In Comments
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face
conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3"
can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Agreed. It's disturbing that there are so many members who are seemingly intelligent, but either haven't read the guidelines or think that guidelines don't apply to them.
> I don't have the mental energy to give everyone I come across the benefit of the doubt... people who don't take the time to try and understand me get dismissed pretty quickly.
So you basically demand others spend mental energy on you, but you refuse to return the favor?
This is a very common case. Both sides attempting to communicate their point and get acknowledgement that it's been understood and at the same time neither side making an attempt to understand. Sometimes it's not even a disagreement, just a difference of expression, aka. 'in violent agreement'.
Which is of course a misunderstanding of my point.
The question is going to be will you start telling me what my point is? because I'm not going to waste my time on you.
No reasonable person who has been online for any length of time is going to really argue with what I just said. There is no way you sit and really contemplate and try to communicate as best you can with everyone you come across online, you would never make it out of a single youtube video.
There's how you view yourself and then there's the way you really are. You pick and choose just as readily as I do, the only difference is I'm pretty open about it.
Sony Pictures Entertainment, who produced and marketed this movie, is based in the US (Hollywood) and run by Americans. In all likelihood this decision comes from them.
In other words, you want free content. But content costs time and money to produce. And content is inevitably colored by the source of the money. When the source is advertising, the content you receive is optimized for advertising. Of course, this is not a problem if you're happy with the content you're getting now.
Ongoing internal investigation? Or -- and forgive me, I don't know a universally inoffensive way to broach this subject -- because her being a gender/ethnic minority in her line of work makes Amazon reluctant to terminate her?
> Ongoing internal investigation? Or -- and forgive me, I don't know a universally inoffensive way to broach this subject -- because her being a gender/ethnic minority in her line of work makes Amazon reluctant to terminate her?
It's possible, but thus far there is no evidence to suggest that is the case(unless I missed something). Suggesting that, 'maybe they didn't fire her because she's a minority' is exactly the kind of unfounded bias that underrepresented groups have to deal with all the time. If Munira were a white male no one would be saying, "Well maybe he didn't get fired because he's a white male, in a white male-dominated environment."
Jumping to the accusation that this is about race is exactly the kind of thing that makes it difficult for underrepresented groups in tech.
She put herself in a position where someone higher up in management knew that her Stanford degrees were fake, but nobody else knew. So that someone totally owned her - they could use her as the "dark hand" for literally anything (putting inconvenient people on PIP, fudging inconvenient metrics to advertisers / business partners / executives / etc).
That is probably why she was not fired. If this is actually true, it suggest extreme disfunction in management as well.
Employers being reluctant to fire an employee because the employee is a member of a minority is pretty much a myth - particularly in jurisdictions such as the US where employees generally do not have much by way of job security. At best it will just make the employer double-check to make sure they have dotted the Is and crossed the Ts before pulling the trigger.
Also, forgive me, I don't know a universally inoffensive way to broach the subject, but people expressing a fear that minorities are receiving unjust benefits are often racist?
It's not a myth. Legal and HR will explain to you how easily the company can get sued in those cases. It can be VERY hard to let go an employee who is member of a minority (I speak of experience).
not if you have been properly documenting things for everyone you fire. Amazon fires enough people that they should have procedures in place that make this trivial.
For people not familiar with the way things work in the USA, "properly documenting" here means that you need at least a few months of written warnings, an "improvement plan" that then "failed" and such before you can fire someone who just isn't working out at all.
Who the hell documents anything well? I thought we were all programmers here.
Documentation of anything is the most difficult task, the most disliked task, and the most avoided. That's gotta be true no matter what anyone's job is, programmer or not.
LOLOLOLOLOLOL. I feel the number of top stories on HN are steadily moving away from programming, and that it is more about Entrepreneurship/VC/Business Management these days.
Do you have any sources to back up the claim that it's a myth? I'm genuinely curious because my personal experience in the industry for 10 years says otherwise. But that's just anecdotal, and I've never come across a study on it.
> People expressing a fear that minorities are receiving unjust benefits are often racist?
This type of thinking in our industry needs to STOP. There is far too much evidence that women are treated like absolute shit pretty much across the board (don't bother pointing out your handful of CEOs and other execs, if you can't face this fact then you're part of the problem).
If it happens to women, it happens to others.
You sound like you've got some pretty sweet white, male privilege. If you aren't a member of that majority, well they've certainly got you on their side.
And you sound like you can't read - I was arguing the opposite ;) Or rather, I was putting out there the idea that people that whinge about minorities receiving advantages are racist. But as I was aping the intellectually dishonest argumentative technique of the GP, I didn't actually make that claim, I merely suggested that this was a possibility.
For the record, I'm female, and member of a discriminated against minority, that has previously been fired for membership to said minority. And no, I don't think management in that case paused for even a microsecond worrying about potential backlash from firing a member of a minority (they stated quite clearly in the termination letter that this was actually the reason they were firing me - nice). If they were at all concerned about that, they certainly hid it well...
You're getting downvoted because you've misunderstood the original comment. Antimagic seemed to be pointing out that claiming that Munira was still in employment because she was a member of a protected class was quite probably racist. You replied saying that kind of thing needs to stop, because it's mean to women.
The only sane conclusion from this is you've misread antimagic's original comment.
"Member of a protected class" is probably a more accurate term (if applicable). (IANAL) And if she's a member of a protected class in the US or her state, then yes, any company has to consider the consequences of being involved in a protected class employment suit.
