I’ve never worked in the Bay Area, so could just be OOL but I’m genuinely surprised that this is such a big deal, or that this blog post got so much praise.
Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!
Coming from the east coast (and maybe a little from an earlier era) I also find the attitude on this stuff a little mystifying.
"In my day" -- it was just poor form to bring up that kind of stuff at work. If you did so at all, you usually tried to avoid being "that person". You don't get to choose each person you work with, so it pays if everyone puts in a bit of extra effort to not give anyone else a hard time.
I think some of these work politics issues--in particular around the bay area-- is partially a product of extremely homogeneous work forces (at least politically), partially poor work-life balance cultures (no life outside work), partially social networking (massively increasing the visibility of your co-workers out of work activities), and <???>-- I don't feel I really have a complete understanding of what is going on.
Maybe a factor is a breakdown in our wider culture's ability to see people who disagree as being people who are still good people with reasonable points but just have different understandings or priorities (or even just to patronize them as stupid or uninformed). But instead perhaps there is a trend to rapidly decide people we disagree with are irredeemably evil just based on a soundbitized version of some insanely complicated political trade-off (or maybe even just by association)... But I'm not really sure how much that breakdown is actually happening compared to the appearance of it happening in the reporting funhouse mirror ("Reasonable people do a reasonable thing" said no headline ever).
Some of it might also be due to a transition from products to services-- people seem a lot more willing to view product sales as anonymous and totally transactional, while they seem to view a service as something more akin to a marriage.
A big downside of reactions like coinbases' might be that in what I would consider the traditional regime there was still an opportunity for employees to bring a little bit of their politics to work-- so long as they were professional and not obnoxious about it, or in places where there were genuine interactions with work ("How about lets not buy the toner cartages made from clubbed baby seals?") ... but if you can't count on people to control themselves and you're forced to set bright line policies then there is probably a lot less room for people to be reasonable.
I worked for companies on the east coast, then moved to SF and now work at a big tech company. The companies I worked for on the east coast were mostly B2B, so we were focused on making a good product for businesses so they’d pay us more money. Big tech companies recruited for a long time with the pitch that we’re changing the world. That has brought in a bunch of employees who joined bc they want their employment to make a positive change in the world. Companies are now realizing the conflict being a neutral platform poses to these people - if I have a belief that my employment should make a positive change in societal issues, how could I work somewhere that I believe contributes to making things worse?
I wonder what % of SV employees actually did move there for "making a better place blabla". It always souded as a pure marketing signal , like those old Benneton ads. I can understand that people who work for wikipedia do it, but not the big tech sector. It's particularly hard to believe it considering the cynicism of the current "total compensation"-oriented generation of tech crowd.
A large group of people, maybe even a majority, believe in the general idea that technology can help solve social problems. Then you have a company that says they make the world a better place. Of course you're going to get some people who legit want to do that, and believe the scale and scope of the operation allows this to actually happen! Then they're very upset when, for instance, their spreadsheet software is used to track how to steal refugee children from their parents and sell them to adoption services. It's going to take some adjustment to convince these people that the company that says they're making the world a better place is simply constantly lying, and only exists for profit.
When you recruit starry-eyed kids out of college telling them that they’ll change the world at your company, well, some of those kids never grow up and realize that it’s just marketing.
I've worked on the east coast for the early half of my career, and no company has ever mentioned "making a positive change in the world" as a pitch for the job. I was hired to fix bugs and connect two API layers to each other so that a set top box could ship or so we could release the next version of a display driver. There was plenty of political diversity in the office: people from all across the political spectrum. Yet, we all worked together fine, and you almost never heard an actual political argument. Occasionally it would come up as a polite conversation at lunchtime. The rare minute it got heated, someone would maturely step in and say, hey, guys, let's get back to work and put it aside, and that was that. This is in stark contrast to the stories you hear out of west coast tech companies today! How have we managed to screw this up so badly?
I also worked for an east coast company like that for several years, and I went to grad school because I couldn’t take it anymore. This wasn’t because of the politics, it was more because life should be better than plugging together two API layers so that a display driver can ship.
I yearn for the return of that attitude, polite conversation of differences and the tolerance and rational discussion of nuanced issues which makes it possible.
> if I have a belief that my employment should make a positive change in societal issues, how could I work somewhere that I believe contributes to making things worse?
Why the binary presentation, though?
You can make the world better by doing a single thing well and respecting your customers (and their all-kinds-diversity) while doing it. Even if you're not directly contributing to BigIssue by doing it, the people who are presumably need to be able to count on a reliable supply chain that gives them the tools/services/resources they need.
Unless your work has serious atypical externalities, just doing what you're doing doesn't itself make things worse -- it make fail to do the absolute maximum it could possibly to to make one specific thing better, but if that's your focus you should be working on that thing directly. In a reasonable organization there should be a lot of opportunity to put your thumb on a scale towards continually improving all sorts of things-- without inviting disruption and discord --by threading the needle and nudging all the free choices in the right direction and respecting that other reasonable people can have different priorities.
