Google Cloud Executive Who Sought Pentagon Contract Steps Down (nytimes.com) 82
Diane Greene, whose pursuit of Pentagon contracts for artificial intelligence technology sparked a worker uprising at Google, is stepping down as chief executive of the company's cloud computing business (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). "Ms. Greene said she would stay on as chief executive until January. She will be replaced by Thomas Kurian, who oversaw product development at Oracle until his resignation in October. Ms. Greene will remain a board director at Google's parent company, Alphabet," reports The New York Times. From the report: The change in leadership caps a turbulent three years for Ms. Greene, who was brought on to expand Google's cloud computing business. Google Cloud has struggled to make major inroads in persuading corporate customers to use its computing infrastructure over alternatives like Amazon's A.W.S. and Microsoft's Azure. In a blog post published by the company, Ms. Greene said she had initially told friends and family that she was planning to run Google Cloud for only two years but stayed for three. Ms. Greene, a widely respected technologist and entrepreneur, said that after leaving Google Cloud, she planned to help female founders of companies by investing in and mentoring them. Ms. Greene joined Google in 2015 when it acquired Bebop, a start-up she had founded, for $380 million. Ms. Greene defended Google's pursuit of a Defense Department contract for the Maven program, which uses AI to interpret video images and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes. In March, she said it was a small contract worth "only" $9 million and that the technology would be used for nonlethal purposes.
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1) It's "her" not "him"
2) She's still part of the board for Alphabet
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Or she's a bad boss who didn't understand what her "underlings" would want to work on with excitement and motivation and what they would rather quit before being forced to work on.
VMWare (Score:3)
Re:VMWare (Score:5, Informative)
Funny how they are happy to play with China... (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny how they seem to have reservations about the US, but happily help China with surveillance and oppression. This is ironic, because China bans Google from doing business on their soil.
Re: Funny how they are happy to play with China... (Score:3)
Given all the Chinese they hire, its probably for the best anyway to keep them from working on Us govt things. Google (and silly com valley) doesnâ(TM)t have a monopoly on smart people, but does seem to have an out-sized share of weirdos and people who think more highly of their themselves and their abilities than they can necessarily back up.
That they would rather spend their precious time on earth working at an ad agency that has tricked people into believing it is a tech company is interesting, but
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They forced the woman out - even after she agreed with the employees demands - and was replaced with a man.
Where’s this vaulted diversity the company talks about?
The man is not white. Intersectional victimhood studies ranks male people of color as more oppressed, and therefor more deserving, than a white women who is not gay.
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Way to go (Score:3, Insightful)
Listen to the foreign employees who hate to see a strong american military.
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yea yea we know you hate the USA.
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Listen to the foreign employees who hate to see a strong american military.
It is patriotic to hate to see an american military this strong. That's what the second amendment was all about. Ironically, most 2a supporters probably don't know that, but anyway
Men need not apply (Score:4, Insightful)
"[Green] planned to help female founders of companies by investing in and mentoring them."
Since this is apparently OK, I take it that if a male executive wants to exclusively help male founders of companies by investing and mentoring them, rejecting female founders solely because they lack a Y chromosome, that's OK too, right? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, after all.
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Y chromosome is best chromosome! /s
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Oh, no, look at the poor persecuted white male here. Listen to his cries for help.
I am a white male. I grew up in a society that believed discrimination by gender, race, etc. is morally wrong. I have gone out of my way to follow this rule.
A serious question: If the social norm against discrimination has changed so that it is acceptable to favor one gender over another, why should I continue to abide by the old rules?
Suppose that women at my place of work are, on average, worse teammates than men. I get paid by what my team produces. Why shouldn't I refuse to work with women? These
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Suppose that women at my place of work are, on average, worse teammates than men. I get paid by what my team produces. Why shouldn't I refuse to work with women?
Let's suppose what you say is true: that the small number of women you worke closely enough with to judge their work are on average worse team mates than the men. Which presumably means not all of them since we're talking averages.
You're generalising your experience of a few women to the entire population and appear to not be extending the same act
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He said the opposite
> I grew up in a society that believed discrimination by gender, race, etc. is morally wrong.
And many people now do not believe that, and discriminate.
A rational actor cannot forever remain anti-discrimination whilst also being part of a group which gets increasingly discriminated against on the basis of gender, race etc., it just means you get marginalized quicker and have no defence. This is why identity politics is a polarizing evil.
