Google Makes Another Huge Blunder: Firing Damore

First Mistake: They Forced Him to Go to a “Diversity Seminar”

Harvard and MIT trained engineer James Damore loved working for Google. He felt free to work on things he enjoyed doing, and liked the people he worked with. But Google’s management made a huge blunder: They forced him to go to a “diversity seminar,” where white males are sent to be made to feel shame and guilt.

Anyone With a Brain Knows that “Diversity Seminars” Are a Stupid Idea

Diversity seminars not only fail to stop bad workplace behaviours and attitudes — they actually make them worse!

… five years after instituting required training for managers, companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of black women actually decreased by 9%, on average, while the ranks of Asian-American men and women shrank by 4% to 5%. Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance—and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward. __ Harvard Business Review

More reasons to put the brakes on the diversity training scam

But Google’s managers apparently fail to use their brains, at least when it comes to topics related to “diversity.” And so they sent elite young engineer Damore to one of these shaming sessions. He didn’t like it. What’s worse, he compiled his thoughts on the topic in a memo, which was made available to other workers at Google. Read the memo in full.

Too Many Workers at Google Started Agreeing With Damore’s Memo

Google’s unthinking managers now had a problem on their hands — the makings of a modest, non-violent mutiny. A mutiny consisting of thoughtful ideas being communicated within the workforce, but ideas that did not conform with management’s conception of what employees should think. In essence, thought crimes were being committed. And so Google fired their elite young engineer, out of fear that more employees might begin to publicly question Google’s groupthink bubble.

A Predictable Public Firestorm Erupts after Firing

Subsequently, James Damore has filed a complaint against Google with the US government’s NLRB. And contributions are pouring in to Damore’s legal defence fund, even while the young engineer hits YouTube and the airwaves explaining his case to the larger public. A New York Times columnist is now calling for Google’s CEO to resign after he justified firing Damore!

The engineer may well have a valid legal case for suing his former employer, the Groupthinking Monolith Now Known as Goolag:

Damore has two viable legal claims, evident from comments he made to The New York Times: “I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does.” Damore added that before his firing, he filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging Google was “misrepresenting and shaming me in order to silence my complaints.” He noted that it was “illegal to retaliate” against him for filing the NLRB charge. __ More at The Federalist

Google Has Already Lost in Court of Public Opinion

Google’s management lives in an echo chambre, which may explain some of its colossal blunders. A survey of workers in prominent Silicon Valley firms indicates that management has a steep uphill battle on its hands:

Blind, an anonymous chat app, surveyed over 4,000 employees of Silicon Valley companies in the wake of Damore’s firing to see where they stood on it. Fifty-six percent of the Google employees who participated in the survey oppose Damore’s firing. True, this survey was voluntary, and is therefore scientifically meaningless, but it does make you wonder how many people within Google are upset with what was done to Damore, but who now know that they must keep their mouths shut if they want to avoid the same fate.

Damore’s great sin here was in saying out loud things that may be true, or at least well within the bounds of debate, but not popular within his social environment. __ Rod Dreher in American Conservative

Science supports the modest claims made by James Damore in his relatively timid and respectful memo. But the way that Google’s management acted — both in forcing Damore to attend a “shaming session” and in firing him for circulating his modest suggestions aftwerward — was anything but respectful to its employees or to the workplace environment. Heads should roll.

More on diversity training:

“Diversity training doesn’t extinguish prejudice. It promotes it,” says Peter Bregman in Psychology Today. He’s not alone in his belief. Walter Olson at Overlawyered.com has collected numerous articles detailing why diversity training doesn’t actually make people more tolerant. In fact, it can open your company to lawsuits, as the Federal Aviation Administration found out way back in 1995.

A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had “no positive effects in the average workplace.” Millions of dollars a year were spent on the training resulting in, well, nothing. Attitudes — and the diversity of the organizations — remained the same.

It gets worse. The researchers — Frank Dobbin of Harvard, Alexandra Kalev of Berkeley, and Erin Kelly of the University of Minnesota — concluded that “In firms where training is mandatory or emphasizes the threat of lawsuits, training actually has negative effects on management diversity.”

__ Source

Note: The lucrative scam of “diversity training” has been diverting scarce resources away from productive activities and into the hands of con artists for many decades now. It is nothing more than a tool of indoctrination serving the dominant politically correct groupthink monoculture of the left, which currently controls most of academia, large numbers of corporate boardrooms and management, most of the news and entertainment media, and the core of the deep state behind most governments of the EU and the Anglosphere.

More:

Google’s management pathetically stupid

Google deserves what is coming to them