L’affaire du Damore has come to a quiet close:
Google and the engineer it fired agreed to end their legal fight but didn’t detail terms of the case’s conclusion. Google and James Damore, an engineer it fired in 2017, have agreed to dismiss his lawsuit against the tech giant, a quiet end to a loud case that began with a controversial memo in which Damore criticized the company’s efforts to improve the diversity of its workforce.
“This matter is dismissed in its entirety,” Judge Brian Walsh wrote in a Thursday order with the Superior Court in Santa Clara, the Silicon Valley county where Google is headquartered, after Damore and Google “agreed to end the case … between them.” Details of the agreement weren’t disclosed.
Translation: Google paid Damore several million dollars in order to prevent the further public release of information.
Meanwhile, Pikachu confirmed that Google remains committed to complete convergence:
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai responded to a report that Google has dramatically scaled back diversity and inclusion programs to appease conservative critics, promising that the company remains committed. “Diversity is a foundational value for us. Given the scale at which we build products and the fact we do it locally for our users, we are deeply committed to having that representation in our workforce,” said Pichai in an interview on The Vergecast. “What we are doing in the company is constantly at our scale. We look at that first — see what works, what we can scale up better. All I can say is we probably have more resources invested in diversity now than at any point in our history as a company.”
Translation: Google will keep hiring people who can’t possibly do the necessary work until it goes bankrupt.