Anecdotal but my office is ultra-woke. There are endless internal emails about whatever-week, or veterans-this, or LBGTQ+-that etc etc. People have been hounded out and either quit or been fired for fairly minor "infractions" of the groupthink (...and also some people have rightly been fired for actual inappropriate behaviour).
And guess what all this talk about "toxic masculinity" and generally vilifying all men leads to? If you said "chilling effect" then you are bang on. It is a bloody minefield. Keep your head down, never talk about non-work stuff, refuse to provide feedback or do interviews, refuse to help people out unless it is directly your job' responsibility to do so etc and hope you don't get fired.
It genuinely feels like I have a target on my back.
I utterly adore that my workplace has a strict ban on using any company resources such as the email system for non-work related business. The one time in eight years someone sent a political email they were formally reprimanded.
This is more common than not in traditional enterprises and businesses. It feels like a unique trait of the Silicon Valley bubble (and places testing to emulate it).
Document the hostile work environment in a journal, look for new positions, and quit when it becomes too much of a threat to your wellbeing. If you decide to quit or get fired, use your documentation of the environment as a basis for filing for unemployment benefits or if it merits it, higher levels of complaint/compensation.
The "progressive" cause is just as capable of doing wrong as the "conservative" cause; there is this general perception that being "woke" is the moral high ground and if you're against the "conservative" people who are jerks then you and your peers do no wrong.
In fact it seems like the conservative jerks and the "woke" jerks are doing the exact same thing - abusing groups of peoples and behaviors in order to show off their moral superiority.
A bunch of young people in the past generations left the church because they saw church people hating on folks who didn't fit their definition of "good people" and saw that definition distorted into abusing folks that deserved to be who they were. The exact same behaviors are showing up and getting stronger in the "woke" community, just with different targets. I'm still waiting for the popular backlash against the "woke" agenda - probably just the next generation of kids rebelling against their parents' ideals.
I have a target on my back too and occasionally am treated like a predator, but I also have the privilege that though it isn't harmless to me, I usually have the ability to get up and exit the situation treating me poorly. This is what everybody should try to cultivate - the freedom to quit a bad situation and not be a slave to a particular job, group of people, life plan, etc. When you can say "I would like to do this but I have other options" then it becomes a whole lot harder to be abused because when bad things happen you can just say goodbye.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how strongly you feel about a topic. Nothing good can come of this—just internet hellfire, which leads to scorched earth, which is all the same, which is uninteresting.
Please don't break the site guidelines like that. Getting downvoted sucks, but it happens to everyone and one condition of participating in threads here is not to make them go haywire when it happens.
Edit: you've unfortunately been posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments repeatedly elsewhere as well. Can you please not? We're trying for something different here.
Given the context is the dogmatic approach to office culture, this comment is super ironic. Of course the firings were a correct decision from your (insane and skewed) perspective.
>>Given the context is the dogmatic approach to office culture, this comment is super ironic. Of course the firings were a correct decision from your (insane and skewed) perspective.
Without the facts of the matter, you're talking out of your h'arse.
Either firings are legal or not. They have nothing to do with office culture.
Insane and skewed? ... yes, yes you are. Well done for identifying it, it's just your aim is about 180 degrees wrong. I imagine you have that issue frequently in life.
Have a nice day :) (you absolute, unmitigated pr!ck, lol)
Your experience in an environment doesn't match someone else's experience in an environment you think is similar, so they are wrong and you are right?
Isn't this a core of the whole "woke" thing? Just because you have a nice experience doesn't mean everybody does and you shouldn't silence somebody not having a good time because you don't understand or have the same experience.
I am not ‘TLightful’, but I’m guessing it’s because you used the term “The Elect”, which only certain groups use. It’s one of the shibboleths of these modern times.
