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Comment by tdb7893 | Hacker News Reader

I'm really surprised that they don't avoid these sorts of political conflicts at work. It makes me really curious what the company culture is like

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It really depends on whether you choose to participate. If you don't waste time on email groups and intranet social media, very little of this sludge actually seeps into the day-to-day work, or at least that has been my experience.

Yup. It's there if you go looking for it but it's 100% invisible if you don't.

except when it makes it to the front page of hn.

But isn't that the problem? When we see the news media blasting articles about internal disputes most Googlers hadn't heard of, that could mean the internal culture is secretly toxic and the employees are too brainwashed to notice.

Or it could mean that people are selectively leaking a misleading picture of the company.

Google has 80k employees. If just 10k employees have heard of some kerfuffle before it winds up on tech crunch, that's still a _lot_ of people.

But maybe the specifics of some individual disputes aren't widely known as the events are unfolding; still, lots of the stuff described did get wider airtime internally before being 'leaked'.

+1 to this.

I've been there 6 years and it has had essentially zero impact on me.

I usually only find out about it when people are making fun of it on memegen.

I work at Google. For a company of this size, the culture is extremely dependent on your specific team/org.

I think I probably hear more about politics at Google from HN than from actually working at Google.

Exactly. Google has become the demon for the right suspect partially because the Clinton's are gone.

In the US you rarely even know who the gal in the cube next to you voted for.

The culture is senior year / early grad school for CS majors.

It used to be the prevailing wisdom in corporate America that discussions about religion and politics have no place in the office. It can only lead to conflict and furthermore, WTF does it have to do with the task at hand? I mean, pretty obvious stuff, right? But somewhere along the way the inmates started running the asylum, so to speak, and political discourse and activism became an integral part of the work place (although I’d argue this is more of a Bay Area/startup phenomenon, you obviously see very little of this in stuffy corporate gigs). Who knows the exact underlying reason for this, but it is what it is.

My understanding from the Damore case is that Google has internal message boards that discuss all sorts of political topics and things predictably get quite heated and has lead to people being blacklisted and fired. Nasty stuff, other companies should pay attention to what’s happening at Google.

But didn't Damore have to attend compulsory diversity classes, that solicited feedback from its attendees? So you are supposed to take your medicine and say it tastes wonderful eh.

Its wasn't exactly compulsory; but if you wanted to advance in the company you pretty much had to attend. Even this statement might be over stating it, as we here much more from the employees who feel like they have to attend (and might then complain about it), then the ones who don't and would have no reason to ever bring it up.

> Its wasn't exactly compulsory; but if you wanted to advance in the company you pretty much had to attend.

Even that seems unlikely. Certainly, managers have to be trained about compliance and inclusiveness, but was JD a manager? I guess not.

I mean, if you work at a paperclip factory, sure, it doesn't matter, but if you work at Palantir, it certainly could. And if you work at Facebook? Right now, you'd better be thinking about the wider political context of your work.

It also used to be the prevailing practice in America that professionals were nearly exclusively male and not reflective of the broader racial makeup of the country. This still is the case in Google's industry.

I claim that not talking about politics at work and having a predominately privileged workforce are closely related. Heterosexual etc. white men like myself have less that we need to talk about, less support we need to ask for from our company and coworkers on "political" topics.

I would guess that a rich constellation of distinctive blends of political and social opinions populate the favored perspective list at various companies.

Imagine which political views an employee might want to avoid voicing while on the job at companies like:

* An oil refinery in Louisiana

* An ice cream maker in Vermont

* A defense contractor that makes unmanned aerial vehicles for the US Air Force in Southern California

* A film studio in Atlanta

* A slaughterhouse in East Texas

Google is a global company with employees from many, many different countries working in offices all over the world. Many different social norms.

"Corporate America"'s prevailing wisdom can not be blanket applied to all these people in all these countries (both in a cultural "it ain't gonna work" sense but also legally things are different elsewhere too)

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