<story><title>A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellowship-of-friends-sect.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ineedasername</author><text>At minimum Google could have investigated the odd clustering of employees that indicated some sort of nepotistic hiring practice. Of course they might be doing exactly that, but it&amp;#x27;s not the sort of thing they can really comment on.&lt;p&gt;Edit: also the self-dealing on hundreds of thousands of dollars in wine.</text></item><item><author>abeppu</author><text>So, if the author was fired for the reasons they believe, that&amp;#x27;s pretty bad behavior. But if he had not been fired, what was management supposed to have done about the cult members working for this department?&lt;p&gt;Yes, the cult&amp;#x27;s leader sounds like a pretty awful person, but he wasn&amp;#x27;t working there. What were the cult members doing in their work in the department that was clearly wrong? It&amp;#x27;s suggested that there was favoritism and unfair promotion going on -- but it&amp;#x27;s not very well evidenced here. Were they using company money to fund their organization? It&amp;#x27;s also not clear from the article that the wine outfit is a cult subsidiary.&lt;p&gt;And if the concern is primarily that the cult itself is a shady organization with some bad people, and that something should be done to stop Google from having a clique of staff that are even _affiliated_ with that organization ... well that seems like a really fraught policy. Are you supposed to then ask everyone in the department about their religious affiliations, or whether they&amp;#x27;ve given money to a fringe religious organization? That also seems like a really unhealthy road for a company to go down.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nitwit005</author><text>The problem in this case would be they seem to be hiring almost exclusively from a rather obscure religious group. That means they&amp;#x27;re illegally discriminating against members other religions.</text></comment>
<story><title>A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellowship-of-friends-sect.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ineedasername</author><text>At minimum Google could have investigated the odd clustering of employees that indicated some sort of nepotistic hiring practice. Of course they might be doing exactly that, but it&amp;#x27;s not the sort of thing they can really comment on.&lt;p&gt;Edit: also the self-dealing on hundreds of thousands of dollars in wine.</text></item><item><author>abeppu</author><text>So, if the author was fired for the reasons they believe, that&amp;#x27;s pretty bad behavior. But if he had not been fired, what was management supposed to have done about the cult members working for this department?&lt;p&gt;Yes, the cult&amp;#x27;s leader sounds like a pretty awful person, but he wasn&amp;#x27;t working there. What were the cult members doing in their work in the department that was clearly wrong? It&amp;#x27;s suggested that there was favoritism and unfair promotion going on -- but it&amp;#x27;s not very well evidenced here. Were they using company money to fund their organization? It&amp;#x27;s also not clear from the article that the wine outfit is a cult subsidiary.&lt;p&gt;And if the concern is primarily that the cult itself is a shady organization with some bad people, and that something should be done to stop Google from having a clique of staff that are even _affiliated_ with that organization ... well that seems like a really fraught policy. Are you supposed to then ask everyone in the department about their religious affiliations, or whether they&amp;#x27;ve given money to a fringe religious organization? That also seems like a really unhealthy road for a company to go down.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonas21</author><text>There was also an odd clustering among early Google employees who all came from a place called &amp;quot;Stanford.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It may be difficult to distinguish between these two hiring patterns without asking the sorts of questions that are illegal for employers to ask.</text></comment>