9 ms·

I think that it would not be a bad thing to have more diversity of thought in the tech community, or at least to have some basic level of considerate behavior t

I think that it would not be a bad thing to have more diversity of thought in the tech community, or at least to have some basic level of considerate behavior toward people with different opinions. I grew up in Red America; while I'm politically neutral/apathetic at this point, most of my friends/family are still varying shades of red. It was a drag to have all of my colleagues constantly and casually make insulting remarks about people that I care about. Once, during an oncall shift, I pulled an all-nighter dealing with PagerDutys trying to keep our team's systems up; came in the next day and had to sit through a presentation where an assortment of republican party figures (no, not just Trump) were used as examples of "low IQ people" as part of some contrived metaphor that speaker was trying to make. Everyone laughed. No one made any comment about how this was unprofessional/inappropriate. Felt pretty angry. This kind of environment is unhelpful to everyone. Obviously for folks on the right it is unpleasant, but for folks on the left it contributes to a culture of excessive contempt and hatred, increasingly detached from any actual contact with the people that they hate. This is not helpful for building winning coalitions.

dudul 9y ago
It makes me think of one of our Slack channel at work that is full of jokes about Trump, the GOP, stupid republican voters, etc. To make it clear, I personally don't give a damn F about politics, I don't vote, don't follow any political "drama". But the fact that people feel that it is appropriate to do that at work is pretty mind blowing to me.
- int_19h 9y ago
  It's the ongoing increase in partisanship. It makes it easier to form ideological bubbles even where they didn't exist before, because the ratio is so skewed to begin with, it's entirely possible to end up in a group of people selected by some unrelated criteria (e.g. a work team), and find out that there's a significant overlap ideologically. So issues that were not okay because of the potential to offend someone etc, gradually become acceptable, because (at one particular point) there was no-one in particular to be offended. Of course, once established as part of the culture, this becomes self-reinforcing...

dudul 9y ago

It makes me think of one of our Slack channel at work that is full of jokes about Trump, the GOP, stupid republican voters, etc. To make it clear, I personally don't give a damn F about politics, I don't vote, don't follow any political "drama". But the fact that people feel that it is appropriate to do that at work is pretty mind blowing to me.

int_19h 9y ago
It's the ongoing increase in partisanship. It makes it easier to form ideological bubbles even where they didn't exist before, because the ratio is so skewed to begin with, it's entirely possible to end up in a group of people selected by some unrelated criteria (e.g. a work team), and find out that there's a significant overlap ideologically. So issues that were not okay because of the potential to offend someone etc, gradually become acceptable, because (at one particular point) there was no-one in particular to be offended. Of course, once established as part of the culture, this becomes self-reinforcing...