I'm not sure where we go from here, but not being able to escape anxiety-inducing situations in a workplace is the definition of a toxic work environment. I don't think the answer is a return to 20th century "no politics at work," but at the FAANG I worked at, politics was impossible to avoid. Even the desire to be apolitical is itself criticized at worst and not respected at best. Work doesn't afford the use of the "block user" button. I hope we figure out a better way that respects some people have a hard time immersing in it the way others do.
"not being able to escape anxiety-inducing situations"
This sounds like an emotionally abusive environment unless you happen to agree with the political agenda being pushed. To feel socially pressured to go along or else be ostracized from your work is fairly awful.
I'm fortunate that I've worked in a rather politically balanced industry which naturally turns out to be apolitical as a consequence of mere demographics.
> This sounds like an emotionally abusive environment unless you happen to agree with the political agenda being pushed.
Yeah, 100%. Were you in California last summer? “Silence is violence” was the phrase of the day. I’ve got about a gazillion stories from living in San Francisco for three years.
I'm curious if you could share some of your stories.
Since last year, I've stopped using social media like FB. When the summer came around, my friends were posting political stuff online and noticed I wasn't interacting with it. My phone would then blow up with messages along the theme of: "are you showing your real self by not supporting x?".
Ideology follows many of the same basic structures as a religious belief system, in many cases ideology is a subset of a religious belief system, but in this case it's not. Combine that with the extreme polarization and demonization of the other side*, one of the oldest propaganda techniques ever[0], you end up with cult-like mentality. Even some circles (on both sides) will have love-bombing [1], a technique used to recruit new members. I grew up in a cult (Jehovah's Witnesses) and went against my dad when I was 16 to get out of it. Once you've been though that stuff and come out on the other side, you can't help but not see it in the modern political climate and it's disgusting.
My skip level manager had me in a 1-on-1 once and said something along the lines: “you probably got the green card because Trump likes your demographic”. (I have an EB-1 extraordinary ability green card, and I assume they were talking about me being straight and white). What the fuck am I supposed to say there? Was absolutely speechless. Moments like that are basically shit tests: “are you one of us?” Pretty sure I failed that test. Oh well.
One time quite recently I shared a Joe Rogan podcast on slack (Moxie from Signal was on there). I then went to sleep. Man, when I woke up the thread was popping with “I refuse to click on this link”, “Joe Rogan is a transphobe”. Someone posting stories about Joe Rogan being friends with Alex Jones and how problematic that is. Nothing to do with the actual podcast episode with Moxie. If anything, it was hilariously ironic because they were talking about how Signal provides privacy for people and how, if you don’t have privacy, people will scrutinise everything you’ve ever said and find ways to #cancel you. Just bizarre. I couldn’t even be bothered to respond.
Honestly most stories at work are just the accumulation of tiny comments here and there. Just the odd joke about conservatives or the implicit assumption you agree with them. One time some girl at work told me “I can tell you’re not as liberal as us”. I asked her why, because I definitely wasn’t but I also definitely didn’t bother arguing at work. She said she could just tell by my vibe. I mean it’s true. Fair play to her I guess.
Your skip level manager experience reminds me of an interaction with a diversity officer at my previous employer.
The company had hired a diversity officer and she began an initiative that requierd all company employees take an optional cultural course that was essentially something about power dynamics between culture/race. Since it wasn't really relevant to my role, I decided not to take the course as it was optional... until I found out it wasn't. I started receiving emails and phone calls from the diversity officer that I should take the course. I thought it was a bit weird and just ignored her. She then contacted my boss and told her to tell me to take the course. Starting to get pissed off, I asked my boss if the course was option, she said yes, then I said I'm not taking it.
I'm mixed race with mainly French and Indian ancestry and while I can pass for full white (albeit a white person that spends time in the sun), my skin is tanned just enough that I can pass for other ethnic groups as well. However, my name is undoubtedly French.
I then received an email from the diversity officer saying that I was an example of a problematic white person and that I was probably ignoring her because she was female and Indian. Then I was contacted by HR for discriminatory conduct and told to report to their office. When I showed up at the office, I could visibly see they were confused as they were clearly expecting someone that didn't look like me. Luckily for me, some of my family is Hindu and I happened to be wearing a religious bracelet I received as a present and I was basically able to fend off their accusations of racism and whatnot. Left the company shortly afterwards.
If that were me, my next few words back to the diversity officer would probably get me fired depending on how rational the people in charge of my employment were. If they were just as irrational as her, I would definitely be getting the boot though.
>! You must know that Joe Rogan is a polarizing figure and posting him in any but a right-wing community is going to be a troll for reactions
My PhD work was on Signal. I work in security. I literally just wanted to talk about Signal, man. It was actually pretty disappointing to me people talked about how problematic Joe Rogan is instead.
> you should reflect upon your reaction if a podcast from a thinker you despised was posted.
I just said I have a gazillion stories about how it’s better to keep silent in San Francisco than voice your opinion. Trust me, I wouldn’t react the same way.
I definitely don’t want to #csncel e.g. John Oliver just because he said some shit I disagreed with once. I hate that culture. In fact, I’d probably share him if he happened to be saying something I thought was interesting at the time. I think I have before when he was talking about Apple privacy or blockchains actually. So no, I wouldn’t react the same way.
> imagine someone posted a podcast of an ideologue, in a place where you feel safe expressing your opinion, as the detractors of your Joe Rogan piece felt safe where you posted him.
Are you trying to get me to say my reaction would be the same? It just wouldn’t be. I would at least listen to the episode before just commenting. Also where exactly is this place? My small group of friends? My partner? Anonymously online? That’s basically it. Because it’s definitely not work or social media.
> Certainly with a PhD you can't actually have been surprised by the reaction to your post. What's the point of your performative surprise?
Someone asked me for some weird stories from San Francisco, so I shared some.
> Is it that you don't feel safe expressing your opinion in certain places
Yeah that’s pretty much the point of my stories and the topic of this HN thread.
> You can't change the world for the better by trolling.
Yea this conversation is over then. If you think I’m just trying to troll people there’s really no point for me to talk to you.
The guy you're replying to appears to be a perfect example of a woke idiot. The whole idea that Joe Rogan is extremely controversial is incredibly stupid. The guy has an interesting, super popular podcast where he talks to super interesting people in a very chill, entertaining way. How terrible. This idea that you have to ban anyone that ever said anything you disagreed with is extremely illiberal and sounds like something from a totalitarian society.
I had a guy at work once who told me that he was a fan of HBO's Silicone Valley until he heard of that email one of its writers sent. After that he stopped watching the show. I asked him if he does constant research to find out if a person who produces any entertainment he likes said or did something bad in his personal life & then stops watching or listening any of the content they had something to do with. He said yes.
There are enough stories criticizing "the tolerant left" to support the notion that had Moodles been in the opposite end of this situation, he likely would not have reacted in the same extreme way. There is a culture with an express goal of fostering intolerance of average people, and San Francisco hosts a concentration of it.
Perhaps OP assumed the coworkers were able to think critically and not engage in basic ad hominems?
In my work environment I expect my coworkers to be able to engage with substance and would be very disappointed if they refused to look at something because it came from someone “problematic”.
I very much appreciate that this whole thread is suffused with the assumption that interlocutors are making their arguments from stupidity or illiteracy.
> posting him in any but a right-wing community is going to be a troll for reactions
This is an extreme shifting of the overton window and cult behavior that excommunicates liberals from the left. Joe Rogan himself is on the left, he has mostly liberal views, he wanted to vote for Bernie Sanders. But because he's heterodox and talks to the "other", he's a sinner who must be cast out.
Isn't there a difference between someone on the other side within the democratic political spectrum, and someone on the other side wanting to overthrow said democracy?
And yes, there's people outside of the democratic political spectrum both on the right and the left side. In Germany they currently march together ("Querdenker").
However, at least according to the FBI, the right-wing extremists are the larger problem right now.
Not really. This is only understandable if you subscribe to the idea that "not giving someone a platform" is a desirable and effective way to combat bad ideas.
I think Joe Rogan has said in the past that he just considers Alex Jones a friend and just enjoys having him on the podcast. Also, the guy has had literally thousands of guests on his podcast, including Bernie Sanders or whoever these woke people presumably agree with. And even then, sometimes him and his guests have been drunk or high. Do that to anyone and it's certain you'll find one or two clips among the tens of thousands of hours where someone says something that someone else doesn't like. Big deal. I honestly think one of the reason podcasts are so popular these days is that they're longform and authentic, unlike the media or even political debates, where it's more about soundbites and zingers.
I also totally agree that the best way to combat so-called bad ideas is to talk about them and debate them, not deplatform, as if you're so smart to know what's good or bad for people, and the people themselves are too stupid and will be easily manipulated and believe a bad idea.
Anyways, that's neither here or there when I'm literally sharing a podcast about Signal which has nothing to do with one guest he's had on way in the past. I think a lot of the comments i got were just poor control of emotions and some virtue signalling.
> I also totally agree that the best way to combat so-called bad ideas is to talk about them and debate them, not deplatform
I would like it to be that way. However, I've seen over the last 10 years (at least in Germany) that it just does not seem to work. Deplatforming at least limits the ability of extremists to reach more people, even though it seems to make the people already in that corner to become even more radical.
> as if you're so smart to know what's good or bad for people, and the people themselves are too stupid and will be easily manipulated and believe a bad idea.
Well we are stupid and we are easily manipulated, unfortunately. And that's why as a society could (and imo should) decide that we won't expose ourselves to certain kinds of propaganda. This is not a random process of censoring people we don't like - this has to do with legislation and courts enforcing those laws.
> I think Joe Rogan has said in the past that he just considers Alex Jones a friend and just enjoys having him on the podcast. Also, the guy has had literally thousands of guests on his podcast, including Bernie Sanders or whoever these woke people presumably agree with.
He’s also had Colion Noir (a black, ex-lawyer, gun rights supporter) on his show a few times, and seemingly supports gun rights. He’s also a gun owner. He’s got quite an interesting and divisive way with both sides.
Its not necessarily a good or effective way, but the only one we got, as it seems. It definitely works better than discussing those ideas. That only works with people who do not actively lie to win that discussion. If one side does not care about the truth, discussions are pointless. Brain are not computers. Giving such people a platform and allowing them to repeat their lies unfortunately does lead to more people subscribing to those lies, just because they get repeated often enough.
Note that I do not talk about "the government" doing this. I am just talking about some people choosing not to give other people a platform.
This is a fine argument for censorship in general. Sadly, we have centuries of evidence that such an approach is ultimately futile. If you concede that censorship "definitely works better than discussion", you're ultimately conceding the debate.
A far better approach is to draw a hard red line and not allow anyone to cross it - e.g. if you're advocating for ending democracy or free speech - no democracy or free speech for you. Otherwise, you gotta find a way to defeat bad ideas without trying to shut them out. If you attempt to censor (use whatever euphemisms you prefer, but that's all it is), you'll fail, and do irreparable damage to your own arguments in the process.
But who then decides if someone crossed that red line? And what if that decision is being done in bad faith?
Again, I am not talking about censorship by the government. I am talking about some people deciding its not worth to listen to some other people, and therefore not giving them a platform? Isn't that my free choice - you can talk freely, but I can just not listen to you?
Isn't what you propose - taking away the right to free speech - far worse than censorship? Would you jail people if they still speak freely after they crossed that red line?
Honestly if a bunch of people wanted to censor someone I would want to listen to that person even more.
I also think you’re kinda playing Devil’s advocate a bit much here. We have red lines in conversations already. E.g. advocating violence against another group of people is a red line for a lot of people. E.g. Advocating the superiority of one particular race is usually a red line for people.
> Honestly if a bunch of people wanted to censor someone I would want to listen to that person even more.
Sure, you can do that. For me, it would probably depend on who did the "censoring" (see below).
> I also think you’re kinda playing Devil’s advocate a bit much here.
Wait, who's the devil here? Seriously, I have no idea what you mean.
Again: it am not talking about censorship by the government, I am simply talking about not listening to certain people. For me, in Germany, I would for example categorically refuse to listen to and engage in discussions with voters of the "AfD" party (right-wing party, with one leader that you can officially call a fascist based on a court decision) or the so called "Querdenker" people.
You're basically arguing for what totalitarian regimes do when they censor any speech they deem undesirable.
I'm sure you will reply that the type of speech you want to censor is actually bad but who decides that? You?
Freedom of speech without significant negative consequences is one of the main principles of a democratic society. As long as the speech in question is not promoting violence it should be allowed.
The fact that so many liberals now think that it's desirable to have consequences for expressing a wrong opinion is mind boggling and scary. That is a completely illiberal stance. It's also stupid because it somehow misses the point of freedom of speech being a principle. What if these woke people faced significant negative consequences for expressing THEIR opinions?
> You must know that Joe Rogan is a polarizing figure and posting him in any but a right-wing community is going to be a troll for reactions. That doesn’t strike me as “bizarre,” it strikes me as the obvious outcome for your choice.
This is interesting to me, because I found out about Joe Rogan from some liberal friends that were recommending him. Doesn’t Joe label himself as. liberal? Why does the left hate Joe?
Do they? All I see are a small vocal minority hellbent on tearing the fabric of society apart, amplified by the media who make money from pitting us against each other.
Downvote button is not just for disagreeing guys. I’m not even allowed to downvote because I don’t have enough karma but it seems like those who are deemed worthy to are abusing it.
Are you sure those people are really your friends and not just people you hang out with? IMHO real friends wouldn’t use passive aggressive tactics like that.
That's exactly what it's like. I've not seen it put like this before, but anxiety inducing is just right, and yes, it is abusive.
Take the letter people, for example. They will ridicule people for not understanding the difference between G and Q, for example. Phrases like "if you don't know what X means, you must live under a rock" are common.
Then you have the pronoun people who tell us anyone can choose any set of pronouns they like. They tell it's easy to relearn your native language and remember a set of pronouns for each and every person you interact with, from a basically infinite set of combinations.
I'm reminded of the secret languages children invent. But these are now adults doing it, at work. It's especially difficult for older people to change the language they use and can make them feel thoroughly alienated.
If you keep taking HN threads further into ideological flamewar, we're going to have to ban you again. Would you please stop?
In case it's helpful: not all your comments do this, nor even all your comments on divisive topics. When you stick to describing your personal experience, for example, it's fine. But when you call names, denounce others, or pour snark and vitriol, those things are not fine—and you've done a ton of that on HN. That's not cool!
We probably would have re-banned you by now, except I imagine I see signs of improvement here and there. Please improve further. It's not in your interest to make this place nastier; that's guaranteed to make it less interesting, and the odds of it being interesting are the only reason for any of us to come here.
> They tell it's easy to relearn your native language
It's absolutely the opposite of "relearning" in relative complexity/difficulty.
> remember a set of pronouns for each and every person you interact with, from a basically infinite set of combinations.
I've literally never met a person of alternative pronouns in real life (both the "unintuitive" variety and the "made up" variety), surely you are exaggerating with unreasonable hyperbole.
> Phrases like "if you don't know what X means, you must live under a rock" are common.
I've gotten this constantly my entire life, no matter how obscure or unimportant the information, more often sports and non political things than politics.
> I've literally never met a person of alternative pronouns in real life (both the "unintuitive" variety and the "made up" variety), surely you are exaggerating with unreasonable hyperbole.
I have. But it's not just the ones with alternative pronouns. Some of them have standard pronouns but still sign their email with them at the end. The implication is I shouldn't assume their pronouns and they can change them at any time.
> I've gotten this constantly my entire life, no matter how obscure or unimportant the information, more often sports and non political things than politics.
At work? Has your career ever been affected by your lack of knowledge about snooker?
No, I mean the people who identify as a letter and scald you if you don't know what their letter means. I have no idea what half of those letters mean or whether it means gay or straight (the T could definitely be straight, I know that much). I've also known plenty of gay people over the years who haven't ever mentioned these letters so it's nothing to do with that.
I look at all this self segmentation and categorization as a net harm to all queer people as a community, I've actually come around to the idea of GSM (Gender and Sexual Minorities) as a preferred term, because it makes it harder for us to self segregate internally, and no longer view the fight for one groups equality as the fight for all of us.
I'm gay, and for me equality was people no longer caring which gender I was attracted to. I wanted that level of normality - where my orientation just no longer mattered - where I no longer needed a separate support community just to exist, where I no longer needed to fear someone finding out I was different than others, that was supposed to be the goal, wasn't it?
I look at trans folks the same way, if someone is trans, as soon as they tell me they're now a woman, or a man, they're a woman, or a man, they're not a transwoman or a transman, they don't get an othering here - that's counter to the goals of as taught to equality me - so we wouldn't need to fear anymore.
My goal, is still that in the workplace none of this should matter any more than what color hair you have (or if you have hair at all, in the same way that bald is a hair color) - that was what the end goal of all of this was supposed to be - and yes, its natural to want to seek out affinity groups - people who have had shared experiences - but that should be something that helps the minority add something to the whole, not take something away from the whole.
While there is still discrimination, particularly for trans folks, we've come so very very far from where the world was when I was a scared 15 year old who came out in 1998, and yes, there is still road yet to travel, the circle-the-wagons mentality I see among other queer folks, and what I perceive as the desire to try to turn the LGBT rights movement into a generic left wing movement is harmful to our end goal of equality for queer people everywhere - The end goal should be to make LGBT rights and acceptance an uncontroversial issue across the entire political spectrum.
> I'm gay, and for me equality was people no longer caring which gender I was attracted to. I wanted that level of normality - where my orientation just no longer mattered - where I no longer needed a separate support community just to exist, where I no longer needed to fear someone finding out I was different than others, that was supposed to be the goal, wasn't it?
I thought so too. This hits on the crux of problem for me: the continually and arbitrarily moving goal posts.
The thing is, people like me never did care. When I was in school it was a thing to call people/things "gay" as a sign of disapproval, but as soon as I became an adult I stopped that and actually met some gay people, some of which became friends. But ultimately I've always felt the same way about all private matters: it's none of my business and I just don't care. Hell, I don't even have the spare brain capacity to care. I just can't do it.
One of the arguments that used to be made about being gay is that it's not a choice. I never found this a convincing argument. In my view, I don't care whether it's a choice or not. It's still your choice to make. So I think I was progressive even back then.
But now it's changed. It's no longer about not caring but, rather, people like me should care, for some reason. I get that if this was a human rights or civil liberties issue, but it's not. We're past that. So why, then, is "gay pride" a thing, if not to push what should be a private issue into people's faces? Why is it in the workplace? You don't have sex at work so why do I need to know that you're gay? How does that help achieve our goals?
Not caring is now demonised. The goal posts just keep moving. If there were concrete issues that haven't been considered then I'm all ears. But I really don't hear them. It's just "you must acknowledge that I'm different!" while I just keep saying "I don't care!" like I always have done.
There are serious problems in the world. There is crime, corruption, poverty and illness. There are people living in fear every day. There are people living in pain every day. But the most pressing issue is that some people don't like that our language has gendered pronouns? Life is not fair. Nobody ever said it was. At some point we all have to learn to just deal with it.
> One of the arguments that used to be made about being gay is that it's not a choice. I never found this a convincing argument. In my view, I don't care whether it's a choice or not. It's still your choice to make. So I think I was progressive even back then.
People telling me that its a choice - even in an an affirming way still makes me all but violently angry to be very honest - because it presumes that I would chose to be a victim - which runs head long into my own ideological views. Being a victim is something that is generally outside if your control, and not something you'd willingly choose.
> But now it's changed. It's no longer about not caring but, rather, people like me should care, for some reason. I get that if this was a human rights or civil liberties issue, but it's not. We're past that. So why, then, is "gay pride" a thing, if not to push what should be a private issue into people's faces? Why is it in the workplace? You don't have sex at work so why do I need to know that you're gay? How does that help achieve our goals?
Another thing I'd note - I should have the same right to talk about my personal life as everyone else does - straight folks talk about their wives, girlfriends, husbands and boyfriend - I ought to be able to do the same. I shouldnt need to leave a whole sector of my life out to deal with someone else's sensibilities.
> Not caring is now demonised. The goal posts just keep moving. If there were concrete issues that haven't been considered then I'm all ears. But I really don't hear them. It's just "you must acknowledge that I'm different!" while I just keep saying "I don't care!" like I always have done.
There is a difference here - I agree with you that the goalpost has moved, but not where the goalpost moved to - it's not just acknowledgement, I'd argue that its moved to celebrate.
> People telling me that its a choice - even in an an affirming way still makes me all but violently angry to be very honest - because it presumes that I would chose to be a victim - which runs head long into my own ideological views. Being a victim is something that is generally outside if your control, and not something you'd willingly choose.
Yes. In case it was unclear, I don't think being gay is a choice. As a man I know very well there is no choice involved with what makes you aroused and what doesn't. My point was that it's really a separate issue and the fact it's not a choice should not be the reason it's "allowed". I'm not gay, but there should be nothing wrong with me choosing to take part in gay sex as long as nobody is being harmed.
> Another thing I'd note - I should have the same right to talk about my personal life as everyone else does - straight folks talk about their wives, girlfriends, husbands and boyfriend - I ought to be able to do the same. I shouldnt need to leave a whole sector of my life out to deal with someone else's sensibilities.
You're right and I completely agree. This is the kind of "normalisation" I think that was initially the goal and one that I continue to support. I think the feeling is it's gone a bit beyond that, though. It's not just an incidental mention of a same sex partner, it's bright blue hair and constant signalling where it isn't necessary. The gay men (that I'm aware of) at my work are completely professional and really have only ever asked for equality, nothing more.
> There is a difference here - I agree with you that the goalpost has moved, but not where the goalpost moved to - it's not just acknowledgement, I'd argue that its moved to celebrate.
This is something I can't relate to. Maybe it's because I'm not part of minority. I'm not proud to be straight. I'm not proud to be a man either (in the sense that I have XY chromosomes and balls). I just am those things. I was born with it. Why would I be proud of it? It's not what defines me. When I introduce myself to people I tell them my name. If they enquire further I will tell them my interests and achievements. I don't say "hi, I'm a straight, white man who was born that way". I don't understand being proud of something you were born with, especially something as insignificant as who you like to have sex with.
I'm proud of my gayness insomuch as it's adversity I've overcome and it's given me a perspective on the world as a minority that had a not been gay I might not have had.
I'm proud of the things being gay has brought me, the accomplishments from it, the journey - that's what pride is actually about, celebrating that journey, those accomplishments, the community we formed to overcome adversity.
There is something valuable in being different than the norm, because of the perspective it does indeed bring you, and it's okay in my book to feel pride about that.
My hope is one day, there won't be a need for pride anymore, we're not there yet, but maybe in my lifetime.
Thanks for this valuable insight. I have learnt something from this. I understand that you do have something to be proud about and that it's not just being proud of being gay, but proud of being gay in this world.
People like me often make the mistake of jumping too far ahead. I'm basically already 10-20 years ahead here, so in my mind I don't feel like you need to be proud of anything. I have to remind myself that others aren't as quick and change happens more slowly.
Shame that my original comment was flagged, so I'm probably the only person who will read this.
I wonder how common this issue is, hoe often we're just talking past one another. Even though we're agreeing.
I think some folks on my side of this are stuck in the past, Trump's election in some ways paused our internal mental realization of our own progress greatly.
If anything it made us feel as if the last 20-25 years of progress was imminently threatened, and we're seeing the reaction to this right now. It saddens me so very greatly, because it just inflames things further and somewhat perversely that reactionary tendency puts the progress at risk.
As a straight man, it is not my place to enforce what anyone wants to call themselves-- as an ally the best thing I can do is listen, but it's important to speak up, too, to use the privilege I have for good when I can.
I'll note that I didn't mean to come across as the ultimate authority on the taxonomy of minorities to which I do not belong. The commenter to whom I was responding had dismissively referred to LGBTQIA+ as "letter people" who scold you for getting it wrong, and I was pointing out that the letters are really not some impossible to divine thing, it's just an acronym like HDMI or SCSI that describes some ways real people identify themselves.
>I perceive as the desire to try to turn the LGBT rights movement into a generic left wing movement is harmful to our end goal of equality for queer people everywhere - The end goal should be to make LGBT rights and acceptance an uncontroversial issue across the entire political spectrum.
I find myself confused. You seem to be saying that a subgroup of the greater community of gender and sexual minorities are turning GSM rights into a leftist thing. How exactly does one go about doing that? One side of the political spectrum outright rejects the validity of GSM rights, and the other doesn't, and you're saying the side that doesn't is somehow at fault?
Have you considered that your lecture on the taxonomy makes you “one of the letter people” and “the letter people” have nothing to do with the people they purport to describe?
a subset of one side of the political spectrum has rejected GSM rights, but the majority of folks over on the right, honestly, are.. indifferent. They just don't care too much either way anymore. Polling actually shows a plurality of Republicans even support some measure of queer rights - how much, YMMV.
Similarly a subset of folks in the GSM community is trying to hitch our wagon to leftist ideology, which will make it harder to get the last full measure of rights, because the spectrum ideologies I see espoused on social media are not what I'd call within the mainstream of american political thought - Thats the concern I have.
Right. And what does any of that have to do with work? I don't care what sex you like, what genitals you have or what you were born with. Keep it to yourself, please.
For the record, my politics are firmly left of centre so I don't appreciate getting the "right wing" rubber stamp that is so often dished out to silence people you don't like.
>Right. And what does any of that have to do with work?
For you? Nothing. For your LGBTQIA+ coworkers? It means having to figure out how many times a day to bite your tongue when somebody "apolitically" makes an "innocent" attack helicopter joke that "isn't targeting" them. Ignoring those people and their feelings is political. I have personally called out coworkers who were making shitty "jokes" in front of clearly-uncomfortable non-straight coworkers. This is a real thing that happens every day even if you successfully ignore it.
>No, I mean the people who identify as a letter and scald you if you don't know what their letter means
I was assisting you should you desire not to be "scalded" by not understanding what eight letters mean. Your combative stance about those marginalized people belies your claim to be "firmly left of center."
As a neurodiverse queer person, as far as I can tell, those jokes have little do to with LGBTQ issues - and as far as I'm concerned, its people being a dick and not being rightly called out for it - friends don't let friends be assholes - coworkers don't let coworkers be assholes, you don't need 8 letter acronyms to do that.
It's people playing the "I'm not touching you game" then getting surprised when they get bit in the ass for their constant assholery.
I'm in the middle of this issue, On one side (right), I have a camp of raging assholes who wants to push the line as to what's acceptable, they know they're playing the performative asshole game - its just edgy internet bullshit.
On the other (left), I have another side who keeps moving the line on what isn't acceptable and has now demonized innocent mistakes (intent no longer matters, just the feeling of 'harm' among the aggrieved), and stuff that probably isn't offensive, and now often white knights for people they do not know, who are not there, and may not actually be offended themselves.
Neither of these extremes make finding any sort of reasonable standard of decorum terribly easy for what its worth, as both sides tend to be fundamentally unreasonable and absolutist in their interpretation and application. Both have figured out they can demand some sort of kabuki theatre 'accountability' when they feel their 'rules' have been transgressed - and its a big pile of BS in the end - and helps no one, and ends up adding a big pile of stress to everyone but the people who are yelling loudly.
At my past three workplaces spanning more than a decade, such an utterance would get you fired immediately. In fact, I knew of it happening, even though I didn't know the involved parties, because it was such shameful behavior that it was widely talked about.
Almost everything is a real thing that happens every day, but the extent of it and where it occurs is not always easy to know. Do I see people every day have to suffer the indignity of other people's tasteless or outright hostile jokes? No, it is quite rare.
Do I see people treated differently because they are young/old, not meeting an arbitrary standard of beauty, because they are not an extrovert who feels confident in expressing their opinion or uncertainty, because they lost a loved one or are pregnant or have a medical condition that competes with their ability to work 60 hours a week? Nearly every week I see this. But there's no Slack emojis for these things.
I would rather see a broad standard of tolerance and dignity applied in the workplace but in the U.S. at least what we get are empty gestures towards certain groups and those groups go in and out of fashion with the media cycle.
As a geek and slightly autistic person, I find the show "The Big Bang Theory" mildly offensive and alienating. It has been compared, quite rightly so, I think, to a black minstrel show. I will tell anyone who wants to know why I, and many others, feel this way about the show, but if someone makes a joke about it at work or, worse, compares me to the Sheldon character, I just smile and get on with it. They don't mean any harm. I'm not about to start some tirade where we ban mentions of the show at work. That's just not how society works.
Great way to shutdown an argument without contributing anything. Shame someone for not thinking like you do.
I feel like I am the victim if I'm the person considered to be "in the wrong" because I won't use this new language other people are creating and recreating all the time. I didn't have to worry about compelled speech like that 10 years ago.
Because the genie is out the bottle. For better or worse, many tech companies have worked hard to make your workplace your social hub in an effort to retain employees and get them to work longer hours. That's already happened, so now we have to deal with the good and bad that came from that. Going backward to how things were is as realistic as uninventing Twitter.
As someone who worked in tech in the 20th century, we also worked long hours, fyi.
We didn't connect with coworkers outside work, I think, because social media didn't exist and so we held on more to earlier friendships longer and actually were more open to acquainting ourselves to new strangers we met in public.
The old "can I have your number" days.
I think politics were present in the office much, because pre-social media, there was no conduit to get bombarded with hyperbolic political messages. ...and thus those people who were very political were not invited to social gatherings more frequently. ...something you can't do as easily on social media.
I'm curious if Americans won't really understand the meaning of that in 20 years. I feel like it would be equivalent to saying "September of 2001", and surely Americans now understand what that refers to.
Personally think this pushback by companies will continue and that those companies that successfully avoid "woke at work" will be spectacularly more effective at delivering products and services their customers want.
I doubt it was ever so simple. Maybe for a halcyon moment when incomes were rising and ideology was sparse on the ground - the 50s and early 60s - politics had little part in work, in as much as most people still agreed. But they all agreed on horrible things, like how to treat women in the workplace with disrespect.
People are politics, especially in a free land like ours. No politics at work is unrealistic, I believe.
Because this experiment has obviously failed and this attempt to create a less toxic work environment through activism has resulted in a thinly veiled attempt to create a more toxic work environment for those who do not want to conform to neo-marxist orthodoxy.
This is one my main gripes with conservatives right now. You go to any of the places you congregate and alongside the more reasonable scepticism towards woke culture, there’s this constant talk of the rise of “neo-marxism”
I have seen zero evidence for this. None
Besides very basic issues like minimum wage, on the whole, the new left does not care about economics. There’s the occasional “bad capitalism bad” meme or tweet, but that’s the extent of it
This whole neomarxism shit just seems like a confluence of:
1. it’s bait to conservatives, so it gets attention
2. If you don’t like BLM etc, it’s much easier to just label them as marxists, rather than actually dismantle their flimsy ideology
3. it’s probably partially a reaction to the media calling Trump a fascist
In conclusion, it’s convenient for a lot of the right to confuse identity politics with marxism, and it puts me off because it’s lazy and ignorant
Not quite. BLM in particular is called Marxist because the people who actually organize that movement have called themselves "trained Marxists" and the British BLM website for a while claimed their goals involved overthrowing capitalism and the nuclear family. If you don't think BLM is Marxist that's understandable because those facts didn't get much attention, but, they definitely are. Adopting a clenched fist as a logo should be another hint.
At any rate, it's mostly because Marxism is not really an economic ideology, even though communism is often presented as an alternative to capitalism. Communism is arguably not an economic system at all given the absolutely minimal detail Marx provided about how a communist economy was actually meant to work. Marxism is best understood as a packaged set of views about the current state of the world and human nature, the correct/perfect state of the world and human nature, and a plan for how to get from here to there.
A key component of Marxist thought is that the current state of the world is one of "alienation" (today we would say oppression), in which a small minority subtly oppress the majority in such a way that the majority don't realize they're oppressed. But if they were to realize, they could rise up and via a revolution overthrow their oppressors. This would establish a transient state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) that would eventually, once society was finished being transformed, sort of melt away leaving communism as a kind of superior form of existence in which there's no oppression, human nature has fundamentally changed and as a consequence everyone is equal.
It's that last bit that gets the bulk of the attention because, firstly, the rest is kind of vague, and secondly, the socialist revolutionaries were expected to deliver obvious, real-world benefits for their revolution and focused on the "everyone is economically equal" bit as something that could be achieved via large scale government action. But to Marx that was only one part of it. The rest was about human nature.
The modern left, especially in Silicon Valley, is easily identifiable as a new variant of this basic ideology:
- Society is split into oppressors (white men) and everyone else (women, other races). People are always one of these groups and cannot move between them. Many oppressed people don't believe they're oppressed, but that's because they've been deceived and it's very important to make them realize that white men are oppressing them.
- People are either really good, or really bad, and people who are really bad (anyone who doesn't subscribe to this ideology) need to be suppressed, expelled, or silenced in various ways.
- The world is suffering under vaguely defined oppressive forces (Marx: imperialism, the Woke: patriarchy/systemic racism). If these forces are defeated, humanity will be elevated to a superior form of existence.
- Exceptionally aggressive "with us or against us" tactics are legitimate and even required to reach this state.
There are a bunch of other similarities, but that's the gist.
Wow, both the parent comment and grandparent comment here are the best of HN - extremely well reasoned thoughts with different perspectives. Thank you for sharing!
To start, I appreciate the long and thought out answer. You’ve put some effort in, and it was a pleasant and interesting read
However, I think you’ve misunderstood BLM at its core. BLM is not a specific group like the GOP or the NRA. Maybe it was originally, and maybe it nominally still is, but BLM is a slogan. It’s a label. It’s more like calling yourself left-wing, or right-wing.
If I say I’m left-wing, do you assume I have the same views as the people who sat in the left wing of the French parliament all those years ago?
So if I say “Black Lives Matter”, should you assume that I believe the same as some nameless, faceless founder that I don’t know?
Just to add a bit of real life evidence to that, I don’t know if you’ve met the kind of people that associate themselves with black lives matter, but being a student, I have, a lot. They have no interest in Marxism, let me tell you
And in regards to your comment that Marxism isn’t economic: I don’t like to directly call people wrong, because it’s abrasive and rarely changes anything, but no, you’re completely wrong.
Marxism is primarily about the distribution of wealth in society. The name of the book is ‘Das Kapital’. It’s not ‘Das Identity’, or ‘Das Oppressors’. It’s ‘The Capital’. It’s a book analysing who holds the money and means of production in society and how that capital is distributed amongst the classes. Marx was an economist.
and I take your point that if you extrapolate some of Marx’s views outwards, they could be applied to what blm people stand for. However, that is not marxism. That is one aspect of Marxism, extrapolated outwards and applied to something different.
Look at it this way:
Plenty of right-wing anti-semites believe that the world is secretly oppressed by a small minority of jews. Would you call them Marxists, or neo-marxists?
Now finally, onto your parallels between the silicon valley ideology that’s risen up and Marxism. First of all, there’s an inherent extremely obvious contradiction. Silicon valley is full of massive capital holding corporations, who aggressively crush any attempts to unionise, who are the antithesis of marx’s primary goals. Even if the ideology shares some vague themes with communism, in my opinion, that is easily enough to scratch off a Marxist label. Easily.
Onto your actual parallels:
1. this is just a repeat of above. Sure it’s true, and sure it’s a parallel, but it’s nowhere near enough to start throwing round the word marxist
2. that may have been an aspect of communist societies, but it’s also an aspect of fascist societies, and basically any society who had something to hide. Besides, we’re talking about Marxism, not in-practice communism
3. First, Marx’s feud wasn’t with imperialism, it was with the class system. I’m sure he didn’t like imperialism either, but that wasn’t his primary enemy. Anyway, that’s beside the point. I’ve never heard anything like that from a BLM or new left/silicon valley type. They’re very interested in short term aesthetic wins (pulling down statues, apologies from politicians etc etc) and I really don’t think many of them have considered their long-term goals. This is a conversation I’ve had a few times. I posit that surely the end-goal should be to, outside of practicalities, forget race/gender/sexuality even exists in the first place, and they aren’t really sure and don’t seem to have thought about it
Additionally, achieving your goals and converting the world to your mindset is not an invention of Marx, and not even remotely exclusive to marxists
4. this also is hardly unique to the ideology, or to Marxism, or any group. the Nazis were the same. So are the Westboro baptist church. Are they Marxists?
To take the WBC point further, look at those parallels again. How many of them apply to the Westboro Baptist Church, or the Nazis, or most cults?
