5 ms·

I’ve never worked in the Bay Area, so could just be OOL but I’m genuinely surprised that this is such a big deal, or that this blog post got so much praise. Ne

by kkhire 6y ago

I’ve never worked in the Bay Area, so could just be OOL but I’m genuinely surprised that this is such a big deal, or that this blog post got so much praise. Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!

moduspol 6y ago
Virtually every meaningful task humans have accomplished has been a result of groups of us putting aside our differences to unite and focus on solving the problem at hand.
- demygale 6y ago
  What if the problem at hand is ending structural racism in the workplace?
  - jcims 6y ago
    >groups of us not 'all of us'
  - moduspol 6y ago
    "Structural racism" is a coded term. We have laws against discrimination and HR departments across the country bending over backwards to avoid lawsuits... but you're not asking about the problems those are intended to solve. When you ask a question like that, what you're really asking is, "why don't workplaces have the outcomes I expect along racial lines when it comes to hiring, compensation, promotion, and more?" And implicitly, "why can't workplaces be forced (or force themselves) toward meeting the outcomes I expect?" Those are different questions, but they're encoded in yours. And they don't really apply to the topic at hand.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      Avoiding lawsuits is not at all the same as attempting to deal with the issue honestly as opposed to framing it in the same light as some new kind of competitive marketplace.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- jeromegv 6y ago
  ??? Nice way to rewrite history. Would you say the civil rights movement was successful because it wanted to put aside differences? Or because they fought for their rights, their difference, and the privileged majority had to make concessions?
  - jcims 6y ago
    It's actually a perfect example. It's hard to imagine everyone fighting for civil rights was previously aligned on all fronts or agreed with everything that was done along the way.
    - chillacy 6y ago
      In MLK's book "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community" he talks about some of the internal battles within the civil rights community and how they explicitly tried to forge alliances with other groups. That's when I learned just how brilliant MLK was in this political / social sense.
  - moduspol 6y ago
    > Would you say the civil rights movement was successful because it wanted to put aside differences? Absolutely. Everyone involved with the movement put aside their differences to focus on the same goal. It would not have been as successful if everyone showing up for a rally was expected / coerced into supporting other political issues.
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    Yes very much so. They found the moral high ground and were able to persuade people on our shared humanity. No one “had” to do anything. People were compelled to as they were persuaded that we had immoral systems in terms of individuals civil rights. A universal appeal to shared humanity is an approach that works. Shaming people into a type of morality will only invite pushback.
    - md_ 6y ago
      For some historical context, contemporaneously, the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular; it's exactly the kind of thing that would have been described as politics best left out of the workplace. "In 1964, in a poll taken nine months after the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, 74 percent of Americans said such mass demonstrations were more likely to harm than to help the movement for racial equality. In 1965, after marchers in Selma, Alabama, were beaten by state troopers, less than half of Americans said they supported the marchers." (Taken from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/the-next-reconstruction/615475/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/the-nex...)
- CPLX 6y ago
  It’s pretty common for the problem at hand to be a group of violent extremists attempting to seize power.
nullc 6y ago
Coming from the east coast (and maybe a little from an earlier era) I also find the attitude on this stuff a little mystifying. "In my day" -- it was just poor form to bring up that kind of stuff at work. If you did so at all, you usually tried to avoid being "that person". You don't get to choose each person you work with, so it pays if everyone puts in a bit of extra effort to not give anyone else a hard time. I think some of these work politics issues--in particular around the bay area-- is partially a product of extremely homogeneous work forces (at least politically), partially poor work-life balance cultures (no life outside work), partially social networking (massively increasing the visibility of your co-workers out of work activities), and <???>-- I don't feel I really have a complete understanding of what is going on. Maybe a factor is a breakdown in our wider culture's ability to see people who disagree as being people who are still good people with reasonable points but just have different understandings or priorities (or even just to patronize them as stupid or uninformed). But instead perhaps there is a trend to rapidly decide people we disagree with are irredeemably evil just based on a soundbitized version of some insanely complicated political trade-off (or maybe even just by association)... But I'm not really sure how much that breakdown is actually happening compared to the appearance of it happening in the reporting funhouse mirror ("Reasonable people do a reasonable thing" said no headline ever). Some of it might also be due to a transition from products to services-- people seem a lot more willing to view product sales as anonymous and totally transactional, while they seem to view a service as something more akin to a marriage. A big downside of reactions like coinbases' might be that in what I would consider the traditional regime there was still an opportunity for employees to bring a little bit of their politics to work-- so long as they were professional and not obnoxious about it, or in places where there were genuine interactions with work ("How about lets not buy the toner cartages made from clubbed baby seals?") ... but if you can't count on people to control themselves and you're forced to set bright line policies then there is probably a lot less room for people to be reasonable.
