Google parts with Cloud VP over his manifesto renouncing his antisemitism

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/google-separates-with-cloud-vp-after-employees-complain-about-manifesto.html

by SirLJ • 5 years ago

100 91 5 years ago

websites2023• 5 years ago

Awadallah will land on his feet, but what signal does this send to other holders of hateful ideologies? To me, the signal is: “You can’t change. Not really. If you ever held a heterodox view, ever expressed that view in any medium at any time in you life, or were caught in our surveillance capitalist nightmare systems doing so, you’re dead to us.”

How does that inspire anyone to change their view?

VikingCoder2• 5 years ago

I think we're going to get to the point where people only share their views on sensitive manners in anonymous / pseudo-anonymous forums, so they can't be linked to you.

That's not necessarily terrible.

thesuperbigfrog• 5 years ago

> anonymous / pseudo-anonymous forums, so they can't be linked to you

Such places increasingly do not exist.

With few exceptions, practically all electronic communication can be traced.

Microphones are almost everywhere and voice recognition is very advanced.

"Privacy" increasing means that someone is paid well enough to not need to monetize your communications, but that they will still have the data ready to hand over if law enforcement comes knocking with a warrant or subpoena.

vorpalhex• 5 years ago

If your goal is to redeem people instead of punish them, it's terrible. We want people to give up hate and rejoin society.

andrewzah• 5 years ago

I think it is terrible for society in the long term. We can post anonymously for now, but that may become much more difficult in the future.

We need to encourage a society that takes words into context, and assumes good faith instead of imagining the worst possible interpretation of everything. Similarly, we need to encourage people changing their views. Casting out anyone who said something bad, ever, independent of any character growth or changes of opinion as one becomes more knowledgeable, is going to lead to people continuing to hold horrible views... just in private.

Right now there is zero incentive to publicly apologize about anything or change one's opinion because people don't care about that, they just want punitive actions taken regardless of any changes afterwards. That doesn't really help address the underlying issues of racism, -isms, etc, at all....

weezin• 5 years ago

It is an issue if those forums are echo chambers blinding people to the outside world or opposing viewpoints.

jonfw• 5 years ago

Opinions without identities are meaningless. We are increasingly living in a society where the only opinions we can attach to a human are from our families or talking heads on TV and social media.

stale20022• 5 years ago

“You can’t change. Not really.

Well, you can though. Let me tell you a different thing that it signals.

It signals, that if you hold a harmful ideology, that not only should you change to it, but that you should be ashamed enough that you will never admit that you even held these ideas in the past.

It is not that hard, for most people (emphasis on most. If you run for senate, or something, it is a different story), to simply lie and say that they never held these opinions in the past.

Incentivizing people who believe these things, to vehemently deny they every held them, doesn't sound too bad of an outcome to me.

ryan93• 5 years ago

You can literally can change, you dont have to write a linkedin post about it.

sjg007• 5 years ago

American has the fallen hero rebirth meme. It doesn't mean you get to stay where you were though and it requires a bunch of hard work and positive PR to get out of.

Has Mel Gibson recovered?

josh_today• 5 years ago

This is the type of change we need to celebrate in people not further scrutinize!

As a Jew I would love to create dialogue with a person who realized the past hate was unjust, to hear why the hate existed and more importantly to understand what opened their eyes.

It is that process that will help eliminate hate across the board. Today as a society we approach discrimination through censorship and cancel culture which unfortunately will not solve deep rooted hate.

brodouevencode4• 5 years ago

Showing grace for past sins is crucial for a heterogenous society to operate well. Let the guy be honest and open, it may encourage others to do the same and acknowledge differences.

UncleMeat4• 5 years ago

As a Jew I would love to create dialogue with a person who realized the past hate was unjust, to hear why the hate existed and more importantly to understand what opened their eyes.

There were opportunities for this to happen with this person. They did not go great.

csours2• 5 years ago

I understand that this is embarrassing to Google any way they handle it, but surely this is the worst thing to do?

To me, this is the work, the hard part of inclusion. Understanding that people are not always perfect and sometimes very flawed.

arkitaip3• 5 years ago

This is the easy solution, just fire the guy and go back to being a Happy Corporate Family.

