Most people already know about the case of James Damore who was fired for discussing differences between men and women.
A Wall Street Journal article now details the case of another engineer fired by Google for being conservative, and mentions the case of yet a third engineer.
Mr. Cernekee, 41 years old, spent much of the next three years battling Google over his perceived violations, and pressing his contention that right-leaning employees were being treated unfairly, according to interviews, documents and copies of posts on Google’s internal message boards. In one example from 2017 that he reported to human resources, a manager publicly asked on a board about employees holding views like Mr. Cernekee’s: “Can’t we just fire the poisonous assholes already?”
In June 2018, Mr. Cernekee was fired.
And then there’s Greg Coppola who gave an interview to James O’Keefe alleging problems at Google.
Last week, a senior Google engineer, Gregory Coppola, gave interviews to a pair of conservative media outlets and suggested the company was politically biased toward the left. Hours later, he received a call from human resources putting him on administrative leave and disabling his access to internal systems, according to a person familiar with the matter.
He hasn’t been fired yet. But a message was being sent. There’s also a third case mentioned beyond those of Damore and Cernekee.
Mr. Cernekee also crossed with Republicans internally. One fellow engineer active in the company’s conservative circles, Michael Wacker, internally circulated a dossier describing Mr. Cernekee as “the face of the alt-right” at Google. Mr. Cernekee rejects the label. He says he disagrees with alt-right philosophy, which promotes white nationalism, and considers himself a mainstream Republican who supports President Trump. Mr. Wacker was separately fired this spring; he says Google human resources warned him his behavior was “rude and dishonest.”
Terms like “rude” can be subjective. And can be indicative of political differences.
1. The larger question is does Google enforce its codes evenly across the board? Answering that question requires transparency and the same kind of digging that would indicate whether Google was disciplining black employees more.
2. Are conservatives being disciplined or fired at a higher rate at Google, than engineers in general, and lefty engineers?
3. Is this due to Google’s policies being written or enforced in ways that cause disparate impact? Are the codes written and enforced so that conservative ideas are subject to sanction while leftist ideas aren’t?
That last one is the biggest question we face in the battle with the tech giants.
And, obviously, workplace discrimination doesn’t stay in the workplace. Most of the first search results on Google for “James Damore” lead to negative media coverage of him.
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