- kleinsch 6y ago
  I worked for companies on the east coast, then moved to SF and now work at a big tech company. The companies I worked for on the east coast were mostly B2B, so we were focused on making a good product for businesses so they’d pay us more money. Big tech companies recruited for a long time with the pitch that we’re changing the world. That has brought in a bunch of employees who joined bc they want their employment to make a positive change in the world. Companies are now realizing the conflict being a neutral platform poses to these people - if I have a belief that my employment should make a positive change in societal issues, how could I work somewhere that I believe contributes to making things worse?
tarkin2 6y ago
But most company's work becomes political now. You only want to work on a feature for a social media platform? No politics there, right?
- hackerfromthefu 6y ago
  Most companies? Maybe most SV ones?
cblconfederate 6y ago
I often wonder about the other side: Why do people who work in SV seem so militant on political issues? After all they live in a very privileged space (or "bubble") which is severely disconnected from the reality of most of the Earth, and even nearby american cities. I don't know enough about the demographics of the region and what can drive this behaviour but it is full of contradictions. For example, while they all seem invested in political causes, and seem to be using donations as a way to show virtual support to causes, I notice that they rarely venture into actual politics themselves.
- stevehawk 6y ago
  because they are over educated and wealthy and it lends itself to the thought of "if i'm this smart and this successful how could i be wrong and why don't you want this life?"
- hnrodey 6y ago
  >After all they live in a very privileged space (or "bubble") It's my personal view that so much of the current political vitriol is because as a society, we've run out of things to worry about. We've reached critical mass of people solving Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and therefore, we are dwelving in to other arenas where we are feeling neglected.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    I have a much more benigh benign theory: The end of mass entertainment. When we no longer listen to the same music/watch the same movies/ same tv, it's hard for people to come up common themes in discussions. Politics doesnt fit in that because usually countries have one government, and everyone has an opinion on politics, it's too easy
  - trashcan 6y ago
    Is this train of thought not trending towards: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab... > 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
throwaway4715 6y ago
SV companies sell candidates on changing the world and disrupting the status quo. They literally target and recruit the type of people who would want to discuss politics at work.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
> we were always too busy with...work! I think that's one side effect of having these gargantuan, hugely profitable tech companies. They can essentially have a huge portion of their workforce be unproductive if the essential "money machine" at each company (e.g. AdWords at Google) is running smoothly. Other, smaller companies can't afford to have as much fat in their workforce, so their workers need to be actually focused on, you know, work, and if they're not, their lack of productivity is much more visible.
itsoktocry 6y ago
>Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work! Same, and that's the conundrum. "Activist" employees put others on the spot by querying coworkers' political views and expecting discussion. And for those who have had their head in the sand for the past few years, things like "being a Joe Rogan fan" are now considered unacceptable politics.
- 3np 6y ago
  > things like "being a Joe Rogan fan" are now considered unacceptable politics For one who has had their head in the sand and is only vaguely familiar with Joe Rogan; why?
  - remarkEon 6y ago
    My take: he’s generally opposed to this kind of laborious activism and tedious “political correctness” (broadly defined). He’s had some folks on his podcast who are very outspoken on certain things (trans issues, politics, etc) that people find offensive, and they claim he’s a “gateway to the alt right” as a result. Despite Rogan self-identifying as a progressive, the label has pretty much stuck and even though he has an extremely wide variety of guests - from cutting edge technologists to comedians to Snowden - on the show, he’s forever tainted by not aligning to the activists’ goals. My personal opinion is that they don’t like him because his platform is massive and threatens other traditional means of informing people about what to think on certain topics.
  - lalaland1125 6y ago
    Joe Rogan is infamous for inviting white supremacists onto his show.
  - hajwh 6y ago
    I think Glenn Greenwald nailed it with this analysis: https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/as-joe-rogans-platform-grows-so-does-the-media-and-liberal-backlash-why/ https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/as-joe-rogans-platform-g...

