Silicon Valley “Outraged” After Google Employee Pens Viral Doc Slamming “Anti-Conservative” Culture
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Aug 6, 2017
A 10-page document penned by an unnamed Google engineer titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, that criticizes the company’s “left leaning”, “anti-conservative” culture and calls for replacing Google’s diversity initiatives with policies that encourage “ideological diversity” instead, has led to outrage among fellow Google employees and Silicon Valley pundits. The document, first reported by Motherboard and published in full by Gizmodo, reportedly has gone “internally viral” inside the company on Friday according to CNBC. The engineer’s identity has not been revealed, but he reports to Google VP Ari Balogh, listed on Crunchbase as the company’s executive VP of storage infrastructure products.
The document’s author also wrote that employees with conservative political beliefs are discriminated against at Google and lamented about how “leftist” ideology is harmful. They argue that the company should have a more “open” culture where their viewpoint would be welcomed. The document said that improving racial and gender diversity is less important than making sure conservatives feel comfortable expressing themselves at work.
Motherboard said it had independently confirmed with multiple Google employees that the document is being widely shared among many of the company’s software engineering teams: “If I had to guess, almost every single woman in engineering has seen it,” a current employee told Motherboard. At several points on Friday night, the document was inaccessible because too many people were attempting to view it concurrently.
But what has prompted the ire of both internal and external pundits is the document’s argument that differences in pay between men and women in the technology sector are not entirely related to bias against women, but are partly attributable to biological differences between the genders. It also called on Google to “stop alienating conservatives” and calls into question practices like “unconscious bias” training for committees that promote employees.
The 10-page Google Doc document was met with furious derision from a large majority of employees but Jaana Dogan, a software engineer at Google, tweeted that some people at the company at least partially agreed with the author; one of our sources said the same. While the document itself contains the thoughts of just one Google employee, the context in which they were shared — Silicon Valley has been repeatedly exposed as a place that discriminates against women and people of color — as well as the private and public response from its workforce are important.
“The broader context of this is that this person is perhaps bolder than most of the people at Google who share his viewpoint—of thinking women are less qualified than men—to the point he was willing to publicly argue for it. But there are sadly more people like him,” the employee who described the document’s contents to me said.
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