The part that's biting them is that now that they're 100,000 people, creativity is wasted anyway, because any brilliant new product idea will get killed long before launch and if it doesn't it'll probably catastrophically damage Google's brand. So the upside of this cultural decision is worthless to them, and the downside is incredibly chaotic and difficult to manage.
I think we'll see a shift away from this at Google, but I think other startups will still consciously embrace it. When you're 10 people and are about to go out of business if you don't come up with a brilliant idea, your incentives are dramatically different from when you're 100,000 and make tens of billions from your existing business lines every quarter.
One example is advertising agencies, which in the last century (in spite of what you see on popular television) were very button-up places but created cultural touchstones we still know today.
(Edited to clarity I'm referencing ad agencies in the 20th century, not the SV-wannabe agencies a few have evolved into today.)
Like their shuttle looks like a prison bus but is labeled "disruptive thinkers transport" or some such. That's Mike Judge levels of ridiculousness.
You're joking, right?
It's absolutely a false dichotomy to assert that there can either be creativity or there can be constraints.
As a game developer, I look no further than the numerous game jams with artificial constraints as evidence that creativity can flourish within the confines of constraints. One might even argue that creativity is given constructive direction by way of constraints.
I don't believe it's possible to have creativity without emotions, and I've got citations to that point (which are apparently quite controversial, that comment has been fluctuating heavily in score) [1].
It's possible to put constraints on your emotions and to not immediately do something because you feel like doing it. This is the essence of emotional intelligence, and of maturity. The thing is that this is a conscious process: you are expending your limited attention on watching your behavior and ensuring it conforms to the desired norms. (If you internalize those norms such that conformance is unconscious - well, then you've internalized the existing norms, but the point of creativity is that you're trying to break out of those unconsciously-internalized customs.) That means you're not expending that attention on the details of the problem itself. Most of the problems involved in revolutionizing an industry with computer code are immensely complex and require all the attention you can give them.
It speaks directly to the nature of creativity. Is creativity simply the discovery of the new; or is it an expression of desire for the new? Is it something else?
Hmm...
Although, to the original concern: I don't believe constraints on behaviour necessarily constrain emotions; such constraints influence emotions, but I wouldn't expect a general suppression of emotion.
Paying someone $90 million to leave after allegedly assaulting someone [0] isn't something that happens "constantly", and seems like a pretty reasonable thing to have strong opinions about. And there's nothing "performative" about successfully rolling back mandatory arbitration [1], which studies have found is stacked in favor of employers and muzzles employees [2], and which the ABA now recommends against [3].
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18075780/google-sexual-as...
[2]: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/1/16992362/sexual-harassment-mand...
[3]: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/publications...
Honestly if Google really kicked him out because of an unsubstantiable claim by some woman with an axe to grind, or some private sexual perversions .... after all he did for Google? $90M is probably too little for what they gave him. That's like, less than a year's CEO salary.
That's true of every accusation the Miami Herald published against Jeffrey Epstein as well. Do you believe none of that should be in the public realm, either?
I'm not arguing that you're wrong, I'm just pointing out that if you want to live in a world where such accusations stay out of the public realm, then that means you want to live in a world where Jeffrey Epstein is still raping adolescent girls, and you have to admit that's a price you're willing to pay to protect the accused.
Conversely, I have no problem admitting that if I support such he-said-she-said accusations being publicized and having consequences, then even if Al Franken and Aziz Ansari did nothing wrong whatsoever, the hits to their reputation and earnings opportunity cost that they suffered is a price I'm willing to pay to reduce sexual harassment.
I also don't fully understand what you mean but "shouldn't be in the public realm". If me and some other person are the sole eyewitnesses to something, should I be muzzled from saying what I witnessed in the public realm simply because the other eyewitness disagrees?
Your point about emotions is also good. Here is another way to put it.
The issue IMO is that they told people they were changing the world and by making information universally available etc etc. The people who went to work for them early really believed it and those people seeded their culture.
The people who just wanted to make a bunch of money went into other fields (like Wall Street or law). Those people also talk about politics and undoubtedly have political activists. But the politics of someone who just wants to make a ton of money are aligned with a company whose stated goal is to just make a ton of money.
This political alignment doesn't happen for free at Google. And since they seeded their culture with people who cared about improving the world, they have a higher than average rate of influencial employees who don't want to make money in traditionally "dirty" fields like arms dealing and private prisons.
Google has to solve this problem because their cloud division can't survive if they can't take government contracts. I see no way of solving it except that they just have to kill the old culture while attempting to minimize attrition.
I mean, just think about it. Standard Oil had the same monopoly over a valuable resource (oil then, Software and Data today) that Google has today (fine, Facebook etc too... but there is no Facebook search; also they are monopolies over different kinds of digital products). They need to be broken up; their successors will probably end up becoming quite big over time; rinse, rise, repeat.
Capitalism is an amazing thing. Only the strongest survive but then they dominate everything and strangle the market itself. Fuck that, keep the markets free of such control by non state actors.
Ouch, don't let Facebook hear you say that :p
They tried so hard to get Search to stick, to the point of trying to juice the numbers by forcing you to go to a result page instead of directly to a group/page/profile in the live results dropdown.
