Psychiatrists, he says, assured him “it didn’t matter”.
I’m not necessarily the best at predicting what would be controversial It wasn’t until his mid-20s, after completing research in computational biology at Princeton and MIT, and starting a PhD at Harvard, that Damore was diagnosed with autism, although he was told he had a milder version of the condition known as “high-functioning autism”. He came second in a national chess tournament at 14, and in his teens became the world’s highest-ranking player in Rise of Nations, a computer strategy game. Within a year he was able to compete in four games of chess simultaneously while wearing a blindfold. His parents were concerned it was several years before they discovered that their son’s verbal difficulties were accompanied by some extraordinary talents.īy the age of about 11, Damore was coding adventure games on his TI-83 calculator. As a child growing up in Romeoville, a suburb of Chicago, he took longer than usual to speak in complete sentences. W ords were never James Damore’s strong suit. “I’m not necessarily the best at predicting what would be controversial.” “My biggest flaw and strength may be that I see things very differently than normal,” he tells me. Even now, still out of work and coming to the conclusion he has in effect been “blacklisted” from any major tech company, Damore finds it hard to comprehend how his opinions sparked such intense controversy. He believes he has a problem understanding how his words will be interpreted by other people. In the course of several weeks of conversation using Google’s instant messaging service, which Damore prefers to face-to-face communication, he opened up about an autism diagnosis that may in part explain the difficulties he experienced with his memo. Damore, meanwhile, has appeared to bask in the attention in the months since he left Google, he has become a commentator on political issues that extend well beyond the tech industry, becoming one of the most polarising figures in Silicon Valley.Īt the same time, the experience has prompted some introspection.
She does not want to be identified or directly quoted: she is keen to remain in the shadows. Damore’s girlfriend has agreed to meet only after being assured that, like her, I disagree with her boyfriend’s views.
We are in Mountain View, home to Google’s headquarters. “I lost a lot of sleep and didn’t eat much.” “I definitely didn’t think that it would explode like it did,” the 28-year-old says now. On 7 August, two days after his memo was leaked, Damore was fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes”.
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