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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>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 To be an idiot was to be withdrawn, isolated and selfish, to not participate in the public, political life of the state.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...

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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.

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"?

>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.

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?

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.

"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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Well said!

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