Hacker News Reader

Comment by vowelless | Hacker News Reader

I am glad Dang changed the title as the original one was unnecessarily inflammatory.

I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that?

> Such a declaration could run afoul of legal boundaries in some circumstances. While workers have no constitutional speech protection in the context of their employment, federal labor law requires that employees be allowed to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment and possible unlawful conduct like harassment, discrimination, and safety violations.

This seems like a false dichotomy. There is a difference between being amoral and illegal.

The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).

Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics.

View on HN

I don't think even Google actually encouraged people to discuss politics at work. They never did when I was there. It was more a side-effect of decentralising the power to create forums. Anyone could create discussion lists there without asking permission, this was highly useful for coordination, making it easy to spin up new projects and avoiding siloing of information into people's private mail accounts. The flip side was nothing stopped anyone creating lists to discuss whatever divisive topics they wanted.

There's also been a cultural shift over time. When I first joined Google I remember feeling that it was a pretty libertarian sort of place. In my team several colleagues were openly and proudly very pro-capitalist, anti-communist, small government types. If anyone was left wing it wasn't visible and I don't recall encountering identity politics, ever. There was a very strong cultural commitment to neutrally serving every user with every query, and ranking being completely algorithmic, to the extent that the company agonised over hot-patching "Googlewhacks" where pranksters manipulated results for unusual searches to offend their ideological opponents.

This didn't seem strange, it was just how it was. I have a vague feeling I thought other tech firms were the same. Twitter declared they were the free speech wing of the free speech party after all, and anything internet or web related had a strong vibe of "communication will make us stronger".

This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments.

I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers. The hard shift leftwards in academic institutions has been well documented. Even in 2006 I remember a recruiter telling me they'd "run out" of candidates in the USA and that's why they were expanding more into Europe. The concept you could "run out" of candidates in a place as big as America was pretty shocking to me - on probing, he explained that almost all people with the skills they needed were in well paid happy jobs already and few were interested in moving, even with the great perks on offer. Whilst there were always a small flow of people coming onto the market due to natural churn, "everyone who cares knows Google is hiring" he said, and they'd already interviewed vast numbers of them.

This change in culture would inevitably lead to this situation due to the way that conservatives see leftists as naive, but leftists see conservatives as evil. Combined with leftists generally understanding conservatives much worse than the other way around (this has been shown by large scale ITTs), and together it means flooding your firm with new grads is a surefire way to create massive internal conflicts.

>I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers.

Could this not have easily been a backlash against the companies no longer operating neutrally? You describe a timeline here that goes neutral Google -> hard left because of the employees. That doesn't jive with what I've seen in the news. Google and other tech companies were the ones trying to get into China and building systems that censor users. The big data companies started surreptitiously tracking everyone, whether or not you had agreed to ala Facebook's shadow profiles. That doesn't really mesh up with libertarian ideas of free trade. Based on the employee backlash these all seem like they were management driven decisions that employees didn't agree with. Wouldn't a natural reaction be to push hard in the opposite side of the direction the companies management was going towards?

Isn't that push exactly what's happening? The decision making power is still concentrated and many of original hires are still there so I'd imagine there's plenty of oversight and momentum involved in the company's direction. But the ongoing and increasing protests clearly show there's a change in attitude, or at least by a very vocal minority.

I didn't describe a neutral Google internally: looking back, it's possible there were a bunch of closet Marxists who felt uncomfortable admitting that. I doubt it because in other offices I've never seen people on the left hold back from publicly announcing their views (it's called virtue signalling for a reason!), but I guess it's possible.

The companies policies were neutral though. There was no concept that helping people find information might hurt them, as you see in modern day Google.

During the time period I'm talking about Google got banned from China because they refused to continue censoring the search engine. That was circa 2010, I think. So consistent with a company having a very free speech, libertarian view. It made waves because so few companies were willing to sacrifice the Chinese market on the altar of free speech, but Google was. Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out.

As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers. But the news industry was shrinking, and editors/owners in particular felt hugely threatened by Google News, which effectively replaced them with an algorithm and commoditised news almost overnight. The media went from being very positive about Google (great company to work for) to trying everything they could to attack and destroy it. What they wanted was money, pure and simple, and eventually as the attacks stepped up they stopped pretending otherwise. Hence the new EU Copyright directive and "link taxes" that started popping up.

The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently. There were always pointed questions at TGIF when I was there, but disagreement with management was largely congenial. Things started going downhill around the time Colin McMillen created Memegen. It was basically an internal Twitter but worse, I don't think you can ever fit 140 characters into an image macro. That introduced and encouraged Tweet-sized thinking/viral liking campaigns whereas previously disagreement had been surfaced in email debates (the famous "centi-threads") or through face-to-face discussion. Long email discussions did annoy some people, but they at least had an expectation you'd contribute by writing something useful. After Memegen got big I started seeing people unironically cite that they got highly voted memes as evidence of creating value in their internal CV and promotion packets, which was ridiculous.

>Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out.

>The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently.

Yes and concurrent with the executive change, Google employees have started becoming openly more liberal. I am saying that its just as plausible that the change in tone from the employees as a group, was a reaction to the managerial decisions that were themselves a change in tone.

>As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers.

That's three separate ideas that are not coupled together. Nothing has to change about the privacy policies if they were always tracking, and most users can be happy with the product even with the privacy intrusions.

I will disagree with you that they were happy though. It seems more like a matter of ignorance as there has been a rise in ad blockers and deleting Facebook since the privacy violations of major tech companies has become more widely known

Also for this claim specifically

>As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off.

Are you really trying to claim that Google does not track user data? That it does not suck up every bit of data it can from all the traffic they have access to? How exactly does Google target their ads and make their revenue then?

Edit: Literally at the top of the front page as I am writing this comment

https://www.pulse.ng/bi/tech/google-exec-says-nest-owners-sh...

You're right that it is hard to disentangle cause and effect, but Google's senior leadership has been very stable over time. Pichai was clearly the continuity candidate. The things I've named were all bottoms up - Google's leadership has always been quite reactive hence policies like 20% time. But when I joined the whole company was 10k people and only 5k in engineering. Now it's over 100k people.

Google does track user data but if you aren't logged in it's anonymous, resets frequently and is a very noisy dataset. That's why they create lots of good incentives to be logged in, like useful products.

Facebook isn't suffering at all, it continues to do great. To the extent users get bored of the classical product they move to Instagram which Facebook also owns. There's no evidence of any real change in user behaviour: free is a great price.

But most as targeting isn't based on personal data. The core Google cash cow is ads targeted to your current searches. That works even if you're anonymous. The rest is worth doing but not that massive. It's certainly not worth worrying about. Bear in mind the media had for years been claiming Google "sells your personal data to advertisers" which as I'm sure you know is totally misleading (really is just a lie).

What's an ITT? You seem to mean none of these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT

Took me a bit to figure that out, he's referring to "Ideological Turing Tests" https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.htm... ... use of the term is kind of a dog whistly connection to a number of internet communities where that idea is considered very persuasive.

[The few times I've seen the term used have largely been cases where the speaker is really embarrassing themselves by claiming ignorance on the part of their opponents while demonstrating an absurd amount of their own...]

Experiments that ask people to fill out surveys as themselves, or as they imagine a liberal would, or as they imagine a conservative would, in equal proportion.

Jonathan Haidt did one of these experiments with about 2000 participants. It's social science so it should come with all the usual disclaimers, but the results can be found here and have apparently been replicated since (though I'm having trouble rapidly re-locating a study I found that replicated it, for some reason I can't find the right keywords to surface it).

You can find a writeup here: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/sympathy-for-the...

> This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments.

Huh? Can you link some substantiations to these claims, it seems way bizarre?

There was recently a large trove of google documents leaked, comments linking to them get vanished on most sites (including HN).

They were a mishmash of various things but included e.g. descriptions of various programs and employee activities such as influencing search results to inaccurately reflect the world in the interest of 'justice', e.g. if you search for CEO a neutral search engine mostly men in the results because there are more male CEOs, but a 'fair' search engine would return more women or at least equal numbers. The documents also described google's use of demographically targeting election notices for the benefit of particular candidates (and great consternation with significant number of the targeted demographic voted for the other candidate)... stuff like that. The documents also included lists of penalized news sites which unsurprisingly was largely conservative sites, but wasn't just the more extreme alex jones type stuff.

A lot of it was culled off these internal political lists that the earlier poster was mentioning... so it's probably pretty dubious that many of the things in it actually reflected google company positions. (That said, the 'fairness' and news penalties appear to be active programs and not just smack talk by internal political activists).

More smoke than fire overall, but the more extreme right wing has been promoting it as a pretty substantial bit of evidence of unethical (and in some cases unlawful) conduct by google. Thoughtful discussion of it hasn't been aided by the widespread suppression of the subject.

Erasing gendered pronouns from comments: no, because that's a story I heard from former colleagues who are still there.

Arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring: this is what Damore did, but he wrote it much more formally and cited lots of studies. It boiled down to though, "most women find tech boring because they're women". Damore's essay is here: https://firedfortruth.com/2017/08/08/first-blog-post/

Manipulating ML models: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-mod... with their stated example:

An example of bias in this context is if the incoming message is "Did the engineer finish the project?" and the model scores the response "Yes he did" higher than "Yes she did." These associations are learned from the data used to train the embeddings, and while they reflect the degree to which each gendered response is likely to be the actual response in the training data (and the degree to which there's a gender imbalance in these occupations in the real world), it can be a negative experience for users when the system simply assumes that the engineer is male.

This logic is broken and wouldn't have happened in the old Google. If you're predicting what response the user is most likely to type next, then "Yes he did" is a more useful prediction by any objective measure because most engineers are men. But here, Google AI Research concludes that the most likely prediction would be "a negative experience for users" and sets out to "debias" their models. Debias in this context means to bias the model away from learned reality and towards what liberal intersectionalists want the world to be, in the hope that by subtly manipulating people through AI predictions they can actually bring that world about.

I want to play devil advocate for a moment and defend a wildly optimistic view of what some googlers might intend to do.

Already a way to debias a model (I know nothing of ML in specific, it is just an overview) would be to have the model explicitly realize that "engineer" need to be assigned a gender in certain situations. So in this sense the correct answer should be to try and understand whether this engineer is a specific human whose gender you should know so not to make wrong assumptions.

Whether this defense applies to this specific case I do not know, my point is that sometimes it is possible to actually partly debias something. The fact that it can be done in the wrong way does not mean it should not be done.

The same way there is a nice middle point between corporate anarcho-capitalism and totalitarian regimes.

I give you points for optimism and arguing in good faith :)

Unfortunately the extract I quoted is very clear. They aren't talking about understanding that engineer is a person adjective and thus could refer to an entity of unknown gender, which is a separate subfield of AI to word vectors (it'd entity analysis/knowledge graph). They're talking pure probabilities here: given a sequence of words, what is the most probable following sequence? The model gets the answer correct but Googlers are weak and cannot handle the truth, so in an Orwellian twist they label measured reality "biased" and set out to edit the model to convince it that there's no difference in probability between "Yes he did" and "Yes she did".

> Combined with leftists generally understanding conservatives much worse than the other way around (this has been shown by large scale ITTs)

This seems the opposite of true, but I'd be interested to see some sources to back that up. One of the few reasons I still use Google News is because it oddly links me to conservative news sites more often than I'd expect. I'll click on some of those links just to see what the "other side" is talking about, and I find their characterizations of liberal viewpoints to be pretty bizarre most of the time.

On the flip side, what I read (as a liberal) from conservative sources tends to be what I expect.

> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that?

The health of the democracy is far more important than your company's profit margin. And besides, enforcing silence is still a political move that strongly favours the opinions that the power structures imply with their actions.

Democracy is fine.

The health of my family is more important than your politics.

The health of politics has a massive impact on the health of your family.

Every lunchtime my colleagues and me solve world problems. We talk about how stupid the current leaders are, and how easy it is to fix the problems in the world. We solved world hunger a few times, and also transportation issues and other things.

Then we say "Another world problem solved!" and go back to work.

What exactly is the "health of politics"? And what does some discussion in the workplace where you're paid for productivity have to do with it?

I don't want to hear your political opinions at work. I want to work and make money for myself. Just because I have to be at work to make money for myself shouldn't mean I now have to listen to your views on politics. That is my view on it.

no ones talking about forcing you to talk about it, question is, if you wanted to talk about the ethics / poltical impact of what you are doing with coworkers, shouldn't you be allowed to?

I come to work for one reason -- to get a paycheck. If you want to talk about politics to your friends/coworkers, do it after work. If you don't like your company's ethics-- change companies.

So nobody should ever advocate for the fictional person to whom their work is assigned, whose existence is granted by the society at large only because of the theory that its existence improves and betters that society, should be a better citizen of that society?

That's not super dystopic and antisocial at all.

That has worked great at countless workplaces /s

Every moral system I can think of would prescribe that, everything else being equal, you should attempt to change the behavior of the company you find unethical while you have at least some power over it, rather than removing yourself from a position of power to affect more ethical behavior. It strikes me as very strange to advocate that folks remove themselves from positions of power to effect moral progress.

How much power do you think an employee has at a global company - especially one that is now owned by Microsoft?

GitLab ≠ GitHub.

Look at Google and Maven. Individually, not that much. Collectively? More than you think.

I'm on board with this right up until the end.

I'm a security guy and have been a privacy person. My job is often to advocate for the customer over the immediate desires of my employer. There's no pretending that doesn't have a moral or ethical dimension. So, how am I supposed to do my job without trying to change-- steer, guide, develop, choose another word if you prefer-- my company's ethics?

Advocating for your customer is different than ranting about geo political conflict.

