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Comment by dublin | Hacker News Reader

If you are not fully on-board with the latest current tenets of wokeism (keeping up with this is itself a full-time job), and the cancel culture it creates (remember, the slightest slight is cause for you to get cancelled!), then you should avoid ever even considering working for any FAANG (or many other large) "tech" (really advertising) companies.

You WILL comply with the group-think, or you will be eliminated. Independent thought or differences of opinion are simply not permitted. They pay well, but that's what it takes to make people put up with the miserably hostile work environments they create (rah-rah "we're such a great place to work!" programs only go so far....)

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In other words, you had opinions outside your job description, and couldn't be a professional and keep them to yourself. It comes as a shock to some people that a corporation is not a democracy, and that yes, that applies to THEM.

We all need to know what we are being paid to do and just keep our mouths shut about things outside of the area that we're being paid for.

If work is neutral ground, one might argue then, that all personal (political) opinions should be kept private and not discussed in the work place. Regardless of if they are left or right leaning …

That's generally the case until the politics target your fellow employees. Abortion is a healthcare issue and an HR issue that may affect any employee, and anti-LGBTQIA politics definitely can affect your co-workers' rights and their healthcare. Religion overstepping in the workplace, especially when laws are involved is another political issue that affects employees' relationship with their employer. These types of politics are difficult to keep out of the workplace because employment law crosses many of these boundaries, and most employees want to see their co-workers prosper.

That's the dodge that makes people angry. The left simply define whatever they personally care about politically/ideologically as fair game for the workplace because it affects other people (tautological), or they see themselves as in opposition to some sort of vague evil that they have to defend helpless colleagues from. So they impose radical ideology on everyone and if anyone objects, saying it's politics and they should keep it at home, they just claim either it's really not politics, or that it is but anyone who objects is evil and should be ashamed/cancelled for not being 100% on board.

I know a lot of ex-Googlers. They all got sick of this stuff and either left, or hate the firm but stay due to inertia. Over time more and more peel away. I don't know any who joined pre-2010 who still respect the company, and the reasons are always the same. They see it as having become a 1984 style Big Brother.

The only thing they did wrong was fool you into believing that a private corporation can be a bastion for free expression. Sorry, that is what academia is for.

Corporations are just organizational machines for making their shareholders money. I'm sorry you're just now learning this, so late in the game.

That seems like a collection of clichés that have nothing to do with anything I wrote. I worked at Google for years. It wasn't like that for most of the time I was there. The problems are new. The Google I joined was committed to political neutrality, and it worked. Meanwhile their ever more extreme purity spirals are not actually making them more money as far as anyone can tell. Probably the latter.

I don't think academia is any better, the culture that is messing up tech firms came out of academia.

I'd be all for everybody keeping their mouth shut. But that's not the reality. My employer feels compelled to send out emails opining on foreign wars and supreme court decisions and murder trials and the significance of gay pride month. If you want to keep politics out of work, it starts at the top.

I've got tons of opinions and views that I would never share in work setting. It's not that I'm extreme or something, but it does require certain maturity not to get upset when people tell you that they completely disagree with your precious opinion. From my experience most people don't reach this far on the maturity scale, so it's usually not worth it at all.

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