I don't think that stuff has any place at work. It's a red-flag to me if that kind of thing is commonplace in the office. Not only is it distracting, but it's insulting to employees who may have an opposite position politically.
If you're emotionally affected by something to the point where you're unable to hide it, then you shouldn't come into work.
Companies are often intensely political; artificially pretending neutrality internally while actively working externally to influence the political landscape to me is more bizarre than being open about politics in the office.
If a corporation actually is solidly neutral and inactive politically in it's external actions, then, sure, the internal environment should reflect that.
> it's insulting to employees who may have an opposite position politically.
I don't see how that's any less true of a company's external political activism.
Personally I would not work at a place which did so, and would consider reporting it to the anti-discrimination department in my country.
We (in the US), rather emphatically, do.
(There are some protections against religious discrimination in employment that apply to most employers, but those protections do not extend to prohibiting employers from all internal expression of religious views, or even substantive policy based on religious views. And, in fact, writing additional affirmative protection for employers’ internal expressiom of religious views, even to the extent of making that a basis for exempting them from generally-applicable legal requirements, is a popular trend in the US right now.)
Accommodating employees and their religious practices is another matter, within reasonable limits.
Most Silicon valley companies depend heavily on immigrant talent and resource pool to keep the perpetual billion dollar start ups coming every year.
If your political sentiments are in deep opposition to what brings in your salary, you already have a very broken view of your life in general. And a company executive expressing any sentiment isn't going matter much, if at all.
When I worked in the South, but in a liberal area, you might talk about it with coworkers you trust, privately, but no one of any authority would get up and say anything.
The 100+ person company I worked at during the last election, there were statements by the senior executives as well as emails. Yes, the office had people openly crying, or absent, and the mood was like a funeral but I also don't think it's the place for especially C-level people to make those type of statements even if 99% of the office felt the same way.
There was also much hubbub around the (one) Women's March, solicitations, emails, etc. I'm happy for the women and men that marched for themselves but I wonder if they might've done some actual justice by asking the higher ups if internally women and men were being treated the same in terms of pay and opportunities, a conversation that I had with more than one female colleague in private.
Working in NYC nobody ever mentions politics. I haven't even heard so much as an unkind word about Trump.
The Democratic Republic of California is a liberal shithole.
If I were an employee, I would assume the grief is primarily about increased costs to the employer.
Cultures dies as a company grows to a certain size. Feels like the best way to combat that would be to have teams that are small within the company and operate independently and with autonomy, especially when it comes to hiring. That probably isn't realistic though within a large company. Am keen on what ideas people have or if they've had experience with something that works with regards to retaining a good culture.
My take: bad things are bad, and other people overstating their badness does not make them good.
I don't know how much more hyperbolic you can get than saying Trump is literally going to end the world. There is plenty of real things to criticize him about, you gain nothing by overstating things to the state of idiocy.
Trump might be president, but in the Valley tech bubble, Anti-Trump is status quo. And politics in a bubble isn't like doing math homework, you only have to show how you got your answer if you want to disagree with the "obviously" correct positions.
The anti-Trump rhetoric is stronger than the old anti-Republician rhetoric. So the people annoyed by empty arguments are going to be louder too.
I'm anti-Trump but I'm also anti-politics-at-work. There's no contradiction there.
Handing my resignation felt great every time. It's addictive in fact. Just seeing the disappointment in my boss' face and the jealousy in the eyes of my colleagues brings me profound life satisfaction.
If I ship a product this year, next year I can reflect back on how the requirements change, how I didn't anticipate a customer use case and learn from this for future design.
Delivering some code for 6 months won't get you anywhere past a code monkey in my opinion.
Job Hopping every six months translates to 'cant be trusted with any serious work'.
In India its more or less a given, that your resume won't even make it past the screening stage.
When you job hop a lot, you become very adaptable. I can start contributing high quality code after the first week. I can internalise the coding conventions and all the nuances of the code base straight away because I've seen it all and I understand the different team mindsets and dynamics really well.
