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My employer knows two things about me: A) I will not work on/for military/defense products/clients, unless there is some blatantly obvious noble characteristic

My employer knows two things about me: A) I will not work on/for military/defense products/clients, unless there is some blatantly obvious noble characteristic about the project (I come from a background in video analytics). B) I will not work on/for conservative products/clients. Luckily I'm in a job and industry where both of these are pretty unlikely. I've done the latter (B) once and I really, really regret my role in it to this day. It only took once, just once, but it just happened to be one of the of the worst offenders in the U.S. political landscape. Knowing that I basically optimized disinformation campaigns and built media platforms for some of these people eats at my soul, especially when I see the current state of the U.S. -- I helped some jackass convince a whole slew of people that electing a fraud was the Right (TM) choice. Now we have concentration camps for children (with no reunification process), our healthcare is even worse than it was somehow, we're in multiple trade wars, and we definitely don't give a single shit about the environment (look at today's news feed about the U.S. drilling policies). And I helped it happen. Sorry for the rant. But engineers have a moral duty to be selective in who they're aiding. I was all too happy to watch pretty graphs go up, and up, and up. I was foolish. I just cared about the project and how challenging it was. Good on the engineers at Google for being principled.

bayfullofrays 8y ago
I am with you on this. I am a recruiter for a large tech company in Seattle and with the recent political environment, I have asked my team to take it upon themselves to ask if the person they are going to bring into our team and our community is going to help us progress as a whole. I get angered when people tell me to look at just their CV, but there is so much more there. If I know that someone on their Facebook profile liked some Alt-Right podcast or calls themselves a "Libertarian" on their Twitter profile, I know that there is a good chance that they are not going to work well in an inclusive environment. So I save us both the trouble and move past the candidate. We have an obligation to stand up for our beliefs if we are going to see the change we need.
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  - kadenshep 8y ago
    Yeah, this is an incredibly unordinary talking point and it's not honest. At the very least it's just troll bait. "I hope your org gets sued." For what, not hiring crazy racist people? It's okay to call a spade a spade, instead of trying to masquerade these "differences" as some kind of valid, constructive view point. It's incredibly politically correct and it's annoying. The chances of you actually being a good, intelligent engineer that harbors absurd and morally repulsive view points tends to be astoundingly low in my experience. It's often been my experience that engineers that seemingly struggle with abstract concepts tend to harbor pretty nutty viewpoints once you start talking with them. There seems to be a pretty heavy correlation here, in my experience. And I keep saying in my experience, but I think the phenemon is well understood across the industry. The chances of you not believing in the scientific valdity of global warming, or being okay with the current mess that is the health care market, and being able to model and reason about abstract concepts tends to be... misaligned. Or if you can't even rationally talk with people without being disingenuous. These tend to be decently understood subjects and if you're not able to comphrehend them the chances of you being able to reason about technically hard problems in an efficient manner is going to be low. Hackers aren't supposed to be politically correct, yet this talking point gets brought up every thread and it's pretty boring and old. I've worded the above like 3 different ways to avoid the predictable responses. And for the record, I look at U.S. conservative candidates with extreme suspicion because of the above. I don't mind differing opinions. I hired an anarchist which is completely opposed to nearly everything I politically believe. Except for a few key points. His ideas are academically sound, well researched, and he's not xenophobic/homophobic or just generally unscientific. That's a far cry from what happens when U.S. conservative politics get involved.
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      [deleted]
      - kadenshep 8y ago
        Do yourself a favor and re-read my post. And yes. It's an agreed upon view point.
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bayfullofrays 8y ago

I am with you on this. I am a recruiter for a large tech company in Seattle and with the recent political environment, I have asked my team to take it upon themselves to ask if the person they are going to bring into our team and our community is going to help us progress as a whole. I get angered when people tell me to look at just their CV, but there is so much more there. If I know that someone on their Facebook profile liked some Alt-Right podcast or calls themselves a "Libertarian" on their Twitter profile, I know that there is a good chance that they are not going to work well in an inclusive environment. So I save us both the trouble and move past the candidate. We have an obligation to stand up for our beliefs if we are going to see the change we need.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
- kadenshep 8y ago
  Yeah, this is an incredibly unordinary talking point and it's not honest. At the very least it's just troll bait. "I hope your org gets sued." For what, not hiring crazy racist people? It's okay to call a spade a spade, instead of trying to masquerade these "differences" as some kind of valid, constructive view point. It's incredibly politically correct and it's annoying. The chances of you actually being a good, intelligent engineer that harbors absurd and morally repulsive view points tends to be astoundingly low in my experience. It's often been my experience that engineers that seemingly struggle with abstract concepts tend to harbor pretty nutty viewpoints once you start talking with them. There seems to be a pretty heavy correlation here, in my experience. And I keep saying in my experience, but I think the phenemon is well understood across the industry. The chances of you not believing in the scientific valdity of global warming, or being okay with the current mess that is the health care market, and being able to model and reason about abstract concepts tends to be... misaligned. Or if you can't even rationally talk with people without being disingenuous. These tend to be decently understood subjects and if you're not able to comphrehend them the chances of you being able to reason about technically hard problems in an efficient manner is going to be low. Hackers aren't supposed to be politically correct, yet this talking point gets brought up every thread and it's pretty boring and old. I've worded the above like 3 different ways to avoid the predictable responses. And for the record, I look at U.S. conservative candidates with extreme suspicion because of the above. I don't mind differing opinions. I hired an anarchist which is completely opposed to nearly everything I politically believe. Except for a few key points. His ideas are academically sound, well researched, and he's not xenophobic/homophobic or just generally unscientific. That's a far cry from what happens when U.S. conservative politics get involved.
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    [deleted]
    - kadenshep 8y ago
      Do yourself a favor and re-read my post. And yes. It's an agreed upon view point.

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