But then again, he seems to be lacking in leadership skills if he keeps getting "misunderstood" regarding his manifesto.

Protip: your VPs should never write any kind of manifesto involving jews in any shape or form. Stick to banal business management tropes like anyone else.

hn8788• 5 years ago

I don't think him claiming he's keeps getting misunderstood is necessarily an indictment of him. Sometimes the misunderstanding comes from readers having a particular mindset, so they see everything through the lense of their preconceptions, which might not match up with what the author was thinking.

xrd2• 5 years ago

As awkward is his note was, this is a public admission that he had bigoted views and grew and is still trying to grow out of them. I wish I was a fly on the wall at Google to understand why that's not acceptable. Growing and learning is necessary and the only hope.

arkitaip3• 5 years ago

Here's what I think happened:

The Powers That Be took a short look at this drama and decided that no, this is not the hill to die on. They never are. Being perceived as tolerating antisemitism because VP Weirdo keeps getting "misunderstood" over a "manifesto"? That's not even a hill anymore, it's a grave someone dug for themselves.

underseacables2• 5 years ago

Maybe Google is taking the view that anything even remotely controversial which could cause someone to look negatively upon the company, is a cancer that must be removed immediately.

Zhenya• 5 years ago

Except Kamau Bobb, who was simply removed from Doing diversity activities at Google but still employed here.

UncleMeat4• 5 years ago

The post is not the only relevant data point here.

partiallypro2• 5 years ago

I don't understand this new culture of not allowing people to have redemption. The past isn't the present or future. People change, that is what is so problematic with "cancel culture," and digging up old tweets, etc.

howaboutnope• 5 years ago

There's just something unsustainable about an environment that demands constant atonement but actively disdains the very idea of forgiveness.

-- Elisabeth Bruenig

spicyramen2• 5 years ago

If you do it at personal level not representing a company is fine. But this dude thinks mixing politics and work is a good idea...being a VP. Clearly he lacks emotional intelligence or common sense.

partiallypro2• 5 years ago

Mixing politics and work is the new American corporate mantra (as long as its a certain strain of politics)

1024core• 5 years ago

I think there is more to the story than just his manifesto coming out. I feel like there was tension even before this incident, and this is the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

We should be encouraging such introspection and admittance of past failures. It gives people the opportunity to change. If we don't reward people for changing, they will never change!

mfer• 5 years ago

If we look at things in terms of positive and negative reinforcement this has some interesting consequences.

So, he admitted to antisemitism in the past and shared how he has grown or is growing past it. This kind of admission by him has the ability to challenge other and positively reinforce others who are in a similar situation to him. That _positive_ reinforcement for change away from antisemitism.

He was pushed out which is a form of _negative_ reinforcement. That will teach him and others not to speak out with stories of how they have changed which will limit others from positively reinforcing future change like this.

The way this influences people going forward is worth noting.

foolinaround• 5 years ago

damned if you do, damned if you don't!!

missedthecue• 5 years ago

Don't ask, don't tell: racism edition

UncleMeat4• 5 years ago

Except being racist is bad and being gay isn't.

nbvxhnvc• 5 years ago

His manifesto is a self-congratulatory virtue signal that does more to show off his prejudices that still exist and which he demonstrates zero self awareness of, so it's no surprise that it backfired.

These kinds of manifestos/confessionals on LinkedIn are so completely inappropriate. There's no reason this guy needed to ever publicly say anything on this topic no matter his intentions real or perceived, and it is absolutely predictably that he stepped in it.

mattzito2• 5 years ago

So, I'll start off by saying - I work at google, in cloud, but not for this person, I don't know anything about him, and this is my own opinion.

I think if someone had asked him at an all hands for his position on the israel palestine conflict, and he said something like:

"I grew up in a strict Egyptian Muslim household, indoctrinated to hate Israel and Jews, and it wasn't until I was exposed to jewish people and became friends with them that I realized how toxic those ideas were, and I regret that I ever held those ideas and no longer do. And now I hope that everyone on both sides of that conflict can have the same realizations that I did, and realize that we are all human and just want to live in peace"

I don't think it would have been an issue, or at least not to this degree. It's possible to acknowledge a past flaw, talk about how you've taken steps to address, and move on in a productive way. But that's not what he did.

