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I am glad Dang changed the title as the original one was unnecessarily inflammatory. I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss poli

I am glad Dang changed the title as the original one was unnecessarily inflammatory. I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that? > Such a declaration could run afoul of legal boundaries in some circumstances. While workers have no constitutional speech protection in the context of their employment, federal labor law requires that employees be allowed to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment and possible unlawful conduct like harassment, discrimination, and safety violations. This seems like a false dichotomy. There is a difference between being amoral and illegal. The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them). Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics.

tom_mellior 7y ago
> Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics. This cuts both ways: If your employer is known to take millions from ICE to support what ICE does, and your opinion is that ICE is an evil organization, that can also make you "quite uncomfortable". It might also make you want to leave that employer, which would make it harder to "support yourself and your family".
- vowelless 7y ago
  I would suggest leaving, in that case. If not your employer, some other company will fulfill that contract anyway. Millions of people work in the defense industry. I did too, in a different life. I left due to moral reasons (Not that i am doing anything moral today).
  - tom_mellior 7y ago
    > I would suggest leaving, in that case. Well, that's the thing. If that's such a simple thing to do, I would suggest that you leave if you're uncomfortable in a company where employees are allowed to voice their opinions on company policies. You supporting your family is not more important than me supporting mine.
archi42 7y ago
> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. There is a middle-ground between "talking about politics" is "encouraged" and "forbidden".
- marvin-83 7y ago
  yes but large organisations find the middle ground difficult to cultivate. It requires that people avoid becoming excessively emotionally invested in the discussion; such that disagreements do not negatively impact their working relationships. Small teams with good temperaments are easily capable of this. Large organisations tend to look for more definitive policies that can be easily laid out and enforced.
  - archi42 7y ago
    You have a point there (and hence no downvote from me ;-): GitLab is a 961-strong company (all remote, says the website). However, we have much larger nations and, as a society, we should try to get along with each other, despite differences. Mind that this rule even prevents discussing legitimate concerns about customers with your team mates.
- core-questions 7y ago
  Where we seem to find ourselves today is in a position where if you have very progressive politics, you can say whatever you like - no matter how radical - whereas if you have conservative politics you can't even admit that without any specifics without being thought of as evil. This is how we can get away with saying it's "encouraged" while really making sure any meaningful counter-argument is "forbidden" at the same time.
  - sgustard 7y ago
    I work at an oil company in Houston and if I expressed a shred of progressive thought I would be run out of town. Maybe this place is more your speed?
Nullabillity 7y ago
> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that? The health of the democracy is far more important than your company's profit margin. And besides, enforcing silence is still a political move that strongly favours the opinions that the power structures imply with their actions.
- corndoge 7y ago
  I don't want to hear your political opinions at work. I want to work and make money for myself. Just because I have to be at work to make money for myself shouldn't mean I now have to listen to your views on politics. That is my view on it.
  - keithnz 7y ago
    no ones talking about forcing you to talk about it, question is, if you wanted to talk about the ethics / poltical impact of what you are doing with coworkers, shouldn't you be allowed to?
    - scarface74 7y ago
      I come to work for one reason -- to get a paycheck. If you want to talk about politics to your friends/coworkers, do it after work. If you don't like your company's ethics-- change companies.
      - eropple 7y ago
        So nobody should ever advocate for the fictional person to whom their work is assigned, whose existence is granted by the society at large only because of the theory that its existence improves and betters that society, should be a better citizen of that society? That's not super dystopic and antisocial at all.
        7y ago
x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
Why do titles have to be sanitized for this audience? I can't remember of too many other sites whereby the admins have to essentially scrub the original titles. That makes me question the userbase more than it does the writers of said article.
- imposterr 7y ago
  Because as much as we'd like to believe that everyone reads the articles and that editorialized headlines don't affect us, they do. Sanitizing headlines helps people stay on topic.
hannasanarion 7y ago
>America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them). This is a very confusing position to me. It is a bad thing to pick and choose your customers based on moral agreement, unless that morality is defined by the government in which case it's good?
- jimbobimbo 7y ago
  Morality is not defined by the government - legality is. There're a lot of things that a lot of different people deem immoral - based on their religion, upbringing, media consumption and whatnot - which are not illegal. There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view. It's a free country after all.