Google could be asked to do the same with some of their product lines/companies.
It's very unlikely though. These companies have a lot of influence and a lot of power .. and when was the last time the Federal government broke up a company over antitrust violations? It didn't happen with Microsoft .. and for examples of really big monopolies, you'd probably have to go back to the Bell/ATT days.
While that's true, just money and influence aren't sufficient for this. Congress passes laws, but its upto the Executive to interpret it. The lack of breaking up of larger corporations has indeed been due to their significant influence, but I'm interested to see how e.g. a left-learning President like Sanders or Warren would use the powers of the Federal Executive (specifically the Justice Dept) to enforce existing anti-trust laws. Probably the only thorn in their plan would be SCOTUS, and its possible that its current makeup might make it amenable to the influence of corporations (its not clear to me if it will).
http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c...
Or how Bell is now ATT and plenty of other useless oligopoly companies?
This was the same logic that allowed talented men to turn their workplaces into a very unwelcoming place for women by allowing them to make sexual jokes, proposition their coworkers, and have business meetings in strip clubs. If you are going with the “take your whole self to work” spiel you can argue that sexuality is a bigger part of most people’s lives than politics. So if we can ask for co-workers to not discuss their latest bedroom exploits, surely we can ask for people to not talk about politics at work.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creativity-the-art-a...
https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-emotions-that-make-us-more-creat...
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0266...
TL;DR: It's not the specific emotion that matters (indeed, there's evidence that having mixed emotions, where you can synthesize aspects of them, is crucial to creativity), it's the motivational intensity behind it.
I don't believe this. I can tune out whatever random BS my coworkers a few desks over are talking about and still be engaged in technical discussions about what we're building.
It just requires some discipline and an expectation of that discipline.
Arguably, the differentiating factor between humans and animals is our ability to organize on large scales. Monkeys and killer whales can coordinate behavior in groups of sometimes up to 50 or maybe 100 individuals. However, humans can coordinate behavior across millions of people. Building a modern automobile, a computer chip, or the social security system requires coordination across so many individuals, no one person can fully and deeply understand the entire system.
The ability of humans to believe information that they do not fully know is true, is probably one of the defining traits of humanity.
Google used to be just that, and they made untold billions from it, so it's not surprising that they held on to remnants of that spirit for too long.
Now they're a gigantic megacorp, and need to act the part.
...and life goes on, everything is different but also the same...
It’s possible to both be funny and be conscious :: It’s possible to be creative and not fixated on political activism.
I don't have any problem keeping my non-work related opinions to myself at work, and I don't see any corresponding repression of my professional creativity.
The same applies everywhere, and going by the book is always the least creative thing you can do. Of course often going by the book is the best solution you have, but it is hard to argue that it doesn't reduce creativity in the workplace.
I can't imagine my being an R or a D having any connection with engineering creativity.
> it could mean that instead of using your own judgement when hiring people you remember that race and gender is political so you override your gut-feelings and go by the book to avoid problems in the future
I give an evaluation of their ability to do the job, and let the HR dept. fret about the company's social equity agenda.
I don't choose my friends based on if their politics/religion align with mine, either.
Sadly most even remotely political topics have started to turn into one, even on HN.
It's getting to the point where I wish moderators would just downrank such topics to position 20+ or outright ban them front the frontpage.
Or at least slap some clear "POLITICAL" tag on it and give users a filter option.
Is that something that companies do on purpose? Because such an environment sounds like absolute hell.
I want to spend my time dealing with technical problems not arguing with people's egos.
What they're now learning is that this decision is incompatible with certain forms of revenue like military or immigration-enforcement contracts. That doesn't mean that the right answer is that you should accept such forms of revenue and reject the employees who don't support it. That just means you have to choose. What they're regretting is simply that they can't have it both ways.
(Also, GitHub in particular is trying to endorse a particular form of politics at work - they've been defending the practices of ICE in their internal and external communications. If opposition to ICE is political, support of ICE is political too, no?)
Google and GitHub are trying to turn into IBM and Oracle. That's fine, but they should remember that they were originally trying to beat IBM and Oracle. And they shouldn't be surprised if a company that explicitly embraces activist engineers and forswears sources of revenue incompatible with that activism, a company that says "We will talk about politics at the workplace and this is our particular form of politics," one day beats the pants off them.
Google only really became politicized a couple of years ago when certain media publications started making demands for diversity numbers within the organization and publicly shaming them for not meeting some imaginary bar in the area.
Github was the premier hosted SCM solution long before it literally pulled its meritocracy rug from under it [0] and has been living off first-mover advantage since, succeeding in spite of the activists it now employs, not because of.
I personally _would be_ very surprised to see an identity politics focused company beat either, not merely because of their [Google, Github] current status but because those in question haven't shown themselves to be capable of building much at all.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/githubs-ceo-ditches-meritocr...
This is also historically revisionist. Google's been super political since forever, it just wasn't in the news for it.
Googler 2006-2014. I can't say I remember much politics during that time. The closest it got was Eric Schmidt having close relationships with Washington. That and the China thing but even there, Google was in China with a censored search engine up until they went and hacked the firm. I don't remember much discussion of the fact that we had a Chinese version of the search engine.
