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At 3 paragraphs (131 words), that was a really short article. However, I agree with the subheading: "Mark Zuckerberg says employees shouldn’t have to confront s

At 3 paragraphs (131 words), that was a really short article. However, I agree with the subheading: "Mark Zuckerberg says employees shouldn’t have to confront social issues in their day-to-day work unless they want to" That sounds good to me. I've never had to talk about these kind of things at work. Are there work places where this is unavoidable?

daok 6y ago
Yes. There are places where employees MUST go in these meetings that talk about social differences, inclusions, diversity, etc.
- deleted 6y ago
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- dahart 6y ago
  Everyone has to discuss diversity at work because there are laws prohibiting discrimination, that's a good thing. Not everyone has to discuss politics at work.
  - ikiris 6y ago
    I'd love it if there was a difference between the two again.
    - dahart 6y ago
      I think I know what you mean, and me too. But... mandatory diversity training at work is typically very bland, sticks to communicating what the rules are, and is very apolitical compared to forums, employee banter, or stuff you find on the news or Facebook or YouTube. Having been through a bunch of them at several companies, I wouldn't put them in the same camp as 'politics' at all.
      - stagehn 6y ago
        It is heavily political since there's no evidence of efficacy. You can see the heterodox academy piece that summarises the available evidence. Since it is not efficacious then I'm forced to conclude that the motive is political and ideological.
  - stateofnounion 6y ago
    > Everyone has to discuss diversity at work because there are laws prohibiting discrimination How are these two things causally connected in your mind?
    - dahart 6y ago
      Are you implying they're not connected, that discrimination and diversity are unrelated? Your wording makes it sound like some kind of political debate trap you're setting. FWIW, I'm uninterested in arguing here why and whether there should be such laws, or justifying efforts to prevent discrimination. The existence of these laws is a fact, and you're free to study the history and legal precedents for why they exist. Here's a generic but decent starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination
      - davidivadavid 6y ago
        No. He's implying that the fact something is a law doesn't mean your employer should lecture you about it.
        dahart 6y ago
        Why? Isn't making people aware of laws how you abide by them? The risk of not educating people and being caught ignoring abuses is fairly serious. Broadly speaking, some of the laws we're talking about are laws that specifically require making employees aware of their existence.
        s1artibartfast 6y ago
        I think they are talking about meetings at work which do not focus on the law or workplace etiquette, but serve to raise awareness of for diversity/minority/social justice issues outside the workplace.
        dahart 6y ago
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    > Everyone has to discuss diversity at work because there are laws prohibiting discrimination Sorry, but this is misleading. Most such companies are actively complying with antidiscrimination laws. These diversity discussions/initiatives at work are almost always unrelated to those laws. It's not a case of "Hey, we suddenly realized we're not complying with laws, so let's launch these initiatives." Most such discussions don't have any content about the law or legal aspects because they are not about laws prohibiting discrimination.
    - dahart 6y ago
      What are the initiatives about then, if not the laws and/or prohibiting discrimination? Do these companies agree with your claim, are you getting that from HR and/or company lawyers, or is this an opinion? I've never been to a diversity training program that did not talk about the laws, and I've been to many. You are suggesting that companies are wasting their money for no reason, and consciously running training programs that are unnecessary? Why would "most" companies do that? > Most such companies are actively complying with antidiscrimination laws. Complying with US discrimination law means that companies are providing "reasonable accomodations" for people in historically discriminated categories, and for anyone who might file a complaint in the future. Educating the employees about acceptable behavior is a pretty obvious way to avoid getting sued. > It's not a case of "Hey, we suddenly realized we're not complying with laws, so let's launch these initiatives." The risk of running into both PR & legal trouble over diversity complaints has risen over time, due to increasing levels of education, increasing exposure to cases of discrimination and abuse, and generally increasing awareness of diversity issues.
      - BeetleB 6y ago
        I am speaking specifically to diversity initiatives visible to all employees, as opposed to those that are specific to managers or HR. The law doesn't require us to banish the phrase "master/slave" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative. The law doesn't require us to banish the words "whitelist/blacklist" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative. The law requires we do not discriminate based on a protected category (gender, race, etc). We have always been compliant. However, the law does not require us to hold special recruiting events for underrepresented folks when we are already compliant, but yet that is a major part of my company's diversity initiative.[1] There are pay disparity laws. We were fully compliant before they became the law. They are not part of the diversity initiative and usually not discussed. The law doesn't prohibit us from saying "Merry Christmas!" but our diversity initiative addresses this. The list goes on and on. Note: I am not saying I'm against such initiatives. Merely noting that at least for my company (and jurisdiction), these initiatives are not about what the law requires. We have always had employee expectations training for all employees, and it already covered things required by law, long before the company dove into these initiatives. It may be that your company's diversity initiative is about legal compliance, but for many company's, it is a lot more than that (by a lot, I mean the majority of the initiative is not required by law). > The risk of running into both PR & legal trouble There's a world of a difference between PR trouble and legal trouble. Your comment originally was about the legal side, and so is my response. I do believe that most diversity initiatives are about PR, and not about the law, which was why I responded. [1] These are invite-only, and so it's not open to all groups - just the ones we picked.