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    > There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view. Right and wrong are subjective, legal and illegal are objective. From the perspective of the business owner who is focused primarily on maximising revenue / profits for their business, there is nothing wrong with simply focusing on legal compliance. From the perspective of the employee who is motivated by things other than maximising revenue / profits / their own salary, there could be plenty wrong. It’s a free country cuts both ways. Both parties are free to see things as right and wrong as they see fit.
    - jimbobimbo 7y ago
      I'm not sure if we're in disagreement about what living in a free country means. Everyone has their opinion on right and wrong, but as a society we agree that there's a specific set of laws that we all follow, so we all could get along.
    - cgiles 7y ago
repolfx 7y ago
I don't think even Google actually encouraged people to discuss politics at work. They never did when I was there. It was more a side-effect of decentralising the power to create forums. Anyone could create discussion lists there without asking permission, this was highly useful for coordination, making it easy to spin up new projects and avoiding siloing of information into people's private mail accounts. The flip side was nothing stopped anyone creating lists to discuss whatever divisive topics they wanted. There's also been a cultural shift over time. When I first joined Google I remember feeling that it was a pretty libertarian sort of place. In my team several colleagues were openly and proudly very pro-capitalist, anti-communist, small government types. If anyone was left wing it wasn't visible and I don't recall encountering identity politics, ever. There was a very strong cultural commitment to neutrally serving every user with every query, and ranking being completely algorithmic, to the extent that the company agonised over hot-patching "Googlewhacks" where pranksters manipulated results for unusual searches to offend their ideological opponents. This didn't seem strange, it was just how it was. I have a vague feeling I thought other tech firms were the same. Twitter declared they were the free speech wing of the free speech party after all, and anything internet or web related had a strong vibe of "communication will make us stronger". This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments. I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers. The hard shift leftwards in academic institutions has been well documented. Even in 2006 I remember a recruiter telling me they'd "run out" of candidates in the USA and that's why they were expanding more into Europe. The concept you could "run out" of candidates in a place as big as America was pretty shocking to me - on probing, he explained that almost all people with the skills they needed were in well paid happy jobs already and few were interested in moving, even with the great perks on offer. Whilst there were always a small flow of people coming onto the market due to natural churn, "everyone who cares knows Google is hiring" he said, and they'd already interviewed vast numbers of them. This change in culture would inevitably lead to this situation due to the way that conservatives see leftists as naive, but leftists see conservatives as evil. Combined with leftists generally understanding conservatives much worse than the other way around (this has been shown by large scale ITTs), and together it means flooding your firm with new grads is a surefire way to create massive internal conflicts.
silasdavis 7y ago
> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues I am not familiar with companies that encourage discussing politics. Politics is about how people ought to be organised. I find it strange that this would not be something to discuss in the context of many persons primary organisational structure. Part of my remuneration is the effect I may have on the world. Positive or negative.
oarsinsync 7y ago
> The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions While you correctly note that governments can pass sanctions against countries to facilitate trade restrictions, it's worth considering the full context of the article when considering their descent into proving Godwin's law. They explicitly state the example of Chef working with arguably contentious and/or politicized domestic organisations. Given that recent employee protests are based around domestic government organisations, that have (rightly or wrongly) been compared to nationalist and/or protectionist organisations in history, what is the correct course of action there? If you disagree so strongly with your own government, and/or believe your own government cannot be trusted to tell you the truth, what is the correct response? In recent history, we had marches against going to war on what wasn't considered believable grounds. Despite the best intentions of the leaders at the time, who ultimately ignored the peaceful and legitimate protests, the protestors were later proven to be true. Given that backdrop, and the corporate / commercial capture of legislative interests, how is employee activism not a logical next step of 'vote with your wallet' combined with 'change it from the inside'?
rtkwe 7y ago
> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that? The issue is the null stance is functionally equivalent to support for the status quo which at this moment includes a lot of stuff people would not actively sign on to but often feel very content with passively signing off on it. > If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them). This ignores both just how much the business tail wags the legislative dog in the US and the mountain of other factors that prevent or slow Congress from taking action against specific countries.