by kkhire 6y ago

moduspol 6y ago

Virtually every meaningful task humans have accomplished has been a result of groups of us putting aside our differences to unite and focus on solving the problem at hand.

demygale 6y ago
What if the problem at hand is ending structural racism in the workplace?
- jcims 6y ago
  >groups of us not 'all of us'
- moduspol 6y ago
  "Structural racism" is a coded term. We have laws against discrimination and HR departments across the country bending over backwards to avoid lawsuits... but you're not asking about the problems those are intended to solve. When you ask a question like that, what you're really asking is, "why don't workplaces have the outcomes I expect along racial lines when it comes to hiring, compensation, promotion, and more?" And implicitly, "why can't workplaces be forced (or force themselves) toward meeting the outcomes I expect?" Those are different questions, but they're encoded in yours. And they don't really apply to the topic at hand.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Avoiding lawsuits is not at all the same as attempting to deal with the issue honestly as opposed to framing it in the same light as some new kind of competitive marketplace.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jeromegv 6y ago
??? Nice way to rewrite history. Would you say the civil rights movement was successful because it wanted to put aside differences? Or because they fought for their rights, their difference, and the privileged majority had to make concessions?
- jcims 6y ago
  It's actually a perfect example. It's hard to imagine everyone fighting for civil rights was previously aligned on all fronts or agreed with everything that was done along the way.
  - chillacy 6y ago
    In MLK's book "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community" he talks about some of the internal battles within the civil rights community and how they explicitly tried to forge alliances with other groups. That's when I learned just how brilliant MLK was in this political / social sense.
- moduspol 6y ago
  > Would you say the civil rights movement was successful because it wanted to put aside differences? Absolutely. Everyone involved with the movement put aside their differences to focus on the same goal. It would not have been as successful if everyone showing up for a rally was expected / coerced into supporting other political issues.
- nemo44x 6y ago
  Yes very much so. They found the moral high ground and were able to persuade people on our shared humanity. No one “had” to do anything. People were compelled to as they were persuaded that we had immoral systems in terms of individuals civil rights. A universal appeal to shared humanity is an approach that works. Shaming people into a type of morality will only invite pushback.
  - md_ 6y ago
    For some historical context, contemporaneously, the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular; it's exactly the kind of thing that would have been described as politics best left out of the workplace. "In 1964, in a poll taken nine months after the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, 74 percent of Americans said such mass demonstrations were more likely to harm than to help the movement for racial equality. In 1965, after marchers in Selma, Alabama, were beaten by state troopers, less than half of Americans said they supported the marchers." (Taken from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/the-next-reconstruction/615475/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/the-nex...)
CPLX 6y ago
It’s pretty common for the problem at hand to be a group of violent extremists attempting to seize power.

nullc 6y ago

Coming from the east coast (and maybe a little from an earlier era) I also find the attitude on this stuff a little mystifying. "In my day" -- it was just poor form to bring up that kind of stuff at work. If you did so at all, you usually tried to avoid being "that person". You don't get to choose each person you work with, so it pays if everyone puts in a bit of extra effort to not give anyone else a hard time. I think some of these work politics issues--in particular around the bay area-- is partially a product of extremely homogeneous work forces (at least politically), partially poor work-life balance cultures (no life outside work), partially social networking (massively increasing the visibility of your co-workers out of work activities), and <???>-- I don't feel I really have a complete understanding of what is going on. Maybe a factor is a breakdown in our wider culture's ability to see people who disagree as being people who are still good people with reasonable points but just have different understandings or priorities (or even just to patronize them as stupid or uninformed). But instead perhaps there is a trend to rapidly decide people we disagree with are irredeemably evil just based on a soundbitized version of some insanely complicated political trade-off (or maybe even just by association)... But I'm not really sure how much that breakdown is actually happening compared to the appearance of it happening in the reporting funhouse mirror ("Reasonable people do a reasonable thing" said no headline ever). Some of it might also be due to a transition from products to services-- people seem a lot more willing to view product sales as anonymous and totally transactional, while they seem to view a service as something more akin to a marriage. A big downside of reactions like coinbases' might be that in what I would consider the traditional regime there was still an opportunity for employees to bring a little bit of their politics to work-- so long as they were professional and not obnoxious about it, or in places where there were genuine interactions with work ("How about lets not buy the toner cartages made from clubbed baby seals?") ... but if you can't count on people to control themselves and you're forced to set bright line policies then there is probably a lot less room for people to be reasonable.

