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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

I may want to apply to coinbase. I am really fed up with 'activist' employees and the toxic environment they bring. All I want is to just focus on engineering and ship features/improvements. Bringing politics to the office(thanks Google!) has been one of the worst things to happen in the 21st century for tech companies. Interestingly enough google has been going through absolute hell with these cancerous employees and other companies will have the same issues by embracing their failed strategy. Lets leave politics at home or outside the office where it belongs.

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>All I want is to just focus on engineering and ship features/improvements.

Yeah if there wasn't the pesky world around all the engineering and we could all just stare at our stock options while we sit in our gentrified neighbourhoods and pretend the world doesn't exist.

You can ignore politics but politics doesn't ignore you. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is an unworthy attitude for a democratic citizen. The etymology for the word 'idiot' comes from 'idios', meaning 'one's own', in ancient Greece signifying a person who is only concerned with their private interest, rather than living an active life and participating in civic affairs. To be an idiot was to be withdrawn, isolated and selfish, to not participate in the public, political life of the state.

Given how much people nowadays love to invoke the Greeks and our ancient Western traditions, maybe it's time to remind everyone of the meaning of that word again.

http://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDUC305/305parkeridiocy...

GP never said to ignore politics. You are the one that brought that up. They said to leave them out of the office. There is plenty of time for politics before and after work. Bringing your politics in to work just makes for an uncomfortable work environment for you co-workers.

'the office' or the firm today, is for better or worse our primary means by which we can exercise influence. That is why tech workers are bringing politics into the firm in the first place, because they realise, rightly, that it is one of the most potent channels to actually exercise change, and that's why so many people want to keep politics out of it. The workplace is the one space where your political opponent can't simply escape from politics, and has to be confronted with your views, which is after all the actual point of political life.

People realise that rather than the local town hall, the large internet platforms, their workplace, and their social media feed have become the public space of ideas. That's why the free speech debate focuses so much on internet platforms, and why 'it's privately owned' has long lost meaning to anyone in the debate.

Keeping politics 'out of the workplace', at least in our environment today, is basically to say to keep politics out, period. It's not the apolitical position, it is the 'idiotic' position because it intents to keep politics out of the one place that actually matters the most in this day and age.

It’s always been this way in the west, post industrialization. People treating it as some novel development are just ignorant of history. Why do you think so many democracies have “labor” or “workers” parties? Myriad progressive movements and political parties were born out of and materially supported by workers organizing their workplaces.

Some would call political activism on your employer's dime theft.

Unless it's part of your job description.

But no one likes to face what it means to sell their time to another person.

> Some would call political activism on your employer's dime theft.

That's probably true, but they would be wrong. The fact that some people would say incorrect things is not a strong argument.

You haven't really provided any arguments for why converting companies (entities providing goods and services) into mini political parties is a good idea. Anyone can yell about "status quo" and "change". In reality, "status quo" is frequently an ill defined concept and the benefits of change depend entirely on what kind of change it is.

When I work for a company, I provide my labor in exchange for payment. I am then free to use my money to support an activist organization or a cause. So are all other employees.

Corporate activism, on the other hand, is inherently degenerate. It means your employer withholds resources from improving the business or paying higher salaries. They instead apply those resources to some causes of their choosing. Any employee who doesn't agree with the cause is effectively coerced into supporting it unless they quit. So is every customer. The goods and services become inherently tangled with an ideology of some sort.

Why should a model where everyone is free to pursue their personal activism be replaced with a model where people are coerced to pursue activism "approved" by corporate execs?

The post doesn't argue for converting companies into political parties, merely that it's natural for workers to be politically active at work, given the continued atomization of modern society making the workplace a default place for political activity, especially since so much of day to day life and social activity takes place there.

It's also a straw man to talk about corporate execs leading the activism, the post was talking about the workers themselves.

> The workplace is the one space where your political opponent can't simply escape from politics, and has to be confronted with your views

It is for this exact reason that many people object to politics being overtly brought into the workplace against people's will.

If someone wants to discuss politics (or religion or sexuality or anything else that makes us all human) with you, have at it. If they don't want to, you need to stop.