shuuut 7y ago
You are right. We should not allow any discussion at work that is not about the work itself. There are so many things that can disturb team cohesion! Even non political ones like talking about if you prefer rain or sun, or fries with mayo or ketchup. Thank you! And now let’s go back to work...
microtherion 7y ago
> Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product Do you think the Gitlab CEO's policy declaration helped or hurt team cohesion?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Depends on how it was received by actual employees. We don't know how many received this positively vs. negatively. Evaporative cooling of group beliefs does actually work to increase cohesion. If, given a controversial decision like this, people who disagree with it pack up and leave, the variance of opinion within the company will actually decrease, improving cohesion.
  - microtherion 7y ago
    I see. Your scope of "cohesion" is at whatever remains of the team AFTER the divisive action by the CEO. My scope was the ORIGINAL team. I agree that decreeing a divisive policy and prohibiting dissent tends to leave one with a more "cohesive" team. I very much doubt that it's a commercially optimal strategy. You end up with (a) true believers, who build up group think and (b) yes-people and the spineless, neither of which strike me as high value contributors. You've optimized for agreement, rather than excellence, as a hiring criterium. I would much rather see "cohesion" in the form of a team that, DESPITE widely diverging views, manages to agree on a common vision.
eropple 7y ago
> The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries You're talking countries--that's one case but it's not the only case. America also has Nazis. Here. They are Americans. Even if they weren't, it's an abdication one's core moral responsibilities to one's community and society with this kind of "oh, ask your [bought] legislator [about something unrelated]" do-nothingism. But they are. I'd make damned sure that an executive team knew it was them or me before I took one thin dime that might've come from Richard Spencer or one of our other homegrown Nazis. When I was a consultant I fired clients for less and I slept great for doing so. It's literally the minimum duty I have to my community and to the human race at large--the denial of custom to hostis humanis generis wherever they rear their heads? A bare minimum of decency.
- hnuser54 7y ago
  I'd do the same, but this is just describing the choice of every worker in a free labor market. And almost nobody in the US has more labor market power than tech workers. Some people leave their jobs because their leadership is too Christian, or their boss is an adulterer, or whatever reason.
ljm 7y ago
I don’t think the issue is politics itself really, it’s more of a lack of maturity or compassion when it comes to having the conversation. If people engaged in the conversation aren’t prepared to take every participant seriously, no matter their politics stance, then it’s a sure-fire way to create a toxic work environment. You can’t go into it with the assumption that everyone needs to be a left-leaning liberal, or that it’s okay to bully a Trump voter (or vice-versa with right-leaning and Obama). If at that point you can hold a conversation about politics without losing your shit as soon as someone supports something you don’t like, then encouraging it is fine. If you’re still in the mindset of having compassion for only the people on your own side then some growing up needs to happen first. Otherwise all it does is alienate those colleagues with marginal beliefs. Not exactly diverse and inclusive then. And it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll enable far-right nutjobs or neo-Nazis as a result. HR tends to frown on things like racism and such like, it wouldn’t really get very far.
com2kid 7y ago
I had plenty of conversations at work about differing tax policies, libertarian vs authoritarian policies in regards to land ownership, drug legalization, military action, etc. The problem is the willingness of people to engage in civil discourse has fallen off a cliff. "Thought leaders" on both sides are making serious $$$ by convincing their followers that the other side is to be truly despised and that all opposition must be met with aggression of some sort (if not physical, verbal, spiritual, etc). Creating an us vs. them mentality has proven (yet again in history) to be very profitable. Every time this happens, the results are regrettable and 50 years later everyone is looking at history books going "what the holy hell were they thinking?" tl;dr the problem isn't discussing politics at work, the problem is that society in general has turned into a team sport where people pick sides and start acting like hooligans when they meet someone from the other side.
southerndrift 7y ago
>I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that? Fail early. You can achieve cohesion by letting go of everybody who cannot discuss politics in a civilized manner. Then you can be sure that the remaining team can discuss anything without any problems. On the other hand, is it cohesion when the team is held together by outer influences?
shantly 7y ago
> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that? I'm not usually a "the people in power are actively trying to keep the workers divided amongst themselves and seeing one another as the enemy, so they don't organize against the people who are actually keeping them down" sort, but in this specific case... well, there might be a bit of that going on, at least for what "political discussion" usually means in the context of SV-type workplaces.