  - hnreader998 6y ago
    Oddly, companies are actively and deliberately discriminating against race and gender in tech companies in the name of diversity and inclusion. It boggles my mind that none of them have been sued yet for these practices.
    - dahart 6y ago
      What are you referring to?
      - hnreader998 6y ago
        I should have been more clear. Like someone else mentioned, these diversity (and inclusion) discussions are not related to discrimination laws and equal opportunity. They are always related to increasing diversity in the company by hiring more underrepresented people (previously this just meant women in eng but now it's been expanded to POC). In order to achieve this, companies are actively discriminating against non-minorities, which some may call positive discrimination. Regardless, it's discrimination nonetheless and it's very common yet somehow nobody cares.
        dahart 6y ago
        > these diversity (and inclusion) discussions are not related to discrimination laws and equal opportunity. FWIW, that's a claim that doesn't quite match my experience at work, nor of talking to some of the people who implement these programs. Though to be clear, we were talking about widespread mandatory company-wide meetings, not any old discussion on inclusion that happens to occur while at work. We may need to get more specific about which programs we're talking about, they're certainly not identical everywhere. It also doesn't seem to add up when I read our current laws, which are changing over time to emphasize. > In order to achieve this, companies are activity discriminating against non-minorities, which some may call positive discrimination. The historical term for this is affirmative action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action), and the idea is to temporarily increase benefits for a disadvantaged group, not to intentionally decrease benefits for the advantaged group. Calling it discrimination, therefore, is a framing that isn't always true, and is somewhat political. It's not always true because things aren't always zero sum. If I choose to give someone a dollar, you don't lose a dollar. If there really are a fixed number of jobs at a company that is 80/20 men, and the company decides 30% must go to women, then technically yes, that is a form of discrimination. But - just hypothetically - is it a negative discrimination if the reason that the company is 80/20 men in the first place is because it previously discriminated against women, and would have been 50/50 without several decades of history of unspoken discrimination? It's important to also think about a few things- One, that unlike social prejudices, affirmative action is not intended to be permanent. It's intended to help boost people who've been unfairly and systematically disadvantaged, while they're disadvantaged, and only until things even out. After that, the boost should go away by design. Two, that some of those disadvantages in history have been really extreme, and the kind of discrimination you might imagine you feel when your company tries to hire more women isn't the same order of magnitude of what women and black people as a whole have gone through. > Regardless, it's discrimination nonetheless and it's very common yet somehow nobody cares. Is all discrimination bad always? I'm very discriminating about my partners. I'm not sure that nobody cares, I think some people are in favor of seeing that gender and racial injustices actually go away, since not doing anything about it hasn't worked yet.
samthecoy 6y ago
If you work for a large social network with huge social responsibilities, discussions about ethics ought to be unavoidable, in my opinion. If you're writing accounting software for paper suppliers or something equally banal with few ethical implications, then sure, there's no need (and less reason) to have water cooler conversations about pro-genocide agitprop or whatever. EDIT to add that of course not all departments at Facebook make the sort of decisions that have a marked social impact. More referring to the content policy teams, and the news feed algo teams, and so on.
- toomim 6y ago
  > If you work ... with huge social responsibilities, discussions about ethics ought to be unavoidable, in my opinion. The problem is distinguishing ethics from politics. These are very hard to disentangle, because ethical values are usually based on some political orientation. And I don't want Facebook to be making political decisions on my behalf, as a user. And I don't even want internal employee discussions to be derailed by political considerations. So how do you distinguish ethics from politics? I don't think it's possible, unless the company defines its own ethical values, a priori, and only considers those when making decisions. If you read the article, I think that this is precisely what Facebook's new policy is trying to do by putting a fence around "social issues."
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    > because ethical values are usually based on some political orientation Are you sure that isn't exactly backwards? Because it definitely should be the other direction in my very strong opinion. One's morals or beliefs on ethics should inform their politics, not the other way around. One way is based around a person's inner being, the other is molding their being and stances based on a sports team.
    - sigstoat 6y ago
      one of you is describing the world as it is, and the other the world as you think it ought to be.
jseliger 6y ago
It's interesting to watch companies rediscover the old rule about leaving politics and religion at the door.
- jjice 6y ago
  It seems like it's slowly died over the past decade. Thankfully, my past two jobs were very work focused without much political involvement. However, I'm sure it's easier for my jobs since they were for a retail company and an engineering firm.
- deleted 6y ago
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- dylan604 6y ago
  When your company is the place the rest of the planet gather to discuss these very topics, it's not easy to not have to talk about them just in discussing what topics your platform is being used.
- munificent 6y ago
  If a business wants its employees to leave politics at the door, the business should too. If Facebook is going to have departments for government affairs, public policy, and lobbying, then it is entirely reasonable for employees to be politically active too. Otherwise, you're basically saying corporations should participate in the political process but individuals should not. And that's exactly how we got the Earth into the increasingly shitty state it is currently in.
