https://www.cbsnews.com/news/andy-rubin-google-settlement-se...
Google has enough money to hire the best law firms too. Why would any law firm engage in frivolous litigation against a potential future client?
The linked settlement is 10X that of this one, which if paid, would be divided among 6,600 people. Not exactly a huge payday.
So, yes, it appears Google is in the habit of paying out contradictory settlements rather than litigating them.
The state of US case law -- IANAL, this is a layman's understanding -- is that plaintiffs only have to show that there exists "disparate impact," which is to say that outcomes were not exactly the same for Asians/whites and blacks.
Two things can be true: 1) Google did not intend to discriminate, did not institute any policy designed to discriminate, did not in actual fact discriminate against non-Asian/white employees; and 2) they could still be held liable for hiring results that look like discrimination in a single-variable analysis.
So, yes, I think there are indeed situations in which they'd pay out settlements knowing full well they've done nothing morally or ethically dubious.
Because the chances is getting a payout is greater than the chances of ever working for Google.
Some dumb stuff that happened while I was at Google:
* There was a ERG for literally every single race except White people. "Just join one of the others" was what they told me.
* During an onboarding learning exercise because I was merely showing initiative before the rest of the group. "Ok everyone here's my idea". I was tapped on the shoulder by the contractor-teacher-person and asked to move aside and let the group do the very same thing without me.
* Nonwhite employees in my org also got a special mentor who helped them get a leg-up in the company. Some employees were whisked-away from their work responsibilities to go on little field trips with other teams. A few of these people were totally inept technically at their job and I saw them convert into better jobs. It must have been nice.
I'm pretty liberal, but this corpo-liberalism that somehow thinks an eye-for-an-eye to people living in 2025 is insane to me. It might even burn someone so much it changes their politics if they're whimsical.
1. There were ERGs for old people, young people, people who brought dogs to work, Irish people, Jewish people, etc. I can't imagine why they would say you couldn't create one for the group you wanted.
2. One thing hot-shot programmers fresh out of college need to learn is that while their opinion is valued, they need to listen to other people on the team as they may have important points as well. While it's nice to show initiative, that's L3-L4 thinking. To get to L5 or higher, you need to be able to listen, strategize, and drive consensus. All of those fuzzy things that you became a software engineer to avoid. Because at the end of the day, no one is particularly interested in how clever you are, they're interested in what you can get done. And you can get a heck of a lot more done through working with other people, even if they aren't quite as clever as you. After all, quantity has a quality all its own.
3. Every new employee gets assigned a mentor (at least at the office I was at). I'm not sure how this would differ from the "special" mentor you're talking about, but maybe you can inform me. Though with the level of ego reflected in your post, I'm not sure you would have benefited from a mentor, special or otherwise.
4. Some people that are hired are not as good, technically, as others. I'm aware of confirmation bias, so seeing a few less technically capable employees that happen not to be white doesn't surprise me. And when I do the math, assigning scores to previous co-workers and talking it up, I don't actually see a statistically significant difference in the capabilities based on race (though it does lean a bit towards white males being less capable).
But maybe my Google office wasn't representative, as we weren't one of the main ones.
I don't know if it's a common thing at companies or not, but it's a new initialism to me.
Imagine moving to say, Switzerland, to work for a massive corporation. 90% of the employees are Swiss. The other 10% come from a smattering of other countries from around the world. To help those employees acclimate to a new culture and find support, the company sponsors country-based ERGs.
Of course, there is no Swiss ERG, as it's the "default", because the entire company is essentially a Swiss ERG. But, the company encourages its Swiss employees to join the others as a show of support and cultural exchange.
If you had attended one of those groups, you might have found yourself feeling extraordinarily welcome, and even learned a few things about your fellow employees.
>A few of these people were totally inept technically at their job and I saw them convert into better jobs. It must have been nice.
If "totally inept" people are being promoted with any frequency, then that's a problem for any company. I think we have all seen this occasionally but, in my experience, it has very little to do with race (or other identity) and more to do with the Peter Principle and the fact that hiring and HR management is notoriously hard to get right.
I'm not suggesting anything about the earnestness of your observations, but you should be aware that assuming every non-white person you see at a company is the beneficiary of preferential treatment is a bit of a canard. And the idea that a disproportionate number of those are inept is yet another.
As such, whimsical people might draw rather nasty conclusions from your statements, that are other than what you intended.
> There was a ERG for literally every single race except White people. "Just join one of the others" was what they told me.
What would an ERG for white people even do? What would you want from it?
> Nonwhite employees in my org also got a special mentor who helped them get a leg-up in the company.
There are general mentorship programs, too. Usually focused on career development. I was a part of the main one.
Why should a rational person support people who act against him. This will horribly backfire...
I wouldn't interpret this as a top-level policy, just some individuals in some hiring and pay/leveling decisions with little accountability. This does mean they represent Google though, and one remedy for that is a settlement by the corporate entity.
Ideally shareholders would become interested in rooting this out and creating better, less expensive, accountability.
It creates an environment where everyone (or some additional subset of everyone) feels they need to elevate their own in-group.
Thinking back to a unicorn I worked for we were unofficially told to favour women in hiring. We all thought it was a great idea at that time, but also I do remember a coworker saying how her group has been doing heavy favouring of women in hiring for years already before being told to do so.
Does anyone familiar with the case know the context behind this?
This got down to a pretty low level of details, not only specifically cutting the class down to "Hispanic, Latinx, Indigenous, Native American, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and/or Alaska Native" employees but also explicitly excluding anyone in any of those groups who identified as Black.
The bigger issue really is that Google should start reviews of a lot of managerial decisions in this regard. If you've got courts agreeing with plaintiffs, then these people you've been hiring are pursuing their, um, "preferences", a little bit too openly. You have to take things back in hand.
lol
shows 5 percent black people. not a huge amount
If group X on average performs better than group Y, then objective hiring will lead to more group X bring hired. Then group Y takes you to court for discrimination.
I've been on the employer side of this... you fire someone who's performing badly, and then they come back 4 months later and sue the company for [insert made up thing here].
In our case, an ex-employee is suing us for not accommodating an anxiety and migraine disability, which they never disclosed and never requested accommodations for. So now we face a discrimination lawsuit (from a non-minority) based completely on falsehoods and things that never happened.
The reason people do this is because it works! Employers will almost always settle before it goes in front of a judge in order to avoid the hassle and cost of defending the claim.
The article doesn't go into details, so it's probably a safe bet not to make these sorts of assumptions at all.
So this is an "I feel wronged so I'm going to call you names" trial, because the only person in question is Cantu.
Google can and absolutely should be paying these people more in compensation.