tom_mellior 7y ago

> Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics. This cuts both ways: If your employer is known to take millions from ICE to support what ICE does, and your opinion is that ICE is an evil organization, that can also make you "quite uncomfortable". It might also make you want to leave that employer, which would make it harder to "support yourself and your family".

vowelless 7y ago
I would suggest leaving, in that case. If not your employer, some other company will fulfill that contract anyway. Millions of people work in the defense industry. I did too, in a different life. I left due to moral reasons (Not that i am doing anything moral today).
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  > I would suggest leaving, in that case. Well, that's the thing. If that's such a simple thing to do, I would suggest that you leave if you're uncomfortable in a company where employees are allowed to voice their opinions on company policies. You supporting your family is not more important than me supporting mine.

archi42 7y ago

> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. There is a middle-ground between "talking about politics" is "encouraged" and "forbidden".

marvin-83 7y ago
yes but large organisations find the middle ground difficult to cultivate. It requires that people avoid becoming excessively emotionally invested in the discussion; such that disagreements do not negatively impact their working relationships. Small teams with good temperaments are easily capable of this. Large organisations tend to look for more definitive policies that can be easily laid out and enforced.
- archi42 7y ago
  You have a point there (and hence no downvote from me ;-): GitLab is a 961-strong company (all remote, says the website). However, we have much larger nations and, as a society, we should try to get along with each other, despite differences. Mind that this rule even prevents discussing legitimate concerns about customers with your team mates.
core-questions 7y ago
Where we seem to find ourselves today is in a position where if you have very progressive politics, you can say whatever you like - no matter how radical - whereas if you have conservative politics you can't even admit that without any specifics without being thought of as evil. This is how we can get away with saying it's "encouraged" while really making sure any meaningful counter-argument is "forbidden" at the same time.
- sgustard 7y ago
  I work at an oil company in Houston and if I expressed a shred of progressive thought I would be run out of town. Maybe this place is more your speed?

Nullabillity 7y ago

corndoge 7y ago
I don't want to hear your political opinions at work. I want to work and make money for myself. Just because I have to be at work to make money for myself shouldn't mean I now have to listen to your views on politics. That is my view on it.
- keithnz 7y ago
  no ones talking about forcing you to talk about it, question is, if you wanted to talk about the ethics / poltical impact of what you are doing with coworkers, shouldn't you be allowed to?
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I come to work for one reason -- to get a paycheck. If you want to talk about politics to your friends/coworkers, do it after work. If you don't like your company's ethics-- change companies.
    - eropple 7y ago
      So nobody should ever advocate for the fictional person to whom their work is assigned, whose existence is granted by the society at large only because of the theory that its existence improves and betters that society, should be a better citizen of that society? That's not super dystopic and antisocial at all.
      - 7y ago

x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago

Why do titles have to be sanitized for this audience? I can't remember of too many other sites whereby the admins have to essentially scrub the original titles. That makes me question the userbase more than it does the writers of said article.

imposterr 7y ago
Because as much as we'd like to believe that everyone reads the articles and that editorialized headlines don't affect us, they do. Sanitizing headlines helps people stay on topic.

hannasanarion 7y ago

>America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them). This is a very confusing position to me. It is a bad thing to pick and choose your customers based on moral agreement, unless that morality is defined by the government in which case it's good?