There are an neigh uncountable number of travesties and injustices in the world and finite time and resources to fight for them... but as a society we can't stand strong to face any of the big issues if the water taps aren't flowing, the power isn't on, the communications lines aren't communicating, the spread-sheets aren't spreading, the trash (literal and figurative) isn't getting collected, and whatnot. We have to prioritize, triage, and focus on what we can accomplish.
And someone-- many many someones, in fact-- has to be the shoulders we stand on as our tallest reach for the stars.
Besides, if advocacy was really what people were sold on in large numbers how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits? :) I think that asks me to believe that there were many people who's next alternative to a google role was taking a $40k/yr 501c3 job and google was foolish enough to offer that person a mid-six-figure compensation package.
> Unless your work has serious atypical externalities, just doing what you're doing doesn't itself make things worse
Most of the big tech companies are all encompassing enough that they all have serious externalities.
- Amazon and Microsoft face protests that they enable ICE
- FB faces protests that they enable Trump to promote hate speech
- Google faced protests over a possible Pentagon contract
> how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits
Keep in mind that a decent percentage of employees of big tech companies are non-eng. The comp is still better than outside, but not the order of magnitude you see for eng.
In general, are you surprised that people want to have their cake and eat it too? :P There is a group for whom changing a specific issue is their top priority and they'll accept below-market comp to work at a nonprofit. There's a much larger group, especially among younger generations, who want both top of market comp and to feel like they're changing the world, and the tech companies promised they could have it all.
A number of people in big tech are facing the decision of: should I keep working at a company whose values I may no longer agree with? Or should I quit (possibly taking a cut in pay, perks, scope, caliber of eng, etc), since I may not find a big tech company whose values I completely agree with? I haven't seen a trend towards leaving yet, but the fact that the stock of big tech has been going through the roof has made it sting even harder to leave now, so I'll be curious when the market run ends how this ends up.
I suspect that when the market takes a turn for the worse we'll see a lot of attrition from the big companies to startups. When the golden handcuffs become bronze, many employees will be free to seek self actualization elsewhere.
I often wonder about the other side: Why do people who work in SV seem so militant on political issues? After all they live in a very privileged space (or "bubble") which is severely disconnected from the reality of most of the Earth, and even nearby american cities. I don't know enough about the demographics of the region and what can drive this behaviour but it is full of contradictions. For example, while they all seem invested in political causes, and seem to be using donations as a way to show virtual support to causes, I notice that they rarely venture into actual politics themselves.
>After all they live in a very privileged space (or "bubble")
It's my personal view that so much of the current political vitriol is because as a society, we've run out of things to worry about. We've reached critical mass of people solving Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and therefore, we are dwelving in to other arenas where we are feeling neglected.
I have a much more benigh benign theory: The end of mass entertainment. When we no longer listen to the same music/watch the same movies/ same tv, it's hard for people to come up common themes in discussions. Politics doesnt fit in that because usually countries have one government, and everyone has an opinion on politics, it's too easy
> 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
because they are over educated and wealthy and it lends itself to the thought of "if i'm this smart and this successful how could i be wrong and why don't you want this life?"
>Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!
Same, and that's the conundrum.
"Activist" employees put others on the spot by querying coworkers' political views and expecting discussion. And for those who have had their head in the sand for the past few years, things like "being a Joe Rogan fan" are now considered unacceptable politics.
My take: he’s generally opposed to this kind of laborious activism and tedious “political correctness” (broadly defined). He’s had some folks on his podcast who are very outspoken on certain things (trans issues, politics, etc) that people find offensive, and they claim he’s a “gateway to the alt right” as a result. Despite Rogan self-identifying as a progressive, the label has pretty much stuck and even though he has an extremely wide variety of guests - from cutting edge technologists to comedians to Snowden - on the show, he’s forever tainted by not aligning to the activists’ goals.
My personal opinion is that they don’t like him because his platform is massive and threatens other traditional means of informing people about what to think on certain topics.
> liberals care far more about proper culture signaling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics.
I'd argue this is more about the political climate in the US (and many other places) than about liberals specifically. Arguably for "true liberals" this shouldn't be a consideration at all but might be for conservatives.
Virtually every meaningful task humans have accomplished has been a result of groups of us putting aside our differences to unite and focus on solving the problem at hand.
??? Nice way to rewrite history. Would you say the civil rights movement was successful because it wanted to put aside differences? Or because they fought for their rights, their difference, and the privileged majority had to make concessions?
Yes very much so. They found the moral high ground and were able to persuade people on our shared humanity. No one “had” to do anything. People were compelled to as they were persuaded that we had immoral systems in terms of individuals civil rights.
A universal appeal to shared humanity is an approach that works. Shaming people into a type of morality will only invite pushback.
For some historical context, contemporaneously, the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular; it's exactly the kind of thing that would have been described as politics best left out of the workplace.
"In 1964, in a poll taken nine months after the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, 74 percent of Americans said such mass demonstrations were more likely to harm than to help the movement for racial equality. In 1965, after marchers in Selma, Alabama, were beaten by state troopers, less than half of Americans said they supported the marchers."
