Yeah if there wasn't the pesky world around all the engineering and we could all just stare at our stock options while we sit in our gentrified neighbourhoods and pretend the world doesn't exist.
You can ignore politics but politics doesn't ignore you. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is an unworthy attitude for a democratic citizen. The etymology for the word 'idiot' comes from 'idios', meaning 'one's own', in ancient Greece signifying a person who is only concerned with their private interest, rather than living an active life and participating in civic affairs. To be an idiot was to be withdrawn, isolated and selfish, to not participate in the public, political life of the state.
Given how much people nowadays love to invoke the Greeks and our ancient Western traditions, maybe it's time to remind everyone of the meaning of that word again.
http://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDUC305/305parkeridiocy...
You cannot ignore your dreams, your health, your family, social ills, the air quality, politics and a myriad of other things in the world around you. But if you focus on all of those all the time you will achieve nothing. Imagine a great inventor, scientist, engineer or artist working on his next idea. Do you really want to make him jump and go demonstrate for/against your list of hot button topics?
And that's to say that you can and you should.
If the different political sides had more balance, I think it'd make sense to permit a modest bit in the workplace.
But today the left is so sure of its position to the point where they think they are in the black & white moral right _and_ they are increasingly dominant and loud in our cultural institutions and many corporate institutions that it is substantially interfering with basic ability to think.
Is there a way to have employees say e.g. "the company needs to endorse suchandsuch political slogan" or "the company needs to oppose suchandsuch candidate" without yelling? I don't think so.
Sadly for many people the answer to this is an unequivocal yes.
Much of technology is agnostic to politics, and enables much evil and good alike. This does not, in my mind, serve as justification for technology creators to intertwine politics with the creation of said technology.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/treasury-plugs-gap-in-anti-mone...
Bob doesn't want to be accosted by Richard from accounting because he doesn't do enough to advocate for anti-money laundering political causes or senatorial candidates. Bob just wants to show up and do his job.
> Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.
Then, just a few short paragraphs later, they list things that they focus minimally on, because they are "not directly related to the mission." One of those things is this:
> Broader societal issues: We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.
It doesn't get more blatantly contradictory than that.
People can care about an issue without taking a stand or even discussing the issue.
This "with us or against us" attitude is precisely what makes it difficult to get along with activists.
The only reason it is "a problem" is that it doesn't conform to the long term goals of the activists. The company needs to have goals that are separate from those of the activists in order to survive.
Perhaps you and the OP would be quite happy, say, writing code for a lab that makes novel fentanyl analogues for the express purpose of including them in black-market knockoff heroin powder, which in turn leads to a number of deaths (accurately cutting in your microgram-potent meds is hard, and sometimes your downstream supply chain makes a hit that's got too high a fentanyl analogue/cut material ratio, go figure!), or an industrial system that captures unsuspecting babies to then drown them, strip their flesh, and harvest their valuable bones (not really that realistic in our normal reality, but per http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=25967.0 it works great in Dwarf Fortress! or it did, anyway, until that got patched out because of said bone harvester), or hell, let's just Godwin on it and say you'd be perfectly happy writing automation tooling to make Treblinka 10% more efficient.
The respondent, whom you so readily chastise, has a quite valid point that we can't separate our engineering work from "politics" (ethics, really, but there does seem to be a side in this debate that prefers to say "politics", since that evokes more the admittedly annoying horse race electoraliasm and doublespeak-driven world of actual politics and takes away from the thrust of the issue, which is ethics, which happen to often overlap with politics but are very much their own thing) ever. That's an important thing to recognize, especially in an industry that has persistent issues with laying ethics aside in pursuit of "great inventions" (let's be pragmatic, it's mostly in pursuit of profit, with some good inventions as an occasional byproduct).