What are you thinking of?
I look at it like this. My friends who still work there complain about stupid idpol all the time now. I never heard complaints like that when I was there.
Obergefell v. Hodges was only four years ago. American conservatives are still trying to reverse gay marriage.
(And hiring mostly in SF isn't itself a political choice?)
We are talking of the company that was advocating do not evil. This was political from day 1, remember their stand on China?
Yes, when they stopped caring about engineering skills and starting caring about diversity checkboxes, their overall engineering capabilities declined. Google has done relatively little of note over the last 5 years given their size, and part of it is that they have an incompetence cancer and engineering teams cannot trust other teams (or even coworkers in larger teams).
Do you realize how harmful it is to an organization when you can’t tell if a coworker you are depending on is competent or if they were hired because of their genes?
> This was political from day 1, remember their stand on China?
Which stand? Because they flip-flop all of the time.
All candidates must past the same hiring bar, no one gets extra points for "diversity". So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired.
Retries, easier judges, removing some earlier barriers, etc would all be obvious discrimination in any other process.
You yourself admit that the process has false negatives. If those are in any way probabilistic (which is obvious that people get in after multiple tries), allowing minorities to try more frequently is lowering the bar for minorities.
If you let someone throw extra darts at the dartboard to hit the bullseye, that doesn’t make them as good as the people that hit it in fewer attempts.
> So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired.
Good for you, but not everyone was so willfully ignorant when I worked there.
Yes, the company tells you that's how it works. But I was also a Google engineer, I did hundreds of interviews during a time when it was way less into diversity than it is today. And absolutely Google bent its policies to try and hire more women. Constantly.
Some tricks I saw used:
1. Assigning the best/most reliable interviewers to women. Recruiters confirmed to me that they did this.
2. Allowing women who failed the phone screens to proceed to on-sites anyway.
3. Organising recruiting events which banned men, e.g. there was since early years Google CodeJam, a coding competition that was pretty openly used as a way to find candidates. But the men crushed the women, repeatedly. I think there was a female finalist once in 13 years. So they set up a second CodeJam with large cash prizes, but banned men from it.
In recent times there was the recruiter who quit and claims he was told to not hire non-diverse candidates. I believe that. I was told about recruitment's diversity goals by recruiters themselves.
But still, there was a lot of resistance to bending the hiring pipeline in more extreme ways. That culture carried over to Facebook. I've been told that at Facebook recruiters were incentivised with cash to hire more women, but they gave up pretty fast because stuffing the pipeline with weaker candidates didn't work: they got flushed out by the hiring committees.
By the way you're blind to a much more important trick Google uses. Eng hiring was, during my time, at least somewhat well defended against diversity abuse. But firing was totally controlled by HR. And it is an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible for women to be fired, regardless of how low their performance is. Instead they get moved around between teams. Men, on the other hand, can be and are let go for merely not exceeding expectations. Obviously that's one way to get less male workforce, if you're patient!
1. Assigning the most reliable interviewers to women ensures that women who do meet the bar don't get inaccurately rejected.
2. The hiring bar is enforced at the on-site, not at the phone screen.
3. Sourcing an all-women group from a hiring event and sending them through the normal interview process is ... sending them through the normal interview process.
If you want to claim that Google is trying harder to hire qualified women than qualified men, sure, I don't think anyone disputed that. The dispute was whether Googlers ever think an unqualified person was hired to meet a diversity goal.
(And how often does Google fire someone for discovering that their interview process emitted a false positive? Given the incredible cost of making that mistake, most hiring processes are tuned to err towards false negatives instead of false positives, and Google's intensive process should be particularly good at that. Unless you're claiming HR is firing qualified men to meet a quota - i.e., textbook wrongful termination at scale - a bias for never getting around to firing women can't have a noticeable effect.)
This is a lie perpetuated by googlers. That’s a false dichotomy. There is no evidence that their process reduces false positives. Pointing to a bunch of false negatives just means they have a process that produces a bunch of false negatives. For how smart googlers are purported to be, you would think they wouldn’t report such an obviously illogical statement.
Please don't troll on HN.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...
Maybe you don't agree with those claims but please don't simply write off anything you don't like the sound of as trolling.
Cool, you should sue. The SJW women are suing alleging Google has been discriminating against them: https://googlegendercase.com/ Are you going to let the SJWs win? It sounds like you have an open-and-shut case, from what you're claiming.
> Feminists would utterly lose it.
Again, that's not what's under dispute. What is being claimed is that Googlers have no reason to doubt that every person there met the hiring bar. Even in your scenario, that would still be true. Even if Google refrained entirely from hiring white men - which, yes, would be illegal - they could still enforce the hiring bar.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...
I don't have any documents or hard evidence, just what I saw and heard. So I can't contribute to that case even if I wanted to get involved.
They aren't opposed goals; an organization with a meritocracy that over-optimizes on too few metrics is fragile and collapses in a dynamic market.
The best recipe for a company that isn't printing billions of dollars from Advertising to go bankrupt is try to follow their book and culture.
