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From the employer's perspective, there is one type of employee that can pretty much work in any environment given that they are paid - and there is another type
by dkarras 5y ago
From the employer's perspective, there is one type of employee that can pretty much work in any environment given that they are paid - and there is another type that needs ALL the other coworkers doing things and acting in a particular way for them to feel safe and productive. I'm not even against their need to feel safe, included, heard, or their claimed victim status, ptsd, lack of representation, whatever they are concerned with at any point in time - but it is very hard and expensive to build and maintain an environment where they will prosper - very expensive too.
A new drama every week, dealing with bad press from a resigned "activist" employee every other month. Even with sympathy towards those people, I probably wouldn't want to touch them with a ten foot pole when money and livelihood of all my employees are at stake. I'd probably just try to help their cause by other means but would not try to torture them in an environment where they'll inevitably suffer and be unproductive. Their utopia does not exist in planet earth (yet), is it reasonable to expect that to exist in a company working environment?
From a certain perspective, more is wrong with the world than right, and it is impossible to provide an environment that is "right" when most of the world is wrong. When you are the employer, you take the implicit role of building miniature model of that world in their working environment and I reckon that is impossible, at the very least very very expensive.
- patrick451 5y ago> From the employer's perspective, there is one type of employee that can pretty much work in any environment given that they are paid - and there is another type that needs ALL the other coworkers doing things and acting in a particular way for them to feel safe and productive. I'm not even against their need to feel safe, included, heard, or their claimed victim status, ptsd, lack of representation, whatever they are concerned with at any point in time - but it is very hard and expensive to build and maintain an environment where they will prosper - very expensive too. This is why any smart employer should start aggressively filtering such candidates out of their hiring pipeline.
- fancyfish 5y agoEven though this isn’t official guidance at my FAANG, I’ve started weeding out anyone who (as best as I can infer) cares about political activism. They are damaging to an organization. Even if they don’t start political interest groups at work, they will bring up political topics in casual conversation which will exclude certain people’s viewpoints. My stance is, we pay you to be an engineer, so I hire people devoted solely to engineering.
- me_again 5y agoI think you are leaving out the pretty expansive middle ground where everyone lives. The options are not "pretty much any environment where they get paid" and "woketopia". Do you expect female employees to put up with harassment because it's too expensive to improve the working environment? Should employees "just deal with" being yelled at by managers? I'll pass thanks, but I don't think that qualifies me as an activist.