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Comment by workthrowaway27 | Hacker News Reader

Lots of large, multinational, Google size companies have a culture of not discussing politics at work. Or if you do, it's with your friends at work, not random coworkers.

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But you can't have your cake and eat it too. Google and the recent crop of SV startups are what they are, we hear, because they don't have the culture of of the stodgy old multinationals, and Google got to where they are so quickly, and beat so many companies at their own game, with their more freewheeling culture. Lots of large, multinational, Google size companies have no tradition letting individual contributors spending 20% of their own time building a product in a market the company isn't in, and never would have invented Gmail.

This is a non sequitur. They were able to grow so fast because they're in non capital intensive industries with limited constraints on their ability to scale up rapidly and were able to leverage the birth of a new marketplace and an existing telecommunications infrastructure largely financed by the government and by other corporations. The impact of their internal culture with regard to politics is tangential at best and probably non-existent given that these issues have only come to a head in the last few years.

China has similarly dominant tech companies and I'm sure they do not share SV's political opinions.

Yeah, I'm certainly not opposed to the hypothesis that Google's culture had nothing to do with their success, it was just product-market fit and good timing. But it's a commonly told story - everyone praises (or praised, for a while) "Google-style" interviews, Laszlo Bock's Work Rules! was pretty popular, etc. And it's a selling point for startups that they have Xooglers who are bringing in that culture; if Google's success is just "launch the right product at the right time," the fact that you have a random former Google employee should be as relevant as having a random former Yahoo! or Alta Vista employee.

> But you can't have your cake and eat it too. Google and the recent crop of SV startups are what they are, we hear, because they don't have the culture of of the stodgy old multinationals

You could just as easily say they were successful despite this or that aspect of their company culture.

I am not sure if you can say "no discussing politics at work." while having "diversity advocates" at the same time.

Of course you can and how majority of the companies in the US operate. Usually you have no idea how the gal in the cube next to you voted. While most companies try to have diversity.

> how majority of the companies in the US operate.

Majority of US companies have 'diversity advocates' among the ranks of non HR employees?

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