You may think that’s against my argument, but it’s not. I’m not here to defend the new left or BLM. They do share some themes with cults and bad groups from history, and I think their ideology is borderline madness. (read up on critical race theory). That doesn’t make them Marxists though. It just doesn’t
I agree it's reasonable to view BLM as a leaderless social movement, and that the existence of people who claim to speak for it is a bit suspicious. But the original point I was responding to was that neo-Marxism is some sort of wacky label that isn't justified by anything, and that labelling BLM as neo-Marxist is a sort of unjustified smear that's designed to bait conservatives. To address this point, it's not necessary to actually win the argument that BLM is a Marxist movement, only to point out why people might genuinely believe it without having been baited into it. And I think the fact that the people who own the websites and claim to speak for the movement say they're Marxists is sufficient to make that a justifiable claim, even if it may be debatable and certainly not the full story.
You're right that Marx didn't explicitly identify his work as being about identity politics. However, Marx wasn't really a student of economics in the way modern economists would recognize. He showed very little interest in the mechanics of how business worked, to the extent that when his friend Engels invited him to visit one of his factories Marx declined. In fact, I believe there's no evidence Marx ever actually spent time in places where the working classes utilized the means of production, even though his entire philosophy revolved around them. Marx viewed capital almost exclusively through the lens of class struggle. Capital was something that some people had lots of because they oppressed other people, and it really wasn't much more complicated than that. In particular his world view had nothing in it that justified the existence of capitalists - he assigned zero value to their role as coordinators and planners.
A part of your argument is that some of these attributes could apply to "right wing anti-semites" and you mention Nazis in a few places. I actually believe the Nazis were not right wing at all, for example if you read their propaganda magazine (Signal) it is basically a standard socialist critique of western culture, which they called imperialism, naturally, and obviously the party called itself the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. However last time I made that argument on HN I got slapped by dang so let's put that to one side here, as it's apparently taboo.
W.R.T. short term vs long term goals. Yes, it's true, Marx was a much longer term thinker than the current crop of neo-Marxists. He had a sweeping view of human history and was happy to make long-range predictions about the inevitability of revolution. There's nothing like that anywhere in the (supposedly) neo-Marxist philosophy. However, I think a critic of Marx would observe that his long term plans were extremely vague. Marx was big on criticism of capitalism and short on detail about communism which is one reason for the enduring popularity of "regime X wasn't really communism" as an argument. The Communist Manifesto was about as close as it got, and that boiled down to a bunch of bullet points that could be enumerated in 60 seconds flat. It was a long way from a real plan. It's more than the new Left have (right now), but not much more.
At any rate, to say it again, the point here is not really to thrash out what Marxism is or isn't. The point is, there are sufficient parallels that even if you disagree with the argument it's obvious why plenty of people make it. It's not like this idea was just invented out of nothing for nefarious reasons. People who conspicuously subscribe to BLM/feminist/new left thinking describe the world in very similar ways to how Marx did, are invariably voting for policies closer to his policies, and some of them literally say "we are Marxists". That's sufficient for the arguments to be made in good faith even if they're wrong.
BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors (on the news recently for her luxury-home purchasing spree) openly describes herself as a trained Marxist. The other BLM co-founder, Opal Tometi, is chummy with the Maduro regime in my home country.
Compare BLM's comments on family structure to Engels' The Origin of the Family and the connection cannot be more obvious.
Because "no politics at work" isn't neutral, it means supporting the status quo by way of defining what counts as "politics". Is calling someone by their preferred pronouns, or wearing a mask during the pandemic politics?
i can’t stand this argument. if your not actively trying to X then you support Y. it’s cherry picked grandstanding. its a way to single people out without a conversation. cancel culture in the microcosm. you do not have to act in any specific way to hold some political beliefs and no one should judge you for your beliefs
But it can sometimes be true in the sense that if you do not support X, you are willing to let Y happen. Things like climate change, mask wearing and stuff.
You can hate that argument, people can still accuse you of it and they might be right.
no. this falls apart because there are innumerable i justices in the world. i am silent on almost all of them. that does not mean i support the status quo
There's a difference between an injustice somewhere in the world completely unrelated to oneself, an an injustice one witnesses and doesn't say something (e.g. discrimination) or an injustice one is part of and does not change anything (e.g. climate change if one lives in a wealthy country).
It is neutral by definition. And it is also a very good approach as it automatically filters out wokes from the potential candidate pool (as we've seen in Basecamp's example it also works wonders on your current workforce).
Why aren’t you spending every waking minute talking about the atrocities in China, the Middle East, central Africa, etc. You must support the status quo there right?
And, “there’s nothing we can do” isn’t true for the United States citizens who can vote the most powerful economy/military in the world.
Being deliberately misgendered at work is a real issue, the law doesn't prohibit it in many states. Look at cases like Meriwether v. Hartop, a professor was disciplined for deliberately misgendering a student repeatedly, then successfully sued the university
Should it be illegal? Is it illegal to call someone by the wrong name, or age, or race? Should it be?
I don’t think we should be making rudeness illegal.
On the other hand, professors absolutely shouldn’t be able to sue their institution for punishing them for it.
There’s a middle ground
No one is claiming it is illegal to call someone the wrong name or age or race.
The question in this case is "should it be illegal to discipline an employee for deliberately misgendering a student?" At least one federal circuit court found that it is illegal for the university to discipline a professor for deliberately misgendering a student multiple times.
This is all to say, being deliberately misgendered by a coworker is a real problem. A private employer would not be required by law to fire or discipline an employee who was doing the same thing as this professor. So for the employer, deciding whether or not to discipline an employee who deliberately misgenders a coworker is "a political issue"
Anxiety is a normal emotion. If it's pervasive it can certainly be a problem, but I'll also point out that anxiety inducing situations can have nothing to do with politics, of course.
People who approach others like this are putting themselves out there. They are just as at risk, if not more, as you would be by expressing your own responses in a non threatening way. If you don't know how to do that, I suggest you learn. It'll give you a voice at work.
Please, people, do NOT be honest about your conservative or non-woke political positions in this industry. You will absolutely be punished for them by your peers. It is not in any situation ever worth it. Clock in, clock out, take the check, and always always always keep interviewing constantly because they will have no issues firing you arbitrarily.
Work at a large enough company and the woke literally have an entire division of the company (DEI) dedicated to finding reasons not to hire you in the first place, reasons to not promote you, and identifying ways in which your opinions make others feel "unsafe", etc. The entire deck is stacked against you unless you blend in.
"Bring your whole self to work" is bait. It's how they identify friend and foe. Do not fall for it. Pretend to be apolitical if you must. It probably won't work 100%, but giving up plausible deniability is not in your interest.
I agree with you, though it is still a little soul crushing. Obviously making big bucks and providing for your family is more important than debating some cancel culture social justice warrior at work who’ll never be convinced anyway, but listening to some eye rolling inducing faff every day and feeling like if you just told the truth you’d be fired makes you feel weak after a long time. Especially if you vehemently disagree just as strongly as they think what they think.
Being honest and disagreeing would not be as heroic as refusing to “just go along with the nazis”, but just ignoring them is also a little harder than ignoring some crazy preacher on the street. It’s an awkward middle ground that just slowly erodes your soul and I find myself looking for friends as outlets to moan to when I hear something particularly ridiculous. But I absolutely hate feeling weak that I need to remain silent, or feeling like I’m in the damn French resistance or something when I actually have pretty moderate views. Worst of all? I say what I think to people who I respect enough as adults to be able to take it. But when I remain silent it’s basically because I think they’re emotionally too immature to take it.
I’m not sure if a blanket ban on politics will work either though. At the end of the day, it’s just another form of nepotism, just like boys on Wall Street all going to strip clubs together or something. It might stop some heroes from shooting themselves in the foot I guess.
"There are still many of us out there who believe that hiring candidates based on their race is not healthy for society, the company, or any individual candidate. That opinion is largely being stamped out, by design, in management at the orgs I'm talking about.
This has nothing to do with not wanting to step up and manage."
Personally I think I like blind job applications (ie where the name, ethnicity, gender, age etc of the job applicants is held unknown for the interviewers, as long as possible), which it seems to me that you like too
I told some stories in the other thread here. I definitely agree with chitowneats' sibling comment about hiring based on race being morally repugnant also.
> how hard is it to just agree? I agree with conservatives and liberals even when they are saying ridiculous things.
It sucks you feel you have to do that just to survive your job. That's a toxic culture. These woke types feel you should bring your whole self to work, express yourself freely etc. One rule for me, another for thee. Agreeing with someone's worldview everyday when you actually disagree is bad for your ego. What's good for your ego is being authentic. I get what you mean about the need to be right all the time is a sign of a weak ego though. Though I don't have that, which is why I mostly don't bother talking about politics at work.
> "Oh yeah, I totally know what you are saying"
> "mmm hmmm"
> "Interesting I hadnt thought about it like that before".
That's different to actually agreeing. I would never explicitly agree with someone just to placate them at work. How do you think I've survived San Francisco for the last three years? I usually go with agreeing when I actually agree and not bothering to talk about it if I don't think they're mature enough to handle me disagreeing, which is pretty often. But I'm never, ever, going to agree with someone's drastically different worldview just to do my job that's totally unrelated. Nobody should have to put up with that.
It seems to be a pretty unhealthy thing, psychologically. It's why 'gaslighting' is its own special term.
It's what's often used in psychologically breaking people down.
I think people can cultivate a "I'm keeping my cover up" mentality that helps, but I really do believe it has more costs than you're presenting, and it's not just about "ego" which is a very negatively loaded phrasing.
Or write a critically acclaimed work of fiction 5 years ago.
Please update your cancel culture example du jour.
Edit: Reference was to Antonio Garcia Martinez.
Edit 2: In case it wasn't clear, the post I'm responding to is referring to James Damore, an autistic man who was manipulated into believing people wanted to have an honest, good faith discussion about the issues of gender and sex and hiring at Google. He got baited by "bring your whole self to work". Don't get baited.
> according to a new Harris poll commissioned by Paradigm, a diversity consultancy, more than two-thirds of adults in America want to be able to discuss racial-justice issues at work
First off, note the wording (which is actually "we should be able to discuss racial justice issues at work"). This question is a bit open to interpretation, but I'd interpret as "employees should not be prohibited from discussing racial justice issues". Which I certainly agree with... I would not want my employer censoring private conversations.
The 66% thinking businesses should take action on racial injustice issues is reasonable... most people would want their business taking action against racial discrimination or harassment internally at the bare minimum.
What's more controversial are specific DEI programs at the workspace (diversity training, race-targetted recruiting bonuses, company donations for certain causes, etc.) -- the survey high-level doesn't go into that.
Finally, this is an online poll where "no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated", so I suppose there is heavy room for error.
The line I draw in the sand is that of thinking that work _is_ the place where one should talk about social issues. To my mind it most certainly is not. Everyone in that organisation has been employed to a single end (hopefully) to create a product.
The software developer or marketing assistant or middle manager does not decide the strategic course of the organisation. This is not a democracy and those individuals (myself included for most of my life) simply do not get a vote.
Now, should work be an environment where we _can_ talk about social issues without repercussion? Sure! Should we be using significant chunks of that time to modify people's behaviour to be socially acceptable? Not in my opinion.
What this highlights is that we really haven't figured out a forum which is designed to discuss social issues. At the moment we've got the internet which guarantees maximal disagreement on all points and we've made the mistake of thinking the work environment is synonymous with the home environment and the social environment. Resulting in everyone being offended about everyone else's behaviour at all times.
you could equally phrase it as “30% BELIEVE RACIAL JUSTICE TALK SHOULD BE BANNED IN WORKPLACES” and that would be just as shocking. Although that’s probably the same 30% as Trump’s core base
Some subset of adults want their work to provide the same warm and fuzzy validation of their beliefs that they get on Facebook. Another subset distrusts "anonymous polls" and will quickly click the right answers to make HR go away. That might add up to 66%.
This was never a problem pre-pandemic. People would discuss these issues at lunch or at the watercooler. If you were bothered by politics interrupting your little heads-down work bubble? Just take lunch at your desk or pack your own water bottle. But in the WFH age, there's no getting away from it. These discussions happen in company general chat, where often important business also happens.
I think this was less of a problem pre-Trump more specifically.
At some point the idea that foreigners and minorities should be treated like human beings seemed to become controversial in some circles. Same circles that thought an alternate invented history was preferable to reality and spent a lot of time/money mainstreaming that idea.
The resulting push back was expected and necessary. There is a cycle of civil rights wins followed by backlash in the US, I don't think that cycle ever ends.
Republicans started lying in the 90s to stay in power. Trump was a consequence of that. But yeah, pre-Trump they did "only" bend the rules to stay in power, with Trump that changed to openly trying to overthrow democracy. That you can only do by constantly lying.
Kinda sucks if you only have to parties, and one becomes a fascist cult. Makes discussing politics impossible, probably. There's just a difference between untruths, over-reactions, "cancel culture" and all those things on the one side vs. plain fascism on the other side.
First of all every political party lies to stay in power. The idea that this is unique to the Republican party is ridiculous. The Democratic consistently lie and bend the rules as well.
If you think Republicans are supporting fascism then you either don't know what fascism is or what Republicans support.
Its not me that thinks that. Its, you know, historians and stuff. But what do they know.
There's a difference between some people lying or saying not entirely true things sometimes, and a whole system of belief based on lies. If you believe Republicans and Democrats are on the same level there, there's no point that we continue. I will not convince you of anything and vice versa.
It is quite interesting to watch people rationalize what they experienced under Trump, even as a person that was not a fan of the sensationalist coverage he received in the MSM... IMO he was an objectively bad leader and his short-termist approach has upcoming 2nd and 3rd order effects that most people are not prepared for.
The global immune system is in the process of responding to the re-emergence and attempted normalization of western (white) chauvinism that he played a role in reviving.
I'd be willing to be the word "able" is doing the heavy lifting here. Not because everyone has vocal opinions on BLM, but that this is America, land of the free, you can't tell me what I can and can't say.
Not to mention, "racial-justice issues" doesn't necessarily mean they are PRO-racial justice either.
Yeah, I hold what I believe is the popular (and most correct) opinions and there is no way I'd want to have a conversation about any of that with my coworkers.
We live in the age of the lie. It's impossible to take anything at face value, because it seems like every organization we interact with is just lying to us all at every opportunity.
Actually, we live in the age of one group of people constantly lying, and convincing everyone else that everyone lies. Soviet-style propaganda - making everyone believe that the truth cannot be known, everything is possible and everyone lies.
(I am talking about intentional, informed, strategic lies, I am not talking about people that just don't know better etc.)
While I agree with your assertion in the general case, I think the response from other factions is that they, too, must lie in order to compete, leading to much more systemic, intentional, strategic lies.
Boards should have more apprehension about their companies being exploited as political platforms by employees.
It's as though there is a bargain where in exchange for boards tolerating staff radicalization, these employee groups cheerfully overlook the dystopian, totalitarian surveillance infrastructure, environmental devastation, and political corruption machines they seem to have zero problem building and managing on their behalf, and decieving users into depending on them. One doesn't even need to take a side to recognize the bitterness and contempt in tech toward red state denizens. I've sat through numerous meetings where all the shibboleths were trotted out to make sure we were all on the same political page before senior executives engaged in what would be considered hate speech against working class people in any other context. If calling people "trash" isn't hate speech, I really don't know what is.
There still exists a group (perhaps even a majority) in society who are good and charitable people with an immense amount of tolerance for this stuff because they believe tolerance is the price of principles, and they're only principles when they are hard to keep.
Radicalized platform company employees do not have a single moral leg to stand on in this regard. Bringing your whole self to work to build defacto social credit systems and partisan social engineering and surveillance tools is just moral licensing. Maybe that's how they sleep at night. While they found a new way to take a few more minutes of peoples time to show them outrage and advertisements, at least they mouthed the right party lines in favor of distant oppressed people they don't know personally?
I know a number of people in tech who sincerely believe they do not need to be good men or women by any standard because they are self justified by being engaged not in discourse, but ideological warfare. I used to think they were misguided idealists and I thought their passion could be used for good, but I've come to realize they are just dispicable.
All I can recommend is, don't let yourself be bullied.
They are, and the reason for this was given in the GP:
"It's as though there is a bargain"
The board and executives know who weilds the stick. If it's the left that generally wants higher corporate taxes, more regulation, more anti-trust, and they control the media, then they're the ones that you want to appease as a bargain.
Adopting wokeness is significantly cheaper than all the alternatives.
The right mostly wants to leave companies alone (aside from the "censorship" issue in social media), have little representation in mainstream media, and are not on social media as much (due to age), so companies don't see them as a threat and don't need to kowtow to them.
The right mostly wants companies to push the politics of their owners, ensuring that the payments keep flowing from the companies to the right wing leaders.
I fail to see your point, you seem to contradict yourself in an attempt to justify your own bias.
Are you arguing that the solution to the problem you mentioned: "dystopian, totalitarian surveillance infrastructure, environmental devastation, and political corruption" is to avoid radical politics at work??? So, what do you propose? That the board (that is responsible for those horrors) steps in an remove / do away with these "radicals" in a "totalitarian" manner??? That is your solution? It sounds that you are no different from them, just have a different agenda and you are perfectly fine with them and their methods as long as they are aimed at the people you don't like.
>All I can recommend is, don't let yourself be bullied.
well the shareholders are always free to write the software that earns them their money themselves then.
Completely aside whether I agree with the rest of your post, this isn't about people being bullied, it's simply about tech workers exercising their very considerable bargaining power to pursue their goals which have transcended earning a paycheck, which is their right.
This is the free market everyone in tech loves, negotiating for political leverage is just a higher form of compensation Turns out tech firms love disruption, except when their own work model gets disrupted
My problem with politics at work isn’t so much that it’s politics but more that it’s always idiotic performative horseshit. Like please stop pretending you want to “help” a group of people who disproportionately hold the jobs you are automating out of existence etc. More often than not it has more to do with a small number of individuals trying to get more power for themselves than a genuine desire to help anyone.
A lot of the time the performative bullshit is the company itself trying to make changes that garner approval and attention but that don't cost it anything significant.
One example would be GitHub keeping its contract with ICE but changing the master branch to main.
this kind of captures my problem with the current progressive politics. It’s all about signalling that you’re in a support of all manner of identities, unless that identity is working class, or unemployed
It’s extremely convenient for the neo-liberal elite. They get to sit back and continually rip us all off economically, while the generation that would normally be fighting it is busy fighting an invisible “institutional racism”. The people in power are not racist. Not specifically anyway. They’re just greedy. Often, because of past racism, or just coincidence, that greed disproportionately affects minorities. But the issue is greed and corruption and an improperly regulated society. It is not the invisible racist man, or microaggressions.
These issues still matter, and there’s absolutely a place for social justice politics, but it’s much much less important than economic justice
There are a lot of racial justice advocates who agree with you pretty much entirely. Racial justice is economic justice, and economic justice has very little to do with who has what jobs.
Class reductionism and race reductionism are both enemies of progress; we have to understand the intersection of such things if we're going to get anywhere.
Most political discussions fall apart due to people's inability to tolerate dissenting views. The inability to tolerate disagreement in a civil manner is likely just one cause.
The amygdala hijack kicks in and suddenly people are frothing at the mouth shouting and are then soon reaching for their metaphorical pitchforks. Online its all about silencing that dissention. Shut up! You can't disagree! Steps are soon taken to make such disagreeing wrongthink disappear.
It suits a child-like yet patronising view of the world but really its anti-intellectual / anti-diversity / anti-tolerance.
This is pretty much why I've checked out. I used to love discussions with people who made me see something in a different way, but these rage-driven shouting matches are illiberal (in the classical sense) and toxic. It's politics for addicts.
How’d you go from people not wanting open conflict and harassment to being anti-diversity? That’s a big leap. There is a place for civil discussion but if you get kicked out because you start screaming at people and flipping tables it’s not because you’re being oppressed, it’s because you’re being an asshole that no one wants to be around.
"[...] a place for civil discussion but if you get kicked out [...]'
That "but" is the dividing line. As soon as you cross it you've left civil discussion. (And become the asshole who needs to be ejected because of it). Most times, especially in political debates, its caused by an inability to tolerate a diverse range of views, including those you don't agree with. Polarisation overwhelms this ability even further.
"Diverse" is an overloaded term. Its not always loaded with emotion or about oppression. Diversity of opinions is useful. Tolerance of that is important.
No, I provided an example of uncivil debate namely screaming and flipping tables. As long as you can sit peaceably and discuss your views it doesn’t matter what they are.
I'm just trying to wrap my head around how skewed a poll taken by "a diversity consultancy" would conclude that: "... two-thirds of adults in America want to be able to discuss racial-justice issues at work."
I imagine it depends on how the question is framed.
No one wants to be fired for merely mentioning the top news story of the day in office conversation. And sometimes it's a "racial justice" topic.
On the other hand, I also don't think most people want to be forced to detail their exact racial-justice views in the office or feel pressured to openly support something.
One of my favorite examples of "how the question was framed" is from ~5 years ago. They asked one group if they were in favor of Obamacare, the other if they were in favor of the Affordable Care Act. Turns out the ACA polls better.
Honestly I haven’t really had any bad experiences discussing these issues in person, but when I read the dumpster fire known as Twitter it makes me not want to get involved
Coming up with a poll question where any answer you give will be interpreted as support for the pollster's politics is an art. I totally believe that poll. A lot of those people probably wish they could express an ANTI-work opinion at work, but we'll never know how many because the poll was designed to not reveal exactly how popular or unpopular woke politics are.
I think we would all like to be able to safely discuss most things anywhere. If you ask the question a certain way, it might not so much about about 'the desire' but the 'right / ability' to do it without getting fired.
The reason why politics is traditionally frowned upon in the workplace is to avoid toxic peer pressure and the resulting uniformity.
It is illegal to discriminate against employees for their political opinions, religion, sexual orientation, race, ethnic background, etc. Allowing or even encouraging open political debates in the workplace jeopardizes it.
Legality is not the same as morality. Remember that slaves were not a protected class at one point. A coarse analogy, I admit, but it's true: we can change this to include politics if necessary.
Yeah, it isn't, but that's a bit surprising since in many other places the same specific legal definition explicitly does include political affiliation for obvious reasons e.g. so that the employers couldn't fire someone for being a member of some labor rights or communist party or even a candidate from them.
Political opinions are not protected in the same way, nor should they be, as the protected classes you cite (gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc).
Here's the best I could find... I was a little bewildered by this, TBH. I thought, as long as your political beliefs didn't cause a distraction at work to yourself or others, you were safe from being fired. Guess I was wrong. At least on a federal level. Different states have different rules:
There are only a couple of US states that have something along the lines of "or political beliefs" appended to their workplace discrimination laws. In most US states, it's perfectly legal to announce that you're firing all Democrats, effective immediately. In those couple of states you wouldn't want to announce that, though you could still lay them all off and dare them to try to prove it in court (very difficult unless you've explicitly announced).
Why jump to the extreme? There are plenty of people who seemingly behave “normally”, but are internally sympathetic to some abhorrent views. Does that mean they can’t write JavaScript as well as the next person? If I’m privy to their beliefs that I find disagreeable, does that mean I should “out” them, even if their internalized beliefs have no discernible effect on the workplace?
I’m trying to find my place in the conversation as well. More questions bubble up the more I think. Do I really care that my neighbor is racist if I never interact with them?
From the employer's perspective, the definition of "extreme political views" would be the labor rights / pro-union parties (wherever there's not a two-party first-past-the-post system like USA, those often are explicit separate parties) and the communist party, but the working class would very much want that employers don't get to make that decision.
The criteria for too extreme should not be specific to employment. If some organization is considered too bad to exist (e.g. the Nazi party in post-WW2 germany), then it should be dismantled as such, but if the country considers a political movement legitimate enough to participate in elections and gain seats in government, then obviously supporting that organization or membership in it shouldn't be an obstacle for employment as well. I have no idea on what the legal status (if any) of KKK is today in USA, but whatever it is, IMHO it should be the same both for politics and employment.
Please change your belief about the innateness of race and sex, so that I can see the voluntary nature of beliefs in action.
Again, you can choose how you act in light of your beliefs. And beliefs do change, but at most you can choose to be open those experiences that might lead to a change in belief. Changing them is not a direct act of will.
Setting aside the question of whether beliefs are influenced by genetics, there's no dichotomy between 'innate' and 'choice.' My religion or political views may not be 'innate' (whatever that means), but they are also not a choice. Can they change over time? Yes!
But not because I woke up and made the free choice that today, I will believe something else. You cannot simply decide to truly believe something else in the same way I could choose between two appetizers on the menu. You cannot choose to legitimately hold a belief. (You could choose to pretend to hold a belief.) If you don't believe me, try choosing to believe Nazi ideology is right and true.
I would actually say sexual orientation is quite similar. Someone cannot simply choose their sexual orientation. A huge conflux of factors come into play, such that people develop a sexual orientation. It may change as we 'discover' new things about ourselves, but there's no choice involved in how we feel.
People chose to adopt or to leave nazism all the time as well (that said it’s not a particularly common belief).
Sure people changes their beliefs - something I thought was true turns out to be no longer true, I no longer believe in it. I think you’re trying to say that because our beliefs are based upon our judgment they’re somehow not fluid. But we chose to judge and consider ourselves.
As mentioned earlier, sex, race and sexuality are innate and deserve protection. Nobody is arguing otherwise (unless you are).
No, people do not “choose” to adopt or to drop Nazism. They might choose to join the party, or to leave it, or to do something evil that Nazis do. But they don’t choose to believe Nazi ideology or to not believe it.
You cannot change a single one of your sincerely held beliefs by simply choosing to believe otherwise.
I have no idea what you mean by “innate.” Can you explain in what sense a belief is not innate but sexual orientation is? You seem to think fluidity had something to do with it, I think, but clearly people’s sexual orientation is fluid in the same sense: people often believe they’re straight and later believe they’re bi or gay, for example.
Sex and race are externally observable fuzzy characteristics, I don’t really think especially the latter is a useful concept because it’s too fuzzy. But I can at least imagine what you mean by “innate” in this sense, something that you’re born with (sort of) and which other people can determine immediately on sight.
I've stopped being annoyed with what seemed like blanket unsupported statements and written a more patient response:
> But they don’t choose to believe Nazi ideology or to not believe it.
If one gets new information, one decides whether that information is worth changing their beliefs. That is one important distinction between innate qualities and beliefs. And yes choice is involved.
> You cannot change a single one of your sincerely held beliefs by simply choosing to believe otherwise.
I receive new information, I reevaluate my beliefs. Simple.
> people often believe they’re straight and later believe they’re bi or gay, for example.
That's true and a good point - heterosexuality (which is closely tied with the ability to reproduce) is assumed to be the default. But see the next point...
> Sex and race are externally observable fuzzy characteristics
Agreed that 'race' is a funny concept. Americans mainly seem to use it to refer to skin color vs actual ancestry. That's the sense I'm using it here.
Also sexuality is externally observable. If someone is a man and having sex with (gender here) that's externally visible. You can literally watch it.
Political activities and affiliations are a protected for workers in California, where most of the companies in the article are based. However in extreme cases (like if you express your beliefs in a way that creates a hostile working environment) someone can still be fired
Lawful political beliefs, affiliations, and actions are a protected attribute in Australia[0]. I have no idea whether this forces you to hire e.g. actual Nazis, although they'd probably have some unlawful beliefs.
Seems more likely it's so that employers can prevent their employees from discussing their working conditions with each other and enforce _more_ uniformity by stifling demands for better treatment.
This is significantly and historically more the case.
The previous comment confuses Bullying with Political discussion. Though it is true bullies can participate in political discussions a bully is typically a bully in all areas.
> Coinbase and Basecamp, which each lost 60 employees after their bosses changed the rules, have apparently been inundated with applications from people wanting to work for politics-free firms.
Basecamp lost 20 employees. 60 would be nearly their entire workforce.
Coinbase did indeed lose 60 people out of around 1200 at the time.[0]
Worth noting that ignoring the stated justification, Coinbase offered their workforce the limited-time voluntary severance package that was a lot more generous than normal. So it's hard to say how many of those that left did so for political reasons.
According to Wikipedia, 23 out of 57 Basecamp employees left the company recently. [1][2]
Unfortunately verifying that using information from Basecamp doesn't seem to be possible anymore, as they took down both pages listing their employees. [3][4]
Yeah, naturally it will need to be more positively marketed rather than defining itself as basically "anti-" something. For example maybe they should highlight the "focus" angle ie both DHH/Coinbase indicated that a big part of the reasoning was to remove distractions. Who knows the fact of the matter, but it seems like a reasonable razor (spending finite resources in one area means they're not available for another area)
Do you actually mean “politics free”, or do you mean “progressive politics free”? Because unless the website is made absolutely perfectly with exactly the right intentions, it will become parler or gab for jobs.
Who are the people that care so much that they’ll choose a job based on it? Probably 80% hardline conservatives, 10% aggressively apolitical people and 10% unwoke left types like me
But even if the other 20% might theoretically use a site like that, the 80% hardline conservatives would be deeply off-putting.
It’s why I’d never use Gab or Parler. Yeah the free speech idea is nice, but when it comes down to it, mostly, who are getting banned from Twitter and Facebook? The really abrasive and rude right-wing people
Who feels ostracised in their job? I’d say generally it’s the hardcore right-wing people who lean towards being poor communicators
> Who feels ostracised in their job? I’d say generally it’s the hardcore right-wing people who lean towards being poor communicators
I feel ostracized in my job. Of course, no one actually knows I'm right-wing at work, so they'll openly trash talk straw-man caricatures of my beliefs in front of me, which leads to further self-ostracism. I think that's the big lie of the progressive elite we have today: it pretends to be inclusive and preaches "bring your whole self to work," but in reality this is all just another status hierarchy to climb.
But I likewise haven't been a fan of Parler and Gab. If I were to guess, one of the YouTube clones will succeed first before something like Parler or Gab.
Politics is what it is precisely because it is vacuous - you signal allegiance and that is all. You as an individual cannot influence anything any more than discussing an incoming storm would influence its trajectory.
But unlike the storm we know that the results of what society produces are determined by the society. And people don't realize or care that they as an individual are not society and have no influence over it in any meaningful capacity.
Many of our problems may be alleviated if game theory was a mandatory class in highschool. But then democracy would perhaps be in peril as people realize voting is as useless to them as is discussing politics. Tragedy of the commons can be a depressing thing.
How often does a single vote decide an election? Never? Therefore your optimal move is not to waste your time voting - you gain nothing. If everyone thought that way it would be bad perhaps? But they don't so it doesn't matter to you.
It might be argued discussing politics contributes to some emergent consensus forming that benefits society, but that consensus will form whether you participate or not and in exactly the same way unless you win the social lottery and have a disproportionate influence. So you are better off not wasting your time on political discussion, just keep track of the political trends the same way you would keep track of the trajectory of a storm heading towards you.
Tragedy of the commons applies to potential just as much as it does to existing resources. The Nash equilibrium is to consume all the resources you can right down to exhaustion because you alone cannot preserve them and others will consume them whether you do or not.
It is also a Nash equilibrium to conserve your time and not spend it on activities that would benefit the collective but not yourself - in the presence of a collective your contribution (and therefore influence and gain) approaches zero.
Isn't there a Nash equilibrium where everybody takes the action that is best for the group not just themselves, and this achieves a better outcome individually? This seems like the rational outcome most voters are pursuing.
But I don’t think that’s a useful way to model political participation. It’s a social activity. Many participants don’t see the time spent on it as a cost. Also, it is possible to multiply your political force by working with others.
As you point out, it makes no rational sense to vote, the personal effort isn't worth increasing the probability that your preferred candidate will win by epsilon. Not only is the expected benefit small, but that benefit is all socialized.
People vote either out of sheer ignorance/unthinking of this reality, or because it makes them feel emotionally good (a sense of duty to society, entitlement to virtue signal at dinner parties, or whatever). I'm not complaining, if people want to provide an uncompensated service to society, that's great.
There isn't one. It's just a restatement of public choice theory and how little influence individual voters have. Of course, as soon as you consider there are other ways to do politics besides voting it becomes meaningless.
I have no tolerance for politics at work. As far as woke at work goes, not too long ago someone in my office commented on slack "I don't approve of unnecessarily gendered emoji" - I can't even begin to imagine what sort of mind produces such thoughts. First world problems? No idea.
the one that gets me is adding race to emoji. they all used to be 'Simpsons yellow', a skin tone not found in any ethnic or racial group, and as such not representing or excluding any group but now we have black white and other various skin tones for our happy-faces. WHY? Does black happy face mean something different than white happy face isn't happiness universal? why bring race into something that was simply meant to express emotion?
I don’t think everyone interpreted “Simpsons yellow” as race-less. Certainly the show didn’t - On the show, Homer identifies as a white male IIRC, and some characters (like Apu) are not yellow.
You have to pick some skin tone for the default; just floating features would be off putting.
Believing that the pan-white default of “simpsons yellow” is raceless because you feel represented in it excludes that others might not feel represented in it. And it’s a small thing to have fixed that costs you basically nothing.
I say this as a non-white person who ostensibly should feel better represented by these emojis: a person who feels anxiety or exclusion when they see a yellow "thumbs up" is someone who has a low grade mental illness in need of address.
Well-meaning white people have been duped by a vocal minority of non-whites, who themselves were duped by cynical, washed out 60s radicals with bad ideas who failed to achieve anything in their time. You have been encouraged to treat non-whites like child emperors in your midst, whose every whim and dictate can only lead the way to racial harmony and absolution of your inherited sins. This is madness, and it's embarrassing for me and other right-thinking people to witness.
>Believing that the pan-white default of “simpsons yellow” is raceless because you feel represented in it excludes that others might not feel represented in it.
> Well-meaning white people have been duped by a vocal minority of non-whites, who themselves were duped by cynical, washed out 60s radicals with bad ideas who failed to achieve anything in their time. You have been encouraged to treat non-whites like child emperors in your midst, whose every whim and dictate can only lead the way to racial harmony and absolution of your inherited sins.
We are still talking about adding some code points to Unicode here, right? Or did I miss something?
I agree it shouldn’t be a big deal, but it also isn’t a large change to offer skin tones as an option for people who want them. You can simply not use them if you don’t want to.
> What race is Milhouse, with his blue hair?
Not Indian or Black. Almost certainly he reads as white to most people. The blue hair and yellow skin was not meant to signify the characters place outside of race, it was a stylistic consequence of them not having hairlines
>We are still talking about adding some code points to Unicode here, right? Or did I miss something?
This is a matter of representation and inclusion, which are worthwhile goals that should matter to people in positions to make decisions.
Also, this is trivial and doesn't matter.
>Not Indian or Black. Almost certainly he reads as white to most people. The blue hair and yellow skin was not meant to signify the characters place outside of race, it was a stylistic consequence of them not having hairlines
No, you miss the point. It's a creatively liberal work, and viewing it through a racial lens is
1. a choice of the viewer
2. provides a flawed and inconsistent mapping back to human race
3. pathological
The fact that you engage the question and believe there is a sincere answer is the evidence of pathology, IMO. It shows a commitment to read race into everything, instead of acknowledging that blue-haired people don't exist, and so it's quite likely that the project of mapping a phylogeny back to homo sapiens is dubious.
What you're doing is exactly analogous to a hypothetical person claiming that the Simpsons was a pioneer in pro-ablism art and culture, because all characters have four fingers. It's pareidolia.
It’s not about me reading race into the Simpsons, I am saying that the “simpsons yellow” was not intended as a pan-racial skin tone and does not read that way for many people. The fact that minority characters are given a different skin tone than yellow, and the statements of the cartoonists suggest to me that the creators themselves do not view it that way, so it does not seem unreasonable for other people to not accept “simpsons yellow” as a pan-racial skin tone.
Can we at least agree on that or is that too a sign of some “pathology” on my part?
Then, if that’s true, and we think it’s a problem, adding more skin tones seems to me like a trivial fix; but this particular fix being of little cost does not cheapen the wider problems of diversity and inclusion.
Look, to me this is as preposterous as someone complaining that the eggplant and peach emojis should come in various shades. They aren't meant to be literal representations of your junk, and a yellow "thumbs up" is not meant to represent your actual hand. It's meant to represent your approval.
I agree it's a trivial change. To me the underlying issue is that, were it some non-racial domain this issue occured in, most people would have no problem seeing the claim that something so petty and insignificant has actually caused deep injury to my identity for what it is: absurd and possibly deranged. It's only when it comes to race that well meaning people are content to accept such absurd positions, thereby infantilizing the complainant.
And my real issue is that when you do that, it has been my observation that it changes your assumptions about all of "us". So I resent the default assumption that I am weak or need coddling, which is an assumption that I see many of your persuasion holding. (Acknowledging that some assumptions were made on my part just now as well)
There is something at best blind, and more likely to my mind, dishonest about the "It's just a trivial change" argument. It's used to bludgeon dissent. "You can't possibly be such a jerk you'd not do this small thing"
It isn't such a small thing - beyond making a bunch more work for a bunch of people, beyond picking which N other colors get recommended, beyond complicating UIs for all messaging apps, you've now raised the stakes and potentially introduced race into every message. Why didn't Sarah use the slightly darker thumbs up for me, when I'm slight darker than average? She must be a racist!