  - reader_mode 6y ago
    That's a straw man argument, just because an employee isn't allowed to bring politics to work doesn't mean they can't be politically active on their own time.
    - munificent 6y ago
      So individuals can do recreational politics but corporations are free to sink as much of their resources into it as they want? Is your claim that we really need more corporate control over politics in the US and less citizen participation?
jsabo 6y ago
That depends on if your existence is political I suppose. Ask some of your LGBT colleagues, especially trans colleagues, if they feel like can just leave politics at the door.
- travisoneill1 6y ago
  I have worked with many LGBT colleagues who never bring up politics at work. This "existence is political" thing is just a bullshit phrase that the obnoxious people who can't go an hour without bringing that crap up use to justify it.
  - jsabo 6y ago
    Remember there are multiple supreme court cases just this year about trans people's right to both be trans and employed. That's part of what is meant by "existence being political".
  - nagaiaida 6y ago
    How confident are you that the root cause of that political silence is a shared belief that politics shouldn't come up in the workplace rather than potential concern about the effects of openly discussing the issues that affect them?
  - ketzo 6y ago
    Correction: they never brought up politics to you. You don't know that they weren't political in their discussions with other colleagues. Perhaps it is worth considering why that might be the case. People whose existences are deeply politicized (and they do indeed exist) are not often excited to have political conversations with people who say things like "'existence is political' thing is just a bullshit phrase." I'm not trying to be a dick, but it took me a long time to realize that there were conversations I was not being made a part of because I was not receptive to, or dismissive of, those conversations.
    - tha0x4 6y ago
      >People whose existences are deeply politicized (and they do indeed exist) are not often excited to have political conversations with people who say things like "'existence is political' thing is just a bullshit phrase." It is a bullshit phrase though. They don't want to bring anything up because any skepticism is viewed as a direct attack on their ideology, and their ideology is the core of their existence, so, calling out the illogic of their ideology is a political attack on their existence. It's an old tactic used the world over in places like communist Russia, China and North Korea.
lacker 6y ago
I was working at Facebook during the 2016 election and it was pretty unavoidable. A big part of the problem was just that everyone was using Facebook for work all the time. So quite often, there would be some enormous thread arguing about whether X or Y was the right policy, was Trump violating the rules and should be kicked off Facebook, or was Facebook's anti-Trump policies violating freedom of speech, or was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting, etc etc. And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week, could you provide feedback on it. Type X of hardware is being deprecated next quarter. So you really have to be checking Facebook-for-work consistently for professional reasons. You have to scroll past the political debates all the time.
- mattm 6y ago
  I was shocked when I learned that employees at Facebook use Facebook internally for work related discussions. Facebook is not built for that purpose.
  - lacker 6y ago
    It is actually built for that purpose! Or at least, there are many people dedicated to optimizing the use of Facebook at work, selling it into companies as an enterprise solution, and so on. There are millions of paying customers. At some point I believe it was called "Facebook for Work" but now it has been rebranded as "Workplace from Facebook". Some features are work-specific, but it feels basically like you are using the Facebook interface, but just with all the content being from your coworkers about work stuff. https://www.workplace.com/ https://www.workplace.com/
    - ryan_lane 6y ago
      Easily one of the worst "productivity" tools I've ever been forced to use. Like facebook, it's optimized to bring your eyes to it, and not to make you productive. Notifications are exactly like facebook notifications, so you'll get an email that says "open workplace to see this". To use the tool effectively, you need to have it open at all times. It's a weird in-between state of slack and email, where it's somewhat async and somewhat sync. You'll get overwhelmed with notifications and will want to have "inbox zero", which is considerably more difficult than in email, where you can optimize your workflow. The sidebar will have a list of groups you're in with read/notification counts that make absolutely no sense. It also has chat functionality that can't be turned off, and it's not group based. It's like being forced to use gchat for all communications. It has a "organization tree" feature that requires employees to fill in their own reporting structure. This also can't be turned off. If you want your employees to spend all day chatting in forums inside of facebook, workplace is the product for you.
wmichelin 6y ago
Facebook is not your average workplace. If your platform is profiting off of active political misinformation, you have an obligation to not only discuss these issues, but solve them. If you determine that you can't solve them, it's time to stop accepting the money.
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  Most employees at Facebook are doing nothing of the sort. They are working on databases and internal tools and changing the color of buttons. If you work on an integrity team then yes, you'll have to discuss such issues, but most employees don't.
  - jonathankoren 6y ago
    But they are. Everyone at the company is complicit. Lets say you're a delivery driver for a pizza parlor that is famous for the level of rat poison in its sauce. Do you continue to knowingly deliver the poison pizzas because you're not the one making the sauce? Afterall, who's going to deliver the poisonous pizzas? Come on. This is right up there with, "I was just following orders."
  - onion2k 6y ago
    One of the things I love about startups is feeling like my input is partially responsible for the mission, culture, and direction of the company. I can't imagine doing work for a company that was doing something and not feeling like I'm making a contribution to that goal. Maybe you're right and developers at FB don't see that they have any responsibility or input towards what FB does with the tech they build, but I hope not. It would be horrible to be that detached from the outcome of your work.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    That feels disturbingly close to a "just following orders" defense. Just because you're in the basement keeping the boiler running, it doesn't mean you can ignore what goes on upstairs. If what they're doing upstairs is unethical, it's unethical for you to keep the lights on for them.
