Comment by trustfundbaby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trustfundbaby | Hacker News Reader

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I've found it very odd how freely and openly siding with a political candidate has become the norm since 2016 at the tech firms I've worked in. Even more so, has been the viciousness of the pushback when I've asked for such discussions to be funneled into private channels and forums, with the whispers being "oh he must be a trump supporter", which is pretty hilarious if you know me.

I think this article is a well articulated viewpoint and I hope that more companies move in this direction. There is a reason why for all those years that it was considered a social faux pas to discuss politics and religion in polite company and especially at work, the potential for division, hurt feelings and retaliation can very easily cause deep irreconcilable schisms in even the most talented workforces.

I just hope that this doesn't however transform into something more insidious, a way to muffle very important voices for change with respect to diversity at tech companies, though I have a sinking feeling that it will

You win some. you lose some I guess.

Completely agree. Where I was working in 2016 in SF, many employees were reading FiveThirtyEight all day in the summer leading into the election and I occasionally mentioned "its clear how this data is not accounting for certain things" - you know like the entire rest of the country that isn't along the coasts. People didn't want to hear it and acted surprised, like really shocked and disheveled, relying on their filter bubble and FiveThirtyEight's one time stellar performance in 2012.

I watched how people acted like the "worst case scenario" would have been an opposition party getting a tie in the electoral college and not the landslide that occurred. For that party's re-election campaign I am seeing the same conjecture, modeling worst case scenarios about a "slim electoral college victory".

So instead I just placed undervalued bets on prediction markets for a nice payday. Peter Thiel essentially did the same thing, on a bigger scale and reaped disproportionate benefits.

People should just focus on the company's mission statement. I am glad more companies are taking a page out of Netflix's old culture document, dissolving the "we are family" bullshit in favor of a championship team aspiration.

Weren't 538's pretty much the only predictions that gave Trump a decent chance at winning 2016? IIRC, they were somewhere around 30%.

yeah, I bought Trump on prediction markets between .10 and .30 to ride those up to 1, so sounds about right

I'm with you until the Republican party wedged on breaking core business operations like hiring (foreign STEM PhDs we knew for years) and day-to-day employee concerns like whether our teammates could get married. It just became too disruptive. At some point, it does interfere with mission.

All that was before physically dangerous public health policies. Now not just jobs and employees, but their grandparents too.

Pre-2016, businesses took the same positions - serving international markets and employing foreign workers. They were just not considered political at the time.

People always talked about their heterosexual families and brought their cis sexual identities to work. Then others asked for the same allowances.

People always acknowledged white culture at work. Then others asked for the same allowances.

I don’t think business culture changed so much as politics started to question business culture.

I'm not qualified to talk about business culture in general, but in Silicon Valley specifically there's definitely been a shift beyond just corporate culture. I've personally seen quite a few employees insist that their company should intervene in political controversies unrelated to how the office is run and how workers are treated there.

they don’t have any problem donating to candidates and party funds though https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...

curious how coinbase would rebut

A quick google search would show that most of the people Coinbase has donated to support cryptocurrency. The only one I can't find info on is Patrick Davis from New Mexico. This is in line with the message of the blog post.

The problem is that those candidates also support other things. If they donated money to these candidates, they are responsible for those other things too.

crypto is inherently political though in the sense that you have to talk about government, central bankers, inflation, fiat currency, etc. when you talk about it.

i don’t know how you separate it from politics when it was literally born out of the failures of government to protect us from the global financial crisis.

You can do what Coinbase does, and focus on the positive benefits cryptocurrency helps people achieve rather than problems in political governance. It'll be unavoidable to occasionally touch on topics which happen to be political, but there's no reason a cryptocurrency company would have to take sides on how the Federal Reserve should be run or whether the financial crisis bailouts were appropriately administered.

Financial cryptography predates the global financial crisis by about twenty years, and was born out of a desire for private, secure, and censorship-resistant transactions (in which government is not the only attacker).

https://www.chaum.com/publications/Security_Wthout_Identific...

https://www.coindesk.com/the-rise-of-the-cypherpunks

I was very active on the cypherpunks in the 90s, and I can tell you from first hand experience and chatting with people like Hal, Nick, and Tim, that a big component of cryptocurrencies was very much the desire of right-wing economics of libertarian thought -- crypto-anarchy. The subject of nullifying the power of governments to tax was a frequent topic.

And I would would not be surprised if you found the management team at Coinbase to be compromised of some Trump supporters buying into a Faustian bargain of using him to rubber stamp libertarian friendly policies.

Quite a lot of SV tech-bros, especially in the investor and fintech community fall into this pattern, e.g. Peter Thiel, Palmer Lucky, etc

The political element can be cleaned up when the mission is framed as study first. As in, study the options. Study the stakeholders. Study outcomes when implemented and trialed. Study the mechanisms by which outcomes are measured.

When you do this the laser focus on the mission stsys near the surface: You can't address all the political elements by building or lobbying from within your team, but you can say "our study shows that..." and thus create the environment for another group to act upon, while not doing every suggested thing yourself because the dependencies needed will take you off mission. It's coherent with the idea of decentralizing decision making.

>I've found it very odd how freely and openly siding with a political candidate has become the norm since 2016 at the tech firms I've worked in

Have found this to be the trend in general or the trend for supporters of certain parties/ideals only?

> Have found this to be the trend in general or the trend for supporters of certain parties/ideals only?

oh in my experience, definitely one sided against trump and anyone who voted for him.

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