If you read the entire LinkedIn post, it's pretty cringey. It starts off going deep into how much he hated Jews, then talks about how long it took him to not hate Jews, then he takes a sharp right turn to point out that because he is .1% Ashkenazi according to 23andme, he's technically also Jewish, so isn't this whole thing just an idea? Aren't these political and cultural boundaries just ridiculous ideas we need to get past? Then he takes a swing at Zionism that I don't quite follow, and he wraps things up.

First off, no one asked him to share his thoughts on the subject. Second, it's easy to find someone attempting to co-opt your identity via a saliva DNA test offensive. Third, by trying to talk about how made-up these groups and identities are, it can come across as erasing them. Fourth, and finally, his political views on solving the Israel-Palestine conflict have nothing to do with his previous beliefs.

Again, if he stuck to what he used to believe, and how he sees that's wrong, that's less controversial. But he uses it as a springboard to offer up a grand unified theory of racial identity which, again, no one asked him for his ideas and solutions to this extremely complex problem.

Then, from the article, apparently he continued to espouse these views in public, defending them, referencing his .1% jewish heritage as a defense.

But setting aside all of the exact specifics - if you're a VP at any large company, you should know this is not acceptable. You have to be able to read the room, you have to listen to feedback, and you have to know how to communicate with others. You have to be able to build trust and rapport with your team, it's not about being "right". If he was unable to do that, as it seems like was the case, then he's not a good fit.

xrd2• 5 years ago

Thank you for posting this. I learned a lot. You've added a lot of context that wasn't there for me before.

flockonus• 5 years ago

Perfect quote paragraph you have there, it would have been ideal indeed. However i agree he's not there yet, but trying to make the transition in public, while boosting his ego = recipe for disaster.

Another way i was thinking about it, is someone on such a high position can't be such a dummy, therefore he might have unconsciously chose to spend some of his accumulated status/power to stoke some awareness to some factor that he believes it should be more spread; and managed to do a terrible job a communication whatever was his thorn.

passivate2• 5 years ago

I didn't see it that way at all. Maybe because my home country has border issues and we've dealt with otherization from a young age. Certainly, nothing like the conflict he refers to, but I guess I have some personal context. I see someone who was genuinely baffled at the thought that there are good people of a particular ethnicity, when he was brainwashed completely to the opposite. The point about the 0.1% DNA is actually quite interesting. years back, I remember this white supremacist on oprah undergoing a DNA test and learning he had some black ancestors. It was a crazy moment where they realized that they were hating a part of their own identity - no matter how small it was. IMHO, most of the so called "manifesto" - can't we just call it a blog? - is milquetoast feel-good kumbayah stuff that has been said uncontroversially by other authors for decades.

As an aside, I think telling someone "nobody asked you for your opinion" is pretty rude. I don't think its constructive to put limits on people's freedom of personal expression in that way. It was a personal message/blog that they felt like getting off their chest. Google firing him just for this (if that is the case, I guess we don't know for sure) is absurd IMO. My sense is that it became a PR issue and Google just got rid of him rather than actually fostering a place where differing opinions are welcomed. This cancel culture is getting crazy.

thirdreich• 5 years ago

Matt's view is spot on. While his intentions may have been positive, this was cringe-inducing read all the way. Don't understand why people feel the need to publish their dumbest thoughts publicly on social media to get lynched in the court of public opinion. Writing an opinion piece on topics like this is a little like making love to a porcupine - you have to be very careful. It has never been worth it to someone's reputation (however well-intentioned) or career to come out and say anything of this sort, political correctness is an asset, particularly for someone in his role and level. The framing and choice of language really did him in.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

People who read the room to cater to an audience are never worth listening to, it is a waste of time. But in a corporate talk that is understandable as I think Google didn't have solving the middle eastern conflict on its agenda.

I still think your reaction to his opinion or view is a bit childish. But as I said, understandable in a corporate environment. The mistake was to give this opinion in an "official" position.

