able to take over everything we value as human beings, and turn them into something else.

NoblePublius• 5 years ago

How much of his unethical Google stock did he donate to charity?

pdimitar5• 5 years ago

"Maybe we were just a bit naive," Cornet said.

They likely were, and think of me what you like but I've noticed the same with most Americans I've known. Not sure why that is but apparently there's some good amount of propaganda going on in the USA and people apparently believe it. Meanwhile people have to pay $5000 after an ambulance picks them up. Or $90000 for semi-trivial medical procedures.

I believe asking yourself "is my country really like I believe it is?" is a good food for thought even it's a bit sideways to this here topic at hand.

On topic:

I can sympathize with the author. I know what it is to have been a long time in a company; it becomes much more than a workplace. You have friends, you even have people you invite to your Sunday barbecues. It's also very likely that a number of internal processes are going smoother for you because you know whom to ping and what exactly to write in a form so your stuff gets done quicker. You have job stability and unless you are rocking the boat too much your seat is likely 99% safe.

All of those become true stoppers when you start pondering leaving. They pull you back and make you doubt yourself and your idea of switching company.

But unlike a number of commenters here I find nothing hypocritical about the decision to go to Twitter. We don't know how Twitter operates internally; maybe it's still better than Google. Or maybe they are still after FAANG level of wages so are ready to make some ethical compromises for them?

In any case, immediately discounting somebody's opinion on a corporation because they joined another corporation misses a lot of context, is flamey and non-constructive and almost smells like a paid troll, and is something I don't expect HN to condone. But sadly, here we go, it's the top comment here.

blueboo• 5 years ago

But unlike a number of commenters here I find nothing hypocritical about the decision to go to Twitter…

It’s not just about which is less ethical or hypocritical. These are imperfect organisations filled with people who want to have a positive impact, and this person may reasonably believe that a fresh start or a particular role positions them better to make the impact they want to have.

pdimitar5• 5 years ago

Agreed. I've been that person as well, trying to enact positive change from the inside.

prions• 5 years ago

You are not immune to propaganda

pdimitar5• 5 years ago

Of course I'm not. I realized this some years ago and started actively trying to prevent it. But I'm sure I'm buying a propaganda that I shouldn't, even today.

ckarmann• 5 years ago

They likely were, and think of me what you like but I've noticed the same with most Americans I've known.

I am probably misunderstanding what you say, but Cornet has grown up in France, and is probably very aware that health care cost in the US is not a normal thing since he comes from a country where it is considerably cheaper if not free.

His naiveté was about the nature of Google and how he thought a giant corporation basing their revenue on ads and collecting information could be a positive force in the world and not abuse its power. It seems to me his gripe is about the hypocrisy, which in a sense make it even harder to fix the company: if people denies the company ethics problems, you can be sure they are not going to get better.

Twitter in that sense has never promised to not be evil. You can't be naive about its ethics because you just have to doom-scroll the app for an hour to feel bad about it.

pdimitar5• 5 years ago

His naiveté was about the nature of Google and how he thought a giant corporation basing their revenue on ads and collecting information could be a positive force in the world and not abuse its power.

I agree with your refinement. Admittedly the first part of my comment was a rant on a bigger topic that rubs me the wrong way every now and then -- with the slight clarification that to me "an American" isn't "USA-born", it's more like "has lived in USA for a long time".

It seems to me his gripe is about the hypocrisy

I think so too but then again, a big company changing ethics is also smart enough to know they have to peddle certain propaganda at their more naive hard workers. Sadly it has been the case ever since written history and it seems to be a general weakness of the human brain: we can trade things in our lives (physical and mental health, personal happiness, alone time, leisure time etc.) for some "bigger cause".

People are especially vulnerable to these "bigger causes require sacrifices" propaganda when they are young. And such huge companies are run by excellent psychologists (I mean that higher management / politicians naturally are such) and they know how to manipulate those younger people.

if people denies the company ethics problems, you can be sure they are not going to get better.