If you remove infinite money and market dominance would it still work out in the end ? My guess is that it wouldn't.
Google feels sometimes very much like startups with VC money just being inefficient and burning other people money, except of course, Google is burning it's own money that is generated from the non sexy / cool stuff (ads and enterprise email / storage )...
Google in the early days didn't have infinite money nor market dominance and it obviously worked out. Doing what they did is what got them from A to B.
> If you remove infinite money and market dominance would it still work out in the end ?
And the answer to that is clearly: yes. It would because it did.
None of Google's success it had to do with identity politics. In many ways, you could argue Google was a-political for most of its life.
They should be surprised as it hasn't ever happened before. That's not to say that it won't or shouldn't happen, it just would be surprising.
I suspect if a company says "Bring your whole self to work, and we're actually serious about it, only bother applying if you think you'll gel with the folks already here," they'll still be able to hire as many people as they need and they'll deliver better products because of it.
I would argue that they are less productive seeing that after all these years they haven’t diversified from advertising - where 90% of their profit comes from - as compared to Apple or Microsoft or even Amazon.
It was really clear I was giving wrong answers. I told them flat out that I think people should be judged by the quality of their character, not the color of their skin and that the company should just try to be fair and hire the best people.
I mean I get that companies want to do the right thing but you can only really do ONE thing well.
These aren’t really politically charged questions but rather questions about how to manage people and the issues that come with people. While the cause of the complaint may be politically charged, how one would handle the situation should be pretty by the book.
By “the book” I meant a well thought out process that follows the law, protects parties in a dispute, prevents retaliation, encourages reporting, and is well documented and understood. I’m probably missing a bunch of other best practices - not a certified HR Specialist.
My only aim here was to distinguish between disputes that arise in politically charged areas vs. the handling of those disputes which, I would argue should not be charged at all but rather an efficient run-through of a dispute process that “works”.
Or, to use an analogy, consider interviewing someone who, when asked about their preferences and strategies for ensuring code quality, answers "I just write correct code in the first place". Even if they're correct in that statement, that's not the sort of person you want in charge of that subject, because most people don't work like that, even if they wish they could.
Not the same, differently?
Because the entire point of the law on protected classes is that people should be treated the same regardless of being a member or not of a protected class.
Non discrimination, not discrimination.
They are not necessarily what people would actually do, but they sound like the correct answer in interview-speak.
(We'd need to know more details about the question and the answer to be sure.)
Recordings and videos could get leaked at any time by an employee to the media or on social media, which will further blow it up (ahem, like with Facebook) or perhaps take things out of context or cause more chaos.
Google actually trying to have a serious - and not just PR/HR-bullshit - discussion about highly nuanced, opinionated, divisive topics relevant to the workplace in this type of mass-meeting setting is basically playing with fire out in the open.
(This isn't a take on yes/no politics in the workplace, just an interpretation from Google/Facebook)
Worth clarifying a point. The leakers didn't make Zuck say stupid things.
I can understand that having scrutiny on every single communication is probably pretty hard, but people often neglect that the best PR scandal avoidance mechanism is to not do stupid things.
They serve three meals, but you're not expected to eat all three meals. Some people like to get in early and leave early, others like to get in late and stay late. The food is just a perk, there if you want it.
Also, you're not obligated or expected to work longer if you eat dinner. Not sure where you heard that one. If you're at the office when dinner is served, it's considered that you've already stayed late.
Of course, now there are constant stories of tech employees griping about how evil they think their employers are, how unfairly they're being treated, how little freedom they have to express their opinions. It's hard not to roll my eyes sometimes.
I found a good litmus test with how courteous people are, or aren’t, in the gym.
Personally I probably manage to get breakfast once a week on average and stay late enough for dinner 2 or 3 times a year.
You say that like it's a given truth - do you have anything to back up that assertion? FWIW, I don't recall Google courting "activists", though they obviously did court people who were highly invested in their education and careers, and of course there is probably a non-0 correlation with those types of people and "activists". I also wouldn't describe Google as "pro-politics". They certainly were pro-open-communication, but given their size now, and the complete change in the nature and temperature of political discussions over the past decade, it's not surprising at all that hey would be forced to change this.
Google let employees spend company time and resources to do left-wing activism, how is that not "pro-politics"? The things you see coming from Google the past few years are the death throes of these rules being removed and Google becoming a conventional company where you have to work when you are on company time.
Sure, and this is just one of many examples:
They have been very proactive in this space for a long time.
See that symmetry?
> courted activists are now regretting their decision.
I think it's fair to say that there are a large number of people who are very invested in the answer to this question, hence it will be difficult to get a serious unbiased answer. It's also quite politically hot.
> For a long time it was common knowledge that you would try
> to keep stuff like that out of the workplace.
Activists and unions have brought many a company and Country to its knees. Companies that stay away from politics (or any statements at all) seem to be doing better, but somebody like Google or GitHub have so much financial and structural clout that they can afford to make mistakes.
> My guess is there will certainly be a shift away from
> other companies trying to do this in the future.
> Rightfully so imho.
