Or because they believed his manifesto to be both bullshit and a legal liability. Especially as the company -- which Damore accused of using its "money to water only one side of the lawn [i.e. women's]" -- fights off a possible class-action lawsuit [0] and an ongoing federal investigation [1] alleging discrimination against women.
Again, why should Google put the guy who lacks basic research skills (again, being ignorant of anti-discrimination cases brought by men) to be in charge of gathering and analyzing data?
Ok. You throw around terms like "ignorant", "massive error" etc; but I don't think your own assertions are not founded.
What "basic facts and history" are you alluding to, and how do you think they are relevant?
Why do you feel justified saying the author is "ruled by his emotions"? You made blank assertions without explicitly backing them up ("Only someone ignorant..", "only someone ruled by his emotions..")
You say his premises are not "coherent in their arrangement" but can you give an demonstrate this? Just saying "clearly he's ignorant" etc isn't enough to convince me you are right about the quoted snippet, let alone the whole memo.
As was stated in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14974650 you are nit-picking a memo intended to invite discussion, but name calling ("ignorant") without providing at least a similar level of citation, or explanation, yourself is not constructive.
That's hardly a good option. Google hired him as an engineer, to work with his team and build things. With this manifesto, he's made it very hard for his team to work with him, and alienated at least a third of his colleagues. Why would Google want to keep around an engineer in that situation?
The firing is justified from the point of view of the company, they want someone that can contribute, and he's just effectively removed himself from that pool. In my opinion, this is a bigger part of why they fired him, and the fact that they disagreed with his policies was just a cherry on top.
Actually he hasn't made it hard for his team to work with him. Rather, they choose to make it hard for themselves to work with him, because they believe his views on politics and gender science make him a "bad person" who must be shunned to teach him a lesson.
The world is full of religious people, Trump supporters, conservatives, and people who agree that men and women are biologically different and that might affect their life choices. Adults can go to work and collaborate productively with these people.
Google is quite clearly now full of people who are not adults in this respect, and who feel it's totally OK to refuse to work with someone they never even met because of a memo they wrote on political and policy issues. And their management supports them in this.
From the companies point of view this may mean they are justified in firing him, but California law apparently disagrees - you aren't allowed to fire someone for their political affiliations, and that is true even if other employees are refusing to work with them. That would require you to fire those other employees, as they are the ones refusing to do their work unless a legally impermissible act is taken.
oh please... how he acts is their fault? are you serious?
if he was a white-supremacist who wrote a scientifically-backed manifesto about biological differences with his black coworkers, would you still be blaming the people who are 'shunning' him?
What? He is an engineer, not a social scientist. He lacks the qualifications to perform such a study. Why would Google pay him to do that?
Further, his job was to make more money for the company than he cost it. The negative publicity he generated, right or wrong, means he is no longer doing his job. Firing him meant the managers did theirs.
... as the memo just proved ...
Management could have put him in charge of gathering and analyzing data to prove or disprove his memo.
They fired him instead => they don't care about data => the memo was right, management is biased