There's a huge difference between increasing outreach and lowering the hiring bar. One shields more candidates, the other one increases the chances of hiring someone from the same pool of candidates. The reason why Google (and many other companies) are increasing outreach is because they want to maintain a high-quality of engineers, otherwise they'd just open the floodgate and let everyone in and solve their diversity problem once and for all.
Damore's memo states a lot of things about Google's recruiting practices that are still to be proven truth. Lowering the bar is one of them.
> His reaching out to alt-right media and having a "Goolag" shirt on the very first interview suggests that he was kind of ready for it.
Which alt-right media did he reach out to? I've been paying pretty close attention and I saw him being interviewed by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, but they are not alt-right media. They are both classical conservatives.
> As anyone who's worked for Google (I have) will tell you, that's highly discouraged. You don't want to put Google or yourself into a weird legal position for posting publicly about this (for example, Google would have to track you down and make sure to archive all your internal emails moving forward for possible discovery, etc.)
Then all we have to go on are theories and the question: what's to be gained from him lying about this?
His very first interview was with Stefan Molyneaux, a self-described "fighter for men's rights" (yeah, I know.)
> what's to be gained from him lying about this?
I don't think he was outright lying, I think he was just uninformed and made a lot of assumptions and drew
conclusions (biased by his own political views) out of those assumptions. I do think his inflammatory approach to accusing Google and Googlers of "leftist bias" was a way to get attention.
About what's to be gained? Well... he's been interviewed by the New York Times and he'll probably get a book deal out of it, plus whatever money he might get if he manages to successfully sue Google.
I've been told that his first interview was actually with Jordan Peterson. The Stefan interview with simply the first to be published maybe, or widely seen.
> Damore's memo states a lot of things about Google's recruiting practices that are still to be proven truth. Lowering the bar is one of them.
That's true and an excellent point. If he's lying about Google's recruitment practices, either by misunderstanding or by outright false accusation, then large parts of the memo are moot.
On the other hand, I would make the counterpoint that the only reason his honesty has come into question is because of the negative reception his memo has had. Also, what are the odds that Damore misunderstood things? I'd say low.
Additionally, I have yet to see any fellow Googlers publicly calling him a liar, but we shall see.
> I would make the counterpoint that the only reason his honesty has come into question is because of the negative reception his memo has had
I'll be honest, that's what ticks me about Damore: after presenting the ideas in his memo a couple times and not getting any traction, he made a case of sharing them publicly inside Google. Not with a group of friends, not with the diversity team, but publicly. As you say, he's not a dummy, so he probably expected this whole controversy. His reaching out to alt-right media and having a "Goolag" shirt on the very first interview suggests that he was kind of ready for it. I'm not 100% sure he's being honest about his intentions to "help Google."
> Additionally, I have yet to see any fellow Googlers publicly calling him a liar, but we shall see
As anyone who's worked for Google (I have) will tell you, that's highly discouraged. You don't want to put Google or yourself into a weird legal position for posting publicly about this (for example, Google would have to track you down and make sure to archive all your internal emails moving forward for possible discovery, etc.)
Damore's memo states a lot of things about Google's recruiting practices that are still to be proven truth. Lowering the bar is one of them.