What if your customer is a geopolitical entity involved in a conflict.

What if they are an entity having "politics done to them" by a geo political entity.

A lot of the time I agree. I don't think I've ever had a need to opine on the merits or demerits of the filibuster at work.

But "should we deploy in China, knowing we will have to hand over data on possible dissidents?" is something I've had to deal with repeatedly. I see no way of having that discussion without getting into politics.

Of course, you can rightly say that some people just sit down and write code without becoming embroiled in the great conflicts of our time. That's true.

But the struggle for diversity in tech and equality more broadly is one of the great struggles of our time, and I know of very few engineers who do not recruit, interview, or hire. Should those people just cash their paycheck, or should they take the time to discuss an issue that nearly all employers claim to take seriously?

I think you can continue with this line of reasoning to include things like compensation (especially health insurance, m/paternal leave, and sick leave policy). And nearly everybody has a stake in the compensation discussion.

So, while I get the desire to just do the work and go home, I don't think it's so easy to separate politics from work without doing grievous harm to both. Which suggests to me the obvious thing: that the real goal of these efforts is not to foster inclusiveness or provide a better working environment, but rather to prevent a dialogue about how to do just that.

Is this an opinion strictly about politics? Or does it apply to other topics? Sports? Art? Entertainment?

Sometimes others look for more than just a paycheque at work.

If you come to my desk while I am working and start ranting about you don’t believe how bad your sports team is, I don’t care about that either.

I have friends. I even have made friends at work (very cautiously). But we shoot the shit after work.

> If you don't like your company's ethics-- change companies

Why is that the only recourse? Attempting to change your company's mind is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. You may find that you're unable, and then would prefer to quit, but quitting in protest should always be the option of last resort.

I would go as far to say: aren't you morally obligated to? There are jobs that are inherently in political/philosophical/moral bounds. And they should be treated as such.

I didn't say anything about forcing me to talk about it, I said I shouldn't have to listen to it.

Do it at lunch or on a break. During work, nope.

If it's important to you, you should be willing to pay for it yourself instead of insisting someone else pay for it.

Whatever activities you're doing on company time are paid for by the company.

If you're yakking about politics, it is impacting the time of coworkers around you. It's distracting and unnecessary.

Democracy bestows upon you, certain responsibilities. Earlier, you did not have to worry about political stuff because someone else (the lord of the land, the king or an emperor by divine right) took care of the things for you. You just work the fields or smith around.

Since the concept of democracy, the rule of the people, politics is also one of the unwritten (or written) responsibility of the people. If you do not want to do it, then you are actively running from your responsibilities, which might make you a bad citizen in other people's eyes.

Fact: In ancient Athens, if you were a free citizen and you did not participate in politics, you would have been considered a non ideal / bad citizen

How is it a useful democratic exercise to inundate non political employees, or employees who don’t share the majority’s moral political views?

The types of moral politics I am thinking about is discussing the tweet-du-jour, basically celebrity gossip about politicians, etc. Worse still would be people taking strong, loud and uninformed positions on foreign policy, like Syria. I actually happen to find that triggering, given my background. I would rather that people keep their opinions outside of my cubicle so that I can focus on producing the best work I can - instead of constantly being reminded of the shithole I left behind.

What you do matters. The people on the ground turning Syria into the shithole you consider it to be were probably also "just focusing on producing the best work they could". Apparently they did a pretty good job.

Will someone talking about Syria at Gitlab have any meaningful affect?

Syria was an example, in practice it depends the relevant questions will depend on your company.

For example: I work at a MedTech company. I consider it supremely important that I (and everyone else) am able to say no, I am not going to work on feature X because it would breach patient privacy, or feature Y that is impossible to do without unacceptable risks of causing malpractice.

Of course, whoever proposed those projects would then be free to make a convincing case for how we could mitigate those problems, or why I might be wrong.

That’s not discussing politics - that’s keeping your company in compliance and keeping them from getting sued. That is work related.

I would go so far as advocating not manufacturing in China because of the current political climate is work related because it can have a direct impact on the bottom line.

Being work-related is orthogonal to if it is political, or the benefit it'd bring to your employer.

I'd be making the same objections if I didn't have GDPR and Patientdatalagen to point to. Hell, I'd have been in favour of introducing those laws, even knowing that it would increase our costs (which I also care about, just not to the same degree).

The purpose of going to work is to get a paycheck and to either make your company money or save your company money. Doing what’s best for your customer is a long term investment in your company.

The health of democracy requires that individuals be able to speak their mind and advocate their beliefs.

This doesn't work if their livelihood is controlled by a group of hyper-intolerant political totalitarians.

