Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

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> I find this section peculiar. Why does the company have "values"? I though companies were supposed to be looking after the intrests of their shareholders, i.e., profit. Do the shareholders consent to the lost profit being donated to political motives? This broader trend of companies becoming political organizations is terrible, frankly.

This ship has sailed since about 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_cor...

I would like to see new companies that completely reject the status quo in every way:

- No HR departments

- No virtue signaling whatsoever

- Cubicles are back, no open offices

- Only hire based on competence

- Explicitly prohibit any kind of activism at work

- No politics at work

- No tolerance to anything but work. If you sexually harrass someone, instantly fired.

- No woke HR training (no one watches it, yet no one has the courage to say anything about it)

- No green washing pledges (these are not as effective as public thinks)

I'd sign up for a job there. People need to read 1970's annual reports. They were so amazing.

> - No tolerance to anything but work. If you sexually harrass someone, instantly fired.

> - No woke HR training (no one watches it, yet no one has the courage to say anything about it)

Given that a chunk of the HR training is about reminding people not to sexually harass, I'm not sure how you can achieve both of those? Especially when you don't have an HR department. Who's investigating the allegations? In practice this kind of culture leads to "if you are sexually harrased, you have to keep your mouth shut or you will be fired".

Who gets to decide what is "political", too.

Topics that cause disagreements not related to the job can be classified as personal and/or political.

We should not take X as client, they are bad -> political

We should not take X as client, my ex work there -> political

We should not take X as client, they are unreliable with payments -> not political

We should not take X as client, clients W, Y, and Z will drop us -> not political

Is a man talking about his wife political?

Is a man talking about his husband political?

Is a person transitioning political?

Talking about eating apples could be political in the definition I gave.

I don't think it is a good idea but it is a solution to the question of who get to decide what is political and what it not: everything not job related is political.

Yes, yes, yes.

I would be perfectly content to never hearing about any co-workers personal lives, wives, husbands, what ball game they went to, how their kids are the best thing every, etc etc etc

Those principles could lead to taking on some really awful clients, though. Think of e.g. companies like IBM that provided support to organizations engaged in genocide.

> We should not take X as client, clients W, Y, and Z will drop us -> not political

"Why would they drop us?"

"I'm sorry Dave, corporate code forbids me from discussing that"

Again, I am not advocating for anyone to follow this "solution" but you can discuss how Y does not want to be associated with X without discussing whether they are right or not to do so.

I use a gender neutral restroom, but our office has none. ... Political?

I use they/them pronouns, and I ask politely for others to use them... Political?

Cause I've been told that being a queer person is political. I don't think it is, it's just... Who I am.

People who say no politics at work generally have never had to think about how some identities are perceived as innately political.

>I use a gender neutral restroom, but our office has none. ... Political?

Yes, don't use the bathroom at office.

>I use they/them pronouns, and I ask politely for others to use them... Political?

Absolutely, it is the very visible agenda of a very loud political machine. It's nothing but political. It can be an example of "political, n." in a dictionary.

That said, you don't need to be fired over everything political you do, just like discussing a little politics with your office colleagues once in a while is not necessarily an offence. Just as long as you stay respectful and polite when someone says no, they won't use your nonsense pronouns, very fine.

>Cause I've been told that being a queer person is political.

I doubt someone actually said that unironically, you're very likely deleting tons of context.

But the long and short of it is that no identity is political unless you make it, given the stereotypical "queer" person, I absolutely empathize with whoever said that statement to you, but "queerness", whatever that may be, itself is not necessarily making you political at work, it's just the kinds of people attracted to it. In theory, every ideology of every shape and color and identity can coexist under temporary and concrete banners like "make money".

> no identity is political unless you make it

> 'using they/them pronouns' is political

is the implication here that normative is non-political and non-normative is political? another example, would it be political to bring your non-heterosexual spouse to a company function where other employees may bring their spouses?

*fixed formatting

Not necessarily, there are plenty of non-normalized things that are not political. Like I said, being political is first and foremost an attitude, a very specific attitude that nothing matters except your very own pet issue, and the willingness to let everything and everyone burn in order to push your view or just flaunt it.

