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Comment by aedron | Hacker News Reader

With 20 years experience under my belt, it is my firm belief that the workplace is not a place to discuss politics, religion, or other highly personal and divisive issues. Obviously, this extends even more to the workplace itself bringing these topics up.

I'm not aggressive or even obvious about this disposition, I just gently steer clear of violating it. I feel the same should apply to companies, fine if you want to make a stand on some political issue, but don't make a show of it, because it implies that all your employees should agree with your position.

People in the world have different opinions on things, we need to be able to work with eachother on shared interests without making every place and occasion a battleground. If not in the workplace, then where?

On a somewhat related note, I don't consider my colleagues my friends, or, God forbid, the workplace a 'family'. My relationship to my employer is a professional one, trying to disguise this by intermingling personal feelings can only end in tears, when one day you discover that it was such all along, only you deluded yourself (or let yourself be led) into thinking differently.

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The problem is, though, that politics is inherently tied up in actions related to the workplace.

Let’s say one of your colleagues or managers occasionally makes decisions that would be frowned upon by some people. Maybe you’re recruiting, and they let slip that they passed over a female candidate because they thought she might have a child soon. Or maybe they passed on a gay man because they didn’t think he should be working in a role where he’d interact with children.

This is a political act. Deciding to respond to it, or to ignore it, is also a political act. If this culture is widespread, it would seem reasonable to object to it at a company-wise level. It seems infeasible to separate politics from employment in that sense.

Those examples are not really political, but they are illegal.

They are illegal because the politics of the decades before us have decided they should be illegal.

They were commonplace and accepted twenty years ago. They're illegal now because of politics and political activism.

Pretty sure they have been illegal for way longer than 20 years, for example the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) of 1978 and discriminating based on sexual orientation has been illegal since 1992, at least in California.

The big political fights we are seeing in USA are not local reality. It is like me being in Sweden saying that we aren't progressive enough since Poland has a lot of conservative views, and that therefore we need to add even more protections for women and minorities in Sweden until they are properly accepted in Poland. If someone told me that I have to be engaged in their rights in Poland or I am a misogynist and homophobic then I'd just sigh and ignore them.

> They're illegal now because of politics and political activism.

The point is that expecting the law to be upholded is hardly a political act. It's basic rule of law.

They are explicitly political. Not only that, they still happen, only became illegal due to political pressure, are not illegal everywhere, and are just two examples from many you can obviously think of.

The second example, employment discrimination against a gay person, is only illegal in the US in around 20 states. The other states do not include sexual orientation in their anti-discrimination laws, nor is it covered under Federal law.

I believe these actions are egregious enough that they do warrant taking some action, a conversation at minimum. That being said, in my own experience there is a near constant undercurrent of political sentiment that I simply avoid because there seems little point in engaging only to cement how much we disagree. It's more low-key stuff, like mild comments about something someone read on Twitter or a snippet of political news.

Nice examples. Can we use some that are probably 100x more common at Google?

Maybe you’re recruiting, and they let slip that they passed over a white male candidate because they're working on a new diversity initiative. Or maybe, after being trained constantly on gender bias and seeing vigorous workplace political debates on the subject, you investigate the issue and find no evidence to support anything other than the fact that men and women have different preferences, and you present this evidence to the debate and get fired.

Even acknowledging such cases seems to be political.

I don’t understand the point you are attempting to make. These are all political acts. The fact that you like some of them and dislike others doesn’t change that. Even the choice of sketching the “hard-done-by innocent researcher cruelly hounded out of his job” is a political act. This is the point - how do you isolate that from the workplace when it’s clearly so tied up in it?

He's/she's saying that acknowledging the effects of diversity hiring is political because it implies you don't like the concept if you're speaking against it.

Citation needed? You're either intentionally or unintentionally spreading FUD.

You presented evidence for a negative?

I don't really believe that people should be expected to respect inane illogical arguments just because they have a political side to it.

In fact, doing knowledge work, being unable to form a coherent argument or inability to distinguish faulty logical arguing, would in fact make you a lot less qualified for it.