You should also refrain from stating your reaction in such a context.

makeitdouble• 5 years ago

When employees expressed their discomfort at the all-hands meeting Wednesday, the executive doubled down on his manifesto and insisted employees misunderstood, they said.

It doesn’t look at he’s really open to feedback, doesn’t seem much sensible about how people react to his opinions in general.

Other people might take the wrong message from his demotion, but then it also means they didn’t really care looking into the details, so wouldn’t they have been mistaken in other ways if he stayed in position and continued spitting weird manifestos ?

darthrupert• 5 years ago

This confirms what many (like Sam Harris) have suspected a long time: political correctness for large companies is about PR, not about doing what's right or improving people.

brodouevencode4• 5 years ago

#6 here: https://twitter.com/ZubyMusic/status/1412012537986568193

dogorman2• 5 years ago

"When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard." -Sun Tzu

You should allow your opposition to at least believe they have an alternative to digging in and fighting you to the bitter end. Even if you have no intention of allowing them to escape or surrender, you should let them believe it's still possible.

mbg7212• 5 years ago

When you surround an anthill, you can just stomp on it, though. Corporate political correctness is built on the perceived certainty of being so far on the winning side of history that any other point of view isn't worth considering.

dogorman2• 5 years ago

Progress in the long run may seem inevitable, but certainty of victory can be dangerous in the short to medium term. Whig history ignores the possibility of setbacks. Progressive democracies have fallen to authoritarian dictatorships in the past, and there will likely be more examples in the future. Hubris is not your friend.

effingwewt• 5 years ago

I think I'm confused here.

I don't mean to be pedantic, but stomping an anthill wouldn't be 'winning' you would be pressed into your own retreat pretty quickly.

I believe the quote holds true, leave an out they will retreat or at least try. Cutoff all egress and it's a fight to the death.

Or was that what you were saying and I misunderstood? Or was I just wrong on all accounts?

stale20022• 5 years ago

they have an alternative to digging in and fighting you to the bitter end

There was an alternative though. The alternative was for this guy to not make a cringy blog post about his past anti-semitism, and simply not talk about it.

The solution to people having horrible ideas in the past, is not for them to make giant, public renouncements.

Instead, the solution is for those people to be ashamed enough about their past positions, that they won't even admit that they held them.

That is a really good solution for most people, as most people are not going to have every little detail of their past interrogated. It is very much possible for people with these bad ideas, to merely stop having those bad ideas, pretend like they never had them, and join productive society.

linuxftw• 5 years ago

Let this be a lesson to all of you. First, don't write manifestos online of any sort, one day your words might be held against you. Second, don't admit guilt to anything, ever. All these 'unconscious bias' and 'majority guilt' are about soliciting admissions from you.

"As a person of X, I realized I was discriminating against people of Y." That's guilt. That's fire-able.

Don't emulate behavior just because it's fashionable. You might get the impression that society is run like a college campus now, but it isn't. All this activism isn't for you, it's for political control.

wyldfire• 5 years ago

In an awkward attempt to decry hate amid the Israel-Palestinian conflict, he listed all the Jews he knew who he said were good people. Employees said his public admission, which omitted major historic Jewish events, made it difficult for public-facing developer advocates who are tasked with being the face and bridge for Google developers internally and externally.

It is weird to create a list of "good" Jews. But it seems to me like it may be a genuine attempt at positivity.

Most of what talking heads cry about Cancel Culture is just "consequences for having bad attitude/behavior". But this case seems like things going overboard.

esens3• 5 years ago

The issue is in Egypt and other Arab nations they never meet any Jewish people at all. They just see the stereotypes, etc. When you never meet people you can view them as complete evil because you buy the propaganda.

This leads to the contact hypothesis as a means of reducing prejudice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_hypothesis

at_a_remove• 5 years ago

Now, as ever, the advice to never apologize to this particular crowd holds true. Google is just one more bunch reinforcing this point.

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

We definitely don’t have the full story in situations like this. Google can’t and won’t provide their side of the story because it’s internal company HR business. Meanwhile, the employee can and will use LinkedIn to shape the narrative in a way that is beneficial to their reputation.