This really does happen -- I recently had someone complain about a person who only spoke somewhat broken English (as a second language), for not using inclusive language, and they specifically held it against them when selecting them for service (which has nothing to do with DEI issues).
Somewhere farther down another commenter asked if I would consider it race neutral if it was dark magenta.
My response was yeah sure.
If it is not a real skin tone it is neutral and i would feel just as attached to it and feel it is raceless equally as bright yellow. I don't feel anymore or less represented either.
Dark magenta would probably have the same problem that floating features have, which is it distracts from the content (and would probably be hard to read compared to actual skin tones).
The situation was, people chose yellow as the default, and that excluded some people. So, if we cared about being polite and fixing it for those people, and if our options were to either change to some hideous magenta that couldn’t be misinterpreted as representing a real skin tone vs just offering more skin tones, I think we made the right choice.
The choice is not dark magenta or bright yellow or bust though. A large spectrum of colors exist, and if we really wanted to not offend anyone, we could have chosen blue or green or pink or orange or any other color that couldn't possibly be a skin color (untill we meet easily-offended aliens of course).
The Android blob emojis worked for years and people were happy with them. They were so popular that some people even backported them to newer Android versions, after they were removed.
IMHO This: :-) is an emoji.
These new-fangled things on our phones are tiny pictures.
As pictures they communicate differently than ascii characters because they are a different medium.
yeah it really bugs me when ascii faces like :-) are auto converted into a emojii/emoticon by messaging apps or text editors. but that is another conversation
This is why I've always preferred the unifont interpretation of emojis: just monochrome graphics that get rendered with the same color as the surrounding text.
I perceive the cartoon yellow emojis to be white, an alternative interpretation never occurred to me at all.
The first time a black coworker gave a black thumbs-up reaction on slack, I noticed I didn't want to +1 it. I didn't identify with it, it didn't feel like it was coming from me.
This was a strong reaction and totally unexpected, and it was a "holy shit" moment as well, because I suddenly imagined how excluded I would have felt if that had been the only option for years.
I've found myself using the gender neutral reactions instead of the gendered versions despite not identifying with them as much just so my colleagues don't have to choose between incrementing an emoji that doesn't represent them and highlighting that they're different by adding their own gendered reaction.
But it'd be nice to not have to think about it the first place.
There’s a lot wrapped into this comment. Did you perceive yellow to be white because it is the default and you are white? I say that because of your realization you had. I assume that some people felt excluded because of their preconceived notion that the Simpsons are white (with good reason) but also that others (perhaps younger people who may not have seen the show) would follow the same default->my skin color connection.
> The first time a black coworker gave a black thumbs-up reaction on slack, I noticed I didn't want to +1 it. I didn't identify with it, it didn't feel like it was coming from me.
Why wouldn’t you identify with a +1 from a black (or other race/ethnicity) colleague?
The question is a bit aggressive, but if possible don’t consider it like that — I live in an (unfortunately rather conservative) part of the EU and TBH I’m often surprised with the race/diversity activism. I usually support them, if nothing else then because I’m clearly ignorant and not affected by the challenges some of my coworkers have to put on with.
Don’t think GP is having an issue with a +1 from a black coworker, rather that the coworker had reacted in slack using a black thumbs up.
So GP didn’t want to click the black thumbs up to react using the same emoji, because GP didn’t think that a black thumbs up represented him, and would rather react with a yellow or white thumbs up.
GP is then just saying that non-white coworkers probably feel the same about the yellow thumbs up emoji.
Ultimately using emoji is about expressing oneself, and skin colour is a big part of peoples identity (for better or worse). So it makes sense that they want their expressions using emoji to represent their identity.
When using emojis to convey their emotions, some people prefer their emojis to match what they look like. It's not a big deal - certainly not worth complaining about a feature that makes some people happier. The impact of online avatars on self-perception and outcomes is an interesting topic that's worth looking into (it's not limited to race).
But more importantly, why shouldn't a black person be able to use a black emoji? We have the technology.
I agree completely - why not let folks have emojis that more accurately reflect them?
That said, I agree with the GP, who the hell says "I don't approve of unnecessarily gendered emoji"? I mean, fine, then don't use them.
Or other commenters that felt uncomfortable plus-oneing emojis that didn't match their skin tone. Really?? I upvote these things all the time without a second thought because it just means I agree with you, not that we're the same shade. I think it's kind of sad when literally every mundane action, even something as trivial as upvoting someone's comment, can only be seen through the prism of race first and foremost.
The reason is because "woke" is racism in reverse.
As long as there's racism (in any direction), color matters. You can't treat or think of people differently on the basis of race without knowing who is in what race.
The last thing "woke" people want is for discrimination on the basis of race to disappear, or for the color of people's skin to no longer factor in to how they are judged or treated.
Edit: agreed with a below commenter, and thanks for the correction. There isn't any such thing as "racism in reverse", just racism.
Here's Christopher Hitchens in his 2001 book, Letters to a Young Contrarian:
>Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political". It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities". This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.
Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.
I miss Christopher Hitchens' way with words. He truly had a talent for expressing himself richly and convincingly. The ultimate irony is he deconverted me from the religion of my childhood posthumously because I saw the news of his death and then googled him. Which lead to a fascinating summer of YouTube videos of debates and conversations.
Agreed. I've listened to and enjoyed several of his debates (as a Christian, no less) and mourn the loss of him.
He was a formidable and worthy opponent on the debate stage, and by all accounts one of the most kind, thoughtful, personable, and affable people off the stage.
I think it's OK for people to like things that resemble themselves. We will probably end up with emojis that reflect a variety of different body shapes and so on too.
"Simpsons yellow" actually represents white people on the actual Simpsons TV show. The other characters who represent the non-white population all have different skin colors that line up with the people of those cultures or races. So even though nobody's actual skin color is Simpons yellow, culturally we already were representing white skin as that color.
True, I must confess to only having watched one whole episode of the Simpsons start to finish, as the humor never seemed to click for me. I always much preferred Futurama.
The original smiley face was yellow because it was drawn on yellow paper, chosen because the task was to make a logo to cheer people up and yellow was “sunshiny and bright”. The colour has nothing to do with skin tone.
I have a fun conspiracy theory that the variety of emojis is a subtle plot to increase the barrier to entry against smaller companies. Now they have to invest in a much larger number of graphics to create unique set, which encourages them to use something off-the-shelf and brandless.
Am I misremembering? I coulda sworn that originally the 'white' (realistic, non-yellow) emojis were the only option, and the "neutral" yellow tone was added at the same time as the more diverse set of realistic skin tones. I'm certain that's how it was in Slack, for example - I remember discussing it with people at the time. Was I hallucinating?
I think if you are using Slack as an example of how emojis or emoticons were rendered "originally" then you are off by at least a decade. Maybe there were some platfroms/applications that used caucasian skin tones in their emojis, but that was definitely not the rule.
Not angry, exhausted. Tired of everything becoming new theater in the culture war. Tired of things that were intrinsically neutral and apolitical before are being changed for no reason other than to make it another battleground.
perhaps its better that no one can see the skin tone of any of commenters because then comments have to be judge on the merits of their arguments rather than melanin concentration in the skin of the people saying them.
I think what people are getting at with this (and trying to be cordial about it as best they can) is that the only people that want to have a separate image for every color person on the planet are racists.
Step back, take a deep breath and read what you wrote.
You are saying that we should not care, but you clearly care if the face is black ... So, somebody decided that he would like to have a black emoji because he like it that and you decided to make an issue out of it ... and accuse the other person of what you yourself are doing ...
If you don't see it is because you don't want to see it.
"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"
I am not upset that there is black, i am bothered that something that was implicitly neutral is not neutral anymore. that it can now be used as yet another point in which to divide than unify.
If you've watched the Simpsons, the "Simpsons Yellow" is white, it is clearly demonstrated in the show - Apu isn't yellow! It undermines your whole point!
To me it seemed less racist when we all had yellow hands. Then again I think poc is a silly term - non Europeans have completely different experiences and cultures from each other even within the US.
Indeed. Yellow was race-neutral - nobody's skin color. Then the race-ist emojis started... and discrimination sky-rocketed (e.g. there's still no ginger emojis!).
Yes, dark magenta would be fine. But must importantly, there was no race associated to the Unicode code points before and rendering was entirely up to the font choice. Now there is a defined skin color.
I’ve wondered about this but I’ve never seen anyone use an emoji thumbs up in anything but yellow. I can’t imagine ever setting it to match my skin color, but it would be neat to learn about people who want emojis that look more like them.
If anything, I’d be more likely to choose a color far away from my skin.
I do it because it’s a way to personalize my message and share a bit of who I am through my text. The emojis are there to emulate my face and hands during speech, so making them look like me too is helpful to conveying a little more of what a face-to-face conversation would offer.
There was a piece on NPR saying that it's trivializing the experiences of black people. As usual, normal people don't have any problem with it, it's just a small clique of journalists and activists.
Giving the (somewhat silly) existence of all the colors of emoji, I think the best solution would be to have the software randomly pick a color every time one is displayed.
Can you expand on what do you mean as being blind to race? Do you want them to see your race, treat different races differently? Aren't we supposed to be a color-blind society? Maybe I am just not understanding what you mean.
I think on an individual level we should be “blind” to race but when it comes to solving some of the big problems of society we have to recognize the role that racism plays in those problems and
There's a context implied, but not explicitly stated here.
Being "blind to race" means that the context in which the other person exists is being ignored. Seeing things like race and gender mean that you are keeping context in mind when interacting with people.
Systemic racism isn't necessarily about your personal intent, but it is about the results of your actions. Being blind to race effectively results in supporting the racist status quo. Being blind to sexism effectively results in supporting the sexist status quo.
The current default for American society is white. PoC have a different lived experience, and white people don't often know what it is like to have that lived experience. Similarly, richer people lack an understanding of what poverty implies about the lack of choices.
> Being "blind to race" means that the context in which the other person exists is being ignored.
No, it does not. It means that the colour of their skin is ignored. If a white family has the same socio-economic status as a family of colour, should we treat them differently simply based on colour?
I think you mean we should assume the family of colour is actively discriminated against so they can't be in the same socio-economic group, but at the same time you claim that "systemic racism isn't necessarily about personal intent"...?
> Similarly, richer people lack an understanding of what poverty implies about the lack of choices.
This is probs what you actually want to control for, but it's easier to go for the low-hanging fruit that's also culturally fashionable right now, I get it.
My view is certainly coloured by being a white Eastern European living in Western Europe. Not all white people have the same background, certainly not in Europe. I'm sure there are shades of white in America as well. Point being: colour is only an easy proxy for the real issues that need solving.
Here's my "race-blind" take: give help to the people who need it, in the way that they need it. The implementation can then have a race-driven approach, but the policy is race-free. Or is that not good enough?
"Blind to race" claims often go along with smugly ignoring systemic racism in society and acting like it's a solved problem because a black man was elected President.
"racializing all facets of everyday life, including emojis"
Every representation of humans is racialized, they exist in a social context where race exists.
Pretending that it is not and then complaining when someone says, "hey, we maybe should make it so not everything looks like white folks" is just silly stuff. Emoji diversity is good and 100% harmless!!
> Every representation of humans is racialized, they exist in a social context where race exists
This is only true as long as we go out of our way to make it true. The concept of “googly eyes” for example, is totally race agnostic. Likewise, emojis represent emotions that don’t inherently need to be coupled to race. Emojis aren’t even a new concept, we had emoticons in the ‘00s in AIM, where 99% of the emotions had nothing to do with race.
I say this as a brown man; it really doesn’t matter to me if the “thumbs up” I use in a coworker’s merge request is brown or the default yellow. On the flip side, emoji diversity is yet another reminder that I’m different from others, especially in a context where I would rather focus on what makes us the same.
It relates to your explaining the subtext because that subtext is a straw man.
I can’t speak for the GP commenter to whom you responded, but I can speak for myself when I say that I strive to to treat everyone the same regardless of their race (and not make a big deal out of race), while also being well aware of the prejudices and injustices that might affect someone on the basis of race out in the world. If that doesn’t describe “race blindness”, then we probably need to come up with a phrase to represent that person.
Yeah. I grew up in a third world country and moved to North America pretty late. I never realized how sheltered and weak Americans were till I joined a well known YC company.
I feel like this is true, especially of younger generations, in many rich countries.
I think maybe because it takes challenge and pain to grow and things have been quite comfortable for a long time for many.
It could just be my perception. But I've never seen so much anxiety, such reluctance to do hard things, and such inability to focus. Social media may be largely to blame.
You need to experience challenges and overcome difficulties to build a strong character. The same way the immune system needs to be exposed to bacteria and dirt to become strong. When you aren’t, the result is a weak fragile personality that can’t cope with the slightest unexpected derivation from how they expect things to be.
"Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel."
Most likely because we don't all know his individual lady friend, but we definitely know people who are 'women in the bay area'. If a person makes a broad sweeping statement then qualifying it with an individual exception is no more significant than some tiny disclaimer int he corner of a billboard.
White men as a group have high social and economic status, so a broad-spectrum put-down isn't likely to impact them very much. Women have spent a long time trying to overcome exclusionary social mores, and have correspondingly less social and economic capital, so it's in their interest to cooperate against overt sexists.
I've seen a lot of white homeless men around the Bay Area. In fact, the ratio of homeless white men to homeless women of any race is quite high.
Do these homeless white men have high social and economic status? I'm curious to know when it is appropriate to generalize based on group membership, and when it is not.
EDIT: More curiosity from me: Has anyone demonstrated that any women were actually impacted by his statement (again, a few lines taken out of context from, well, a book-length book) in any real way?
The assumption seems to be that now he's irrevocably tainted as sexist, like some sort of charged particle inducing sexist discrimination on any nearby woman according to some inverse square law. I have yet to understand how a flippant (and joking) sentence or two in a book somehow causes anyone any real harm.
I just looked up the suicide rates, and holy cow.[0] How many additional white men have taken their own lives because they are assumed to be able to "handle put-downs?"
Do not put your words in my mouth, please. You got a good faith reply, which you are misrepresenting. It was you that switched the context to 'white men in the bay area' in the first place.
I really don't see how your comment does not imply the meaning I took from it. You said that white men (due to their "high social and economic status" as a group) would not be impacted much by a negative generalization. In other words, as I put it, "they can take it".
Now, if I've misunderstood something substantive about your argument I am open to correction. With regard to how I phrased your argument, the whole point was to make it clear why I don't find your argument convincing.
The more our communication defaults to chat (e.g. slack) the more I feel like it is detrimental to our productivity. I think we will wake up from this fever dream of Slack and realize there are better ways to communicate.
I'm not sure the idea of "no politics at work" is exactly the right mindset.
I like the idea that a narrow mission (corporate or otherwise) allows for coalition building, and that you can sometimes put your differences aside and build something great the world can benefit from (this was an idea pushed by the early defenders of open source and the OSI).
When you build these coalitions, it also somewhat forces you to humanize the people not from your political faction.
It's like deriving and then acting upon several layers worth of meta-information from very mundane things. People would take the bit that was said (or not said), build some story around that, possibly derive a second story from the first and then go out and attack you based on that. Nothing is taken on face value.
I can imagine what sort of mind produces such thoughts: an unoccupied one.
Lots of people are going to work just to get out of the house and doing make-work. They aren't invested in their work. It isn't what they want to do. The work isn't real with real outcomes and real responsibility. It's not hard.
> I can imagine what sort of mind produces such thoughts: an unoccupied one.
A distracted mind, perhaps. I think it's interesting how far from the economy politics has shifted. I have the impression that before the 21st century people used to fight a lot more for worker's rights, unionization, better working and living conditions... You know, things that actually impacted the bottom line of capitalists. Curiously, all this mainstream "wokeness" seems to have begun after Occupy Wall Street.
Politics seems to have been de-economized and the economy seems to have been de-politicized.
you do have tolerance. you just don’t know it. a lot of things are “political”. You cannot share virtually anything about you or your life without some political subtext.
Try sharing something, anything and I’ll make it political in 2 easy steps.
Unless you’re a machine, there is politics at work. does everything have to be a woke political discussion? prolly not
A lot of things are "political", but not that many are political.
> Try sharing something, anything and I’ll make it political in 2 easy steps.
Yeah, see, that's the problem. The problem isn't that everything is in some way political. It's people who are looking to make things political. (In fact, that could be a functional definition of woke-ness.)
You don't want that at work. Eventually, the woke people will find a way to turn on some of your most valuable and most talented employees. That's not going to end well, no matter who wins the fight.
The problem isn't that everything is in some way political. It's people who are looking to make things political.
But often they are political and people are simply pointing it out, which makes other people uncomfortable. 'That's just how X is' or 'things have always been that way, what's the big deal' are very often the product of past political decisions whose results have become the default.
so you saw what i was trying to point out. the problem is not political things. it’s people that are turning a difference of opinion into “cancelling” someone else.
my opinion is that you literally cannot ban politics at work. people will still talk about things. you need a culture of tolerance and openness.
But your workplace is full of politics. Are you not allowed to use GPL dependencies? Do you get bonuses paid in stock options? Is there a senior developer that takes no input from new hires as a general rule? Does your boss get paid a lot more then you? Are parents allowed flexible work hours? Are more and more positions being filled in low paying areas? Does your company sell software to the American Military? to ICE? Does it have manufacturing in the occupied Palestinian territories?
Leaving politics outside of the office is simply not possible.
The weird thing is how it’s all seems so co-ordinated. As if the HR departments of every firm get their marching orders from some central advocacy group.
I bet this is a side effect of the internet and especially social media. Rapid spread of ideas/memes creates large zones of homogeneity, sort of like the fill-colour operation in paint programs. Suddenly we have "tribes", but with millions of people.
The same phenomenon drives the homogeneous subgroups to extremes, since externally they define themselves in opposition to other subgroups, and internally they egg each other on, rewarding the members who find the most intense new ways to express the identity.
It's not coordinated, except in the sense that the technology allows for forms of replication that never existed before. Because our brains don't expect that sort of world, this maps to a feeling of "it all seems so coordinated", even if we resist that explanation intellectually.
HR is a reasonably well-paying clerical field amenable to those with non-technical degrees. This and its human-orientation makes it a natural fit for soft-science/sociology majors working outside their field.
HR is not usually an important or powerful part of a company. I wonder if HR people, consciously or subconsciously, are drawn to the idea of being important and powerful for once.
They are. Focault and critical race theory embedded themselves deeply in a lot of non STEM degrees a while ago, which is where HR candidates usually come from.
That generation is now running HR in a lot of these companies.
> Critical race theory scholars question foundational liberal concepts such as Enlightenment rationality, legal equality, and Constitutional neutrality, and challenge the incrementalist, step-by-step approach of traditional civil-rights discourse;[12] they favor a race-conscious approach to social transformation, rejecting liberal embrace of affirmative action, color blindness, role modeling, or the merit principle; and an approach that relies more on political organizing, in contrast to liberalism's reliance on rights-based remedies.[27]
These things are like some kind of social software. Behaviour patterns that HR departments or other departments use, because they worked well for others, get around the consequences of some legal precedent, or simply because they are fashionable. As examples, take casual friday, adding "(m/f)" to job offers, or giving out stock options.
We are all just apes apeing each other after all ;)
I always find myself amused at how the people who are involved in the political, social, and other flame wars in the workplace find time to do actual work. Just looking at the threads from earlier this week, I see a couple dozen people posting 50+ posts each every day for at least 2-3 days (each post is anywhere from a half-page to two pages of text with links, images, etc). It would take me at least 5-10 mins per post so we are looking at 6 hrs per day on average. Honestly it’s on low end since they also read other posts I would guess ;)
This reminds me of the research showing some tiny percentage of Twitter users, like 3%-4%, are responsible for the vast majority of flamewars. The asymmetry of the internet gives these people the ability to crowd reasonable people out of the commons.
I think another problem is that communicating by text in twitter posts. Its very hard to tell how serious someone is being. No facial expressions, mannerisms, or hand movements to guide. Like they could be making up the most absurd reactions, typing up a storm, and people will take them seriously more often than not.
Twitter is worse than other platforms because the format is really contrived. The 280 character limit doesn't give people space to write a nuanced, fair, well thought out response to things.
Also, if you contrast twitter and reddit, I would say that on reddit, everyone is kind of on the same footing more or less. Anyone can post a thread and if the content is interesting, it can rise to the top, then every response in that thread also has an equal chance to have visibility. The design of twitter is made so that masses of people follow some small number of "influencers", and these people have an outsized voice. There is no upvote or downvote, it seems to be largely based on how many followers you have.
The fact that there's no specific topical discussion groups I think also really amplifies the toxicity of the platform, because twitter can suck a bunch of people who have nothing to do with the discussion into the flamewar, as a way to increase "engagement". On a platform like HN, you have discussions about programming, and they're split into threads which people can choose to read or not. Reddit is split into subreddits on a variety of topics. It doesn't actively try to rope random people into some bullshit drama they have nothing to do with.
And uh, fun fact: twitter is not profitable, more than 15 years after they were founded, 8 years after their IPO. The stock has basically gone nowhere. It's a wonder they're still here, despite their lack of innovation and lack of business sense. IMO, the world would be better without this platform, but uh, I guess once your tech company gets past a certain size, it can never go bankrupt?
You should check out r/politics. It's primarily progressive and is as if the worst Twitter opinions sprang to life, became Twitter users, and got a larger textarea. Twitter does have the concept of topics, but it's mainly a mechanism for virality, which is tags. It's well known that Twitter users will witness an event emerge online, converge on a tag, and all compete for the edgiest quotes to get into the news reactions.
> Why tech firms are trying to run away from politics—and failing
Really? Don't be surprised when you manipulate the political sphere outside your walls in ways never seen in the history of the world and that politic creeps inside and devours you from within.
I don't disagree with your general sentiment, but companies (unreasonably large ones especially) have certainly manipulated the political sphere "outside their walls" in such ways for a long time. See East India Company, Standard Oil, etc. See also the Gilded Age for a time that is very reminiscent of the times we live in today [0].
> Coinbase and Basecamp, which each lost 60 employees after their bosses changed the rules, have apparently been inundated with applications from people wanting to work for politics-free firms.
Basecamp had 57 employees at the time of their announcement. Are they down to -3?
That's not what the quote says. It clearly states that EACH company lost 60 employees. If the intent was to convey a sum then it would have needed to use words like "combined" "total" or "sum" or at the ambigous minimum noy included the "each" word that exclused the "sum" meaning from consideration.
People are human.
But work is work.
The canonical point of a workplace is to come together to fulfill the aims of the entrepreneurs.
The personal aims of the workers are fulfilled best outside of work.
Just stop to think about it logically for a minute... is the workplace the best place to circulate a petition condemning something that has nothing to do with work?
The workplace necessarily is going to bring together people that do not agree on personal matters - but who best align on matters relating to... work.
Color me naive, but shouldn’t what happens in the office be about the office???
Shouldn’t we be advocating on non office things outside of the office??
> The point of a workplace is to come together to fulfill the aims of the entrepreneurs. The personal aims of the workers are fulfilled best outside of work.
What? I can’t be the only one who works directly in order to fulfill my needs (like literally my most basic needs, think food and shelter).
I was about to say, this is the most chilling HN sentence I’ve ever read. The totality of our existence from 8-5 is not owed to someone who profits from our labor and skills because they got lucky with some seed money or an inheritance a decade ago.
That’s just the divine right of kings with extra steps.
Your labor and skills are not owed because they got lucky, they are owed because that is what you are exchanging with the owner for money.
They may tolerate (and even enjoy) your personal quirks and causes, but they are paying you to get things done that they don't have the time or skill to do themselves.
"Your labour and are not owed because they got lucky, they are owed because that is what you are exchanging with the lord for the privilege to work this land"
"Your labour and skills are not owed because they got lucky, they are owed because that is what you are exchanging with the owner to pay back your debt and earn your freedom"
You can use that logic to justify any oppression as long as you frame it in the language of property. It's not a valid argument - you don't have a choice but to exchange for money because you're in a position where you have no choice but to engage in oppressive social structures or face the violence of the state if you want to survive.
It's not a choice. You have a (metaphorical) pistol to your head to engage with the system as it is, die, or be killed.
Its really not so different from what your ancestors as serf or as debt slaves in antiquity might have lived.
As long as you live in a society where private property in absentia (ultimately based on theft, might I add) exists, the "choice" to exchange is colored by violence and is far from truly free.
Wasn't there a big scandal some years ago about the big tech players making deals under the table about wages and not poaching each other's talent? At some point, when there is too much to lose, big companies are going to start collaborating on things that are not beneficial to the worker. At that point, you might say that you have total freedom in your choice of where to go to work, but you are also limited by the 'invisible hand of the market'
But yeah, I do agree that a direct comparison of programmers to serfs is a bit overboard. However, I am also seeing it in the sense that things don't really change much, even in a few centuries. The world is probably getting better for the people, but that doesn't mean that the same old tactics by the rich and powerful don't appear in new clothes.
Of course. I didn't mean to literally say that working as a programmer is like being a serf, just that the arguments for lopsided employment relationships are the same millenia old agreements that justified debt slavery and serfdom.
No, it's not. Serfs in a lot of Europe had the possibility to change their lords. Either by asking another lord to buy them, or by leaving to a city or to another lord's land without being taken back for a year, in the example of England.
The capital for a programmer's startup is not the laptop, its the intellectual property. That costs way more than a 1000$, typically the equivalent of at least a few tens of thousands of dollars in IP. But beyond that programmers are very far from the average.
The average person in the 2021 worldwide economy cannot live off social benefits on a whim.
The difference is in the degree of which one can switch. The vast majority of serfs, even if they might have been able to, did not switch out their lords. Programmers and really any white collar workers can do so readily and easily, every few years even.
Not really. To me it seems like you're latching onto a single not so relevant point of the difference. I could use the same argument for why serfdom is not at all equivalent to debt slavery because you can choose to grow the land however you like.
It's not true that all white collar workers can switch jobs every few years. Some white collar workers in the US can, and even then with asterisks (non-competes, wage fixing, etc...)
The biggest reason why serfs would stop moving is to have children and a wife.
> It's not a choice. You have a (metaphorical) pistol to your head to engage with the system as it is, die, or be killed.
This is ridiculous. In the US people constantly quit to start small businesses, work for other businesses, or just not work at all. There is zero threat of violence if you choose not to work.
Additionally, there is no concept of debt slavery at all outside of the military (which is probably the most successful socialist institution in the US). There is no forced labor to pay down debt.
> private property in absentia (ultimately based on theft, might I add)
Based on theft from who? If I grow some cucumbers in my garden, who have I stolen them from?
I don't think you understood what I meant, I probably wasn't clear.
There is no threat of violence if you choose not to work. The violence is if you try to subsist to your means without engaging with the economic system. So you are forced to engage in the economic system as it is.
As for debt slavery, I'm simply saying that the arguments used to justified exploitative labour relations are exactly the same as were used to justify debt slavery.
If you grow cucumbers in your garden, your first need to buy the land for the garden, which was ultimately stolen from someone else. But growing a cucumber in your garden is not private property in absentia, it's private property in present use.
All you're saying here is that a person can't survive completely on their own. That's always been true, and is just part of The Human Condition, not a plot by evil capitalists.
Division of labor is the foundation of civilization, and how we have become so incredibly wealthy.
In a division of labor system, everyone needs to contribute as much as they benefit, on average, and the system of mostly voluntary trade is how we keep track of that. You trade your labor for money, that you in turn trade with others for the result of their labor.
Demanding to share the fruits of that system - which come from the work of countless other people - without being willing to contribute to it with your own work is both selfish and antisocial.
>In the US people constantly quit to start small businesses, work for other businesses, or just not work at all. There is zero threat of violence if you choose not to work.
SOME people. Median savings are ~$4k, realistically the average person needs access to credit (which they may not have), a strong support network, or some other way of surviving longer than 2 months without work.
And whether or not you do have the wealth or support network needed to choose not to work is determined mostly by who your parents are. This isn't a fair system.
> If I grow some cucumbers in my garden, who have I stolen them from?
The cucumbers aren't stolen, but the land is. Ultimately almost all private property in land was dispossesed of common ownership or previous inhabitants. Not that you need to feel guilty about it, but you do need to pay your taxes.
It's clear that people are exchanging their labor/skills for money. Your parent is referring to where that money comes from and why some people have it, while others must exchange their labor/skills for it.
It's pretty clear that capital is running away with the game right now. Until that's rectified, your argument about exchanging labor and skills for money makes your parent's point rather than negating it.
That is, the exchange is only free among parties with relatively equal power (at least collectively). And, if it's not a free exchange then your point is moot.
Exactly. The fundamental basis of capitalism is voluntary exchange. Either party can set their own conditions, and are free to decline the conditions of the other. Everything not part of that exchange is, well, not part of that exchange.
There is an enormous supply of workers who don't want social and political issues in the workplace, but silently acquiesce because saying anything gets you branded negatively and quickly canceled. It doesn't matter if you agree but prefer keeping it out of the workplace; you must either support the woke brigade or keep your mouth shut.
Keeping your mouth shut is no longer an option “silence is violence” and “not taking a position is a position” have taken over. The issue at Basecamp was that activists were harassing other employees to get them to make public statements on issues.
Of course. By "clarify", I meant you will be forced to toe the party line if you don't want to be passed up.
There are still many of us out there who believe that hiring candidates based on their race is not healthy for society, the company, or any individual candidate. That opinion is largely being stamped out, by design, in management at the orgs I'm talking about.
This has nothing to do with not wanting to step up and manage.
> You don’t think conservatives do exactly the same thing? Cancelling isn’t unique to the left nor something that just recently started.
Yes, conservatives did the same thing during Mccarthyism, and it's widely accepted to have been a bad thing. A different group having made the same mistake in the past is a reason not to do it again, not an excuse to do more of it.
Might the current efforts to make it harder for specific demographics to vote be considered a form of canceling?
Is gerrymandering a form of canceling?
Because the problem with McCarthyism was the government infringing on freedom of association.
On the other hand, the kind of cancelling that gets talked about today is simply people independently exercising their freedom of association, and it's being made into a boogie man to take those choices away from people.
I don't have a problem with conservatives doing it either as long as they don't enforce it on others, and don't do it for the protected classes. Everything else is fair game for both sides.
I think you missed my point. It’s not about party governance.
The more reactionary elements are, to put it politely, bullies. Stefanik went to school a few blocks away from me and her evolution/devolution has been well publicized even before she hit the national spotlight. It makes her the perfect patsy.
She has been “rewarded” for loyalty, but has to double down on whatever. The problem is you have to do what the bullies want or you’re in the cold.
The issue for the public at large is you have a coalition of reactionaries, losers (the Colorado bartender with a gun fetish turned Representative) and compromised people whose only path forward is double down on extremism. There’s a non-zero probability that someone like Rep. Greene will accuse POTUS of being a alien lizard-person. It’s exactly the same as McCarthy.
It's not the same as McCarthy because they aren't nuking someone's access to anything other than Republican party leadership. McCarthy could take away random citizen's livelihood; Greene is just playing politics in a gross way with other politicians.
They do it today, too. Conservatives in my area canceled a small business because the owners shared a BLM meme on Facebook. They even got the local PBA spokesperson to smear the business all over media, as well. The owners had to take down their social media profiles, and felt pressured enough to release a statement for apologizing for the meme.
It wasn’t just the Red Scare. Black people were cancelled by default. Jews were tolerated, at best, and quota’d out of leadership roles. Women were functionally disallowed from being anywhere near whole classes of employment. Gay people were forced to hide and remain closeted to even be allowed in polite company.
Most of what right wingers complain about being “cancelled” for are perpetuating arguments to restore the bad old days where members of all those groups were treated as second or third class citizens. Can you blame them for occasionally being a little overexuberant in telling you to STFU?
> Can you blame them for occasionally being a little overexuberant in telling you to STFU?
Absolutely. If you claim the moral high ground, you cannot possibly expect to be taken seriously if you make the same mistakes as the people you are criticizing.
That's fine. Struggling for power is absolutely okay. It is natural. Let's recognize it for what it is.
What I don't accept is virtuous claims that people want equality. It was never about that. It's about increasing their own group's power and privileges.
The responses to the Basecamp and Coinbase announcements were equally mixed between people who wanted to avoid them, and people who want to seek them out. There are plenty of people who want work to be about working together on work.
I for one want work to be welcoming and productive for everyone. Ironically, the best way to accomplish that is to focus on work, and not non-work.
Agreed, as long as there isn’t some major issue internally (sexism/racism) that affects your ability to work, or the work itself is an issue (being made to create distasteful content for example) I don’t want to think about politics at all.
I don’t want to have outside matters pushed on me while working regardless of how much I agree with them.
I’ll happily engage in activism outside of work where people aren’t forced to sit around me every day.
I don't resent people raising political or social arguments. Actually, I quite enjoy them and actively partake outside of hackernews. What I do resent is being told what the right answers are and forbidden from disagreeing on threat of termination and ostracisation. My own preference order is appropriate discussion of social issues, no discussion, told what the answers are without discussion.
Let me give an example. At my most recent job there is a monthly lunch for women at my level with our VP. Who is also a woman. The explicit topic of this lunch is career advancement for women. I learned about the lunch from my two female coworkers.
In order to get promoted you need to have feedback and buy off from upper management. Same for raises and bonuses. Now, I don't know, but I assume having a monthly meeting to talk about my career advancement with the VP of our group would be a benefit for the pursuit of getting promoted and getting more money.
My perception is that if I said something like "Hey, isn't it a bit unfair we give this perk to women and not men?" Is that I would be quickly shamed. If I stuck to it, I'd expect to get fired. I don't think I could even question the logic of it, and I do have some questions, without being fired.
Ironically, it strikes me as an extremely privileged perspective to have the same political beliefs as the company and also to insist on talking about them at the company. "We just want to say what the owners think and punish people who disagree. Who could object to that?"
Why not just look at the current ratios of managers and test your hypothesis that lunch with this VP helps? My personal experience is that lunch is cheaper for the company to give than raises; it enables them to look like they're doing something while dollars to donuts the actual gender ratios get more & more lopsided as the paychecks rise. Perhaps your company is unusual and this isn't the case, and this lunch actually accomplishes something. I'd be quite interested if that were so.
It's impossible to know if it did or didn't help people.
"Excuse me, do you think you're a manager now because of gendered benefits extended to you? Hmm? What's that? I should pack up my stuff?" I think if there was a men's group, to help men get promoted, that people wouldn't shrug and say "Maybe it doesn't help."
>My own preference order is appropriate discussion of social issues, no discussion, told what the answers are without discussion.
Surely "appropriate discussion" includes a lot of telling people what the answers are without discussion. It's just hidden from your view.
For instance, you would probably agree that your co-worker wearing a swastika, walking around the offices during lunch giving seig heils to his friends, is not "appropriate discussion". Nor would it be "appropriate discussion" for your coworker to wear his klan hood on casual Friday.
So where's the line between "appropriate discussion" and "told what the answers are"? Are you telling your poor nazi and klansman coworkers what the answers are, without discussion, when you ask them not to do such things?
While that’s true, there’s also ambiguity and difficulty involved in deciding what is and isn’t political. (For that matter, is “is this political?” political?)
Absolutely! There's no silver bullet here - to work well in a diverse group, you have to understand and accept that not everyone will be on exactly the same page. My own workplace says things I find to be too political from time to time, and I don't see that as an important problem. And I've definitely seen people who overcorrect in the other direction, turning over every rock to try and find hidden politics.
What doesn't work is the original commenter's idea that
> Everything is political. Even saying you don’t have a position is tacit endorsement of the status quo.
Because the logical conclusion of this argument, and I strongly suspect the intended conclusion, is that you should continue all political arguments at maximum intensity until you win. If my manager comes by and asks me to get back to work, I can't do it - that would be a tacit endorsement of the status quo!
Well, to be clear, this is a conclusion I've seen people explicitly draw - I'm not just making it up. There was a famous incident at Coinbase where a request to discuss an important political issue spiraled outwards and outwards, until a bunch of employees went on strike to demand the founder adopt their political slogan.
Often you can't talk about political issues in an adult and professional manner. Many issues have to do with deeply and passionately held beliefs; you can't expect people who believe that some law is taking their rights away, or that some war is an unjust slaughter, to discuss it in the same tone they'd use to discuss a project planning issue. You can make it work for some issues in some contexts, and I know plenty of people who successfully talk politics with groups of their coworkers over lunch. But companywide discussions about hugely controversial issues are almost never going to go well.