The issue isn't that workplace practices can be political, the issue is practicing political activism for your own pet cause in the workplace on company time and expecting literally no retribution. A lot of the pain points come from the fact that in practice it's turning out a lot of the politics in debate are only vaguely related to the specific company's actual activity.

> the issue is practicing political activism for your own pet cause in the workplace on company time and expecting literally no retribution

When the pet cause is something that affects working conditions at the company, then that "issue" you describe is simply expecting the company to follow labor laws.

Workers have the right to organize with other workers and advocate for change in their working conditions without retribution from the company.

> Workers have the right to organize with other workers and advocate for change in their working conditions without retribution from the company.

You're misrepresenting the facts. The newspiece states that the activists were fired for tracking and doxxing colleagues that they seemed reactionaries. This sort of abuse is hardly defensible.

    the issue is practicing political activism 
    for your own pet cause in the workplace on 
    company time

I agree, but that's not remotely what was happening here.

The other essential part of not mentioning politics at work is that these private beliefs should not impact work conduct.

EG as per a sibling comment, if an HR Rep is not convinced regarding trans-rights, they should absolutely not let that impact their treatment of a trans person that comes to them.

Or, more famously, (and not that it did him any good) Brendan Eich made a political donation to candidates opposing gay marriage, but (afaik) there were never any reports of him mistreating any LGBTQ+ employees.

Sounds like a stretch. If something like that happens, you take it to HR, you don't don a mask and cape and begin rallying your coworkers to fight alongside you.

> With 20 years experience under my belt, it is my firm belief that the workplace is not a place to discuss politics, religion, or other highly personal and divisive issues.

I, too, old this belief, but it's kind of hard when the "new culture" is overwhelmed with a sense of entitlement to "be heard". Everyone thinks their individual opinions should be able to be shared whenever they feel the need to be validated, and that everyone must hear their opinion in that moment, regardless of how controversial it may be. And if you try to stifle their attempt or even mildly disagree, then you are the bad person. Couth and tactfulness have given way to entitlement and postmodernism in the modern work culture.

Everything is relative to the discussion and beliefs at hand. If you want to disagree about fried chicken, fine, have your beliefs even if I think you're wrong.

If you want to disagree about, say, LGBT rights, then I will probably deem that you are the bad person. That's how strong, deeply held beliefs work. I'm sure if I tried hard I could come up with an example of a belief that would make you consider me a bad person if I stated it as a coworker.

What you're describing is just that your values differ greatly from "new culture" values, not some new entitlement among young people.

It's definitely entitlement when your supposed "right to be heard" on non-work-related issues seems more important than the workplace disruption it causes.

Well, I can't speak for your experiences because I don't know your experiences.

What is "right to be heard" mean? For me it usually means employees speak their concerns with management, and management is receptive enough (ie they care about employee retention) that if something is really bad they hold a Q&A session. Maybe act on it.

I'm an empowered, high-demand employee in a high demand industry. If management doesn't want to hear about my concerns, that's fine and they can say so. I'll find another employer in less than a week.

Edit: to give a more concrete example, my employer was in talks to write software for client X, a corporation well known for being Bad People™️. A bunch of employees came forward that they didn't want to do business with client X. Management discussed it thoroughly with these employees, hosted public roundtables, etc. I wasn't part of this discussion so I can't say the outcome, but yes the employees who cared demanded a right to be heard, because often that's why we work for progressive employers in the first place.

I think it's both what you and the parent are saying.

People in the younger generation (myself somewhat included in that) do feel extra entitlement toward saying what they want, when they want, in whatever forum they want. But it's a lot harder nowadays to keep one's personal and professional lives completely separate. I'd lean toward considering this trend a good thing; we don't work in a vacuum. Activism absolutely does have a place in a professional setting when so many social and political issues contribute to discrimination in the workplace.