What I think the respondent may be getting at is that there is a significant population in the industry that probably does have some lines they won't cross, but is privileged and willing to cross a great many lines that won't affect them personally. You perhaps think that's a laudable stance, and you can hold that opinion if you wish, but you should do so with the recognition that there are a number of people that will see that less as a commitment to honorable professional detachment and more as a willingness to trod over the rights and wellbeing of the less fortunate so long as it doesn't injure you immediately. I'd argue that it's important thing to at least consider in an industry that often speaks of changing the world for the better--perhaps that was more it drinking the consultant kool-aid about what millenials value in their work and deciding it needed to work that into messaging, if not action, but hey, if it wants to say that, it ought to put its money where its mouth is.
A lot of engineering work is inherently political. For instance, an engineer designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz and by doing his engineering work he supported the politics of the holocaust since his work and those politics are inseparable. In most cases, the connection is not so obvious and clear cut, but it's still there.
So did Wernher von Braun. I've intentionally selected the most extreme example that came to mind readily to illustrate the point: designing rockets for the Nazis to be built by slaves and used to carry bombs to kill civilians has moral and political implications. It's reasonable to judge von Braun for knowingly participating in atrocities even if his only interest was in rocket science. It's not possible to separate the engineering from the politics.
Cryptocurrency has political consequences, though they're not as obvious as those of ballistic missiles. For a company to work on cryptocurrency trading and pretend to be apolitical is disingenuous because if the company is successful, its actions will have a political impact. I'm inclined to think that anyone engaging in acts with political consequences should be proactive about what those consequences will be. Most technological change comes with the potential for political consequences.
Of course, there's engineering work that's less political. Making incremental improvements to the efficiency of widely-used infrastructure is usually fairly neutral; it's good for everyone, but doesn't really change the balance of power.
Yes I do and countless of scientists and artists do exactly that, which is why a lot of them ended up being subject to McCarthyism paranoia at one point or the other. Brilliant scientists, more than anyone else maybe, need to engage the political world to understand what influence what they built has on it. Technologists being painfully unaware of the political ramifications of their work, if anything, got us to where we are right now.
It's no coincidence that the politically detached scientist is the archetypical citizen of autocratic countries. The technologist who does not care for politics is today, the most sought after person in China.
All labor is "activism" performed in service of a specific outcome, because every action is inherently ideological. Only tools are morally neutral -- not the actions performed with them.
What you spend your time doing, introduces an influence that drives nature and society in one direction over another. If you make tools for microlending, you are contributing to the economic activity of disconnected portions of the world population. If you make tools for surveilling undocumented immigrants, you are contributing to the apparatus which continues to strip and violate the human rights of large groups of people.
Different degrees of separation warrant different levels of attribution. But no one is completely inculpable.
English isn't my native language but doesn't this make it sound like you only spend "a day or two" researching? Or are these two sentences unrelated?
> Bringing politics to the office(thanks Google!)
How bad is it really? Have you ever been told something like "I won't review your PR because you don't vote for the same person I do"?
As I noted elsewhere in this thread, I think it's more ambiguous these days, not less.
As a few concrete examples:
* Say I refuse to buy Chinese-made goods because I oppose the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. What do I do if my employer considers doing business in China? Should I not mention this, because it's "political"?
* What if it's 1933, and my employer is IBM, and the customer is Nazi Germany?
* Say I believe in equal rights for gay couples, and my employer is considering expanding health coverage to same-sex partners. Should I speak out in favor of it?
In each of these examples, it seems to me there's a spectrum of options, ranging from:
A. No constraints on in-office behavior; I speak out about anything.
B. In the office, I am purely a shareholder-profit-maximizing robot.
I don't think either of those extremes is very satisfying—I expect many of us would say it is noble to oppose selling adding machines to Nazi Germany, but that we'd have many more questions when it comes to some of the other examples.
Unfortunately, I think that means that there's no simple answer here. "No politics in the workplace" can result in ghastly, amoral outcomes (selling adding machines to the Nazis).
But "every culture war, all the time" is a great way to be a dick.
I think my personal code here is, "try not to be a dick." Past that point, I don't think there are easy answers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Uni...
Their sacrifice wasn’t any less important or necessary to the expansion of the democracy in the United States. In fact, it was this “bringing politics to the work” that provided the means for workers having real representation for them in government in the first place.