hnreader998 6y ago
It's even worse than unavoidable. My company has removed any kind of anonymous discussion/Q&A, which just fuels a mono culture. You only get one-sided discussions because going against the grain will be career suicide.
- onion2k 6y ago
  All this means is that you value your career over the political statement you want to make. The point you want to contribute isn't all that important to you. This is why it's worthwhile listening to people who speak out when there is a cost to themselves - they believe in what they're saying enough to sacrific something for it.
  - hnreader998 6y ago
    I don't disagree. My main point is that at a bay area tech company, the cost is one-sided, which drives company policies and philosophies, all while endlessly preaching about diversity.
  - NicolasGorden 6y ago
    This seems naïve. Cost is a factor. Greg, a nobody who nobody likes says X thing - X isn't a big deal, and doesn't affect most people and about 45% of people would agree X shouldn't be said, even if it isn't a big deal. Mark, a senior directo who everybody loves says Y thing - Y is a big deal, but only 10% of people would agree it shouldn't be said. Guess which will get called out?
  - rjkennedy98 6y ago
    You are right we should listen more to terroristic suicide bombers because they put their lives on the line for what they believe /s. Seriously, haven’t they don’t studies that most of these revolutionaries are actually not very smart people. How does risking your life for a cause have anything to do with being correct about an issue?
tanilama 6y ago
You hate how polarized the disclosure had became, where not taking a stance is now the same as taking the stance for the opposite side. I would say, FB did the right thing here, to not supporting a platform that actively politicizing itself.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Work on projects that have less moral ambiguity.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Such as ... food production? "But your food is consumed by literal fascists"... water supply? "Did you know that evil people also drink the water you are providing and hydrate their bodies so they can do more evil things?" For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.
  - dexen 6y ago
    Upon reading your, and GP, it occurred to me that we've lost the idea that it is the buyer that is responsible for the purchases. It used to be that people and organizations making unethical purchases were the ones we considered, and held, responsible. For a long time we've had good, positive movements centered on informing the buyer. We added expiration dates, ingredient lists, nutritional value information, crashworthiness scores and reliability ratings, country of origin labels, even ethical sourcing labels. Perhaps too much of a good thing caused information overload and resulting numbness? Somehow, between the Prohibition, the "war on drugs", and the supply side moral regulations, we've lost the spirit of "well informed free agents making decisions". Most of the services (FB and the likes) we're discussing here are morally neutral by their nature, and it takes concerted efforts to make them non-neutral[1]. It is the particular use they are being put to that is moral or immoral. Let's not shift vast moral powers from the wide society to a narrow cadre, shall we? The economy is a neat distributed system. It's the popular democracy before democracy became popular. Let's not give it up. -- [1] example of non-neutrality: the current trend of algorithmic manipulation
    - kelnos 6y ago
      > Most of the services (FB and the likes) we're discussing here are morally neutral by their nature I don't think that's the case. Is it moral to exploit human psychology when developing addictive features that pull people into the site over and over? Is it moral to sell user information to advertisers so they can emotionally manipulate you into buying crap you don't need? Is it moral to design interactions that evoke outrage and disagreement in order to increase engagement? Is it moral to track user activity across the web, outside the company's site? I don't think any of these things are moral. These practices might not be necessary for a site like FB (then again they might), but this is the model they all seem to choose. And that's what actually matters.
xnyan 6y ago
What this means in intent and practice is that you are not allowed to discuss social issues that the hierarchy and those that align with the hierarchy find objectionable. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that if a facebook employee wants to talk about poverty in underdeveloped countries on internal social media, then that's going to be ok, but if the discussion concerns people who were harmed because they followed bad medical advice that was spread by use of facebook, all of a sudden that's an unacceptable socal issue at work.
- clomond 6y ago
  I.e. it’s all good as long as you don’t rock the boat.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  I wonder if free-speech or political protection in workplace can be abused by competitors to destroy your culture as proposed by people in the comments. Is there a chance of that happening or does it already happen?
  - an_opabinia 6y ago
    > Is there a chance of that happening or does it already happen? Nah. Every Facebook employee I've met, every one that I'm reading, they are sincere about what they're angry about. It's a bad look, to assume some Facebook employee's opinions are being co-opted by... fucking Google? Apple? That's ridiculous. I'm not even going to speculate why anyone questions some random Facebook employee's sincerity. Instead I offer: Imagine if someone told you, every opinion you had, all the time, talked over you or told you to shut the fuck up and said, "Oh you're getting co-opted by Google, this is exactly what they want you to do, 'destroy our culture.'" And then, in the same breath, that guy defends, breathlessly, some idiot outraged over the removal of master/slave nomenclature, or some idiot trying to mainsplain crackpot sex difference theories to his female coworkers. C'mon, you'd be mad as hell, it's so utterly ridiculous.
    - fxtentacle 6y ago
Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
>Are there work places where this is unavoidable? Many: Education. Healthcare. Corrections, law, and law enforcement. Social work. Public utilities and subsidized housing. Etc.