Is the LinkedIn post renouncing their anti-semitism a spontaneous act that triggered the firing? Or were they internally in trouble with HR and the LinkedIn post renouncing antisemitism was a last-minute attempt to get ahead of an issue that could damage their career? We can’t know, but I suggest being careful whenever someone expertly and publicly spins themselves as the victim in a situation like this.

Either way, a company’s hands are virtually tied when someone publicly makes declarations like this:

“I hated the Jewish people, all the Jewish people”!

And that same person is responsible for matters of customer relations and/or managing internal employees. Whether or not he genuinely renounced his beliefs, making a statement like that adds suspicion on top of past and even future actions by this person. When (not if) he has to make a difficult decision or take an unpopular action involving Jewish customers or employees, they will always wonder how much his public declaration of past hatred for Jewish people was a factor.

brodouevencode4• 5 years ago

You may not be wrong (to your point, no one knows), but is such a cynical approach beneficial?

nnnnnnhfcc• 5 years ago

It's cynical to support the firing of an executive that admits to the worst sort of extreme racism publicly as a misguided attempt to build his own brand? Lol

SQueeeeeL• 5 years ago

It's extremely beneficial to avoid uproar and having your emotions manipulated. Knowing when someone may be taking advantage of an absence of information helps you focus on real issues and not manufactured ones

asdfasgasdgasdg• 5 years ago

Cynical? It seems like a measured and realistic approach to me. There's no upside in getting riled up when there's every reason to believe you are missing important context.

GVIrish• 5 years ago

Yeah I would be careful about drawing conclusions and assigning blame in this situation because it's hard to know all the factors leading to his dismissal. At the least, it sounds like there were problems with his leadership for months before this:

Employees who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said the frustration with Awadallah’s leadership style had been building for months, leading up to this week’s all-hands meeting, where employees confronted him about their discomfort with his manifesto, working with him and the leadership attrition of his reporting leaders.

At the very least, if your job is dev relations you've got to be somewhat adept at how to communicate publicly. It sounds like his manifesto didn't hit the mark.

And I'd have to question why he decided to do that in the first place? Did something force his hand? I feel like many people have had the experience of growing out of past prejudices but posting a manifesto about it is not something I've seen too often, certainly not in the workplace.

TimeFlies66• 5 years ago

There was a fired CEO recently that hackernews was up in arms over because he came out and said that he was fired for microdosing. A couple of days later it came out that he was talking to the press for months without an okay from the board. The first story is never the real story.

Simulacra• 5 years ago

My takeaway from this if you've ever done or said something bad in the past, bury it. Don't ever bring it up again. Don't confess to it, don't talk about how you've changed, just bury it. Your past is an empty black hole, because otherwise it seems, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. This guy should be applauded for recognizing his own hatred, and how he's changed and left that hate behind. Instead, he loses his job.

Is forgiveness and growing from our mistakes completely dead now?

ramesh312• 5 years ago

Is forgiveness and growing from our mistakes completely dead now?

Yes. And you nailed it; there can be no explanation of anything anymore. Nuance is irrelevant. Best to keep all conversation strictly professional, maybe talk about sports teams or the weather but that's it. Your personal thoughts must now be either kept completely internal or published anonymously if you wish to take part in our progressive society.

asah2• 5 years ago

Like many large organizations, Google condone controversial material expressions of individualism, without approval by PR/legal/HR (which are granted only when it benefits the organization, and typically with carefully sanitized scripts). At Google, this has been true for 15+ years and is not new.

If you look at the top brass at any large org, they all subjugate their individualism to focus on reinforcing carefully crafted PR/legal sound bites.

asah2• 5 years ago

Typo: doesn't condone

esens3• 5 years ago

This is a fact of life for Israelis and surrounding Arab countries. I am unsure why we pretend that these negative sentiments about each other do not exist -- they are incredibly widespread in these populations.

Unfortunately in the countries around Israel with whom they have had wars, there is significant anti-Semitism: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3136059.stm

And in Israel there is significant anti-Arab sentiment, which rose significantly as a result of Palestinian terrorist attacks in the early 2000s: https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-shows-large-swaths-of-isr...

lma212• 5 years ago

isn't anti-semitic and anti-arab the same term? historically/technically speaking

adsche• 5 years ago

No, and it never was. The term 'anti-semitic' always meant prejudiced against jews. This is not changed by the different meaning of 'semitic' in e.g. 'semitic languages'.

tmsh• 5 years ago

I fully expected to read his post and dismiss it with the idea that as a leader your first job is to make your employees comfortable and feel safe and respected.

