As appalling as the behaviour of these people is, that growing awareness can only be a good thing.
This is an interesting intersection. It either implies that all employers are left-aligned (not true) and therefore willing to fire employees that hold right-leaning opinions, OR that low level employees are so expendable that it literally any reason can get them fired if enough people complain.
It's mostly this. When you're a small-medium business, the last thing you want is negative PR and people canceling or DDOSing you because one of your employees wrongthinked.
But I doubt they will care until a conservative employer fires someone for tweeting support for a progressive belief.
I don't ascribe a right or left bias to them. It's the mob that has the bias (perhaps because of age or ideology or certainty or something else) and the mob uses the technology and then the HR department responds by firing the employee.
Do we need to coin the term "DDoE"? Distributed Denial of Employment. It's a hack against the socio-political system that targets find themselves in, not too dissimilar to Swatting.
It has more to do with aggregate action, which has recently been made possible with platforms like Twitter, than with the particular ideological stances.
My personal experience is a lot of HR departments do have a left-of-center bias to them, especially at the lower-levels (but at times reaching all the way to the top). A few reasons:
1) HR departments tend to skew female, and women on average skew somewhat more left-of-center than men do
2) They often have special teams for "diversity & inclusion", which inevitably tend to be filled with people with left-of-center political views
3) They'll put requirements like "commitment to diversity & inclusion" in job descriptions, which can (ironically) act as a filter to remove political diversity. Those phrases can get copy-and-pasted into job descriptions in other departments too, but while for many in engineering/sales/etc it is just compliance boilerplate with little real significance to the hiring process, HR really means it.
Of course this isn't universally true, I'm sure there are some HR departments out there full of Trump supporters. But most of the people here would not be working for those kinds of companies.
see aca5
You can criticize, you can ignore and you can boycott. Instead too many people (look at the response to JK Rowling) are threatening death and rape. Or are harassing employers until they capitulate.
But I'm sure such dogged defenders of free speech normally send other reporters after people to acccuse them of being anti-Semitic for a joke about them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hels/status/1283092586392178695?s=20
Leftist extremism is exactly avoiding the court system by applying pressure to rob people of their livelihood - a much more immediate, public, and potent method of intimidation - and an excellent way to set an example to others who might speak against the theocracy.
He said immigration was ruining the country, and that there are too many Indians / Chinese in the Bay Area. About half of my organization either have an H1B visa or a green card.
Am I a McCarthyist for rejecting him outright without hesitation?
You cannot say "there are too many (X) in the Bay Area". Period, I will not hire you.
...but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about people being punished for daring to disagree with the progressive agenda.
His feed was full of things like, "All Cops Are Bastards", many images of the hammer & sickle, and generally hating on white people. He even retweeted an illustration of the White House burning with a hammer & sickle flag being raised in front of it along with the caption "my 2020 goals".
Actually... I lied. The person I described is Steve Klabnik. Despite throwing around extremely offensive imagery and calling for violence against members of certain professions and races, that guy can get a job anywhere he wants. Meanwhile if someone simply says, "all lives matter" or makes an OK sign, they risk getting fired. The double standard could not be more obvious.
Yes.
Why can’t he have an opposing view from you on immigration?
I was on a visa and could still see the h1b program was being abused.
We often have less than ideal experiences with other cultural groups. That’s normal.
Is your work culture toxic because of your visa holders?
Would you refuse to hire feminist women because you had a mostly male team?
You can criticize H1B programs and their abuse, but saying there are too many Chinese and Indians explicitly and rejecting them for that is not "McCarthyism".
So do I and so do the vast majority of people who want less immigration.
> and rejecting them for that is not "McCarthyism".
To be fair to the parent - it would be if you tried to make sure they weren’t hired anywhere.
You were making a biased and snap judgement about a candidate - but that happens a lot in the interview process - same as if you rejected an African American candidate because you didn’t think they would fit in.
What would you do if one of your existing employees was found to have that kind of twitter account?
That is not the same as having subjective internal biases about an African American candidate.
You are saying you wouldn’t hire them because they wouldn’t fit into your work culture right?
Or are you saying you wouldn’t hire them because you don’t like their beliefs?
One is a statement made by a candidate that is at best insensitive to people of different races.
The other is a poorly specified scenario where a black person does not fit in? For what reason do they not fit in? Is it because of their race or something else.
It sounds like the parent thought the dev wouldn’t fit in with the other team members and so didn’t hire him.
> The other is a poorly specified scenario where a black person does not fit in?
It’s hard to fit in when you are a small minority.
Non government institution discriminating against people for their perceived political views.
If you remember - the majority of McCarthyism's intimidation was in his "do not employ" lists of people.
It's absolutely comparable!