Dear James,

Hi! We once shared an employer, but I doubt you know my name. I was in SRE and don’t have a university degree (not even an imaginary one on my LinkedIn profile) so I kind of spent my career in relative obscurity. I left Google a year ago after ten mostly-happy years. This means you and I would have overlapped for a couple of those years. What this also means is that I’m writing here solely based on what I’ve seen on the Internet — I’m not privy to any of the internal discussions and haven’t had access to Google confidential information since my last day. I’m still friends with people at Google, but I’ve not discussed this with them so I feel I can comment openly. This is the response I’d have written were I still there. I’m also only going to talk about the before and the immediate aftermath of your post, because everything after that including the exact circumstances leading up to your eventual firing is between you and the company.
I’ll admit that my career at Google was not particularly stellar. The reasons are complicated, but suffice to say that childcare responsibilities don’t mix well with 7pm meetings with Mountain View and depression is no fun at all. One area in which I achieved a little impact was in using time I should have spent doing Important Useful Work to philosophise on mailing lists or on corp G+ about Weighty Things That Matter. I had some success in this area. My investigation into imposter syndrome, which it’s probably reasonable to assume you’ve never read, aroused no small amount of interest. (I also got peer bonused for lambasting people on one of the local mailing lists for Zürich over their entitled behaviour, but I’m not sure whether that’s something to be proud or ashamed of.)
One thing I did in my last year at the company was spend some of my time as a volunteer trainer for the company-wide unconscious bias workshop. I am going to assume you went to one of these workshops, probably reluctantly. Running these courses was some of the most fulfilling work I did at the company. I got to work with some of the smartest and most interesting people I worked with during that time, which is saying a lot as in ten years at Google you meet a great many smart and interesting people.
The course itself was designed to be thoughtful rather than hectoring, and I don’t think there was even a small whiff of the “Thought Police” about it. We went out of our way to make it clear that unconscious bias is something everyone has, because that’s the way our brains work. Unconscious bias is okay! Nobody was asking you to flagellate yourself for thinking. But it’s a completely different matter when that unconscious bias becomes deliberate, conscious bias and starts to impinge on the way you treat other people. That’s not unconscious bias, that’s just bias, and there is absolutely no place for that at work.
The message we tried to send was simple. Everybody should be treated with the same respect and consideration regardless of race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, veteran status, age, religion, and so on. When at work, you should avoid doing things either deliberately or accidentally which make individual members of your team feel excluded. Don’t assume everybody thinks in the same way as you do.
Ultimately, it’s about self-awareness. And a core example of demonstrating self-awareness would be to take a moment before sending a multi-page manifesto to the whole company to make sure it’s appropriately and respectfully written and doesn’t include language that may make some of your colleagues feel as if they are somehow less valuable than the ones who are more like you. One of the most important skills you need when writing things which you want people to pay attention to is empathy. How will the reader react? Are there words in there which will get the wrong sort of attention and detract from the overall message you’re trying to send?
The fact that you didn’t pay attention to this makes me sad, because it makes it clear that you didn’t really pay attention to what was said in the unconscious bias workshop. When you claim that women are somehow biologically less suited to do the job you do that’s a textbook example of letting your own biases make your colleagues feel as if you think they don’t belong at the company. I mean, you can think that all you want. I’d obviously rather you didn’t, and I’d hope you’d be open-minded enough to consider that you might be wrong, but thoughts alone cannot get you fired.
Hell, I had all kinds of thoughts that would have got me fired had I made them public. There were a few people in the company over the years that I thought were assholes, but I didn’t tell the entire company that I thought they were assholes. Why not? Not because I would have been summoned to HR within hours, but because the assholes were also my colleagues. Some of the assholes were technically brilliant. And — this is the important part — it was clear that by no means everybody else thought they were assholes. In fact, over the years when I got to know some of the assholes better I liked them a lot more.
So what do I think you should have done? If you really meant what you wrote and wanted it to have an effect, what should you have done? Well, to start with I wouldn’t have gone straight out and posted it to the entire company. Google is a pretty open company. It would have been trivial to find out the names of some people who would have been interested to read your document with an open mind. When I was at the company I’m pretty sure Laszlo Bock would have either responded himself or (more likely) redirected you to someone who was very well qualified to do so, and may in fact have read the papers you were citing. I know Laszlo left about the time I did (although I don’t think the two events are connected) but I would assume his successor would do the same. There are (IIRC) mailing lists for questions about bias issues where people would have probably not liked what you said and would have refuted it but wouldn’t have called for you to be fired. It is entirely possible that you would have had your questions gladly answered and your assertions responded to had you been smarter in your communication style. With some feedback you might have ended up with a paper which I’m sure would have inspired some vigorous discussion when sent to the whole company, even if you wouldn’t necessarily have agreed with the conclusions reached in those discussions.
Your fundamental mistake was not in airing unpopular views. People do that all the time (e.g., “Canning Google Reader was the best thing the company ever did!”). Your mistake was not in your views, it was in the way you communicated them. The lack of empathy running through your document, the lack of a careful proofread with the reader’s reactions in mind, that was your mistake. When you combined that with scattershotting it to every single Oompa-Loompa in the damn Chocolate Factory the resulting shitstorm was inevitable. And to then somehow act shocked that because having caused that shitstorm you then found that it had an adverse effect on your career at Google? Well, I really don’t know where to start with that.
I don’t really think the “blacklists” you talk about really exist other than in peoples’ minds. But in your case they might as well because by doing what you did you became, forever, in the minds of thousands of people, That Guy Who Did That Thing. And however good your technical skills are, if you are That Guy Who Did That Thing you’ve effectively made yourself unemployable within the company because in almost every team there will (I hope, at least) be at least one person whose abilities you have at least indirectly dissed. No manager should feel obliged to make a member of their team work with someone who has openly cast doubt on their ability to do their job simply because of who they are.
One last thing — while I’ve tried to talk about communication above and steer clear of the politics, I’d like to take issue with your assertion that “conservatives are persecuted at Google”. I have plenty of first-hand experience that they are not, both in the form of some of my former co-workers in the USA and in the fact that Google’s thriving internal communication systems include multiple forums for gun fans, conservatives in general, and.. well, pretty much everyone else. I even stumbled across one list years ago where people were making “hilarious” jokes about shooting liberals and Europeans, which was quite a surprise given that I’m a European liberal and thus definitely in their crosshairs. There are multiple other forums where people argue politics from all sides of the spectrum pretty much 24/7.
Google is an argumentative, crazy and amazing company full of smart, opinionated people. The majority don’t agree with your political views, but they also have no problem with your holding and expressing them. Unfortunately, the view you got into trouble for wasn’t a political view, it was just an ill thought-out attempt at trying to justify your own conclusions retroactively with science. And there’s nothing people hate more at Google than that sort of intellectual laziness, with the possible exception of perf season.
Cheers,
Mike
