Hacker News Reader

Comment by equality_1138 | Hacker News Reader

Seconded. In particular, I've come to recognize the growing confluence of woke politics and tech management as major impediment on my ability to do my job well. Reading up on career coaching and psychology has certainly helped, but can also serve to overcomplicate the situation. My therapist provides highly personal and much more practical guidance in accepting the bs.

View on HN

How do “woke politics” prevent you from doing your job well?

Generally they undermine patterns, and without patterns in our lives, life itself becomes quite the burden. When it happens but you aren't aware of it, you start to degrade in various ways and if you pile the unknownness (what is happening? why do I feel this way? why am I not getting done what I want to get done?) on top of it, it's not a fun time. At least, that's a factor I've read about recently; plenty more factors and angles. That's not to say that changing patterns is inherently bad, but changing too much at once or a change that must be synchronous and immediate vs. gradually and asynchronous are very different processes for us humans.

By the way, it might also be a misspelling (work politics vs woke politics); but coincidentally this applies there as well but to a lesser degree.

This is a really interesting perspective I haven't run into before. It definitely captures a subtractive strain of political and social thought I find incredibly frustrating. The lefty "woke" variant is hotly criticized lately, but its libertarian and conservative siblings have had their moments in recent years. Something in it speaks to everyone.

Of course, dismantling order is a poor substitute for refining order, and while the idea of starting over from scratch is seductive, I'm not convinced the "post-dismantling" environment is a good one for building better things (regardless of your definition of "better").

Unfortunately, the thirst for hard resets seems stronger now on all sides than I've ever seen before, which disappoints me to no end. Everything grows out of something else. And if you can't picture how what we have today could become what you want tomorrow without resorting to burning it down, you probably aren't ready to build something better from scratch. The least you can do is let the thing stand while we figure out how to make it work for everyone.

Remember the time those two new fathers were overheard making dongle jokes at a conference and the twitter outrage mob got them fired for it? Things like that worry me. They don't prevent me from doing my job, but I could understand how someone prone to anxiety might get hung up on it.

One might also remember that the Black woman who posted about it on Twitter also got fired by her employer. "Woke politics" are an easy target for free-floating anxiety, but the real concern for 99% of us is that we have virtually no rights at work.

Publicly internet shaming someone for a middle school joke overheard at a conference is less professional than making the joke, and I buy the argument that it would "interfere with her doing her job." It'd be different for a more direct or egregious joke or if someone on stage said it.

Apparently she's been a lot more quiet for the past few years to the point that she's harder to google without second order effort. This backs up that what she did was unprofessional and interfered with her job, but I'm torn over this because it also means she got silenced. Then again, are "dongle" jokes the hill you want to die on? Or TWSS? This was in 2013 before the term "woke" was even popularized.

Not sure what her race has to do with this, though.

But at least she got silenced for doing something blatantly wrong. She took their picture, posted on a public forum without addressing the people or anyone else locally.

This is why this type of call-out culture is bad. You attack first, the damage is done, often excessive damage, without addressing the issue locally. It would have been different if they had done something wrong, she gets ignored by the police, THEN calls them out.

The other issue with these public witch hunts is they are random. Some people get no traction, others hunted down. This lack of consistency is a horrible way to enforce rules which may or may not have even been broken.

The story: https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spirale...

It's uninclusive to put one very specific brand of politics in people's face all the time with the unstated message that if you think a little differently you had better be quiet about it.

Some people can find that to be distracting.

Can you be more specific? I'm not sure I understand how that's affecting you from being able to do your job well.

I'm not OP but I am politically engaged with not 100% the same opinions, so sometimes I get annoyed by the environment and have to remind myself not to care.

Imagine your workspace was full of aggressive pro-Trump messaging. A bit distracting maybe?

Sorry I didn’t see the username change.

But I don’t understand how a workspace that was full of any kind of aggressive messaging is healthy even if I agree with it? That sounds pretty toxic to begin with.

It's especially frustrating if you generally agree with the goals but think the aggressive messaging is a bad look.

Any constructive feedback is generally received as "this person must be a closet white supremacist". Better to grit your teeth and remain silent.

Imagine also your coworkers casually mention they'd gladly shoot any pinko commie liberal they'd encounter, good that there are no such people among us! And then discuss how liberals are filthy amoral idiots only worthy of being spit on. And you happen to be a liberal. And even though you know they're probably joking, and they most certainly don't mean you, would it influence your work relationship with those people a little? Would it make you more distracted and less motivated?

