> Cowardly HR departments who don't recognize that, by and large, the activist employees are mediocre at best, rather than remotely productive employees, has made things worse.

This feels like you're projecting your opinion of these people and their political beliefs (which it appears you disagree with) onto their entire character and acting as if your opinion of them is the reality of the situation. Are there activist employees that are poor performers? Probably. But it feels more like you're trying to paint an entire subset of employees negatively because you disagree with their political stances.

I'm simply pointing out that people who are into their actual work, as opposed to people who are into their work environments and cultures, are more productive. People obsess about managing time, but it's really about managing finite mental energy. Activist employees expend mental energy on social causes which don't benefit the bottom line of the company. I'm not saying they shouldn't be activists, I'm just saying they should do it on their own time, not at work and in the workplace. Exactly zero of the engineers at my company who were leading the charge on this stuff were standouts. Average performers at best, mostly sort of QA material and nothing more. I don't have real data, obviously, but my anecdotal, non-scientific survey of friends at Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc has shown a pattern of lower status employees being attracted to these activities.

I don't actually disagree with a lot of the goals of the activist employees at my former Boulder-based tech company. I simply disagree with them using the HR department to impose their views and beliefs onto the majority of employees who don't want it, in a way that becomes disruptive and distracting from making money. At the end of the quarter, the assholes in charge who wouldn't shut up about equity are still making hundreds of times what the average employee makes, and will fire anyone if the numbers aren't what they promised in the earnings forecast. The social justice initiatives seem to be designed to turn the rank and file against each other, instead of having them ask if their CEO is really worth 300 software engineers in value to the company.

I think the idea is like, if you're at a 10 person startup you don't have people like this because the company can't survive if people are spending their time on these issues. No one has time to make an initiative to rename whitelist to allowlist. It only starts occurring once you have enough corporate stability to nurture it.