We created a rule that politics and religion were not appropriate topics at work. A couple of people quit in response, and morale improved dramatically.
I don't care about the political or religious beliefs (if any) of people I work with, and they shouldn't care about mine. If I really cared, then we could have off-work discussions...which I've done a few times (and they were respectful and productive).
I also think it's important to say that I'm not in the US of A, where political discussions seem to penetrate every aspect of life.
Seems like we've redefined "political" to mean "things that make me uncomfortable."
Are you advocating for change in your workplace that isn't strongly linked to workplace peformance? (E.g. pronouns in email signatures or having the company take a public stance on some contempory issue like BLM) And is what you're advocating for considered "lefty"? And wasn't even on the public radar 20 years ago? Then it's woke.
Were they talking about green peace? Climate change? Save the whales? Homelessness? Air pollution? Food preservatives? Obesity? Genocide? Under-representation of Jews in the NBA? No.
No apparently you can not be actively working to better those situations and you’re just fine and definitely not part of the problem. Oh but this one cause? Yeah we declare you’re part of the problem.
Sorry but there are a lot of causes in the world. You simply cannot pick and try to guilt me into actively supporting it in leau of all the other causes I might be personally connected with.
That was quite the insulting seminar.
Who is doing that? Please cite something.
> And wasn't even on the public radar 20 years ago?
Where does 20 years ago time frame come from? That's pretty arbitrary and seems more to be based on your feelings than fact.
We've all heard there are facts and opinions, but there's a 3rd category I think: definitions.
And this is awful :(
It's normally the Worst Argument in the World: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen...
Arguing about whether a definition is particularly useful or outlines a cluster of similar things can be good, but it's rare.
Certainly sometimes it's good to debate a word but this crossed the line into incessant requests for people to do work to come up with ever more definitions and citations.
From my perspective you asked "What does woke mean?" and I drew from my personal experience to answer how I have seen it used. The examples I choose of pronouns in signatures and having a BLM position were very common ones that also occurred at my current company.
Does that make sense now? I'm not actually sure what you want a citation on... that people push for pronouns in email signatures? That this does not have a direct and obvious link to workplace performance? That pushing for such was unheard of in 2001? That this is how people use the word "woke"?
Wokeism (ˈwəʊkɪzəm), noun: 1) a type of progressive activism whose adherents like to play word games about whether or not they exist.
Humor aside, when there's even dictionary and Wikipedia entries about wokeism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke) that outlines common themes of woke progressivism, that sort of rhetorical trickery just comes off as disingenuous.
Arguing for “inclusivity” in a corporate setting is delusional wokeism (as companies are exclusionary by definition, they don’t hire most people)
This is a broad term that different people might understand differently. Please define it first, then use it.
> politics and religion
This is off-topic. The mentioned discussions and disagreements at SpaceX were unrelated to these matters.
In general, it is in my opinion dangerous to say that an opinion different than the one of the boss is unwelcome at a company. This is how cults and autocracies operate. It amplifies the opinion of the leader and unjustly silences everything else.
Respectful discussions about the topics of disagreement are in my opinion essential for a company to preserve its defined ethical standards and not deteriorate into a community ruled by herd mentality and groupthink influenced predominantly by a single person.
That's not what seemed to have happened here. Basically a bunch of employees said they were embarrassed by Musk's behavior. It's like saying the CEO is a clown. If you expect to still have a job after expressing publicly such opinions, well that's very naive.
Not with proof, just hearsay.
This is political.
And who benefited from that? Not talking about it is politics. You cannot avoid that. It's literally impossible.
The method in this case, writing an open letter, seems like a way to weaponize network effect and have an outsized influence over say simply talking to your manager or using an internal feedback system. I think SpaceX is right to say this causes social pressure internally to sign on and not be on the wrong side of the "if you're not with us you're against us" attitudes of politics today.
Hard to disagree with that.
> the exact issues you care about could be very different from someone else's and having all these discussions is pretty distracting.
Definitely, which is part of why women and minorities get ignored and hence exploited when the status quo is embraced.
> weaponize
God I'm so tired of people's exaggerations. Nonsense.
No it's not. Trying to change society is politics. What you're saying is akin to "silence is violence" which is just as ridiculous.
Well, no. Not talking about something, is nothingness, silence, an absence of speech. I can demand that void of speech be filled with literally anything.