What GitHub is doing is giving individuals rooms to breathe, think, and live. It's preventing the rule of the intolerant minority, the forced homogenization of thought and suppression of dissent. We banned these things from the government long ago; this is a good step towards reducing the power of non-governmental power centers in corporations to coerce speech and thought of people around them.

As a free-thinking person this would make me much more likely to want to work for GH. At a place like Google I know I'd have to be deeply closeted as others flagrantly denigrate my identity and ideas around me. Here at least everyone can be closeted together, and live in a pluralistic way with different beliefs alongside each other.

This is how we suppress constant political conflict. You just aren't allowed to go after people for who they are or what they believe; we accept differences. And reducing political speech at work helps with that.

At my place of work, when I brought up my opinions on diversity/inclusion/gender neutral speech, I was verbally bullied, and resent this still, after 3 years of working there. Talking politics at work is not democracy, because people with dissenting opinions get silenced by belligerent activists. I applaud gitlab for refusing to be arbiter of morals

Not sure if/what Github is doing, but I think you meant Gitlab.

> The health of democracy requires that individuals be able to speak their mind and advocate their beliefs.

Exactly.

> This doesn't work if their livelihood is controlled by a group of hyper-intolerant political totalitarians.

Exactly. Hence why we need to acknowledge the right to speak your mind.

> a place like Google I know I'd have to be deeply closeted as others flagrantly denigrate my identity and ideas around me.

The Google case is interesting. Maven was pretty equivalent to a peaceful demonstration. Management had one opinion, (many) employees had ethical objections and eventually got their way.

Damore's case was.. messier, and more relevant to your point. Then again, this policy would just subject everyone to the same thing, while sacrifing the previous benefits. And it's all ultimately enforced by humans anyway, so if anything I'd expect it to lead to further polarization.

> Here at least everyone can be closeted together, and live in a pluralistic way with different beliefs alongside each other.

Many decisions don't have a neutral option. This policy just means that you won't have any say once those crossroads become relevant.

>It's preventing the rule of the intolerant minority...

If a majority want to discuss politics and political change, isn't this just an intolerant majority enforcing their politics on everyone?

Unless someone is the type of person who would never advocate for any change no matter what happened to them, from being made King to being made a slave, then they aren't actually apolitical. Everyone who doesn't want to discuss politics or thinks they aren't political are just saying that the current political status quo fits their views.

Politics isn't an atomic unit. It's perfectly normal - and arguably the default state - to be apolitical on many if not most issues.

The default state is still a state, its not a null option. You wouldn't be apolitical if the current politics said your parents had to be executed when they hit 50 and your children had to be turned over to the state so they could best determine their use, would you?

That's a hyperbolic statement, but the intent is to show that being "apolitical" about current politics has no distinction between agreeing with the current politics. If you start telling people they can't discuss their politics because "we want to be uninvolved in politics" what you are really saying is, "My politics are in charge and the status quo. Your opinion needs to be silenced"

Your hyperbolical example notwithstanding, I disagree. Being apolitical isn't about promoting status quo, it's about being indifferent to the status quo and the whole space of adjacent options.

If I'm apolitical about issue X, it doesn't mean I'm a happy supporter of current state of X. It means I don't care whether it stays the way it is, or changes to any of the possible alternative states that are within the Overton window around X.

To use a clarifying analogy: if there's a C++ project in the company, and somebody asks me for the opinion about whether to rewrite it in Java, and I say "I don't care, I'm indifferent about this issue", it doesn't mean I support the project staying as is. It means literally what I said - go ahead and rewrite it in Java, or Python, or COBOL. Whatever, I just don't care. This is what being apolitical about an issue means.

And back to politics - I have a right to care or not care about whatever I please. You can try to convince me to care about some thing you care about, but you have no right to force me to care, and trying to do it makes me only want to oppose you out of spite. The "apolitical means just supporting status quo" meme is essentially a manipulative attempt at forcing people to care about something they don't, a rehash of the old "if you're not with us, you're against us".

>If I'm apolitical about issue X, it doesn't mean I'm a happy supporter of current state of X. It means I don't care whether it stays the way it is, or changes to any of the possible alternative states that are within the Overton window around X.

You don't have to be a happy supporter. You can be an extremely unhappy supporter if you still think the status quo is better than other options.

Saying "I don't care", is just an opinion and doesn't affect anyone. Saying "I don't care, so nobody else is allowed to talk about the subject" is implying that your world view and opinions supercede others. If you were in a group that agreed on a mechanism for deciding what could be talked about, then it would make sense for everyone in that group to follow the decision. That's not whats happening though. The people who are okay with the status quo are telling the unhappy people to be quiet, because it makes the currently okay people feel uncomfortable.