daok 6y ago

Yes. There are places where employees MUST go in these meetings that talk about social differences, inclusions, diversity, etc.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dahart 6y ago
Everyone has to discuss diversity at work because there are laws prohibiting discrimination, that's a good thing. Not everyone has to discuss politics at work.
- ikiris 6y ago
  I'd love it if there was a difference between the two again.
  - dahart 6y ago
    I think I know what you mean, and me too. But... mandatory diversity training at work is typically very bland, sticks to communicating what the rules are, and is very apolitical compared to forums, employee banter, or stuff you find on the news or Facebook or YouTube. Having been through a bunch of them at several companies, I wouldn't put them in the same camp as 'politics' at all.
    - stagehn 6y ago
      It is heavily political since there's no evidence of efficacy. You can see the heterodox academy piece that summarises the available evidence. Since it is not efficacious then I'm forced to conclude that the motive is political and ideological.
- stateofnounion 6y ago
  > Everyone has to discuss diversity at work because there are laws prohibiting discrimination How are these two things causally connected in your mind?
  - dahart 6y ago
    Are you implying they're not connected, that discrimination and diversity are unrelated? Your wording makes it sound like some kind of political debate trap you're setting. FWIW, I'm uninterested in arguing here why and whether there should be such laws, or justifying efforts to prevent discrimination. The existence of these laws is a fact, and you're free to study the history and legal precedents for why they exist. Here's a generic but decent starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination
    - davidivadavid 6y ago
      No. He's implying that the fact something is a law doesn't mean your employer should lecture you about it.
      - dahart 6y ago
        Why? Isn't making people aware of laws how you abide by them? The risk of not educating people and being caught ignoring abuses is fairly serious. Broadly speaking, some of the laws we're talking about are laws that specifically require making employees aware of their existence.
        s1artibartfast 6y ago
        I think they are talking about meetings at work which do not focus on the law or workplace etiquette, but serve to raise awareness of for diversity/minority/social justice issues outside the workplace.
        dahart 6y ago
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > Everyone has to discuss diversity at work because there are laws prohibiting discrimination Sorry, but this is misleading. Most such companies are actively complying with antidiscrimination laws. These diversity discussions/initiatives at work are almost always unrelated to those laws. It's not a case of "Hey, we suddenly realized we're not complying with laws, so let's launch these initiatives." Most such discussions don't have any content about the law or legal aspects because they are not about laws prohibiting discrimination.
  - dahart 6y ago
    What are the initiatives about then, if not the laws and/or prohibiting discrimination? Do these companies agree with your claim, are you getting that from HR and/or company lawyers, or is this an opinion? I've never been to a diversity training program that did not talk about the laws, and I've been to many. You are suggesting that companies are wasting their money for no reason, and consciously running training programs that are unnecessary? Why would "most" companies do that? > Most such companies are actively complying with antidiscrimination laws. Complying with US discrimination law means that companies are providing "reasonable accomodations" for people in historically discriminated categories, and for anyone who might file a complaint in the future. Educating the employees about acceptable behavior is a pretty obvious way to avoid getting sued. > It's not a case of "Hey, we suddenly realized we're not complying with laws, so let's launch these initiatives." The risk of running into both PR & legal trouble over diversity complaints has risen over time, due to increasing levels of education, increasing exposure to cases of discrimination and abuse, and generally increasing awareness of diversity issues.
    - BeetleB 6y ago
      I am speaking specifically to diversity initiatives visible to all employees, as opposed to those that are specific to managers or HR. The law doesn't require us to banish the phrase "master/slave" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative. The law doesn't require us to banish the words "whitelist/blacklist" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative. The law requires we do not discriminate based on a protected category (gender, race, etc). We have always been compliant. However, the law does not require us to hold special recruiting events for underrepresented folks when we are already compliant, but yet that is a major part of my company's diversity initiative.[1] There are pay disparity laws. We were fully compliant before they became the law. They are not part of the diversity initiative and usually not discussed. The law doesn't prohibit us from saying "Merry Christmas!" but our diversity initiative addresses this. The list goes on and on. Note: I am not saying I'm against such initiatives. Merely noting that at least for my company (and jurisdiction), these initiatives are not about what the law requires. We have always had employee expectations training for all employees, and it already covered things required by law, long before the company dove into these initiatives. It may be that your company's diversity initiative is about legal compliance, but for many company's, it is a lot more than that (by a lot, I mean the majority of the initiative is not required by law). > The risk of running into both PR & legal trouble There's a world of a difference between PR trouble and legal trouble. Your comment originally was about the legal side, and so is my response. I do believe that most diversity initiatives are about PR, and not about the law, which was why I responded. [1] These are invite-only, and so it's not open to all groups - just the ones we picked.
- hnreader998 6y ago
  Oddly, companies are actively and deliberately discriminating against race and gender in tech companies in the name of diversity and inclusion. It boggles my mind that none of them have been sued yet for these practices.
  - dahart 6y ago
    What are you referring to?
    - hnreader998 6y ago
      I should have been more clear. Like someone else mentioned, these diversity (and inclusion) discussions are not related to discrimination laws and equal opportunity. They are always related to increasing diversity in the company by hiring more underrepresented people (previously this just meant women in eng but now it's been expanded to POC). In order to achieve this, companies are actively discriminating against non-minorities, which some may call positive discrimination. Regardless, it's discrimination nonetheless and it's very common yet somehow nobody cares.
      - dahart 6y ago
        > these diversity (and inclusion) discussions are not related to discrimination laws and equal opportunity. FWIW, that's a claim that doesn't quite match my experience at work, nor of talking to some of the people who implement these programs. Though to be clear, we were talking about widespread mandatory company-wide meetings, not any old discussion on inclusion that happens to occur while at work. We may need to get more specific about which programs we're talking about, they're certainly not identical everywhere. It also doesn't seem to add up when I read our current laws, which are changing over time to emphasize. > In order to achieve this, companies are activity discriminating against non-minorities, which some may call positive discrimination. The historical term for this is affirmative action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action), and the idea is to temporarily increase benefits for a disadvantaged group, not to intentionally decrease benefits for the advantaged group. Calling it discrimination, therefore, is a framing that isn't always true, and is somewhat political. It's not always true because things aren't always zero sum. If I choose to give someone a dollar, you don't lose a dollar. If there really are a fixed number of jobs at a company that is 80/20 men, and the company decides 30% must go to women, then technically yes, that is a form of discrimination. But - just hypothetically - is it a negative discrimination if the reason that the company is 80/20 men in the first place is because it previously discriminated against women, and would have been 50/50 without several decades of history of unspoken discrimination? It's important to also think about a few things- One, that unlike social prejudices, affirmative action is not intended to be permanent. It's intended to help boost people who've been unfairly and systematically disadvantaged, while they're disadvantaged, and only until things even out. After that, the boost should go away by design. Two, that some of those disadvantages in history have been really extreme, and the kind of discrimination you might imagine you feel when your company tries to hire more women isn't the same order of magnitude of what women and black people as a whole have gone through. > Regardless, it's discrimination nonetheless and it's very common yet somehow nobody cares. Is all discrimination bad always? I'm very discriminating about my partners. I'm not sure that nobody cares, I think some people are in favor of seeing that gender and racial injustices actually go away, since not doing anything about it hasn't worked yet.