I agree, but it's hard to fully quantify. I guess the real point is that politically companies and Countries are split approximately 50/50 between two main parties and any polarizing position a company takes will likely upset roughly half of the people. I think the only way to maintain a proper diverse structure is to not take sides.
About 20% of the company publicly, openly supports unionization but 2 people got fired. From the rest, almost 100% of them have received a raise or a promotion during the same period.
Employees have been objecting to the hiring of conservative activists into influential positions.
E.g. there were objections about support for the Trump administration's extreme positions on immigration and activist positions opposed to trans people.
I cannot stress enough how bizarre the internal politics truly were now that I left Google. It's interesting to see posts from Xoogler activists in Xoogler boards who try to introduce themselves as some sort of oppressed heroes, only to be stonewalled by the alumni community who couldn't care less about their PC agenda now that their career isn't held siege to PC whims.
This is just descending deeper into “more and more of your life must be dedicated to paid speech.”
Google is basically turning into that big IBM they weren’t going to be.
It’s entirely social pressure to conform to business norm.
There’s no reason things like cloud software and AI must be built by Google. Look at the Linux kernel.
This is kowtowing to financial economics first, cause paid speech is everything to an ad company.
Humanity is still emotionally transitioning away from traditional values belief in top down godhead must rule! hierarchy. We’ve seen literally for a whole now the idea of a God described by Abrahamic religion is not compatible with our physical measure of reality. But human social sensibilities take time to update as the generations of old linger
The finance economy is the last big hurdle.
This sort of logic and villianization just adds to my reasons for not wanting that in my workplace.
Pretty much all of the “pro-politics at the workplace” types would demand that anybody who wore a MAGA hat be fired… so I think that the people who think politics in the workplace are OK are the ones who are actually the ones maintaining the actual status quo: you can have opinions, as long as they’re the same as mine.
This understandably makes some people uncomfortable. It challenges beliefs, it challenges self-worth, it challenges value systems, it challenges worldviews.
None of these invalidate the underlying concept that sheltering today's winners from any challenge, complaint, or criticism, is inherently repressive to those outside that class.
The reality is that many people keep politics out of the workplace because they dislike the amount that bringing politics to the workplace can affect the cohesion of their team/department.
You're creating a strawman argument.
You clearly value the change that can be brought by bringing politics into the workplace. That's totally cool, your value system is different than that of some other people. All they're asking is that you take their viewpoint without assigning your assumed reasons to it.
The meaning may be absolutely as you describe. The effect, however, is to perpetuate gradients in power, privilege, and control.
You can challenge all you want, but being an annoyance in the office by forcing your views and interpretations on everyone is a major issue. I don't care about your politics and don't want to discuss mine. The company is paying you for productivity, not political change. Understanding boundaries is the first step to communicating with people.
Oddly enough, I'm debating (on Mastodon) against the notion that a Single Global Authority defined as "suitably free", supported through taxes, would be a prefered / acceptable alternative to present private Internet service provisioning.
I agree with most of the sentiment, particularly public subsidy of comms capabilities. The concern is that it's not possibly to simply define a thing as "suitably free", you've got to work in a real world, in which definitions don't simply instantiate themselves, in which adversaries may take control of critical regulatory bodies (I pointed out that One Geopolitical Party with interests Significantly Opposed to Another has in recent history held the chair of the UN Human Rights Commission, where the UN was the proposed Internet provisioning entity).
Similarly: you can't simply declare by definition or fiat that we're all on the same team. For multiple parties' interests to be fairly represented and addressed, there must be some mechanism for representing and addressing those concerns.
Otherwise the proposal simply ignores existing realities and complexities and attempts to abstract them out of existence. They'll reappear in time in other places or forms.
Additionally, my understaning of "presume good faith" may be different from yours. It's not so much a belief I'll maintain, most especially in the absence of evidence. It's an operating and communications modality I will attempt to sustain (and hope others do), up to the point at which it is clearly no longer tenable. It's an extension of all feasible grace and credit, to the point that no possible justification for that extension remains.
Andreas Schou, a Googler, used to have an excellent guide to moderation pinned to his profile page there. A copy survives here:
https://www.voidstar.com/Takeout/ActivityLog/Comments.html
I've posted it, with paragraph breaks to Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/raw/W3vpntgM
I'm on my side, first and last and always. If cooperation helps me, so be it. But if cooperation harms me, then I will speak up. If I am not heard, I will leave.
That is my inherent and sovereign right as a human being.
It's the same argument as not wanting to find everything there is to know about your neighbor, a dose of ignorance is healthy to maintaining most relationships in life. You don't need nor is it healthy, to apply the same standard of knowledge to your coworkers as to your significant other.
And no, the vast majority of people don't consider those characteristics to be political at all and really don't care. Come in, do work, go home, and don't hurt anyone. It's not a complicated political argument.
Something about lying with dogs and fleas. I'm happy to listen if you elaborate on what exactly you mean by political. Though I'll caution by stating that in general, I find that most "political" issues can be phrased as consequences of ethical concerns (if there weren't underlying ethical disagreements, there wouldn't be political issues).
Let's take as an example the act of a company contracting with CBP. This is "political", in the sense that it is, to many, clearly an act of protest against the current administration. On the other hand, if one has ethical objections to separating children from their parents, or any number of other things, there can be a moral (and if one is an ACM member, an organizational) imperative to escalate when you have ethical concerns.