But did the klansman or the nazi have any political discussion? They're just wearing their funny outfits and walking around saying hello to their friends. If anything, someone complaining about their behavior is having political discussion.
Both the Klan and Nazis are political organizations so supporting them seems pretty clearly political speech. Similar, you wouldn't be allowed to wear your Klan hood or your Bernie Sanders hat to a polling station (where political displays like that are prohibited). (Although, of course, people probably wouldn't notice the Sanders hat)
You're going to throw accusations like "supporting the klan" or "supporting the Nazi party" around with only circumstantial evidence? You're one of those political discussion agitators after all.
These two fellows just think that the hats and armbands they're wearing are stylish accessories. And the hand motions? No more than a good triceps workout.
Suppose we worked at a sporting goods store and management noticed that employees and customers were regularly getting into arguments about teams, players, game outcomes, etc. So, management says to employees "Employees should not discuss their own personal views on sports. This will help us better serve customers and work together."
Well, once that new policy is in place, it won't exactly be a head scratcher as to how we should view an employee wearing the jersey of his favorite basketball player. Personal opinions on sports are out and wearing a sports jersey is clearing showing, or at clearly will be interpreted as showing, support for that basketball player.
My argument is that your preferred work policy - "appropriate discussion" is impossible without a lot of implied use of your least favorite policy - being "told what the answer is."
In turn, your second policy - "no political discussion" is practically unworkable. I demonstrate by an example. If you want to make it so your coworker can't wear his swastika, you must allow political discussion:
"This piece of clothing has a certain understood meaning in society, wearing it implies he supports xyz, any claims to the contrary are a fig leaf."
"No, no, I just like the look..."
And we have a political argument on our hands about whether such attire is appropriate.
In short, allowing no political discussion at the workplace is not possible.
As to your own metaphor, it falls flat. Everything is politics. Not everything is sports. It is very possible to go about your day without making any sporting statements, and impossible to not make political statements.
I think there will be ambiguity and good faith discussions and clarifications to settle expectations. I also think that people who insist on it will always be able to split hairs and invent arguments.
If the company has a policy that says "No unwanted touching of coworkers" and one employee hovers his hand over coworkers while taunting "I'm not touching you" the problem is not with the guideline. Likewise, if you say "No politics at work" and someone keeps coming up with creative arguments of the form "Technically isn't this politics" then the problem isn't with the guideline either.
you say that everything is political and I do not disagree. But I consider it is a essential professional skill to be able to at least minimise the prevalence and effects of political ideas in the workplace and anywhere where the subject and debate is not appropriate. Too many people are outright declaring they are entirely set against even considering adapting to the needs and requirements of and elementary civil courtesy and manners towards paymasters who already not only provide exceptional levels of pay and additional lifestyle enhancements alongside a job but also nothing less than incomparable freedom of expression in your actual performance of your work which is easily recognised by comparison with your freedom of solutions for the work involved in any other engineering job.
edit what baffles me - translation : disgusts me - is the total lack of consideration given by politically activist employees to their colleagues. It's time for this behaviour and practicing of intolerance to no longer be tolerated.
this prompted me to further thinking today (cut from a separate comment draft):
The recent discussion about how programmers are bringing politics to work with them has suddenly made me wonder how I'll find recruitment if I am open about this business being a means to a cultural end. The trick with having any political component in your business is maintaining the absolute separation and distinction between the objective and everything else : the moment you allow political thought or anything else for that matter to permeate your work, you're neutered. And if you don't maintain a very clear fix on and evaluative feedback from your goals then you will fail as well. I surprised myself yesterday I am so stridently from a older generation and mentality to generalise where from my views on work politics must appear to have arisen - irrespective the plain sensibility and logic and educational experience agreeing with me - since I am intensely political and have spent 30 years working on possible means to balance the power of advertising and more importantly to return to sub multinational scale companies the ability to advertise which is effectively denied by the status quo. I mean how is Amazon not political in the act of providing unprecedented access to literature.. [0]
The UK legislation prohibits all conduct of political aims via any incorporated business.
I don't know why I can't immediately tell you if the USA is the same or not, but I'll be surprised if it isn't.
if you need any better reason why you shouldn't allow politics in your workplace, I should say that this is why.
[0] rather than improve my logic and rewrite this conspicuously inconsistent statement, I have realised I want to go and think about this further in some depth. I have added my own self reply comment deliberately to contradict any impression that I have given of being a political in my work and life. I have seen here that I need to better delineate the distinction in my mind that separates politics from my business in the way I have entirely accurately reported, because I should be inclusive of my personal political animus and purpose that I have furthered through commercial activities. Of course, providing access to literature as Amazon did on unprecedented scale, is political and obviously not party political. However, non partisan action can very often be taken to be partisan tactics by individuals and organisations in party political life. However this is where I see that we need to eliminate all connections to partisanship attached to actions of social benefit. This is a problem inherent to privilege and social class structure and economic inequality. We need to urgently learn collectively the true political meaning of the ranges of corporate action which are presumed as being socially beneficial and aligned with Democrat policy and society and identify where this is not true. I'm looking immediately at the effects of the gig economy and the increasing similarity to serfdom and indenture that is the combined function of low interest rates and impossible to escape debts from education that's become compulsory irrespective if you have no ambition in accordance with the traditional necessity for university education. low interest rates have almost certainly forced into debt children of parents who in my generation could have paid for education from interest on modest savings. the current requirements for millions in capital in retirement is a insufferable burden I struggle to comprehend not least because I must save for retirement over again due to medical bills and I have barely the years of expected life in which to do so. the most important consequence is my company is re-established on financial assumptions designed to provide a retirement income within 20 years and that's very much faster than any employer is capable of doing, who has come to my attention m
I think that the real politics that has begun to enter into American and European business life is a financial political anxiety which is manifesting itself to become vocal and visible in very many different ways other than talking about money because especially in America we don't like to talk about how much we earn and less and less so because of increasing inequality.
and because of this social taboo I think I am beginning to understand why the introduction of political ideas into the workplace has been so fraught and emotional
but I'm not even started in my search for a understanding of this problem - all I know is that I have to actually find a way of resolving this contention if I am going to be able to retire myself, because the only likely employment I can get due to my health is the ongoing revival of my company which inevitably is going to face these issues head to head sooner than later.
It means that you are not interested when a politician or a work based group with political ideas (official or unofficial) tries to "recruit" you and join their cause telling you that they are fighting to elevate your rights and status.
You'll simply decline knowing full well that you can elevate yourself just as much (actually way more) solely with your hard work and performance.
The "saying you don't have a position is an endorsement of the status quo" argument implies that the entire world needs to stop until your favorite problem is fixed. That's a recipe for getting to the political equilibrium where anti-abortion voters live.
It is not "divine right of king" by any stretch of the imagination. It is a contract for exchange of service between to parties. Because you agreed to exchange their money for your labor. During that time you are obligated to do what you are agreed to be paid to do under the conditions agreed to at time of hire.
And yes they are owed your skills because they are paying you for them, that is how any exchange of services work. If you don't provide them you are not giving them what they are paying you for.
You are right, we are selling our labour. But the idea that that means that we are selling our _time_ is a recent development in human history. Most societies in the past would have a hard time even understanding the idea that one's time could belong to your employer, es explained by David Graeber in "bullshit jobs"
It seems to me that past societies would have a very good understanding about the idea that one's time could belong to your employer as many of them were (and some had) full-time live-in servants, or season-long farm labor contracts for landless laborers, or serfdom/rent situations with a duty to work x days/season to cultivate the landlord's land instead of theirs, or indentured servitude or even slavery, or any other such relationships. Before industrial age it might be weird for the time of a free middle-class man to belong to an employer, but there weren't that many such men.
"Historically, human work patterns have taken the form of intense bursts of energy followed by rest. Farming, for instance, is generally an all-hands-on-deck mobilization around planting and harvest, with the off-seasons occupied by minor projects. Large projects such as building a house or preparing for a feast tend to take the same form. This is typical of how human beings have always worked. There is no reason to believe that acting otherwise would result in greater efficiency or productivity. Often it has precisely the opposite effect.
One reason that work was historically irregular is because it was largely unsupervised. This is true of medieval feudalism and of most labor arrangements until relatively recent times, even if the relationship between worker and boss was strikingly unequal. If those at the bottom produced what was required of them, those at the top couldn’t be bothered to know how the time was spent."
I honestly don't think this would be a problem if people spent their time advocating on internet message boards vs internal corporate message boards - even on the clock. This isn't about selling time, it's about what's the appropriate place and audience for certain types of discussion.
In practically every job I've ever had, some of the conversations that folks are advocating to continue would have gotten me first warned and then fired. But I've never worked for a 'tech' company per se, just in technology. I guess it could be different in SV but then that's probably the issue. Most of the country just doesn't operate this way and finds this kinda weird.
Time is easy to measure. It could well be line of code or Completion of work, but that will quickly become highly subjective. If someone finds a better way to measure and pay for the software engineers, it could open plethora of possibilities.
> And yes they are owed your skills because they are paying you for them
I'm unaware of any typical employer ever paying wages/salary in advance, it's always in arrears, so on that basis there's no point at which the employee owes the employer their skills.
People have been brainwashed by this type of attitude for years.
I think people bringing their politics into the workplace are more interested in attracting attention than anything else. But the obsequious worship of the boss is just gross.
> When will we acknowledge that one of the most noble pursuits
Christ, this Superhero CEO bullshit has to stop. It is beyond absurd. Is the multi-hundred X income multiplier really insufficient, they need their egos stroked constantly, too?
I have co-founded a startup, and otherwise have worked at them for almost the entirety of my adult life. I know how much work, risk, and pain is involved.
But this apparent need for Glorification of the Supremely Worthy Job Creator nonsense is just cultish and gross.
Society would be better off glorifying entrepreneurs than instagram celebrities.
Also most founders do not get a multi-hundred X income multiplier. Instead they fail and often go into debt. Yes there are some outsized winners, but the vast majority don’t. That’s why we should be elevating those individuals to promote a culture of risk-taking.
Hey now, those Instagram celebrities are "influencers". They're entrepreneurs too.
I don't think either is particularly worthy of "glorification". I'd reserve glory purely for people who help other people without much monetary reward.
So someone like Henry Ford who helped popularize cars gets no glory, but someone who dedicates their life to running an orphanage for free does?
Sure the latter is important, and we should talk about them too. But civilization progresses due to risk-takers like Ford who spot an opportunity and dogmatically pursue it.
Because we don’t need to glorify pursuits that aren’t advancing society.
I’d rather we had another newly minted billionaire employing 60k people with middle class jobs than one more man who helps old ladies cross the street for free.
It's clear we have very different ideas about what "advancing society" is. I tend to think that people like MLK are the ones that advance society. The man helping old ladies cross the street is advancing society. Successful businesses advance the economy.
A billionaire who employs 60k people hasn't done anything altruistic. It's a business, not a charity. The skills and time of those 60k people made the billionaire a billionaire. Why would I laud either side in a fair exchange?
I might praise the skill and foresight of the billionaire. I might praise the skill and hard work of the workers. But neither is "advancing society". They're pursuing their own interests.
Because just keeping the economy going is advancing society. It’s the base that keeps all of the researchers fed, clothed, warmed, etc. Anyone contributing to keeping that functioning is critical.
The only people who don’t care about the economy are ones who haven’t lived through a truly bad one.
It’s not some thing that just happens in a vacuum to make people rich. It’s what drives 99% of the production of all goods and services in the US. The endowments for all of our top research universities depend on the economy, etc etc.
You call it “just a business transaction”, but employing 60k people with good paying jobs in a financially sustainable way is incredible because it means they are producing more than the value of all of those salaries to the wider society. Producing a surplus is how we advance.
You can argue that some businesses are leeches because externalities or whatever, but that can be fixed with taxation. When it comes down to it we need to operate at break even or a surplus as a society or we are fucked.
Henry Ford was literally an inspiration for Hitler and other high level Nazis for his stance on 'the Jewish question'. To the point that Hitler kept a large portrait of Ford in his office, and specifically called him out as an influence on his thoughts on Jews in Mein Kampf.
So yeah, he shouldn't get glory, but instead only be looked at as an example of 'how to make a bunch of money'.
The accumulation of wealth only serves as an example of the accumulation of wealth; the opinions of those accumulating are quite often orthogonal to any other consideration.
Sure and I’d rather society glorify those who decide to start things - mom & pop shops, new products, services, etc. than someone who takes photos of themselves to create an online persona that they go on to monetize.
There's often a thin line. A lot of these influencers end up peddling products or services of their own- after achieving fame, it's best to diversify one's business. And the online persona do at the very least provide a service to the public: entertainment.
> Society would be better off glorifying entrepreneurs than instagram celebrities.
How about that happens after they retire at 80? That would be a good balance. You glorify an entrepreneur and soon enough he'd be pushing BS vaporware products or using his cult of personality to raise endless equity at absurd valuation or outright scamming the government (Musk cough cough...conman cough cough)
I wouldn't have chosen the term noble either, but remember there are some non-native English speakers here.
Fundamentally, people don't start companies for social status reasons - if anything, social status is the reason not to quit your comfy executive job at a large tech company and instead have to work out of a co-working space.
And since your own description of your professional career implies that your startup didn't make you a billionaire, I really don't understand why it was necessary to bring up the "multi-hundred X income multiplier" fallacy.
When will we stop fetishizing and lionizing "job creation"? The ideal business would employ zero people, have zero expenses, and make a 100% profit margin.
From a purely business perspective, every job created is an inefficiency. No one sets out to create jobs when they start a business. They set out to make money and create products or services of value - in that order. Employing people is an unfortunate side-effect of that.
I agree 100% and I wasn't trying to contrast free markets and collective markets. I just dislike the virtue signaling around "job creation". It's not virtuous at all.
We fail to acknowledge that "job creation" benefits the business, because it helps them earn revenue or reduce costs. Ain't nothing noble about hiring someone to do a job. It's a business, not a charity.
> The beauty of the free market is that by pursuing selfish interests, people wind up benefiting others as well
The free market does not encourage pursuing action where the benefits accrue to people outside of the transaction, but it does encourage actions where the harms are so externalized.
A hypothetical optimally regulated market systems with Pigovian taxes and subsidies to internalize externalities would in theory have the effect that pursuit of private gain would at least not be adverse to the common interest, but that’s very far from a “free market”.
Externalities are costs dumped on others who didn't agree. Hence taxing externalities and using the revenue for the common good corrects for that. Hence it is free market.
> Externalities are costs dumped on others who didn't agree
Yes.
> Hence taxing externalities and using the revenue for the common good corrects for that
That's the argument for Pigovian taxes and subsidies. The typical “free market” counterargument is that the government taxing and spending for the common good to correct that:
(1) violates consent and does not take into account whether and how much the individual “beneficiaries” would be willing to pay when taxing the public and spending for Pigovian subsidies,
(2) does not compensate for lack of consent or compensate the individuals harmed what they would be willing to accept to consent to the inflicted harms when collecting and spending pigovian taxes.
And, therefore, that the correct policy is for individuals who would benefit to subsidize third party action in place of Pigovian subsidies, and seek individual remedy, e.g. via the courts, for unconsented negative externalities.
> Hence it is free market.
That it compensates for what sone people see as a problem in unregulated markets doesn’t make it “free market”.
Not true at all. Some employees can create profit if you could hire more of these employees you jump. Sales people are easy to measure, if you could hire 100 or 1000 people who make double what they cost you do.
If you want some other area of your company strong you invest in that area. An lawyer during a period where the public is sueing you pays for itself.
Hiring a developer to fix a login issue saves refunds.
A lot of jobs seems less important but they provide support and are net positives. Having a server guy means you have a working server. Having a marketing guy means new leads are coming in. Having more sales people means converting more of those leads.
The ineffiency comes when you have too many people in one department waiting on an understaffed area in some other part of the business.
> Some employees can create profit if you could hire more of these employees you jump
And that's my point. Every hire a business makes is to increase revenue or reduce costs. Employment benefits the worker, but it also benefits the business. If a business could get the work of that employee done without hiring that employee, it would happily do so.
If two parties partake in a trade that has mutual benefit, why is either of them "noble"? Why aren't we calling the worker "noble" for providing the business with their skills and time?
Your idea of business and what entrepreneurs want is simplistic. You must know it will be easy to find people who don't fit blanket statements like this.
Even if you think this is the natural inclination of the public corporation, not all companies have to go public and not all investors in public companies care about nothing the company does besides make profit. It's a world of humans we operate in, not some kind of logical optimal point.
Do you disagree with my central thesis that businesses employ people almost entirely to increase revenue or cut costs? The presence of a few sinecures in some companies doesn't change this basic fact.
Yes I disagree and not because of people slipping through the cracks or something. I was referring to people and companies who have a mission. For example to help the blind to see or connect the world. Or the many many small businesses who seek to improve their local region and employ people.
Perhaps you're thinking of the pressures on management of the fortune 500 or something, but that's a far cry from sweeping claims like "almost entirely" or "every job". If you want a job at a place with more of a conscience or whatever, they are all over the place. Especially among startups.
> For example to help the blind to see or connect the world.
And if they could lower costs by employing fewer people, they'd have more money to spend on helping the blind see or connect the world. Alternatively, they employ more people because they believe it will allow them to help more blind people or connect the world better. The point is, they don't hire people for the sake of giving them a paycheck. There's something of equal value expected of those people in return.
> Or the many many small businesses who seek to...employ people
Which ones? Which business has "employ people" as an objective to be maximized? How does it even manage to stay in business working like that? (Note: I'm not talking about businesses that make serious sacrifices to minimize job losses in a downturn; that's praiseworthy. I'm talking about businesses that have headcount as a primary metric of success.)
And if pure job creation is soooo morally good, how do you feel about a government job guarantee? They have that under a number of communist or socialist systems. So is communism or socialism morally superior to capitalism?
Serious question: if you hire a babysitter for date night with your partner, do you feel virtuous about creating employment? Or do you see it as an exchange of some money for a service? If you do feel virtuous, you should re-think that.
Another serious question: is automation immoral? It puts people out of work, after all.
Try using google. Search for companies with a conscience, or companies that give back, or entrepreneurs who's goal is to create jobs in a poor area. I personally know a few.
And my point is not to get drawn into an argument about economic systems or morality, but simply point out your lack of accuracy in describing reality.
>When will we stop fetishizing and lionizing "job creation"?
When it stops getting politicians elected. No one wants to vote for the person who assures them they will do everything in their power to put them out of work and transfer their value directly to shareholders.
Not all founders work hard. Not all founders are revolutionary. They are not lords and do not deserve worship. Altruism deserves praise. Employment deserves payment.
There are multiple meanings to the word noble, and you have chosen one that makes little sense in the context of the rest of the comment. It is hard to read this as anything other than a bad faith argument.
no you get this magical thing called a salary for your work. your compensation isnt woke virtue signaling. they arent "profiting off your labor because they got lucky on some seed money".
youre profiting off their ingenuity and idea. If many other entrepreneurs didnt do this, you wouldnt have a job because they wouldnt be available. and most people dont have the risk appetite to do something like that.
so no youre not being exploited by them. youre leeching off their idea and should realize who depends on whom.
I love how you don't think that many of us have worked both freelance and "employed" jobs.
I have value and most people here probably do as well. How do I know that? Because I can make others earn money by solving their problems through different means (usually technological in nature).
That seems like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of the comment.
I think what they're saying is that you should view an employment relationship as an exchange, where you get money (which can be used to fulfill your basic needs), and your employer gets your labor for a certain number of hours per week.
As you are voluntarily exchanging your labor for money, it's reasonable that the focus of the workplace should be to advance the goals of your employer and not your personal goals. Of course it's best if these goals align and everyone can achieve their goals simultaneously. But when there's a conflict, the employer's goals should take priority. That's why they're paying you.
> But when there's a conflict, the employer's goals should take priority.
Employees don't need to blindly follow the pre-existing structures, rules, dynamics, and culture of their workplace 100% of the time, never attempting to modify them. It is possible to change these things, both in small and in large ways.
Sure, efforts to make large changes are probably not successful the majority of the time. But change does occur. An employer is an abstract entity composed of humans. Who else can change the nature of this entity but the humans who make it up? And small changes, while seemingly insignificant, can add up over time in a very meaningful way.
One can also vote with their feet and leave if the clash of values is large enough. This requires having other options or resources, but for those with the option, it is a powerful way of making a statement.
I disagree. They are paying you because of your judgment and character to do what they want in the best possible way. When employees just go along to get along, that is when company sized disasters happen. You have an obligation to speak up for what you perceive as good and oppose what you see is evil. That is a part of being a professional, it is taking responsibility for the big picture. Why do customers want this, how can we build a sustainable business delighting them and avoid the temptations to take shortcuts that are seductive but short sighted.
But how does this include political campaigns about Israel? What you describe sounds more like keeping the workplace ethical, not changing the mission of the business to be a political NGO.
I think it's fair to say the reason the business employed you is to fulfill the aims of the owners of the business. This does not negate you have your own aims and needs, but for the employment relationship to continue those aims need to be in alignment.
Seems like you're agreeing with them. You do what you need to do at work so that you can afford to buy food and shelter outside of work.
But even if not, they seem to mean personal aims to be philosophical in nature, such as political ideological furthering, not concrete like food and shelter.
>What? I can’t be the only one who works directly in order to fulfill my needs
well I do, but I've noticed that employers in interviews always want to know about how interested I will be in their problems and what I find attractive about their problem space and I get the distinct feeling they don't want to hear "if you pay my target wage I will be interested in what you want for 8 hours a day"
Are these not just two different perspectives on the same thing? The "aims of the entrepreneur" is overly specific to certain work arrangements, but overall the point stands. You have motivations to work which align with fulfilling your needs, and the organization you work for has motivations which align with what the owners/leaders want. The latter is served in part by your labor.
You’re both right. As a member of a company one is to further the mission of the company but it’s based on an agreement that in exchange for that, you and the company come to an agreement on compensation.
The office exists within society. Some things exist everywhere you go in society. You don't give up ethics and morals because you cross the threshold of your place of business.
Ignoring social problems in the workplace because it is a workplace is how we avoid solving those problems as a society.
The office is exactly where we should be advocating for things, because it is where we spend the most time and can affect the most change.
Just in recent history, the Civil Rights movement was built by people disrupting workplaces through boycotts and sit-ins. As we move forward in society it goes to reason that future movements should follow that example.
I worked at place like this at Lyft and to be honest it made me pretty uncomfortable. I was aligned with most people about most of the causes circulated freely, but not all. And on the items I wasn't fully onboard with the party line, I felt there was a huge risk to my job if I ever were to voice that.
I won't ever work in an environment like that again. Once I cross the threshold with my coworkers to be friends I feel like there's a significant difference in what we are comfortable talking about with each other and certainly I expect to debate social causes with them at that point. Otherwise, I find it incredibly naive to expect consensus on any ideas, regardless of how fundamental they seem.
This sounds like a problem found in fancy valley tier-1 unicorns then. I keep hearing stories of people bombarded with political discussions on a daily basis and can hardly believe them. I'm not doubting anyone's sincerity but jeez... I feel like this perhaps localized to certain segments of the industry.
I've worked in this industry for over a decade and really haven't had any major political discussions with coworkers outside of a few pertaining to extremely boring local politics. and I only engaged in them because I knew my colleague wasn't sensitive to the matter and it was out of earshot of any other coworkers (it was about zoning).
(Also, as an aside, I find it painfully hypocritical anyone at a gig company like Lyft struts around the office being "woke" after what the company did with Prop 22)
This is happening because these large tech companies- not just tier-1 unicorns but FAANGs themselves, have been presenting themselves as paternalistic employers for the past decade. You provide employees with all the free food, on-campus gyms, and massages by appointment as they want, then present them with supposedly open cultures of free inquiry, your employees are going to use it. You satiate someone's lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy, and they're going to want to self-actualize. So the freethinkers and activists motivated to join these companies are going to try to engage in activities beyond, well, work.
So the companies reaped what they sowed. They wanted to have their employees stay at work and did so by making the office a desirable place to not only work but live at, and their employees start wanting to bring their lives into work.
This totalistic capture of big tech over employee lifestyles mirrors what these companies are also seeking to do at the marketplace. When a company manages not only the technological needs of their customers, but everything from entertainment, to healthcare, to home security, to shopping, logistics, and everything else, then they set themselves up to be veritable empires. That's why big tech companies are now dealing with every issue including free speech, environmentalism, worker's rights, what activities should be eligible for payment services. That's just the price of being a business that wants to be involved in all facets of human society. It includes politics. You can't be an empire and still pretend to be above it all. Both your customers and your employees are going to treat you as one.
The free food, gyms, massages and other things are companies trying to encroach on the area of the Third Place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place ) in order to keep people in the office longer.
In trying to take on the activities of the third place, they've also inadvertently taken on the rules of the third place - but those things that need to be part of the third place are counter to being at work (the second place... the first place is home).
If you're talking about politics and have a person who you report to (or reports to you) as part of that conversation, the discussion gets to one where you're walking on eggshells.
I believe that the third place and the workplace are inherently different environments and the more the workplace tries to be that third place, the more these sorts of conflicts of what the different places mean and how they operate will come to light.
1) The avg. American is much less arrogant and confident in their capabilities compared to 20 or even 10 years ago . So it's natural that they are coming to terms with the fact that they might have to explore any avenue of possible social ladder climbing.
Climbing the social ladder via group association was much more frowned upon 20 or even just 10 years ago. Now people happily strap and go for the ride
2) None of this BS would be happening if the economy was growing at 7% Real GDP on a constant basis. You mentioned Maslow, well America is pretty high on the Maslow pyramid, considering the hedonistic treadmill and the law of diminishing returns you need a 7% YoY just to mantain the level of happiness and satisfaction
There is a lot of money in being hired and promoted in the top unicorns, so its not surprising that when such a company allow a parallel lower-effort identity-based system of hiring and promotion some choose this path instead of more high-effort merit-based career development.
However, having parallel systems of promotion and hiring is causing resentment as well as mistrust that deteriorate organizations. What some workplaces are saying is that woke activism are negatively affecting the core mission, which is not surprising because to serve customers well a company need to build upon individual merit (not identity).
Seeing this comment triggered several memories about how out of touch I felt the lyft office folks were - both as a rider and as a driver.
I was quite shocked on several occasions actually - some things were at times 'tone deaf' other times I wondered how they could do things that most would certainly know are going to disgust some 40% of the population and yet push it out there to everyone anyway.
And to see what they think of the drivers, while you are driving some of them - just wow. I hope they never get knocked off that high horse fantasy land they are living in.
Of course my experience is a small data point comparatively and not necessarily indicative of the corporate culture as a whole 100 - and all that.. I can imagine working with the folks I encountered on a few rides - working in close proximity with them every day would be mentally exhausting.
It might be a strawman, but I’m going to guess and it would be something like an end to perceived workplace raceism/sexism/*isms.
If you let in political advocacy movements from the left do you really want political movements from the right? Or is it just ok if the left is advocating for it? I kinda think the left is trying to have their equity cake and eat it too…
To some people (I am not one of them at all, but I understand the argument) any abortion is literally murder, and it as a sincerely held belief as the recent movements like BLM and #metoo were.
So do you really want to hear about abortion/guns/illegals/debt/satanism/furries in the workplace? This is just setting up workplaces for problems or maybe we can just realize work is for work?
I've had a coworker complain about my casual use of blasphemy and management agreed that I should tone it down. It's not necessarily left vs right; it's aiming to reduce toxic behaviors that make a workplace unsafe for others.
Not every "political opinion" belongs in the workplace, but I've heard about everything on your list but furries in the workplace and gone on to have productive working relationships with those coworkers, occasionally with a brief "agree to disagree" demarking a topic as unwelcome over lunch.
I've had coworkers with whom I have had cordial disagreements regarding politics and this isnt the issue.
When the head of your division uses the time before meetings to talk politics, it is toxic- the power dynamic isn't even. Coworkers can do the same when they publicly hold discussions and expect everyone to agree- the dynamic is off, and toxic. You simply can't have a civil, earnest conversation in a group chat or email setting, because it is too easy for the group to run away with a misunderstanding.
First, you're implying that all opinions are equally valid. That is... I'll be polite and simply call it nonsense. "Gay people should have rights" and "gay people shouldn't have rights" are not opinions of equal value, and it's not "eating your cake and having it too" to say that the latter opinion is unwelcome.
Second, there's a very clear relationship between the "left" topics you mentioned and the workplace; not so for the "right" topics. You can make an argument that abortion/contraceptives are work-related because of employer-sponsored healthcare (I think it's clear that employees should keep their noses out of each other's private medical matters, but... okay), but the rest are totally ancillary. If you want a "no politics at work" rule, then you wouldn't have conversations about guns (unless it's to advocate that your employer allow guns at work), you wouldn't have conversations about immigration policy (unless it's to advocate that your employer stop sponsoring visas), and you wouldn't have conversations about furries (unless it's to advocate that your employer ban furry sex in the workplace... which I don't think is a problem that anyone has). You know what you would still have? Conversations about discrimination in the workplace. Conversations about whether your employer's political dollars are funding violence. Conversations about whether your recruitment policies are unconsciously biased.
While there are all kinds of radical opinions, in USA there are two quite clearly established camps of mainstream opinion, and it does seem reasonable that if roughly half of the country (or your state) vote for one candidate and roughly half for the other, then it should imply that the opinions of both of these camps are roughly equally valid from the perspective of the society.
One gets a bit more votes and gets to decide policy, then another gets a bit more votes and gets to decide different policy, but ultimately both groups are part of the society and the workforce, and they should be able to coexist and cooperate while working in a single company. Whatever your stance is on the "left" and "right" topics, people who hold and express the exactly opposite stance, an opinion that you consider invalid and who likely consider your opinion on that political topic invalid in return, those people may be your neighbours and your colleagues and they have the same right to be there as you do, what's sauce for goose is sauce for gander.
And the main criterion for the eligibility of a discussion IMHO is not the relevance of the political topic to workplace (IMHO the target of employer's political dollars are just as valid topic as employer's religious mission, i.e. not at all, and specific discrimination of specific employees in this company would be on-topic but general discrimination issues in the country are exactly just as valid as general immigration policy or general tax policy) but the impact the discussion has on inter-employee relations and conflict. A political topic where strongly opposing co-workers can express their opinions, disagree, shrug, and go on working without the disagreement affecting their cooperation is obviously okay to discuss, but if the discussion of some topic results in employees conflicting for those non-directly-work-related political reasons, or in some employees not expressing their opinion because conflict would be imminent, then that topic is harming work and it would be reasonable to require to put it aside. Because letting it be (or, worse, the employer taking on one of the sides) would be de facto creating a hostile work environment for one or the other groups (whichever happens to be the less dominant at that particular workplace, it definitely cuts both ways), and that's simply not acceptable.
>if roughly half of the country (or your state) vote for one candidate and roughly half for the other, then it should imply that the opinions of both of these camps are roughly equally valid from the perspective of the society.
Or, it implies that roughly half of society is wrong. More than one genocidal dictator was originally elected by popular vote. We do not need to take as a premise that equal support implies equal value.
>those people may be your neighbours and your colleagues and they have the same right to be there as you do
See, this is exactly the problem. Right-wing cultural opinions tend to define certain groups of people as not having the same right to be there. You cannot simultaneously advocate for tolerance and be totally okay as just a minor difference of opinion with the other side saying that some people should be thrown out.
Sure, mainstream opinions may be wrong, that often happens. However, they're still mainstream opinions, not a few rare extremists that can be just pushed out to edges and excluded. So you can disagree with their wrong opinions, and work to change their mind, but until they do - and even if they don't - in the workplace, you have to be able to work together with people strongly holding those wrong opinions; however wrong these peoople are, they should have equal rights to you. (I mean, weren't you also suggesting throwing out some people off workplaces because of their views?)
And one definitely can advocate for tolerance for the intolerant as well - IIRC Jefferson explitly argued that we should, Popper argues that it won't turn out well and we shouldn't, I'd probably argue for something like John Rawl's position which is essentially tolerance up until actual imminent threat to physical security or perserveration of key institutions, i.e. intolerance of intolerant only as an extraordinary measure, but there are many reasonable arguments about this, there's no consensus agreement on any solution to the paradox of tolerance.
You're conflating the practical and the moral. In practice, yes, you often have to hold your nose and work with all manner of odious people. That doesn't mean that that's the way it should be, or that those people are just as right. The ideal would be for such people not to exist, and we have to figure out how to get along in a world where they do; I think that's qualitatively different, even if we end up with roughly the same practical day-to-day experience either way. Tolerance doesn't mean acceptance or celebration.
> First, you're implying that all opinions are equally valid. That is... I'll be polite and simply call it nonsense.
I agree the idea opinions are all equally valid is nonsense. It's also very likely we disagree in many of our political opinions.
At the end of the day we still share this society. Unless your plan of saying my opinions are "unwelcome" includes forcing me out of this society, how do you expect that to play out?
Politics at work is still politics at work. I'm generalizing a bit here for sake of the point. There is a large amount of people advocating that other people with leanings and opinions should have their services, contracts, and professional relationships cancelled. Based on their personal politics. This cuts both ways. If companies can rightfully do that to customers, then it is also legit for them to do it to employees.
The relationship is the same by type, the content of the topics is of the same type.
Where do you draw the line between "personal politics" and "fundamentally wrong?" In the 1950s and 1960s some people felt the line was segregation.
The problem is when human decency is equated to "personal politics" (or vice versa). Some of the lines are obvious to me, but others are more blurred. At the end of the day, reasonable people can work around those fuzzy boundaries without issue.
For starters, if you can define a specific known crime being committed by a specific person. It is fundamentally wrong and you absolutely should bring it up at the right time and place.
If your accusations are about groups and the actions committed aren't specific actionable crimes that you are aware of, you're very likely in politics and/or advocacy.
Human decency is a very nebulous term when it comes right down to it. What I find right or wrong may not match what you find right or wrong. Without an agreed upon objective measure you can't define who is actually right - regardless of how clear or blurred the lines appear to you.
Without that objective measure, especially if debate skills are bad and participants are low on listening and high on fallacies, then it's really just an unproductive shouting match.
Many of the people on both extremes of “I want only work, never politics, at work; the world was perfect in 1948” and “work is an ideal place to bring my politics into, because others cannot escape hearing me and my crusades” are quite incapable of working around those fuzzy boundaries without issue.
Why nitpick over what is clearly an example? But to indulge, prior to the Obergefell ruling, 31 U.S. states held statues banning same-sex unions. That was just 5 years ago.
--Protected-- These groups in USA have some subtle, hard to prove discrimination. If you're not in the group it's hard to even perceive and/or understand (it's why the issue is so hot-button).
Like all those prospect-hires who never got a call back - as they weren't "a cultural fit for our company" on record. But maybe (and heres the nearly impossible part to prove) the hiring manager didn't like them cause they /sounded gay/ or /was a bitch/.
Edit: you downvote cause you don't think it happens or because you don't like reading about how it happens?
It would be possible to say that one was not hired about all groups, including White Christian men. This happens a lot but no one talks about it for some reason.
E.g. we didn’t really feel that Mr. Ciswhitechristan was a great cultural fit because we are trying to foster a diverse and equitable workplace and we need more protected groups. /s
It's worth noting that all people are "protected". One should be careful there, because "protected characteristics" include race, color, gender, pregnancy, disability, and age if over 40. All people have race, color, and gender category; any person can experience disability; and if we live long enough we'll all be over 40. Not particularly disagreeing with your comment, just pointing out for those reading that you -- you -- have protected characteristics, legally, no matter who you are.
When you say, "all opinions are equally valid", what does the word "valid" mean?
It seems to be this word is doing a lot of work and if you explore this your position will quickly collapse.
Opinions are generally about moral issues - what we should do, what goals we should pursue. They are not about positive facts like "how many people live in America".
In the arena of goal-setting there are indeed no objective facts. It is equally valid to want to pursue a global caliphate where all women are slaves to the men who own them and all gay people and apostates are executed, as it is to want to pursue a global social justice utopia (however you could even describe such a thing). There is no objective standard to reject either goal. There are simply preferences.
What's more prefereable? Killing an unborn fetus at 3 months development, or obligating a mother to carry it to term? Why? How can you possibly say that your preference is objectively true? It obviously isn't.
If you think your preferences are objectively more right than others, you need to explain what part of the nature of the universe makes it so. (Incidentally religious people have this explanation - it's because the creator of the universe declared that these are the best preferences.)
If you want more reading, you can look up the difference between positive and normative beliefs.
Your goal here is just to set up a system where the people with power, who happen to agree with your preferences, get permission to punish people who disagree with their preferences. This is 100% a belief conditioned on the fact that you know that people like you have the power. If the people with power disagreed with you you'd be a free speech advocate (as people of your opinion were a few decades ago).