But it’s a genuine, good post. There are so many better ways for Google to have handled this than to just fire like they’ve done with AI researchers before.

The relevant comic is: https://goomics.net/327/

IncRnd• 5 years ago

Link to the actual manifesto: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-one-amr-awadallah/

This makes it a little clearer why Google parted ways with him.

mewse-hn• 5 years ago

- It takes real programmer brain to publicly post a 10k word solution for world peace littered with pop culture references

- If you are an executive for any company, maybe don't publicly share your opinion of the israeli/palestinian conflict, using your real name, and try to buy twitter ads pointing to it

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

The rule is true, although the reason why I would agree with your recommendation is mostly a flaw I see in the audience, not necessarily with the sender.

CivBase• 5 years ago

I complemented Google for how they handled a similar situation in the comments of a HN article from a few weeks ago[0]. In that case, they reassigned their head of diversity in light of his former antisemitic statements which had been recently uncovered. Just like their "VP of developer relations for Google Cloud" Amr Awadallah, their "head of diversity" Kamau Bobb had publicly renounced their old ways but, given the nature of their position, it didn't make sense to keep them there.

The difference is in that case Google reassigned Bobb to a position which would not be compromised by their past. In this case, they outright fired Awadallah. That raises some red flags.

As many other commenters have pointed out, we don't know the whole story and probably never will. This line from the article might shed a little more light on the situation, though:

Within the manifesto, Awadallah describes how he was "cautious" of VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenblum based on his last name

If Awadallah had a history of antisemitism while at the company that had been recently uncovered, it could make sense for him to be terminated. And if that were the case, I doubt Google could speak publicly about it.

I want to promote a society which doesn't hold people forever accountable for past mistakes and allows them to change and improve. But I also don't want to promote a society where misdeeds go entirely unpunished just because the perpetrator apologized in a social media post. It's hard to strike a balance and I'm hesitant to comment any more about this story without more information.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27381425

underseacables2• 5 years ago

It’s possible they saw firing their head of diversity (which I think they should have) as politically messy. Easier to fire some people of color than others. In the situation you pointed out, Google may have feared BLM more than they fear the Arab world. It really feels like there’s an algorithm at work here, not rational sense.

Illniyar• 5 years ago

I read the majority of the linkedin post.

While it starts off benign enough with renouncing antisemetism and wierdly anti-zionism it soon goes into a tirade.

After the first few parts it's mostly about the Israel-Palastinian conflict (mostly denouncing Israel's actions), with a lot of denouncing Trump a long the way.

For a company trying for the last few months to get rid of politics in the office, I can definitely see how this would be a firing offense from a top executive.

ramesh312• 5 years ago

Antisemitism is a lot like pedophilia; if you find yourself even mentioning its' existence, you're immediately suspect yourself. Best to never let the words even come out of your mouth regardless of context. Deny, suppress, gaslight, and ignore anything that even remotely touches the subject. No one ever got brownie points for profoundly exclaiming their lack of hatred for jewish people.

(And you see I'll be downvoted here for even mentioning it. Q.E.D.)

nailer• 5 years ago

Meanwhile here’s how Google handles present-day racism against Jewish people: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdbHft64/

spicyramen2• 5 years ago

I think there is a basic rule at work: Don't mix politics and work. There are type of personal positions political, religious and sexual that are always controversial and is better to keep it to yourself. As a VP of DevRel he definitely should be focusing in work related topics as afaik Google isnt #1 Cloud there. In today's world we have been including sexual preferences as a norm for people to share at the workspace which has also triggered people and in my opinion we should keep it personal. In this case Awr is a VP who manages multiple people of Jewish origin. Looks like absolutely he has nothing better to do that decided that it was a good idea to write a blog post and record a video. This topic is not going to bring people together he really has very low emotional intelligence whatever his intention was. Good riddance

Google parts with Cloud VP over his manifesto renouncing his antisemitism

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