No means no here as well. The fact that they can't leave imposes a higher burden on consent, not a lower one, IMO.

And what about when the business performed by the company you are working for has political consequences?

Brian Armstrong pretty clearly stated that position:

> Policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.

Are there other "political consequences" around crypto that you'd have Coinbase engage in?

Your strawman argument is invalid to what I said. I spend an inordinate amount of time researching each candidates views and each propositions pros and cons. Before election day I usually set aside a day or two to deep dive into every choice I make. I take voting very seriously as people have died to give me the luxury to vote. These actions all occur outside of the office where they belong. That being said leave politics out of the office.

Absolutely. And I better not hear anything about unionizing either, with all their liberal communist ideology! They're lucky I let them have jobs. /s

Lots of people also died to make sure that we have the right to organize our workplaces, a right that’s just as much enshrined in law as voting:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Uni...

Their sacrifice wasn’t any less important or necessary to the expansion of the democracy in the United States. In fact, it was this “bringing politics to the work” that provided the means for workers having real representation for them in government in the first place.

This may sound like a troll, but how do we delineate what politics belong in the office and what do not?

As I noted elsewhere in this thread, I think it's more ambiguous these days, not less.

As a few concrete examples:

* Say I refuse to buy Chinese-made goods because I oppose the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. What do I do if my employer considers doing business in China? Should I not mention this, because it's "political"?

  * What if it's 1933, and my employer is IBM, and the customer is Nazi Germany?

* Say I oppose H1B visas because they take jobs away from American citizens, and my employer considers expanding the H1B workforce. Should I speak out against it, or hold my tongue because my motives are "political"?

* Say I believe in equal rights for gay couples, and my employer is considering expanding health coverage to same-sex partners. Should I speak out in favor of it?

In each of these examples, it seems to me there's a spectrum of options, ranging from:

A. No constraints on in-office behavior; I speak out about anything.

B. In the office, I am purely a shareholder-profit-maximizing robot.

I don't think either of those extremes is very satisfying—I expect many of us would say it is noble to oppose selling adding machines to Nazi Germany, but that we'd have many more questions when it comes to some of the other examples.

Unfortunately, I think that means that there's no simple answer here. "No politics in the workplace" can result in ghastly, amoral outcomes (selling adding machines to the Nazis).

But "every culture war, all the time" is a great way to be a dick.

I think my personal code here is, "try not to be a dick." Past that point, I don't think there are easy answers.

Voting is literally an infinitesimal part of politics. Voting is an instantaneous act, and then it's done. That is not politics.

All labor is "activism" performed in service of a specific outcome, because every action is inherently ideological. Only tools are morally neutral -- not the actions performed with them.

What you spend your time doing, introduces an influence that drives nature and society in one direction over another. If you make tools for microlending, you are contributing to the economic activity of disconnected portions of the world population. If you make tools for surveilling undocumented immigrants, you are contributing to the apparatus which continues to strip and violate the human rights of large groups of people.

Different degrees of separation warrant different levels of attribution. But no one is completely inculpable.

> "an inordinate amount of time researching [...] I usually set aside a day or two"

English isn't my native language but doesn't this make it sound like you only spend "a day or two" researching? Or are these two sentences unrelated?

> Bringing politics to the office(thanks Google!)

How bad is it really? Have you ever been told something like "I won't review your PR because you don't vote for the same person I do"?

The comment author does not advocate ignoring the world, he wants to separate his engineering work from politics and thus wants to look for employers who do not push a particular political program on him. Which seems a perfectly valid (and attractive to me) view.

You cannot ignore your dreams, your health, your family, social ills, the air quality, politics and a myriad of other things in the world around you. But if you focus on all of those all the time you will achieve nothing. Imagine a great inventor, scientist, engineer or artist working on his next idea. Do you really want to make him jump and go demonstrate for/against your list of hot button topics?

This response is mis-characterization and is acting in bad faith, no one in this thread is asking for forced demonstrating. That's not actually a thing that's happening.

>Do you really want to make him jump and go demonstrate for/against your list of hot button topics?