There is in fact no way to objectively set up a policy of "Allow the right opinions, and punish the wrong ones" and it's childish to say you can.
Oh, yes, those poor persecuted right-wingers. They only have checks notes the Senate, the Supreme Court, and most of the state legislatures to defend them. Whatever will they do?
>It is equally valid to want to pursue a global caliphate where all women are slaves to the men who own them and all gay people and apostates are executed, as it is to want to pursue a global social justice utopia.
Imagine being this enlightened.
I wasn't making a legal argument, I was unabashedly making a moral one. You're free to start your own tech company where only right-wing speech is allowed. That doesn't change my opinion that the right wing, especially the sort of right-wing culture warrior who doesn't want "politics" at work, is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Your best argument for your beliefs is that it is not literally illegal to hold them. I don't disagree, but I also don't think that's exactly a winning argument.
Your opinion is not valid. Guns aren't necessarily political. Should I refrain from asking work colleagues who they think is likely to medal in the 2021 Olympics women's skeet shooting event?
Imagine your coworker talks all the time about how they love guns, how many guns they have, and how good they are at shooting. Then they talk about how they have a concealed carry permit and how it's even legal in your area for them to carry guns at work. And one time after a few happy hour beers they said that their ancestors used to shoot people like you. But not you obviously, you're a great coworker, they like you.
No direct threat. Not political. Still creepy as hell.
It depends on the tone. If their point is why the right to be armed is important for minorities and that unequal rights in this regard helped allow historic injustice, I don't think it would be creepy. It would be somewhat political though.
> To some people (I am not one of them at all, but I understand the argument) any abortion is literally murder, and it as a sincerely held belief as the recent movements like BLM and #metoo were.
This as well as other parts of your comment seem to imply that you believe the sincerity or intensity with which one holds a particular belief is one of the most important factors in the merits of that belief. I personally do not think this is the case.
I think sincerity is a short hand to cut through partisanship. You believe what you believe sincerely, likely because you find it backed in truth / agreeing with your morals and best intentions. If we assume all humans generally back their sincere beliefs because they find them truthful / backed by their values, the conclusion is that you either have different information or different morals.
You can either assume everyone who disagrees with you is evil or stupid, or you can probably more accurately recognize that someone who disagrees with you, especially if they also live in America, has access to just as much info as you, has access to similar resources, probably isn’t evil: so the conclusion is that they are acting in good faith but with different morals.
Sincerity is a short hand for the fact that most humans are intelligent like you, and most humans in your proximity have access like you, and arent evil, so the result is that they are much more similar than you than you think but with different experiences.
It means you can cut through to the root questions instead of using far worse shorthand’s than sincerity - like “they voted the other way so they much be evil and hellbent on destroying my way of life”.
I tend to believe that about some portion, say 20% to 50% of what I believe is not accurate. I can’t be sure which portions are wrong, so I try to stay close to the evidence and open to correction when communicating. Sincerity is fine but it isn’t a replacement for being open and humble and kind.
This comment seems to imply that certain beliefs (ostensibly your own) are objective truths/facts that hold special merit. This is simply not the case.
Yes, because I spent the first two decades of my life trapped with a very wide variety of these people. To be clear, I'm specifically talking about the overt activist community.
You have no idea how many hours I was forced to watch cravenly dishonest videos about reproductive biology. It may be anecdotal, but I believe the characterization I'm offering of these people is universal to that activist community and entirely accurate. I would gently suggest you not be so dismissive with a cliched reply like "anecdotes aren't data" which isn't particularly relevant here.
The anti-abortion groups vary from radical folks who want to bomb clinics all the way to charity organizations that help counsel mothers about options and arrange for adoption or single parenthood.
To work with one group and say you know how the entire anti-abortion spectrum thinks is like working with antifa and saying you know how left of center thinks.
Many of the educational centers you mention are similarly dishonest about medical facts, which is doubly revolting as they're preying on people in a very vulnerable moment.
GP didn't say "end workplace sexism/racism", they said "end perceived workplace sexism/racism". The former could (arguably) have a definition of when we have arrived at this condition. The latter can never end, because someone can always perceive that it still exists (even if, objectively and hypothetically, it does not exist).
Also, labeling the other side "divisive, hate driven" is not helpful. It's at least divisive itself, and it definitely does not invite understanding of the other side.
But ultimately GP's point was that if you argue your side should be represented, you should consider whether you are okay with the other side also being represented. If not, maybe politics ought to stay out. (Or maybe the views should be moderated or rules of engagement enforced)
> Somehow implying that forced Critical Race Theory trainings are ending workplace sexism and racism instead of making it worse
Yeah buddy, I agree, hate-driven divisive ideology has no business being forced on workers in the workplace, that's why people are pissed off about all this Woke crap
I mean if we're talking personally, the end of my rope is insurrection. I would not tolerate sympathies towards the events of January 6th. If my manager or other senior staff began expressing them I would have to voice my thoughts on the subject and begin sending resumes.
The idea that both sides are equal is just fallacious. One side is advocating to be more aware of systematic racism and the other tried to incite revolt while rejecting the validity of our last election. One is advocating for a large discussion and the other is working against democracy.
> One side is advocating to be more aware of systematic racism and the other tried to incite revolt while rejecting the validity of our last election. One is advocating for a large discussion and the other is working against democracy.
On some level, you must be aware that the other side frames these issues differently than you do, but with the same ferver and honesty as you.
I happen to believe you're both spouting a load of ill-founded, partisan-driven, ad hoc beliefs, so I'm yet another point of view.
Oh, and "large discussion"? Most people who share your ideology at Google, Facebook, and the like seem much more interested in imposing their point of view on others than in any "large discussion". To they contrary, if we express disagreement in discussion regarding certain issues, they try (and often succeed) in having people like us fired.
Nytimes did an infograph on political bubbles, ie are your neighbors all Democrats or Republicans? Turns out Republicans are the ones who are less likely to live in a bubble of conservative beliefs.
> Turns out Republicans are the ones who are less likely to live in a bubble of conservative beliefs
That's not surprising, given that liberal beliefs dominant our cultural landscape (eg: mainsteam media, Hollywood, social media, tech companies, colleges+universities, primary+seconday education, most corporations, etc, etc).
It's pretty much impossible to live in a total bubble of conservative beliefs unless you live in a compound in a rural area. On the other hand, it's quite easy to live in a bubble of liberal beliefs in a typical large American city.
I feel there is room in the middle. While we should not leave ethics at the door, not every ethical issue is applicable to work (as I’m sure you would agree.)
So while it might be relevant to discuss “woke” issues like discrimination on group characteristics at work because that’s an issue that could manifest itself at work, I don’t think it’s relevant to call for a statement about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by Google, as is suggested in the article.
Oof. There isn't room to just go to work... to work?
I want to go to the office and interact with people who are the best at what they do, I want my company to hire those people, and I expect them to hold me to equal standards. When the office was explicitly segregated, men vs women, black vs white, whatever,sure,they're could have been room for politics to change that in the workplace. It doesn't seem the same now. We hire the best people we can get,and we go to work to achieve a common aligned with whatever our work is.
I'll deal with, or avoid, politics outside the workplace. I can't imagine trying to work through all the nuance of my personal political views with a coworker or, God forbid, an employee.
How much would you enjoy discussing your potentially opposing political views with your boss? I trust him to be a good person, but once you pay that seed of doubt in someone's mind, things are never the same.
That would be nice for sure. I think that some people don’t get that privilege still by virtue of who they are. As a recent example that came up in my social circle, say you’re a woman in tech. It turns out that literally every single woman I know in tech has had to deal with at best unwanted propositions but more frequently outright harassment by their male coworkers. In situations like that, you can’t get away from “politics,” because the politically charged situations come to you.
And I’d much rather work in a workplace where we make it clear, publicly, that that kind of behavior is unacceptable than one where we ignore it because we don’t want to talk politics at work.
The connection to politics in your scenario isn’t clear to me. Are people having charged discussions on Slack about whether men should be allowed to harass women?
I would think the scenario would be an open and shut case of going to associate relations to complain about the harassment. No real political discussion to be had.
That's really optimistic. Turns out it doesn't work and usually ends the woman's career at that company -- or maybe she gets some justice and then is destroyed by the folks on the internet who thinks she's just a feminazi b*(&. (I'm showing my age here I guess; I don't know the terminology of kids these days.) Look up Jennifer Blakely, or Kara Woo, or see the 2018 report analyzing 46,210 harassment claims filed with the EEOC or Fair Employment Practices Agencies between 2012 and 2016 that found 65% of women who make complaints lose their jobs soon after. I'm sure someone will helpfully tell me that they probably all sucked at their jobs and so they just complained of sexual harassment before being fired because they're vindictive and/or trying to game the system. It does sort of prove my point but most people who tell me that feel they've discovered something original.
Women just want to go to work and not deal with politics also. That means not being cut out of the stock tips discussed after lunch, not having to deal with egregiously gendered jokes in discussions with the other (all male) managers, not having to do extra office social stuff because "you know women they're good at that", not having their technical work denigrated while supposed soft skills are played up. I can't magically not look female to go to work. So I'm stuck.
Either I put up & shut up or say something, which is then automatically political.
Yeah, all of this, and the idea that any of it is going to change without people actively fighting against it is asinine, honestly. Reporting something through the HR chain is almost never effective (if you’re even in a big enough company to have HR, and you’re not being harassed by the very managers to whom you might otherwise report), and it’s often detrimental. Have we all forgotten that HR exists to protect the company, not the employees?
I don’t know what the best way to solve problems like this is, but the solution is probably not “trust the same authority that engendered the culture to fix it.”
Talking about the differential experiences of women vs men in the workplace and pushing for policies or support to improve the situation seem like pretty political activities to me.
Just as an example of how these situations become political also, I was once at a company where an employee raised an issue that was pretty unambiguous and had multiple witnesses. The same employee was then demoted and sidelined until they eventually quit. They were well liked in the company, so a number of people quit along with them in protest. There’s no way for something like that to not be political, in my opinion.
I guess it’s just not always as simple as going to management and hoping for the best.
Edit: also it’s great that we view women’s right to not be harassed in the workplace as a given, but how did it get there? Decades of tireless political activism. Sure, some things people are political about seem less important, and will probably fizzle out, but IMO it’s not worth quashing the potential for real, good change for the sake of not having to deal with the things we think are unimportant.
I guess the question I have is, what about political issues that are inherently part of the work you’re doing?
Is it reasonable to talk about the politics of building a widget that will have an effect on people?
I work in marketing and end up having this type of political discussion fairly frequently with bosses and colleagues. How are we tracking folks? What data are we collecting? What does the law say we can do? What’s our risk tolerance for breaking the law? These are all inherently political things that should be addressed and thought about. Burying our heads in the sand isn’t productive.
I do discuss opposing political views with my boss. It turns out these discussions can be reasonable.
The point you bring up though is a good one, and it's why we need advocacy in the office. Because despite the legal protections against segregation and discrimination, it still exists. And it's next to impossible to do something about it when greater society doesn't believe in it, because no one is racist or sexist to their (usually white male) face.
But that's not political, it's just human decency. Equating it to politics, and even worse letting the mere existence of discussion (which was advocacy ultimately is) become a heated debate is the problem to solve.
> How much would you enjoy discussing your potentially opposing political views with your boss? I trust him to be a good person, but once you pay that seed of doubt in someone's mind, things are never the same.
Why do you assume my boss is a man? That comment planted the seed of doubt in my mind. I'm sure a quick visit to HR can sort this out.
> You don't give up ethics and morals because you cross the threshold of your place of business.
Calling this rabid politics as 'ethics' and 'morals' is a neat trick. It is like calling "freedom to not air one's views', 'freedom to get fired for non PC views', 'freedom to be deplatformed' as actual freedom.
You obviously have the freedom to not air your views.
You have at-will employment in a lot of the US, so employers can fire you for any reason (except for some exceptions), or without a reason . I don't think this is a good thing, but there you are. This is a freedom for the employer.
If you have a right to a platform (i.e to not be deplatformed), that obviously limits the freedom of the ones supplying the platform.
So all of those points are actually freedoms, just not for the one being fired or deplatformed (the first point, freedom to be quiet, is obviously a freedom for the one keeping quiet. Maybe you meant something else?).
I think its less of a "giving up your ethics and morals because you crossed the threshold" thing and more a "leave your coworkers the fuck alone" thing.
Do you think it is a coincidence that this nonpolitical workplace thing is catching on right now, and not, say, 30 years ago? Nobody was calling for a nonpolitical workplace when the issues at hand were sexual harassment and equal pay for equal work. If there were some hiding behind that, they certainly didn't have a critical mass of support behind them.
The problem isn't so much that people bring their ethics to work as it is that busybodies bring their moral crusades to work and demand that everybody join their cause or be labelled a bad, bad person. I, for example, have taken my ethics everywhere I have gone every day of my life. I have a rebellious spirit. I think rules in jobs like banning tattoos are stupid (even though I have none visible). I think dick in a suit dress codes are hazing and counterproductive. What I have not done however is send out an email chain to everyone in my office demanding that my CEO be fired for not doing a press conference on the plight of the furry fluidgender otherkin in Tanzania.
> Nobody was calling for a nonpolitical workplace when the issues at hand were sexual harassment and equal pay for equal work.
People were most certainly calling for nonpolitical workplaces when it was about sexual harassment and gender/race discrimination. Which people are still struggling with, by the way!
That's a really wishful-thinking reading of history. Back when women were coming into the workplace, no, a non-political workplace was not the thing called for -- a male workplace was what was called for. If you need a movie, watch North Country (based on the nonfiction book Class Action).
Then, as now, is that people show up to work in the bodies they have and they get shit for it. People get agitated because there are problems in the world they want to fix. Just 'cause they're not problems for you doesn't mean they're not problems. It's easy to pretend its all about fluidgender otherkin when it's not your problem.
It is my problem. That's arrogant of you to assume that I don't care about people and injustice.
But the fact is, we are talking about absurdity in the workplace right now. We aren't talking about equal pay for black people or women. We aren't talking about equal consideration of homosexual people for jobs. When we talk of it hypothetically that's how it is framed so as to paint everyone tired of it as an evil bigot, but when it occurs in the workplace, it's a CEO getting fired for wearing anime shirts to work, it's a petition to require Google to issue a formal statement on the Israel Palestine conflict. The people that don't want politics in every waking moment of their lives, it's not that they just don't want to see their boss get fired for throwing a black guy's resume in the trash. It's that they're sick of every person's pet crusade being blasted into their lives and having to nod in eager agreement lest they be destroyed for not being one of the Good Guys™.
No the issues are more like if you send a resume in with an African American name or photo it is way less likely to be called for an interview than the same resume with a whiter name. Same for male/female etc. Even house appraisals and “call the cops or offer to help” as subject to the same, present day, biases.
It _really_ depends on your industry. And time period. Studies from 20 years ago (which is when a lot of the studies people commonly cite for this were done) only tell us so much about conditions now.
Alright then how about this: the only politics allowed at work are racial, sex or sexuality discrimination at your workplace. Is that a good compromise? Or are you doing what a lot of people do, using these narrow issues as a wedge to do exactly what I'm talking about and people are tired of?
"The office is exactly where we should be advocating for things"
Not if those things are mostly orthogonal to the mission and capabilities of the company.
We exist in a division of labor economy for a reason. Company A does X and company B does Y because those two companies have skills and missions that are unique to the people and institutional memory inside those companies. A is highly optimized for X, and B for Y.
The people in A might even disdain Y (e.g. a charity volunteer's opinion about hedge funds) and the people in B might disdain X (e.g an oil and gas worker's opinion about environmental activism).
That's all fine because those two companies are narrowly focused on their verticals of interest.
This woke at work stuff demolishes that. People on company A and B didn't sign up for things orthogonal to X and Y, and many of them do not want to be socially pressured to go along with some activist agenda hoisted onto the company by a noisy minority of employees.
> The office is exactly where we should be advocating for things, because it is where we spend the most time and can affect the most change.
Just like we can't say "I should vote on other people's behalf because I know better", we also can't say "I should have more access to societal change because I am employed in an affluent organization". Otherwise it would be elitism 101.
Office as a means of societal change doesn't provide equitable access to everyone in a democratic society. There is no such thing as democratic participation through back-channels.
Playing politics in or around a megacorp is only popular because petite-bourgeois, frustrated with not actually being an elite and having any real control, try to co-opt hot button societal issues in the hopes that their political gesturing will be a status enhancer and grant them access to some power.
That's not what I intended to say, I meant that within your office or team your voice is simply heard. Thats true regardless of how "affluent" an organization may be.
I am not sure I understand why people are downvoting / disagreeing with this. The pevasiveness and permanence of racism- indeed, the use of the term "whiteness" as a proxy for all social ills- is basically the core tenant of CRT.
>Ignoring social problems in the workplace because it is a workplace is how we avoid solving those problems as a society.
Those who create social problems in the workplace by constantly prosecuting their cultural crusade perform an astounding display of entitlement. Nobody is obligated to agree with your social judgements, no matter how fervently you hold your beliefs or how self-righteous you are. This is especially true when a large part of your cultural crusade consists of sifting through utterances from the distance past in an attempt to find anything you and your fellow crusaders consider "problematic", so that you may punish the transgressors.
As an older person, my personal belief is society went off the rails in the late 1980s. Its when we started giving every kid a trophy, no matter how poorly they performed. Its when we started telling every kid they were entitled to respect, no matter how boorishly or stupidly they acted. Its when we started telling every kid that they were entitled to be free of judgement, no matter how awful their behavior or how much they deserved to be judged. Its when we started telling kids that their opinions were valuable, no matter how absurd, idiotic or delusional those opinions were.
Now we have generations of people who think they have the right to force others to (fervently!) adopt their cultural mores. They are blinded by self-righteousness, having been raised on a steady diet of coddling and compliments. They have been conditioned since birth to reflexively appeal to authority whenever they feel wronged or "micro-aggressed".
The poster you’re responding to may know and agree with all this as well, and that could be why they hold the position they do: They may be opposed to society changing.
I agree 100%! Constitutional rights are a great example, those don’t stop when you enter the workplace and need to be protected 24/7.
So no doubt you’ll be happy to sign my petition to further protect our 2nd amendment right to carry a concealed weapon at work! Yeah, right there, just sign. Oh you don’t support the constitution? When you said we should bring these fights to work you meant just the ones you support. Ohh....
I'll be honest, I wouldn't care. The left as it seems you envision is not a monolith.
But this is a good example! Gun policy (and the constitution itself) are legitimate political discussions that people can have without turning into a "fight." You can even educate or advocate either side in a civil way.
You could even engage in advocacy for gun owners that get murdered by police, like Philando Castile.
> Color me naive, but shouldn’t what happens in the office be about the office???
Yes I don't understand any of this either.
Maybe I'm just an old dog who's been in software engineering for 20+ years, but when I get hired by a company they exchange one thing (money) for what I can offer (programming).
If I am uncomfortable with what they are asking me to do regarding my skill of programming, I can quit at any time and go somewhere else.
I can't for the life of me understand how employees are debating things like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict during their time at work, on public channels.
There is plenty of time outside of work to do whatever you want.
Not everyone has the option of going somewhere else. I would like to see that as a viable option for everyone. I have often wondered if we ensured everyone had a viable option how it would allow us to change discrimination laws. An employer of last resort that you can legitimately support yourself with. Not poverty wages.
It’s well worth reading up on the details of the Basecamp disaster. At every point in the process, it was about work. How people behaved at work, how clients were treated, how people reacted to feedback, how information was communicated. It may have been “politics” but it was in no way separable from Basecamp‘s core business.
From having read about the details: someone took a list making fun of mainly European (‘white’ in American) names and posted an image saying mocking people leads to genocide.
Yes this is easily separable from making productivity tools.
Although my immediate reaction to the Pyramid of Hate [1] was a similar jump to, “is this saying jokes will lead to genocide?!”, ultimately I don’t think that was the intent. People seemed to have interpreted it in different ways, specifically “You’re telling me I support genocide if I think someone’s name is funny?”
I think the people who brought the pyramid into the equation were pointing out how individual behaviors, in aggregate, lead to greater possibilities of increased oppression. I think it’s a simplification to say that they lead to genocide, because those sorts of results are dependent on many other factors (ie economic problems, political instability, etc). When combined, these factors result in greater oppression.
More apropos to the conversation regarding workplaces, I would consider them evolving into institutions where certain cultural norms are upheld. The more institutions within which a certain cultural norm is respected by individuals, the more other people/institutions in power have leeway to move in certain directions.
> I think the people who brought the pyramid into the equation were pointing out how individual behaviors, in aggregate, lead to greater possibilities of increased oppression.
I don’t think I accept this theory. But if I did, it’s not relevant because the list wasn’t making fun of “others” and seemed to have no correlation to any particular vulnerable population.
So it’s both an issue of an arguable diagram in the first place (even if the ADL created it) introduced in a place that was not relevant since there were very few Asian names on the list yet the discussion seemed to really get into racial issues that didn’t apply to the situation.
Of course, had employees been mocking or belittling people because of their race or the list was 94% Asian (instead of the 94% euro) then it’s a different story and the discussion would be very different. But that’s not “woke” that’s just enforcing ethical codes in employees to not discriminate based on race.
My perspective on this is you don't lob any sort of infographic about genocide at somebody without meaning to tarnish them. That's escalating the seriousness of a conversation drastically. Making fun of people named Dickinson is not remotely cool, but bringing genocide into the resulting conversation seems way over the line.
Is genocide not the most serious subject that infographic brings up? It's not some minor footnote in the infographic; it's right at the very top in the most prominent position. I'd say that infographic is more about genocide than anything else.
The graphic is about how each level is supported by the level beneath it.
Minor footnote is a straw man and false dichotomy. The graphic is about all the things like I said. It wouldn't be less about genocide if it was an escalating list. It isn't less about biased attitudes because it's a pyramid.
The infographic being substantially about genocide, albeit not exclusively about genocide, does not change how I feel about it's use in that conversation: a blatantly hostile escalation. When you send somebody this infographic to scold them, you are insinuating that their actions might lay a foundation for genocide. That message comes across loud and clear, and in the Basecamp context, was plainly over the line.
How is that pyramid not classic slippery slope fallacy?
You could make a pyramid where you have violent movies and playing violent video games leads to a person becoming a serial killer arguing that violent movies and video games desensitize you to murder.
It's only a slippery slope fallacy if the progression is hypothetical and unjustified - otherwise, it's an actual slippery slope. The progression from normalization of racial animosity to genocide - on a societal level, not the strawman that any individual will make an off-color joke today and build the gas chambers tomorrow - is something that has demonstrably happened multiple times in the past couple of centuries, unlike the link between violent media and actual violence.
Indeed, it’s worth discussing because it was used as a blueprint by some of the despots of the twentieth century; it’s not just something that was figured out after the fact.
These despots were even very open about their plans and methodologies. Hitler specifically cited as inspirations the United States’ systematic oppression and genocide of indigenous peoples, and the Ottomans’ oppression and genocide of Armenians.
This stuff has never happened in a vacuum. Anyone who insists on always arguing from first principles is—most charitably—being a useful idiot for those who know exactly what they’re trying to do.
Yep. The story of Basecamp is a story of how the extreme-right is able to successfully tar any progress - or, frankly, any lack of regress - as "politics", and therefore something that belongs in a box somewhere else, to be addressed at some other time. When what you want is the status quo, you can always look like the great reconciler by saying "this isn't the time for this conversation", because you win by default.
Not everyone, but if you think it's a good idea to get on stage and say that white supremacy doesn't exist as a significant part of American culture, I think I have a pretty solid idea who you voted for in 2020. Especially if you have a reputation for reposting Breitbart articles.
As an outsider, what it looks like happened at Basecamp was:
1. Some people did something insensitive. Not great, but not the end of the world.
2. Some people - possibly overlapping the previous group - call out that said activity is insensitive, and ask for it to stop. Possibly not in the politest way possible, but also not starting fights.
3. A right-wing extremist in a position of power gets bent out of shape and uses his position of power to say that racism doesn't real, and that microaggressions are pretty cool, actually.
4. Chaos ensues. CEO doesn't immediately tell right-wing extremist to fuck off, and instead thanks him for his contributions - which, while understandable in the heat of the moment, isn't a good look for him... especially since he has no deniability about already knowing extremist's true colors.
5. Rather than taking sides between slightly over-enthusiastic concerned employees and right-wing extremism, CEO says that all politics are now off limits, which makes it sound like both sides were equally at fault. Right-wing extremist's position is thus legitimized, which is likely all he wanted in the first place.
> The canonical point of a workplace is to come together to fulfill the aims of the entrepreneurs.
I disagree. The notion that humans turn into employer-owned production machinery for 8 hours a day is one very particular way to conceptualize work. But it ignores both the individual as a whole person and the society that contains and enables the workplace to function.
To me, even as a former and perhaps future entrepreneur, I think it's a giant mistake to see a workplace as a place where the entrepreneur is a tiny god-king. Work is a social and societal activity at least as much as it is an economic one. If people want to play-act as robots, I won't deny them their kink. But that's not what interests me about work, and it's not the kind of person I hire.
I agree with your sentiment that we are more than replacable robots.
But I think for a long time 'a whole person' referred to your character, your hobbies, your family, your quirks. And politics was a small, and usually private part of that.
We are in a time now where politics is tribal and has usurped a huge part of people's identities. To the point they see the other tribe as the devil merely by association.
And I could see how that would cause conflicts in a business that are detrimental to the bottom line
People who huffily decry "politics" also tend to have political beliefs which they feel are apolitical. Examining and unpacking those beliefs is "political," however, so that the net result is "I just don't want my politics questioned or examined, even when it affects other people."
Believe it or not there are plenty of people who live their lifes outside of politics. They don't vote, they don't have any favorites in the political arena
Politics is divisive and agressive. Some people are put off by the easy narratives of good vs bad
Only dictatorships have historically wanted to permeate every aspect of life with politics. The USSR used to say "everything is politics". There are plenty of examples... politics needs moderation. I wish that people could vent their passions with football like in the old days. At least everyone knew no one was "really serious" about why their team deserves world domination
There is a time and place for politics (not at work). God knows how many times I've had to put on my earphones just to disappear from the latest office brawl about politics
Living "outside of politics" means having no self-preservation instinct. Politicians are like gangsters constantly plotting against you, trying to take your money from you, or force you to do things you don't want to do. They can make your life real Hell on Earth. The only chance of stopping them is by protesting loudly and by voting.
> Believe it or not there are plenty of people who live their lifes outside of politics.
Nobody lives their life outside of politics. At best, they ignore partisan politics. But they can only do that because the political status quo is one that favors them and the people they care about.
I agree that an "office brawl about politics" is bad. But that's because brawls are bad, not because you can somehow have an office untouched by politics.
Take the very simplest example: how many hours do you work a week?
That number is determined by a political process. It always has been. When it was set purely by the rich people who owned businesses, 80 to 100 hours work weeks were common. Workers pushed back over decades; eventually we ended up with things like a 40-hour work week and overtime pay. Due to politics, that number has been rising in the US, with legal protections for workers decaying. Meanwhile, some people with more political and economic power have been pushing for shorter weeks. There's a long history to this, and it's all political: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/how-the-8-hour-workday-chang...
You can still do politics before and after work at your workplace entrance. You can even stage a walk-out where you demonstrate outside the office/factory/etc. But loudly spraying your opinion into your workmates ears who have no choice to be there is a form of torture. If there happen to be opposing loud "enlightened" people it will be a brawl. Although sometimes it's so one sided that the office can turn into a sort of one-party state. Politics is best kept out of the actual workplace
If your only understanding of how politics can function in a workplace is "loudly spraying your opinion into your workmates ears who have no choice to be there" then that's your problem right there.
Note also that your insistence that no "politics" happen in the workplace is political. So you can either hold true to your views and stop mentioning it or give it up and instead advocate for some more reasonable change.
I am not asking people to shut up. As it happens, I always am the one that shuts up. Just the other day a guy was loudly explaining why free healthcare is such a bad thing right behind me. What did I do? Shut up. I had work to do. Perhaps in a different setting I would have discussed politics and offered an alternative view. But I had no choice but to shut up, because I was working, which is what I have to do to provide for my family. Needless to say, I felt aggravated by not only his politics which argues that I shouldn't have healthcare, but the fact that he cared to violate my right to be undisturbed while working. Just look at it this way: would you find it OK if people started talking religion at work? Like "my religion is right and yours isn't". Or would you find it OK if people started advertising brands? Like "Good morning. I don't care you guys are working. I'm going to stand here and talk for 15 minutes to tell you how product XYZ is exactly what you need".
Politics is today's religion, and in religion there will always be zealots who put their idol above everything (and everyone) else. All I ask for is respect. Today's open offices will turn into torture chambers if we bring politics there. Please use restraint, be kind to others
I agree that off-topic conversations at work can be a problem. I think your coworker shouldn't have done that. But your coworker could have been just as much of a pain talking about his car or his wife or his opinions on sports teams. The problem is not "politics".
There are also plenty of on-topic conversations that will get ruled out under a "no politics" rule. For example, the question "Why is everybody here white?" is an important workplace conversation, as is "Why do we pay women with similar experience less money?" and "Why are we letting the VP of Sales bang the interns?" But these are seen as highly political. And I think those are the real target of "no politics" bans.
Just look at Basecamp as an example. Turns out they had for years been making fun of customer names. When that was brought up, one of the complaints was that making fun of ethnic names can be racist, and that low-grade racism lays societal support for the more obviously dangerous kinds. That so enraged one of the powerful white dudes in the company "politics" was banned and the DEI committee was scrapped. Which in turn led to more than a third of the company quitting. They're bidding those staff goodbye and sticking with the ban on "politics".
Refusal to discuss racism is an obviously political move, so if anything the quantity of "politics" at Basecamp has increased. I think the real meaning of the bans is "the comfort of people doing well under the status quo should be preserved", which is deeply political.
You're talking about partisan politics; most here are talking about the more general meaning of "the actions or activities concerned with achieving and using power in a country or society". So talking about workplace racism is political, but it's not about political parties.
Interesting example of identity politics here. "Don't talk about things I don't like or else you're a communist. You don't want to be a communist do you?"
I responded to a comment that was essentially saying “all viewpoints are political” in response to a comment that literally said
> Only dictatorships have historically wanted to permeate every aspect of life with politics. The USSR used to say "everything is politics".
The communist jab was due to them using the same strategy that the USSR used. I’m not sure if they were doing that intentionally or unknowingly out of habit or ideology, in either case they were being obtuse.
I think you grossly mischaracterize the comment you were responding to.
And yes, invoking communism is very much an identity politics signifier in this discussion. One side of this debate is endlessly calling everything they don't like "communism" and "(cultural) Marxism". Which is pretty bonkers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
Yes, I indeed just don't want my politics questioned or examined, even when my critic has a questionable narrative of how it affects other people. I see how this is commonly leveraged as a superficial excuse to evangelize reluctant parties. "Silence is violence."
I don't want to be subjected to company-sponsored political struggle sessions, nor do I want to subject others to company-sponsored political struggle sessions. Yes, this can superficially be construed of as a political belief. If you want to find some other mutually-agreeable term for the idea that one's workplace should not be dominated by partisan evangelizing, then I'm open to suggestions.
This is a strawman. I was not advocating company-sponsored political struggle sessions.
Does a company-sponsored presentation discouraging unionization count as a "political struggle session?" I have been subjected to that before, and the company would not describe that as political -- no, they're just protecting their investments. For the employees whose lives the question of unionizing actually impacts, unionization is a furiously political question.
I wasn't saying we need more corporate presentations about LGBTQA+ pride or BLM. But minorities exist, they're people, and their normal lives will often be "political" to those who are able and willing to ignore the problems those minorities face.
"NO POLITICS PLEASE!" will silence those whose ideas are considered "political" while implicitly endorsing ideas that have been promoted to "apolitical."
Here's a quote from an Innuendo Studios video[1] which has some relevance here:
>The adage about bros on the internet is “‘political’ means anything I disagree with,” but it’d be more accurate to say, here, “‘political’ means anything on which the community disagrees.” For instance, “Nazis are bad” is an apolitical statement because everyone in the community agrees. It’s common sense, and therefore neutral. But, paradoxically, “Nazis are good” is also apolitical; because “Nazis are bad” is the consensus, “Nazis are good” must be just an edgy joke, and, even if not, the community already believes the opposite, so the statement is harmless. Tolerable. However, “feminism is good” is a political statement, because the community hasn’t reached consensus. It is debatable, and therefore political, and you should stop talking about it. And making political arguments, no matter how rational, is having an agenda, and having an agenda is ruining the community.
> But I think for a long time 'a whole person' referred to your character, your hobbies, your family, your quirks. And politics was a small, and usually private part of that.
Is it possible that you’re referring to a time when large classes of people had little to no voice in politics or representation in government?
There have always been people who are antagonistic and tribal at work. What’re you talking about? Where do asshole bosses and kiss-ass tropes come from if not precisely this?
No? There’s still workplaces that will have a random racist antagonizing an employee of color or some perceived woman-with-dyed hair will get shit for being assumed a liberal. Stuff like this was common and still hapens.
I think the notion that "politics was a small, and usually private part of that" is not and has never been true.
Assuming you're talking about America, where that view is common, I think it's referring to a particular post-WWII status quo that generally held among white professionals. But that didn't mean politics was absent; it just meant that enough people agreed on the status quo and felt disagreements could be resolved through governmental processes that partisan politics could be left at the workplace's door. But many elements of that consensus were deeply political. For example that consensus from the 40s to the 60s was to oppress non-white and non-male people in the workplace.
Indeed, the notion that "the bottom line" is the main thing that matters is very political. For example, it leaves out the split of that money. It leaves out how you treat the workers. It leaves out whether increasing the bottom line has negative societal effects. Using the power of employers to force people not to talk about this is an extremely political action.
As you say, things have changed. In the US, the political process has become deeply dysfunctional because of asymmetrical polarization. A majority of one party believes things that are false and is expelling any of its leaders say otherwise. That same party is aiming to win through stopping people from voting and through other structural impediments to democracy. If people are disenfranchised at the ballot box, it's no wonder they're turning to what levers of power they do have.
So if people really want a quiet workplace, then banning politics is exactly the wrong way to do it. Instead, they're going to have to step up and pressure to fix the political system, and then use that system to address the legitimate concerns of their fellow citizens.
Do you know the expression 'no politics or religion'? That is because you can't create a nice and fun environment where people start clashing over these topics.
You can discuss personal things, make jokes with your colleagues, etc. I think that is a very healthy environment.
An environment where people have strong opinions on politics an religion is never a nice environment. Never.
So I think it's fair that in a work environment, we decide "hey, we don't what that shit here".
People with strong opinions can still talk about them and get along. See every time interfaith community leaders collaborate on a food drive, charity event, etc.
The key is to remember that not everyone agrees with your strong opinion, or even cares about that, and that shouldn't make them any less important to you as a person.
And yes, these environments exist, I've worked in them.
>See every time interfaith community leaders collaborate on a food drive, charity event, etc.
I'm guessing they tend to focus their discussions on the food drive, charity event, or other task at hand. Not whether Jesus is the messiah or whether Isaac or Ishmael is the rightful heir to Abraham.
> People with strong opinions can still talk about them and get along.
While it is mathematically true that people can do this, the vast majority prove they choose not to nearly every single day. And once called out on it, it becomes another "tone policing" issue.
Oh? Why don't you list the topics you think of as political, ones that should be ruled as out of bounds? If you do that, you can pretty quickly see that what you are doing is practicing politics.
I agree that the workplace shouldn't be filled with random, irrelevant contention. But the current crop of "no politics" rules aren't about that. They are about taking topics that are material to the workplace and preventing people from discussing them so as to favor the political interests of particular people and groups.
This very much.
It really comes down to "majority rule". If you don't follow the majority you will be bullied and quit.
Woke is the enemy of diversity.
I tend to agree to this viewpoint. Most of the impactful products are built by people who are inspired to build the product, sometimes even to the extent of hating the entrepreneur. For them work is almost a part of life.I don't mean that such people think of work all the time and don't have other interests in life, but largely what they are building is kind of ingrained into their life. It's really difficult to separate what they do from who they are. Almost every leader wants their team to exhibit these characters albeit on a spectrum.
But what comes with that is the personality attributes, political viewpoints etc. It's hard to disagree on some fundamental traits and still continue to work together. At least in these teams which tend to get closely knit.
This could potentially lead to homogenous teams which we don't want.We want teams to hash out diverse and conflicting ideas.
Really hard balance to achieve.
