Ask HN: Does anyone else think Michael O. Church is a hero?

I've met him, and I worked with him 4 years ago. This is a man who, if he'd kept his mouth shut, could have worked anywhere, climbed up the ranks quickly. Unfortunately, he has an OCD focus on social justice, and was willing to risk his career for what he believed in, and he's been made into a villain figure for some reason, just because he said something harsh about Marissa Mayer and didn't like his experience at Google.

Since then, he's been attacked from all sides and a number of people have tried to erase him. I don't know if YC was behind the Quora ban (I actually like Y Combinator) but it's obvious that something fucked up happened.

Is he a bit arrogant? Sure, although less so in person. Does he cultivate an obnoxious internet personality? Yeah, to some degree. But he's also insightful and, unlike most people who just care about making money, he actually cares about the direction that our industry is taking.

Am I the only one who sees this?

1) "OCD focus on social justice"

2) "What a quente" as applied to Marissa Mayer.

It doesn't work like that. If you walk around and use well-known slurs for homosexuals and African Americans, but then say "yea, but I also apply them to straight white people, so clearly I don't use them as orientation and race slurs", you will become a pariah just the same.

I don't know anything about the emails that you mention, but then again, I am not really "plugged in". My e-mail is in my profile, feel free to forward them.

The world is full of people doing bad things all the time, you and I included.

I think he could write in a way that don't insinuate people who do bad things are bad people. He writes as if people are intentionally greedy, or they intentionally take advantage of software engineers, just because they can get wealthy, and for some reason, that's bad. I think it's the judgement that alienates him from other people. (In my very humble opinion)

He blames these "power figures" in the tech industry for the woes of software engineers. But what we've got to understand is, it's normal to take advantage of circumstances to enrich oneself. It's par for the course. There's nothing bad about the people doing it better than everyone else. It's like stuff is on sale on the supermarket and there's nothing unethical about taking advantage of that sale to get a few more milk cartons in your fridge. It's not people's obligation to remove suffering from the world around them.

But where he's insightful and interesting is, he makes me think, what is it I do that lets these people have all this power[1]. These people, if they're doing such things, are doing it because they're being enabled. Am I the enabler?

If people are being taking advantage of here, it's because they allow it in the first place. The tech industry wouldn't even exist without us.

[1] For example, letting Facebook decide for me what news I see, or working for a startup without demanding equity, or working in a company where there's no one to learn from. "They" can't do these "things" to me without my participation in the first place! The power is right here in my chair, not there in Facebook's office or in the startup's board of directors.