The groups agreeing with that author, basically. The author is black, yes, but he also (according to Wikipedia) criticizes a number of left-wing and activist educators, the anti-racism movement, the concept of “microaggressions” and has denounced affirmative action based on race. So he is, understandably, not without controversy and detractors. Coming back to the term “The Elect”, it is a term adopted by him to make a political point. Therefore, only people who agree with that point will use the term, and people who disagree with that point (or with him, more broadly) will take affront to the term, as is the custom of these modern times.
Reflecting decades later I think they were probably mostly insecure, and at the time I realised they were mostly only marginally competent.
"Only a fucking idiot would do that" meaning "I do not know what you are talking about but if I admit it I might look bad, so I will attack you instead"
Some times they were truly brilliant. I could call out some very famous project leaders (one of whom attacked me on a mailing list on a topic over which I was an expert and he was not. Deeply personal attacks) but I do not think it would be helpful. There are plenty of examples, and they are easy to find in old logs.
But times are changing and being a total prick to prove a point is not tolerated in the worlds I (mostly) move in now. It takes debate and reasoning to prove your point.
Should have happened thirty years ago. We lost a generation to fields where asbestos suits were not mandatory to participate. That was literally the advice for almost every forum back in the day "wear your asbestos suit"
I'm usually against cancel culture. Except against those that partake in it. I'll admit I feel a lot of schadenfreude when those people get canceled themselves and they're held to their own standards.
The important question today is what we would have done if Joseph McCarthy had been right. If (in some bizarre parallel universe) he was somehow right about Communists doing...Communist things and we all definitely agreed on this, would we have applauded his tactics?
The cancel culture crowd today seem to think yes. They look to him as an idol and see his only flaw as his unjust cause.
I don’t think I agree. Extrajudiciality should be shunned in all its forms even if it leads to bad people meeting bad ends.
Now you know how the other side felt all along :).
Seriously, we are now asked to treat everyone with respect and that is a problem?
Edit: No I don't mean eye for eye. I am merely pointing out, this is a male dominant industry where women didn't even have a chance for a long time. The moment we face little uneasiness, we are complaining and throwing temper tantrums.
The problem isn’t to treat people with respect.
The problem is that some few people are absolutely hellbent on interpreting any interaction through a lens of sexism or racism, and a large silent majority allows them for fear of drawing unwanted attention and/or harm.
This is not to say that sexism or racism isn’t or hasn’t been a large problem, but the correction pendulum has really swung way too far for some people and that is actually not at all helpful since it only builds up resentment among people who actually are supporters of the cause of equality.
> The problem is that some few people are absolutely hellbent on interpreting any interaction through a lens of sexism or racism, and a large silent majority allows them for fear of drawing unwanted attention and/or harm.
A lot of people might not just be that good at what they do but manage to advance by way of their gender/race and scare away any negative feedback. Thus, given that their skills themselves won't save them, leveraging mob justice to do so is a viable strategy for them.
Every sense of morality transformed into abuse has at least some basis in what would be called real objective good.
You cannot simplify the problems of "woke culture" as "asking everyone to treat others with respect", because that is not what is happening on the dark side of "woke" and you can't pretend that the dark side doesn't exist.
No, that's not the problem. It's that offense is easy to take at anything and companies erring on the side of caution will prefer to get rid so they appear to be doing something. Whether it is right or not doesn't matter by the time the truth is out the actions have been taken.
OP is perhaps suggesting that a system where nobody feels like they have a target on their back is possible. Such that we don't (as you appear to tacitly admit we do) simply creature a culture that is still toxic, but for different people.
You wrote 2 sentences and still managed to contradict yourself.
Either parent and 'other side' have been both victimised (by him now knowing how they felt) or parent isn't a victim but since you claim he is experiancing what 'the other side' did neither were they.
And guess what all this talk about "toxic masculinity" and generally vilifying all men leads to? If you said "chilling effect" then you are bang on. It is a bloody minefield. Keep your head down, never talk about non-work stuff, refuse to provide feedback or do interviews, refuse to help people out unless it is directly your job' responsibility to do so etc and hope you don't get fired.
It genuinely feels like I have a target on my back.