Author Topic: Politics at work  (Read 612 times)

Hawkmoon

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Politics at work
« on: May 04, 2021, 10:26:48 AM »
"Poly" (from the Greek word polys) is a word that means "many." Ticks are blood-sucking insects. Combine the two, and you get ...

And now the millennial "I need to be a victim" generation of snowflakes, or at least one group thereof, has lost its collective mind over the notion that an employer had the nerve to tell them to stop discussing political crap on the company intranet and just, like, do their jobs.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hands-meeting-employee-resignations-buyouts-implosion

I have never heard of the company, but I side with the owners. It's their damned company, so if they don't want employees wasting their time (and the company's bandwidth) being "woke," that's their prerogative. Wake up, people -- you were hired to do a job, to perform a specific function. Do your work, collect your paycheck, and go home to discuss the politics and SJW crap with your wife/husband/significant other/dog/whatever -- on your own time and using your own equipment and bandwidth.

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Another employee said they had been thrown by the fact that the founders, after years of telling employees that they were part of an elite chosen few who were good enough to work at Basecamp, would get rid of them so easily.

“They just want to build cool *expletive deleted*it all day,” the employee said. “They don’t want to deal with people, which is something you have to do as a manager … Jason and David just threw us away.”

No, idiot, the founders didn't get rid of anyone or throw anyone away. YOU QUIT! All of you. All because the owners and founders of the company wanted you to stop playing politics at work.
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Ben

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Re: Politics at work
« Reply #1 on: May 04, 2021, 10:38:06 AM »
so if they don't want employees wasting their time (and the company's bandwidth) being "woke," that's their prerogative. Wake up, people -- you were hired to do a job, to perform a specific function. Do your work, collect your paycheck, and go home to discuss the politics and SJW crap with your wife/husband/significant other/dog/whatever -- on your own time and using your own equipment and bandwidth.

I was talking to a former coworker a couple of days ago, and she (a very progressive leaning person) said she has been doing pretty much nothing the last few months except attending mandatory ethics, equality, and diversity courses. She likes the idea of them because of her politics, but even she said doing so many since Biden has been in office has been draining.

So the fed.gov at least, seems more concerned with being woke than doing work.
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RocketMan

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Re: Politics at work
« Reply #2 on: May 04, 2021, 10:43:11 AM »
I suspect there was a lot more tension and unrest going on behind the scenes at that company before this occurred.  Whatever was going on could have had its roots in too many employees with idiotic "woke" attitudes poisoning the workplace.  This event was likely just the last straw for a lot of folks.
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dogmush

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Re: Politics at work
« Reply #3 on: May 04, 2021, 11:05:39 AM »
I can't believe I read that whole piece of tripe, but a paragraph at the beginning caught my eye:

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Thirty minutes after the meeting ended, Fried announced that Basecamp’s longtime head of strategy, Ryan Singer, had been suspended and placed under investigation after he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company. Over the weekend, Singer — who worked for the company for nearly 18 years, and authored a book about product management for Basecamp called Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters — resigned.

What, I thought could be so horrible that it would cause a very senior executive to just resign that quickly.  Did he drop the N-word?  Surely it was something that an investigation would prove heinous.

Nope:
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“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don’t believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
He continued: “Very often, if you express a dissenting view, you get called a Nazi. … I have not felt this is open territory for discussion. If we were to try to get into it as a group discussion it would be very painful and divisive.”

And then, when given the opportunity to grovel before someone higher on the victim list he actually doubled down!

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“I can gladly respond,” he said. “I stand by what I said. Saying white people have something in common is racist. I stand by it … I am very sure I don’t treat people in a racist way.”

(Singer remembers one of these quotes differently: “I said that claiming anybody must have a certain viewpoint because of the color of their skin is racist,” he said today.)

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The Black employee said they did not want to hear from Singer,
 

I'll bet.  I suspect the actual problem with this guy was hidden a little farther up the article:
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Along the way, he had also alienated some of his coworkers by promoting conservative views. In 2016, three employees said, he praised right-wing website Breitbart’s coverage of the presidential election in an internal forum.

Singer is probably better off not being in that particular toxic workplace, but I hope he's well off.  Further employment in software development may be hard to find.

MechAg94

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Re: Politics at work
« Reply #4 on: May 04, 2021, 11:50:03 AM »
I have heard a couple people mention the 80/20 rule in companies where 20% of the people are driving 80% of the work.  This guy sounds like one of the 20%.  A company can only run off so many people like that before the whole organization starts dragging down.
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MechAg94

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Re: Politics at work
« Reply #5 on: May 04, 2021, 11:54:15 AM »
1.  Why would a company have internal discussion forums that discussed anything outside of work and subjects supporting company's work?  Anything else ends up as a company approved distraction. 

2.  Why would any smart employee get too involved in a company discussion board?  Of course, I can see someone in a leadership position trying to make an economic point and being labeled as "conservative" and therefore racist pretty quickly. 
“It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”  ― Calvin Coolidge

Bogie

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Re: Politics at work
« Reply #6 on: May 05, 2021, 02:21:14 PM »
I recently switched stores.
 
The old one had a couple of old guys... One would listen to NPR on the counter radio, and the other would listen to Newsmax or something similar on a phone.
 
Me?
 
Y'all know me, right? What do you think I had on when I could get the chance?
 
1970s oldies, preferably funkishness. Because 50% of our customers could at least sort of dig it, at least.
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