The issue with "activist" employees isn't so much that they want to bring politics to work (which I can see arguments for and against). It's that the new "activist" employees insist everyone's politics be the same, else you become a target.
I think "no politics" offices will crush it in the future, if by nothing more than being able to focus on the product.
Sure, that's the trade-off.
In a vacuum we all want to "make the world a better place". Does cancelling academics who appear on Joe Rogan's podcast "make the world a better place"? Does having a coworker cancelled or fired because of a stupid joke "make the world a better place"? I don't know; I don't think so.
On the other hand, I think there should be internal political discussion regarding policy at a place like Facebook.
What are the politics relevant to your job? It's not easy to answer.
> Policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
Are there other "political consequences" around crypto that you'd have Coinbase engage in?
People realise that rather than the local town hall, the large internet platforms, their workplace, and their social media feed have become the public space of ideas. That's why the free speech debate focuses so much on internet platforms, and why 'it's privately owned' has long lost meaning to anyone in the debate.
Keeping politics 'out of the workplace', at least in our environment today, is basically to say to keep politics out, period. It's not the apolitical position, it is the 'idiotic' position because it intents to keep politics out of the one place that actually matters the most in this day and age.
When I work for a company, I provide my labor in exchange for payment. I am then free to use my money to support an activist organization or a cause. So are all other employees.
Corporate activism, on the other hand, is inherently degenerate. It means your employer withholds resources from improving the business or paying higher salaries. They instead apply those resources to some causes of their choosing. Any employee who doesn't agree with the cause is effectively coerced into supporting it unless they quit. So is every customer. The goods and services become inherently tangled with an ideology of some sort.
Why should a model where everyone is free to pursue their personal activism be replaced with a model where people are coerced to pursue activism "approved" by corporate execs?
It's also a straw man to talk about corporate execs leading the activism, the post was talking about the workers themselves.
It is for this exact reason that many people object to politics being overtly brought into the workplace against people's will.
If someone wants to discuss politics (or religion or sexuality or anything else that makes us all human) with you, have at it. If they don't want to, you need to stop.
No means no here as well. The fact that they can't leave imposes a higher burden on consent, not a lower one, IMO.
Unless it's part of your job description.
But no one likes to face what it means to sell their time to another person.
That's probably true, but they would be wrong. The fact that some people would say incorrect things is not a strong argument.
You are not going to innovate or create anything if you're fighting all day, every day. Constantly distracted. The purpose of a company is to bring people together to CREATE something of value. To solve problems. Hopefully to improve lives on some vector. And you do that most effectively by rowing in the same direction, focused.
People spending their day on Twitter or Slack or in the office halls arguing about the war is not productive. It's mostly just destructive. They're certainly not inventing anything, or curing a disease, or improving energy efficiency, or creating tools, or educating, or entertaining, or inspiring, or anything else additive.
The original quote is diplomacy is war by other means. And it had very specific connotations to explicitly adversarial political relationships. Politics is much larger than diplomacy, and indeed as Aristotle concluded there is nothing in a society that is not politics.
"Being apolitical is a political stance"
"If you don't take a stand you're part of the problem"
Gosh, this is tiresome.
You can also still take action - by leaving. That's exactly what this policy is encouraging with a generous exit package. Why is that not acceptable? Why does the corporation have to follow what you decide?
For example, AGI will be built either by accident or intentionally by sociopaths at Google, etc. All decisions at a certain scale are inevitably political, and choosing to ignore the politics in those contexts is in itself a political position.
Much of the discussion here today is confused by the intermingling of so many concepts under the singular term "politics".
But if the football player interrupts the game and starts running around with a BLM flag in the middle of a play, that's inappropriate. Or if my manager decides to use the first 5 minutes of every standup to have a group discussion about libertarian ethics.
There's no bright line between which speech is appropriate and which in inappropriate and it's all subjective; and I would certainly oppose any sort of legislation that impinges on the expression of free speech in this area. Society can negotiate these rules in the course of social etiquette, not in the court of law.
