Steve Chalmers
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

Observations (directed at the original author and not you, Sarah):

Companies are not democracies, they are dictatorships. In a company, once a decision is made, the people in that company have a choice of supporting that decision or leaving. The decision to be diverse is a fundamental decision made early in google’s history. Although I realize the value of open discussion is in this case in conflict with the value of supporting diversity, a conflict which Alphabet’s CEO will probably have to personally resolve, I predict that diversity will prevail.

I spent a 36 year career at a different silicon valley based tech company before retiring recently. That company values honesty and integrity very highly. One day early in my career, perhaps 34 years ago, I watched a relatively new engineer liberate a 6 pack of beer from the cart carrying the leftovers of a catered lunch outside a conference room. While in some companies that would have been a good laugh, in that instant (with his manager watching) he ended his career, because he was seen crossing an ethical line that was uncrossable in that company. Took most of a year to play out; I was one of the senpai who coached him to move on.

I believe that in effectively telling tens of % of your colleagues that their gender or the color of their skin makes them less fit than you for the roles they are in, you have cost Google more results and more productivity than you will deliver in your career, and probably impacted more stay-or-leave decisions than you will recruit engineers in your career.

What you thought was an authoritarian suppression of ideas and speech was simply a business control against demotivating and driving away various subsets of employees. That shows a stunning lack of understanding of the consequences of a simple action on your part.

    Steve Chalmers

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    Student of complex systems; prematurely retired from a career in tech focused on the boundaries between server, storage, and network in the data center.