Entries in Sundar Pichai (7)

Wednesday
Nov292017

Google finally gets the cheeseburger right in Android 8.1

One of the weird, quirky tech stories that hit us recently was the idea that Google didn’t know how a cheeseburger looks like with the incorrect depiction of the food item as an emoji. The cheese it was seen placed at the bottom of the bun instead of the burger. It even caught the attention of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who promised to look into the “issue.” And true enough, he did.  Android 8.1 already has a “proper” cheeseburger emoji heading our way. But that wasn’t before the company made fun of itself and made an “Android Burger” IRL.

Source: The Verge

Friday
Aug112017

Google CEO cancels diversity all-hands meeting, cites employees concerns about safety and online privacy

CNET

Google was set to hold an all-hands town hall meeting yesterday at 4 p.m. but was cancelled at the last minute. According to the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai, the meeting was cancelled because several employees have expressed concern about being harassed online with their questions and names being published outside of the company. Google is currently facing a diversity-related controversy when one former Google engineer argued in a 10-page manifesto called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” that biological differences between men and women are the cause of the gender gap at Google and in the tech industry in general.

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Wednesday
Aug092017

Google engineer who penned ‘anti-diversity memo’ gets fired, files labor complaint

If you’re paying close attention to the recent tech news, one of the biggest things to come out of Silicon Valley, or Google to be more specific, is this “anti-diversity memo,” as it’s being called, written by a now ex-Google engineer. James Damore, who’s written the manifesto, was just fired by the company on Monday for “perpetuating gender stereotypes” and violating Google’s code of conduct. Damore was arguing in the memo that the biological differences between men and women are the cause of the gender gap at Google and in the tech industry in general. And he puts to question Google’s diversity efforts. Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke up, or rather wrote down his thoughts in a note to employees saying, "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK."

On the day Damore was fired, he also filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board in the US saying that Google’s upper management has been “misrepresenting and shaming” him. “I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does,” Damore told The New York Times. And he seems to have a case on his hands, at least enough to “get through the courtroom door,” as one lawyer points out to Wired that “Damore's lawyer might argue that his memo was protected under California law, because it related to allegedly unequal treatment of employees.”

Source: The Verge

Tuesday
Jan312017

Over 2,000 Google employees join protest against Trump’s immigration ban

You can’t browse through any news site these days and not see news related to U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigration in seven Muslim-majority countries. Even big tech company leaders are speaking up. But it isn’t just the leaders this time. More than 2,000 Google employees in eight offices in the US walked off their jobs to protest the immigration ban. They made use of the hashtag #GooglersUnite, where the employees tweeted photos and videos of the walkout activities around the world—including one at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.

The protest happened after employees donated over US$2 million to a crisis fund that will be distributed to nonprofit groups working to support the refugees. Google matched the donation. The protest was organized by the employees but supported by Google. Both the company’s co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai spoke at the rally, with Pichai being quoted by saying “The fight will continue,” and Brin saying “it’s a debate about fundamental values.”

Source: The Verge