But c'mon, when we're at work we're here to get shit done, just let us focus on that. If a group of coworkers wants to organize around common political goals, do it amongst yourselves. Go ahead and use a conference room and work laptops even, if it's after hours and not disrupting business.
Except this has nothing to do with that. It has do with a group of people that insist that everyone get behind their pet cause and use their job to promote whatever activist belief they have - and negatively affect everyone else who may not agree with them.
I'd stand behind anyone who wants to protest their companies business model - like the executive at Amazon who protested the treatment of a union organizer (which was racist and absolutely disgusting). I'm not going to get behind the culture of activism which has nothing to do with civil disobedience.
For a deeper dive on this, look at Arendt's "Report on the Banality of Evil."
I'd say most harm was done by humans who did not just do their job, but thought they knew how everyone else has to do their job, live their lives etc, by political activists.
You might think of activism only as what those do that you're politically aligned with. What are those on the opposite side who work just as hard to bring about their ideas of society?
What serves the public better, a utility company that "just does its job", or a utility company that snoops around people's garbage, identifies dissenters and then stops supplying water to them (because otherwise you'd be aiding the enemy)?
Ironically, the people preaching activism in the workplace would be livid if a religious believer proselytized their faith at the workplace, despite the believer having as strong a belief in their ideas as the activists do in theirs. Quite the double standard.
I don't begrudge the dislike of workplace politics—again, I'd love to not talk about this. But for some groups, i.e. black Americans, it may not seem like a choice of whether they can be political. Indeed I'm a little surprised more Asians in tech aren't concerned at the president's rhetoric about the "China virus". Remember, it's within living memory that the US government rounded up Asian Americans and put them into internment camps.
While I agree on the need to address climate change urgently itself, I must point out that progressives would be infuriated if the same level of evidence were demanded for the scientific validity of beliefs regarding various identity groups they support. Again, a very clear double standard.
> "Indeed I'm a little surprised more Asians in tech aren't concerned at the president's rhetoric about the "China virus"."
You shouldn't be. News stories like the Harvard Asian-American admissions lawsuit and California's Proposition 209 repeal and many, many others have made it amply clear that progressives are no friends of Asians either, but at a much deeper level.
It's one thing for an employee to be activist within the company about new (or even existing) features/products/etc, because that is part of the company's mission and business ops and its the kind of feedback a company should get before it introduces a potentially controversial product/feature to the market, or about problematic products/features that should be retired. Otherwise you end up with companies like Palantir, or unethical business models based on loot boxes and youth gambling.
It's another thing for an employee to take external politics that aren't directly or indirectly related to the company's business, and try to make the company and other employees take a stand on those political issues. Generally, the only time this is appropriate is if, for example, those political issues directly affect a large segment of the customer base and taking a position is also a deliberate act of marketing. (See, e.g., Patagonia, Nike and even Hobby Lobby, but contrast with Chikfila.) Otherwise, you just end up alienating a large portion of your employees and customers to the overall detriment of the business.
“all young white males are like this” <- is this racist?
Your position regarding thinking everyone who isn't political at work is naive or evil is not helping the problem. This is only alienating people who already find such aggressive and exaggerated statements wrong.
I can think of many reasons people might find this appealing. They may be incredibly politically engaged in their personal life and want work to be a place of focus. They might disagree with the political solutions that their coworkers favour, which is totally okay! But it would be extremely draining for that person.
Please, start with the best interpretation of people rather than labelling broad swaths of people as wicked and mentally ill. This is a great opportunity for discussion!
I don't think you can ever fully just 'work on your craft' without considering the consequences of what you are doing.
Do you think it would be ok to 'just focus on your craft' if you were hired to design computerized controllers for suicide bombers?
Obviously that is a ridiculous example, but it is a good demonstration of why you can't fully ignore what your work is being used for.
You don't need to care if your work is some great helper of humanity, but you do have a responsibility to make sure your work isn't evil.
The world is a lot more nuanced than your vitriolic labelling of it. Be tolerant!
Fortunately, these days, it's possible to make a whole career out of working at companies that don't subscribe to this neo-McCarthyism.