Why would anyone who disagrees with the status quo stop talking about it solely because other people didn't like it?

The situation is different. People who are apolitical on a topic tend to stay away from discussions on the topic, but do not actively prevent others from having those discussions. Except some of those who are into politics like to have this discussion everywhere, all the time. At work, at school, at church, at the bar, everywhere. Left unchecked, this makes loudest, most emotional people infect every aspect of everyone's lives with discussion on their pet topic. That's why apolitical people fight to have "safe spaces" like the workplace, where everyone is actually supposed to be working, and not constantly getting derailed into politics by someone with an axe to grind.

You have the picture of the battleground completely wrong on this. It's not apolitical people shutting down oppressed minorities. It's a minority of people with an opinion on a topic fighting it out with a different minority with a different opinion on the subject, and both sides try to recruit followers to their side from the larger population of people indifferent to the issue, using the "if you're not with us you're against us" argument. Whereas what the larger population wants to say to both groups is, "fight it out among yourself and leave as alone, and for the love of everything that's holy, mind the collateral damage".

(See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21276788 for another take on how a political side feels to both those who disagree with it and those who just want to be left alone.)

Democracy is fine. So is your freedom to choose a different job where you can discuss and do what you want.

The fact that other companies exist without this policy means there is no "power structure" other than a private company deciding what's best for its own culture.

The health of the democracy is independent of discussing politics in the workplace. There are plenty of other opportunities to discuss politics and otherwise tend to the democracy.

Since when are businesses responsible for the health of democracy?

Have most business in American history been hotbeds of political discussion and activity? Have we previously attributed the relative health of American democracy to this characteristic of American businesses?

Probably since at least Citizens United and social media provided a medium for spreading targeted propaganda.

> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues.

There is a middle-ground between "talking about politics" is "encouraged" and "forbidden".

yes but large organisations find the middle ground difficult to cultivate.

It requires that people avoid becoming excessively emotionally invested in the discussion; such that disagreements do not negatively impact their working relationships.

Small teams with good temperaments are easily capable of this. Large organisations tend to look for more definitive policies that can be easily laid out and enforced.

You have a point there (and hence no downvote from me ;-): GitLab is a 961-strong company (all remote, says the website). However, we have much larger nations and, as a society, we should try to get along with each other, despite differences.

Mind that this rule even prevents discussing legitimate concerns about customers with your team mates.

Where we seem to find ourselves today is in a position where if you have very progressive politics, you can say whatever you like - no matter how radical - whereas if you have conservative politics you can't even admit that without any specifics without being thought of as evil.

This is how we can get away with saying it's "encouraged" while really making sure any meaningful counter-argument is "forbidden" at the same time.

I work at an oil company in Houston and if I expressed a shred of progressive thought I would be run out of town. Maybe this place is more your speed?

The context here is obviously tech companies and media, which appear to be entirely in control of extremists. Keeping of course in mind that it's most likely a small but very vocal minority that dictates the general perception.

> The context here is obviously tech companies and media

That's not obvious to me at all. The parent said "Where we seem to find ourselves today..." which pretty clearly implies a universalist statement, and one that happens to be dead wrong.

The opposite of progressive intolerance is not intolerance toward progressives. One can (and should) object to both.

Probably, but what if we both got something that improved our quality of life? I don't want to hear preaching any more than you do. Wouldn't we all get along with our coworkers better if there was less of this in general?

I meant middle ground as in "you can talk about it, but you're neither forced to nor is it banned".

Also, there used to be a political spectrum and not just "progressive" and "conservative": This is something completely different than left/right - a right-wing person can easily be a progressive about his right views, while a left-wing person can be conservative [or even reactionary] about his left views.

[Edit: Note, I'm a non-native speaker: Maybe this differentiation is different between English than in German?]

Your English appears to be excellent and your original point seemed quite clear to me.

@core-question's reply under yours wasn't an indication that yours was unclear; it was just taking the conversation in a slightly different direction (which is normal).

I think you're wrong that this affects conservatives significantly more than other groups (and maybe that betrays your personal bias).

What is true is that people who are beliefs much are out of far outside the norm for their workplace are discouraged. For example, if you're someone who believes that profit is theft, and you make that clear during work, it will probably have negative effects for you. Whether "conservatives" are the victim of this depends on their workplace and just what views they espouse.

Not a conservative, more of a third positionist myself. Even in places where conservatives are comfortable, I've still got opinions they'd hate.

So I shut up.

The issue is the null stance is functionally equivalent to support for the status quo which at this moment includes a lot of stuff people would not actively sign on to but often feel very content with passively signing off on it.

> If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).

This ignores both just how much the business tail wags the legislative dog in the US and the mountain of other factors that prevent or slow Congress from taking action against specific countries.

