Steve Chalmers
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

Peter, I agree with you that if Google fired Damore for heresy, that is, for speaking facts against SJW doctrine, that would be absurd (and an injustice).

There’s another way to look at the situation which I think will help. Consider business as a game with these rules:

  1. The business is here to get a set of things done, which have a value to customers (price) higher than what it costs the company to deliver those things. Profit is the measure of that difference, and is the driver of efficiency in the capitalist system.
  2. The business has a set of employees. These are not disposable, they are people in whom the business invests significantly (paying them while they learn the ropes, paying the costs of the mistakes they make and the risks they took which didn’t pan out, letting them develop into people who can grow the business rather than just sit in their cube doing a narrow task).
  3. Choosing who to hire, that is, choosing the employees to invest in, is crucial to the success of the business. Investing in a bunch of idiots, or even in a bunch of people who can do narrow tasks but will never develop into growing the business, is a sure recipe for stagnation and decline. So an employee who actively sabotages the hiring of the best people, because they’d rather hire a less qualified person (perhaps they’re afraid of hiring someone smarter than they are, or someone who works harder, or someone more educated, or possibly just are more comfortable hiring someone of the same skin color, religion, political beliefs, and gender) is harming the company. Oh, and breaking laws around hiring discrimination is bad for the company’s brand (decreases the total customers are willing to pay for its products) and any related fines are bad for profit.
  4. A healthy, performance culture business is always looking at its employees to make a frank assessment around who should be heavily invested in, who should be kept, and who was a bad investment and should be eased out. This process is imperfect, and sometimes a very capable person is simply not in a place to best use their skills. Capable employees understand this and are constantly watching for signals that it’s time to move on. In this environment, sending a “move on” signal to someone the company wants to invest in or keep not only destroys the past investment the company has made in these people, but also destroys what they would have done. Sending a “move on” signal to a valued employee simply because of their skin color, religion, gender, political beliefs, or any other non job performance reason is simply a waste of corporate resources.

What Damore did was send a “move on” signal to about 10,000 valued Google employees, in which Google had invested at least a billion dollars. From what I can see as an outsider, and in my opinion, he had no clue his memo would have that effect (ie it was an act of social incompetence, not an act of malice). Again as an outsider, and again in my opinion, Google’s management couldn’t reassure (un-signal) those employees and protect that billion dollar investment without firing him. The value of all the work he was going to do for the entire rest of his career at Google was less than the value of the employees he’d put Google at risk of losing. It was just a business decision.

And the science, while correct, was irrelevant.

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    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.