At the same time, making judgments about the parent's values is a bit out of line. Some people really do just want to go to the office, put in a full day of work, and go home where their "real" life happens. I personally think that's a limiting attitude, but don't begrudge people their need or desire to go that route.

> making judgments about the parent's values is a bit out of line. Some people really do just want to go to the office, put in a full day of work, and go home where their "real" life happens.

My impression, from working in one of these progressive workplaces, is that nobody is forced to interject or defend their personal opinions, or be a part of those discussions at all. Indeed, just as we have employees bringing the latest from the social justice circus to work, we also have employees who sit it out entirely. We even have a dedicated #activism slack channel, which is obviously opt-in.

So when I see complaints like the parents, my impression is the true feelings are "I want to disagree and say X but my coworkers will think I'm a bad person." Obviously, the coworkers will only think you're a bad person if you're disagreeing with them on a strongly held, deeply personal value, hence my example of LGBT rights.

There are a such thing as bad opinions. If I share bad opinions, people will think I'm a bad person. Every person's conception of bad opinions is a little different - For example, most people here agree that mass surveillance and censorship is bad, but only some people here feel that deporting DACA immigrants is bad.

Thus, I concluded the parent probably just holds vastly different values from his or her more vocal coworkers. There's nothing wrong with having different values, in fact it's quite normal. I don't know why else parent would be concerned with being labelled a bad person.

I too work in one of these "progressive" workplaces. On political / social matters, I sometimes have an opinion that differs from the one that the company (very vocally) advertises.

People holding the majority view are publicly cheered by the company, but people holding minority views are (at best) tolerated.

This frustrates me on several levels:

- There's no room for debate on these topics. The official company position is treated as so obviously correct that a reasoned debate on the matters is treated as unnecessary, or even worse, immoral. I find this insulting.

- The company / majority position seems to be self-contradictory. E.g., they promote LGBTQ behavior as praiseworthy, which implies that certain religions' teachings about sexual ethics are factually incorrect. But the company also claims to respect people's religious choices.

These leave me with the impression that the employer is hypocritical and/or disingenuous.

> People holding the majority view are publicly cheered by the company, but people holding minority views are (at best) tolerated

May I have a specific example?

There appears to be a lot of negative opinions about this kind of workplace based on the comments (and my downvotes on some of my comments haha). I'm just trying to understand it.

If you're curious, you can see a specific example from my workplace in the edit region here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21524930

I've never personally had a bad experience from being in a "progressive" workplace. I don't agree with them on everything, but in general I've never had a bad experience. The "social justice" aspect is pretty opt-in, so I don't know what could lead to a negative experience such as being less than tolerated.

> The company / majority position seems to be self-contradictory. E.g., they promote LGBTQ behavior as praiseworthy, which implies that certain religions' teachings about sexual ethics are factually incorrect. But the company also claims to respect people's religious choices.

I don't really see the contradiction. My work celebrates employees by giving us catered lunches that often include pork but nobody perceives that as being anti-muslim, as long as there are non-pork choices. The vegetarians and vegans don't mind meat on the table as long as there are vegetarian and vegan choices.

A subset of teachings from a subset of Christian faiths will say something like "[homosexuality] is an abomination". It would be disrespectful to employee's religion (and common sense) for the employer to tell their employees they must be homosexual. It is not disrespectful for the employer to celebrate other employees who are homosexual. Am I misunderstanding?

Thanks for the substantive discussion!

> May I have a specific example?

I can't without giving out too much detail. I shouldn't have stated that without being able to provide substance, sorry.

> It is not disrespectful for the employer to celebrate other employees who are homosexual. Am I misunderstanding?

I think we're getting close to the fundamental issue here. Let me unpack my logic a bit:

1) Celebrating behavior X implies that X is in some way virtuous.

2) To claim that X is virtuous, is to claim that any belief system S which states X is not virtuous is in error.

So I see the current discussion as having the structure shown above, with:

X = partaking in a homosexual relationship, and

S = the theologies of various Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sects.

So in short, it seems to me that employers are logically implying that certain employees have false religious beliefs, but the employers are hiding behind the fact that the their implication isn't clearly stated.