Yes I do and countless of scientists and artists do exactly that, which is why a lot of them ended up being subject to McCarthyism paranoia at one point or the other. Brilliant scientists, more than anyone else maybe, need to engage the political world to understand what influence what they built has on it. Technologists being painfully unaware of the political ramifications of their work, if anything, got us to where we are right now.

It's no coincidence that the politically detached scientist is the archetypical citizen of autocratic countries. The technologist who does not care for politics is today, the most sought after person in China.

Wanting to separate engineering work from reality is precisely what Barrin92 is saying should not and can not be done. Engineering work isn't just some insulated game that gives you tokens to buy things you need in the real world. The engineering work is itself part of the real world.

Everything is part of the real world. Would you go to a mattress company and demand that they make it harder for your political opponents to get a good night's sleep?

Wouldn't be the first time a mattress company got involved in that space. Casper sponsors the Slate Political Gabfest podcast, or used to at least.

No, I wouldn't, but I don't know how that is relevant. If a mattress company refused to sell mattresses to gay people, I wouldn't do business with that mattress company, and I would also approve of employees of that mattress company taking part in political activism to oppose that practice.

I guess I don't see how the response is relevant. If Coinbase refused to sell cryptocurrency to gay people, I'd be all in favor of employees and external political activists saying they should - and Coinbase agrees, they don't expect to be apolitical with respect to the actual work that they do.

I dunno, but I bet in the long run the mattress company that allows internal debate outperforms one that silences it.

I just don't see how yelling about complex and emotional social issues could help a company build good mattresses.

Because activism is more than yelling about complex and emotional social issues, even if that’s the way you perceive it.

Is there anything between yelling and forbidding all discussion?

To some degree. It's very possible for employees to have polite discussions over the lunch table about political topics, and to the extent Coinbase is trying to prohibit those discussions I'm against it.

Is there a way to have employees say e.g. "the company needs to endorse suchandsuch political slogan" or "the company needs to oppose suchandsuch candidate" without yelling? I don't think so.

I think this is all contextual to our times. We just have so much disagreement on what we are sure is moral/immoral.

If the different political sides had more balance, I think it'd make sense to permit a modest bit in the workplace.

But today the left is so sure of its position to the point where they think they are in the black & white moral right _and_ they are increasingly dominant and loud in our cultural institutions and many corporate institutions that it is substantially interfering with basic ability to think.

By that logic, you can't separate church and state either.

And that's to say that you can and you should.

Separation of church and state is nothing more than a limitation on the government, prohibiting it from establishing a national religion or inhibiting religious practice. It is not a claim that religion can never be discussed in government, or that government can never be discussed in religious practice.

If you’re a government employee it’s highly discouraged to the point of official reprimand.

That's so hilariously incorrect as to be alarming.

This is impossible. When the very technology you work on is employed in entirely political ways (i.e. dragonfly), you cannot separate work from the world.

Cash is a technology that is one of the biggest enablers of drug trafficking and child prostitution. Does this serve as an argument for employees of the Treasury Department (which prints and mints said cash) to engage in politics in the workplace?

Much of technology is agnostic to politics, and enables much evil and good alike. This does not, in my mind, serve as justification for technology creators to intertwine politics with the creation of said technology.

Yes, if it will bring about more regulations and protections.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/treasury-plugs-gap-in-anti-mone...

This is quite Amusing, because the treasury department is involved in efforts to prevent human trafficking: https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/combatting-h...

Which is a good and laudable thing! But you're talking about the place the Treasure Department has in advocating for political positions that are inline with it's mission. I'm talking about whether Bob the coin stamp machine operator holds responsibility for building a technology that is, in some cases, used for nefarious purposes.

Bob doesn't want to be accosted by Richard from accounting because he doesn't do enough to advocate for anti-money laundering political causes or senatorial candidates. Bob just wants to show up and do his job.

Hey, I've been writing on planning an article discussing some components of open-source and ethics, and I would really love to use a (variation) of your sentence. Would you mind if I did that, and if so, would you like me to include some form of direct attribution to you? You can find my email in my profile.