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Oh, no, look at the poor persecuted white male here. Listen to his cries for help.
I am a white male. I grew up in a society that believed discrimination by gender, race, etc. is morally wrong. I have gone out of my way to follow this rule.
A serious question: If the social norm against discrimination has changed so that it is acceptable to favor one gender over another, why should I continue to abide by the old rules?
Suppose that women at my place of work are, on average, worse teammates than men. I get paid by what my team produces. Why shouldn't I refuse to work with women? These women
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I mean... yeah? That's okay. I'm sure there are venture capitalists out there who make decisions that way.
Or were you trying to use your incredibly strained butthurt here to provoke some kind of outrage?
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I mean, I don't think discrimination on basis of gender is uniformly great, but I do think there are jobs that, in general, men or women are better at than each other. In reality, there are certainly women who can do a 'typically male' job better than some specific men. And vice versa.
Some rich lady has the right to discriminate on the basis of gender when she decides whom to give her money to. The fact that I don't think gender is the best predictor of success isn't important to her. Or, at least, she hasn
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The point is that if Diane Green were Dale Green, and discriminating against women instead of against men, he would be denounced by one and all. The news article certainly would not have passed that over without comment. Massive double standard.
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Yeah, so? Is there a rule that we can't have double standards? Is the point you're trying to make that you have some childish concept of "fairness" that everyone else needs to adhere to? Diane Green is preferentially supporting women because she perceives that men are already preferentially supported in the industry. Is she right? I dunno, I don't have that data. But what's the consequence if she's wrong? That some number of women get VC support who wouldn't without her?
Oh, no. Someone, please protect us fr
Re: Men need not apply (Score:1)
Youâ(TM)re describing how it has worked for millenia, but what is also thankfully on itâ(TM)s way out
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Apparently it's not, as the parent poster points out. Just a different gender now.
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rejecting female founders
Why do you assume that if he wants to help female founders he would have to reject male founders? Doing the former doesn't imply the latter.
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He? Why are you assuming that Diane Green is male?
As for your question, nobody says "I'm planning to help female founders", making sure to including the limiting adjective "female", if they plan to treat male and female founders equally.
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Don't waste your time. He will just throw facts and logic out the window to try to spin what you say and insist YOU mean something you don't until he is satisfied that he has proven he is better than you because you commit thought crime.
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Unless they think that female founders are treated less favourably, in which case adding "female" would emphasis their commitment to equal treatment.
Shitty Management Techniques 101 (Score:1)
2) Anticipated worker uprising ensues.
3) CEO "steps down."
4) CEO replaced by new person.
5) "I don't like it either guys, but if we don't finish the contract they'll close us down." 6) Silently acquire new contracts "we need to break even guys, we're bleeding money and this tech directly translates to this other tiny contract with only a small change."
7) Rinse and repeat, jumbling steps as desired.
SJW 1 - Logic 0 (Score:1)
Idiots, you dont turn down contracts like that.
Id take the contact in a second, and if any of my employees complained, they would no longer be an employee.
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Ever worked for a government contractor? (Score:2)
Setting aside the ethical quagmire you descend into when you take on that work... especially under the current administration... it's just in every way awful all-around.
I worked for a government contractor my first job out of college. Yah, I was young and dumb and had student loans that were going to need to be repaid. And no. Just... no. I'm never going to make that mistake again... not for 45, not for his successor, not for Obama if they were to amend the constitution so he could run again, not for Kenne
Re:Ever worked for a government contractor? (Score:5, Interesting)
It was the same decades ago. And it's the same with a lot of embedded/electronics companies. They stick to hardware they know that will work, even if it is decades old, because that's what the whole company and the principal engineers used back then. And if they do have the newest/latest hardware, all the software must be backwards compatible with the old hardware, so you won't get to use the new features of the new hardware. Anything career building will be outsourced to a contractor, to make sure you don't learn anything transferrable. You'll have a three month or six month notice period which makes it impossible to change jobs.
They might have found it so hard to find staff that they offshore some work. So then they need headhunters to literally hunt down people with embedded experience. And I literally mean "hunt down". Stalking people via LinkedIn by looking for keywords. Even getting GCHQ to monitor Emails and social media for anyone posting a CV, then using those Email addreses and accounts to make connections. Sometimes even sending anonymous Emails or Linkedin messages providing "careers advice".
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Double standards (Score:2)
Helping the Pentagon for profit is bad, but helping the Orwellian Chinese surveillance network is acceptable.