Google to pay $28M to settle claims it favoured white and Asian employees

Google is a huge organisation, so both claims could certainly be true.

One thing I will note is that both of these can be true. Google is a huge company run by a lot of people and unless the specific claims are contradictory there's nothing stopping Google from doing both. It's not like we can expect it to be run with any consistent ideology

At the scale of Google, both claims can be true. Different teams are responsible for their hiring and management, so might have their own biases.

For example if you could discriminate positively towards Chinese and negatively towards Indians and meet the claims in question.

That is not evidence of a shakedown by a corporate law firm, which is the original allegation.

Google, Apple and others have colluded to not poach employees from each other, distorting a free labor market, and settled that for $400m.[0]

[0]https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...

It's not exactly beyond the realm of possibility that individual managers at Google had discriminatory promotion practices. Google picks up the legal tab for their alleged malfeasance, because they empower managers to make those decisions.

If it is so easy to squeeze some cash out of a major company, I'd imagine Google, Apple and many others in California would be cutting checks left and right to dodge lawsuits alleging violations of the state's Equal Pay Act, which saw its last major update in 2018, enacted into law in Jan 2019.[1]

https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/california_equal_pay_act.htm

I also doubt that Google will avoid hiring a law firm just because they were on the other side in the past.

“ What would an ERG for white people even do? What would you want from it?”

What do other groups get? Support, networking, mentorship probably. A lot of white people could use that help too.

>What would an ERG for white people even do? What would you want from it?

The exact same thing as anyone of any other group of course.

To be clear, Whites are a minority at Google. They are also not even the largest group. (Not that this should matter - all groups have the right to exist).

I’m uninitiated to this concept and not white

and I’m scratching my head about why these same questions arent asked for “employee resource groups” of other minority “themes”

as well as why the ability to empathise is so apparent for those other themes but not so easily imagined for this person who is white

forgot the EEOC, I’m about to go to the SEC Whistleblower bounty program since shareholders might want to know how misguided the population there is

I would have been happy if it was called "White Allies" and it just focused on being a good sensitive person.

If Swiss and white were the same thing, that would make a lot of sense. On the other hand if you were a Ukrainian refugee or something, learning Swiss-German as a second language and struggling to integrate into the company's Swiss culture, then it might feel extra-alienating if the company suggests you could join the Asian or Indian employee support groups to help you bridge the culture gap.

OTOH, for the same reason, skin-color-based groups don't really make sense to begin with.

ERG groups provide mentorship and support. The assumption that all white people, males or in this case Swiss don’t need support or get it automatically is plain wrong.

Straight white men, or even just white people, is in no way the "default" at Google, and very far from the 90% in your allegory.

> Of course, there is no Swiss ERG, as it's the "default"

Switzerland is a country of three dominant languages. When I worked for a Swiss bank, they had internal groups for, essentially, domestic expats.

Google is like 45% white, 45% Asian.

Asians have an ERG.

If Whites want to make an ERG, why can't they? What is special about Whites that they must be prevented from doing the thing that literally all others have done?

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There isn't an effective difference

If people want to change anything about it, they need to know the structure of it

The court did not agree with the plaintiffs - this case was settled outside of court.

By the same numbers "Latinx+" are actually over-represented at Google and white people underrepresented. Neither by a large amount though.

With how close the numbers actually are I wonder if the different biases of different HR people and hiring managers actually cancelled out pretty well.

I don’t think it’s obvious that summary statistics will be helpful unless they’re particularly carefully done. Where do averages come from? If individual data points are biased in the same direction (that is, not noise that cancels out) then the group average will be too.

This isn’t something you can just assume when you see someone quoting statistics. It could be a garbage study.

It really depends on what assumptions you are making, your basis of comparison, and how you measure performance.

Does X perform better than Y in general or within the community. Does hiring match national population, the applicant pool, or the top 1% of the applicant pool? How do you measure performance?

These topics are rarely fleshed out in any public corporate policy. All I know is my bonus depends on increasing the % of minority employees.

Is the Google applicant pool a representative sample of the group at large?

It works, but court cases are public record. Good luck getting anyone to touch you with a ten foot pole afterwards, not like the candidate can prove why they weren't selected.

Though this problem seems to be mostly restricted to the US American legal system.

I don't think I disagree, so this is perhaps a devil's advocate argument--to the extent a product is meant for somewhat general use, by integrating more perspectives during development, we might uncover blind spots and innovate in ways that resonate more deeply with their core audience, not less. Asking, “Whose needs might we be overlooking?” could be useful not because every minority requires a bespoke solution, but because overlooking them might mean missing opportunities to serve even the majority better.

From anecdotal experience with voice recognition software: early versions struggled with accents and also required training on your voice specifically, which limited their utility. Making models more flexible didn’t just help minority users with accents—I think it improved accuracy for everyone. Similarly, curb cuts on sidewalks, originally designed for accessibility users, now benefit parents with strollers and even those food delivery robots running around some cities.

Maybe one frame is to avoid unintentional exclusion? The pizza shop isn't obligated to, but could at least consider the fact that some people don't eat meat (or pork or whatever), and therefore keep the margherita on the menu to the benefit of everyone.

I agree that it's impossible to build a product that satisfies everyone, which is the issue with global tech companies. In my utopian world, we would educate people and develop tools so that communities can build their own tools to cater to their own needs (in the same spirit as unix). I think that's better than what we have today with technocrats in Silicon valley dictating how tech should look and function for the rest of the world.