In essence, if I believe the family separation policy hurts people, and my company may enable that policy, do I have a moral imperative to escalate my concerns about the hurt we're causing? Or is doing so "political" and therefore inappropriate to mention at work?
When you protest against it publicly in the workplace and shout down others for as little as not vehemently agreeing with you, then we have a problem.
This is the difference between escalating concerns vs political activism, regardless of the actual issue at stake.
Isn't this what you're doing now: shouting down others for as little as not vehemently agreeing with you about the place of political discussion in the workplace?
Edit: To rephrase since you missed what I was getting at: you are advocating for institutional support in silencing people who express views with which you disagree in the workplace. That is, views which are "too political" should be forbidden and, if expressed, presumably shouted down or otherwise silenced.
If for example, I expressed my disagreement with you that I believe political views are reasonable to express in the workplace, what action would you take?
Replying to your edit => A workplace is different than the state. You do not have complete freedom within a corporation, and expression is very different from beliefs. Nobody cares about your beliefs, but your expression will be limited to increase harmony and productivity within a commercial space where you're paid to do work.
> When you protest against it publicly in the workplace and shout down others for as little as not vehemently agreeing with you, then we have a problem.
I'm asking if you think that's generally true. For example, if you actually believe this, you would presumably make no attempt to silence me if I protested something in the workplace, as doing so would be taking exactly the action you object to.
Presumably you would internally object to my protesting something, and we both agree that that's alright. But were you to express that concern outwardly, say by asking me to stop, it would be shouting down others for as little as not vehemently agreeing with you about workplace conduct. And therefore we would have a problem, or more correctly, you would have a problem with yourself.
In other words, we encounter a bit of a paradox. How you resolve this paradox is of paramount importance: the value system you use to resolve this paradox becomes the values you use in the workplace.
I'm using this to illustrate a point: there isn't a "null" position. Nebulously banning "political" views doesn't work unless you're clear about what makes something political. And people will disagree with you on those things. Its much less painful to ban things based on content (say: cursing or insults) than "how political it is", because the second is just an excuse to let your values implicitly bias the local Overton window without acknowledging that.
I can't speak for the original commenter, but I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that. Banning politics is a difficult and inevitably biased rule. But the alternative seems to be that politics invades every minute of everyone's life, and that's completely intolerable unless you're fortunate enough to precisely align with your local mainstream.
> but it's miles better than the scenario where politics is allowed to invade every minute of everyone's life.
I just want to note that, as someone who works at Google, its very easy to turn politics "off", so to speak. There are mailing lists and group chats I just don't access. I'm privileged enough to be able to do that because there are very few political issues that directly affect me. That isn't true for some of my coworkers. Those who are, to take one example, immigrants are directly affected by "politics" on the daily. And so avoiding discussion or interaction with politcal issues isn't possible for them. The same is true for coworkers who are Muslim, or who have undocumented family members. The political realities are inescapable for them. Asking them not to discuss those issues at work is like asking me not to discuss, say, a parent being hospitalized. They're real issues that affect and weigh on people. Forcing people to keep those things bottled up, especially when the company may be taking action that negatively impacts those people, isn't nice.
* Banning politics from the workplace is a huge benefit to people whose views are less mainstream. In the presence of politics, people with non-mainstream views have to either lie about what they think or live under a constant cloud of controversy.
* Banning politics from the workplace is the only way to keep your values independent of the political environment. If politics are allowed, you constantly have to monitor the political landscape to make sure following your company values won't make your employees rebel.
* Your analogy does hold, and it would be unreasonable to have a rule where I'll be punished for chatting in the breakroom about how my cousin might be deported. But it would also be unreasonable for me to interrupt meetings with demands that the company must cancel its medical plan, because my dad has the same insurance and I don't think they're treating him right.
More broadly, I don't think anyone actually wants or would benefit from politics in general in the workplace. The only people I've seen argue for it are confident that their politics will be popular, and that all political views they find offensive will continue to be forbidden.
To your first point, this is only true if you're forced to participate. We have workplace social events, I sometimes choose not to participate. We have political arguments, I often disagree with the majority in those conversations. I simply don't engage when I'm not up for a debate. It's yet to be an issue. I'd agree that forcing people to express their political views is unreasonable, but that also isn't a position I've seen expressed except as a Boogeyman.
To your second point, if your values are independent of the current political climate, you need to be able to discuss how your actions align with your values. If you're working in political spaces, this necessitates discussion of political issues. To be concrete, if your values are "don't be evil", you need to be willing to have the discussion on whether or not working with the Chinese government on a censored search tool is evil. This is a really complex question (and I use this example because I've heard great arguments in both directions), but if you censor political discussion, the organization can't be held accountable, because no one is allowed to ask.
To your third point, I'm in agreement with your specific example, but asking a question about improving the healthcare policy at an all hands on HR issues would be warranted. Similarly, asking about access to gender neutral restrooms would be warranted even if it's political to some people.
To your last bit, I'm not saying that you can't ban certain things for certain reasons. As an example, banning discrimination is okay, even though some discrimination might be political.