I think that's inconsistent with the employers' claims to respect employees' religious views.

I can agree with your logic, in particular with one additional axiom:

3) an employer can respect employees religious views only if they will not imply the religious view is in error

It's clearly (from your logic) the case that employers description of "respects" violates axiom (3). If you belong to one of the sects in question I can understand being upset, but I would argue that (given the breadth of beliefs in the world) it is impossible to not imply some employees "respected" belief is wrong.

So perhaps this is the point, that employers should not claim to respect beliefs because they necessarily must act inconsistently while doing so. Thus, one might conclude, a workplace should stand for nothing in particular and thus allow employees to believe anything without celebrating or respecting it.

However, I wouldn't agree with this conclusion. I would rather that my employers tries the best possible at the (futile) task of being respectful and celebratory to all, and if problems are raised they try to be concluded with minimal conflict and maximum respect.

In fact, I'd claim this the common sense approach. This is how I resolve having friends with non-identical belief sets, for example.

(An example: one coworker made a joke to the expense of astrology. A different coworker chimed in that she and others adhered to astrology and found this joke offensive. The original coworker offered an apology and all was well.)

Thanks for the excellent response. Good job spotting my (unintentionally) suppressed premise, (3).

> I would rather that my employers tries the best possible at the (futile) task of being respectful and celebratory to all, and if problems are raised they try to be concluded with minimal conflict and maximum respect.

I think we agree that employers ought to take positions somewhere on the Pereto curve [0] of that tradeoff-space.

At one level, it seems to be a question of how happy various employee groups would feel for the different policy options. I don't have a principled reason for my own preference in that trade-space, so I try to not put my own views on a pedestal for this topic.

If nobody has a convincing argument for the proper balance in that tradeoff-space, though, it makes me wonder if it's simply a matter of personal preference / opinion for everyone involved.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

Thanks for the discussion

> If nobody has a convincing argument for the proper balance in that tradeoff-space, though, it makes me wonder if it's simply a matter of personal preference / opinion for everyone involved.

I would suspect that it is, so I guess we've gone a bit meta because the "accepted" way for large organizations of humans to make these trade-offs is politics

So then is it right to say the solution to "too much politics at work" is office politics to decide the right amount of politics at work?

> So then is it right to say the solution to "too much politics at work" is office politics to decide the right amount of politics at work?

I have the feeling I'm a few philosophy-degrees short of being confident in any particular answer to that question :(

I hate it when discussions about potentially important topics end with a muddle of uncertainty about metaphysical matters. It seems to end this way just about every time.

If a company claims to support multiple religious choices, isn't it inevitable that some of those will conflict?

They can probably avoid the more metaphysical questions but as soon as they have a canteen there's going to be issues if any group assumes their religious rules must be applied to everyone's food (and indeed what they're eating outside of work).

The problem is that, for many issues, you can't separate the politics from social issues. Many of these political issues concern aspects of morality.

For example, a CEO might not want someone who is anti-LGBT representing their company in any way. On the flip side of that, I wouldn't want to work for a company where the leadership was anti-LGBT. Even if these people are otherwise good at their jobs, a person's morality does matter when deciding who to work with/for.

You might make the argument that no one at work should even know if anyone else is anti-LGBT or not, or argue that people should put those cares aside in the interests of a harmonious workplace, but I just don't think that's how (all) humans work.

There are practical considerations to this, too: say a trans employee has to deal with an anti-LGBT HR person regarding trans healthcare and the company's health plans. The HR person is going to be uncomfortable about that conversation, and the trans person isn't going to feel like their concerns are being taken seriously, or even feel safe having that conversation in the first place. That's... not okay.

> On a somewhat related note, I don't consider my colleagues my friends, or, God forbid, the workplace a 'family'.

Just like any other random group of people in the world, some of my colleagues are my friends who I socialize with outside work, and some (most) aren't.

(Agreed, though, the whole "company is family" nonsense needs to stop.)