jimbobimbo 7y ago
Morality is not defined by the government - legality is. There're a lot of things that a lot of different people deem immoral - based on their religion, upbringing, media consumption and whatnot - which are not illegal. There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view. It's a free country after all.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  > There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view. Right and wrong are subjective, legal and illegal are objective. From the perspective of the business owner who is focused primarily on maximising revenue / profits for their business, there is nothing wrong with simply focusing on legal compliance. From the perspective of the employee who is motivated by things other than maximising revenue / profits / their own salary, there could be plenty wrong. It’s a free country cuts both ways. Both parties are free to see things as right and wrong as they see fit.
  - jimbobimbo 7y ago
    I'm not sure if we're in disagreement about what living in a free country means. Everyone has their opinion on right and wrong, but as a society we agree that there's a specific set of laws that we all follow, so we all could get along.
  - cgiles 7y ago

repolfx 7y ago

I don't think even Google actually encouraged people to discuss politics at work. They never did when I was there. It was more a side-effect of decentralising the power to create forums. Anyone could create discussion lists there without asking permission, this was highly useful for coordination, making it easy to spin up new projects and avoiding siloing of information into people's private mail accounts. The flip side was nothing stopped anyone creating lists to discuss whatever divisive topics they wanted. There's also been a cultural shift over time. When I first joined Google I remember feeling that it was a pretty libertarian sort of place. In my team several colleagues were openly and proudly very pro-capitalist, anti-communist, small government types. If anyone was left wing it wasn't visible and I don't recall encountering identity politics, ever. There was a very strong cultural commitment to neutrally serving every user with every query, and ranking being completely algorithmic, to the extent that the company agonised over hot-patching "Googlewhacks" where pranksters manipulated results for unusual searches to offend their ideological opponents. This didn't seem strange, it was just how it was. I have a vague feeling I thought other tech firms were the same. Twitter declared they were the free speech wing of the free speech party after all, and anything internet or web related had a strong vibe of "communication will make us stronger". This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments. I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers. The hard shift leftwards in academic institutions has been well documented. Even in 2006 I remember a recruiter telling me they'd "run out" of candidates in the USA and that's why they were expanding more into Europe. The concept you could "run out" of candidates in a place as big as America was pretty shocking to me - on probing, he explained that almost all people with the skills they needed were in well paid happy jobs already and few were interested in moving, even with the great perks on offer. Whilst there were always a small flow of people coming onto the market due to natural churn, "everyone who cares knows Google is hiring" he said, and they'd already interviewed vast numbers of them. This change in culture would inevitably lead to this situation due to the way that conservatives see leftists as naive, but leftists see conservatives as evil. Combined with leftists generally understanding conservatives much worse than the other way around (this has been shown by large scale ITTs), and together it means flooding your firm with new grads is a surefire way to create massive internal conflicts.

silasdavis 7y ago

> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues I am not familiar with companies that encourage discussing politics. Politics is about how people ought to be organised. I find it strange that this would not be something to discuss in the context of many persons primary organisational structure. Part of my remuneration is the effect I may have on the world. Positive or negative.

oarsinsync 7y ago

> The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions While you correctly note that governments can pass sanctions against countries to facilitate trade restrictions, it's worth considering the full context of the article when considering their descent into proving Godwin's law. They explicitly state the example of Chef working with arguably contentious and/or politicized domestic organisations. Given that recent employee protests are based around domestic government organisations, that have (rightly or wrongly) been compared to nationalist and/or protectionist organisations in history, what is the correct course of action there? If you disagree so strongly with your own government, and/or believe your own government cannot be trusted to tell you the truth, what is the correct response? In recent history, we had marches against going to war on what wasn't considered believable grounds. Despite the best intentions of the leaders at the time, who ultimately ignored the peaceful and legitimate protests, the protestors were later proven to be true. Given that backdrop, and the corporate / commercial capture of legislative interests, how is employee activism not a logical next step of 'vote with your wallet' combined with 'change it from the inside'?

rtkwe 7y ago

> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that? The issue is the null stance is functionally equivalent to support for the status quo which at this moment includes a lot of stuff people would not actively sign on to but often feel very content with passively signing off on it. > If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them). This ignores both just how much the business tail wags the legislative dog in the US and the mountain of other factors that prevent or slow Congress from taking action against specific countries.

shuuut 7y ago

You are right. We should not allow any discussion at work that is not about the work itself. There are so many things that can disturb team cohesion! Even non political ones like talking about if you prefer rain or sun, or fries with mayo or ketchup. Thank you! And now let’s go back to work...

microtherion 7y ago

> Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product Do you think the Gitlab CEO's policy declaration helped or hurt team cohesion?