In essence, I'm of the opinion that if you hold a belief strongly enough to ban dissent, you should be forthright about the belief. If your want to ban Republicans, or ban people who openly identify as trans (both of which are legal in various US jurisdictions), at least have the decency so say so and not hide behind banning "political discussion" or "political activism".
I don't think forced political expression is entirely a boogeyman. There was an article a couple months back[1] where a guy was publicly offended that (admittedly among other complaints) his coworkers weren't talking enough about police brutality. Anecdotally I have a lot of stories; for Hispanic Heritage Month, for example, we had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posters all around the office.
It's definitely important to discuss how your actions align with your values. Sometimes that will mean discussing values issues that are also political issues, and sometimes that will mean making a very slippery distinction. But this isn't the extent of the political activism at Google. When employees insisted that Kay Coles James must not be allowed on the AI advisory council[2], they didn't argue that having her would make Google do some particular evil thing. They argued that she's a mean person who holds the wrong political views, so Google must shun her.
People definitely should be honest about what they want to ban and why. But again, in my experience, most people opposed to politics in the workplace honestly do have content-neutral motivations. I'm a very strong Andrew Yang supporter, bumper sticker and pile of campaign swag and all, and I never bring it up in the workplace because I'm not there to do partisan politics.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kd3w/google-employee-me...
[2]https://medium.com/@against.transphobia/googlers-against-tra...
Sure, someone complained that people weren't knowledgable and up for debating an issue that was important to him. But notably, no one was forced to express anything, he was simply disappointed that they weren't willing to discuss the issue. Actually it wasn't even that, he was disappointed that, instead of expressing concern over the death of a black man, his coworkers were more concerned over how people were protesting[0]. No really, what he complained about was his coworker expressing this opinion:
> “These protestors aren’t going to solve anything, ” she said. ”Like, what are those people even trying to do? Seriously. What are they trying to do? Make people mad about getting stuck in traffic? Piss people off because they can’t get to Grand Central? It’s annoying . I just can’t stand it.”
I can see why that would be disappointing, but even still that disappointment is a far cry from forced political expression.
> When employees insisted that Kay Coles James must not be allowed on the AI advisory council[2], they didn't argue that having her would make Google do some particular evil thing. They argued that she's a mean person who holds the wrong political views, so Google must shun her.
But they did! There were other objections too, but one of the objections was specifically that James's values are directly contradictory to those that Google expresses, both in terms of diversity issues and in terms of AI.
> Not only are James’ views counter to Google’s stated values, but they are directly counter to the project of ensuring that the development and application of AI prioritizes justice over profit.
From the original petition. The thinking, which I broadly agree with, goes something like this: KCJ isn't an expert on AI. She's essentially a layperson, so her value on the ethics board would be as an ethics person, not as an AI person. Two of Google's AI ethics principles are "2. Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias." and "3. Be built and tested for safety.". KCJ appears to be comfortable using AI for military applications, arguably a violation of 3, and certainly doesn't care for avoiding bias towards trans people, a violation of 2. She didn't make any sense on the committee, and I'd argue that the followup made it clear that it was more meant to pander than to actually address issues.
> I'm a very strong Andrew Yang supporter, bumper sticker and pile of campaign swag and all, and I never bring it up in the workplace because I'm not there to do partisan politics.
Sure, and I don't generally bring up politics at work either. But that doesn't mean that I should deny other people, who are more directly affected by things, the ability to do so.
[0]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjvy3/heres-the-memo-abo...
2) I would prefer any feedback and protests be in private when are relevant to the company. You don't make a fuss and nobody else does either, so we can all work in peace and quiet. Most companies implement these rules for the sake of everyone.
3) "unless you're clear about what makes something political." This is exceedingly clear for the vast majority of people, except the activists who are making the fuss.
Perfect, so questions of what companies we contract with, how we do hiring and diversity, and what bathrooms people are allowed to use are all office policies and reasonable work discussion topics. Can you give examples of the kinds of things you object to then?
Fwiw, I've known people who discuss their porn and drug habits at work. Hell I've known people who do drugs with their co-workers.
> I would prefer any feedback and protests be in private when are relevant to the company
Of course, it's only as a side effect that this undercuts the effectiveness of any activism.
Are you familiar with the concept of "yes of course you can protest, but not like that" for all values of that? If the only acceptable forms of protest are ones that can be ignored with no consequences, you've just de facto silenced those who have concerns with the status quo. That's a very political decision, totalitarian ist to be specific.
> This is exceedingly clear for the vast majority of people, except the activists who are making the fuss.
If it's so clear, you should have no trouble making it explicit without relying on the word politics. Since you still seem to miss it, my entire premise here is that "politics" is a form of doublespeak and people who use it are generally unwilling to actually go on record with the views they want to censor, instead using it as a sort of "things that make me uncomfortable in the moment" catch-all, but without giving the same courtesy of banning "things that make me uncomfortable" to other people. So far your unwillingness to pin down exactly what you mean by political hasn't done much to dispell that thought.
Since you want it explicit:
1) Contracts are not office policy. Objecting because of politics is political.