>America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).

This is a very confusing position to me. It is a bad thing to pick and choose your customers based on moral agreement, unless that morality is defined by the government in which case it's good?

Morality is not defined by the government - legality is. There're a lot of things that a lot of different people deem immoral - based on their religion, upbringing, media consumption and whatnot - which are not illegal. There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view. It's a free country after all.

> There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view.

Right and wrong are subjective, legal and illegal are objective.

From the perspective of the business owner who is focused primarily on maximising revenue / profits for their business, there is nothing wrong with simply focusing on legal compliance.

From the perspective of the employee who is motivated by things other than maximising revenue / profits / their own salary, there could be plenty wrong.

It’s a free country cuts both ways. Both parties are free to see things as right and wrong as they see fit.

I'm not sure if we're in disagreement about what living in a free country means. Everyone has their opinion on right and wrong, but as a society we agree that there's a specific set of laws that we all follow, so we all could get along.

All true. But additionally, it is not quite right to say that morality and legality have nothing to do with each other. Legality, generally speaking, is the subset of morality that a sustainable majority has codified into objective laws.

In other words, legality is basically the subset of morality that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. Which is why going beyond legality into subjective morality so often becomes polarizing.

> legality is basically the subset of morality that Republicans and Democrats can agree on

I largely agree with this, except when we start looking at uncharted territory.

Generally speaking, we are (legally) free to do as we please. As people do things we (as a sufficiently large group) disagree with, laws may eventually pass to restrict the freedoms to do those things.

Just because something hasn't been codified into law, doesn't necessarily mean it's not likely to be largely condemned, it could just mean nobody anticipated anyone actually doing the thing prior to it happening.

Combine that with a legal system that works on the letter of the law, rather than the intent of the law, and incentives can (and when capital is concerned, often do) skew away from morality entirely.

Consider that the falsehood that a corporation CEO has a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders at all costs continues to perpetuate, for a consideration of the mindset that simply works on the basis that if it hasn't been outlawed, then it's okay.

Trying to choose your customers based on some moral framework is entirely pointless in most situations. Putting aside the fact that whatever framework you decide upon is going to be completely arbitrary. If you take the position that you should only do business with people who’s values are consistent with yours, then you can’t stop at your customers. You need to examine the customer base of your customers, and the customer base of the customer base of your customers, and your entire supply chain, and the supply chain of your supply chain, ad infinitum. To apply this idea consistently is impossible, and to apply it inconsistently is just meaningless virtue signalling.

The idea that you should never do anything that provides utility to any party who’s values are incompatible with your own is not tenable, and it’s simply incompatible with any sort of open or tolerant society.

I think it’s much more sensible to look at the impact you’re having on society as a whole. I wouldn’t work for Facebook or Google, because I disagree with what they’re trying to achieve. But I’d sell them a service if I was offering one on the open market. If I ran a gun factory I probably wouldn’t want to sell them to <insert government that I think is evil>, because I know they’ll take that product and do evil things with it, but I’d sell that same government an SCM service.

> If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries

I dont believe most democracies really represent the public. They do on paper, in theory, but in practice there are lobbies that lobby for big biz and their main owners. They have much more influence in political decisions. Hence I dont believe the "public" wants sanctions on Iran/Syria/Cuba/etc, but that it is merely convenient for big biz to have those sanctions.

> Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics.

This cuts both ways: If your employer is known to take millions from ICE to support what ICE does, and your opinion is that ICE is an evil organization, that can also make you "quite uncomfortable". It might also make you want to leave that employer, which would make it harder to "support yourself and your family".

I would suggest leaving, in that case. If not your employer, some other company will fulfill that contract anyway.

Millions of people work in the defense industry. I did too, in a different life. I left due to moral reasons (Not that i am doing anything moral today).

> I would suggest leaving, in that case.

Well, that's the thing. If that's such a simple thing to do, I would suggest that you leave if you're uncomfortable in a company where employees are allowed to voice their opinions on company policies. You supporting your family is not more important than me supporting mine.

> The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions

While you correctly note that governments can pass sanctions against countries to facilitate trade restrictions, it's worth considering the full context of the article when considering their descent into proving Godwin's law.

They explicitly state the example of Chef working with arguably contentious and/or politicized domestic organisations. Given that recent employee protests are based around domestic government organisations, that have (rightly or wrongly) been compared to nationalist and/or protectionist organisations in history, what is the correct course of action there?

If you disagree so strongly with your own government, and/or believe your own government cannot be trusted to tell you the truth, what is the correct response? In recent history, we had marches against going to war on what wasn't considered believable grounds. Despite the best intentions of the leaders at the time, who ultimately ignored the peaceful and legitimate protests, the protestors were later proven to be true.

