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Comment by rednerrus | Hacker News Reader

My company is becoming increasingly political and it's terrible. I'd gladly go work at a company where I didn't have to engage with endless political activism. If I want to hear everyone's opinions on everything, I'd find their facebook page or the HN usernames and follow them.

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My last company was trending in a similar direction. They would allow one ideological group to post completely unsubstantiated political claims, but opposing views were not allowed to be presented at all, even if they were thoroughly researched (this wasn't "official" policy, of course). Note that while I'm not a lawyer, I suspect that these permitted ideological viewpoints were sufficiently sexist and racist as to open the company up to some legal liability.

Increasingly aggressive activism of this sort started ramping up at my employer a couple of years ago. Several outspoken activists started complaining and demanding all-company meetings, which were granted by HR and company leadership. In these mandatory meetings, which were attended by hundreds of employees, all sorts of contradictory accusations were lodged by the activists. For example, in the first meeting, one of activists complained about being (accidentally) mis-gendered by a new employee. In another meeting, a different activist complained about an employee apologizing for mis-gendering them. Apparently this made the activist feel awkward, so they'd have preferred no apology at all. It was at this point I realized there is no reasoning with activists such as these. Their demands weren't coherent. They were just a bunch of people complaining about hurt feelings. These meetings must have cost the company millions of dollars and huge amounts of lost development time. And they certainly didn't resolve anything.

I and a lot of my colleagues just want to do our work without being forced to participate in regular struggle sessions.

Everyone who is interested in the current wave of hyper-politicization should learn about struggle sessions. These originated in Maoist China and were a bullying tactic used by red guards to humiliate anyone who had any opposition to the radical ideology being imposed at that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

An acquaintance of mine worked for a company that stocked tampons in the men’s restroom because someone lobbied for it despite the company having no female->male trans employees. My acquaintance, who is male->female trans, was baffled.

Doesn’t that just mean providing equal facilities? If you put hand sanitizer in one bathroom, you should try to provide it in all of them.

A separation here is that these facilities are inherently unequal due to the existence of gendered signs declaring one restroom "Men" and the other "Women". In this existing framework, it doesn't make as much sense to go to the expense of stocking an item 99.99..% of users won't use.

Instead, the signs could be changed to simply state "Restroom". Sure, one might have urinals and the other a tampon dispenser, but anyone can use either and everyone could agree to be adults about it.

Should we test men for ovarian cancer to provide equal medical services?

The fact that these activists were being unreasonable does not mean they cannot be reasoned with.

I imagine transitioning is a very emotional and vulnerable thing to happen. Hence it being awkward that someone apologized for misgendering isn't unreasonable at all. Advocating that no-one should even do that would be unreasonable. But just presenting "this happened, this is how it made me feel" is a very natural thing.

From such a presentation general rules cannot always be derived. That is not the point of such a presentation. The point is for someone who is having feelings to have those feelings heard and recognized. Maybe that can lead to a bit more understanding for people who were never in such situations.

It seems like a waste of time to make these meetings all-hands company wide. But don't dismiss these activists just because they pushed for an all hands meeting. It wasn't a good thing to push for, but people get things wrong sometimes. Having been wrong is not the same as always being wrong.

My gut feeling is that allowing this at a workplace is a (rather perverse) variation of the "employee of the month" nonsense. I.e. instead of rewarding your subordinates monetarily, you give them a power to bully their peers, but not to compete with yourself.

It is also useful in pushing out "troublemakers". People that will not call BS on the unsubstantiated political claims are also less likely to call out corruption/nepotism/inefficiency of the middle management.

In the long term the company will stagnate and die, but we live in such a wonderful time of government bailouts, low interest rates and desperate investors, so it may take a long time to unravel.

It was instructive to hear the discussions in a Russian-speaking developer community about this... how the current stuff going on in the big companies reminded the older generation of the performative ideological cheering going on at their workplaces back in the late Soviet times.

Think about it this way - sometimes, you have to be on call and stay up till 5am because of some crappy code you didn't write, and it sucks. Sometimes, you have to go to the May 1st workers parade and help carry a banner you disagree with, and it sucks. Sometimes, you have to go to a silly training session and explore the feelings you don't have, and it sucks. It's all part of the job - it was all fun activities, they wouldn't pay you to do it :)

The problem is that they are going for our kids at schools. Trying to hammer into their heads that instead of shooting for the stars, they should hate themselves for being White and spend most of their life yielding the way to the poor oppressed minorities. That's child abuse if you ask me.

I know many people will find your comment alarmist and hyperbolic, but you're understating it. I follow this issue closely and some of the crap that's being fed to schoolchildren in the US at the moment is jaw-dropping. Check out the site whataretheylearning.com for the tip of the iceberg.