kleinsch 6y ago
I worked for companies on the east coast, then moved to SF and now work at a big tech company. The companies I worked for on the east coast were mostly B2B, so we were focused on making a good product for businesses so they’d pay us more money. Big tech companies recruited for a long time with the pitch that we’re changing the world. That has brought in a bunch of employees who joined bc they want their employment to make a positive change in the world. Companies are now realizing the conflict being a neutral platform poses to these people - if I have a belief that my employment should make a positive change in societal issues, how could I work somewhere that I believe contributes to making things worse?

tarkin2 6y ago

But most company's work becomes political now. You only want to work on a feature for a social media platform? No politics there, right?

hackerfromthefu 6y ago
Most companies? Maybe most SV ones?

cblconfederate 6y ago

I often wonder about the other side: Why do people who work in SV seem so militant on political issues? After all they live in a very privileged space (or "bubble") which is severely disconnected from the reality of most of the Earth, and even nearby american cities. I don't know enough about the demographics of the region and what can drive this behaviour but it is full of contradictions. For example, while they all seem invested in political causes, and seem to be using donations as a way to show virtual support to causes, I notice that they rarely venture into actual politics themselves.

stevehawk 6y ago
because they are over educated and wealthy and it lends itself to the thought of "if i'm this smart and this successful how could i be wrong and why don't you want this life?"
hnrodey 6y ago
>After all they live in a very privileged space (or "bubble") It's my personal view that so much of the current political vitriol is because as a society, we've run out of things to worry about. We've reached critical mass of people solving Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and therefore, we are dwelving in to other arenas where we are feeling neglected.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  I have a much more benigh benign theory: The end of mass entertainment. When we no longer listen to the same music/watch the same movies/ same tv, it's hard for people to come up common themes in discussions. Politics doesnt fit in that because usually countries have one government, and everyone has an opinion on politics, it's too easy
- trashcan 6y ago
  Is this train of thought not trending towards: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab... > 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.

throwaway4715 6y ago

SV companies sell candidates on changing the world and disrupting the status quo. They literally target and recruit the type of people who would want to discuss politics at work.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

> we were always too busy with...work! I think that's one side effect of having these gargantuan, hugely profitable tech companies. They can essentially have a huge portion of their workforce be unproductive if the essential "money machine" at each company (e.g. AdWords at Google) is running smoothly. Other, smaller companies can't afford to have as much fat in their workforce, so their workers need to be actually focused on, you know, work, and if they're not, their lack of productivity is much more visible.

itsoktocry 6y ago

>Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work! Same, and that's the conundrum. "Activist" employees put others on the spot by querying coworkers' political views and expecting discussion. And for those who have had their head in the sand for the past few years, things like "being a Joe Rogan fan" are now considered unacceptable politics.

3np 6y ago
> things like "being a Joe Rogan fan" are now considered unacceptable politics For one who has had their head in the sand and is only vaguely familiar with Joe Rogan; why?
- remarkEon 6y ago
  My take: he’s generally opposed to this kind of laborious activism and tedious “political correctness” (broadly defined). He’s had some folks on his podcast who are very outspoken on certain things (trans issues, politics, etc) that people find offensive, and they claim he’s a “gateway to the alt right” as a result. Despite Rogan self-identifying as a progressive, the label has pretty much stuck and even though he has an extremely wide variety of guests - from cutting edge technologists to comedians to Snowden - on the show, he’s forever tainted by not aligning to the activists’ goals. My personal opinion is that they don’t like him because his platform is massive and threatens other traditional means of informing people about what to think on certain topics.
- lalaland1125 6y ago
  Joe Rogan is infamous for inviting white supremacists onto his show.
- hajwh 6y ago
  I think Glenn Greenwald nailed it with this analysis: https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/as-joe-rogans-platform-grows-so-does-the-media-and-liberal-backlash-why/ https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/as-joe-rogans-platform-g...