At some point common sense kicks in and you realize that talking to your wife about the colour of her favourite mug, is not politics. You realize, deciding what bread to eat for breakfast hasn't been calculated on how many votes Ron Paul got in the last primary, or whatever.
Making politics everything and making everything about politics, turns it into a religion. It isn't one, it's not a cosmology, and it'll never satisfy as a 'theory of everything'. Politics is one category out of many.
It's just a method of wrangling everybody's desires together for the purpose of governance. That's it. It's got nothing to do with coding up a widget for some factory and it's economic aim to serve the entire population with quality mugs at a cheaper price.
if there is a social conflict (and boy are there social conflicts), not talking about those social problems is tacit support for the dominant position. pretending that one's work life can be neatly compartmentalized and has no bearing on the rest of the world is a fantasy of those who value their own comfort over the well being of others
How would you feel if you asked me about a hot button issue important to you at work and I declined to talk about it. Would you approach HR?
Also, if someone does that to me, the first thing that comes to mind is "Fuck off". Unapologetically.
Not a good way to convince people.
Also not talking about politics doesn't mean not engaging with politics at all. One could still be listening, thinking and voting which means not simply embracing the status quo despite not talking about it readily.
its *
Why are we surprised when employees then want to talk politics?
If one wants to be a political activist, perhaps go find a job that's better suited for that type of behavior.
If almost everyone would agree on the turdishness given a couple of facts on the case (none of this "heard from a friend of a friend" bullshit) then discussing and raising might be possible (though I'd probably still just leave).
But if people's assessment of the truth of that statement will depend hugely on that network of beliefs and values called "worldview" as well as exposure to different facts on the subject... then it's going to be hard.
if executives were bringing these topics into the company through their outside interactions on twitter, would it be a violation of the policy?
> Activist employees are toxic to company culture.
I would argue that musk's personal "activism" (or whatever you want to call his twitter account) is far more harmful than this letter is to company culture
Does that include Musk himself, with the way he's been acting on Twitter lately?
Also, in the end Damore's continued employment became political thing, so it was probably inevitable he had to go. But the form - especially the crazy doublespeak - of his firing was the problem.
And yet, all I've heard from the left over the past decade is that corporate employees have no free speech because oh it's not covered by the first amendment, as if that gave you the right rather than acknowledging it, and how oh actually it's not a free speech issue, it's a safety issue, or whatever excuse of the week, and anyway the company can do what it wants regardless. (In this one instance only, of course.)
So! Fine, normally I'd be against this sort of thing of people being fired for voicing opinions, but in this case there is a big heaping of schadenfreude involved.
Leopard fence was good for something after all, was it!
Most on progressive twitter though were pro Damore being shot into the moon, but are defending these SpaceX activists (by CORRECTLY pointing out that Musk is a hypocrite with his interpretation of 'free speech')
And most on HackerNews were defending Damore, yet today think it's absolutely correct to expect to be fired from a private company for the smallest sign of dissent.
I don't have proof it's the same people, but the upvotes tell a narrative.
Me, personally, I'm in the first group. If you work for Musk you have to understand he's a petulant child who will take every slight way too seriously than what would be expected from The Richest Man In The World. And I'm not even mad that he's a hypocrite. I know he is. Everyone with a braincell knows he is.
But it is wild to see how deep Musk's cult goes that he can inverse Eurasia and Eastasia and people just fall in line.
The solution is, of course, employment protections and unionization, but 'free-speech liberals' aren't actually very liberal, and dogmatically hate both of those things.
I'm much more in favor of unionization than you'd think, but I don't think unions are a reliable defense from these kinds of leopards.
I think ESG is the overarching umbrella that has compelled corporations to normalize activism.
Like leading an effort to unionize? I know that's socialism talking, but democracy in the workplace is as important as it is outside of it. And the free sharing of ideas (up to a point) is paramount for that process. A company could well benefit from active and engaged employees that make a company and its goals their own.
Of course, if your company has a top-down leadership culture fostering exchangeable employees (and let them feel that), then maybe employees that do have an opinion about the company and its leadership are indeed "toxic".
Yeah sounds totally believable.
Seems very believable to me.
On the other hand, there has to be some capacity for this type of discussion to occur. Musk owns less than 50% of SpaceX, and I generally think employees should have some manner of input into the operations of the company they work for. History is full of cases where the justified party tried to convey their problems politely, were ignored or quietly silenced, and had to raise the problem loudly to get any traction. I think it's a reasonable desire to want to work for SpaceX, but not want someone's first reaction to hearing that you work at SpaceX to be bringing up whatever stupid thing Elon has done this week.