Being adaptable and delivering a few one off features is junior engineering which senior engineers can coach through. Coding conventions differ from team to team, package to package adapting to these also doesn't mean you are a robust engineer. It means you are competent. Solid engineer are expected to adapt. All big software projects that stand the test of time have nuances and even possibly anti-patterns because the initial design missed something.
I'm not sure what you mean by "saw the kinds of companies I worked for" but if you worked at Google for 6 months, Facebook for 6 months and Amazon for 6 months it still wouldn't mean much to me. All it means is you are smart enough to get your foot in the door but not successful enough to succeed.
99.9% of the time, the single-company mindset that you're suggesting just gets people stuck in a rut (I've seen it). If you've had a different experience then you're one of the lucky ones.
I bet this gem didn't make the cut: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/tripp...
You meet a lot of different people when you switch companies often. I think you build many more bridges than you burn.
I've quit my job probably about 10 times now. Employers don't care at all how often you change jobs; they all think they're special and so you'll stick around for them... They all think that they're the next unicorn... Funny thing is that if they were actually a unicorn, I would stay.
If my employer is a visionary genius, I make money.
If my employer is a delusional fool, I make money.
6 months is a good amount of time to figure out which one it is.
It would probably be more accurate to say that it's a yellow flag, requiring a bit of explanation but not necessarily a bad thing. I find the pattern of switching every 6 months for (presumably) ~10 years to be pretty extreme and difficult to explain, though. Not to mention exhausting! How many job interviews must that have taken?
No kidding! Here I am complaining about 18-24 month moves and the OP was moving in 1/3rd to 1/4th of the time. Whatever uppers he's taking can't be good for you. Either that or he has the best spouse in history.
Still, honestly, it's a yellow flag. If the guy is good, 6 months may be just fine. But it's a cautious interview I'd think.
You don't need to master the whole code base in order to make high quality contributions but you need to be aware of what you don't know and focus your efforts on the parts that you understand really well while learning more about the parts that you don't understand. You can learn as you go throughout for the first 3 months.
If you're already familiar with the framework that the company is using, that's already a big step. Peer review can help as well.
Most good companies have similar coding styles and follow similar practices but they might have different requirements when it comes to testing, security, scalability, Agile/Scrum, etc...
Ooooooh! Yeah, I should have caught that earlier. 6 months now makes a lot more sense.
We basically hire for sections of the codebase. It's pretty common for developers to discover the existence of an area of code that they haven't had to touch before and were unaware of the existence of even years after starting to work here.
For reference, the Bible has ~30k verses in it. A verse isn't a line of code, but I'd say mastering the Bible is a good benchmark for equivalent complexity to coding. If anything the Bible is more straightforward than a 2 million line code base.
The people who'd I'd say mastered the core codebase were the people that wrote it. Over the last couple years, they've been laid off one by one, but most of them have been around for 15-18 years already (the prototypes were built around 1998, and I think that the current code descends from stuff written in 1999). I've been around it for about 8 years now, in total. I wrote most of the current build system, a lot of the packaging code, the initial version of two or three of the plugins, and individual features in a few of the others.
The Bible has a distinctly different kind of complexity, though. Social complexity, rather than technical. A line of code has an unambiguous meaning, with other lines of code, the OS, and the underlying hardware providing an unambiguous context. A verse of scripture can have multiple simultaneous meanings, and the context is provided both by surrounding text and by the millennia-old cultures that the verses were written in. I'm not sure how I'd make the comparison.
We aren't doctors, we just need the skills to figure things out and fix them quickly.
My point was that someone can ramp up quickly on a portion of the system and have a vague idea of other parts of it, but "mastering" it covers too much code to do it in a reasonable time. Each plugin introduces special cases for the data flow, and the plumbing for that ends up running through the whole system.
Your coworkers probably aren't jealous of your inability to stay at a job for more than 6 months.