While it isn't possible to separate engineering from politics in general, the sentiment is doubly hilarious when your goal is to enable a new global monetary system.

The Coinbase blog post is directly self-contradictory. First it lists some things that they focus on in order to accomplish their mission. One of those is this:

> Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.

Then, just a few short paragraphs later, they list things that they focus minimally on, because they are "not directly related to the mission." One of those things is this:

> Broader societal issues: We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.

It doesn't get more blatantly contradictory than that.

I think what they're saying is that will work to make the environment within the company as welcoming as possible. However, they will not try and solve that problem for society at large. Although you may disagree with the approach, it doesn't seem contradictory to me.

And again, it's a false notion to think that those are two separate things. You can't, to use example that I hope is obvious, support making your work environment welcoming to everyone regardless of sexual orientation, while also refusing to oppose or even discuss a political movement or politician who would throw people in jail for having a certain sexual orientation.

While I would find that political position abhorrent, I wouldn't expect and certainly not demand that my company issue a specific public statement denouncing it.

You don’t need to expect or demand that, although I certainly would. The problem is when a company claims they care about that issue as part of their mission, but then prohibits employees from taking a stand on that issue or even discussing that issue.

Why is that a problem?

People can care about an issue without taking a stand or even discussing the issue.

This "with us or against us" attitude is precisely what makes it difficult to get along with activists.

The only reason it is "a problem" is that it doesn't conform to the long term goals of the activists. The company needs to have goals that are separate from those of the activists in order to survive.

What about being able to discuss that internally with coworkers? Because the company prohibits that as well.

My wager is they de facto won't prohibit any discussion between consenting and mutually interested coworkers that doesn't negatively impact their work output, which seems "fair enough" to me.

So you'd be okay working for a company with policies you don't agree with because "they probably won't enforce them"?

> The comment author does not advocate ignoring the world, he wants to separate his engineering work from politics and thus wants to look for employers who do not push a particular political program on him. Which seems a perfectly valid (and attractive to me) view.

A lot of engineering work is inherently political. For instance, an engineer designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz and by doing his engineering work he supported the politics of the holocaust since his work and those politics are inseparable. In most cases, the connection is not so obvious and clear cut, but it's still there.

Are there no lines the op, or you, would not cross in the pursuit of your engineering work? Perhaps you're okay with Coinbase's mission specifically, but are you saying that you're okay with _literally anything_ in the pursuit of good engineering?

Perhaps you and the OP would be quite happy, say, writing code for a lab that makes novel fentanyl analogues for the express purpose of including them in black-market knockoff heroin powder, which in turn leads to a number of deaths (accurately cutting in your microgram-potent meds is hard, and sometimes your downstream supply chain makes a hit that's got too high a fentanyl analogue/cut material ratio, go figure!), or an industrial system that captures unsuspecting babies to then drown them, strip their flesh, and harvest their valuable bones (not really that realistic in our normal reality, but per http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=25967.0 it works great in Dwarf Fortress! or it did, anyway, until that got patched out because of said bone harvester), or hell, let's just Godwin on it and say you'd be perfectly happy writing automation tooling to make Treblinka 10% more efficient.

The respondent, whom you so readily chastise, has a quite valid point that we can't separate our engineering work from "politics" (ethics, really, but there does seem to be a side in this debate that prefers to say "politics", since that evokes more the admittedly annoying horse race electoraliasm and doublespeak-driven world of actual politics and takes away from the thrust of the issue, which is ethics, which happen to often overlap with politics but are very much their own thing) ever. That's an important thing to recognize, especially in an industry that has persistent issues with laying ethics aside in pursuit of "great inventions" (let's be pragmatic, it's mostly in pursuit of profit, with some good inventions as an occasional byproduct).

What I think the respondent may be getting at is that there is a significant population in the industry that probably does have some lines they won't cross, but is privileged and willing to cross a great many lines that won't affect them personally. You perhaps think that's a laudable stance, and you can hold that opinion if you wish, but you should do so with the recognition that there are a number of people that will see that less as a commitment to honorable professional detachment and more as a willingness to trod over the rights and wellbeing of the less fortunate so long as it doesn't injure you immediately. I'd argue that it's important thing to at least consider in an industry that often speaks of changing the world for the better--perhaps that was more it drinking the consultant kool-aid about what millenials value in their work and deciding it needed to work that into messaging, if not action, but hey, if it wants to say that, it ought to put its money where its mouth is.