Herein lies the conundrum, you are correct. And I'd point out that maybe you here are projecting some naivete: we are not ants, dude, and we don't possess collective hive-mind consciousness so we cannot ever all work together towards a common cause.

For every single programmer refusing to work due to warped company ethics there are 1000 more waiting in Africa / India / Eastern Europe / Brazil / etc. These companies' awful ethics will never disappear because the world is too big and there is always somebody who will pick up the job.

The only way out is this: that the jobs require so much expertise, experience and a surgical touch that a random hungry team from India cannot ever hope to do the job properly. And for a number of positions inside big companies this is already the case. However the temptation to hire cheaper devs is too great and the companies usually sink a lot of money in those "cheaper" devs until they realize they aren't saving any money due to reduced quality of work, huge communication overhead, general chaos and no planning, and several other such nasty problems that the cheaper dev teams always seem to carry with them.

You can't be naive about its ethics because you just have to doom-scroll the app for an hour to feel bad about it.

I am completely with you here. The thing is though, what we find bad/evil about Twitter's model is what other people absolutely LOVE about it. What can you do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

teameat• 5 years ago

He reminds me of Scott Adams, Creator of the Dilbert Cartoons started with PacBell way back and got a lot of early inspiration from that experience. Maybe this guy should consider becoming a full time cartoonist as well instead of going to work for another "evil tech giant" ?

Apocryphon3• 5 years ago

Maybe he’ll become a resident cartoonist, documenting the inner life of these tech giants through his work.

rchaud• 5 years ago

Newspapers are dead. They syndicated Adams' comics throughout the 90s and 2000s. There's no compensation and distribution model that can replace it as yet. Probably won't ever be, the future is all video.

SavageBeast• 5 years ago

The greatest rebuke one can give to an employer is to stop taking their money.

If all the sudden Company X woke up to find 30% of its staff was officially resigning at noon the same day ... well now things just might change.

I've never heard of this happening.

phpnode• 5 years ago

Basecamp came pretty close to this recently, I'm not sure whether it had a material effect on their business or future direction.

amachefe• 5 years ago

"The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing"

So folks, Keep doing evil, but keep your mouth shut.... Like Twitter.

justinclift• 5 years ago

Now that Cornet has left Google, he has made his archive of Goomics available to the public online for free ...

Not sure why the article author thinks its free.

The linked page has a sample PDF of each volume, with a bunch of Amazon "Where to buy" links under it.

lucaswoj• 5 years ago

https://goomics.net/

markus_zhang• 5 years ago

All companies are profit seeking so I don't really know where his original idea came from. I might be disillusioned by other things (e.g. did not expect a very stringent device policy) but not that. I'm glad that he moved on but I'm afraid he will be disillusioned again.

rossdavidh2• 5 years ago

So, Google does a lot of good, and a lot of harm, because it's a huge company with a lot of power. Twitter, his new employer, does essentially no good. It provides nothing that email didn't give us, except a lot more screaming and incentives towards polarizing behavior that makes us collectively stupider. That he thinks Twitter is ethically superior to Google is mind-boggling to me.

eljimmy• 5 years ago

I don't think it's fair to compare the users of Twitter's service with Google as a company. Those are two very different groups of people. One are users, one are employees.

I feel it's also worth mentioning, focusing only on the small negative groups of Twitter's public users reminds me of this comic here: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07

mandmandam3• 5 years ago

Twitter has certainly done a loooot of harm, but to be fair it has done good as well. It wouldn't have grown like it did if people found no use for it.

tolbish• 5 years ago

For a second it seemed like you were about to list the good Twitter has done.

blackbrokkoli• 5 years ago

Are you seriously implying that "people finding a use for it" is somehow proof for doing good?