I can't imagine wanting to leave just 6 months after starting somewhere.
But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their coworkers verbally over the coals.
This kind of thing breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you to "please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
Your interpretation was far from the strongest plausible. As a result, we got a weak and ranty subthread terminating in such hellpoints as "Your America bashing is completely uncalled for". Avoiding that is why we have the guidelines, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them more carefully from now on?
Ooh, steelmanning as official policy. Excellent.
You're definitely positing a false dichotomy here and I'm not even sure how you came up with "either people are crying over Trump xor they are assholes to each other every day".
Cali/SV/Google all lean one way because they've been benefiting from the way things have been going. The thought that large swaths of the country have been experiencing a declining quality of life just doesn't register to them. That doesn't make them "insane," just uninformed.
Your America bashing is completely uncalled for and unwarranted.
It's pretty sad that you don't realize that executives getting on stage and crying in front of employees the day after an election is a complete aberration. This was was not and is not commonplace.
And as someone who quite frequently rolls his eyes at the inevitable "As a European.." comments on every American politics or healthcare article posted on HN, I didn't see the GP as America bashing at all.
That's unduly personal, and therefore uncivil, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Unfortunately this kind of thing appears frequently in your comment history. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when commenting here?
More especially so when "X" is a second-hand anecdote and that second-hand anecdote stems from a company that is in no way representative of the average American work place.
The idea that as long as you aren't yelling, swearing, or actively insulting someone you are not treating them poorly is one of the biggest failures of Google (and other Bay Area companies') internal culture.
Verbal abuse is not ok, but even polite disagreement can be a career limiting move in such an environment.
And let me be clear: I'm not talking James Damore "I'm just expressing an alternative opinion" low boil misogyny. That kind of thing is unacceptable.
But it's really easy to slip into an echo chamber, especially when a lot of what Bay Area companies work on is qualitative. (E.g. pretty much anything related to UX, policy)
Why is his cultural questioning of potential causes for gender disparities bad, yet we're supposed to avoid falling into an echo chamber for other issues? If issues can't be questioned, doesn't that itself form an echo chamber?
>Why is his cultural questioning of potential causes for gender disparities bad, yet we're supposed to avoid falling into an echo chamber for other issues? If issues can't be questioned, doesn't that itself form an echo chamber?
Because he's wrong, and not even the sources he himself selected say what he says the say?
https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
Allowing someone to express these misogynistic wrong opinions using company resources during company time creates a hostile work environment and opens Google up to liability.
The choice isn't b/w being an echo chamber and expressing views which make coworkers uncomfortable for their gender.
On the contrary, I think that alone is sufficient reason.
Its hard for me to go into detail about this right now. But as an employee working with other people, one must be aware of the effect one's actions and words have on fellow coworkers. In this case, the correct approach would have been for him to perhaps engage with a smaller group of people, not post a manifesto where it could be accessed by everyone at Google, which is a large number of people. Depending on the feedback, he could have change the wording to be perhaps more appropriate, and engaged in an honest conversation with HR.
There is no evidence that he did any of these things. Again, its common decency to be aware of one's words on fellow coworkers. With social issues, its not just facts, but also how you chose to express those facts that matter.
You could say: but why shouldn't anyone be allowed to express anything? Why place so much burden on someone to express their true thoughts? Its because we choose to live in a society that doesn't censor the views of its members but also places reasonable restrictions on what/how they can be expressed. So its not that his views shouldn't be expressed, but they weren't done appropriately.
This is terribly naive. HR is there to protect the company, and it's PR image, not to have discussions with you, you're not the one paying them money.
I am aware of HR's role in the company. Regardless of whos paying them money, there are usually people in HR genuinely interested in making the workplace better. And if not, still better to try that than to write a manifesto and post it for everyone in the company to see.
The way I see it, Damore wanted to be a martyr (realistically, what happened was the most likely outcome and he knew it) in the spirit of "The Life of David Gale" and he got it.