> he wants to separate his engineering work from politics

So did Wernher von Braun. I've intentionally selected the most extreme example that came to mind readily to illustrate the point: designing rockets for the Nazis to be built by slaves and used to carry bombs to kill civilians has moral and political implications. It's reasonable to judge von Braun for knowingly participating in atrocities even if his only interest was in rocket science. It's not possible to separate the engineering from the politics.

Cryptocurrency has political consequences, though they're not as obvious as those of ballistic missiles. For a company to work on cryptocurrency trading and pretend to be apolitical is disingenuous because if the company is successful, its actions will have a political impact. I'm inclined to think that anyone engaging in acts with political consequences should be proactive about what those consequences will be. Most technological change comes with the potential for political consequences.

Of course, there's engineering work that's less political. Making incremental improvements to the efficiency of widely-used infrastructure is usually fairly neutral; it's good for everyone, but doesn't really change the balance of power.

> Do you really want to make him jump and go demonstrate for/against your list of hot button topics?

Sadly for many people the answer to this is an unequivocal yes.

Well said!

Great. Go work at a firm that reserves time for activism under a common cause. Plenty of us don’t want to do that at work, and will look for firms that let us focus on engineering for our time at work, so we can reserve our free time to do as we please.

It's perfectly reasonable to separate the workplace and the rest of the world. No need to ignore everything to limit your discussion at work.

You can also still take action - by leaving. That's exactly what this policy is encouraging with a generous exit package. Why is that not acceptable? Why does the corporation have to follow what you decide?

If people don't want to bring the political battlefield into every venue, that's not only valid, but wise.

You are not going to innovate or create anything if you're fighting all day, every day. Constantly distracted. The purpose of a company is to bring people together to CREATE something of value. To solve problems. Hopefully to improve lives on some vector. And you do that most effectively by rowing in the same direction, focused.

People spending their day on Twitter or Slack or in the office halls arguing about the war is not productive. It's mostly just destructive. They're certainly not inventing anything, or curing a disease, or improving energy efficiency, or creating tools, or educating, or entertaining, or inspiring, or anything else additive.

You've misrepresented the quote, and in the process invalidated your whole point.

The original quote is diplomacy is war by other means. And it had very specific connotations to explicitly adversarial political relationships. Politics is much larger than diplomacy, and indeed as Aristotle concluded there is nothing in a society that is not politics.

>Yeah if there wasn't the pesky world around all the engineering and we could all just stare at our stock options while we sit in our gentrified neighbourhoods and pretend the world doesn't exist.

The issue with "activist" employees isn't so much that they want to bring politics to work (which I can see arguments for and against). It's that the new "activist" employees insist everyone's politics be the same, else you become a target.

I think "no politics" offices will crush it in the future, if by nothing more than being able to focus on the product.

Your logic is sound: politics are a distraction, so offices where politics are put aside will be more productive. But I know a lot of VERY smart people who wouldn’t sign up for that workplace. Especially if there are social and political ramifications to the product being built or the customers being served (there almost always are - hence the cliche “making the world a better place” goal of any startup).

Are there really that many? A lot of very smart people tend to end up at Google, FB or Amazon, their ethics don't seem to be the deciding factor in the choice of employer.

>But I know a lot of VERY smart people who wouldn’t sign up for that workplace.

Sure, that's the trade-off.

In a vacuum we all want to "make the world a better place". Does cancelling academics who appear on Joe Rogan's podcast "make the world a better place"? Does having a coworker cancelled or fired because of a stupid joke "make the world a better place"? I don't know; I don't think so.

On the other hand, I think there should be internal political discussion regarding policy at a place like Facebook.

What are the politics relevant to your job? It's not easy to answer.

"Everything is political"

"Being apolitical is a political stance"

"If you don't take a stand you're part of the problem"

Gosh, this is tiresome.