Although companies need to worry when firing members of a protected class, and we can debate whether that level of worry is underblown or overblown, lying about your educational record is a smoking gun that would make it trivial to dismiss the employee on the spot if the company wanted to do so.
One of the reasons I don't like anti discrimination laws. However, I am for allowing the EEOC, anti-trust or similar to order particular sets of companies to stop discrimination for a period of time if necessary, as I mentioned before.
I think your biases are getting best of you, I have seen sufficient number of people of similar ethnic background laid-off and fired. I do not think that is the basis of her employment's continuance. Its very likely that she is willing to do the dark and dirty work, some higher-ups do not want to do.
There is level fascination to mis-direct the causes, let me assure you if people of ethnic backgrounds are so protected - we would not be scratching and clawing at the lower rungs of corporate ladder.
With respect, I don't think you're reading my comment closely enough. I'm not saying that being a member of a protected class protects someone from being fired. I'm saying that a company is likely going to be more careful, and there is an added burden, to be able to demonstrate that that person was not fired in connection with being in that class.
It should be noted that everybody is a member of a protected class by virtue of their race, gender, etc. It's not something that only applies to minorities, and I wish people would stop perpetuating that misundrstanding.
A company as large as Amazon has an HR policy that allows for dismissal upon proof of fraud on the job application. Unless the company was worried about how many other people they'd get asked about why they hadn't canned.
(NB: I'm still uncomfortable with how we're discussing her employment as if we were a gossip site, but this is a general policy.)
as a desi female, we are not included in eeo, tbh. tell me the last time you looked at any one of us and thought, "man, s/he could use a break." never, that never happens. honestly, to me, this circumstance in the letter to the board is the opposite. some idiot desi set-claims herself as a stanford grad and nobody bats an eye. again, no way to prove this to you, but I am desi. i can promise you, everywhere i work, without fail, if there's some random question that involves a degree, they always run to me. i'm always saying "wait, i went to law school, though, i don't get how the urethra works." yeah, no, my take: they just didn't care to check. she probably has dirt on someone or who knows. all we know is they're all a bunch of sleaze regardless of race or gender, iffffff all of this is true and wasn't doctored.
I agree. If well played, she could probably unleash a social justice hell on Amazon, and with current media climate it wouldn't even matter if it was fabricated or not.
Incorrect. This is a prevalent yet still poorly understood phenomenon that has an impact not just on those in the tech sector (as many of us on HN are), but also on society at large. Philosophers and activists have repeatedly tried to explain this type of behaviour, but we still have no answer. I find it very curious.
I have not followed the course because a lack of available free time but I am sure it is really interesting, a relevant to the Amazon case : Unethical Decision Making in Organizations [0]
You can hardly be blamed. This quote just on page 3:
My manager did not communicate to her management chain the positive impact I was having on the product - in fact, she once told me “You’re here to make me look good - you’re doing an awesome job”.
Compare/Contrast: I worked at a startup where I was the only direct report to someone who spent the overwhelming majority of his day watching videos of women exercising (file this under "things I wouldn't have to know if we didn't have an open floor plan"). I spoke to _his_ boss (who sat two seats down from me, because it's a startup), who said the reason I had to go through those ridiculous hoops and charades and end up with an unusual workload was because the guy I reported to had been there a long time and, ya know, he deserved his fancy title and direct report.
Don't get me wrong, dysfunction at large companies is disproportionately large most of the time. But man, even smaller bits of nonsense can be extremely frustrating when you see them up close.
The thing about startups is that very few of them can afford this sort of dead weight. Perhaps for a little while, but it's one of the things that results in so high a fraction of them failing. Which has been true in two I've been in that suffered from this.
To be perfectly fair, in any job this is what you're supposed to do -- make your boss look good, who makes his boss look good, etc. That's how you get promoted.
"Make me look good" doesn't mean "do stuff and I'll take all the credit" -- at least not with a good manager. It's about meeting/exceeding your goals, which helps your boss meet/exceed his goals, etc. and makes the organization stronger.
That said, this is not something you would plainly state to your direct report...
> To be perfectly fair, in any job this is what you're supposed to do -- make your boss look good [...]
I find this sentiment horrifying. When I hire people, I don't want them to spend one second thinking about how to make me look good. I want their brainpower entirely devoted to things like serving the customer, improving the company, and helping their colleagues.
Admittedly, give that so many companies are dysfunctional feudal empires, it is often good career advice. But I still find it horrifying.
> I want their brainpower entirely devoted to things like serving the customer, improving the company, and helping their colleagues.
Don't you think all those things make you look good if you are the hiring manager? Conversely, if the employee you hired fails to perform those duties, you look bad.
Again, "making your boss look good" is NOT supposed to mean "do specific things for your boss that will impress his boss", it's supposed to mean that the employee meets or exceeds the expectations of the job which _in turn_ makes the hiring manager look good because his group is meeting or exceeding their goals, and so on up the line.
If those are equivalent to making me look good, then focusing on those should be sufficient. No need to bring my ego into it.
But of course, they're not. This whole mess at Amazon is an issue only because Kivin Varghese chose to do the right thing by his customer instead of making his manager look good. And look where it got him: screwed over and sued.
Regarding your claim that "make your boss look good" really means "do the assigned job well": I don't believe you. If that's what it meant, we could say, "do the assigned job well". What it actually means is exactly what it says. The reason that people say and mean that is that in organizations driven by power and appearance, making your boss look good is indeed a road to success.