So. You're saying that Google is pretty much like every gig I've ever had.
What I think you're finding is people used to majority privilege, suddenly finding their viewpoints in the minority, becoming obsessively sensitive and claiming victimhood for which there is paltry evidence.
Why is it that when a majority of people hold progressive views, it's an "echo chamber", but if you're a minority growing up in the Midwest, or a liberal in a Red State, it's not an 'echo chamber'? There's some kind of weird assumption going on that somehow, conservatives should be able to expouse views and not feel like they're an outlier minority opinion.
Most of the egregious cases (including the Google Memo) involve liberals who are censored, harassed, or assaulted by progressives for openly inquiring or pointing to inconsistencies in the progressive narrative. Based solely on the frequency of these starkest of cases, I don't know how anyone could reasonably conclude that the evidence is paltry. Everyone should be allowed to ask questions and express (at least moderate) political ideas without fearing for their safety or income. This has nothing to do with privilege, and it shouldn't be a right conferred only to the extreme left.
> Why is it that when a majority of people hold progressive views, it's an "echo chamber", but if you're a minority growing up in the Midwest, or a liberal in a Red State, it's not an 'echo chamber'? There's some kind of weird assumption going on that somehow, conservatives should be able to expouse views and not feel like they're an outlier minority opinion.
Prior to the last few years, I've only ever heard the term applied to conservatives, who ostensibly failed to live up to the formerly-progressive value of open-mindedness. Conservatives have always been taken to task for failing to abide by progressive values (tolerance, free speech, open-mindedness, etc). Now progressives are under the same gun and it's all "poor progressives! why aren't conservatives faulted for failing to live up to progressive values?"; at any rate, the term is still widely (and justifiably) applied to conservatives.
And considering public did not see those old internal debates (there was not even a quote or reference to them in official statement about the firing), google now looks from the outside like that echo chamber.
My point is that Google is not particularly tolerant of dissent, or at least a specific type of dissent. Even back then (it seems worse now).
Did it ever occur to you that in a company with a huge immigrant population, or 2nd generation immigrants with family, many of whom were impacted by this wave of xenophobia and nationalism in this last election, that they felt under attack? That people who immigrated here and fell in love with America, suddenly were shocked into reality when they discover that so many of their fellow Americans were easily manipulated by the politics of Steve Bannon into voting for xenophobia and scapegoating?
Damn right people were legitimately upset at the social fabric coming undone.
1. Complaints about the president, racial slurs included, for "working with the Saudis" to "tank oil prices locally."
2. Complaints about the president, racial slurs included, for "forcing premiums up for the contractor's insurance."
3. Complaints about liberals in general for "forcing us to have men in our girls restrooms" despite the fact that this never happened. General complaints about how it'll be impossible to get an oil platform bathroom in line with "retarded liberal standards."
4. Complaints from engineers making 250/k/year untaxed in the UAE about all the "damn Indians" taking jobs from hardworking Americans. General blaming of the Democrats.
5. Directions from management to not submit resumes with "foreign" last names.
6. Refusal on the part of a major EPC engineering manager to hire the perfect candidate for the job because he was Mexican origin (US citizen via green card route), despite the fact that he had unsuccessfully searched for a good candidate for 3 months.
So let's not pretend that politics don't invade business.
If I blew the whistle, there would be no evidence to support my claim, I'd lose my job, my recruitment firm would permanently be blacklisted by the EPC, there would be no repercussions for the EPC manager, and the world would continue along. I did refuse to work the position after that, but it's not like a recruiter is going to "solve racism in Texas." I do that on my own time, outside of work.
EDIT: Yes, hearsay internet stories, just like the OP that started this thread. Grain of salt and all that.
I think there is a fair debate to be had about where the line should be drawn, but pretending that politics doesn't exist if you don't talk about it is deluded.