And what if they get their suspicions - say, you couldn't bring yourself to praise Trump as much as others - and then your promotion, which one of your Trump-loving managers has a decisive voice on, does not come through, would you wonder why? Would it impact your work? I think it might.

And yet, I've heard things like these (not about Trump, it was even back when Trump was a TV personality) from many people. Did it impact my work quality? I really hope not, as much as I can help it. But I certainly didn't enjoy it.

How familiar are you with the term? Perhaps I used an offensive slur for convenience and should reconsider the phrasing? In my experience, over-emphasizing "social responsibility" that has nothing to do with the product tends to put less competent managers in power. Less competent managers tend to favor less competent engineers. And it's a vicious cycle.

That's just office politics, only centred around a particular hype.

I'm not sure what particular hype you are referring to. I think of "wokeness" as ultra-generic.

>I think of "wokeness" as ultra-generic.

It really is. Those who embody it may have "Resist" in their Twitter bio, yet their purported values align with virtually all of the 1%, the corporations, the banks, the media companies, academic institutions, sports teams, celebrities, etc etc.

It would be hard to be any more generic.

I do know the term — I’d define it as generally being aware of the historical struggles that various groups have gone through and realizing how that impacts them today.

It feels like you’re dancing around your word choice and I’m having trouble understanding exactly what you’re saying, especially as how being aware of power struggles impacts your ability to presumably software engineer well. They seem pretty orthogonal to me.

When you say “social responsibility” putting “less competent managers in power,” are you referring to affirmative action? Or something else here?

Affirmative action is about policy and the law. I was referring to a newer trend wherein middle management assumes the role of thought police and decides for others how well educated they are in "historical struggles that various groups have gone through and realizing how that impacts them today."

BTW I absolutely appreciate your concern for fairness, and encourage you to read up about the history of corporate governance and the financial scandals that arise when lawlessness infiltrates management.

I’m sorry to keep coming back for more info, but can you please give a concrete example of this and how it prevents you from being able to do your job well? I haven’t experienced middle management thought police so I’m curious what your experience is here.

In terms of financial scales and lawlessness infiltrating management — are you talking about things like Enron? How this is connected to “woke politics” I can’t figure out.

I'll pass - can't figure out how well you know about Enron and its similarity to other financial scandals, ripple effects of management incompetence, and corporate governance in general. I don't think it would help to provide just one or two examples at this point.

That's such a bizarrely condescending comment.

What on Earth are you trying to talking about?

It's reasonably clear what this person is struggling to articulate, if we're being honest with ourselves. I've met a few like 'em before.

Thank you. I love to see the intersection of many fields of engineering, science, finance, and mass media here on HN. A truly amazing resource. But yes I struggle with the semantics when they blend together too much. I struggle to see how, when petty Us vs. Them battles flare, it's generally in circles where these fields all culminate into one. I struggle to see the sleazy culture of east coast advertising and stock-trading types (bigots from the 50's and 80's) infiltrate technology as a profession, specifically in Silicon Valley. I struggle to see that "social responsibility" and/or spiritual awakening is being packaged and sold like McDonald's.

I'm not giving concrete examples about my job, nor my thoughts on Enron in this thread. Sorry if I exaggerated the point but I do find it offensive to get a grilling about my private life. Not woke at all.

It's not "being aware". It's being required to police your speech to shield your managers from imaginary accusation of offending some group - where claims of offense usually come from people not even belonging to that group, but just enjoying the whiteknighting and the grandstanding. Being required to spend time on changing your code because suddenly established industry terms are deemed "offensive" by some busybody who would never even see this code and never had and never will since would have a look on it. Being dragged into political power games which one has no interest in and would rather concentrate on writing good code. Having work with people being promoted for reasons other than professional competency, and being denied opportunities for reasons other than professional competency. Etc., etc.

That's an interesting way to put it but I can definitely relate. When the people talk about abstract lofty political ideals all the time, it might well be the case that they have no idea what they're actually doing, or it could be a way for them to mask/deflect from the fact that their actual engineering skills are very limited. It creates a vicious cycle and a culture that drives people who actually want to do great work away.

> How do “woke politics” prevent you from doing your job well?

I’m a hiring manager and where I work we have an unwritten “understanding” that if your candidate recommendations don’t include any women you are a sexist.

I just make sure I include a few female candidates even if none in the recruitment pool are capable because it’s not worth the trouble.

However, I imagine that for many “by the book” hiring managers this causes significant anxiety and stress.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com