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Comment by gtfratteus | Hacker News Reader

As a googler, I say good. People like her have made going to work exhausting. Leave your politics at home and let me do my job in peace.

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I was amazed there was even a Resist@Google group within Google. I’m okay with people protesting the companies actions but Google seemed to be internally supporting protests on company time and property. Which has pitted employees against each other across political lines.

I don’t see why Google cant just keep it apolitical in the work environment while being open to critiques externally and not caring what their employees do politically in their spare time.

"Apolitical" means no speech or actions to change the status quo. That is fine if and only if the status quo is fine.

I just said the company should be open to external critique. Which the employees should be free to engage in their spare time...

Why only in their spare time?

Because you're paid by Google...to work at Google? And other employees shouldn't have to be fed your politics constantly just because they have to show up at work every day just like you do.

Let's take a step back. When I work somewhere, my job is much larger than 'deliver code'. It includes (and will show up on my Review) things like 'team building' and 'contributing to a non-hostile work environment'. It is everybody's job to make sure that their workplace is non-hostile. This is the cultural version of 'see something? Say something'. If you are in a workplace that makes that impossible, or retaliates against people who agitate for improvement, then that is a real problem.

TBH, the real problem here is people's different views on the Overton window. I suspect that is why you are getting such vigorous blowback on these topics; your window isn't aligned with at least some of the people on this thread.

Employees sign non-moonlighting agreements that makes the employer own all their work related ideas. It would be a violation of contract to withhold those ideas.

The problem becomes that googlers stop thinking about anything but the current company priories, and you don't innovate anymore.

Weird as it is, I don't think there's a half-open position with the free-thought floodgate.

>I was amazed there was even a Resist@Google group within Google.

If I was google, I'd allow it. For a while. Then get rid of everybody in there. Good riddance.

It is naive to believe you can avoid politics working at one of the largest corporations on the globe. Isn't the Silicon Valley manifesto to "change the world"? What about that could possibly be apolitical? The effect of "doing your job in peace" is to delegate your political responsibility to the people above you.

Accept the responsibility of being an adult who participates in society.

I'd agree with you, if your employer wasn't spending literally the most money in tech on lobbying in DC. How much money has to be involved before it's ok for your job to get political?

But your work is innately political.

what is political about this?

for(const i = 0; i < 100; i++) { ... }

If you work for a defense contractor your work is political. Not literally political, but you are now serving the state.

Nothing, but we're not talking about contextless for-loops here, and you know that.

mkoryak, your task today is to write us a for-loop that lets us isolate people conducting protected workplace organizing so we can fire them.

Hard to tell if your are intentionally or not ignoring the fact that code as a whole serves a specific purpose, and that purpose can itself be very political. Either way, this is an incredibly embarrassing response.

An IBM subsidiary worked on software to tabulate census results in order to classify individuals by degree of Jewishness. Is it alright to godwin in order to directly answer an obvious question?

Your 'work' on military drone technology and censored search is political by nature.

If you want politics out of your workplace, stop working for the company that spends more on political lobbying than any other tech company.

When people say they want politics out of something, what they really mean is they want everyone else's politics out. My beliefs are common sense; your beliefs are partisan politics.

Exactly. The act of working at Google _is_ now a political position itself. The amount of power Google has should be checked, and if internal employee's are able to curb some runaway unethical programs, it is in their best interest of humanity to do so. I personally couldn't imagine staying at a company that was knowingly harming society.

Is there a way to do interviews and promote only persons with unethical & immoral attributes to keep their business from running into issues like these repeatedly?

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