If you're a parent of a child in K-12 schooling right now, you have a lot of reasons to be worried.

Right, but if alternatives exist, I could go work there instead.

You could consider working for a 501(c)(3) charity, where employees are forbidden by law to make most types of political statements (including in private) using company equipment or channels. The actual laws around this are nuanced and don't cover all types of political speech, but it covers enough to where the average employee will be wise to think twice before saying just about anything political at work. The IRS has zero tolerance for this.

I worked at a 501(c)(3) for a long time and my coworkers followed the IRS rules about politics in the sense of electoral advocacy. That does not mean that they refrained from airing their social views at work or saying what people, groups, or ideas they thought were good or bad.

Your advice would be great for people who are uncomfortable mainly about coworkers using an employer mailing list or chat to ask people to vote a certain way. Otherwise, not so much, I think.

My impression is that restrictions on 501(c)(3)s' political activity are grounded in something like campaign finance concerns.

You could consider working for a 501(c)(3) charity, where employees are forbidden by law to make most types of political statements (including in private) using company equipment or channels

That's not quite how it actually works. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

I work for a 501(c)(3). IIRC from the company meeting we had with an attorney who specializes in this subject, taking a political stance can fall under the category of indirect participation in a political campaign. If you're using company channels to make a statement, you're effectively campaigning under the official badge of that company, even if you're only talking to one other person who happens to work for that same company. You don't want to provide any ambiguity, however slight, to allow regulators to make a case for removal of the charity status. That can be the death of the company in many cases. What sounds reasonable to a layman and what sounds reasonable to a lawyer can be miles apart here.

Sure, but think of how much of politics in the workplace and elsewhere today is not about political campaigns and candidates.

Wait, really? Dont many (most?) 501c3s have highly political missions? E.g. EFF, ACLU, NRA?

The ACLU is a 501c4. There's also the ACLU Foundation which is a 501c3 and in exchange for being able to receive tax deductible donations accepts limits on what it can do politically. See https://stateimpact.npr.org/florida/2013/04/05/explaining-th...

The NRA is also a 501c4.

The EFF is a 501c3, which limits what sorts of political work it can do.

Oh, interesting, thanks. The only one I verified before posting was EFF, and I hadn't heard of a 501c4 previously.

I am with you on this one. The definition of a having a non-political mission must mean all but mentioning a candidate's name.

You can transparently see that some 501(c)(3)s are mostly political groups. As this becomes more common I expect politicians will use them to bypass campaign finance election laws. They will create charities that 'educate' voters about how bad their opponent is without naming that opponent.

Yeah, that's exactly much what I was thinking, that when you take a look at their activities, it's clear that the definition of what's considered political here is fairly narrow.

Re: your hypothesis, after learning about 501c4s from Jeff in this thread and reading about for 10 seconds on Wikipedia, it seems that those actually serve that purpose quite well ("super PACs" are apparently 501c4), so I don't think the 501c3s are highly likely to get used in that way.

Maybe workplaces (and the public in general) should adopt the same rules as to what constitutes political discourse and then we'd stop having threads around "everything is political" statements...

Those organizations (if they are 501(c)(3)) are permitted to discuss politics within the narrow scope of the organization's mission. As I said, the laws are nuanced.

> My company is becoming increasingly political and it's terrible.

IMHO, this is not the problem. The problem are the managers of the work. One doesn't need to micromanage to stop this from happening. Nor does one need to limit free speech to prevent this.

Companies aren't working enough, that's the problem and managers aren't keeping people focused on the actual challenge at hand.

P.S. I feel this is a white-collar problem. These soft skills are paramount but also come from leadership. Restricting speech doesn't really deal with the people that the decision affects. Instead, one needs to become a better manager/leader to get 'buy-in' from the workers and then work!

No, the problem is really about politicization and more specifically the fact that in most US tech companies there is an enormous bias towards those on the political left, and a believe that those who lean left are more “scientifically educated” or intelligent or well-read, etc.

As one example you can see it in the way you can make hostile comments about “straight white males” and nobody says anything, but if you were to make a hostile comment for a perceived racial or sexual minority you’d be fired before even finishing your sentence

I don't think it's a numerical bias. Rather the extreme left are just hyper-aggressive in ways other parts of the spectrum aren't, especially libertarians are not aggressive and they were traditionally a big bloc inside tech firms.

