Firing someone on the spot in a public setting is either a drastic overreaction (and why that's fireable is obvious), or a response to a complete blindsiding … at a level at which the job is to not get blindsided.
It's also a complete HR catastrophe. How could anyone feel comfortable in their position, knowing they could be fired at any moment, publicly and without warning? Terrorizing your employees is completely unacceptable as a manager.
Edit: I guess I don't have much experience with HR at large companies - I use the term to refer to aspects of management related to maintaining employee wellbeing, workplace culture etc.
HR doesn't care about that! Not unless it's actionable. Good way to lose your star contributors, sure, but past a certain basic point retention isn't really part of HR's role.
Really? I've always seen HR as a sort of "union for un-unionised employees". They help you get stuff out of the business, and help the business get the most out of you.
Perhaps I've only encountered the good kind of HR.
A significant aspect of HR (at least in the UK) is protecting the company from its 'resources', and ensuring that the company has a robust (i.e. legally defensible) paper trail when disputes arise. E.g a process for putting people on an 'improvement plan' in response to poor behaviours / performance, and which can ultimately lead to dismissal.
Back in the day, the term 'anti-personnel department' was often used.
And don't get me started on the use of the term 'human resources'
[Edit] - more detail. I'm a techie but have occasionally had line management (in addition to tech lead) responsibilities. The first time I took on these duties, I had to do the relevant HR training and was amazed at the attitude: a little bit of 'duty-of-care' and a lot of 'follow-this-process-to-make-sure-the-law-is-on-our-side'
My experiences of UK large company HR departments was basically that they were the hit squad - if they were in the building then you knew someone was in major trouble.
I had an interesting experience a couple of years back when everyone in our office was called to a surprise meeting with HR except me.... I had already resigned, everyone else got the bullet in that caring way that HR departments are famous for.
A company I worked at did something similar; those who were being kept were told to go somewhere else, not to go to that meeting. Those that were still around were herded into the classroom, to be met by the HR head and a hired goon of a security guard. The entire office was being closed, but the way it was done was more hurtful to those folks than the basic business decision.
Can confirm as a programmer in UK. I hit this wall recently when asking for extended leave to deal with a personal crisis. The colluded response from HR/the business was to give me notice.
Take it from someone whose partner works in HR: they are not your friend. They may be nice people, they may try to help, but their _job_ is to protect the company's interests. Each time you talk to them about conflict, you're taking a bet your interests and theirs align.
In other news, for a bunch of smart people, engineers are spectacularly underunionized.
They are however, definitely interested in retention. They have a keen understanding of the total cost of finding and onboarding a new employee. If a particular executive is putting that in jeopardy then a good HR department will take note.
> They have a keen understanding of the total cost of finding and onboarding a new employee.
Because they will be involved in recruiting, they will also have a keen understanding of how much that increases their workload, which is otherwise pretty flimsy in a lot of cases. The more churn, the more they can justify their headcount.
They definitely are, but in a circumstance like this the most _urgent_ problem they've got is a bunch of ex-employees with a legal action brewing. Implicitly admitting liability without a quid-pro-quo isn't going to happen.
Which isn't to say HR won't want him gone. Just not yet.
Nope; they help the business get the most out of you without getting sued. That's the alpha and omega of HR.
Their obligations are to the company, not to you. When they answer your questions, they do it so you can't claim later on that the company didn't tell you such and such or that the procedure XYZ was unclear, and sue them. They are nice so that you won't see the company as adversarial and sue them. And so on and so forth.
At some places, they have one branch of "good cop" HR that cuddles the employees, hands out candy and attempt to boost morale, and one "bad cop" branch that does all the dirty work of protecting the company from liability and attempting to squeeze out as many hours as possible while keeping compensation and human costs to a minimum.
They aren't your friends. They protect the company first. Definitely think twice before going to HR for anything not related to the normal benefits/vacation type issues. If you have an issue with another employee, you may very well be the problem that gets eliminated, not the other employee.
Many people, myself included, feel that HR is almost totally on the side of the company and don't represent employee interests effectively (if at all).
Having a major disruption in your security department can mean an upcoming disaster for a company offering cloud based services. From what this sounds, they not only got rid of 2 very competent employees, the manager doesn't seem to have acted especially brilliant, and they might have discouraged competent security people from applying at the company. What could possibly go wrong with this?
