That of engineer Antonio García Martínez was one of Apple’s galactic signatures a little over three years ago. It was in April 2021 that this famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur He signed for Apple after working for companies like Facebook. A signature, yes, it would be the most ephemeral.
It’s not that García Martínez didn’t do his job well at Apple. It’s just that shortly after being hired some embarrassing comments were discovered which he had already transposed into his book “Chaos Monkeys”. He aroused the suspicions of his new colleagues at the time and at Apple, they had no respect. He ended up getting fired.
Because chaos is that of the engineer, not that of the monkeys
Before coming to Apple, Antonio García Martínez had a career that, while perhaps somewhat unnoticed by the general public, was highly regarded in the technology industry. His peak was between 2011 and 2013, when he worked as a product manager for Facebook and also worked in the advertising side of what is now renamed Meta.
However, García Martínez would soon raise eyebrows among his teammates. A group petitioned the highest authorities of the company to demand his dismissal. The reasons were none other than his objectionable comments in the past and most notably in his aforementioned book, “Chaos Monkeys”.
This book, published in 2016 in the United States, was an autobiography of the author and with which he invited young people interested in succeeding in Silicon Valley to embark on entrepreneurship. Many of those who were already his colleagues at Apple found some misogynistic comments there.
“Meek and weak, spoiled and naive despite their pretensions to worldliness, and generally full of shit”
Archival photograph of Antonio García Martínez
Although translated into Spanish, this phrase appeared literally in the book published by Antonio García Martínez five years before landing at Apple. With this, I was trying to describe women in the tech industry. This is already a reprehensible comment, although unfortunately it is not the only inappropriate comment found in these texts.
Media outlets such as The Verge have echoed detailed letter from employees in which they cite absolutely all comments. They claimed to have attempted to correctly contextualize each of García Martínez’s sexist and racist comments, even though the evidence showed them that it was impossible to justify them and that they were indeed sexist and racist comments.
A dazzling career slowed down by sexist and racist comments
The fact that this reached the media only made García Martínez’s situation worse. A few weeks after joining Apple this situation had already happened and by May he had already been fired. In all less than a month of work for Apple. On the part of the company, they wanted to cut the matter short and refused to comment on this matter to the media. “Tragedy about the past”, they would think, but not for García Martínez who will always be haunted by these comments about his past.
Some time later, the engineer tried to explain himself by minimizing the problem and putting forward a position in which he was certain that the remarks taken from his book were out of context. At the professional, He continues his own projectsalthough publicly there is not much information about what he does.
What is clear is that, given his career, he could have become a key man at Apple. However, this is yet another example of how, ultimately, It’s not enough to be a good professional. You also have to be a good person and these are values that Apple, like so many other companies, strictly applies.
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