For example, Google employs a good number of immigrants. After the election many of them would have been worried about their future in the country. Wouldn't a good workplace try to address those concerns?
Yes, you are now facing some additional hardships in your job of creating a good workplace where employees can succeed. Those concerns should be addressed within the scope of what the company can or cannot do.
It seems like priorities would shift into protecting immigrant employees and that's okay - that is a hardship that the position entails and is something that should've been addressed long in advance as immigration reform was and probably always will be a controversial topic in the USA.
It was pretty clear who we had elected; a narcissistic and selfish dick with no self control who was willing to do anything to make himself look good.
In the meeting in question, employees were asking Google how they're going to help stranded employees, how Google is going to protect them, how they can still travel outside the US if their job requires it (e.g. You're a British/Iranian citizen)
Google executives did not get up on stage and given an anti-Trump rant. In fact, as far as I recall, they've never directly insulted Trump the way you can see in major news media, because who wants to make an enemy of the US government and what use would it be to give a political speech? What they did is respond to the concerns of employees, and some of them are immigrants, and got a little choked up with emotion in their voice, because they were shocked too.
My extended family has a lot of first generation immigrants. None of them understand American racism and xenophobia like a native, and they thought it was just focused on Mexicans. The travel bans were the first hammer, the attacks on legal immigration (greencards and bringing family members), Bannon's "There's too many Asian CEOS" hail back to the attitudes of the Chinese exclusion act, and finally Charlottesville, all show the danger of playing around with xenophobia. It doesn't stay contained the way you think, and many educated, elite immigrants were suddenly shocked that they might be affected too.
https://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-white...
(Also, it's interesting that you separate politics and meritocratic structure. It is by politics that the things that are merit-worthy are decided---you can be the best developer in the world, but if you're developing the wrong thing, you're not adding value).
I'd hazard a guess it wasn't the fact a Republican won, rather than who won. However that is total conjecture on my part.
What people dislike, beyond the sheer incompetence and pathological lying and bragging, is a tendency to play to the worst aspects of the crowd, for narcissistic reasons. That is, people are upset because they believe Trump is a person who will stoke up division for no reason other than it gets applause and attention, and often, the "heel" in WWE Wrestling parlance that Trump uses turns out to be the least powerful.
the whole point of google is that its an incredibly complicated piece of technology simplified into a search bar. a simple, fun brand - makes sense to have a playful work enviornment.
(Sources: Various internal G+ leaks during the Damore thing, Breitbart[0] interviewed a bunch of current/former Googlers, etc.) [0]Yes, I know Breitbart sucks and is massively biased, though AFAIK, nobody has even suggested those interviews are fictional or even factually inaccurate.
I previously worked at IBM and Oracle for years and I can tell you, that kind of behavior is exponentially worse, complete with engineered backstabbing and deliberate sabotage against coworkes. So if that's Kindergarten behavior, Google is college by comparison.
My kids are half-Chinese. If one of my coworkers said "these half-breed children are polluting our race", I'm pretty sure I'd shy away from working with them. Damore basically implied that Google lowers the bar for female engineers (which it does not), and therefore immediately cast doubt on the quality and merit of his female coworkers.
If I was a woman, I might decide I don't want to work with someone who feels I'm not really supposed to be there.
Damore didn't say or imply what you're claiming either. I wonder how carefully you read what he wrote, if at all. He talked about interest at the population level. He didn't claim female Googlers weren't as good as male Googlers. That was a strawman thrown about by people who couldn't argue with his actual points and so preferred to argue with something else.
So - lots of assumptions on your part, all wrong. Not the type of data driven analysis I remember Google exalting, back in the day.
These dynamics are common in any system where you have a pyramid structure and resources are limited.
Dead giveaway that you are on one :P
Lots of denial in this thread about the contents of those interviews, as they're pretty damning. But it's all true ...
