To be fair, that's a learning most businesses stumbled upon decades ago, it's the new generation of "re-invent management" companies that are speedrunning HR policy.
I don't recommend reading it unless you can tackle the entire thing though
Wow. Yeah. Being accepting and loving is hard. It's one of the hardest things you can do, but only if that person is part of your out group.
I mean, wasting 10 minutes is wasting 10 minutes, whether I'm talking about politics or football or TV.
Once it was a woman who seriously thought white men needed to be excluded from things to make up for all the time they oppressed everyone else. It was like socially-acceptable maliciousness.
When you talk politics, you risk having people reveal extreme views that really accomplish nothing but put a wedge in an environment what's supposed to be collaborative.
And I'm going to brag that my company was lightyears ahead of Google on this one. We don't allow political debates. Such a time waster. But HN is educational.
I’m on a group chat with a couple old friends and when someone starts a debate on a topic I’m passionate about we go hard and we go deep. Suddenly it’s two hour later and here I am trying to do some quick demography with raw data from the census bureau to prove a point.
I’ve started blocking the chat until after work because debates do tend to rage sometimes. And we’re old friends with a grounding empathy and shared experiences to fall back on. Doing the same thing with coworkers during work hours? I would’ve banned it too.
So perhaps that's not too far fetched. I've had jobs that didn't keep me interested or seemed menial, and I will admit to holding a lot of online threads during those work hours. Nowadays, when I'm at work I'm often too busy and interested in what I'm doing to think about other things that are happening.
I think it is not so much due to size, but due to the extreme ideological polarization of American society during the last decade.
When before it was normal to hear and accept - and god forbid, even stay friends- with people that had different political opinions from yours, as of late, that has become quite difficult.
An example of this working is in investment management. The job is largely about groups of people arguing with each other. Often this comes down to differences in "world view".
Some places get around this by just hiring people with the same "world view". But other places take the more robust approach of hiring different people and encouraging more argument. I am not sure if this works because they just don't hire very dogmatic people (a group that is very over-represented in tech) but it can/does work (and does scale up to thousands of employees).
Definitely, large groups that have members across society ban these discussions (the Masons is one example). If you are hiring/recruiting anyone, then no politics is smart. But this isn't the case here. It is possible...if you are motivated. From what I have seen, the Googler approach is to be actively unmotivated.
It is easier to think everyone else is dumb and you are smart than acknowledge you are wrong or don't know. Investment management is unusual, the feedback loop is clear. You are as smart as your last trade. That promotes a robust self-image. I can see why the average Googler doesn't have these traits. They seem to be in the job description (i.e. a lot of people want to work at Google because that will mean they are smart). You reap what you sow.
When we turn the narrative of everything from "respecting differing world views" into "respecting nazis/dictators/bigots" etc and turn everyone into a world saving moral crusader upon whom humanity's salvation rests on, it's a very invigorating and powerful message that takes intellectualism away from discussions.