Given that backdrop, and the corporate / commercial capture of legislative interests, how is employee activism not a logical next step of 'vote with your wallet' combined with 'change it from the inside'?

> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues

I am not familiar with companies that encourage discussing politics.

Politics is about how people ought to be organised. I find it strange that this would not be something to discuss in the context of many persons primary organisational structure.

Part of my remuneration is the effect I may have on the world. Positive or negative.

I had plenty of conversations at work about differing tax policies, libertarian vs authoritarian policies in regards to land ownership, drug legalization, military action, etc.

The problem is the willingness of people to engage in civil discourse has fallen off a cliff. "Thought leaders" on both sides are making serious $$$ by convincing their followers that the other side is to be truly despised and that all opposition must be met with aggression of some sort (if not physical, verbal, spiritual, etc). Creating an us vs. them mentality has proven (yet again in history) to be very profitable.

Every time this happens, the results are regrettable and 50 years later everyone is looking at history books going "what the holy hell were they thinking?"

tl;dr the problem isn't discussing politics at work, the problem is that society in general has turned into a team sport where people pick sides and start acting like hooligans when they meet someone from the other side.

> Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product

Do you think the Gitlab CEO's policy declaration helped or hurt team cohesion?

Depends on how it was received by actual employees. We don't know how many received this positively vs. negatively.

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs does actually work to increase cohesion. If, given a controversial decision like this, people who disagree with it pack up and leave, the variance of opinion within the company will actually decrease, improving cohesion.

I see. Your scope of "cohesion" is at whatever remains of the team AFTER the divisive action by the CEO. My scope was the ORIGINAL team.

I agree that decreeing a divisive policy and prohibiting dissent tends to leave one with a more "cohesive" team. I very much doubt that it's a commercially optimal strategy. You end up with (a) true believers, who build up group think and (b) yes-people and the spineless, neither of which strike me as high value contributors. You've optimized for agreement, rather than excellence, as a hiring criterium.

I would much rather see "cohesion" in the form of a team that, DESPITE widely diverging views, manages to agree on a common vision.

I'm not usually a "the people in power are actively trying to keep the workers divided amongst themselves and seeing one another as the enemy, so they don't organize against the people who are actually keeping them down" sort, but in this specific case... well, there might be a bit of that going on, at least for what "political discussion" usually means in the context of SV-type workplaces.

>I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that?

Fail early. You can achieve cohesion by letting go of everybody who cannot discuss politics in a civilized manner. Then you can be sure that the remaining team can discuss anything without any problems.

On the other hand, is it cohesion when the team is held together by outer influences?

I don’t think the issue is politics itself really, it’s more of a lack of maturity or compassion when it comes to having the conversation.

If people engaged in the conversation aren’t prepared to take every participant seriously, no matter their politics stance, then it’s a sure-fire way to create a toxic work environment. You can’t go into it with the assumption that everyone needs to be a left-leaning liberal, or that it’s okay to bully a Trump voter (or vice-versa with right-leaning and Obama).

If at that point you can hold a conversation about politics without losing your shit as soon as someone supports something you don’t like, then encouraging it is fine. If you’re still in the mindset of having compassion for only the people on your own side then some growing up needs to happen first. Otherwise all it does is alienate those colleagues with marginal beliefs. Not exactly diverse and inclusive then.

And it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll enable far-right nutjobs or neo-Nazis as a result. HR tends to frown on things like racism and such like, it wouldn’t really get very far.

> The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries

You're talking countries--that's one case but it's not the only case. America also has Nazis. Here. They are Americans. Even if they weren't, it's an abdication one's core moral responsibilities to one's community and society with this kind of "oh, ask your [bought] legislator [about something unrelated]" do-nothingism. But they are.

I'd make damned sure that an executive team knew it was them or me before I took one thin dime that might've come from Richard Spencer or one of our other homegrown Nazis. When I was a consultant I fired clients for less and I slept great for doing so. It's literally the minimum duty I have to my community and to the human race at large--the denial of custom to hostis humanis generis wherever they rear their heads? A bare minimum of decency.

I'd do the same, but this is just describing the choice of every worker in a free labor market. And almost nobody in the US has more labor market power than tech workers. Some people leave their jobs because their leadership is too Christian, or their boss is an adulterer, or whatever reason.

Why do titles have to be sanitized for this audience? I can't remember of too many other sites whereby the admins have to essentially scrub the original titles. That makes me question the userbase more than it does the writers of said article.

Because as much as we'd like to believe that everyone reads the articles and that editorialized headlines don't affect us, they do. Sanitizing headlines helps people stay on topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com