throwawayiphone

Thank you for the response. I come from a country, that is still strongly catholic, and it does remind me a lot of what I'd seen there with some devoted catholics. I think your diagnosis of "proselytizing" hit the nail on the head.

"Any company that hires a lot of young people / entry level developers is going to have way more of the activist types. Especially if they're right out of university. "

I think you might be right, in my previous job, it was a fresh out of the uni junior programmer who literally transformed the whole company that way.

Thank you for the response.

I am currently working in a smaller company that is a part of a bigger conglomerate/corporation, which sometimes feel like the worst of both worlds.

I agree that using the word "brainwashed" sounds quite fringe, but I guess what I wanted to convey was that I feel like this constant, incessant seeping of one narrative makes me rather uneasy.

I don't think I am the catalyst of those events, since I hardly ever respond to them (publicly).

I set my mind on moving on, but I am really curious if there are places that are less "susceptible" to those kind of situations.

That'd be London, UK

I couldn't post the whole post due to the character limit so here it is:

For the last couple of years I have worked in two different jobs as a full stack developer. Both of them were really interesting, the stack, the problems, the people, the domain. The first one was in banking, the second one in science, where I still am (starting year 3). In both of those jobs I noticed the same pattern happening with time. A very politically engaged developer/manager/activist would get hired, then we would start receiving from him/her a lot of articles about inequality, feminism, racism, or white fragility, he/she would then start “activating” some other people to his/her cause, then at some point someone would propose that we should go through some kind of anti-racist/anti-sexists/anti-anything training, at which point the atmosphere between people is usually so weird that I decide to change my job. This is literally the point I am at now.

Now, some context. I am about 30 y/o, naturalised citizen of the UK, where I moved about 8 years ago. I am interested in politics, philosophy, science, and many other things, and I talk a lot about them, but either online, or in person/via direct messages with friends. I frequently disagree with things that are being presented as the only truth in those political conversations/courses at work, but I do not want to waste my time to argue about them during my work hours, and not only because of the fear of being labelled racist/sexist/bigoted and reported to HR. It’s also a bit of what Paul Graham wrote in “What you can’t say”: “If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction."

I am obviously not a proponent of racist/sexism/x-ism, so it’s not just a question of me working with people with whom I disagree politically. For the same reason I would not want to work in a company where the constant theme is “building the wall”, or the Tories, or anything really.

I feel like I’m being brainwashed at work, with no ability to stop it, other than by changing my job. I want to do programming, if I’d wanted to learn about the critical race theory I would have gone studying whatever you study to learn it. Any attempt to ask people to move their conversation to a dedicated political channel are being ignored or worse, labeled as “insensitive”, sometimes with a lecture about how “everything is political anyway”.

This is a throwaway account, so please don’t send me actual job offers, but instead I would really appreciate if people could tell me what kind of job I need to look for to get as far away from those weird political people as possible? (This is not a troll post, I am honestly asking for help).

I assume working close to academia probably doesn’t help, so to not make the same mistake for the third time, how do I find places that focus on programming?