Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!
"In my day" -- it was just poor form to bring up that kind of stuff at work. If you did so at all, you usually tried to avoid being "that person". You don't get to choose each person you work with, so it pays if everyone puts in a bit of extra effort to not give anyone else a hard time.
I think some of these work politics issues--in particular around the bay area-- is partially a product of extremely homogeneous work forces (at least politically), partially poor work-life balance cultures (no life outside work), partially social networking (massively increasing the visibility of your co-workers out of work activities), and <???>-- I don't feel I really have a complete understanding of what is going on.
Maybe a factor is a breakdown in our wider culture's ability to see people who disagree as being people who are still good people with reasonable points but just have different understandings or priorities (or even just to patronize them as stupid or uninformed). But instead perhaps there is a trend to rapidly decide people we disagree with are irredeemably evil just based on a soundbitized version of some insanely complicated political trade-off (or maybe even just by association)... But I'm not really sure how much that breakdown is actually happening compared to the appearance of it happening in the reporting funhouse mirror ("Reasonable people do a reasonable thing" said no headline ever).
Some of it might also be due to a transition from products to services-- people seem a lot more willing to view product sales as anonymous and totally transactional, while they seem to view a service as something more akin to a marriage.
A big downside of reactions like coinbases' might be that in what I would consider the traditional regime there was still an opportunity for employees to bring a little bit of their politics to work-- so long as they were professional and not obnoxious about it, or in places where there were genuine interactions with work ("How about lets not buy the toner cartages made from clubbed baby seals?") ... but if you can't count on people to control themselves and you're forced to set bright line policies then there is probably a lot less room for people to be reasonable.
Why the binary presentation, though?
You can make the world better by doing a single thing well and respecting your customers (and their all-kinds-diversity) while doing it. Even if you're not directly contributing to BigIssue by doing it, the people who are presumably need to be able to count on a reliable supply chain that gives them the tools/services/resources they need.
Unless your work has serious atypical externalities, just doing what you're doing doesn't itself make things worse -- it make fail to do the absolute maximum it could possibly to to make one specific thing better, but if that's your focus you should be working on that thing directly. In a reasonable organization there should be a lot of opportunity to put your thumb on a scale towards continually improving all sorts of things-- without inviting disruption and discord --by threading the needle and nudging all the free choices in the right direction and respecting that other reasonable people can have different priorities.
There are an neigh uncountable number of travesties and injustices in the world and finite time and resources to fight for them... but as a society we can't stand strong to face any of the big issues if the water taps aren't flowing, the power isn't on, the communications lines aren't communicating, the spread-sheets aren't spreading, the trash (literal and figurative) isn't getting collected, and whatnot. We have to prioritize, triage, and focus on what we can accomplish.
And someone-- many many someones, in fact-- has to be the shoulders we stand on as our tallest reach for the stars.
Besides, if advocacy was really what people were sold on in large numbers how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits? :) I think that asks me to believe that there were many people who's next alternative to a google role was taking a $40k/yr 501c3 job and google was foolish enough to offer that person a mid-six-figure compensation package.
Most of the big tech companies are all encompassing enough that they all have serious externalities.
- Amazon and Microsoft face protests that they enable ICE
- FB faces protests that they enable Trump to promote hate speech
- Google faced protests over a possible Pentagon contract
> how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits
Keep in mind that a decent percentage of employees of big tech companies are non-eng. The comp is still better than outside, but not the order of magnitude you see for eng.
In general, are you surprised that people want to have their cake and eat it too? :P There is a group for whom changing a specific issue is their top priority and they'll accept below-market comp to work at a nonprofit. There's a much larger group, especially among younger generations, who want both top of market comp and to feel like they're changing the world, and the tech companies promised they could have it all.
A number of people in big tech are facing the decision of: should I keep working at a company whose values I may no longer agree with? Or should I quit (possibly taking a cut in pay, perks, scope, caliber of eng, etc), since I may not find a big tech company whose values I completely agree with? I haven't seen a trend towards leaving yet, but the fact that the stock of big tech has been going through the roof has made it sting even harder to leave now, so I'll be curious when the market run ends how this ends up.
