Zoe Schiffer, The Verge:

Antonio García Martínez is no longer working at Apple hours after employees circulated a petition calling for an investigation into his hiring. Martínez, a former Facebook product manager on the ad targeting team, authored a controversial book about Silicon Valley where he expressed misogynistic views on women.

And:

“We are deeply concerned about the recent hiring of Antonio García Martínez,” employees wrote in the petition. “His misogynistic statements in his autobiography — such as ‘Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit’ (further quoted below this letter) — directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity.”

More than 2,000 employees signed the petition before it was published by The Verge.

All kinds of takes here. For starters, this is the power of the people, and the power of the press.

Props to Apple for acting quickly in response to this petition and Zoe Schiffer’s original Verge article.

From that original article:

García Martínez, who has also written for Wired, was the product manager for Facebook’s ad targeting team from 2011 to 2013. Most of the things the Apple employees have expressed concern about come from Chaos Monkeys itself. (The book is dedicated to “all my enemies.”) The autobiography traces García Martínez going from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. García Martínez has described the book as “total Hunter S. Thompson/Gonzo mode.” The employees, in the petition, view it differently: they say it’s racist and sexist.

But how did this happen in the first place? This mix of Facebook, the ad business, and Chaos Monkeys is toxic. This is clearly a vetting fail. The hope is that Apple homes in on the point of weakness that made this move possible and takes steps to understand why diversity in the workplace is important to prevent such a cultural mismatch from happening again.