samthecoy 6y ago

If you work for a large social network with huge social responsibilities, discussions about ethics ought to be unavoidable, in my opinion. If you're writing accounting software for paper suppliers or something equally banal with few ethical implications, then sure, there's no need (and less reason) to have water cooler conversations about pro-genocide agitprop or whatever. EDIT to add that of course not all departments at Facebook make the sort of decisions that have a marked social impact. More referring to the content policy teams, and the news feed algo teams, and so on.

toomim 6y ago
> If you work ... with huge social responsibilities, discussions about ethics ought to be unavoidable, in my opinion. The problem is distinguishing ethics from politics. These are very hard to disentangle, because ethical values are usually based on some political orientation. And I don't want Facebook to be making political decisions on my behalf, as a user. And I don't even want internal employee discussions to be derailed by political considerations. So how do you distinguish ethics from politics? I don't think it's possible, unless the company defines its own ethical values, a priori, and only considers those when making decisions. If you read the article, I think that this is precisely what Facebook's new policy is trying to do by putting a fence around "social issues."
- t-writescode 6y ago
  > because ethical values are usually based on some political orientation Are you sure that isn't exactly backwards? Because it definitely should be the other direction in my very strong opinion. One's morals or beliefs on ethics should inform their politics, not the other way around. One way is based around a person's inner being, the other is molding their being and stances based on a sports team.
  - sigstoat 6y ago
    one of you is describing the world as it is, and the other the world as you think it ought to be.

jseliger 6y ago

It's interesting to watch companies rediscover the old rule about leaving politics and religion at the door.

jjice 6y ago
It seems like it's slowly died over the past decade. Thankfully, my past two jobs were very work focused without much political involvement. However, I'm sure it's easier for my jobs since they were for a retail company and an engineering firm.
deleted 6y ago
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dylan604 6y ago
When your company is the place the rest of the planet gather to discuss these very topics, it's not easy to not have to talk about them just in discussing what topics your platform is being used.
munificent 6y ago
If a business wants its employees to leave politics at the door, the business should too. If Facebook is going to have departments for government affairs, public policy, and lobbying, then it is entirely reasonable for employees to be politically active too. Otherwise, you're basically saying corporations should participate in the political process but individuals should not. And that's exactly how we got the Earth into the increasingly shitty state it is currently in.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  That's a straw man argument, just because an employee isn't allowed to bring politics to work doesn't mean they can't be politically active on their own time.
  - munificent 6y ago
    So individuals can do recreational politics but corporations are free to sink as much of their resources into it as they want? Is your claim that we really need more corporate control over politics in the US and less citizen participation?