The whole LGBTXYZ discussion is somewhat weird to me. How about letting people's sexual preferences be their own business? I would rather be free from knowing what goes on in people's bedrooms, I don't think this is an unreasonable request.

Your example of the HR person who has to make decisions about medical issues obviously falls in a different category, but even in this case discretion could be assumed to be the default.

Let's look at the symmetrically opposite situation - for example, a CEO might not want someone who is pro-LGBT representing their company in any way. On the flip side of that, some people wouldn't want to work for a company where the leadership was pro-LGBT.

What would be the expected reaction in this case? We'd want (or require) those people to keep their desires to themselves and choose their employees/employers professionally without discrimination, right?

Thing is, you can't both have your cake and eat it; if we argue that companies should be allowed to act on political/social opinions, then that applies also if you don't like them; and if we argue that it should keep their nose out of what position their employees take on various political/social issues and just focus on their work, then again this will apply to both positions that we like and those we hate.

If employers are allowed to fire (or not hire) someone for pushing anti-LGBT agenda, they'd be allowed to fire (or not hire) someone for pushing a pro-LGBT agenda. Either employees have the right to freely express their political positions or they do not - but that right doesn't depend on which of opposing positions they hold.

Hear hear, I'm under 30 but because the industry I work in isn't really as sexy or brand new as some more CS focused ones I tend to work with people who are older and were raised with the type of expectation that the workplace is a place for working and carry themselves more or less restrained in this regard.

I have friends who work in LA and in SF and they constantly bombard me with stories of how employees of all levels (even recent hires) just spew the most extremist political diatribes at all times and some just do it to troll other employees of the different faction. It has gotten so bad that there are several "secret" slack channels for these cliques dedicated to continue gossiping and sharing memes that are pretty distasteful.

Whenever I ask about them reporting it to HR they just tell me that HR doesn't really exist and they pretty much exist just to make sure payroll is distributed.

Just my 2 cents but I prefer just clocking in and talking about the weather than have to put up with that kind of toxicity.

I work with a few of those guys. I truly wonder why their managers put up with it. I’d immediately fire them.

But hiding our views is just avoiding the problem. We should learn to deal with people having different opinions and still be able to collaborate professionally and not turn it into a battleground.

A lot of workplace cultures survive and even encourage discussiong differing views without making every place a battleground. And even encourage civil exchange of views between people who hold different views.

It's in vogue to use the ideas from the Nonviolent Communication book to make this work better. But those ideas are of course politocal.. as is the debate on whether to allow political discussions.

Also it's pretty hard to separate political discussions from work if you're doing something that impacts people's lives. (I'm leaving out jobs where the societal impact is clearly negative, there discouraging discussion might be rational for the employer)

Completely agree - the workplace is not a family and (mostly) not a group of friends.

Even back in my military days, there was a clear difference between people I had to work with and my military family. Living in close proximity forces people to set boundaries and respect others. Plus, if a political discussion got physical or out of control, remedial training for all parties involved.

Sad that this attitude has become the norm. You're basically saying you can do collaborative work with people over the long run without really knowing one another's values. A vicious cycle and "race to the bottom" in terms of both productivity and innovation in my opinion.

> it is my firm belief that the workplace is not a place to discuss politics, religion, or other highly personal and divisive issues

From the company's PoV you're correct. From the employee's PoV I'm not convinced.

I must be old or something. To me, it's a simple question. Is my employer paying me to discuss politics or religion? If no, then I don't see why I should be using their time and their resources to do so.

Exactly - I have to work with _everyone_ in the company regardless of their beliefs. Its a lot easier to get my job done if I can remain in blissful ignorance of their possibly strong beliefs.

My employer isn't paying me to poop either but I make sure to do that every day ;)

To be less glib, the level of acceptable discourse tends to be built into a companies culture. I've never seen a workplace with zero discourse on the outside world, and I doubt it exists. Companies like google clearly push the concept to its breaking point, though.

>I don't consider my colleagues my friends,

Do you allow colleagues to become friends?

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