701–710 of 1001 posts
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You don't even know what generation I am. I'm younger than you'd guess. You didn't address any of my arguments, other than to say it's just my perception, which I admit, is a possibility.
This entire thread is a trainwreck. I feel like I just walked into a slightly more polite version of Voat.
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> “The proximity of his workplace and his home is convenient, but there is a serious political motivation underlying it, too. When Steidl was a teen-ager, he spent several weeks volunteering at Auschwitz, clearing paths for visitors and sleeping in a former barracks. His father had served in the German Army, and Steidl participated in a program that had been established, he said, to show young Germans “what the paren…
We're not actually trying to equate working on email products at Basecamp to working at Auschwitz are we? It's an interesting anecdote but it hardly serves a useful function here.
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you do have tolerance. you just don’t know it. a lot of things are “political”. You cannot share virtually anything about you or your life without some political subtext. Try sharing something, anything and I’ll make it political in 2 easy steps. Unless you’re a machine, there is politics at work. does everything have to be a woke political discussion? prolly not
A lot of things are "political", but not that many are political . > Try sharing something, anything and I’ll make it political in 2 easy steps. Yeah, see, that's the problem. The problem isn't that everything is in some way political. It's people who are looking to make things political . (In fact, that could be a functional definition of woke-ness.) You don't want that at work. Eventually, the woke people will find…
Boards should have more apprehension about their companies being exploited as political platforms by employees. It's as though there is a bargain where in exchange for boards tolerating staff radicalization, these employee groups cheerfully overlook the dystopian, totalitarian surveillance infrastructure, environmental devastation, and political corruption machines they seem to have zero problem building and managing…
I like this line. I might steal it.
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We're not actually trying to equate working on email products at Basecamp to working at Auschwitz are we? It's an interesting anecdote but it hardly serves a useful function here.
Basecamp is a small company, but Google was caught helping the US military, while most of the employees working for Google are not Americans. Even one of the cofounders and the current CEO are not American born, which means that they are asked to potentially do things agains their family.
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This sounds like a problem found in fancy valley tier-1 unicorns then. I keep hearing stories of people bombarded with political discussions on a daily basis and can hardly believe them. I'm not doubting anyone's sincerity but jeez... I feel like this perhaps localized to certain segments of the industry. I've worked in this industry for over a decade and really haven't had any major political discussions with cowork…
This is happening because these large tech companies- not just tier-1 unicorns but FAANGs themselves, have been presenting themselves as paternalistic employers for the past decade. You provide employees with all the free food, on-campus gyms, and massages by appointment as they want, then present them with supposedly open cultures of free inquiry, your employees are going to use it. You satiate someone's lower level…
I'd also 2 other elements.
1) The avg. American is much less arrogant and confident in their capabilities compared to 20 or even 10 years ago . So it's natural that they are coming to terms with the fact that they might have to explore any avenue of possible social ladder climbing. Climbing the social ladder via group association was much more frowned upon 20 or even just 10 years ago. Now people happily strap and go for the ride
2) None of this BS would be happening if the economy was growing at 7% Real GDP on a constant basis. You mentioned Maslow, well America is pretty high on the Maslow pyramid, considering the hedonistic treadmill and the law of diminishing returns you need a 7% YoY just to mantain the level of happiness and satisfaction
My problem with politics at work isn’t so much that it’s politics but more that it’s always idiotic performative horseshit. Like please stop pretending you want to “help” a group of people who disproportionately hold the jobs you are automating out of existence etc. More often than not it has more to do with a small number of individuals trying to get more power for themselves than a genuine desire to help anyone.
One example would be GitHub keeping its contract with ICE but changing the master branch to main.
My problem with politics at work isn’t so much that it’s politics but more that it’s always idiotic performative horseshit. Like please stop pretending you want to “help” a group of people who disproportionately hold the jobs you are automating out of existence etc. More often than not it has more to do with a small number of individuals trying to get more power for themselves than a genuine desire to help anyone.
A lot of the time the performative bullshit is the company itself trying to make changes that garner approval and attention but that don't cost it anything significant. One example would be GitHub keeping its contract with ICE but changing the master branch to main.
People are human. But work is work. The canonical point of a workplace is to come together to fulfill the aims of the entrepreneurs. The personal aims of the workers are fulfilled best outside of work. Just stop to think about it logically for a minute... is the workplace the best place to circulate a petition condemning something that has nothing to do with work? The workplace necessarily is going to bring together…
I don't know why people are upset for not being able to flood others with their politics. If you want a conversation, you would want to make sure the receiving end is suitable for a discussion of some sort, probably better when you have 30 minutes to spare, sit together with tea or something.
One thing I don't like politics is that it is all about opinions, generally not about solutions. As an engineer I like solutions, I like tradeoffs, optimizations.
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Basecamp is a small company, but Google was caught helping the US military, while most of the employees working for Google are not Americans. Even one of the cofounders and the current CEO are not American born, which means that they are asked to potentially do things agains their family.
Isn't that where you, the worker, draw a line and say which companies you will work for?