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Depends on how it was received by actual employees. We don't know how many received this positively vs. negatively. Evaporative cooling of group beliefs does actually work to increase cohesion. If, given a controversial decision like this, people who disagree with it pack up and leave, the variance of opinion within the company will actually decrease, improving cohesion.
- microtherion 7y ago
  I see. Your scope of "cohesion" is at whatever remains of the team AFTER the divisive action by the CEO. My scope was the ORIGINAL team. I agree that decreeing a divisive policy and prohibiting dissent tends to leave one with a more "cohesive" team. I very much doubt that it's a commercially optimal strategy. You end up with (a) true believers, who build up group think and (b) yes-people and the spineless, neither of which strike me as high value contributors. You've optimized for agreement, rather than excellence, as a hiring criterium. I would much rather see "cohesion" in the form of a team that, DESPITE widely diverging views, manages to agree on a common vision.

eropple 7y ago

> The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries You're talking countries--that's one case but it's not the only case. America also has Nazis. Here. They are Americans. Even if they weren't, it's an abdication one's core moral responsibilities to one's community and society with this kind of "oh, ask your [bought] legislator [about something unrelated]" do-nothingism. But they are. I'd make damned sure that an executive team knew it was them or me before I took one thin dime that might've come from Richard Spencer or one of our other homegrown Nazis. When I was a consultant I fired clients for less and I slept great for doing so. It's literally the minimum duty I have to my community and to the human race at large--the denial of custom to hostis humanis generis wherever they rear their heads? A bare minimum of decency.

hnuser54 7y ago
I'd do the same, but this is just describing the choice of every worker in a free labor market. And almost nobody in the US has more labor market power than tech workers. Some people leave their jobs because their leadership is too Christian, or their boss is an adulterer, or whatever reason.

ljm 7y ago

I don’t think the issue is politics itself really, it’s more of a lack of maturity or compassion when it comes to having the conversation. If people engaged in the conversation aren’t prepared to take every participant seriously, no matter their politics stance, then it’s a sure-fire way to create a toxic work environment. You can’t go into it with the assumption that everyone needs to be a left-leaning liberal, or that it’s okay to bully a Trump voter (or vice-versa with right-leaning and Obama). If at that point you can hold a conversation about politics without losing your shit as soon as someone supports something you don’t like, then encouraging it is fine. If you’re still in the mindset of having compassion for only the people on your own side then some growing up needs to happen first. Otherwise all it does is alienate those colleagues with marginal beliefs. Not exactly diverse and inclusive then. And it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll enable far-right nutjobs or neo-Nazis as a result. HR tends to frown on things like racism and such like, it wouldn’t really get very far.

com2kid 7y ago

I had plenty of conversations at work about differing tax policies, libertarian vs authoritarian policies in regards to land ownership, drug legalization, military action, etc. The problem is the willingness of people to engage in civil discourse has fallen off a cliff. "Thought leaders" on both sides are making serious $$$ by convincing their followers that the other side is to be truly despised and that all opposition must be met with aggression of some sort (if not physical, verbal, spiritual, etc). Creating an us vs. them mentality has proven (yet again in history) to be very profitable. Every time this happens, the results are regrettable and 50 years later everyone is looking at history books going "what the holy hell were they thinking?" tl;dr the problem isn't discussing politics at work, the problem is that society in general has turned into a team sport where people pick sides and start acting like hooligans when they meet someone from the other side.

southerndrift 7y ago

>I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that? Fail early. You can achieve cohesion by letting go of everybody who cannot discuss politics in a civilized manner. Then you can be sure that the remaining team can discuss anything without any problems. On the other hand, is it cohesion when the team is held together by outer influences?

shantly 7y ago

> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that? I'm not usually a "the people in power are actively trying to keep the workers divided amongst themselves and seeing one another as the enemy, so they don't organize against the people who are actually keeping them down" sort, but in this specific case... well, there might be a bit of that going on, at least for what "political discussion" usually means in the context of SV-type workplaces.