And kindergarteners are kind and pleasant while mature people are frustrated, abusive and cruel? (From experience I'd say if mature people are frustrated it's from dealing with the tyrannical outsized self-centeredness of the kindergarteners, but I digress.)
Good guys don't always wear white hats, and there's no reliable correlation between Google-style trappings, and a good place to work. I don't have a citation for you, but I've seen great creativity in grey Dilbert cubicles, and I've seen rank despair in brightly-colored factories of the happy-happy.
A shiny thing could be a nugget of true gold, or it could've been placed there to distract you from the fact that you're standing in a bucket of shit. And to contradict and invalidate your true realization that standing in shit makes you feel shitty. And that -- in and of itself, and totally aside from your co-workers' behavior -- is a subtle way of being a jerk to you.
A workplace should be neutral. Let me put the life there, like paint on a canvas.
Its called losing, thats what it feels like, you are missing that there are A LOT of winners.
Your sentiment is reinforced by presidential faux pas but thats a total sideshow to how people are successfully navigating this political environment, using it as a catalyst even for trade and commerce outcomes that will long outlast this administration.
And yes this administration looks to make huge changes that will severely disadvantage the US energy sector for decades while they try to prop up the failing coal industry while trying to kick the ladder out from under energy sources like solar and wind.
The point is that the feelings aren't justified for everyone. So for the parent poster to present that as a canonical reinforcement of how one should feel, or how one's executives should feel, or how all the employees at a multinational company might feel, is completely disingenuous.
Never mind that he ran on a platform of throwing a significant portion of the company out of the country. Step into the shoes of someone holding an H1B for one moment, please.
I'm well aware this isn't how H1Bs are supposed to work, and that many H1Bs (particularly in the Valley) are properly used, but there's definitely some other shoes you can step into on the H1B issue.
Yes, and given Trump's demonstrated understanding of nuanced issues, nobody was expecting him to magically come up with a solution that deals with the abuse, without collateral damage.
That is exactly the time when you want your boss to say that yes, they will have your back.
Step into the shoes of the person who was demanding a fair market wage until the company used an H1B visa to bring in someone who accepts far worse conditions because the threat of deportation is always present.
You might say that it is overly emotional, or too reactionary, or that the tone isn't appropriate, but think - really think! - what it would be like to wake up one morning to the unexpected shock that a President has been elected on the very possible platform of kicking you out of the country and ruining the life you built for yourself.
"No politics" is a fine ideal to aim for, but you can't expect anyone to leave stress like that at the door when they turn up to work.
Immigration is a political issue that hasn't been properly addressed in decades. H1B visas are good in theory, but companies exploit the system to import cheap foreign labor, hurting American wages and job prospects in the process. Illegal immigrants concentrate to pockets of the country, displacing American workers and lowering wages for those who have been hurt the most by globalization.
Should these political issues be ignored just to avoid hurt feelings? I don't think they should.
Of course you wouldn't! It's silly to expect or demand that of a person. Especially in the 24 hours since their life was turned upside down.
"Nothing has changed" is such an absurdly wrong way of looking at the issue. Say you're stood in the street alone. That's normal. Now there's a man stood in front of you with a knife, and he's looking at you threateningly. But he hasn't stabbed you! Nothing has changed. Your body is still unpunctured, so why are you worrying?
Throughout his campaign, Trump made overt threats to immigrants and the lives they live in the US. The fact that your entire future becomes incredibly uncertain within the space of 24 hours is absolutely something to get emotional about. To pretend otherwise is silly.
As is the idea that turning up to the office without being overtly emotional would somehow mean you're absolutely fine. That stress is going to come out one way or another, personally I think that expressing it (yes, including crying!) is a lot better than the alternatives.
I empathize with those on DACA or other immigrant situations; however on average I would argue reporting of the issues, the emotions, and reactions are over the top.
The news cycle every two weeks is - "immigrants getting kicked out, DACA is over" - three days later "president goes back on his word w/ EO" or "congress not in sync with president; won't change legislation." (not literally, but you get the point).
