Hacker News Reader

Comment by swang720 | Hacker News Reader

"Politics in the state is in many ways closed off to different ideas. We grew weary of California’s intolerant far left, which would rather demonize opponents than discuss honest differences of opinion."

I disagree with much in this article, but I do agree with this specific point. I've had many conversations in San Francisco that have turned me off from discussing politics.

It's very difficult for some to accept that others can have more moderate viewpoints on certain issues. Just because one doesn't agree with another to the extent they do doesn't mean there isn't a middle ground.

View on HN

> Just because one doesn't agree with another to the extent they do doesn't mean there isn't a middle ground.

I found this culture sneaking into Silicon Valley companies, too. I recently left a SV company for one in the NE and the difference is astounding.

I’m much happier and there is much less corporate activism.

I am not sure it is a culture “sneaking” anywhere as much as openly and aggressively taking over. This is very true at least in Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix. The intolerant far-left employees openly discuss personal politics on employee mailing lists and forums, unprofessionally spending paid company time on activism, strategizing on how they can control the company and use it to further their political agendas. They achieve their political ends by pressuring executives, pressuring HR, altering the company’s products, pushing policies (both internal and external) that support their views, etc. It is very hard to escape - you see it in mandatory “equity training”, in work conferences that invite far left speakers, and even in trivial things like where to get food for a team lunch (a vocal employee might demand that no money be spent on businesses whose owners don’t pass their purity test). Given how vocal and ruthless activist employees can be (due to the psychological safety of echo chambers), there is no room for any other view whatsoever. It is exhausting, unprofessional, and a big reason why claims of bias from big tech companies are real, not imagined.

I'll add HashiCorp to that list. When we were small, we had #random and other general Slacks where being open and yourself was the norm.

Then we grew a little more, the left-wing activist employees started flooding in and things quickly got ugly. You highlighted and chronicled almost exactly what I've seen over the past four years I've been at HashiCorp. Vocal and ruthless is spot on.

Now they're ushering in the mandatory "equity training", and they removed the open channels.

I've been looking for a new job for the past two weeks, will probably leave at the end of the year.

As a Silicon Valley company employee, I don’t think talking about politics at work is professional. But whenever I hear an opinion that is different from far left, most of time it has discrimination. I guess as a SV immigrant SWE and father , I probably only care about a limited scope of political topics. But what can be the middle ground between discrimination and non-discrimination?

I don't know about your views or any of the opinions you are referring to obviously, so take this as benignly as possible. Have you questioned that what you perceive as discriminatory may have a far left bias?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com