It's my personal view that so much of the current political vitriol is because as a society, we've run out of things to worry about. We've reached critical mass of people solving Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and therefore, we are dwelving in to other arenas where we are feeling neglected.
> 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
A cognitive limitation that it's hard to see the bubble we are in.
Being smart at the things in our bubble makes us over-confident about things we really don't have deep nuanced experience about.
We don't know what we don't know, but we think we do .. until we gain enough experience to appreciate life's complexity and our own limitations.
Same, and that's the conundrum.
"Activist" employees put others on the spot by querying coworkers' political views and expecting discussion. And for those who have had their head in the sand for the past few years, things like "being a Joe Rogan fan" are now considered unacceptable politics.
For one who has had their head in the sand and is only vaguely familiar with Joe Rogan; why?
My personal opinion is that they don’t like him because his platform is massive and threatens other traditional means of informing people about what to think on certain topics.
> liberals care far more about proper culture signaling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics.
I'd argue this is more about the political climate in the US (and many other places) than about liberals specifically. Arguably for "true liberals" this shouldn't be a consideration at all but might be for conservatives.
not 'all of us'
When you ask a question like that, what you're really asking is, "why don't workplaces have the outcomes I expect along racial lines when it comes to hiring, compensation, promotion, and more?" And implicitly, "why can't workplaces be forced (or force themselves) toward meeting the outcomes I expect?"
Those are different questions, but they're encoded in yours. And they don't really apply to the topic at hand.
Absolutely. Everyone involved with the movement put aside their differences to focus on the same goal.
It would not have been as successful if everyone showing up for a rally was expected / coerced into supporting other political issues.
A universal appeal to shared humanity is an approach that works. Shaming people into a type of morality will only invite pushback.
"In 1964, in a poll taken nine months after the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, 74 percent of Americans said such mass demonstrations were more likely to harm than to help the movement for racial equality. In 1965, after marchers in Selma, Alabama, were beaten by state troopers, less than half of Americans said they supported the marchers."
(Taken from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/the-nex...)
Compare this to today's thoughtless and abrasive slogans or the writings of today's favored thought leaders on this and how divisive now only are the ideas but the tactics being used to coerce people into compliance.
So yeah, people at the time may have had a distaste for some of the tactics but the messaging was very popular. The riots that took place later on in the decade were a disaster and led to a new, mainstream form of conservatism led by Nixon.
That strikes me as a level of nuance that is frankly unlikely.
I don't think these landmark legal events occurred because people demonstrated so much what the man and his supporters were saying. I believe people miss the forest for the trees and think if they just get a group of people together they're somehow right or will get their way. But it's about what you have to say and how you say it that matters. Peacefully organizing is a great vehicle for that but you still need the goods.
The violence that happened in the later 1960's set so much of it back IMO.
Yet your conclusion is far too final: it's not a "myth" that people didn't support these changes; some people did and some didn't, as with anything. At one point in the end of 1964, a majority of people oppose the protests that led to these changes.
And in fact, the 24th Amendment faced substantial opposition from southern states; I'm not able to find contemporaneous opinion polls (and I'd be interested if you have any), but it's far from the case that it was without controversy!
I strongly disagree with your last line, however—not because violence is acceptable or productive, necessarily, but because your interpretation exculpates reactionaries who regrouped and pushed back against such changes, which I think is a highly relevant lesson for the Trump era:
Race is such a good predictor of a vote for Trump. The simplest explanation for Trump's rise is that he is a counterreaction to the election of the first Black President.
So too with the success of a cynical Southern Strategy following on the heels of the Civil Rights Era.
However, opinion polls _do_ show a _correlation_ between support for _BLM_ and coverage of demonstrations: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/support-for-black-lives....
You could still support the Civil Rights movement, but believe that mass demonstrations harm it.
Those two things are completely separate.
I think that's one side effect of having these gargantuan, hugely profitable tech companies. They can essentially have a huge portion of their workforce be unproductive if the essential "money machine" at each company (e.g. AdWords at Google) is running smoothly.
Other, smaller companies can't afford to have as much fat in their workforce, so their workers need to be actually focused on, you know, work, and if they're not, their lack of productivity is much more visible.
You only want to work on a feature for a social media platform? No politics there, right?