I also believe that every citizen has certain roles and responsibilities in a democracy(voting for instance). However, the workplace is not exactly a democracy. The only thing that I will definitely participate is in the work that I am getting paid for. All other endeavors of the company should be voluntary. If the company is directly or indirectly forcing these on me, then I will consider it as a breach of my agreement with the company.

Do you ignore politics while you're pooping? If so, why?

As a member of several different marginalized groups, I want to be able to go to work and do my job without having to hear my coworkers argue about whether I get to exist. I’m well aware that politics doesn’t ignore me, but for my own sanity I don’t want to think about it any more than necessary, either.

A lot of harm has been done by humans “just doing their job.” The world needs people who are willing to stand against those who take no interest in weighing the morality of their work.

For example, AGI will be built either by accident or intentionally by sociopaths at Google, etc. All decisions at a certain scale are inevitably political, and choosing to ignore the politics in those contexts is in itself a political position.

>A lot of harm has been done by humans “just doing their job.”

For a deeper dive on this, look at Arendt's "Report on the Banality of Evil."

> A lot of harm has been done by humans “just doing their job.”

I'd say most harm was done by humans who did not just do their job, but thought they knew how everyone else has to do their job, live their lives etc, by political activists.

You might think of activism only as what those do that you're politically aligned with. What are those on the opposite side who work just as hard to bring about their ideas of society?

What serves the public better, a utility company that "just does its job", or a utility company that snoops around people's garbage, identifies dissenters and then stops supplying water to them (because otherwise you'd be aiding the enemy)?

Yes, humans have created harm "just doing their job", such as purposefully making addictive apps like youtube or social media sites like Facebook that make people depressed, or gathering vast amounts of personal data for targeted advertising.

Except this has nothing to do with that. It has do with a group of people that insist that everyone get behind their pet cause and use their job to promote whatever activist belief they have - and negatively affect everyone else who may not agree with them.

I'd stand behind anyone who wants to protest their companies business model - like the executive at Amazon who protested the treatment of a union organizer (which was racist and absolutely disgusting). I'm not going to get behind the culture of activism which has nothing to do with civil disobedience.

There is a difference between being aware of the negative externalities of your work, and using your position in your company as a platform to accomplish your own partisan political goals. The former should be encouraged and the latter discouraged.

Much of the discussion here today is confused by the intermingling of so many concepts under the singular term "politics".

I feel that this is the same argument as the kneeling football players argument. People should be allowed to use their position of power - however limited or not it may be - as their platform for protest. If it becomes so burdensome that you have to put rules in place to prevent it, that's a very clear indication of an underlying problem with society. Creating policy to ignore the problems of society that impact your own workforce is going to leave you with a workplace filled with people who are largely unimpacted.

I think we probably agree in this. The extent to which you use your position of power as a platform for espousing your political views is the key. In my mind, a football player kneeling is akin to a colleague wearing a BLM pin in a prominent place on their clothing at regular company meetings. This kind of "activism" is acceptable in my mind; it doesn't interfere with the activities or purpose of the setting.

But if the football player interrupts the game and starts running around with a BLM flag in the middle of a play, that's inappropriate. Or if my manager decides to use the first 5 minutes of every standup to have a group discussion about libertarian ethics.

There's no bright line between which speech is appropriate and which in inappropriate and it's all subjective; and I would certainly oppose any sort of legislation that impinges on the expression of free speech in this area. Society can negotiate these rules in the course of social etiquette, not in the court of law.

But c'mon, when we're at work we're here to get shit done, just let us focus on that. If a group of coworkers wants to organize around common political goals, do it amongst yourselves. Go ahead and use a conference room and work laptops even, if it's after hours and not disrupting business.

The argument of ethics always exists. As far as I understand the parent comment, they are talking about scenarios where a political position does not necessarily align with the ethics. For example, ending racial discrimination is a right thing to do. But ending racial discrimination by running a campaign on Social Media isn't something that everyone will agree with.

