One thought: If you see a resume with Coinbase until October 2020, that's probably someone who prefers political activism in the workplace. That might be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance. I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes.
Technical interviewing is so extremely biased. This sentiment of “Coinbase October resume is activist” is a prime example of where false negatives come from, even when the candidate correctly inverts the binary tree on the whiteboard in C.
I see it the other way around. (Almost) everything is political. The mission of the company is not disjoint from the society it is embedded in. Things have become divisive by being able to ignore and blend out the opposing views. By not talking and listening to one another. This is just one more step in that direction. Funnily enough, I think it has been extrapolated by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. We will end up…
The mission of the company isn’t completely disjoint from the broader political context, but relevance isn’t a binary proposition. If Google’s mission is to make the world’s information more accessible, and it stopped everything and put all of its efforts toward (for example) minimizing unjust police killings, how much closer to its mission would it be than if it focused on making search better (even if we assume all…
I think a lot of governments would be much quicker to regulate companies like Google and Facebook if they weren't also fighting for these political issues. At the end of the day, these political stances help further the companies original mission.
I am beyond sick of political activists in the workplace, so I hope this trend catches on.
Agreed. I think there are only two options for a company: 1) don't allow any activism in the company 2) allow ALL types of activism in the company Right now, it seems most companies only allow liberal activism but not conservative activism. This is a recipe for problems because it's arbitrary and not democratic.
It’s way worse than that. Even centrists and liberals are silenced by the vocal mob for merely questioning the validity of certain policies or initiatives that claim to have some righteous sounding goal, even when there is evidence that the proposed policy is more likely to be harmful than helpful. For example, it should not be controversial to debate the merits of Black Lives Matter, but since the alternate reality that certain people want to project doesn’t hold up well against facts and data, it’s easier just to brand you a racist (or whatever-ist, depending on the topic) instead. There is a ton of self-censorship and coercion by these activists asserting their supposed moral authority, which is not a good road to go down.
In an industry full of data scientists and engineers, it amazes me how people go along with this narrative that disparate outcomes among members of arbitrary group identities is evidence of discrimination. We know that is not a valid application of statistics, yet people who know better still keep repeating it.
> I think the parent meant that (almost) every endeavor will have some element of politics in it This is textbook pedantry. Obviously "don't discuss politics in the workplace" means "don't discuss divisive topics, especially when they're not particularly relevant to your work". Of course everything is "technically political", but that's not how anyone uses "political" except when they're trying to argue in bad faith…
Gay marriage is a divisive topic in the USA. A gay man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is political. A straight man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is not political. The only non-political choice is not allowing either to occur. Because if you allow both, that is a political statement. If you only allow one, that is too. The funny thing about politics is: a company doesn't get to c…
> Gay marriage is a divisive topic in the USA. A gay man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is political. A straight man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is not political.
Talking about one's wedding around the water cooler is not political, irrespective of the speaker's orientation OR the audience's opinions about gay marriage. Similarly, an argument in favoring or opposing gay marriage would be political irrespective of the speaker's sexuality or the audience's opinions. This seems perfectly straightforward to me. It seems like you're trying to make a problem where none exists.
Taking "no stance" on a political issue is itself a political stance for the status quo. It is impossible to not be political
If the outcome of society would be the same if you exist or not then you are not political. For example if you don't vote and don't support any political causes, then the people who take the time to get involved decides everything and you had no influence.
There are 4 levels of competence. For all the people who know they are incompetence and therefore abstain from voting there are a lot of people (possibly more) that don't know their incompetence and decide to vote regardless. If you're not voting because you're uninformed, you're probably much more informed than many of the people who are voting.
This began over something that doesn't feel "political" to me. For me, and perhaps many others, BLM is primarily about injustice. Is taking a stand against injustice political?
I would say standing against injustice is not political. But there comes a point where in order for change to occur and prevent future injustices, the stand must become a walk (to keep the metaphor). Some will say it should be a jog, others a sprint, some will think continued standing is fine. And that's just discussing the pace. There will be ideas and opinions on route, and whether or not to stop for breaks, and whether water should be supplied, or what impact people walking will have on the roads, the list goes on. I think when the time comes to give direction or motion to a stand against injustice, it then becomes political. It's not bad that it becomes political, it's the natural course of change in society, but it does mean that some of the unity derived from standing must be sacrificed, as people choose the mechanism for change they support. The key is to sacrifice as little of the unity as possible.
I wanted to find an example for my response to this article, and I can't. I was looking for the sites like GitHub, Go Docs, Cloudflare, Hashicorp, and others what splashed a "#BlackLivesMatter" header on across all their sites. I remember a lot of places slapping banners or changing their headers black in support of the movement, and now I can't find any examples of that happening. They all seem to have been removed…
It was largely a fashion trend among executives as well as a fear of being singled out as being not onboard with BLM. It's better to be with the crowd, at least you are immune to specific criticism.
We saw a similar fashion trend in company cancellations of Facebook ads, multiple companies cancelled their ads for a short duration at the same time (each cancellation catalyzing the next) and we've heard nothing about that since.
The mission of the company isn’t completely disjoint from the broader political context, but relevance isn’t a binary proposition. If Google’s mission is to make the world’s information more accessible, and it stopped everything and put all of its efforts toward (for example) minimizing unjust police killings, how much closer to its mission would it be than if it focused on making search better (even if we assume all…
I think a lot of governments would be much quicker to regulate companies like Google and Facebook if they weren't also fighting for these political issues. At the end of the day, these political stances help further the companies original mission.
This comment doesn't make much sense to me. I'm not sure if you're talking about political stances that are meaningfully related to the company's mission, and in either case how that would affect governments' willingness to regulate those companies. Are you simply arguing that governments would be more willing to regulate Google if Google didn't spend so much lobbying against regulation? In that case, obviously (this is pretty much tautologically true), but how does that relate to what we're discussing? If we're talking about political stances like "police shootings are unjustly biased against black people", then that's about as unrelated to Google's mission as one could imagine. It seems like mental gymnastics either way.
> one inconsistency is that Coinbase is based in SF That's not an inconsistency. > Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement? No, of course not.
> > Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement? > No, of course not. Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating: "Police activity in SF has negatively impacted my ability to do work". Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
> Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating
Of course I wouldn't have an issue (ignoring for the moment that you're apparently conflating me with coinbase), because this isn't a political statement.
> Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
> one inconsistency is that Coinbase is based in SF That's not an inconsistency. > Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement? No, of course not.
> > Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement? > No, of course not. Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating: "Police activity in SF has negatively impacted my ability to do work". Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
The issue was never about people expressing their political opinions, but their demands that _Coinbase_ express political opinions and get mired in what police in SF may or may not be doing.