People aren't fully strategic 100% of the time. When clouded by emotion, suboptimal decisions can look strategic. (Ex. establishing/asserting their authority.)
2) If you fire someone on the spot (I have), you'd better have a damn good reason (I did--repository sabotage) as the company is now going to have to pay money to defend/payoff this.
3) Suddenly firing important people disrupts daily business functions for weeks or months.
4) Unless you think they are going to actively sabotage something, you can wait until they get home to reprimand or fire people.
All told, some manager is getting thrown under the bus for this.
The Google thing is a medium splash in a big pond. This is a small splash, but arguably in a much smaller and more concentrated pond. Within the community of red teams and DEFCON regulars I wouldn't be surprised if this is much better known than the (now) ex Googler is within the more general tech community.
An internal memo with astonishingly poor typography was leaked. Since Google sell a word processor and are a font vendor this made them look bad. So he was fired.
(I'm only half joking. People don't talk about how poor the layout of that document was, but it was my first and lasting impression)
It's unbelievable that it was only the memo. And quite likely just the last straw.
I can easily imagine someone that produces poor quality once publically probably did so many times privately and likely more of a symptom of underlying inadequacy than the actual reason for firing.
But you know, headlines..
And yes, have no previous experience or knowledge about this so sorry if I'm armchairing a bit.
Larry Summers (a leading economist with often controversial opinions) got fired from his position as the president of harvard for effectively making the same point [1] except, you know, well argued unlike in the Google manifesto.
If Larry Summers gets fired for that, a random engineer is definitely getting the boot.
Honestly, relative to the usual discussions on the topic (including discussions about the Google memo), the memo was refreshingly well-argued, coherent and polite.
Everyone agrees it was polite, but well-argued and coherent is where not everyone does agree.
I've seen people with advanced degrees host debates where they legitimately advocated creationism as the truth against evolutionary biologists with equally advanced degrees. They were polite, and their supporters would say well-argued and coherent. But anyone who knows anything about the topic would see that the creationists weren't actually adding to the discussion or making strong points at all. Those creationist debates are always unsatisfying and exhausting to listen to, and after a while, that schtick becomes old and non-creationists stop engaging because it's just boring. But creationists will attend and be excited every time because having a debate against a real scientist legitimizes them.
That's how this memo thing felt. Nothing new was added to the discussion (at least not to those of us who have had this discussion before) and it just seemed like an opportunity that some less savory folks jumped on to promote some out-dated views (and more importantly, for mainstream media to jump on to paint all of tech as a place where those views are the norm. That story sells despite how wrong it is).
FWIW, I do hate impoliteness though. I understand why people felt defensive for the author after watching the internet freak the hell out (in rude or dismissive ways) about the memo which was not impolite in itself.
Well yes, that's my opinion :). I found the memo coherent, in the sense that it was well-structured and followed consistent reasoning, and well-argued, in the sense that it linked to supporting research and reasoned mostly correctly from it. It doesn't mean everything there was 100% correct, but almost no one is; it still was a quality entry to the intellectual debate.
At the risk of perpetuating the disagreement, IMO if anything is similar to the creationinst debaters, it's the voices against the memo.
Going through the few recent HN discussions on the topic, I found that on the one side, you had people (including an actual scientist in the domain) telling that the memo basically got the science (even if not ultimate conclusions) right, as supported by _even more_ research people linked to, vs. the other side saying he presents "outdated" views of "biological determinism", etc., with no counter to the research cited by the memo itself (not to mention others) - just unsubstantiated accusations and dismissals.
More than 5 doctors confirmed the memo was consistent with science and his text referenced appropriate sources, as common with any paper. It's incredible that non-medical people can override science with their belief. It's Galileo all over again, fired because one shall not contradict [place godly entity here].
The paper went much further than presenting a summary of mashed up research from a variety of fields that investigate sex & gender variations. For that, all you need is some reprints of Nature and Scientific American.
Instead it wanted to connect that research to a) company policy and b) American-specific political divides. And to do that required a battery of assumptions regarding intention, merit, aptitude, worth, values.
That's where the wheels came off and everyone started projecting their own ideological interpretations, and you've been arguing past each other ever since.
Sorry, I thought it was a vulnerability/technique impacting Google services that dropped at the convention. Now I get the connection was being made to widely reported staff behavior.
