‘Misogynistic’ Apple hire is out hours after employees call for investigation

Outside of the main quote that keeps showing up, he was also fairly creepy writing about women he <i>worked with</i>.<p>&gt; Unlike most women at Facebook (or in the Bay Area, really) she knew how to dress; forties-style, form-fitting dresses from neck to knee were her mainstay.<p>&gt; There were few women one would call conventionally attractive at Facebook. The few there were rarely if ever dressed for work with their femininity on display in the form of dresses and heels<p>&gt; If her look was supposed to disarm me, she needed either more cleavage or more charm.<p>Sounds like not someone you&#x27;d want around if you&#x27;re a company that wants to make people feel at all safe and comfortable in an office.

&quot;This is the same guy who flipped out several years ago when I said that child-free people have lives equal in value to parents, then chased me across multiple platforms posting that I was &#x27;a barren bitch&#x27; or similar. Other women have similar stories. He&#x27;s a monster, basically.&quot;<p>— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;moorehn&#x2F;status&#x2F;1392528812047544321" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;moorehn&#x2F;status&#x2F;1392528812047544321</a>

As with Reddit&#x27;s Aimee Challenor controversy, I can&#x27;t see why the hiring company did not do a simple google search of the candidate before moving forward in the hiring process.<p>In both cases, the hiring process is either broken if they did not bother to search, or they did search and the company initially did not care. The later, bowing to employee pressure and backtracking, would be spineless.

I remember trying to read <i>Chaos Monkeys</i> because it sounded up my alley, and stopping a few chapters in because the author&#x27;s tone, to be frank, made me think he was at least pretentious and at worst a psychopath.<p>I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s worth a firing from Apple, but based on the book, Popehat&#x27;s rule of assholes* might be in play here.<p>* Popehat&#x27;s rule of assholes: From Popehat, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;popehat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;popehat</a>, roughly stating &quot;Assuming equal guilt, the system treats people who are assholes worse than people who are not.&quot;<p>Edit to add: After reviewing his comments in parts of the book I didn&#x27;t reach, and his apparent real-life behavior... yeah, no. Who <i>would</i> hire him?

Thread with more comments that got flagged: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27134993" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27134993</a><p>Remember not to blame dang, y&#x27;all, it&#x27;s due to users who are tired of culture war. I disagree with their views on acceptable discourse topics for HN, but it&#x27;s nothing nefarious.

There&#x27;s a rule in politics and senior roles where your job is to <i>not be the news.</i> Apple didn&#x27;t have a choice in this case. This guy&#x27;s book was irritating, and it sounds like he crossed some personal lines outside of it. Examples of how awful other managers everywhere are guilty of the same and much worse don&#x27;t justify anything he might have done to someone either. However, mobs cynically and disingenuously exploit this &quot;don&#x27;t be the news&quot; convention. They&#x27;re the stopped clock that found a vulnerability to leverage on this particular day and his conceits handed them the scalp they were looking for. He made himself the perfect straw man. So, Point: mob, but I don&#x27;t think there is any moral high ground in this story.<p>The real issue is it looks like Apple has fair weather leadership, and it has made their brand vulnerable to scandal. They&#x27;re at a stage where a single well timed joke or meme could wipe out billions in market cap. I like their products and a lot of what they do for privacy and security, but this episode suggests their leadership is misreading the zeitgeist and has lost sight of where growth comes from. It&#x27;s not fun to defend personalities I don&#x27;t like, but they&#x27;re only principles when it&#x27;s hard to apply them.

Here&#x27;s a video of Antonio García Martínez actually explaining his book (dated 4 years ago): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KE0pIKV5Mlc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KE0pIKV5Mlc</a><p>The YouTube comments on this video seem stuck in time (4 years ago) before our current &quot;PC&quot; era. They&#x27;re largely positive and have nothing to do with political commentary; e.g. the top two comments:<p>&gt; This was one of the best interviews I have heard from TWIST. I&#x27;ve never listened to a single boring one but holy crap Antonio was such a pleasure to listen to.<p>and<p>&gt; Love the insight; “radical candidness is endearing long term”<p>&gt; At a visceral level, we respect the strength &amp; stamina it takes to “suspend disbelief.”<p>&gt; Excellent piece Jason.<p>I&#x27;m sure we can find some salacious quotes from this guy&#x27;s book, but how many people in the latest cancel mob will take the time to read them in their full context before rushing to judgment? (I&#x27;m not rushing to judgment either way, but it does strike me that there&#x27;s a good chance this guy is a blunt person who has some interesting things to say, perhaps some of it rough around the edges and offensive).

Is this the book? Chaos Monkeys, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;28259132" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;28259132</a>

Wait, isn’t this the place where Steve Jobs was the founder?<p>Don’t they still ritualistically tell every new hire that they will be lucky not to get fired?

I dunno, I mean once this guy wrote this book, he should have known he was burning all bridges to corporate America (or at least the woke portion).<p>It&#x27;s amazing that Apple even hired him in the first place. Maybe he was helping to hit a POC target.<p>The upshot is people are being held to account for public speech, and you have to be an idiot to not differentiate along the spectrum of private thoughts, private speech, and public speech.

&gt; At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.<p>- Apple<p>Sounds amazingly like:<p>&gt; This is an environment of welcoming, and you should just get the hell out of here.<p>- Michael Scott

How many murals or paintings of Steve Jobs are still on the Apple campus?

&gt; Shortly after the petition began circulating internally at Apple, Martínez’s Slack account was deactivated.<p>With Apple&#x27;s level of secrecy I&#x27;m very surprised they use Slack instead of some in-house tool.

I remember reading some of a book about the psychology of pushing people into the far-(right|left) camps. It went something along the lines of &quot;if you reject them, it crystalizes their opinions as being right&quot;. It offered advice on how to make them feel heard, and ways to guide them back towards a more mainstream opinion.<p>I can see why the environment is so polarised.

Was he a recent hire at Apple?

“At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace …”<p>By excluding people that write passages in books outside of work that we don’t like.

Back in my days, people were judged by the value their work could could bring to the company, rather than based subjective assessments of subjective moral standards. This makes me feel old.<p>Do you think we will ever return to a world where a builder (for example) would be chosen based on their competence in being able to build a house rather than based upon some potential social media controversy one builder might trigger compared to the other one. Some people just want a nice house.

(1) It was interesting to see Apple employees organizing on Twitter. They don&#x27;t really have any companywide chat or email lists, but some groups have a Slack (only for that group).<p>(2) In the book he was comparing his pregnant British girlfriend to other women in the Bay Area, intended more to make her look good than others look bad. I don&#x27;t think any malice was involved.<p>(3) I hope he&#x27;s getting some sort of severance, or hopefully he got a good signing bonus when he joined.