You can have fun and socialise at work without devolving it into constant arguing. At my current job everyone's fairly mature and I think that even though there are lots of radical opinions it stays very congenial because people back off when it's unwelcome. I don't think there's anything to do with the bosses being gods, or people pretending to be robots. There are plenty of places where you can have heated discussions, it doesn't have to be at work.
Additionally: my employer pays me to fulfill their requirements. That's what I'm there for. If I don't enjoy some aspect of the work (or if it's a shitshow of unrelated and unresolvable arguments that I can't opt out of) I'll leave, I'm free to do that.
Is "the kind of person you hire" likely to share your politics?
Because we are talking about workplaces where there is diversity of thought (if thats your kink)
>I think it's a giant mistake to see a workplace as a place where the entrepreneur is a tiny god-king.
It isn't about being a god king, its about people being capable of collectively doing a task without saddling the execution of that task with all of their personal, political and emotional baggage.
>If people want to play-act as robots, I won't deny them their kink. But that's not what interests me about work, and it's not the kind of person I hire.
If people want to play-act as priests of some new secular religion, I won't deny them their kink. But that's not what interests me about work. What interests me about work is collecting a paycheck so that I can pay my bills and have the economic freedom to pursue my personal interests when I'm not at work. The idea that those with whom I work feel entitled (much less obligated) to police my personal interests (that are completely unrelated to my time on the job) is anathema to me. Those are not the kind of people I would hire, or work with.
How about when the grievance has to do with work itself? Something like James Damore. Or the inverse, someone bringing up a mysogynistic culture company-wide? What if the company implicitly looks down upon people with left/right leanings, depending on whether it's in Alabama or California?
I agree with the general sentiment that going to the office, collecting your paycheck and going home is the smoothest ride for everyone, but honestly, beyond a certain size, I think it's unavoidable to have these kinds of frictions.
Well, for many NOT being a sexist in a work setting is a common sense practice. Business owners of this stance will enforce it mercilessly and will still not think of themselves as having a certain political inclination.
I suppose this circles back to the loose definition of "common decency".
Gosh, you want to collect a fat paycheck and have freedom to do what you want in your off hours? That sounds very political. What are you doing bringing up politics in relation to work?
And you might think I'm kidding. But those views would have made you a complete radical in 1867. By 1967 it wouldn't have been radical for a white man, but it was still radical for anybody non-white or non-male. By 2017, it was somewhat better for women and racial minorities, but in many places it was still radical to suggest that gay people should enjoy those rights.
So "no politics at work" ends up being code for IMGFY. It's not a lack of politics. It is politics, just defending the status quo.
I don't think the argument is that it's some separate sphere entirely disconnected from normal human interaction. It's like saying "the point of a movie night is to hang out and enjoy a movie together". If me and my friends were halfway through a movie, and I stood up and staged a loud political protest against something one of the characters said, my friends would be pretty rightfully unhappy with me.
That’s fair, but if a character in said movie was making brazenly anti-Semitic views (for instance) I think it would be reasonable to share that it made you uncomfortable and have a discussion about it at some reasonable time shortly thereafter.
Yeah, once I was watching the Ottoman Lieutenant with my wife and parents - I turned it off because the film seemed to be denying the Armenian genocide.
I would think any sane person on this Earth would have the decency not to show such a film in the presence of a person with the background you describe.
More likely, this person was offended and had no vested interest, as is all to often the case.
I’m sorry that I’m aware of the Armenian genocide and get weirded out when people act like it didn’t happen or was justified.
Would you keep watching a movie that took the stance “slavery wasn’t so bad” or “well we can all agree Hitler took things overboard, but you know the Jewish people in Europe weren’t perfect neighbours”?
I’m sorry I’m aware of Armenian genocide, and the genocide denial aspect of the film is well detailed in the movie’s Wikipedia page so it took all of ten minutes to confirm what was happening.
To be fair, I think it helped that it is a pretty easy movie to leave halfway through. Nobody seemed to mind.
Oh? What are the kinds of things in a movie that might make you do that?
Let's suppose you're black and go over to a white friend's house for movie night. He puts on something super racist (say, Birth of a Nation, or a collection of blackface routines). You object, but all of his guests mock you for being "too sensitive" and "too political". You say, "I'm not sitting here for this," and leave. Were they rightfully unhappy with you?
I would say no, that your friends are assholes. That you aren't obliged to silently endorse your own oppression.
And I think it's the same thing at work. Would I want endless off-topic discussion at work? No. But some of what people denigrate as "too political" is entirely material to the workplace. Indeed, the Basecamp mess shows clearly that "no politics" rules are about suppressing discussion of things that are relevant, and are necessary because they are relevant.
I'd totally agree if we were still required to be in the office.
With WFH though you can actually more or less pick who you're spending those 8 hours with, in that case maybe keep the politics among the people you're physically around.
> If people want to play-act as robots, I won't deny them their kink. But that's not what interests me about work, and it's not the kind of person I hire.
If you want to see how far some people have lost the plot, consider that this poster is boasting about only hiring people who agree with his politics. You can be damn sure he wouldn't hire a passionate Trump supporter.
That is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that I won't hire people who are excessively deferential to authority in a way that they suppress their individuality and their concerns about the society in which we work.
Why? Because I think the work we do requires attention, care, and concern about the impacts of the work. I build software for actual people to use, and that requires caring about the actual people who use it. I build software in a collaborative, team-oriented context, and that requires caring about the actual people who are one's colleagues.
Of course, there are people I won't hire for their politics. For example, racists and misogynists will not get hired. That's because we're making software for all sorts of people, and being hostile to those people is a dealbreaker. It's because I aim to hire all sorts of people, and being hostile or unwelcoming to colleagues will get them fired in a hearbeat.
If I work somewhere, I am the tool that the founder uses to have wrought forth their vision. I accept that and do what must be done.
Therefore, at the same time, if I create a company, it is mine to do with as I please, to command forth to fulfill my vision.
I don't really understand the purpose of bringing "the whole person" if it doesn't matter to the work being done. It can not only be useless but actively harmful, as people get into tribalistic bouts without doing work.
"Do as you please" isn't really true. You'll have local zoning laws to follow, taxes to pay, minimum wages to respect, health codes, fire safety codes and on and on. So already you're at the behest of regulations.
Then, you're not employing tools or widgets. Tools are inanimate objects created by humans. Humans are thinking beings that have emotions. It's a fantasy to think you can abstract it away just because you pay them in some cotten/linen paper.
But it is fairly realistic to expect them to do their work without making political statements or refusing to work with others due to their political beliefs.
This emperor-or-minion dichotomy is exactly what I'm objecting to. It's both morally repugnant and entirely false.
Having started a few companies, I can promise you that it is not yours "to do with as I please, to command forth to fulfill my vision". What you'll actually be doing is desperately seeking to satisfy customers and pacify investors while working hard to keep good staff. Once you get a good business going, you'll have more of a margin to indulge any tastes you have for being a tinpot dictator. But that's always a personal indulgence that in the long term detracts from building the business. Look at WeWork as an example: that guy was absolutely in the "do with as I please, to command forth to fulfill my vision" mold. And how many billions has he lost?
I can’t help but wonder if the tech industry did this to itself. Tech companies offer so many amenities at the office from free food, to laundry, to massages that the line between office and home has blurred. Maybe the solution is making offices feel like offices and normalizing forty hour work weeks?
I think it started with college campus activism 10-20 years ago. If you feel empowered to shut down the dean’s office to oust a professor, you’ll probably think the same techniques can be applied to your workplace. It certainly doesn’t help that your workplace strives to walk and quack like some kind of college campus.
> It certainly doesn’t help that your workplace strives to walk and quack like some kind of college campus.
Is this not a great thing? Having a walkable place with quality of life amenities is a positive thing when youre talking about somewhere you spend at least 1/3 of the day
A quick skim indicates that student activism has been recorded in some places dating to the early 1800s. How far do you think we should roll back civil rights?
Shutting down college campuses? Hear of the 1960s? Sit Ins? We had a little of that in the 80s around Sout Africa and, oh Alaska ANWAR. Shutdown wallstreet toxics campaign. It is different now but in just the way everything that the Internet touches changes.
No, it’s different in that now the shutdowns are not over issues such as the Vietnam War but rather a professor objecting to to a ‘day without white people’[0], an instructor using a word in Chinese that merely sounds like an unmentionable word in English [1] or a progressive dean using the word ‘slaveholder’ in a self-deprecating context [2]
It started with bulldozer parenting, which lead to a generation being unequipped to deal with the real world. They are effectively still toddlers, stuck in arrested development. They demand to be protected from everything, including words and ideas. If they don't get what they want, they throw a tantrum. Colleges turned into their pushover parents, and then tech companies, and now almost every institution.
I have two college age children and two high school age kids, and i work with a number of people right out of school, and that statement does not reflect my experience. Multiple recessions, 9-11, covid, climate change, social unrest due to racism and violence, and yet they are motivated to act as citizens with responsibility for their system of government. They work hard, are savvy about many things we never spoke of in the 1980s in North Carolina, trauma and difficulties of all sorts, and work to help each other. In a world where the older generations seem happy to condemn them to expensive education, economic and health insecurity, and all sorts of under investment in basic infrastructure, they are pragmatic and innovative in their efforts to improve the whole. They both see the insanity of the Leet Code gates, and develop many ways to master it.
> Just stop to think about it logically for a minute... is the workplace the best place to circulate a petition condemning something that has nothing to do with work?
I don't think that is very persuasive, because it is quite common in most other places petitions are circulated for the petitions to have nothing to do with the activity at that place. For example, of all the petitions I've been asked to sign outside grocery stores or inside shopping malls I don't recall a single one being about things concerning grocery stores or malls.
A better argument would be that when someone circulates a petition at work they are circulating it among people they know, and those people know that they know the petitioner, and that the people who will be offered the petition after them know them.
If I sign a petition at a mall, probably no one I know will notice. If I don't sign the petition, no one I know will know that I was offered the chance and declined.
Not so at work. A petition at work as a side effect is essentially asking everyone to publicly declare their stance on the subject of the petition.
I think a good argument can be made that at work there should be a right to not contribute to discussions not related to work, and to not have such non-contribution held against you. A petition essentially forces you to contribute, and it is a bad form of contribution because your contribution is not accompanied by an explanation greatly increasing the chances of it being misunderstood.
> I think a good argument can be made that at work there should be a right to not contribute to discussions not related to work
I think you already have that right.
> and to not have such non-contribution held against you
That is the tricky part. How do you know if they will or will not be held against you? Maybe your skills aren't great but not bad enough to fire you but now with your non-contribution on an opinion is taken as you opposing it and your shortfall of skills is used as a platform to masquerade the real reason. Maybe the people judging you this way operate in a way that doesn't provide any clear cut evidence of their ulterior motives. Subjective areas like these have lots of shadows and shades of grey to hide things.
> The canonical point of a workplace is to come together to fulfill the aims of the entrepreneurs.
No? For me, it's to give me somewhere to earn money while practicing/improving my valuable skills. I couldn't give a monkeys about the dreams and aspirations of my millionaire CEO.
Society is a democracy. One where we as people provide labor for money. During contracted hours you belong to the company, sure. Outside that you are free to do as you please. Wait no, you were at an Antifa rally on the news outside office hours? Or cancelled on twitter? Or had a drug charge? Sorry, you're fired.
If you can't have your own life outside work without consequences, companies can't reasonably expect people to not bring their own life into work.
Just as how you conduct your life outside work can have a reputational effect on a company, your employer's actions have a reputational effect on you.
Perhaps hiring should measure people's ability to tolerate opposing views? It can't be good to work with people who can't stay civil in the face of disagreements. Surely that is a sign of a lack of emotional intelligence?
That may be your point of view, but can you hire a lot of people with this attitude?
Companies in tech successfully attract talent on the basis that they provide an opportunity to "have impact in the world". I work in tech and I hear this all the time from candidates in interviews, when asking why do you want to work here. Nobody says they just want to make a lot of money for the shareholders and a little for themselves.
The meaning of work and quality of workplace environment is incredibly important to people who work in tech. That's part of the job market situation.
If there was a massive surplus of qualified candidates to do the work, sure the "entrepreneurs" could be telling their staff to "shut up and get to work" whenever they talked about anything non-work-related... But at this time, it just isn't something that employers can really afford to do, and they have set themselves up for it too by hyping up their workplace culture and perks, and by positioning themselves not just as money making machines but as beacons of societal progress.
"Have an impact in the world" is a canned answer. I seriously doubt a large percentage of candidates really care, its just not appropriate (unfortunately) to say we're here for the money.
A lot of people get into software because we love to make things that are useful and we love world of elegance and beauty that algorithms and abstractions allow us. We tolerate but don’t support the people that want to become some rich and famous person. I cannot tell the difference during an interview, fortunately, but you can after a while of working with people.
I also see it very often in internal survey open answers as the answer for why you enjoy working here. These are anonymous, there is no incentive to lie.
More generally, most organizations have a mission. Even if the mission is explicitly political (like getting a candidate elected) there are still going to be things that people care about that aren't mission-related and getting into an internal dispute about them is a distraction from the mission.
But this hardly solves all political disputes. It's enough to rule some issues off-topic and have it generally be understood, but there are always grey areas, and plenty of politics that's directly mission-related.
If you see racism, sexism, etc. outside of RC, please don’t bring it in. For example, please don’t start a discussion about the latest offensive comment from Random Tech Person Y.
Everyone who comes to RC should have the same opportunity to focus on programming, and people from oppressed groups often find discussions of racism, sexism, etc. particularly hard to tune out.
There are many places to discuss and debate these issues, but there are few where people can avoid them. RC is one of those places.
The excerpt quoted here sounds reasonable and pleasant, which is why I was surprised when I clicked through and found what appears to be the social rulebook of hell.
>think about it logically for a minute... is the workplace the best place to circulate a petition...
We've set commerce at the center of our society and gone so far as to grant corporations "personhood", allowing them to wield enormous political influence. As such, they're able to donate unlimited sums of money under the guise of "free speech". With regard to its effect on the spirit of a functioning democracy, this is illogical to say the least.
To some extent, this outsized influence disenfranchises the citizen voter. So, given this system, it's actually quite logical for workers to express their social/political preferences through the corporations for which they work. It's a means of reclaiming some of their power by influencing an entity that itself has more influence.
If this deference to corporations were not the case, then I might be inclined to agree with you.
>*People are human. But work is work."
At least here in the U.S., our work-life balance is totally out of whack. We're expected to give so much to employers and invest so much of ourselves in the success of the company. We take time away from our families, etc. As such, the lines between our personal and work lives are already quite blurred. So I think this is where it seems strange to some that they are expected to leave select parts of their personal lives at the door.
Part of this is that office has come home (literally when it comes to the current pandemic work situation). With tools like Slack and Teams “work” has come home more than ever. Of course, there are healthy ways to limit this but you can’t say work hasn’t fundamentally invaded our home space. Also factor in how much people work, where you spent 40+ hours a week (again, leaning towards more due to pandemic work situation) there isn’t much time for activism outside the office.
Pushing for their company to support social justice causes is the white, white-collar workers way of supporting these causes without inducing the level of discomfort of actually protesting.
And if you get fired for it, all the better. Sans NDA (which companies are making increasingly common) you have an excellent case for the social zeitgeist to support you on.
In a company, some people may social with others after work, become close friends, those social groups are clusters, especially in big companies. Politics should be shared inside those social clusters. Treat it as social, not work.
I don't know why people are upset for not being able to flood others with their politics. If you want a conversation, you would want to make sure the receiving end is suitable for a discussion of some sort, probably better when you have 30 minutes to spare, sit together with tea or something.
One thing I don't like politics is that it is all about opinions, generally not about solutions. As an engineer I like solutions, I like tradeoffs, optimizations.
I think the problem lies not with mixing politics and work (which can obviously be political) but in pressuring companies to engage in activism on unrelated issues.
The problem starts with the slogan "everything is political" which utterly fails to recognize the varying degree with which any activity relates to some political cause. Take Coinbase - their long-term project is to advance the use of cryptocurrencies which is deeply political. And you are welcome to work there if you support this project or engage in activism against it if you don't. This much makes sense. But why do Coinbase management has to issue a statement supporting BLM? What do they even have to do with police brutality? Of course there is a line of argument that they are (just as everybody) complicit in systemic racism so it is their responsibility but it never made much sense to me. Making everybody responsible for everything is not going to work.
In a sense this slogan is similar to "everything is connected", which is in some sense true, but if one takes it too seriously there is a risk of failing to recognize very real differences between things and boundaries between different subsystems which will lead to paralysis or suboptimal actions.
> The workplace necessarily is going to bring together people that do not agree on personal matters - but who best align on matters relating to... work.
I personally agree. Work and personal life should be completely separate.
Yet employers and other orgs are happy to intrude on one’s personal life.
If you can spy on me at home just because I have a work computer or a work app installed, then don’t be surprised that traditional boundaries will be crossed the other way.
The problem here is that the office is deeply interwoven with the political. Part of this is that, as they say, "the personal is political". But let's set that aside for a moment, because we could make the case that in-office personal matters (e.g discrimination) is legally covered. (I'd debate that, but that's more political than HN likes to get, so... setting aside)
Even then, companies have political impact. When the CEO of Citizen decides hate mobs are a good idea, and he sponsors homeless hunting for sport with a $30k bounty, that's political.
If your company decides to sell surveillance software, that's political. More so if they pick specifically whom they sell it to or not. If your company decides to oppose or not oppose attempts to get at user data, that too is political - either way.
And worse, if your company decides that since they have money, they should get a voice in the political process, that too is political.
> The canonical point of a workplace is to come together to fulfill the aims of the entrepreneurs.
Have you ever worked for a large company, that's flush with cash, that likes to offer borderline ridiculous perks to employees (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc.)?
Usually there are relatively few people at these companies who do the work that actually moves the proverbial needle. There are a lot of people at these companies who only ever get to work on some vanity project motivated by internal politics. Work that literally doesn't matter, that the owners don't actually care about, and that's eventually going to get thrown away after being used as some sort of bargaining chip.
But smart people often want to feel like they're doing "important" work, so we dress it up with goals and deadlines and KPIs to make it seem important.
A lot of these workplaces can more accurately be described as "day care for adults."
I don’t think your view of the workplace is canonical, but I do want there to be a marketplace of ideas on this where companies can choose different levels of personal/professional blending. I’d like to have some companies as the “family/bring your whole self to work” and others as “keep politics/social justice/etc out of here” and have these publicly listed somewhere with employees able to vote with their feet.
> The canonical point of a workplace is to come together to fulfill the aims of the entrepreneurs.
See, that right there is a political viewpoint.
Some would argue that work is about fulfilling the needs of society to produce necessary and useful goods and services, the aims of the entrepreneurs take a backseat when they harm society.
Others might argue work is entirely about the needs of the workers, that the work game is mostly about the individuals who are there.
I’m not adding anything particular of value but just to say - I agree.
The current environment - at least online - is you have to be for something, picking a side.
Against you however, people may say - we can’t turn off that part of who we are and be different at work. People have forgotten that saying nothing is an option. Stop talking - especially the people which shout opinions loudly and add no value.
I'm imagining right now how this spherical bad white man spends a day harassing everyone with sexism, then at 5 pm grabs an envelope with a fat day pay, turns to the more qualified woman sitting next to him, makes a disgusting self entitled smile, and on his way to the exit gives a high five to his even whiter boss.
honestly i think the problem here is the standard 40 work week monopolizing societies time. in the last 50 years worker productivity has shot up but the hours worked have stayed the same. we have multiple studies showing greater productivity with shorter work days or shorter work weeks but we insist on keeping 40 hour 5 day weeks.
If people had more time outside of work they could do this outside of work.
I think we're encouraged to reflexively refuse that notion. But if we consider its feasibility, everything kind of makes sense. But that initial reflexive urge to reject the reality you painted is interesting. There is a bit of a chilling effect going on, for sure.
Unfortunately, in the never-ending struggle to force employees to conform to some platonic ideal of efficient production, companies have spent a lot of time and energy - not just in their own policy, but also in lobbying to the government and the public at large - trying to make work the center of the average American's life. Think of all the things you have to pass by your boss before making decisions about your own life: which doctor you go to, where you might live, when you might take time for yourself and your family.
So, this is the flipside. We're not like Germany or Sweden, where the means to simply exist are widely accessible outside of work, and where work ends when it ends, on the dot. Our companies spend millions and millions of dollars going over our heads to influence our legislative representatives, and seek ever greater and ever more direct influence on employees. You have to expect pushback. And political activism within companies, and pressure from employees for companies to be active in the way they desire, is the predictable - and, frankly, justifiable - form that that pushback takes.
Kick everyone out of the office at 5PM and you'll see a lot fewer people so invested in the political environment within and driven by their employers.
> We're not like Germany or Sweden, where the means to simply exist are widely accessible outside of work, and where work ends when it ends, on the dot
This is a curious fantasy that many Americans hold.
After having spent the best part of a decade working mostly in Sweden and Germany, I can tell you this has no basis in reality.
It's the impression that I've gotten from every review of the subject, even from natives, so, "no basis in reality" seems like a stretch. At the very least, it is objectively true that people in these countries work fewer hours than Americans do. But I tend to believe that it extends beyond this, and that there is a fundamentally different approach to work in these countries than in America. If people here want the paradigm to be "work is work," then the sacrifice is that you carve out of the work-centered lifestyle Americans live more time and energy that work cannot touch.
If your contention is that Europe is not perfect in this regard, that's orthogonal to my point, which used those (perhaps idealized) examples as naught more than illustrations.
Americans tend to idealize European countries. We generally have a more accessible healthcare, but otherwise, well... European cities are chock-full of beggars and homeless people. Welfare structures are often hidden behind a high wall of bureaucratic compliance that pretty much locks some people out.
And even if you can manage those, your simple existence won't be on a level of a person with a normal job. Especially a single young person or a childless family cannot expect living beyond a very, very basic level from welfare money. Low enough that you won't be very happy.
Also, work does not end on the dot in Europe either. There are some countries that enshrined the right to do so into laws, but most have not. If you compete in a global economy, there tends to be a race to the bottom.
> The canonical point of a workplace is to come together to fulfill the aims of the entrepreneurs.
Absolutely not, and for a very clear reason: the aims of the entrepreneurs are to make money and reduce costs. My aim, in asking for raises, is to increase costs. Are you saying this is inappropriate?
I am at work because the company and I came to a mutually beneficial arrangement. They need things done that are better done if I'm there; in exchange, I have a number of demands of them, starting with a sizable chunk of money. They're willing to meet those demands, so I work.
If I make political demands of my employer, it may be novel, but it is not a fundamental change of a relationship where I am already making financial demands of my employer. If the employer doesn't like my demands, they are free to try to find someone else, and the process works the same in both cases.
>If the employer doesn't like my demands, they are free to try to find someone else, and the process works the same in both cases.
That's not the problem though. The problem is that your political advocacy causes problems with your co-workers, not your employer. If you have political activism at the work place then you're possibly making the workplace hostile for people who disagree politically with you. You might never hear about it, especially if you're in the majority, but you're still turning people off.
Sure, but it's not qualitatively different from many other situations where employees make incompatible demands, is what I'm saying. One employee can say, I want to be allowed to work from home; another can say, I have trouble interacting with people remotely and want to see them face to face. One employee can say, I want to bring my dog to the office; another can say, I'm allergic to dogs. One employee can say, I want a beer fridge at work; another can say, I'm a recovering alcoholic and free beer is too dangerous. One employee can say, I really want a strong management structure; another can say, I really want a flat structure. One employee can say, I wish to live in New York and work during the daytime; another can say, I wish to live in Tokyo and work during the daytime.
It's the employer's job (not the employees') to mediate between those, if possible (such as by having different teams with different offices/policies/etc.), and figure out which employees to make contracts with, if not.
Or, more directly, two employees can say, I want this much salary, and the company doesn't have budget for both. If they meet the demand of one employee, they are risking the other employee. But nobody would ever suggest (in good faith) that either of the employees needs to put the business first and not negotiate for a higher salary so that the company can retain the other employee. That's the company's problem to solve.
(Since you mentioned a hostile work environment - sure, there is a law in some jurisdictions that you cannot discriminate based on political affiliations. If one employee is trying to put the company in violation of the law, then the company has an easy answer for which employee not to make a contracts with. And, again, such a law binds companies and effectively obligates them not to hire people who will put them in violation of the law; it typically does not bind employees. In the absence of a law giving the company only one choice, it's up to the employer to figure out what benefits them more. Underpaying a hard-working employee is certainly "hostile" in a colloquial sense, but it is not illegal, and many companies manage to retain underpaid employees in practice.)
as I am one that doesn't seek to evangelize my political views at work, I would rather go the other direction pay me more if I agree not too bring them up. (and that includes political causes I agree with. I don't like it because it inevitably causes arguments between other coworkers that hold opposing views and i have to put up with both sides.)
Yes, you're naive. Maybe if your a worker on a factory line and only being paid to turn a wrench, then sure. But at tech firms, you're being paid to think.
Yeah - you are being paid to think to solve the problem specifically related to your work, not being lost in thoughts about your personal political beliefs.
That's not my experience at all. Maybe if you're a junior engineer, then you are told what to do, but generally speaking these companies have many senior people who have to decide for themselves.
The idea that a company has money and that workers are just cogs is an outdated way of thinking. These stories are often focusing on the ethical concerns of senior engineers, often ones whose job is directly tackling problems of ethics (such as ethics of AI, or censorship systems).
Humans being humans can’t compartmentalze and seamlessly switch back and forth between work mode and non-work mode. Besides, they spend the best 8-9 hrs of their creative period of the day at work so the happenings of outside world will be subconsciously analyzed at work.
If a black kid has been killed by a cop the previous night the injustice of it all will linger on for a few days whether at work or outside of it.
There are always external factors that can temporarily decrease work performance, like the death of a loved one. Those random dips are evened out over the workforce.
When large swaths of a business's employees can't even at work whenever there's tragic news, that becomes a problem for the business itself.
My point is even perceived discrimination imposes real economic cost.
> Just stop to think about it logically for a minute... is the workplace the best place to circulate a petition condemning something that has nothing to do with work?
You spent most of your waking hours at work. The slave mentality required to basically turn off your moral compass while you are there (for 8+ hours) - that's mind bending to me
> “The proximity of his workplace and his home is convenient, but there is a serious political motivation underlying it, too. When Steidl was a teen-ager, he spent several weeks volunteering at Auschwitz, clearing paths for visitors and sleeping in a former barracks. His father had served in the German Army, and Steidl participated in a program that had been established, he said, to show young Germans “what the parents had done. The experience helped him confront ‘the dark side of Germany.’ One thing that he contemplated was the ethics of separating one’s work from one’s domestic life. ‘I read about how the homes of the officers were outside the concentration camp, where they had a wife and children, and a little dog, and they were the nicest people you can expect,’ he told me. ‘And then they were going to work—they were shooting and murdering and sending people to death. So I also thought that it makes a huge difference when you are not isolated from your work, when working and living is a symbiosis. Normally, when you have a business and you produce something industrial, you have the plant somewhere and it makes a lot of dirt, and poison, and noise, and destroys the environment. You are working there all day, and then in the evening you drive home and you have your pleasant place to stay, with clean air, while poor people have to live with the dirt you are producing. I control my noise, because I am sleeping there, with an open window, every night.’”
We're not actually trying to equate working on email products at Basecamp to working at Auschwitz are we? It's an interesting anecdote but it hardly serves a useful function here.
It is also a complete inverse of the situation: it isn't the work being called into question, but whether or not everyone uniformly agrees in terms of their personal opinions and personal lifestyles.
Try and look deeper. Sometimes an extreme example at the 99.9999th percentile can bound the problem.
In this case, it demonstrates how well people can separate work from home.
I would say the quote does not demonstrate the delineation between work and non-work. It's about in-group vs out-group bias. If the quote were about Nazi's coming home and hanging out with ethnically diverse friends, that would demonstrate considerable work vs home culture.
German nationals vs other. They’re suggesting OP is drawing a false analogy by framing the compartmentalisation through employment and ignoring the ethnic divisions.
Basecamp is a small company, but Google was caught helping the US military, while most of the employees working for Google are not Americans. Even one of the cofounders and the current CEO are not American born, which means that they are asked to potentially do things agains their family.
No, but for example I was working really hard under Google while Eric Schmidt was the CEO. Then in my last year working there I stopped caring about working hard enough to get a promotion, and just treated it as a workplace where I get money to invest. After a fatFIRE I never looked back.
> Normally, when you have a business and you produce something industrial, you have the plant somewhere and it makes a lot of dirt, and poison, and noise, and destroys the environment.
That’s... not how industry works anymore. The reason you don’t want to live in an industrial park is because they are bright, loud, and take up a ton of space so they destroy walkability.
To the larger point though. It’s a bit daft to compare not talking about politics to shooting Jews. The German guards most certainly discussed what they were doing and felt that it was the right thing.
If we’re going for melodramatic comparisons, political echo chambers in the workplace lead to the type of groupthink that result in real gas chambers.
I think this story actually proves the point. In this case, people were monsters at work and respectable people at home.
Therefore it works the other way around too: someone can worship Satan in a death metal band in his private life and work at a Catholic school.
The very definition of maturity is assuming the role appropriate to the situation. What I think might influence my decisions, but in my job is my duty to set aside what I think and act in the interest of my employer. Not mine.
Now we live in a time where your work identity an personal are conflated into one. Your work is who you are. There's no longer life beyond it.
Maybe is a good thing... But it's certainly exhausting to me. Everyone putting up their best behavior all the time.
People don't spontaneously decide that conducting murder in a concentration camp is a morally acceptable career path. The Nazis succeeded in the first place because they injected their politics into every aspect of life. Politics-free spaces create additional friction that impedes the rise of radical ideology.
There's more truth to this than people want to admit. I would add a nuance that it wasn't just about injecting politics, but a certain brand, with no room for others. If we have politics with tolerance, it's a completely different outcome.
A lot of Nazi's really did believe that they were in the right. That Jew's really were an inhuman invader presenting an existential threat.
Of course that is an incredibly fragile idea to hold. There needed to be an institutional structure that tied those views to everyday practical and emotional needs. You hold those views because your power, prestige, money and family safety depended on holding those views. You suck up to you Nazi boss, whos suck's up to his boss in turn, all the way up to Hitler. And weirdly this is how a lot of companies act. Deep down everyone knows that the corporation is a lie. But slowly and surely your words turn into a stream of carefully crafted shibboleth's and cultural references. And you get a promotion and a new car. Your family is safe and your place in the pecking order confirmed. And every few years a new set of words enter the vocabulary that clear out a few oldies and cycle the structure.
The problem here is not politics per-se but top-down command structures that allow viewpoints to be weaponized for career promotion.
That would be true if there was no difference between seeking equality and justice vs. scapegoating Naziesque goose-stepping grievances. I say this as someone who gets annoyed by politically active coworkers. Not all ideologies are created equally.
Then discourage all irrelevant politics from work and give even less leeway to the "bad" ideologies.
If democratic means are not sufficient to achieve political results you're happy with, then your fellow citizens are not ready for your interpretation of equality and justice. It is antithetical to leverage corporate resources to force your goal. If you happen to be politically vocal without abusing corporate power, then you'd make little political progress, so whether your ideology is good or bad matters very little. You'd just be creating more polarization either way.
> is antithetical to leverage corporate resources to force your goal
So, overturn citizens united, ban corporate PACs, and all corporate political donations? Or are you just trying to ban one side from leveraging corporate resources?
Equality of outcome or opportunity? That matters. I'd support one but not the other. I lived under Communism until 1989 and I know what equal outcome looks like after decades of having its run. There is no incentive to excel and all the incentives to conform because equality comes before merit. After some time the whole society slides into poverty.
What I don't like is to put ideology over humans, meaning to prefer abstractions and reifications over concrete realities and ignore those realities. Fighting for justice on a societal level can often be blind to personal details. It's usually us vs them and personal details don't matter, in that regard it's similar to war, dehumanising their opponents in order to make them legitimate targets.
Yeah, a quest for societal justice can absolutely turn into an egg-breaking rampage with promise of a tasty omelette sometimes in the unspecified glorious future. We have seen it and are a bit sceptical.
The USA was spared this particular disaster. Perhaps we could point out the case of the Prohibition or War on Drugs to our American friends?
These, too, were/are moral crusades ostensibly led by the noblest of intentions, in practice steamrolling individuals without mercy and giving incentive to rise of brutal criminal organizations.
I support equality of outcome. Everyone should be poor. It builds character, and makes for better writers. A nation's progress should only be measured by the literature it generates, and then forces its children to read.
It’s disingenuous to blame all problems our countries had before 89 on socialism, while ignoring the constant blockade and attack from the Western European countries and the US.
Several socialist countries tried to export the west, but it was always with the condition that they privatise, reduce worker wages and take on extortionate IMF loans.
I’m less familiar with the USSR’s policies on this, but I can tell you România tried to export to the west and took on an IMF loan to do so. Then we were blocked from actually selling our exports and the loan was required to be paid early and in full regardless. Since we were only allowed to export food for the most part, rationing had to be used for several years. This economic crisis, in addition to constant propaganda via radio and funding of fascists, is part of how the US and its allies made the 89 coup successful.
If nothing else, we were restricted from buying several foreign currencies at anything other than extortionate rates. A lot of trade deals also insisted on liberalising to some degree or other, which would have (and did, after 89) damaged the local economy. Without trade deals a lot of commodities are so expensive they might as well be banned.
Later on China and Vietnam did manage to negotiate an in-between position with some markets and some free trade (and in the case of Vietnam even IMF loans), but with workers as a class maintaining control of the state and significant parts of the economy continuing to be mostly planned by state-owned enterprises.
A country the size of the USSR does not need resources from other countries to survive. If communism was effective, the blockades would have been irrelevant.
You’re forgetting that the Nazis utterly ane completely destroyed the USSR, digesting an entire generation of men in every soviet state along with all of their infrastructure and resources.
In the end it was the sacrifice USSR which enabled USA and UK (lots of Uniteds here) to claim victory. As a thank you, the west invested considerable resources into rebuilding Germany and Japan while giving the USSR and China the middle finger and immediately treating them like enemies.
We really did kick Russia and China while they were down, repeatedly, then spit on them.
Just as we’ve seen with Israel and China, the bullied have a tendency to become the aggressors. It could have gone differently had we not decided to back the bad guys of ww2.(Germany and Japan)
It did however need to protect itself from the constant threat of annihilation by the US. At one point US generals were proposing to preemptively nuke all of the USSR because their own losses would be acceptable.
So it didn’t help that a developing economy had to redirect a sizeable portion of its productive power towards defence. Nor did the constant less direct attacks from the US and its allies. Despite all of that, average workers had good conditions even when compared to the US itself.
I think that's totally absurd. You're a human wherever you go, you should not be required to put aside what's important to you for most of every day, keeping your head down and paying tribute to capitalism. Work is, and should be, real life.
I sleep about 6 hours a day, I work about 9 hours a day, and the rest is for life sustaining activities, housework, personal projects, and leisure.
Work is where I spend most of my time. Being a positive force in the world is important to me, so I only work on important problems, and to defend against falling into a motivated reasoning culture, I only work places where people can freely discuss ethical issues. I don't want to trick myself into thinking I'm connecting the world, but then discover I'm actually building tools that facilitate genocides in Myanmar or ethnic cleansing of the Uighurs or something.
So no, at least for me, attempting to compartmentalize my life like that seems like a really bad life strategy. I just don't want to regret how I spend a major part of my life.
You can use the money to further your political goals.
If you go to a pizza place and pay for a pizza, you don't expect them to alter the deal after you pay, and instead give the pizza to someone homeless without asking you or refunding you.
Yes. You go to work because they pay you. That's it. I do not care about your politics, and I beg that you don't care about mine. I am not your family. Odds are, I will not choose to be your friend. A professional relationship as coworkers is the goal here.
This naive take seems to imply that companies, in America today, do not have political influence. Or, companies do have political influence, but its workers deserve no say despite spending 40 hours of every week devoted to serving its interests.
> The personal aims of the workers are fulfilled best outside of work.
I agree with this idea at face value. But most people spend the majority of their waking hours at work, traveling to work, or recovering from work -- not for the benefit of entrepreneurs, but to afford the cost of living. I think as a society we'd be less likely to inject our politics into our workplaces if we didn't have to spend such a large portion of our lives at work.
Does anyone really believe that these giant companies actually care about the so-called 'woke' values being foisted upon them?
Once companies realize that getting political is no longer a virtue (and by 'virtuous' we mean anything that increases their bottom line), we'll slowly start seeing sanity crawl back to the workplace. I'm glad to see some companies clearing that path.