As for the belief that the left are intellectually superior, that's not specific to tech firms. You get empty slogans about being "reality-based" from the left in all walks of life. It's why the left are struggling so much with COVID and lockdown: it's been chaos and incoherence from scientists/academics from day one so people who define themselves as superior due to their higher faith in "the science" have been taking a self-image beating. Or simply have gone into denial about it.

> especially libertarians are not aggressive

Depends on the subgroup.

> As for the belief that the left are intellectually superior, that's not specific to tech firms.

IMHO, I feel this is an organic collusion of messaging. Like the boomers felt a little envious to Leftist ideas and it shows in how boomers are teaching future generations. I don't think this is intentional but there does seem to be an implicit shift in the writings that teach the youth. I grew up in the public education system and various books almost assume that Leftists are more critical thinkers. It could be a phrasing of a topic or a popular narrative that has taken root in the culture. Compound this overtime, you have a new generation that assumes the indirect messaging that they've been conditioned on.

In conclusion, I think you're getting a lot of downvotes for two reasons. 1. You're making grand/general statements without supportive points. 2. You are contrarian to the current zeitgeist. I happen to agree with your main points (sheep are sheep and wolves are making sheep frantic). I wish more people were critical thinkers.

Thanks. Having had many years of being downvoted on HN I can assure you it doesn't matter how specific you are, if you aren't leftist here then leftists will downvote you as much as they can. Sometimes an especially aggressive leftist will go through your comment history and downvote every single comment as well in retaliation, which is how you can get a series of technical posts about technical topics that were upvoted at the time suddenly going to -1 after an unrelated later post on a topic the left cares about.

This is why I call the left aggressive. I've never seen those sorts of tactics from libertarians and I have years of experience of them, or even conservatives. I have seen people who claim to be libertarian suddenly turn out to be totalitarian and start behaving in ways that are totally opposite to their prior stated positions once they got hold of some power, though. So I think there are some people out there who self-identify as libertarian because they came to associate it somehow with critical thinking or other positive qualities, yet never truly adopted the world view. But this is rare. Most people who claim to be libertarian act in ways that are relatively consistent with that claim.

I agree that leftists push hard the idea that leftism is the same thing as critical thinking. This confusion can be especially seen in universities, which regularly claim to be teaching students critical thinking yet in which leftists have steadily pushed out anyone not aligned with them over the decades. People truly trained in critical thinking would ask what justifies the claim that universities teach critical thinking, but of course none of them ever seem to do this. It's just taken as given.

We can see the results: academia is filled with groupthink, in which people's worth is based on vague groupthink-oriented concepts like "reputation".

> No

You're speaking from a personal experience. I'm not minimizing your experience with my comments.

But if you have time to browse Social Media or enough time to get into extended hostile discussions (about ANYTHING), then your manager isn't doing their job. Full-stop.

> But if you have time to browse Social Media or enough time to get into extended hostile discussions (about ANYTHING), then your manager isn't doing their job. Full-stop.

What you describe is a sweat shop, not knowledge work. You can have downtime while still getting your work done and acting like an adult with colleagues. If you don’t have this skill set, make the effort to cultivate some tact and decorum.

> You can have downtime

This is where you might be misunderstanding. Downtime shouldn't be to engage in more stressful mental activity. Think about it. Go to the gym. Study for a big exam. Are you really engaged on the goals of a gym? Are you really engaged in getting a good grade on an exam? If you are, you are finite and I highly suspect that the high performers aren't going to try and add more stress on their lives (political or anything else). I'm suggesting they aren't sweating enough at the gym. I'm suggesting they aren't working hard enough. I'm not suggesting that they're a slave. I'm not suggesting they are a wage slave.

I'm suggesting they are more likely to be working in a half-assed way and don't have a 'buy-in' to the company's objectives. Which tends to be true based on numerous business management studies (since at least the 1970s that I've read).

Hard workers want enjoyable leisure. Not pissing off a Karen. Or dealing with a Greg. This is a toxic mindset that doesn't make any sense.

P.S. There is also another variable. That some people are closed minded but, imho, that can be overcome with good soft skills of a good manager/vision/buy-in.

I think you're underestimating how much _fun_ some people find this sort of recreational trolling.

> I think you're underestimating how much _fun_ some people find this sort of recreational trolling.

It doesn't matter if it's fun. It doesn't matter if someone paid them money to sabotage another company. The blame for allowing this excessive behavior in a business environment, lays with the leadership, full stop. Management is typically to blame and since CB is tiny, then it lays with the CEO.

One could look at even the positive aspect of it. Say a group of coworkers are very close friends (either through work or prior) then they are excessively talking about something. Well, then that situation is the responsibility of their bosses.

P.S. I've said my peace. If y'all still don't get it. Go read a few leadership or business management books.

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