Not quite the most telling statement is something close to: engineers are intellectually invested in their work that most don't have time for caring about politics, so they just follow what people around them are doing.

Or maybe they have strong political views, but choose to leave them at home - rather than have conflict with their coworkers?

I know I personally have very strong opinions that I largely put aside at work.

Bingo. I'm left-leaning in a left-leaning environment, but I avoid talking about politics, especially in writing, because it can only hurt me.

Having lived here for the past few years, originally from the Midwest in an area much different than SF, my best take on the younger generation working in tech is that most do not hold strong views in terms of fiscal policies and generally equate politics to social issues. There is a fear of not being "politically correct" and offending someone. Most do not actually care and just lean with the side of least resistance.

It’s about worldview and which things are taught. Curriculums are biased. Think back: How many right-of-center professors did you have? How many were open Marxists?

> How many right-of-center professors did you have?

Nearly all of them, having majored in Economics.

World of difference from majoring in political science.

Ha, you're right. Economics is an exception. I minored in economics, and found it amusing that professors who expounded on the virtues of capitalism were doing so within an socialist institution.

However, looking back, I'd probably place most of my economics professors in the neoliberal camp. I'd propose that the left/right divide is primarily about nationalism vs globalism now -- my professors would have tended to support international capitalism rather than national capitalism.

Figures like Mises weren't mentioned in my classes, despite his famous prediction that the economic calculation problem would cause the fall of communism. Yet Keynes was discussed thoroughly.

No open marxists that I was aware of.

Left/right dichotomies are completely useless when you get to the scale of an individual, so I had profs who had opinions that would be called left and ones that would be called right. Both in the same person.

That said, sure academy leans “left” - but i’d argue that’s because seeking knowledge is inherently liberal. I.e. if the present is good and we should not change (one definition of conservatism), what’s the point of persuing new knowledge/ideas?

That relies on a rather specific definition of knowledge. Thomas Sowell has done a lot of good writing on these topics: the nature and varying definitions of knowledge, the role of academics and intellectuals, etc. It's ironic because he doesn't like them much despite being one himself.

Conservatives tend to place more emphasis on earned experience than liberals do. Experience and "book knowledge" are both different aspects of the concept of knowledge, but it's certainly untrue that universities teach everything that could be called knowledge. Indeed they're famous for not doing so, hence the fact that "it's academic" is an insult not a compliment.

Whether this means conservatives value experience more than book knowledge is unclear, it may be that they consider both important whereas liberals consider experience relatively unimportant and thus cluster in academia.