Sometimes if I have a spare moment and a thought pops into my head I'll put it into a notes app. Sometimes I'll go back and expand these notes to the point where I've essentially got a blog post. I've got dozens of these but I'm just too afraid to post them. It's not that I'm saying anything terribly provocative either, it's mostly about coding and my experiences living in Japan.
Yet there's always going to be a way of weaponizing what I've written against me - no matter how petty or far fetched.
Perhaps I'm not important enough for that to happen. But if that were to change there'll be this massive trove of thing's I've written and people with the time to deep dive through it. And then label me a racist, a misogynist, an ageist, a transphobe or any number of other words which can so swiftly destroy a person yet to make their fuck you money.
I would love to read or hear about your experiences while living in Japan. I spent 5 years there myself, and I'd be curious to see if your impressions were similar to mine or not.
They're reaping what they've sowed, so I don't exactly feel bad about big tech firms trying to flee "wokeness" (read: performative activism that hurts its causes more than it helps them) and finding out they won't be able to do so that easily, as it's exactly the kind of environment they've cultivated and the sort of people they've catered to for the past decade. Everything you do can be construed as a political statement in one way or another, and if you make an ideological battleground out of a workplace you'll be asking for trouble down the road.
I see it as an indicator that although many tech firms have mythologized their missions as agents of positive change they remain largely ineffectual. If people felt that through their employment they were providing a net benefit to society on the issues they care about then they wouldn't really care much about internal company politics/culture.
This 'article' is very short, and the evidence of 'failing' to run away from politics is dropped in the second last sentence.
I think there is a big difference between having a discussion about politics at work, and using your workplace as a tool to forward your political agenda. Somewhere in the middle is using company resources as a platform for (not directly work-related) political discussion.
Although I dislike the way that most employers take advantage of unequal power distributions with employees, I don't see any real issue with a company saying "our policy is to leave politics for non-work time". At some point as an employee you are actually expected to do things that your employer wants, and if you are doing non-work why should the company pay for it unless it's part of your work agreement?
A company transitioning between different policies is a challenging situation, and for a company in the public eye that will almost inevitably generate controversy, but actually "letting the market decide" about this issue seems good. It means that there are companies at various points on the politics-at-work spectrum that employees can choose from.
> "according to a new Harris poll commissioned by Paradigm, a diversity consultancy, more than two-thirds of adults in America want to be able to discuss racial-justice issues at work"
Of course it does, they are a diversity consultancy (whatever the heck that is)
In other news, Marlboro has found, through rigorous scientific study, that cigarettes do not increase the risk of cancer. In fact, they may help reduce the risk of developing cancer by reducing workplace stress.
I see a lot of anti-politics-at-work commentary here. This makes me wonder what the posters would do working for companies that have an explicit social agenda. If the politics are baked into the company, does that void the "politics and work should be separate" point?
Politics has become a dirty word in the US, so people simply don't think of their pet political causes as politics.
In my opinion, many Americans especially do not know how to talk politics (in large part because of how much of a dirty word it has become, and also for a bunch of historical reasons) and instead of addressing this - which, to be fair, is extremely difficult to do - people would simply rather sweep it all under the rug.
It's even more complicated when it comes to the workplace because if you don't know how to talk politics you definitely won't know how to compartmentalise political debate and professional duty. To have politics in the workplace you need to be able to passionately, even furiously disagree with someone in one moment and pleasantly collaborate or offer assistance in the next. Either that or maintain a business where everyone has the same political leanings. There aren't really any in-betweens.
For an example of "an explicit social agenda" I'm thinking about the various cases of explicitly Christian companies with a business that's not directly religious (i.e. not a church or the like) but with an explicit agenda of strictly keeping to the social values of their particular choosing. Should all employees share their values? IMHO not. Should they be able to require that employees share their values? IMHO not. Should employees with contradictory values (in that particular example, let's say abortion policy) be able to feel psychologically safe working there? IMHO yes. So from that perspective, if we consider some company with an explicit "woke" social agenda, the same things should apply - in my view, an anti-abortionist campaigner should be able to work for a feminist boss in a feminist company just as a pro-abortion-rights campaigner should be able to work for a Mormon boss in a company fully owned by a religious fundamentalist family, and the same for any other politically charged topics. Obviously, that doesn't work well now, especially in all the "fire at-will" USA states, but that's how I feel it should be.
The big 4/5 are doubling down in their wokeness and courses that have a very American & democrat slant with absolutely no space for discourse because there's really nothing to gain, risking your job to fight a corporate machine that analyzes woke actions as a sort of compliance of PR to keep appearances.
You either sing the political tune or try to remain neutral. Censorship of a lot of ideas/opinions have become so normal and demanded even (FB, Twitter, Google, etc) that "those that bring themselves" will mostly be those furthering the woke narrative.
It's funny how Israel creates a conundrum because it's the one place were the bipartisan support from the US clashes with the woke view so they're trying to suppress it as fast as possible.
I'm trying to avoid getting involved in politics online. I have a bad habit of speaking my mind and getting into arguments. I'm starting to realize I'm not doing anyone any good, especially me. I think we are struggling to live in a world where everyone's opinion is everywhere. For me at least, I need to learn to live and let live.
A feature of US work culture is that you invest your “whole self” into work. As in work isn’t just a thing you do for money, but a calling... Additionally, there’s a lack of basic social services. Those that do well can carry guilt, this leads to USs tipping culture, among other things.. also in the US private companies wield a lot of political power and capital.
Companies work in this context to attract talent. And people look to large powerful employers to large, important projects for social good. This could mean working at SpaceX to colonize Mars or wanting AWS to have carbon neutral data centers. I want to at least hope my company isn’t a soulless behemoth, but actually lives up to the mission or advertising.
So it’s only natural any kind of social or political issue is going to fall into this category. Including issues of racial equity...
Of course the market can decide what things here they want in companies they work at. It’s not a black and white “politics or no politics” line. Everything and anything can be political.
>A feature of US work culture is that you invest your “whole self” into work. As in work isn’t just a thing you do for money, but a calling...
and it is utter bullshit. I have watched my father and grandfather been chewed up and spit out by their respective employers and that work culture. Work isn't your life its what you do to pay for your life. any time a employer tells you that they are a family or any such BS run the other way.
I am exchanging x number of hours of my time skills and effort for their cash period.
Companies provide too much freedom and they are too afraid to punish employees for not doing actual work they are paid to do. Not to mention not punishing those who create toxic unproductive work environment for others by pushing political agendas at work. This leads to workplace radicalization when arrogant self-proclaimed judges of other people morals and executioners of other people careers behave as uncontrolled passive-aggressive troublemakers.
The only reason this is an issue in the first place is the outsized, insane amount of influence these firms have over our society and culture. It wouldn't be as interesting (or consequential) if these guys were in Ford or GM (in fact it's not rare for unions to have stated political positions).
The problem isn't politics, though. The problem is that you have two mainstream belief systems that do not share the same reality, that are mutually exclusive. One has to be completely wrong. This is not about perceived polarization, black-and-white thinking and stuff. Those camps live in two different worlds, and the truth isn't somewhere in between. They don't disagree about some facts, they disagree more fundamentally about the question how facts are produced.
Naturally, the people in-between or the ones that are silent are seen as an enabler of the other side. And to a certain degree, in this polarized situation, that is true. After all, the other side wants to take away your fundamental rights. And again, that is factually true - the other side does want to take away or not grant some rights from/to you, and you see those rights as fundamental.
So the question is, can you ignore and escape politics? Should you? Do you have to get involved? Well, generally, you should get involved - of course: Society doesn't work otherwise. However, in this situation, its understandable if you skip out, with tensions running that high.
But then how can these two camps can ever come together? The solution can certainly not be that two separate groups enforce themselves in their beliefs - because unfortunately, it seems that this only works by vilifying the other side, only increasing tensions.
So it seems that talking politics at work is the lesser of two evils? Or is it too late for that and stuff's just gone too far?
There’s a very good reason there is an old tradition against politics and religion at work. You’re there to get stuff done, and topics like that tend to derail things.
Smarter people - the type that make good engineers who’d deliver early - think critically about everything, not just their job. What you think of as “woke” is often composed of the compassionate, deeply reasoned ideology that such a smart person creates. It acts, practically, as a theodicy, something any coherent non-nihilistic worldview requires.
Similarly, many smart engineers arrive at opposing world views with less emphasis on the problem of evil and more on a pure rational understanding of the nature and history of society.
These two clever camps, admixed with America’s ideological chaos, rarely see one another clearly. The rationalists think the “woke” people are idiots for engaging with irrational intangibles of identity, and the woke people think the rationalists are cruel for refusing to admit any place for subjective experience in their expectations and understanding of the world around them.
I do think the rationalists miss rather more of reality; we are not in a Greg Egan novel. But the wokeists are ignorant of the spectre of ethnic conflict in human history, of the evil foreshadowed in glorifying identity and subjective experience.
I don't think they're fighting because they hold differing misconceptions. Politics is a bar fight, you won't change people's minds by giving them information because it's not about information. If it was, then the information exchanged in political arguments would actually settle disagreements.
As with anything, we need to ask ourselves how something can be used to attack political enemies and punish outsiders. The woke politics thing is dangerous, and I think organizations (like the CIA) will ultimately be the ones to wield this power against the people, even if they haven't fully mechanized it yet. That is because this isn't just "politics" as the article asserts. This is a form of ambiguous morality (one is expected to just know when something is wrong, and everyone is expected to agree) which requires the use of an oracle (CoC, D&I council, etc) that exists outside of the traditionally enumerable, rules-based systems based on the rule of law, except that it additionally can't be questioned or opted out of. This is the most ideal thing imagineable for people who want to weaponize the workplace to achieve their own ends. Proponents of this system, beware.
I just listened to a conversation where Sam Harris paints a bleak picture after having spoken with leaders in tech.
Sam Harris (SH):
I was recently at a meeting of very connected people in tech and media. I won't name anyone but they are people who are or were running some of the biggest companies. These are people with massive influence and are on the same page with everything we've said here. But when told that they really should just present a united front here and not tolerate these mutinies of their woke employees. So the example I gave in this meeting is ... (Sam goes over the situation of Nicholas Christakis at Yale, omitted for brevity) ... So I floated that example to these captains of industry, and said at what point do your companies just hold the line? And say: if you feel that way go work somewhere else. And everyone in the room agreed that that was not going to happen, that there was no way that was going to happen.
Jesse Singal (JS):
Just because of the backlash you mean?
SH:
Yeah that it has gone too far, it's too scary, there is too much money to lose. It went over like a lead balloon, it was a complete non-starter. I kept pushing it, the people in this room literally know everybody, you could have a star chamber meeting where everyone agreed to be on the same page here, so that the mutineers from Google couldn't just jump over to Amazon or Facebook or Apple. You could literally get everyone to agree to just wake up simultaneously. They said: there's no way it's going to happen. It's over. It was an incredibly bleak picture coming from people who either are at the top or were at the top of some of the biggest businesses in tech and media. Which suggested to me that the situation is worse than I thought, not better.
I disagree with the entire premise of this article, and the statements it makes to prove it’s points are flimsy.
The first three sentences:
> When at work, steer clear of politics. This rule, generally accepted around the world, does not apply in techland. Employees bring their “whole self to work”, including their political beliefs.
As a software manager who has worked at a handful of companies I never once found this statement to be true. I’ve been around people who formed friendships at work and became comfortable enough to discuss political events among themselves on breaks - but never once met someone who thought that it was an acceptable topic for general discussion at the office.
> Internal online forums are full of heated debates
Ok yes, this is a problem and it might be more problematic for tech companies who might be more willing to have internal forms. I believe society as a whole has failed to follow our own interaction guidelines when online. It’s too easy to cross the line without the immediate vocal or visual cues you get in person or on the phone.
> Digital technology has always had a political bent
I disagree and the argument that apple is ‘counterculture’ is their marketing agenda and has nothing to do with the technology.
> Technological shifts have tended to be framed in political terms
I disagree with this too. Open source is simply what it is. Beyond that one argument, it’s such a broad statement it’s insane. Yes, politics likes to frame change in favorable terms- that has nothing to do with the technology shifts themselves.
> tech firms have felt obliged to offer plenty of perks, such as free food, but also “work that aligns with personal values”
How does wanting to have a positive impact on the world have anything to do with the tech field? Only thing I can think of is that there is a lot of really shady tech out their now- anything from tracking people to AI for drones. I don’t want to work for them. I also don’t want to work for a payday loan company- nothing to do with one being a tech company.
> One reason is that more than in other sectors, discussions in tech firms mostly take place over Slack and other corporate communication services
Back to my first concession- this is the root cause of the problem, and with so many offices closed now isn’t really a ‘tech’ problem anymore. Society as a whole needs to learn to to behave in a asynchronous environment.
This is about a guy who wrote a book on his own time, published it outside of work.
Someone did not like some parts of the book and the guy had to quit his job?
There is nothing to suggest the man acted improperly at work.
I write fictional stories in my spare time (never at work),
I enjoy doing it. Some people enjoy reading them
(I can't figure out why)
It is a sad day for a Democracy when I am supposed to worry about what self-appointed political officers acting entirely outside of HR, will feel about what I write.
That is an autocratic regime.
Soon we will have struggle sessions at work.
> There is nothing to suggest the man acted improperly at work.
We've had this discussion already, but claiming sexist views is going to be a problem for you whether you do it at work or elsewhere because of how laws around hostile work environments and notice work. Particularly, if you go on to actually create a hostile work environment (as one might reasonably suppose you will, having publicly espoused the relevant views), then the company might be on the hook for enhanced damages based on the idea that they knew or ought to know you posed a risk. Best not to do it in a high profile way if you want to work for a big company where people are sensitive to that sort of thing.
If you want this to stop being the case, there are a few things that would need to happen. It might be that a combination of these would suffice:
You'd need to convince workers to not believe that someone who says sexist stuff in a book is going to cause a problem for them.
You'd need to convince workers to put aside their personal interests in this matter for the greater good (that being the right to write a book that says sexist things but still work at Apple, or wherever).
You'd need to change the law so that companies who know or should know that they have a risky worker don't pay any extra penalty if that worker goes on to harass someone.
There are probably more complex things you could do to solve this problem but I guess those three are the simplest.
> You'd need to convince workers to not believe that someone who says sexist stuff in a book is going to cause a problem for them.
No. A million times no. If and when an employee creates a hostile work environment, then the employer may address it by disciplining or firing that employee.
Nobody, absolutely nobody, is under any obligation to preemptively address things someone imagines might happen based on their misinterpretation of an out-of-context fragment of writing.
> If and when an employee creates a hostile work environment, then the employer may address it by disciplining or firing that employee.
I don't believe this at all, and more importantly, the way you've phrased your second paragraph, I don't think you really believe it all, either.
That is, your first paragraph appears to be arguing that it's only OK to fire an employee for "hostile work environment" if that employee does something hostile at work, and never OK to fire based on stuff an employee has written before being hired.
But your second paragraph actually shows you think the offense really wasn't that bad, that you think it was a "misinterpretation" taken "out of context".
But what if the employee had been in the KKK, and had argued for white supremacy, and that other races were lazy and poor workers? Would you still think an employer would be out of bounds for firing that employee?
My point is that I think it's perfectly fine to fire someone for egregious behavior or writings before they were hired. It's certainly worth debating whether Chaos Monkey rises to the level of egregious - I haven't read the book so I don't have an opinion. But I think some kind of blanket statement that "what you've written before being hired shouldn't matter" is pretty ludicrous.
> That is, your first paragraph appears to be arguing that it's only OK to fire an employee for "hostile work environment" if that employee does something hostile at work, and never OK to fire based on stuff an employee has written before being hired.
What do you think a hostile work environment is? How do writings outside of work affect the work environment? The work environment is...things that happen at work. In order for the employee to have created a hostile work environment they would have to, you know, act hostilely at work. That is literally what it means.
An employee proselytizing their religion at work might create a hostile work environment. If they go door-to-door and proselytize on the weekends, and never mention their religion at work, that does not create a hostile work environment and they shouldn't be fired for what they do in their own time. I don't see how that is hard to understand.
So, I haven't read the linked article, I'm just going off from what you say here.
Hypothetically, say someone hates you, think you're a low life, that you're not as smart, and have bad habits, a trash culture, despise the way you dress and talk, and find your life choice repulsive, might even think you're tainted and doomed to eternal condemnation.
Now say you work with this person, but at work they pretend like none of it. They act normal and casual with you, and so they don't exhibit an active hostile environment.
Now say you found their online blog, where they basically reveal their sentiment about you. Lets even say they don't specifically mention you by name, but they clearly describe their hate for people which you'd identify as.
Now you go to work the next day with this person... Will you also just pretend like none of it? Will that knowledge now not have inherently tainted the work environment for you? What if they're your manager?
Say you are the person who doesn't like one of your co-workers. Whatever reason, maybe they remind you of someone who treated you poorly. Maybe you just don't have compatible personalities. Whatever it is, something about them irks you. Still, you're a professional, so you treat them with the same respect and courtesy you treat everyone else.
You vent your feelings on your livejournal or whatever. Keeping things anonymous, but your co-worker finds it and demands that you be fired. Should you be fired?
You haven't answered my scenario. I'm just asking if in those circumstances I've described, if you'd still feel at ease and totally happy going to work pretending like none of it. Or if that knowledge of the hate your manager exhibits for people of your kind would make you resent working with them?
This is the first thing I need to know, because I personally would not be able to walk in to work motivated and energetic after that, I'd be very uncomfortable from that point on working under that manager knowing what I now know is their opinion of people like me.
If you'd be fine with this and have no issue going back to work for that manager. Well it'll be hard for us to agree on anything that follows.
Now if this would also make you uncomfortable, we can move to the next point, which is, how should this situation be resolved? You now have a manager making their subordinate uncomfortable at work. They do so because of their publicly expressed hate, disdain, resentment and desire to oppress people of the same kind as the subordinate.
As the employer, what do you think would be the right solution here?
P.S.: I'm asking in good faith, I think it's a complex situation, I'm not saying that firing the manager is the best course of action, but it does seem like one way to solve the issue, so I'm actually curious to hear pros/cons and alternatives.
If the manager continued to treat me professionally and fairly, why should I have a problem with their personal opinions? I'm not there to debate social issues, I'm there to do a job and make a living. As long as I can continue to do that, what does it matter what someone is thinking?
If you let your work and motivation for your own career get derailed by people's unexpressed opinions (that you went out of your way to hunt down for--what? to find something to be offended about?), that is something you should work on.
It’s not complex. It’s none of your business what people think about you. You might be shocked to find out that most people think some pretty fundamentally incompatible beliefs and look pretty harshly down on people outside of their realm of beliefs.
Look at the stats on how many Muslims in the US ideally want Sharia as national law. Look at how many Christians desperately try to make the US Christian roots official and foam at the mouth when someone says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”.
Everyone thinks about half the other people are dog shit. That’s how the US works. It’s a thin veneer of camaraderie over a seething dissonance underneath.
> might even think you're tainted and doomed to eternal condemnation.
This is pretty much literally the case with most strongly religious people and how they feel about non-religious or other religions. Shall we preemptively fire all Muslims, Christians, and Jews just to be safe?
What is your argument here? That your co-workers are obliged to only have positive feelings towards you?
Yes, that would suck. And yes, you would feel bad about the whole situation. But unless they have actually victimized you in some manner (say, this blog actually identifies you, or they're actively hostile to you at work) then no, you aren't entitled to any action against them.
I think some people are thinking, well what is done outside of work shouldn't have work repercussions. Except I think that's not the full extent of the issue.
The problem here is that something done outside of work is making coworkers uncomfortable at work. That is now a work problem. The work environment is no longer making everyone feel safe and welcomed to perform their job, some will now feel uncomfortable doing so.
I think some individuals might say, well that wouldn't make me uncomfortable, and good for them, in that case there'd be no problem. But it's also clear that some people will feel uncomfortable, and that's a real problem for the employer.
So I'm curious what solutions people see to it?
I feel like you need to choose whose going to "suck it up" and "deal with it". It could be either the people who learned of their hateful coworker/manager need to suck it up and continue to work with them. So you tell them, sorry, we won't do anything about it, suck it up or quit. Or you choose to tell the hateful coworker/manager to suck it up, apologize, show regret and stop doing what they do or quit.
Ideally, you can like rearrange your teams to seperate them and not have those people work together anymore, but it can be just a matter of time till the new coworkers of that hateful person also find out about their publicly available views. So as an employer, you need to decide if that's worth the trouble and you might still want to tell them, you can't publicize that stuff anymore, suck it up or quit.
I don't like any of these, since they all have a "loser". Personally, I think it's about what exactly was the source of "discomfort" and if it's reasonable or not. Which means it's probably a case by case thing.
I also recon though that drawing that line can be challenging. For example, maybe I publicize about how wreck less, dangerous and vile gun carriers are, and I think they should all be jailed. Or maybe I publicize the same about anti-vax or anti-maskers.
Personally again, I think if you publicly attack a group of people, and you work with that same group, I feel you got to suck it up. Find yourself a job not around them or stop hating on them publicly. This would apply to my example of a person hating on anti-maskers or on gun carriers as well.
But I also recon even there, drawing the line is hard. For example, it's reasonable to want to publicly discuss if mask wearing should be enforced or not, or if gun carrying should be banned or not with a "common good" argument. Similarly someone might believe in a "common good" argument about preventing teenager from taking puberty suppressors, etc. And you'd want to allow these discussions. And this is where the thin line shows up, could that make a trans worker feel uncomfortable knowing their coworker argues that puberty suppressors should be regulated more heavily?
My stance right now is that I think it is a complicated problem, but the status quo is not neutral, it takes a side that says, the hateful person is never the one to "suck it up", and I don't know that that's any better. So I still think the best thing is to look at these on a case by case basis and the employer needs to use their best judgement, and that means sometimes they might get it wrong, but it should be better than always siding with the hater as the status quo would have it.
I agree that it's a complex issue with a lot of nuance that often gets discarded, and that there's a judgement call to be made on who needs to alter their expectations between the person taking the action and the person feeling uncomfortable.
I think for myself that line is usually determined by who is more active and more specific in the situation, combined with the severity of the material. Some probably-poorly-thought-out off-the-top-of-my-head examples:
- If someone's sending objectionable material to a coworker, they're clearly out of line (active > passive)
- If someone's stalking a coworker online trying to find something to be offended about, they're clearly out of line (active > passive)
- If someone's saying mildly mean things online about a large group in general, and a coworker of that group stalks them and finds the mean things, I'd usually side with the former (active+nonspecific < active+specific)
- If someone's saying horrendous things online about a large group in general, and a coworker of that group stalks them and finds the mean things, I'd usually side with the latter (active+nonspecific+awful > active+specific)
- If someone's writing explicit rape fantasies about a coworker and publishing them online, and the coworker stumbles on them, I'd definitely side with the latter (active+specific+awful >> passive+nonspecific)
Ya, I agree with all those. Any active both ways is kind of creepy. But if it just came to be known, that's where I think things get grey.
Like, I don't really know how to reconcile the thought of someone who actively, but outside of work, is taking a stance against certain people, and then goes to work and pretends to have no issue with having a coworker of that same group. Seems hypocrite, and also feels impossible for me to believe they truly have no issue, it sounds more like they have no choice, but if they did, they'd immediately take actions against them at work as well.
Similarly, anyone "looking for dirt" about their coworkers actively, that's hostile in its own way. And if people overblow things, for example, maybe someone is into some weird fiction with female sex slaves, ya it's weird, but it can be a fantasy, it doesn't mean that they advocate for women to become men pleaser and have their rights relinquished, in fact, politically they might be a big feminist, and yet that could be a weird kink fantasy they're simultaneously into. A person who'd blow it out of proportion and try to get them fired for it is probably holding a grudge against people of their kind in a way as well, trying to get dirt and paint them for a scumbag where in actuality their actions could be generous, kind and supporting of all women.
To me, both these extremes create a toxic work environment, and I don't want either as a coworker or manager. Thankfully, I think most people are neither of these, but we only hear of the bad apples, and we tend to immediately rally for the side where we feel the more likely to be characterized as. I was trying not to do that and see all sides.
> The problem here is that something done outside of work is making coworkers uncomfortable at work. That is now a work problem.
No, it's not a work problem. The mistaken assumption here is that it is everyone else's job to ensure that you feel comfortable all the time. It's not. Your feelings are your problem.
If there is a tangible harm that someone is doing to you, like paying you less money than everyone else, denying you promotions that you are qualified for or something like, that, then that is something that can be addressed. People feel uncomfortable all the time for all sorts of reasons. It's not other people's responsibility to address it.
Maybe you're a telemarketer and you feel uncomfortable talking to people on the phone. Too bad. Either get over it or find a different job.
Maybe you "feel uncomfortable" working around people of different races. Too bad, suck it up.
"I feel uncomfortable" is just one blip of information. It is not an ultimate trump card that automatically commands everything else in the world to conform around it.
I disagree with you, as an employer it's very relevant. Why would I bother with someone that makes others uncomfortable, I can find other people to replace them in their role, it'll help my team work better and my business be more competitive.
Similarly, someone who's hypersensitive might also be difficult to work with and be an issue and I might want to find someone with a bit more resilience.
So clearly, both end of the spectrum can be an issue. It's very reasonable for me to want to staff my business with people who make others comfortable and don't have overt hateful public engagements, which can also tolerate the relevant heat that comes with the job.
> I feel uncomfortable" is just one blip of information. It is not an ultimate trump card that automatically commands everything else in the world to conform around it
If you've read all I wrote and understood this, then I miserably failed to express myself it seems. Since my take is that you have to evaluate things on a case by case basis, specifically because it is not a trump card, but it's also not an irrelevant data point. The employee that keeps getting: "they make me uncomfortable" as feedback from others is probably a nuisance to have on my staff. And now I need to evaluate why that is, is it truly that they are being demoralizing and unpleasant, or is it others who are hypersensitive. That's the case by case. And now, personally, if you've a public Twitter that constantly bash on women and suggests their rightful place is at home raising children and cooking for their husbands. And I have a bunch of women on my staff that are doing a great job, and they tell me that this other guy at work makes them uncomfortable and affects the quality of their work in turn from creating a bad environment, well ya, seems rational that it'll be to that guy that I'll tell to suck it up, and not to all my other women employees.
In practical terms, an employee who has such a highly misogynistic Twitter feed is probably also doing things at work that are actionable and make people feel uncomfortable.
My point is that the Twitter feed (or whatever outside thing) is not, in and of itself, an actionable thing for a workplace to act on. Like if the person were perfectly cordial and professional at work, but also had this Twitter feed. First, how would you even know about it in that scenario? Why are you going out of your way to seek out and obsess over things that make you upset and deteriorate the quality of your work? How and why would you even let that affect the quality of your work? Like, imagine if an employee said "I can't do work today, I watched a really upsetting movie last night". Seriously? The impression I would get from that is that this is an emotionally immature person who does not know how to manage their feelings, not that I need to bend over backwards to make them feel safe.
Why are you using an outdated example (blogs), instead of extremely relevant & modern ones like Twitter and TikTok?
Your scenario is basically describing a guy demanding that his coworker be fired because 90% of the content on her social media channels consist of some variation of "men are trash".
Hum, no reason in particular, I mean replace blog with Twitter or TikTok, or really any public sphere. In my scenario what matters is just that you learn that your manager hates your kind and is active in publicizing that hate. Would that not make you feel uncomfortable going back to work as their subordinate?
I'm not talking about firing them, I'm just asking if you'd now feel uncomfortable working with them?
This just doesn’t work in practice. If you speak up about anyone at work posting hateful content about men or white people, you will be ignored and are likely to receive disciplinary action yourself.
Even worse so, if you complain about misandrist words like “mansplaining” or “techbros” being used AT work, nothing will happen. This is purely one sided and makes workplaces extremely toxic.
I can not comment on specific events, is a really good expression. Even if you give a detailed explanation chances are I am going to see too many holes in it, just by coming from a different perspective. I've been a techbro at times, even though I'm a convinced feminist, but I also like to hear when my action are experienced that way. So I should not comment on your situation, I can just say that there are examples where complaints about that should at least taken lightly.
>In my scenario what matters is just that you learn that your manager hates your kind and is active in publicizing that hate. Would that not make you feel uncomfortable going back to work as their subordinate?
you'll need to give me details about how this manager would actually treat me in this hypothetical situation
if my manager constantly tweeted content that made it seem like they hated men in tech, but treated me fairly, why should I care about what they post on twitter?
> never mention their religion at work, that does not create a hostile work environment
"Never mention" is a bit vague/weak.
If you wouldn't be able to pick the one colleague proselytising from amongst the others, likely(1) they're not creating a hostile work environment.
E.g., a colleague that never mentions the KKK, but has their memorabilia all over his desk, is dropped off by hooded, white-dress wearing buddies etc., is poisoning the work atmosphere.
(1) excepting weird cases like a colleague intentionally gaslighting others.
For a growing percentage of the workplace, knowing that a coworker has a socially unacceptable opinion is creating a hostile work environment.
I completely understand where you're coming from, but you're literally wrong. If you don't want to be shunned from society, don't be identified as someone who does socially unacceptable things.
I'm not super keen on how this is all shaking out either, but it's pretty obvious how to avoid problems at this point.
They aren't literally wrong; we've covered this ground when deciding the role religion plays in society and made some excellent decisions that we don't want to lose.
People who claim to have superior moral principles do not get to enforce them in the workplace. Organisations that rally around moral principles don't get to decide who does and does not enjoy employment.
Intransigent squeaky wheels do not get to decide what "hostile work environment" means. It has to mean hostility in the work environment. If it comes to mean "disagrees with my politics" then society is in for a world of hurt.
"Socially unacceptable" is the litmus test? So, regardless of what the majority of your coworkers think, if you express a contrary opinion that they don't agree is acceptable, you have created a hostile environment.
"If you don't want to be shunned from society, don't be identified as someone who does socially unacceptable things," warned the Holy Inquisition and every Puritan minister.
Now with tables turned, not few people gloat when people complain getting a taste of their own medicine.
While I understand the short term gratification, I find this dangerous long term.
For all the failures of the old norms and methods, at least there was a way to formally abjure your antisocial beliefs and get accepted back into society.
Today not only we didn't yet develop such a code, but we also leave a permanent trace of our past blunders and misplaced allegeances which are now permanently associated with our identity.
Precedents of this scenario create anxiety in a lot of moderate people, most who are even agreeing with the majority of the zeitgeist.
Regular people may not be vocal about it, so we get a perception that now only KKK folks are whining about freedom of speech.
I understand that a growing number of people are confused about what hostile work environment means. That still does not change the meaning as the law defines it, nor should we change it to accommodate those people.
As a practical matter, you'd have to be insane to be espousing very unpopular views under the same name you use for employment.
If I do something outside of work in a public way, and a significant percentage of coworkers find it objectionable, it will shrink my professional network and make building relationships more difficult. Nobody wants to work with someone they find morally repulsive. There's no legal recourse available for this.
Also, from my coworkers' point of view, I'm the one causing the workplace to be unpleasant, and they might start a campaign to have me removed.
From my employer's point of view, I've done some action outside of work that's caused a problem, and now we have a problem at work. That means I've caused a problem at work.
If I can be terminated without legal risk, my employer can terminate me to satisfy the other coworkers.
If I can't be terminated legally, then I can be sidelined, put on a PIP, and eventually forced out of the organization. There's unlikely to be any legal recourse available to me if this is done correctly with good documentation.
Maybe employment shouldn't work this way, but it does.
Yes, as a practical matter, there are many injustices past and present that people put up with for the sake of their own well-being. Unfortunately, the injustices only stop when we stop putting up with them.
I think there are several problems in how things are framed and the language we use. This is important because conflict resolution depends on it.
1) "creating a hostile work environment" means different things to different people which makes it hard to pin down.
2) Person Y claims "Person X made them feel unsafe", which can't be proven since there are no outside witnesses to how people "feel". Maybe I just disliked the person for other reasons and this gave me an opportunity to get at them.
3) People will get offended easily for billions of reasons depending on what their believes are (especially in a heavily polarized society).
4) Solidarity: my friend/coworker who I like claims X makes them feel unsafe so I believe them and stand in solidarity with them because I know them better than I know X. This can easily be turned into "I don't feel safe" in order to get back at them because the moment you have an additional "witness" it will get harder to question the event with every person who says they also feel this way. It becomes safer to just stand with them or to say you weren't there but very risky to stand up for the (alleged) perpetrator.
There is a saying "I can't change what people say, but I can change my reaction and how I feel about them, and whether I allow it to affect me".
If the framing/language requires me to trust that the other party is truthful (but which I don't) then solving the resolving the conflict is impossible.
Personally I dislike the woke movement because I come from a different time where we were told to settle things by ourselves and the person screaming or appealing to the higher authority was not applauded for doing so but considered a coward. This had also many problems but they were not better or worse than what we do today.
When I see my friends bring up their children and protecting them not only from physical harm but also insulating them from the feeling of offense, telling them it's their right never to have a feeling that they don't like and blame the other party the moment they do, so they never experience outrage and how to deal with it - then it becomes clear (to me) why so many kids have turned into idiots. If we then give these people virtual/digital technology and rob them of any real type of social connections and a chance to resolve conflict IRL it's a recipe for exactly this kind of disaster.
The fact that you keep giving these watered down examples of what people do on their own time that hardly anyone takes issue with ("going door-to-door proselytizing on the weekends") only further proves my point.
I mean, suppose Chaos Monkey (again, I haven't read it, so I don't have an opinion) said "Man, the US was so much better when we had slavery" or "This country has all been downhill ever since women got the right to vote." Would you still be making this same argument? I mean this seriously: go ahead and respond with a truly egregious, offensive example and see if you still want to argue "they shouldn't be fired for what they do in their own time".
Again, my whole point is that I think what you really believe is that the offense really just wasn't that bad (and, indeed, maybe it wasn't, I don't know), not that anything out of work is off limits.
The fact that you have to come up with hyper-extreme examples to make this seem reasonable proves my point.
Say Bob thinks women shouldn't have the right to vote. But Bob is also kind, courteous, respectful, and professional to every real woman he interacts with at work. What is it that you think is being gained by firing Bob? If Bob starts harassing women, sure, fire his ass. But as long as he acts civilly, Bob can think whatever he wants in his own head. He can even write it down and if someone wants to publish it, good for Bob. As long as he comes to work and does his job and gets along with everyone, what is the problem? It is absolutely insane that people here are arguing that your workplace should be able to police your thoughts.
We can all disagree with opinions other people have. That's not a valid enough reason to fire someone. Suppose one of your co-workers is a die-hard vegan, should he be able to get you fired you because you think there's nothing wrong with eating meat?
I keep giving extreme examples because they DO prove my point: what we're really debating is what the line is regarding how offensive someone's behavior is, not whether it's done at work or not.
Because again, you keep giving examples that disprove your point:
> It is absolutely insane that people here are arguing that your workplace should be able to police your thoughts.
I'm certainly not arguing that at all. You're free to think whatever you want.
> He can even write it down and if someone wants to publish it, good for Bob.
You almost make it sound like "Bob" dropped an essay on the ground and someone else happened to walk by, pick it up and publish it. Because in the real world if Bob wrote a paperback titled "Women are Bad for Democracy and They Shouldn't Be Able to Vote", did press junkets about this book, and actively encouraged people to buy it, then yes, he'd get fired by pretty much every company in this country and very few people would have an issue with that.
> Because in the real world if Bob wrote a paperback titled "Women are Bad for Democracy and They Shouldn't Be Able to Vote", did press junkets about this book, and actively encouraged people to buy it, then yes, he'd get fired by pretty much every company in this country and very few people would have an issue with that.
I would have an issue with that. This is me, right here, having an issue with that. Again, remember, Bob is unfailingly civil to all his co-workers and clients and what-have-you. He does his job, at least adequately. Why are you firing him? Because he has a bad opinion?
If other employees want to set up debates with Bob outside of work, or on their own time, picket bookstores where his book being sold, they're free to do that. As long as they can act civil at work and focus on selling plumbing supplies or whatever it is we do, who cares?
You are arguing that having an unpopular opinion is grounds to deprive someone of the ability to make a living. To feed and shelter themselves. I know you think this power would only ever be used in the most egregiously, obviously bad situations, but historically that is not the case. It is not the case right here in this real scenario. It is not something we, as a society, should tolerate. As soon as it is allowed, it gets immediately abused. People need to be able to think, and say, whatever they want. It is only actions that warrant punishment.
What if the employee is into domination role playing in the bedroom. Should we fire such employees in the case they brought their interest into the work place and created a toxic environment?