2) Hiring is about getting the best people for the job. Discussing that is fine. Using quotas for race and gender instead of character and competence is identity politics, and thus political.
3) Bathrooms are by sex. Anyone with different needs can negotiate themselves or use single-person bathrooms if available. Discussing it is political.
None of that is relevant to the business doing work. It's political BS, and you're free to start your own company and discuss all you want there to see how that goes.
You're the one claiming the objection is political. I claim the objections are ethical. Again, if you are the arbiter of what is or is not political (which it seems you are trying to be), all this ends up is "objections to things I dislike are political and forbidden".
> Hiring is about getting the best people for the job. Discussing that is fine. Using quotas for race and gender instead of character and competence is identity politics, and thus political.
Great! Racial or gender based hiring quotas are illegal in the US. I don't support them. So which companies do you think are actively and brazenly breaking the law by using illegal hiring quotas? Or are you perhaps just saying that hiring policies you personally disagree with are "political"?
> Bathrooms are by sex.
This may be office policy where you work, but it is not always office policy. Are you saying that it can't be discussed? Because you just said that discussing office policies are relevant to work.
> You can discuss and protest the latter if you want, but not the former.
Now you seem to be walking back that statement. Which is is? Again, it seems that "political" things are just things you disagree with, this is an intellectually dishonest position and one that I'm asking that you reconsider.
By the way, Google is undergoing lawsuits about race and gender discrimination with explicit documentation, as are many other companies and universities in the US.
Your continued inability to provide a consistent definition of politics and banned discussion only reinforces my initial claim: you're using politics as a catch-all to justify banning discussion you have personal ideological objections to, even when those topics are related to day to day working conditions. I'm not picking a definition of political, I'm saying you've been inconsistent with yours.
Google, at any given time, is sued for discrimination against men and women and against conservatives and liberals. What's important is the merit, which most don't have. On the other hand, banning people from discussing it requesting changes to employee bathroom policy probably falls under broad protections of PCA, and would be illegal.
Is idea that expecting you not to berate your coworkers about your pet political issue is erasure?
If so, then yes. I'm not willing to work with anyone who doesn't assume that I'm interacting with them on a good-faith basis by default.
If your only tool for examining the motivations of outsider-groups is bigotry and bias, then all you will find is bigotry and bias.
> Is idea that expecting you not to berate your coworkers about your pet political issue is erasure?
No, the idea is that being trans in the workplace can lead to discrimination, and I've seen people use the excuse that identifying as trans is political to tell trans people they can't use preferred pronouns or use a preferred restroom or like wear what they want to work.
That's bigotry and bias under the guise of apolitical-ness, no matter what you're looking for.
1. People who politically disagree with the work the company is doing should just leave. They do not have the right to resist or organize against it.
2. Google should just go along with anything the government does. If there's an opportunity for profit, Google should pursue it. If employees disagree, they should vote. Otherwise, see #1.
3. Google should have some moral tests, but the current situation passes the test. It's not as bad as people are saying.
I honestly don't see how any of these are tenable. Number one is an argument against labor organizing in general, and the cats kind of out the bag there. Number two is just a variant of number one, and number three is inherently political—it's a situation where people see things differently, and the way we resolve those is politics.
There are plenty of other impolite subjects that are inappropriate to discuss at work too.
So there are certainly limits in the workplace and there is a line to toe for toleration and polite conversation, but saying "politics do not belong in the workplace" is pretty absurd.
On the other hand, many gay folks are afraid to even mention their partner at all at work, even casually in the what that most people do. In that case, the belief that "gay rights are political" that some folks have are creating a toxic environment.
Note that I said that someone who constantly argue against gay rights is toxic, I have met people like that (not specifically gay, but about immigrants for example) and being around them is not fun.
> On the other hand, many gay folks are afraid to even mention their partner at all at work, even casually in the what that most people do.
In that case it is no longer political and they can complain that people targeted them for being gay.
Not that that's good, necessarily. Just distinct.
The type of politics I want in the workplace is the politics of building worker power and fomenting radical labor unrest.
If you build tools for ICE to put children in cages, you're building tools to put children in cages.
It can sometimes be acceptable for a broad overview of a subject, but it's so full of opinion, inaccuracy, and misinformation that it should have near zero credibility for anyone who is seeking truth and bias-free knowledge. Appropriately, it has zero credibility in any credible academic environment BTW.
https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-bri...
There are no people who actually think it’s ok to bring politics into the workplace. There are only people who don’t think their politics are politics; it’s everybody else’s politics that’s politics.
I am really, really tired of people framing "Hiring (mostly) from the typical tech 22-35 college graduate demographic" as "Actively courting activists."
What were you expecting tech companies to do? Not hire anyone under the age of 40, or anyone who grew up, schooled, or worked in a blue state? If they did that, I suppose they'd get a largely 'activist-free' (But not politics-free!) workforce.
Google's business is inherently political. Its relationship with governments and regulators across the world is inherently political. The employee-employer relationship is inherently political. Of course you're going to get employees acting on their political opinions, in those contexts.
My guess is there will certainly be a shift away from other companies trying to do this in the future. Rightfully so imho.