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Comment by stevenalowe | Hacker News Reader

How about we do our jobs instead? Yes please!

This is exactly right. At my small startup we may have heated discussions about monads, or tabs vs spaces, but you'll never hear any talk about any elected official or laws or current events.

It's not that we don't care. It's just that it's not the reason we spend 8+ hours/day together.

Beyond that if you're going to spend 8 hours with someone, you also might not want to argue every time Trump or Pelosi does something radical.

The difference is that Google's product is almost inherently political, especially when it comes to how they tailor search results and rank news results. I think it is productive that people who work on products that have political ramifications should be allowed to talk about politics because what they do has political ramifications.

I would hate for dissenting voices within google to be silenced and everyone to simply follow orders from the top regarding how they make search ranking decisions. Especially considering the recent whistle-blowers from within google alleging political bias in google search results. Surprisingly, none of which seemed to make any waves here on HN.

But not for the vast majority of people working there. Most folks are running infrastructure and building products completely unrelated to their *news offerings. And I think a big chunk of this discussion is just folks sitting on internal boards and wasting a lot of time arguing with people they've never met in some other corner of the company.

How about judging us on our performance at our jobs then, and not treating us as children?

In most professional settings, it’s considered a norm not to talk about sex, politics, and religion unless your business is dealing with one of those areas specifically.

But do most professional settings go to this extent to police their employees:

> creating a team of moderators to monitor conversations on company chat boards

Yes. It's called HR and they will just fire you.

Most professional settings would not have permitted these company chat boards in the first place.

Are you really trying to argue that companies which for example use Slack (or a similar service) are "not professional"?

No, I'm arguing that most large, "professional" companies would not have allowed employees to create create chat groups whose sole purpose was to discuss politics or any other non-work-related topic (whether on mailing lists, Slack, or whatever). In doing so, Google was treating its employees more like adults, which is the opposite of what a previous comment in the thread was suggesting.

How did Google “treating employees like adults” work out? The only reason an employer goes to work is to make money. The only reason an employer hires someone is to make them money or to save them money.

Bringing anything else into the workplace is an unnecessary distraction from both the employee’s and employer’s standpoint. I go to work to have money deposited into my account twice a month and go home to spend time with my family and friends. The more time I spend at work spending energy not doing work either I will be less effective or spend more time away from family/friends/hobbies to be effective at work.

I have worked at a large company that actually did that we had internal newsgroups at BT bt.misc

And even externally the only thing that was verboten was the uk.telecom hierarchy - this was more to not encourage some of the internet kooks.

In my experience this is pretty common. My last company I used to get warnings for using swear words in private messages.

HN does this, we aren't even employees, and it's far far less serious of a site than a workplace message board. HN isn't even paying for my time like my employer is.

Seems completely reasonable for an employer to moderate internal message boards, of all entities.

I guess the issue is people no longer act as adults (having rational discussions over differences) when confronted with differing or worse opposing views? A small but large enough group (on many issues) get enraged and genuinely feel threatened by alternate opinions.

If someone spends a significant portion of their day in heated debate about subjects unrelated to their work they aren’t performing to their ability no matter how they spin their output story to make it look like they are performing well. I think freedom to step away from work for an hour or two to unwind is great but it needs to be in moderation - I think people going too far and spending multiple hours of a day in flame wars is what the policy is meant to address.

Google probably has a higher concentration of "children" (loose sense of the word) than your average tech employer, as it aggressively poaches junior engineers, focusing heavily on academic technical proficiency over other professional aspects, and then many don't stick around long term.

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