I could imagine how any generic law that tried to address this would break horrible in all the multiple ways people have opinion, views and hobbies that if brought to work would create a toxic environment and be grounds for firing. Many would be in direct conflict with anti-discrimination laws.
I'm not sure what you're arguing. If someone is into domination role playing and "brought that interest into the work place" (not quite sure what that means) then there is a very, very good chance they will get fired, and indeed many many people have been fired for unwelcome sexual discussions at work.
Should we fire every such person who is or even has been into domination role playing, not because they have brought it to work, but because they might do it at some time in the future.
The person who got fired by apple did not bring his book to work. He did not talk about the book at work. The action for which he was fired occurred before he was even employed.
Put it in an other way, are people who is into domination role playing suitable to be in a leader role? Can they represent the diverse employees at work? Is the world views expressed in that sexual behavior acceptable in a public figure?
> But what if the employee had been in the KKK, and had argued for white supremacy, and that other races were lazy and poor workers? Would you still think an employer would be out of bounds for firing that employee?
I'm going to go in a different direction here and say maybe we shouldn't fire former KKK members if they aren't causing problems at work.
Look, these people need to eat. Either they work somewhere, or they get welfare. At least with the former they're doing something productive with their time other than... whatever a white supremacist might do with their free time.
Also, if we're firing former KKK members, we're not really leaving them a path towards deradicalization. If they can't integrate with society and get a normal job even if they renounce the KKK, then they have a strong disincentive to leave their hateful community.
If you are a former KKK member who truly wishes to renounce your former beliefs and reform, you should be aware of what an uphill battle it will be to rejoin normal society after espousing such abhorrent hateful beliefs. You have to be aware that some people will never be able to forgive you for that, and that you will lose social and financial opportunities based on your past actions.
As someone who participates in the hiring process, and who works with a large contingent of non-white people, I could not justify hiring a former KKK member unless they showed serious, ongoing efforts to rectify their past. For the same reason I would never hire a former Auschwitz guard if I worked with many Jewish people.
Actions have consequences, and allying yourself with a racist organization has lifelong repercussions.
I am a minority hated by the KKK (more than one, actually).
The condition I specified, "if they aren't causing problems at work" is important. If they come in wearing a KKK t-shirt or espousing racist views at work, of course they should be fired. But if they're respectful at work, how would I even know they had been a KKK member?
It's not about what they deserve. I'm not looking to let them off easy. It's a matter of pragmatism. If they can't get employment, the alternative is we have former (or current) white supremacists living off tax payer dollars with too much free time on their hands and no path towards deradicalization. And I think that's more dangerous to society.
With how much we know about implicit bias causing so many problems in equity for things like promotions and opportunity in the workplace, having someone publicly espouse explicit bias should come with some consequences. The glass ceiling exists.
You’re saying it shouldn’t be based on an out of context fragment, and I agree but often in those situations in context can mean the same thing. Case by case for sure but if you’re saying white supremacist/chauvinistic talking points online and you’re in any position of responsibility, people who are not white or male are justified in not feeling like they’ll get a fair shake.
There's "feeling" you're getting a fair shake, and then there's actually getting a fair shake. If you're going to destroy someone's livelihood, it should be for something they actually do, not for what someone imagines they might hypothetically do.
Turns out those feelings are true more often than not and there are statistics to back it up. Not that ones feelings is enough to ruin someone’s livelihood, but sorry if you’re responsible for people’s career development in 2021 there shouldn’t be any reasonable questions about your being actually biased against groups. It’s against the law even.
May be talking past each other here, but I’m thinking of a scenario where a person puts out writing that shows mysogynistic or racist/homophobic views and then is responsible for giving performance reviews, or hiring/firing people.
Bias is hard to prove in the moment as there can always be other factors to point to, but easy to see in statistics of who gets hired and promoted.
Right, my point is that it's the statistics that matter, not circumstantial evidence like opinions they expressed in the past.
If there's a murder in the workplace, sure, maybe the employee who writes murder mysteries on the weekend did it. But you'd still need actual evidence to convict them.
We're not talking about convicting them though, we're talking about whether they can continue being a part of the workplace without making others feel threatened.
If you're black, and you know that one of your managers is a member of the KKK, there's absolutely zero chance you'll feel that they are treating you fairly. There's also nearly zero chance they will treat you fairly.
The fact of the matter is that work life does not exist in a vacuum. People don't come to work and pretend that things outside of work don't exist. They are also not obligated to treat their coworkers as simple cogs in a machine. This is why things people do outside of work can reflect upon their work relationships. Expecting the opposite is just naive.
Feelings are often wrong. That's why we don't make important decisions that affect people's lives based on feelings. We make them on facts and evidence.
It is everyone's job to temper their feelings with reason. Your feelings are not an absolute truth that must be obeyed no matter what.
I don’t think that’s what the person you’re responding to is saying, and it seems like you’re saying it as if they’re talking about the primacy of feelings over facts. It’s a bit of a straw man.
Take the example they made of a KKK member - should they be trusted to make those decisions based on facts and evidence?
In their example, the manager is already employed there. You don't have to trust them. You can look at the decisions they've made and see whether they made them fairly. If not, then go ahead and fire them.
But "I feel they might be unfair", when all the evidence shows that they have in fact been fair, is not a valid reason to fire someone.
Glad your life is working out for you and your experience leads you to believe in a just world. Discrimination is hard to prove. Having someone even tell you they are biased doesn’t seem to meet your bar. I hope you never have to experience it.
That quote you pulled about there being no causal relationship is from a list of 4 possible reasons they didn't find a relationship. That's not a claim they were making. It's one of a few proposed explanations for the data.
If by material, you mean less than d=0.3, then you appear to be correct.
It's gonna be really difficult to estimate reliable effects from a meta-analysis of such disparate studies, which is normally the case in psychology.
Anyway, it would make sense that cognitive interventions are more effective, as this would suggest that a lot of implicit biases represent pre-conscious reactions (which is interesting in and of itself).
Don't worry, if you read even the just article he linked, you'll realize that the quote he pulled is out of a list of multiple reasons their metastudy did not come up with conclusive results. There's a list of possibilities, and there not being a correlation is a possibility, but due to the nature of metastudies, they are not willing to make that statement.
I think that in an advanced society people should be able to work with people that maybe think you are going to hell after you die for not worshipping the correct God. We don't discriminate based on religion, at least we shouldn't by law. People by the way usually leave religion outside work. I think there is consensus this is a good thing but it seems some people don't want to extend this principle that works so well to other aspects of life. Cargo cult is not just for programming.
I have worked with people coming from all the political spectrum and I prefer to evaluate their professional competence based on their acts, not their words. I have by the way seen misogynistic people change their opinion about women and homophobes change their opinion about homosexuals after some time being in the same company. Alienating people will just keep them in their bubble.
And I'm completely sure of something: the company may have fired the guy that wrote the book but what they really wanted was to fire the people campaigning for it.
> You'd need to convince workers to not believe that someone who says sexist stuff in a book is going to cause a problem for them.
This resonated with me. Anecdotally, I sometimes wonder if small, unpleasant interactions (e.g. getting talked over multiple times in a meeting) have anything to do with my gender (I'm the only woman on my team) or are accidental/benign. I usually assume they're benign because I like my colleagues and they haven't otherwise seemed to think I'm incompetent or weak. It would be hard to give someone like Antonio García Martínez the benefit of the doubt and I'd constantly be on guard, specifically because he's already established that he thinks Bay Area women are weak and "generally full of shit". It would start off as an exhausting work environment even on day 1.
That makes sense to me. If I was hired to work for someone and they were posting stuff on Twitter like, "<my group> people are all pieces of crap," or any other negative generalization, I too would probably sense animus in stuff that I normally let slide at work. I believe that this understanding is at least in large part the source of the protests that led to him being shown the door.
What if he said that privately and you somehow found out. Would it be OK? Because a huge amount of people say similar things privately among their friends and the world keeps turning.
What you describe sounds more like being the victim of gossip, which is probably a far more common and serious problem in workplaces. Should gossip be banned?
The user imgabe has been doing a good job explaining this. But the question here is not someone treats you poorly and you find evidence that they are prejudicial against you. Imagine the converse, suppose Antonio actually treated you the best amongst your team. Should the others be fired for being worse than a “known” sexist? Known in quotes because if they say one thing but act in the opposite manner, I’m of the opinion actions speak louder than words.
Your statements come across as paranoia and looking for a problem where one likely doesn’t exist.
As a white guy should I examine every interaction to see if there are racial or gender undertones? If my African American boss tells me not to be late, is it because I’m white? Or my female boss says my work is subpar, is it because I’m a man? No, that’s silly without evidence.
And Martinez’s statement was: 1) fiction, 2) satire/humor, 3) taking place in a post-apocalyptic world.
Thus, the only evidence you could garner from his writing is he may judge you as “worthless” if it’s a post-apocalyptic world where he needs you to fight zombies.
Is that a problem when he asks you to fill out an excel after you get your free catered lunch at Apple?
It might be silly without evidence. The threshold for silliness would become a lot lower if there were a history of systemic problems and extensive evidence of similar scenarios in the present.
> So if in another company a man discriminated against a woman, it increases the probability that the same thing is happening to the OP?
This is clearly not what anyone here is saying you should really take a moment to reevaluate your position. We're not talking about one man in one company but a historical and systemic suppression.
Additionally, you'll notice that the person you are responding to does not act or treat their colleagues differently, only that they consider where these noticed actions come from.
You would never be able to hire a felon for anything since on that theory, the felon had done something outside of work that being a criminal act, might scare someone at work who had to work around them, even though their behavior at work was perfect.
I think there are some types of felons that probably don't get hired as managers after release, no matter how long it's been since their crime. For exactly the reason we're discussing. Who in their right mind would put a man who had been convicted of rape in charge of women? How much potential liability would the company be taking on if he were to happen to harm one of his reports? It would be astronomical. Who would hire a convicted embezzler as a CFO? I mean I'm sure it happens but I can only imagine it's the exception rather than the rule.
What if it was assault and battery or grand theft? Wouldn't someone feel justified that they were going to be punched in the face or have their phone stolen while around the person thus creating a hostile work environment? In this case, it was something someone said outside of work which is a whole other level of paranoia.
Are felons convicted of grand theft frequently able to find employ in banks, jewelers, or in other places where valuables might go missing? Or are they largely shut out of those industries based on their criminal histories?
Probably depends on the situation. Felony assault is serious business. It's normally not just a punch in the face. If someone committed a felony assault against a coworker while on the job, I expect it would be hard for them to get hired anywhere ever again. If it was against, say, a parent, or someone who was a rival in a love triangle, then perhaps . . . although probably never in a role like bouncer or security guard.
They absolutely have not “paid their debt to society” unless they can undo the felony. You can’t pay back the debt of raping someone or stabbing them or killing them. Even if they let you out of jail.
Then why do we let them out of prison at all? It's certainly safer for us law abiding citizens if all the criminals are locked up forever. Even if there are a few false positives.
By that logic, anyone who is proven then to be involved willingly or not in the false accusation and wrongful imprisonment of anyone should be punished by the harshest means physically possible. Absolutely no mercy.
Willfully? Absolutely. I think willfully trying to get someone convicted of a crime should carry 3x the punishment of that crime. It’s the deliberate misuse of state power to pervert the course of justice.
This is a pretty vague statement especially as OP mentioned fiction. Not some book espousing his political views.
You can pick most of the great authors and find a character or scene that was obscene, but it would be unfair to cherry pick 2-3 sentences, post them on twitter and pretend this represented them.
> This is a pretty vague statement especially as OP mentioned fiction. Not some book espousing his political views.
The book in question is a memoir by Antonio Garcia Martinez from what I’ve read. While there’s an argument to be made that even memoir and non-fiction are in a way fiction, this wasn’t an outright work of fiction. It contained misogynistic statements you’d expect to be true to how the author thinks because of the context of the work.
Unreliable narrators are a known literary concept for a reason. Combine that with, isn't all fiction reflective of the author and thus narrative in some capacity? And you're about halfway there.
We're talking about a particular person and a particular book -- Chaos Monkeys -- and it was non-fiction, and a memoir. Fiction I would imagine would be given more leeway, but I guess we'll have to see when it comes up.
From what I've read/heard, the "sexist" stuff is way out of context. Even if it's not, there's no need to pre-charge someone with a crime because they might have opinions you don't like. IF he did something to create a hostile workspace (which from what I've heard of the guy's character is super unlikely), then that's when something should be done.
Why is it acceptable for people who espouse currently popular racist ideas (e.g. the anti-white training put on by Coca Cola) to remain employed in your paradigm?
Do you carve out an exception where it’s acceptable to cause problems for people as long as they aren’t a minority?
>but claiming sexist views is going to be a problem for you whether you do it at work or elsewhere because of how laws around hostile work environments and notice work.
Then that would be an equivalent to congress creating "anti-sexist"(in reality a particular interpretation of what sexist is) speech-regulating laws, since it automatically bars anyone who expressed something incompatible with the court-mandated speech standard from employment. It also in-effect regulates religious speech, since many religions are sexist according to the critical feminist jurisprudence.
I'm almost more disgusted with the context. Even the self-sufficient woman he claims to be attracted to isn't described as a person. No thoughts or feelings or personality. Just a physically description and a chance to make it known that he had sex.
The Apple employee letter shared a number of quotes. Now, I'm not going to debate whether they are or they aren't sexist. That seems to be something that people look at through their own prism, and it doesn't seem productive to try to convince one way or the other. What matters is that enough Apple employees felt that those statements were sexist, which is an objective fact that would also be very relevant if there were to be a later lawsuit surrounding this person's at work conduct.
Apple employees objectively claimed to feel that the statements were sexist.
I don’t think we can objectively distinguish someone’s claimed feelings from, say, their getting caught up in the fervor of a movement and attempting to persecute an ideological opponent, or persecuting someone chosen rather arbitrarily.
I think in the future, people will start to embrace pseudonymous accounts. People will not share any opinions with their real identities. But they'll do it with their pseudonymous accounts.
This can go further than sharing opinions. People's livelihood will be based on their pseudonymous accounts. It happens already in cryptocurrencies projects. Some accounts who work in these projects are pseudonymous accounts. They can accept payment via cryptocurrencies.
This is also what people do in autocratic regimes. Effectively we have created a "democratic autocracy" by means of allowing mobs of people to steamroll people online and destroy their reputations.
Fwiw, 'autocracy' means "a country, state, or society governed by one person with absolute power," and has nothing to do with any of this. There's no 'auto' here, no governing, and any power involved is far from absolute...
Freedom of speech doors not mean freedom from consequences for what one says. If someone says shitheel things, their 'reputation' is allowed to suffer...
Well just think about all the times in history where religious culture has the upper hand, or anti-communism, or communism. To me it doesn’t matter what the dogma of the day is, the behavior of loud elements in society shouting down free expression, or unorthodox thought, is pretty repugnant. It’s not as simple as saying society is just expressing displeasure. That’s fine, but I think we can all see a different beast rising up here in the US lately that is historically recognizable. Read the opening of The Three Body Problem - that shit was real, and those social movements are a liability for any culture as it’s part of human behavior. There’s nothing exceptional about the US that prevents our society from falling victim to political cults.
The old political cults are still there? And still causing problems? They've just learned to be slightly less visible about it. Brigham Young university will still "cancel" you for not being straight: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/traumatic-whiplash-b...
> Read the opening of The Three Body Problem
Yes, the cultural revolution was bad. Revolutions tend to be massive over corrections which arise because there's no peaceful way of resolving a situation and they know that in the event of a counter revolution they will all be executed. This is why Fabianism is a good idea.
Well, no, I absolutely don't see it. The cultural revolution was launched and enforced by Mao, who had absolute control over a very violent regime, about twenty years into the era of Chinese communism.
There's aspects of an oligarch here too. Relatively few have the money to successfully sue for genuine damage to reputation should false accusations also be made.
Maybe their reputations weren’t all that impressive to begin with. In any case, “allowing” is doing some heavy lifting there. No one is allowing anything. This is just how a society with mostly free expression works. Are people not supposed to express their dissatisfaction with other people? If I don’t like something, and enough other people don’t like it, such that an organization responds in a way to appease us, should there be a law to prevent that? What are you suggesting exactly, that no one should complain about another person? That organizations shouldn’t appease people? Or should they just appease you when you disagree with a “mob”?
> If I don’t like something, and enough other people don’t like it, such that an organization responds in a way to appease us, should there be a law to prevent that?
Like when certain people didn't like other people sitting at the front of buses?
Ignoring context is a thing I guess. But can you imagine if being an asshole was a protected class? The world would be a terrible place if the loudest, most obnoxious people never faced consequences.
For now... How long will it be until this form of authoritarianism consolidates? The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
And as others have alluded to, which I’ll state more bluntly, I’m sick and tired of people feeling like they need to comment on my morals/lifestyle. Especially at work. I literally had someone tell me I shouldn’t have pictures on my phone of me taking my kids fishing the other day, because someone might see them and get offended and report it HR. Pics taken on my phone... wit my family... during the weekend.... and I need to be worried about HR? W.T. everloving F?!
Imagine a society similar to the internet where people roam hiding their identities while doing whatever comes to their head. We have great times ahead, in Mars. I’m seriously starting to consider buying those tickets after all.
"He wrote some stuff and somebody didn't like it" isn't a good faith description of what actually happened. I also don't know what it has to do with democracy.
I would argue that this has always been the case, it has never been uncommon to be fired for political activities done outside of work. Perhaps you're only noticing it now that people who think and act like you are experiencing it?
California is definitely not a right-to-work state.[0] It does have at-will employment, just like almost every other state. But Apple employees are free to unionize at any time and, if successful, require dues for unionized employees.
In fact, if CA is so friendly to unions and big tech companies are so progressive, why are none of the big tech companies unionized?
Most people like yourself are publishing pseudonymously.
If you are building your personal brand with your writing and can’t publish pseudonymously, then maybe don’t, until you’re free enough to not need the Apples of the world.
I haven't figured out why more people don't use pseudonyms in this era?
Of all times in history, this seems like the time to use a nom de plume?
I haven't figured out if it's ego preventing people from anonymity, or they think their name will eventually get out there---so why not happily sign my name to my work?
I do get it that publishing has vastly changed over the years.
It seems like the most talented writers will never get a book if they don't publish themselfs?
While the guy whom gets the most internet publicity, for any reason, gets a book deal?
A lot of publishing is for building ones personal brand so you can get jobs, speaking engagements, invitations to cool parties, etc. can’t really do that psuedonymously.
You joke about struggle sessions but that seems to be the direction we’re headed in, just using different words.
I’ve been in HR sessions where “self-criticism” is a core part of the training. All we need to do now is start throwing around terms like “counter-revolutionary ideas”. We’ve already started to label ideas as “dangerous” because they “foment discord”.
Long form article, but struggle sessions are actually being done in academia now. Coming soon to an institution near you. 25 years ago we used to laugh about how batshit looney Evergreen was, now they’re still on the fringe but what we used to laugh at has become the norm in academia. This is not the path of progress. As CS Lewis said, when you determine you’re going the wrong direction, progress is actually turning around.
>There is nothing to suggest the man acted improperly at work.
That's where you are wrong. He wrote some things he genuinely believed in, and its reasonable to assume that his actions will follow similar lines.
Would I want a self proclaimed nazi to work with me? Hell no. Would I want a misogynist to work with me? No.
It is not reasonable to assume. I may have different views about some traditions and customs but I may also understand that my views are not shared/accepted and act by the accepted norms even if I think they should change. "When in Rome…".
Thoughtcrime moving from fiction to reality looks very scary.
Political beliefs are a protected class in practically every first world country, including the US. If an employee was a member of a fascist party it'd quite literally be illegal to fire them on that basis.
No, political beliefs are a protected class in practically every first world country, but excluding the US; in most states (excluding, IIRC, California - which matters a lot here) it would be legal for a private employer to fire an employee for being a member of the Democrat or Republican party.
The key employee anti-discrimination law is the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits employers from discriminating against applicants and employees on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin - but not political affiliation.
I don't understand the point, all of the firms mentioned in the OP are headquartered and have the majority of their staff in California, where it's illegal to fire for political beliefs.
State, federal or Civil Rights Act or not, it's illegal.
California Labor Code 1101 and 1102 LC expressly forbids it, including retaliatory actions (which is a much lower bar than firing).
In California, being passed up for promotion or being discriminated against in ANY way as a result of your political beliefs or activities is illegal.
Whether or not it’s strictly illegal to, for example, blacklist people from their professions for being suspected members of the Communist Party, at some point we agreed it was a bad thing to do so.
I guess the question now is, was there a general principle behind that, or are we just cool with Stalinism now?
>> If an employee was a member of a fascist party it'd quite literally be illegal to fire them on that basis.
I think the moment company starts taking heat on internet/talk shows/etc. for "employing fascists" that employee will get booted out for poor performance/HR complaints/staff cuts/etc. Or somehow he will resign himself ("no-no, we didn't force him out" company spokesman said in a statement).
I don’t think that is really true. The government can’t suppress speech due to political disagreements with it but private individuals (and “legal individuals” aka corporations) can discriminate based on political beliefs, even religious beliefs. Gender, race, national origin, these are traditional protected categories, and we are adding more as a consensus grows that other sorts of prejudice are harmful to the social compact, but you can be fired for thinking differently in a heartbeat. As mentioned elsewhere, unions can even out some of the capriciously used power of the bosses, but otherwise I think the law is not protecting anyone.
Point of order, in the US, religious belief/creed is a protected class. You can't fire someone for being Jewish, for example.
On the other hand, certain beliefs of certain religions would be potentially incompatible with workplace discrimination law, including law that protects other protected classes. So it gets a little murky. One thing you can say is that if you have a religious belief that isn't causing you to bother other people, that's protected in the U.S.
You are correct about political beliefs, though. At least as far as I can find, political affiliation is not protected. But even if it were, this would necessarily not cover all possible political beliefs, for the same murkiness reasons as above.
I think the case law is pretty clear that you can have an organization that refuses to hire gay people because of religion or people who don’t follow a certain religion, even for jobs like janitor (as opposed to priest).
From every place I've personally seen mention of protecting groups in terms of hiring, they always copy-paste a cookie-cutter list of "protected classes". But political beliefs has never been one of them. I have this weird habit of checking each time. And it only differs by adding additional items related to the newer "classes" like gender/sex.
Yeah, but if you hire a fascist and you know they're a fascist in a company where the majority of your workers is not a fascist, you're going to have problems. Even if you discover after hiring them that they're fascist you'll have unhappy workers. You'll find a way to fire that fascist or lose the rest of the company.
I'm curious why it's a binary thing. The debate seems to wage between two camps: OnlyWorkRelated vs BareItAll.
The truth is, I want neither extreme. I want a nice comfortable balance that my peers and can both tolerate. I appreciate being able to "solve the world's problems" with fellow workers, but not all day. And especially when it starts to get emotional. I find that humor and self deprecation are great ingredients to throw in the mix when I think things are spiraling. In either direction.
“When at work, steer clear of politics. This rule, generally accepted around the world, does not apply in techland.”
Sure, let’s just ignore the long and important history of organized labor around the world. They’re imagining a fantasy land of white collar labor, which in the west was historically white and male. For everyone not in that sliver of white collar work, work for sure was a place where politics were both discussed and engaged in.
As someone straddling the line between gen x and millennials, the concept of partnering with your corporate bosses to advocate for political causes far astray from your company's products, particularly without regard for the ability of capitalism to co-opt that energy in a cynical pursuit of profit, is basically insane to me.
It seems like people have become so desperate to fill the widening void of meaning and purpose that they are willing to graft it even onto their at-will employment contract.
And as someone who watched the internet exponentiate the number of niche subjects and communities it shocks me how much homogeneity there seems to be in how people think and speak today.
Eventually people will lose trust in the system, and will only work as hard as to not get fired. Like they did under Communism. Just a general decline in morale of the country. And lowering of standards of everything produced. This was also coupled with having secret police like the Stasi, and job site informants. Something like 1/3 of the population was making reports on their fellow citizens in East Germany. And work was the primary place to get dirt on someone. Any sign of not being a True believer in the system could get you reported. People should fear the authoritarian left, as much as the authoritarian right. Having communist party affiliation meant you could be terrible at your job, and be promoted. Having party connections, also meant your kids could go to University, with terrible grades. Get cars or housing, when others had to wait years.
This gets tricky when employers ask workers to internalize the company values (incorporating them into their identities). Probably helps with retention, but then you get everything else that comes with identity. If you represent the company, and vice versa, it's only natural to want the company to use its influence in ways that embody that, even if it seems superfluous from a purely financial standpoint.
There's a case to be made that we should tone back the importance of work in all of our lives, which would potentially help with these issues. I understand the need to defend minorities from bigots, and even from milder, less intentional forms of discrimination/bias that can accumulate over the years to cause a strong drag on your life. I still like to think there are ways to do that without a lot of outrage and constant, inane meetings, but who knows.
> Technological shifts have tended to be framed in political terms, as was the case with open-source software, which initially had an anti-capitalist impetus.
This is not true at all. The idea behind free software was always that if you bought it or it was given to you, you should own it entirely. This is very free market. It was anti predatory in nature, and overall political motivations to support it ranged, but the bent was very libertarian. It was opposition to abuse of customers or users and opposition to monopoly and cartel formation, and where it was focused on community building it has always been based on the principle of free association, a foundational libertarian value.
Beyond that gripe, I think the reason for the push against politics at work is because people are tired of being immersed in politics 24/7 whether they like it or not, being and just inundated with every conceivable political anything all the time. Party politics, ideological politics, a constant demand to pick a (very particular) side or face professional repercussions, it is exhausting. More specifically, there's a certain political ideology that has a mantra "everything is political" and I think people are sick of appeasing them and playing their game because they vehemently scream at the top of their lungs every chance they get that they're the super good guys and call everyone that disagrees with them evil.
Cancel culture ruins free speech and free thought. Just keep politics out at work. Severely punish sexist and racist behavior. it's pretty simple. People will avoid wearing their politics on their sleeve. I think there should be a company wide dictate that you don't have to listen to anyone who tries to drag you into it and that you can take it to HR when someone tries to force your hand. Work is for work. I don't want to go there and become a social warrior. I donate to liberal political groups all the time but I don't think that has anything to do with my coding or working with others. Honestly I don't care about you or your politics at work, please leave me out of it.
I try to keep personal interests and views for myself while staying open to discuss any politics that the company is involved in. That can range from internal "woke topics" to external matters like doing business in countries with governments that don't care. The important thing is to stick to facts instead of personal opinion. It's not so difficult and if more people did it, the workplace would be much more pleasant for everyone.
I'm always confused that politics at work can now mean either internal corporate career politics or politics in society. Still, I think it applies to both types.
A major part of "politics at work" is actually politics about the workplace -- see also, the recent Basecamp kerfuffle, which turned out to be about actions taken by employees in the office. Trying to ban politics is well and good, but what happens when the politics are about things that happened in your office?
Politics are inevitable. Companies ought to try to manage discussion realistically, rather than covering their eyes and ignoring the problem.
Your Place : the place where you have such freedoms as you wish.
Work Place : the place we work together with other dedicated professionals in order to fulfil given tasks so that we can enjoy :
A Place : the rightful place in society earned by individuals who abide by the rules and contribute positively to their social environment without causing damage, harm, upset or unfair expenses for others.
No Place : the place for woke campaigning folk in a healthy society.
I suspect they want to get rid of ethically-minded employees who could potentially become whistle-blowers later when they find out how the company really makes its money.
The next step will be to start increasing the salaries and bonuses of remaining employees.
If you're ethically-minded, the best strategy is to stay in the company, pretend to be one of them, then when you catch them doing something bad, blow the whistle on them.
This isn’t surprising, largely a consequence I think of the ‘Bowling Alone’ phenomenon, such that people don’t do much outside of work anymore which allows the expression or development of political views.
I also think that deep down some tech workers feel guilty about how much they earn (wokeness generally entails self-flagellation), and this manifests as workplace activism.
What I learned recently is that a lot of the "woke" efforts in these large public companies are directed by boards who are answering to Wall St, who are answering to elites and politicians. It's no wonder none of the "wokism" feels so in-your-face instead of genuine and organic.
Are we allowed to discuss the fact that, nine times out of ten, it's women, not men, bringing politics to work? I've noticed this pattern in every place I've worked.
Looking at this thread, references to Nazis, KKK etc. are fairly frequent.
One of the curses of the woke movement is the loss of the ability to distinguish between really bad things and banalities. Nothing is banal anymore.
If a Cuban guy writes something unflattering about SV women in his book, it might not be pretty, but it is a far cry from "let's roll our armored brigades through the continent, enslave unwanted ethnic groups and gas millions of people as subhumans" or "lynch blacks and terrorize entire cities".
Signatories of the "fire him" letter do not seem to distinguish that anymore. That is the fruit of the victim mentality tree, watered with everyday Twitter outrage. Nothing is banal and every crisis must be escalated to verbal equivalent of nuclear war.
I wonder if tech rotted our minds. Social networks are full of vicious, all-out conflicts that nevertheless do not cause any visible physical destruction and fatalities - or at least, most of the time. Thus, we are losing our ability to de-escalate, compromise and move beyond. But precisely this ability is the core of diplomacy, as opposed to constant wars that plagued the world previously. This is a dangerous way to go. It feels like a prelude to the religious wars of the 1600s and 1700s. [0]
I'm a huge fan of what Coinbase and Basecamp have done. Coinbase is thriving and Basecamp appears to be no worse for wear. I hope we see a continuance of this trend; whereby we continue to encourage DE&I whilst keeping the worst and most toxic topics out of day to day business.
> Alphabet, Google’s parent, had to deal with another internal petition circulating among employees, this one calling on the firm’s leadership to make a statement “recognising the violence in Palestine and Israel”.
:facepalm: corporations, like nation states, now(ish) are lobbied to take geopolitical stances.
Why can’t we just let the market sort it out? Let the people who want to talk politics all day start, lead, and work at firms that encourage it. And those that don’t will do the same.
It’s my same issue with socialists who want democratic control of companies. If it’s so obviously better, why not start one yourself? Or use government money to do so (socialists, after all). I just wish everyone would voluntarily associate and live their best lives rather than forcing a “one size fits all” approach to every problem. We live in the greatest time ever for expressing yourself in any myriad of ways. Just live and let live.
Indeed. That's why capitalism is strictly better than communism - communism can exist within capitalism. Simply buy the land, invite people, build houses, farms & factories, and have everyone sign contracts saying that they co-own everything.
The lack of such communities (large-scale) demonstrates that stealing from others is essential for establishing communism.
Well his comment was greyed out from downvotes and nothing he said was wrong, just there's a different atmosphere for everyone. His views aligned with a libertarian which I think were once accepted here. It's gotten more leftist here for sure. Part of woke socialism/marxism is shouting dissenters down, downvoting in this case.
That was my assumption. Just wanted to pull more focus into what was occurring. Then, as if on cue, they proved your point by instantly down voted you!
Politics of any kind should definitely be banned from work. Activist types that want to shove their ideology into other people's throat can definitely do that during their free time where other people can at least avoid their presence. There are always plenty of like-minded woke friends to be found from Twitter or r/socialism.
The challenge is defining the line between what’s considered politics and not. For example, would applying gender pronoun titles to internal corporate profile pages be considered politics or not
The UN considers Mexico one of the most violent countries in the world for women. Is that cause outside of workplace-appropriate conversation? You may have chosen a country at random, but it’s disingenuous to say that worrying about femicide is “nonsense”.
> last week Alphabet, Google’s parent, had to deal with another internal petition circulating among employees, this one calling on the firm’s leadership to make a statement “recognising the violence in Palestine and Israel”.
It's a special kind of hubris to believe that despite over a thousand years of conflict in the region, the right people to comprehensively understand and solve the problem are some people who make a search engine from the other side of the planet.
Nobody is fighting over theological differences, they are fighting over land. Specifically, land that was conquered by the British who promised it to both parties, failed to manage a compromise, tossed the problem to the UN who drew up horrible borders, then allowed Israel to settle beyond those borders without consequence.
The entire history of this issue is roughly 100 years old and almost entirely due to imperialism and mismanagement, not some ancient bickering over who has the most correct supernatural beliefs. That’s a line we are taught to feel ok about ignoring the issue, which conveniently benefits Israel.
The belief that without Western / British "imperialism and mismanagement", Jews, Muslims (Shia and Suni) (and Christians) would just peacefully co-exist in Jerusalem is ... wishful thinking at best.
Lack of violence doesn’t necessarily mean a just peaceful coexistence. It sometimes means that one side in a multiethnic state has such overwhelming force that the other ethnicities, though they suffer injustice, try to avoid rocking the boat lest they become targets of violence. This is certainly the case with the Christians of the Levant, who had to accept various restrictions that were not imposed on the Muslim population (e.g. restrictions on symbolism displayed on the outside of places of worship, the prohibition of accepting converts), in order to avoid sparking sectarian conflict.
Majority of the Jewish immigrants after the creation of Israel were ethnic Arab Jews that were expelled from their Islamic Arab countries. This conflict go back much more than 100 years.
> The entire history of this issue is roughly 100 years old and almost entirely due to imperialism and mismanagement
There were four empires who controlled the region over a period of thousands of years. There is a long long history of ethnic violence in the region, going so far back it’s literally prehistoric.
You’re just cherry picking facts to support one side of the story.
I am aware of all of the context you have provided, thanks.
You're mostly right, but I don't think it's correct to say that the "entire history of this issue is roughly 100 years old". At least in the minds of many of the people in the riots — because this isn't exclusively a conflict between militants — it is about who owned the land first. Who's right here? Well, it's disputed. That's… why there's a war.
Sorry, I’m not buying that you can just ignore religion. There’s a reason that there are essentially no Jews left in any of the other Arab states in that area.
You conveniently start the issue at 100 years ago to frame the issue against Israel.
But it didn't start with the British, nor the Turks before them, nor the Mamluks, Crusader Kingdoms, Arabs or Byzantines. It started when the Romans defeated the Jews 2000 years ago and exiled many of them.
They quite literally are. I would encourage you to listen to the arguments put forth by the Israelis currently settling across the internationally recognized borders in the West Bank.
It is a misunderstanding that Israeli settlements are a mainly religious thing. Yes, there are ideologues for expansion who believe in a God-given right to that land and they make a lot of noise and appeal to (some) religious voters. However, a lot of the political support for settlements is based not on religion, but on the idea that Israel is too narrow in its current borders to be easily defended in the long term, so it supposedly has to take the West Bank.
Also, the actual residents of settlements are often non-religious or even outright anti-religious Israelis who were simply priced out of homeowning in Israel proper. There are entire streets in settlements inhabited by families who immigrated from the former USSR for better economic prospects on the basis of Jewish ancestry, but who have absolutely no attachment to Judaism the religion, and they certainly aren’t going to claim a Torah-granted right to anything.
It doesn’t sound like the internal petition was calling for the firm to solve the conflict. That would be unrealistic, but it’s not at all the case here.
I think we're in a much better position to change the culture at Google by having a discussion here on HN than Google is to improve the Palestine/Israel situation by making a statement.
I would even say it's a noteworthy possibility, given that many people who are or will be influential at Google read HN.
But the distinction here about having a discussion vs. making a demand is also relevant. When someone is demanding you make a statement for seemingly no purpose, the real purpose is to assert control over you.
They are not the same. We engaging here in this discussion are genuinely trying to influence a situation over which we have some modest influence (all the while refining our ideas and maybe even learning something).
These activists primary motivation is to achieve the high the comes from exerting power over other people.
Whatever your supposed answer is, it’s not obvious. People spending time on HN very clearly have a different purpose from people demanding their employer take a stand on some political position.
The logical conclusion here is that you're implying that you can't engage in a discussion without first forcing your employer to vocally take a position on the issue.
Then it would seem the statement is inconsequential — at least in my view. How is it constructive to point out a conflict which is already at the forefront of everyone's minds because of mass civilian deaths and the associate global media coverage?
its a very interesting conundrum because both agree it is inconsequential:
- the left get mad because it is "the least we can do"
- the right get mad because it is performative
ultimately people who have made up their mind on what the right thing to do is aren't really listening to those who disagree because they have believe they own the moral or procedural high ground.
> It's a special kind of hubris to believe that despite over a thousand years of conflict in the region,
The recent conflict in Israel/Palestine dates from the early 1900s, with a big acceleration around 1946-48.
Prior to that, the last longterm conflict in the region was over 500 years beforehand, in the Crusades.
But yeah, I agree that it's big hubris for some relatively ignorant and pampered American kids to believe they can solve it, or even properly understand it.
Sometimes businesses/organizations are propped up for their missions by wealthy sponsors and not markets. There are no market pressures that make them go out of business unless the sponsors themselves feel financial loss and stop sponsorship.
