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Comment by stronglikedan | 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.

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.

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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).

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