> Stop politicizing tech.
If you're in the business of "changing the world" or "changing peoples' lives" then your business is political. Politics reflect how people feel about things.
You're using tech as a shorthand for "technology company" -- companies are also organizations of people with feelings. People function best when they are treated with respect and given psychological safety. People need to have room to discuss how they feel about things, so you can build better policies that make people happy and motivated to succeed at the mission. Sometimes those things are lumped into what a company might consider "political" and it's not an easy line to draw.
For example, gender imbalance is one of the most important "political" things that I think every healthy company needs to look long and hard at; how do you do that if you clamp down on that as "political discussion?" Similarly if racial injustice is impacting a segment of your workforce more than others, don't you think it's worthwhile for management to do things like make statements of support, check in on their employees, and basically be a bit human and accommodating? Or wait is that political discussion?
Folks like you who say employees should just "focus on the work" dismiss the idea that people shouldn't just be viewed as cogs in these money-making machines. Tech, where company profit margins are fat and where actual productivity is not measured in SLOC but in the ability to generate ideas and focus on how those ideas affect users, is actually one of the only market segments we can actually point at and say "you have the means to do better." It's really sad when founders like Fried and DHH give their employees the impression that they are no more than pieces of a money making machine after clearly fooling a lot of them into thinking there was some semblance of a social contract there. So no it's definitely not a better place to work now than a week ago.
By the way, people aren't stupid for thinking that there's a social contract, especially at small companies. There's always a loose contract -- and one of the powerful things about equity and its presence in SV companies is how it aligns the incentives for management and labor. But trust is also a component of that alignment force; trust is one of the things that has always made silicon valley magical. So it's really disappointing when that trust is violated.