You missed the "::cough:: illegal ::cough::"
Otherwise, please cite a video/audio source of him actually saying he wants to kick out all the legal immigrants.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12...
Trump's threats were far from contained to illegal immigrants.
I am no Trump fan, but you have failed to do this. Temporarily (or indefinitely) curbing a specific subset of legal immigration is not equivalent to deporting people already in the country.
> Temporarily (or indefinitely) curbing a specific subset of legal immigration is not equivalent to deporting people already in the country.
Is it really that different? If a legally immigrated muslim left the country they would not be allowed back in again. Call me old fashioned, but I feel like a legal immigrant should be allowed to travel.
Except is has, and continues to change. These changes are affect real people, people in my family, in profoundly negative ways. That you choose to ignore others doesn't mean nothing has changed. Only that you are ignorant of what is happening.
Moreover, if you were a legal immigrant on an H1-B, and you happened to have dual nationality with one of the "bad" countries on Trump's list, you quickly found out that you could no longer risk travel outside the country. A large number of Canadian-Iranian/British-Iranian immigrants found they were suddenly capable of being banned.
Acting like the election campaign was no cause for concern is completely ignoring the obvious warning signs, like "We need a TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF MUSLIMS ENTERING THE COUNTRY".
If this had been "We need a total shutdown of JEWS", would you be so flippant with people's concerns about the campaign talk?
So what? They don't have some sort of magical automatic right to be here just because one of their relatives is.
>If this had been "We need a total shutdown of JEWS", would you be so flippant with people's concerns about the campaign talk?
If Jewish immigrants had been engaging in the amount of terrorism we've seen in Europe recently...yes, I would be just as flippant.
Do you think that white people in America engage in too much mass shooting, and consequently should have additional regulations applied to them regarding gun ownership?
>So what? They don't have some sort of magical automatic right to be here just because one of their relatives is.
We have generally held it is good policy to keep families together. And the times when it was not allowed (e.g. Chinese Exclusion Act) were specifically done for RACIST purposes, not rational ones. Tons of Chinese men were prevented from being reunited with their wives because of that, and still more single ones were prevented from marrying locals by anti-miscegenation laws.
These kinds of attitudes are basically the ones that allow you to be manipulated by political parties and have your attention diverted from real issues. Xenophobia works unfortunately, as studies and social experiments from the 60s and 70s show, blaming woes on "the other" is a tried and true tactic. You can take tiny issues related to foreigners or other tribes and blow them up so large they dominate the discussion.
Immigration and terrorism are not the largest issues facing this country, yet they completely dominated the election.
It's a tiny risk because it's a small fraction of an already tiny proportion of the population. Increasing that proportion of the population will lead to a higher level of risk. We've already seen what that looks like in Europe, and that all began to accelerate rather quickly in the last few years. It's very rational to not want that to happen here as well.
> We have generally held it is good policy to keep families together. And the times when it was not allowed (e.g. Chinese Exclusion Act) were specifically done for RACIST purposes, not rational ones. Tons of Chinese men were prevented from being reunited with their wives because of that, and still more single ones were prevented from marrying locals by anti-miscegenation laws.
While that makes some amount of sense, it also leads to chain migration and ultimately displaces more of the native population economically AND politically. We can't ignore that the one side that supports increased immigration is the side that will ultimately benefit from having their children as voters.
>These kinds of attitudes are basically the ones that allow you to be manipulated by political parties and have your attention diverted from real issues. Xenophobia works unfortunately, as studies and social experiments from the 60s and 70s show, blaming woes on "the other" is a tried and true tactic. You can take tiny issues related to foreigners or other tribes and blow them up so large they dominate the discussion.
For what it's worth, I had no interest in immigration issues at all until I was bombarded with how evil it was to be against any form of immigration. Voters have the right to an opinion on these issues, and "that's racist" isn't going to stop them anymore.
