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?
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...