I don't blame the kids. They're young and naturally earnest, and are marinating in an environment where performative wokeness results in positive social reinforcement. They don't know any better.
To suggest that we shouldn't allow people who are adults by every meaning of the word, voice their opinions publicly and attributed to themselves is ludicrous.
I would bet that she did not...
With respect to the original comment, though, I agree that 20 year olds are mature enough make their views public. Sure their views may change, but that's life. It doesn't mean they should refrain from sharing their views.
Regardless of how well these students are set up for life in general, it would still suck for them if they lost out on a great career opportunity because the people guarding the door for that opportunity, on the day that they reviewed that candidate, decided to be douchily dismissive of the fact that said candidate decided to provide overeager quotes for a NYT article back when they were a college student.
Yes, it's possible some future employer might take offense to what they said and throw their resume in the trash. It's equally likely some other employer with an equally awesome opportunity will agree with them and admire them for having the guts to speak their mind and with 10 bland inoffensive candidates and one who was quoted in the NY Times, they'll choose to call the latter. As a bonus, they're probably going to get along much better with the employer who liked what they said.
You can't predict how some imaginary future people are going to react. Be true to yourself and let the rest work itself out. Optimizing to try and please the sensibilities of every imaginable person is both impossible and miserable.
The same is probably true of me today, now in my 30s, but I think at least the trend is positive.
Personally, I was ridiculously vulnerable to influence by social groups between the ages of 16 and 25. So much so, that I impulsively joined the Mormon church and threw two years away trying to convert other people to Mormonism. I also wrote an anti-Microsoft rant in a newspaper editorial, since I was so caught up in the Free Software hysteria of the time.
Fast forward 8 years, and I'm ashamed to have the name "Brigham Young" on my resume, and I work at Microsoft -- hoping nobody ever runs across the misguided crap I wrote about my employer in that local newspaper.
Several of my colleagues wish some public things wouldn't show up in Google searches for idiotic things they did because of societal pressure before their "adult" brains fully developed. They really are much more reasonable and responsible people now than they were then.
By point of comparison, at age 23 Horatio Nelson was the captain of a warship and responsible for leading hundreds of men in combat. Nowadays we're way too tolerant of young people who refuse to grow up and accept the consequences of their actions.
I don't think companies are searching people's Twitter or Facebook accounts for controversial statements. The furthest that most would go is to call up a reference or talk to a previous employer.
Hiring committees don't have time to scrutinize every little last comment that someone has made.
The former is overkill, the latter is done by everyone
Why would an employer ever even see this unless their hiring practices are so broken that they think it's a good idea to go looking for this kind of thing in the first place? And if that's the case, then, sheesh, I don't even know what to say. That's so silly that it's not even wrong.
That's the idea behind this pledge, for example: http://neveragain.tech/ (though I've yet to see any of the Palantir employees actually quitting)
Except that's the opposite of how it works. Upholding morality requires leverage and power. Any person can be broken. That's not a good measure of validity of valid claims.
How about not actually deleting those photos from your servers when the kids request them to be deleted?
They were ridiculed for not knowing any better, for being 'young and naturally earnest', etc., though the exact phrasing used was different.
And yet, they were right. It was their elders who didn't know better.
Since it seems you are using an argument which is structurally similar to the ones used against the kids of the 1960s, it doesn't seem like it should put much trust in it.
Here's a famous snarky comment from a then 24-year old: "Don't trust anyone over 30" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Weinberg#%22Don't_trust_a...
“I was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter, and he was making me very angry. It seemed to me his questions were implying that we were being directed behind the scenes by Communists or some other sinister group. I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.”
I can't imagine that would come off well.
I mean, if you are saying you don’t want to work there, why does it matter if their hiring managers see that? Also, just from personal experience: I’m pretty vocal about my criticisms for Facebook, but that hasn’t stopped me from getting recruiting material from them ;)
Signed, a CS graduate and FB stock holder with 500% return.
There are plenty of reasons, beyond ideological ones, not to want to work there. I don’t think I have any ideological objections to Facebook, but the product itself doesn’t interest me and I’m not a user.
I don't work at FB but I'm sure for a product of that scale even if you don't use or care about the product itself, there may be interesting projects for you to work on.
I also don't think I'd care to work on FB the product, but I'm sure it'd be interesting to get to use Haskell to fight spam and work with Simon Marlow. They also use OCaml for some compiler stuff that I'm sure would be interesting.
I agree and am not sure why you think I thought otherwise.
The person I was replying to said "I don't think I have any ideological objections to Facebook" which I assumed to mean they don't see any moral problems with Facebook.
I was merely disagreeing with the idea that someone's lack of interest in the exterior facing product implies there are no interesting projects for that person in the entire company.
It's definitely possible, but they'd probably be working at another top tech company or finance company (think Citadel, Google, Jane Street) or starting their own company instead.
Of the dozen or so folks I know at Facebook, I'd be excited to work with about two of them again. The others are...fine. Much like the folks Google hires now. They're fine.
Once you hit a certain point, you start hiring ditch-diggers just like everybody else. Because you've got ditches to dig.
Some are motivated by other considerations, such as impact of work and work/life balance.