>would it be political to bring your non-heterosexual spouse to a company function where other employees may bring their spouses?

Depends on you and your coworker attitudes, but generally no. A function like this would probably be very laid back and casual, it's not even "work" by a strict definition, so I can't think of a way your non hetero spouse would be a problem. Company asked for people to bring spouses, company got people who brought spouses. If they wanted Man/w/Woman only, they should have asked for it, subtly or explicitly.

Of course, the kind of people I have in mind can still ruin this, just like they ruin everything. They can always come dressed in a pride flag and act insufferable. And that's exactly my point, being political is, as I think of it, a personality. You can be the most boring normative person in existence and still be political, you can be the most radical and norms-challenging person in existence and still shut up and fix the damn bug because nobody got the time and patience to fight your moral crusades.

Even a few "slips" here and there could be forgiven, we all get political if somebody pushes our buttons enough after all. But repeated, deliberate attempts to be pushy and transgressive and an oppressed victim? That's just something else. It can always be recognized.

Incredible.

I don't recommend doing this; it would likely result in an hellscape of a thought bubble.

It was in a way to show that banning politics at work could produce paradoxical results.

I personally see only 4 answers:

- nothing is political

- everything is political

- it is political if I say that it is political

- we submit to someone else opinion to answer this question

And you might notice that answer 4 is just 3 in disguise.

My conclusion is that political / non-political is not a useful dichotomy

Yeah, I tend to agree, though I come down on "everything is political; but not everything needs to be strife".

Like, sports, long considered the go to water cooler talk, have LOADS of politics. From how the players are treated, to who can afford to see a game, to how we treat uninterested or rival fans.

I think we can poke holes at this but the point was in the exercise of thinking that if we were to start from scratch or rewind history, surely we can do better than what we have today. Today's corporations are not what I imagined progress should look like.

Bunch of this is a legal impossibility. Disparate impact jurisprudence prohibits competence based hiring. "No HR departments" increases your legal liability risks -- a company ought to have one to at least cover their asses by saying that "we followed precedents' prescribed procedures, but alas". "No woke HR training" is the same - it's literally a legal obligation, without which your liability increases by orders of magnitude.

Woke HR training is not a legal obligation, though woke activists would very much like to pretend it is.

Wokeness itself is not a legal obligation (at least for now, but with coming generational changes in the US justice system that could also change), but training is. Finding non-woke HR training firms is a significant challenge though. Recruiting qualified non-woke HR management employees isn't easy either.

Separation of politics from economy is an impossibilty, and the company that you are describing is only turning a blind eye to its responsibilities to society. You want to make profit the only relevant variable, denying any moral or political factors? What you will end up with is a company that is blind to the effect it has on society and to the reasons of how and why it works. For example, say you have a lot of Nazi customers, for whatever reason (maybe you first openend in a nazi neighborhood and they like you). They say that they want you to stop selling immigrants, and following your profit maximation rules you are happy to accept, as immigrants are a minority here and would not give as much profit as the nazis. However, your opposition has to close shop because every nazi has now flocked to you and the immigrant customers are not enough to keep it running. You end up with extreme polarisation and a lack of freedom for a group of people. This example is super simplified and perhaps not satisfying, but in the complexity of the real world and of online businesses etc. there are so much more mechanisms that can lead to discrimination, especially if they are not reflected upon. This phenomenon, where complete rational focus on one variable is disastrous for other factors that are very important in different ways, is also known as the rationality of irrationality. Please read more about it here [1], you may find that your view of society is quite naive. I don't want to diss you, but I would not be surprised if you reckon its strictly the politics job to care about gender equality, antiracism, etc., and that you like yo blame incompetent politicians for the problems rather than rationalist business people who do not see the consequences of their actions. While profit profit profit may have kind of worked in the sixties, it is time to use our new gained knowledge about societal mechanisms and put them to good to fight more pressing problems than growing gdp.

[1]: https://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2012/09/the-rationalit...

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