I think each side needs to have sympathy for each other. I totally understand not wanting to hear about politics. I'd love for the world to be boring enough that work could stay work. But on the flip side, a lot of people have skin in the game, so to speak, and can't disentangle politics from their life. Being able to ignore politics right now is a very privileged, very lucky position. I have no doubt that if you surveyed various politically active employees, they'd love it if they didn't have to think about politics. Unfortunately that's not their decision.

People can be as politically active as they want, on their own time and on their own dime.

Ironically, the people preaching activism in the workplace would be livid if a religious believer proselytized their faith at the workplace, despite the believer having as strong a belief in their ideas as the activists do in theirs. Quite the double standard.

This comparison resonated with me especially once I've learned how "deep" political views are, similar to religious views. Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" is about this. Preaching politics in the workplace will scratch the same nerves that preaching religion will - deeply held beliefs that can cause strong reactions to people who agree or disagree with them.

Perhaps religious believers should be free to proselytize their faith at work. It might not be the most effective venue to do it at, but why should they be forbidden from following their conscience?

Well, in fairness, if someone's religion had reliable, study backed evidence that the world was going to face a catastrophic climate based future, I'd probably be fine with them proselytizing in the workplace.

I don't begrudge the dislike of workplace politics—again, I'd love to not talk about this. But for some groups, i.e. black Americans, it may not seem like a choice of whether they can be political. Indeed I'm a little surprised more Asians in tech aren't concerned at the president's rhetoric about the "China virus". Remember, it's within living memory that the US government rounded up Asian Americans and put them into internment camps.

> "Well, in fairness, if someone's religion had reliable, study backed evidence that the world was going to face a catastrophic climate based future, I'd probably be fine with them proselytizing in the workplace."

While I agree on the need to address climate change urgently itself, I must point out that progressives would be infuriated if the same level of evidence were demanded for the scientific validity of beliefs regarding various identity groups they support. Again, a very clear double standard.

> "Indeed I'm a little surprised more Asians in tech aren't concerned at the president's rhetoric about the "China virus"."

You shouldn't be. News stories like the Harvard Asian-American admissions lawsuit and California's Proposition 209 repeal and many, many others have made it amply clear that progressives are no friends of Asians either, but at a much deeper level.

“Do people like me get to exist in public life” is often a hot topic of political discussion, but it’s not a discussion I’m interested in having or even hearing about at work. Not sure I’d consider this “privilege”.

"Activist" is being used to describe an extremely broad range of employees.

It's one thing for an employee to be activist within the company about new (or even existing) features/products/etc, because that is part of the company's mission and business ops and its the kind of feedback a company should get before it introduces a potentially controversial product/feature to the market, or about problematic products/features that should be retired. Otherwise you end up with companies like Palantir, or unethical business models based on loot boxes and youth gambling.

It's another thing for an employee to take external politics that aren't directly or indirectly related to the company's business, and try to make the company and other employees take a stand on those political issues. Generally, the only time this is appropriate is if, for example, those political issues directly affect a large segment of the customer base and taking a position is also a deliberate act of marketing. (See, e.g., Patagonia, Nike and even Hobby Lobby, but contrast with Chikfila.) Otherwise, you just end up alienating a large portion of your employees and customers to the overall detriment of the business.

I concur, I suspect the influx of applicants to coinbase based on this will be larger than the potential loss of people taking the severance

Certainly. If I was looking for a job, I would rank it very high because of this.

See how toxic the politically active (in the workplace) employees are: i am getting downvoted simply for saying that I would choose an apolitical company if I was looking for a job...

There is now even a job site for firms and employees that want to avoid toxic accusatory work environments: https://www.unwoke.hr/

The name of that site makes its partisanship pretty clear.

I'll have to remember this site so I don't accidentally apply to any of these.

I find it hard to take someone seriously when they define themselves by what they are not. Its defining themselves by their opponent. If there was no opponent who would they be?

Stamp collectors push their stamp collecting ideologies onto all the non-stamp collectors who just want to do engineering. Stamp collectors set up meetings and socially shame/outcast non stamp collectors who don't attend. Non stamp collectors get tired of this and say they are going to make a job board where they don't have to worry about stamp collectors if they take a job at a place.

