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Comment by equality_1138 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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