If someone has the answer on how to find this balance, please popularize it. In the meantime, I've left the large corp I was at and joined a small company with 7 others where I don't have to deal with such problems or such activists.
Like a lot of things, the blame for this falls on the news media.
If the mefia ignored him rather than running a story every time he runs his mouth the world would be a better place.
The man is the richest person on the planet. The media is going to report on what he says because, you know, he's the richest person on the planet.
I heard the exact same arguments about how the media shouldn't cover Trump spouting off, and it's absurd for the exact same reasons.
These people hold incredibly sway over industry, politics, public policy, etc. Hell, Musk's behaviour has led to the Texas AJ investigating Twitter! Not shining a light on their behaviour would be journalistic malpractice.
The very idea that journalists should just ignore these people when they behave badly betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of journalism in an open and democratic society, while also failing to appreciate how much sway these people have over the way our world works.
90% of what they report on Musk is irrelevant.
But let's face it, you don't actually care about any of this. It's clear from the comments you're shilling for Elon. The thing I don't understand is why.
That wasn't an angle I'd thought of (making the rich and powerful in general seem like they are accusable) and it makes things a lot of people have said in the last make more sense, so I thank you for suggesting it and have an upvote.
That said, the pattern of what the media publishes about celebrities in general, and Musk in particular doesn't fit. I am also skeptical it actually accomplishes this goal or that the benefits outweigh the costs.
> It's clear from the comments you're shilling for Elon. The thing I don't understand is why.
Taking this in the most charitable light of "what is motivating you to make all these somewhat pro-Elon posts over the last day?" I did some introspection.
Unfortunately, the answer is very long and complex and I couldn't figure out any way to condense it without being misleading and giving you the wrong impression (seriously, I tried! Unless you have a similar memeplex every shortening pattern matches to something I don't believe!).
I can say a bit about what the reasons aren't: I gain nothing tangible for this (I hold no stock in any Musk companies and am not employed in anything relevant). I have no person connection to Elon and he may indeed be an arsehole, I don't know. Colonizing mars is a fools dream. TSLA is overvalued by at least 2x.
The other 50% are not woke.
One side wants to build cool shit and the other side wants to shit post on Twitter.
Do we know in which department the sacked employees worked? For all we know, they could have been employed in marketing or HR, not exactly the area that "builds cool shit" but often those that are active on social media and bent on bringing SJW politics into the working place.
I didn't see any SJW politics in that letter but concern that Elon's behavior would reflect badly on the company itself. Which is certainly true but if you have a megalomaniac boss I guess you also need to expect to be fired for telling the truth.
That kind of confidence is pervasive in every aspect of their being. They don't have room for doubt.
Reading about wartime generals solidified the thought in me. Many generals like Patton weren't even very gifted strategically, but they were confident and authoritative in their decisions. Oftentimes, that's enough to pull off a victory.
Edison and Tesla were definitely NOT equally capable. Tesla was an absolutely genius inventor and scientist, and Edison was a genius businessperson and good inventor. (Or something like that, TBH it wasn't Edison's biographies I poured over in highschool!)
Tesla received life-long backing and support from Westinghouse, major investment from JP Morgan, and more.
Edison tried, and for a chunk of time, did succeed at pushing Tesla out of the way, but I'd strongly argue that the things that sunk Tesla were not ways that Edison pushed him out of the way, nor would I argue that Edison ever really succeeded at pushing him out of the way.
Is that what you mean?
It is literally just wasting resources.
Working for Musk - no. You already knew everything.
They’re built to serve government. Any extra customers they get is just the icing.
Its getting taxpayers money because the official money hole called the NASA can't manage to launch anything in space anymore.
Tell that to Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. They’d love to know. . .
Um. They are. SpaceX had almost as many commercial launches as gov ones last year.
Also I genuinely think you are an idiot.
Are you calling Gwynne Shotwell a tech bro? That’s her stance.
Anyway, Musk can show me his dick all he likes if I get 200k per viewing.
And I'd also be willing to bet cash that all these employees were very low level, likely new hires out of college, and are all of the political activist type. Because for all his bluster, Musk really hasn't done anything THAT objectionable besides openly shit on Democrats. (No, I don't believe the bogus sexual assault allegation from an anonymous friend of a friend, there's no evidence).