The answer is that there is nothing that unites these people except not being stamp collectors. If stamp collectors didn't exist, then no one would identify as non-stamp collectors.

> If there was no opponent who would they be?

They wouldn't be; that's the point. If there was no problem there would be no reason to define oneself as anti-problem.

Joining a company with garbage politics to own the libs is truly a bespoke reactionary take.

How is that remotely "owning the libs"? Sounds like this person just wants to be free of them (or those that would try to get him fired).

It's not an attack if people just don't want to be around you.

Have you considered Raytheon, Huawei, the Turkish government, etc?

Huawei and the Turkish government very much require their employees to endorse specific political expressions. It's my understanding that Raytheon does not and I think they're an entirely reasonable company for a SWE to consider.

Just wanted to add my voice and say that I agree with you fully: people walking around with the "everything is politics and politics is everything" chip on their shoulder are exhausting to have to be around. They typically come across as insufferably holier than thou and generally just make me not want to have to interact with them. Case in point the number of times I have had to listen to "you are on the wrong side of history" condescendingly being made as rebuke to something I have said dulls my interest in any further interaction.

Besides, engineering problems and the solutions to those problems bring enough variety of opinion that you would think people would be able to fulfill whatever need this new religion of politics brings. Engineering is challenging and rewarding on several different levels.

Weird point of view when most tech and engineering is used to generate political instability, misinformation and vote suppression. In the case of coinbase I wouldn’t be surprise if the « amazing engineering » is mostly used for tax evasion or to by-pass politic finance laws, corruption laws etc...

That's a pretty jaded view of the world. Most tech I would guess goes towards increasing value in the company: improving their offerings, making new technology which solves problems for people/companies, etc.

Very few people have the time and money to fund tech and engineering purely to influence elections. Most money coming in to tech is going to be from customers and investors, the latter being in interest of making money off of the business getting more customers.

Companies like Cambridge Analytica are a very very minute minority compared to the swaths of B2B, consumer tech, etc.

I wish that we collectively had become more political in the past decade and stopped being apolitical cogwheels of machines that have, ultimately, used to undermine democracy.

We all bear responsibility to what happens to this world, and we, collectively, are building systems that affect how people think and view the world, and hence how they act. We are part of this shared universe, and now more than ever, we are the ones creating it.

That's of course coming from a point of view where Democracy is the only moral political system, and the understanding that democracy dies if not defended daily by being political. First very slowly, then very quickly. There are obviously other points of view, and dictatorships have their supporters.

What about when the engineering decisions you make today affect the politics of the future?

Perhaps this doesn't apply to your area of engineering, but I do feel that it does affect a substantial chunk of the HN audience.

How and what data you choose to collect about internet visitors is no longer a purely technical analysis, it now has broader implications that potentially involve political actors. You don't know who might have access to that data in the future or what they might do with it.

We as engineers are the final implementer of these decisions. Should we really abdicate the ethical responsibilities tied to these decisions so easily?

Sorry. Your work is political whether you choose to acknowledge that or not.

My personal view on this is that these "activist employees" are a predictable natural side-effect of any organization is:

1) Large

2) Has a culture that embraces optimism, reject cynicism, and has "Change the World!" type mission statements

3) Have overly-strict culture fit parameters.

Political activists share a lot in common with founders: They are stubbornly optimistic (Why fight for social change if you think it's pointless or impossible?), they want to change the world, and they have interests in building movements/organizations. If your hiring process is designed to weed out candidates cynical enough to know your organizations mission statement is bullshit and recognize you're just here to make money not change the world - or pessimistic enough to think they'll never be part of positive change - don't be surprised if you find yourself with a team full of activists... just saying.

Sorry, do you want an ideologically inclusive environment, as alluded to in the article, or an anideological environment?

Financial systems are political, though. To not realize that while working on a product like Coinbase would be very short sighted.

I'm sure you will find lots of like minded people at Coinbase. And fewer and fewer people with differing opinions. Hmm.

'activist', toxic, cancerous ... Slapping these terms onto the people around understandably takes time and effort away from focusing on engineering and shipping features.

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