jsabo 6y ago

That depends on if your existence is political I suppose. Ask some of your LGBT colleagues, especially trans colleagues, if they feel like can just leave politics at the door.

travisoneill1 6y ago
I have worked with many LGBT colleagues who never bring up politics at work. This "existence is political" thing is just a bullshit phrase that the obnoxious people who can't go an hour without bringing that crap up use to justify it.
- jsabo 6y ago
  Remember there are multiple supreme court cases just this year about trans people's right to both be trans and employed. That's part of what is meant by "existence being political".
- nagaiaida 6y ago
  How confident are you that the root cause of that political silence is a shared belief that politics shouldn't come up in the workplace rather than potential concern about the effects of openly discussing the issues that affect them?
- ketzo 6y ago
  Correction: they never brought up politics to you. You don't know that they weren't political in their discussions with other colleagues. Perhaps it is worth considering why that might be the case. People whose existences are deeply politicized (and they do indeed exist) are not often excited to have political conversations with people who say things like "'existence is political' thing is just a bullshit phrase." I'm not trying to be a dick, but it took me a long time to realize that there were conversations I was not being made a part of because I was not receptive to, or dismissive of, those conversations.
  - tha0x4 6y ago
    >People whose existences are deeply politicized (and they do indeed exist) are not often excited to have political conversations with people who say things like "'existence is political' thing is just a bullshit phrase." It is a bullshit phrase though. They don't want to bring anything up because any skepticism is viewed as a direct attack on their ideology, and their ideology is the core of their existence, so, calling out the illogic of their ideology is a political attack on their existence. It's an old tactic used the world over in places like communist Russia, China and North Korea.

lacker 6y ago

I was working at Facebook during the 2016 election and it was pretty unavoidable. A big part of the problem was just that everyone was using Facebook for work all the time. So quite often, there would be some enormous thread arguing about whether X or Y was the right policy, was Trump violating the rules and should be kicked off Facebook, or was Facebook's anti-Trump policies violating freedom of speech, or was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting, etc etc. And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week, could you provide feedback on it. Type X of hardware is being deprecated next quarter. So you really have to be checking Facebook-for-work consistently for professional reasons. You have to scroll past the political debates all the time.

mattm 6y ago
I was shocked when I learned that employees at Facebook use Facebook internally for work related discussions. Facebook is not built for that purpose.
- lacker 6y ago
  It is actually built for that purpose! Or at least, there are many people dedicated to optimizing the use of Facebook at work, selling it into companies as an enterprise solution, and so on. There are millions of paying customers. At some point I believe it was called "Facebook for Work" but now it has been rebranded as "Workplace from Facebook". Some features are work-specific, but it feels basically like you are using the Facebook interface, but just with all the content being from your coworkers about work stuff. https://www.workplace.com/ https://www.workplace.com/
  - ryan_lane 6y ago
    Easily one of the worst "productivity" tools I've ever been forced to use. Like facebook, it's optimized to bring your eyes to it, and not to make you productive. Notifications are exactly like facebook notifications, so you'll get an email that says "open workplace to see this". To use the tool effectively, you need to have it open at all times. It's a weird in-between state of slack and email, where it's somewhat async and somewhat sync. You'll get overwhelmed with notifications and will want to have "inbox zero", which is considerably more difficult than in email, where you can optimize your workflow. The sidebar will have a list of groups you're in with read/notification counts that make absolutely no sense. It also has chat functionality that can't be turned off, and it's not group based. It's like being forced to use gchat for all communications. It has a "organization tree" feature that requires employees to fill in their own reporting structure. This also can't be turned off. If you want your employees to spend all day chatting in forums inside of facebook, workplace is the product for you.

wmichelin 6y ago

Facebook is not your average workplace. If your platform is profiting off of active political misinformation, you have an obligation to not only discuss these issues, but solve them. If you determine that you can't solve them, it's time to stop accepting the money.

throwaway1777 6y ago
Most employees at Facebook are doing nothing of the sort. They are working on databases and internal tools and changing the color of buttons. If you work on an integrity team then yes, you'll have to discuss such issues, but most employees don't.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  But they are. Everyone at the company is complicit. Lets say you're a delivery driver for a pizza parlor that is famous for the level of rat poison in its sauce. Do you continue to knowingly deliver the poison pizzas because you're not the one making the sauce? Afterall, who's going to deliver the poisonous pizzas? Come on. This is right up there with, "I was just following orders."
- onion2k 6y ago
  One of the things I love about startups is feeling like my input is partially responsible for the mission, culture, and direction of the company. I can't imagine doing work for a company that was doing something and not feeling like I'm making a contribution to that goal. Maybe you're right and developers at FB don't see that they have any responsibility or input towards what FB does with the tech they build, but I hope not. It would be horrible to be that detached from the outcome of your work.
- kelnos 6y ago
  That feels disturbingly close to a "just following orders" defense. Just because you're in the basement keeping the boiler running, it doesn't mean you can ignore what goes on upstairs. If what they're doing upstairs is unethical, it's unethical for you to keep the lights on for them.