Like, that's such a giant leap I struggle to even call it leap. If someone would give the perpetually drugged up guys in front of my local McDonald's a bunch of Semtex-H, I am sure they would find it quite useful, but I also doubt that the world will become a better place.

pc86• 5 years ago

Using something is different than providing good, and using something is different than finding "a use" for it.

You'd be hard pressed to name objectively positive things Twitter has done, which I imagine is why you didn't.

rossdavidh2• 5 years ago

Sometimes, people use something, even though it does them no good.

MSM• 5 years ago

I have no connection to Google, but I'm really, really, impressed that Google was okay with him sending these comics, internally, to upwards of 15 THOUSAND employees. Some of these are pretty scathing- drones in Google colors, the repeated suggestion (acknowledgement?) that the ethics are less and less of a concern, etc. If I posted something along these lines internally at my company, which I think is quite open in the grand scheme- I'd be out the door or given a stern talking to a minimum.

pumaontheprowl2• 5 years ago

Interesting. My stack ranking of unethical tech companies would have Twitter at the very top. None of the others have caused as much societal harm as Twitter. I saw research recently that as much as half of all trending topics in Turkey were manufactured by malicious actors to spread propaganda. Also, it's just an endless pit of addictive negativity. I once had a girlfriend who would browser Twitter for hours on end and was perpetually angry. Not a good way to live.

Google, on the other hand, has a bunch of products like Maps, Drive, Docs, and Meet that are legitimately helpful and useful. I would have no ethical qualms about helping to make Docs better. This is not to say Google is an ethical company in the aggregate, but there are certainly a lot of roles you could take there that would not require you to question your morality every time you start a new task.

antonzabirko2• 5 years ago

You shouldn't rank negativity as more degrading than funding war and genocide

jtmlis• 5 years ago

u can kill blow up civilians all day long, but as long you don't say the wrong word (n bomb or something else) your career will prosper.

clown world.

skrtskrt• 5 years ago

Facebook recommendation algorithms have been shown over and over to lead users toward further and further into violent right wing content and user groups.

I use Twitter a lot and my opinion is that it is a complete free for all. Misinformation yes, reinforcing your bubble if you choose to, but also getting things outside your bubble if you choose to. Blasts of information from all over the spectrum, and you kind of get to chose your own adventure, as opposed to Facebook and YouTube where the only way to go is pretty much "more right-wing, more hateful, and more violent"

GuB-42• 5 years ago

Huh, my Facebook feed is all about feminism, animal rights, and glurge. And I am not at all into that, but I guess many of my friends are, so that's what I am shown. I have a few "right wing" friends, but they are a minority, so I rarely get content like that.

It is just a bubble, it doesn't look like Facebook has any kind of bias, except to the best paying advertiser I guess.

It actually makes Facebook less "bubbly" for me. I get a variety of opinions that aren't mine, they are often controversial (controversy drives engagement), but rarely violent. Twitter and YouTube are much more targeted.

antihero• 5 years ago

perpetually angry. Not a good way to live.

Whilst it is unpleasant and not great for mental health, the world is indeed full of horrendous injustice and bad things. Whilst Twitter has it's own fair share of problems, one could argue that anger is a rational emotion to feel about the world.

Being able to switch off from all the problems and just enjoy life is quite privileged.

voakbasda• 5 years ago

Indeed. Righteous anger should be respected, but I find that any anger now gets labeled as toxic. It is okay to be angry at things that deserve your anger.

Aditya_Garg• 5 years ago

Placing the weight of the world’s injustice on your shoulders and getting angry about it is not an admirable way to live.

drobert• 5 years ago

Cornet has now begun his new job at Twitter. And while he is more hopeful about the company's ethical core, that's not prompting him to put down his pen.

So in the end money and status wins? Maybe he should make a sketch about that because less than 1 in 100 people would consider Twitter to be an ethical company. All in all Google has the upper hand of good delivered to the world compared with Twitter.

Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on why he finally quit

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