I think we're conflating certain actions with certain messages. The words of that speech struck a nerve with people because of its universal appeal to humanity. It's oft quoted line of "...judged by content of their character, not the color of their skin" is still universally praised because of that.
Compare this to today's thoughtless and abrasive slogans or the writings of today's favored thought leaders on this and how divisive now only are the ideas but the tactics being used to coerce people into compliance.
So yeah, people at the time may have had a distaste for some of the tactics but the messaging was very popular. The riots that took place later on in the decade were a disaster and led to a new, mainstream form of conservatism led by Nixon.
I don't know if I understand your point. Are you saying that the 74% unfavorable view of civil rights demonstrations suggests that Americans disfavored demonstrations but nonetheless were strongly supportive of MLK's speech at such a demonstration?
That strikes me as a level of nuance that is frankly unlikely.
Within a year of that speech the 24th Amendment was ratified to the constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. He won the Noble Prize a little over a year later. I'd say people agreed with the message above all else because he truly appealed to a shared, universal humanity. This couldn't be done, especially in that era, without a large amount of people supporting this. An Amendment - think about that and what it takes! It almost has to be universal for that to happen. People supported these ideas. It is a myth they didn't and the evidence is the product of them.
I don't think these landmark legal events occurred because people demonstrated so much what the man and his supporters were saying. I believe people miss the forest for the trees and think if they just get a group of people together they're somehow right or will get their way. But it's about what you have to say and how you say it that matters. Peacefully organizing is a great vehicle for that but you still need the goods.
The violence that happened in the later 1960's set so much of it back IMO.
Hmm, to your first part: maybe. Adam Serwer (in that same article) argues that exposure to tales of southern violence, after the Civil War, was instrumental in changing northern Republicans' willingness to push civil rights legislation. So, similarly, in the 1960s.
Yet your conclusion is far too final: it's not a "myth" that people didn't support these changes; some people did and some didn't, as with anything. At one point in the end of 1964, a majority of people oppose the protests that led to these changes.
And in fact, the 24th Amendment faced substantial opposition from southern states; I'm not able to find contemporaneous opinion polls (and I'd be interested if you have any), but it's far from the case that it was without controversy!
I strongly disagree with your last line, however—not because violence is acceptable or productive, necessarily, but because your interpretation exculpates reactionaries who regrouped and pushed back against such changes, which I think is a highly relevant lesson for the Trump era:
Race is such a good predictor of a vote for Trump. The simplest explanation for Trump's rise is that he is a counterreaction to the election of the first Black President.
So too with the success of a cynical Southern Strategy following on the heels of the Civil Rights Era.
Why? If you asked the same question today about BLM you would also see a divergence between the two. Almost certainly not to the degree to which a strong majority favor the notion but disapprove of the demonstrations, but there's going to be a difference.
I don't know offhand of any high quality opinion surveys asking about approval of _demonstrations_ vs _BLM_ in general, so I don't know if your hypothesis is born out.
I don't see how your statement "the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular" has anything to do with your reference.
You could still support the Civil Rights movement, but believe that mass demonstrations harm it.
That’s not true. The CRM was deeply unpopular to the general population. King was seen as a rowdy agitator. The CRA was passed despite public opinion, not because the activists managed to convince the population that they were human beings. The CRA was so deeply unpopular that it caused a fundamental change in the structure of our political boundaries that has lasted for 60 years. King himself explicitly shamed the “white moderate” rather than courting them.
It's actually a perfect example. It's hard to imagine everyone fighting for civil rights was previously aligned on all fronts or agreed with everything that was done along the way.
In MLK's book "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community" he talks about some of the internal battles within the civil rights community and how they explicitly tried to forge alliances with other groups. That's when I learned just how brilliant MLK was in this political / social sense.
"Structural racism" is a coded term. We have laws against discrimination and HR departments across the country bending over backwards to avoid lawsuits... but you're not asking about the problems those are intended to solve.
When you ask a question like that, what you're really asking is, "why don't workplaces have the outcomes I expect along racial lines when it comes to hiring, compensation, promotion, and more?" And implicitly, "why can't workplaces be forced (or force themselves) toward meeting the outcomes I expect?"
Those are different questions, but they're encoded in yours. And they don't really apply to the topic at hand.
Avoiding lawsuits is not at all the same as attempting to deal with the issue honestly as opposed to framing it in the same light as some new kind of competitive marketplace.
I think that's one side effect of having these gargantuan, hugely profitable tech companies. They can essentially have a huge portion of their workforce be unproductive if the essential "money machine" at each company (e.g. AdWords at Google) is running smoothly.
Other, smaller companies can't afford to have as much fat in their workforce, so their workers need to be actually focused on, you know, work, and if they're not, their lack of productivity is much more visible.
SV companies sell candidates on changing the world and disrupting the status quo. They literally target and recruit the type of people who would want to discuss politics at work.
Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!