Comment by observation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by observation | Hacker News Reader

My 2 cents.

I did write an essay but this is the TLDR.

Google has made a giant political mistake. Everybody saw this coming. Straight into the fire, Google must have known that even as they did it.

If Google's real aim was non-talent-bias, we already know the solution: blind hiring.

Let's use a little metacognition here. People on HN are highly likely to be in the Bubble (same way as average academic must be left of center). They belong to the Valley and will rationalize these kinds of events all day long, it's worthy of "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom!". Rightists are penalized in SV. That's been true for a while, that is the bottom line. This forum itself used to contain more rightists.

I don't know the future for Google or SV but the upshot is that if I found a company it will explicitly not hire leftists. I will have internal cohesion in my mini one party state. Do I want "diversity of ideas/perspectives". Yes, but the atmosphere is already poisoned by events like this and the firing of Brendan Eich. Plainly nobody has the right answers so I'd opt for political uniformity to keep infighting at bay.

More broadly I suspect Affirmative Action is on the ropes which means that SV is way behind the curve.

tldr;tldr; Somebody as brilliant as Peter Thiel would be fired today, or more likely: never hired. That is where we are at.

> Somebody as brilliant as Peter Thiel would be fired today, or more likely: never hired

Or never apply to work for Google in the first place. There are fashions in morality just as there are in clothing ( http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html ) , and who can predict now what ideas may become crimethink to Google's HR department in future?

If you're a talented, in-demand programmer, why work for a company that might arbirarily sack you based on your opinions? This doesn't mean Google will fail -- they have sewn up the web advertising market tight enough that they could weather a decade of bad decision-making.

I'll leave the last words to PG:

> Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud.

and:

> I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

Fortunately I think there's a connection between heretical thinking and originality, so hopefully that tilts towards variety. I think that was the whole point of Thiel's 'interview question'.

Good luck with your political oriented filtering, you should add that into the job description, and save people more time.

Not sure if sarcastic or friendly, but that is the plan.

To be fair, I saw the other day, a job posting doing this exact thing for liberal people. It literally said we are looking for liberal like minded folks to help build X.

So this is happening and I find that very fighting.

How does you not wanting to hire leftists jive with your solution of "blind hiring"? If you did blind hiring, wouldn't you end up with a quite a substantion group of leftists? Your position doesn't seem to be consistent with itself.

No contradiction, I'm saying there's a scientific way to be non-biased and in the current political environment I wouldn't choose that option. It's a selfish tactic, not an altruistic one to better society.

I would have political uniformity which would prevent Red vs Blue infighting.

#Warning# This isn't an attempt at flamebait, it's something like a hypothesis.

I would also likely be able to hire from a undervalued portion of Silicon Valley, I suspect I'd be able to get talented Eastern European, Asian and white men at discount rates. They wouldn't have to deal with PC from HR and other firms may be less willing to hire them.

It is not unusual for a sector of the economy to have a political slant. Everybody knows health/care is mostly leftist, military/intelligence is mostly rightist. These are slight tilts but the net affect has an enormous sway over sector thinking/dogma. I suspect SV will split along such lines (right companies, left companies).

You may be onto something. I for one would welcome such filtering as I would appreciate staying away from leftist echo chambers such as Google.

The echo chamber is most of the Tech world, you should read the comments at arstechnica. Cringe doesn't cover it.

There is a healthy chance this goes very wrong for Google, I see that Breitbart has collected some engineers and is releasing interviews with them. Some of the allegations made by the interviewees are very serious if they are true, potentially laying the groundwork for Google to get attacked by the White House. e.g. search engine result manipulation against right wingers, which would have include/included Trump so...

If I were Page or Schmidt right now I'd have a pit in my stomach.

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