You can't compare Europe's problems with assimilating immigrants to ours. But if you keep alienating immigrants, you will make them feel like outsiders, and then you will face more of the kinds of problems Europe has.
>While that makes some amount of sense, it also leads to chain migration and ultimately displaces more of the native population economically AND politically. We can't ignore that the one side that supports increased immigration is the side that will ultimately benefit from having their children as voters.
When the Chinese came to America, they worked jobs people here didn't want, including taking over cotton picking in the South after slavery was banned, and running stores that catered to African Americans under Jim Crow. They did dangerous work on the railroads that white Americans didn't want to do.
You're running a slippery slope argument that justifies a harsh stance now when none is justified. "They could start raping our women if we let a lot more in" We've seen this played out time and time again.
At the same time conservative politics plays the dog whistle game with immigration, claiming immigrants are putting them out of work, they're also opposing efforts to make native born Americans more competitive, like expanded educational opportunity, access to daycare, and other investments in human capital.
Why was "chained immigration" no problem when it was Western Europeans, but all of a sudden, it's a problem if you have yellow or brown skin? And given the immense amount of value that generations of immigrants have brought to this country, why should I fear "chained immigration"?
>For what it's worth, I had no interest in immigration issues at all until I was bombarded with how evil it was to be against any form of immigration. Voters have the right to an opinion on these issues, and "that's racist" isn't going to stop them anymore.
Well, it's bad to be against it when you have fallacious reasons, by ballooning up the dangers of it and buying into nationalist fervor. There's a reason why the middle class got stagnated over the last 40 years, and it has nothing to do with immigration. The same thing happened in Japan which has some of the most protectionist immigration policies you can think of.
People got used to the low hanging fruit of easy GDP growth that can from a rapid switchover from agricultural to industrial society, and now with growth tapering off to ~2% GDP all over the developed world, everyone is looking for something to blame, and dark political forces all over are trying to blame immigrants. Here it's the Mexicans, the Muslims, the Asians. In Britain, it was the Polish. In Germany, it was the Jews (and not the harsh penalties imposed by WWI on Germany).
Find someone to blame, usually a foreigner.
In the meantime, we aren't making the investments we need in infrastructure, in education, in health, in early childhood -- because those require sacrifice.
Instead, take the easy route: sacrifice these other people.
/s
If you can't be professional in the workplace, take a damn day off. If you can't be professional in front of a crowd, then don't take the stage.
Crying is for funerals. And national politics is for soapboxes, not for corporate presentations.
If you feel like crying, but hold back, does that feeling just immediately disappear and you get on with your day? Of course not. You just bury the stress, and sooner or later it bubbles back up again in weird and unpredictable ways. Is crying at work more or less professional than having a panic attack at work and ending up hospitalised?
Crying is just an expression of stress. If your actual statement is that people shouldn't be stressed about non-work issues at work, then good luck, that's not how human beings are engineered.
Anything else is likely to be disruptive to your coworkers.
I have a lot of empathy for people experiencing emotional distress, whatever the reason. I would never complain about them and would do my best to offer sympathy when appropriate. But I really shouldn't be put in that position at work, and if I was emotionally disturbed I would not come into work so as to avoid putting my coworkers in that position.
I think this is all doubly true if we're talking about the results of an election. Some of your coworkers may be happy for the same reason you're upset.
I mean, shit, if they took that advice, he never would have been elected.
You may not want to believe it, but it is true. Lots of groups of marginalized people felt targeted by Trump and his supporters. And Trump has not done a thing to assuage those fears.
Religious flamewar is particularly unwelcome here.
Seriously though, it's hard to have it any other way when this issue has been moralized as much as it has. A nation has a fundamental right to control it's borders and determine who does and doesn't get citizenship etc. It is not a human right to have access to the United States.
Empathy, it seems, is often a cherry picked virtue.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who sees their country selling out to the highest bidder. Can you not understand their fear?
The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stale way that felt like death.