hnreader998 6y ago

It's even worse than unavoidable. My company has removed any kind of anonymous discussion/Q&A, which just fuels a mono culture. You only get one-sided discussions because going against the grain will be career suicide.

onion2k 6y ago
All this means is that you value your career over the political statement you want to make. The point you want to contribute isn't all that important to you. This is why it's worthwhile listening to people who speak out when there is a cost to themselves - they believe in what they're saying enough to sacrific something for it.
- hnreader998 6y ago
  I don't disagree. My main point is that at a bay area tech company, the cost is one-sided, which drives company policies and philosophies, all while endlessly preaching about diversity.
- NicolasGorden 6y ago
  This seems naïve. Cost is a factor. Greg, a nobody who nobody likes says X thing - X isn't a big deal, and doesn't affect most people and about 45% of people would agree X shouldn't be said, even if it isn't a big deal. Mark, a senior directo who everybody loves says Y thing - Y is a big deal, but only 10% of people would agree it shouldn't be said. Guess which will get called out?
- rjkennedy98 6y ago
  You are right we should listen more to terroristic suicide bombers because they put their lives on the line for what they believe /s. Seriously, haven’t they don’t studies that most of these revolutionaries are actually not very smart people. How does risking your life for a cause have anything to do with being correct about an issue?

tanilama 6y ago

You hate how polarized the disclosure had became, where not taking a stance is now the same as taking the stance for the opposite side. I would say, FB did the right thing here, to not supporting a platform that actively politicizing itself.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Work on projects that have less moral ambiguity.

luckylion 6y ago
Such as ... food production? "But your food is consumed by literal fascists"... water supply? "Did you know that evil people also drink the water you are providing and hydrate their bodies so they can do more evil things?" For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.
- dexen 6y ago
  Upon reading your, and GP, it occurred to me that we've lost the idea that it is the buyer that is responsible for the purchases. It used to be that people and organizations making unethical purchases were the ones we considered, and held, responsible. For a long time we've had good, positive movements centered on informing the buyer. We added expiration dates, ingredient lists, nutritional value information, crashworthiness scores and reliability ratings, country of origin labels, even ethical sourcing labels. Perhaps too much of a good thing caused information overload and resulting numbness? Somehow, between the Prohibition, the "war on drugs", and the supply side moral regulations, we've lost the spirit of "well informed free agents making decisions". Most of the services (FB and the likes) we're discussing here are morally neutral by their nature, and it takes concerted efforts to make them non-neutral[1]. It is the particular use they are being put to that is moral or immoral. Let's not shift vast moral powers from the wide society to a narrow cadre, shall we? The economy is a neat distributed system. It's the popular democracy before democracy became popular. Let's not give it up. -- [1] example of non-neutrality: the current trend of algorithmic manipulation
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > Most of the services (FB and the likes) we're discussing here are morally neutral by their nature I don't think that's the case. Is it moral to exploit human psychology when developing addictive features that pull people into the site over and over? Is it moral to sell user information to advertisers so they can emotionally manipulate you into buying crap you don't need? Is it moral to design interactions that evoke outrage and disagreement in order to increase engagement? Is it moral to track user activity across the web, outside the company's site? I don't think any of these things are moral. These practices might not be necessary for a site like FB (then again they might), but this is the model they all seem to choose. And that's what actually matters.

xnyan 6y ago

What this means in intent and practice is that you are not allowed to discuss social issues that the hierarchy and those that align with the hierarchy find objectionable. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that if a facebook employee wants to talk about poverty in underdeveloped countries on internal social media, then that's going to be ok, but if the discussion concerns people who were harmed because they followed bad medical advice that was spread by use of facebook, all of a sudden that's an unacceptable socal issue at work.

clomond 6y ago
I.e. it’s all good as long as you don’t rock the boat.
searchableguy 6y ago
I wonder if free-speech or political protection in workplace can be abused by competitors to destroy your culture as proposed by people in the comments. Is there a chance of that happening or does it already happen?
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  > Is there a chance of that happening or does it already happen? Nah. Every Facebook employee I've met, every one that I'm reading, they are sincere about what they're angry about. It's a bad look, to assume some Facebook employee's opinions are being co-opted by... fucking Google? Apple? That's ridiculous. I'm not even going to speculate why anyone questions some random Facebook employee's sincerity. Instead I offer: Imagine if someone told you, every opinion you had, all the time, talked over you or told you to shut the fuck up and said, "Oh you're getting co-opted by Google, this is exactly what they want you to do, 'destroy our culture.'" And then, in the same breath, that guy defends, breathlessly, some idiot outraged over the removal of master/slave nomenclature, or some idiot trying to mainsplain crackpot sex difference theories to his female coworkers. C'mon, you'd be mad as hell, it's so utterly ridiculous.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago

>Are there work places where this is unavoidable? Many: Education. Healthcare. Corrections, law, and law enforcement. Social work. Public utilities and subsidized housing. Etc.