This is the exact kind of tone Coinbase is ejecting from their company. You thinking this is the wrong move is exactly the point. People don't want to work around people who call them "sociopaths" over not wanting to debate at work.
They wouldn't be; that's the point. If there was no problem there would be no reason to define oneself as anti-problem.
The answer is that there is nothing that unites these people except not being stamp collectors. If stamp collectors didn't exist, then no one would identify as non-stamp collectors.
It's not an attack if people just don't want to be around you.
Besides, engineering problems and the solutions to those problems bring enough variety of opinion that you would think people would be able to fulfill whatever need this new religion of politics brings. Engineering is challenging and rewarding on several different levels.
Very few people have the time and money to fund tech and engineering purely to influence elections. Most money coming in to tech is going to be from customers and investors, the latter being in interest of making money off of the business getting more customers.
Companies like Cambridge Analytica are a very very minute minority compared to the swaths of B2B, consumer tech, etc.
We all bear responsibility to what happens to this world, and we, collectively, are building systems that affect how people think and view the world, and hence how they act. We are part of this shared universe, and now more than ever, we are the ones creating it.
That's of course coming from a point of view where Democracy is the only moral political system, and the understanding that democracy dies if not defended daily by being political. First very slowly, then very quickly. There are obviously other points of view, and dictatorships have their supporters.
Perhaps this doesn't apply to your area of engineering, but I do feel that it does affect a substantial chunk of the HN audience.
How and what data you choose to collect about internet visitors is no longer a purely technical analysis, it now has broader implications that potentially involve political actors. You don't know who might have access to that data in the future or what they might do with it.
We as engineers are the final implementer of these decisions. Should we really abdicate the ethical responsibilities tied to these decisions so easily?
1) Large
2) Has a culture that embraces optimism, reject cynicism, and has "Change the World!" type mission statements
3) Have overly-strict culture fit parameters.
Political activists share a lot in common with founders: They are stubbornly optimistic (Why fight for social change if you think it's pointless or impossible?), they want to change the world, and they have interests in building movements/organizations. If your hiring process is designed to weed out candidates cynical enough to know your organizations mission statement is bullshit and recognize you're just here to make money not change the world - or pessimistic enough to think they'll never be part of positive change - don't be surprised if you find yourself with a team full of activists... just saying.
Do you think it's a reaction to something? Or did it just spontaneously instigate itself one day? Just uppity libs getting bored?
People are speaking up because people feel existentially threatened. Because people are being existentially threatened. This threat permeates peoples' lives. It doesn't get left at home when they "go" to the office. Asking them to turn it off at work is asking them to TURN IT OFF. And now we're in gaslighting territory.
DARVO. You know it?
We're in the phase now where the person under threat is the problem, the victim is being attacked for speaking up.
Extinguishing politics at work is not some "rational man" exercise. "I just want to be free to ply my trade, dude." It's asking people to pause their very real own pain. It's asking them to deny it, deny its effects; to pretend it's not real. To think they're the problem, not the person who's threatened.
This has never been about "ooh, should we, or should we not, discuss supply-side economics at work?" Broad segments of the population are under threat. That's not politics. That's just violence. Asking them to switch it off at work is just perpetuating and enabling the violence.
Yes; the victim is being attacked by activist coworkers for admitting that they don't agree with attacking people for admitting they they don't agree with things.
And I strongly disagree that most people arguing politics at work feel “existentially threatened.” No, most people that argue politics at work do it because it is a topic that is interesting and quick to generate vigorous (counterproductive) discussion (and division).
No, please, fill me in. What has changed in the last 4 years that has suddenly made people existentially threatened at work? It sounds like you're trying to implicate 'Donald Trump' as the start of all of these issues, and yet I'm not sure how the 2016 US election matters for me, in my country.
Accusing people who want to only do their job at work as "violent"? Your comment is a perfect demonstration of why apolitical work environments will be appealing to a lot of people.
Now, please answer my question. Why do YOU think "politics at work" has flared up so much in the last 4 years?