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I'm locked into starting a career in tech, in one of the wokest cities in the nation.
I need to make money. I'm hoping to start a family in the next few years, and if I'm lucky, I can make enough money that my wife won't have to work full time.
But I've heard a lot of horror stories. And while I was antiwoke in the past, I'm even more so today.
How can I survive in this field while minimizing the amount of "evil" that I have to be accomplice to? I'm not a great liar, and I do see this stuff as a form of mundane evil.
I'll second most everything nara is saying.
Rumors of corporate capture in tech have been greatly exaggerated. Grumbling about mandatory stuff that takes away from actual work is a bonding force that transcends politics. If you can be tactful in your day-to-day, the most "evil" to which you will be subjected is poorly-executed sexual harassment training. Our corporate ancestors have complained about, but survived, that for decades--we can do the same.
This may be somewhat reasonable in direction, but I think it still has an incomplete threat model. One could reasonably exclude Brendan Eich or Gina Carano as outside of normal roles, or Damore as having brought his politics to work or at least to a public forum under his real name; the same exceptions do not really apply to James Garfield. There are very clear examples where being tactful and polite and toeing the party line in public isn't actually enough. Even on top of the limitations inherent to Kolomogrov Complicity themselves -- what's going to become taboo in a year, or two years, and what mandatory to publicly support? -- there's also the simpler failure mode where someone lifts up the rock you've been hiding under, takes a picture, and shows it to your boss. Or, in certain especially 'woke' areas in especially 'woke' businesses, where the discrimination is just addressed "to who may be concerned", since an honest non-woke person should object to it even if they aren't affected.
There are arguments that this sort of attack isn't specific to tech, which is true! But not especially calming. Especially as many of the strongest activists and corporate movements here are in tech, and just as someone making the same concerns for politics or public service or social work or academia or certain parts of the military (!) would not be calmed by hearing tech is nearly as bad.
There are separate arguments that this sort of attack isn't common. That's difficult in part because there are so few clear attempts at broad statistic analysis, and even fewer trustworthy ones; this is not, very clearly, a place you can ask the EEOC or NLRB for numbers, and it's fairly rare for the effects of corporate capture to explicitly state that they are doing things because of your bad tweets. The majority of this stuff . Instead we mostly are relying on what makes it into publicity, which by definition will only cover high-profile cases, or ugliness like tumblrs and twitters focused on getting people fired, which tend to not be greatly focused on specific fields of employment anyway.
But I think to many people, the rate of incidence isn't particularly what concerns them: they wear seatbelts even though they haven't gotten in crashes, and don't stand under the biggest tree in a forest during a thunderstorm even if they've never been struck by lightning. I'm skeptical that this is genuinely a 1-in-a-million thing, but a 1-in-a-million-lifetime risk of getting fired in a high-profile way which ends with the intentionally-vague 'racial or sexual misconduct' on your pink slip and any reference calls is actually something I'm willing to jump through a lot of hoops to avoid even outside of the realm of politics.
Now, some of the resulting philosophy remains the same, regardless of your take on this position. A First Commandment of Working While Not Out, regardless of your beliefs about how common, will probably start with something like :
But if you have the above concerns, it goes further:
This is, to some extent, a thing that happens in any field, outside of 'woke' influences. This is, to some extent, a thing that won't necessarily impact you.
But a serious engagement with what has happened in the past, makes for a drastically different threat model.
Right, and that’s where i think it diverges from the thunderstorm. (Maybe even the seatbelts, though I’m inclined to think the expected value there is way higher.)
I see people who are terrified of cancel culture, of getting outed and fired for bullshit reasons. They’re not wrong that the consequences can be severe! Compare, though, a driver who not only wears the seatbelt, but refuses to drive at night. This objectively makes him safer, and also constraints his actions far more. There is a point of diminishing returns to caution.
I’m of the opinion that the point is pretty low. That people can keep the sports team and the hobbies, can try to relate to their coworkers, and still mitigate the bulk of any career risk. It’s worth cultivating a sense of tact and unsafe topics; it is less useful, and perhaps even harmful, to act without any personality.
It’s possible that I’m too credulous. There’s definitely a subset of companies which crank the risk factor much higher. They are rare. Without knowing the OP’s city, my prior is that his particular company is not one of them.
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At the risk of fighting the hypothetical--why? Assuming the nation you're talking about is the United States, you're always free to just go get a different job.
I don't know what specifically you do for a living, but if it can be done remotely, remote work is pretty hot right now! Then you can live wherever you like, modulo stable internet access. And even if you can't or won't do remote stuff, there is no shortage of tech jobs in non-woke or less-woke cities. Chances are good that whoever you work for will have some amount of "diversity" stuff going on, but like, even Silicon Valley gets slammed for being insufficiently woke all the time.
Still, if you insist on going forward with this thing that you're apparently afraid to go forward with, I expect you'll find it, most of the time, a lot better than you fear. Even at exceedingly "woke" corporations, there's a lot of real, actual work to be done that just isn't impacted in any discernible way by hyper-obsession with race or gender or whatever. In most circumstances you can literally just ignore it. Some companies do go so far as to "discipline" people who, say, don't add pronouns to their signature block, but the vast majority will never notice or care. When someone passes the plate for Black Lives Matter or Habitat for Humanity or whatever, you just... don't give!
Yes, you'll probably need to bite your tongue from time to time. But that's always true everywhere you're thrown into dealing with people. If you think you have it bad in that department, try working customer service! You'd be amazed how far you can get by allowing people to draw their own conclusions, instead of spelling your beliefs out in excruciating detail at every opportunity. And if you're forced into a mandatory diversity training where an outside contractor with primary-colored hair tells you why you're the oppressor, sit through it, ask annoying questions if you dare, and fill out all the anonymous feedback follow-up paperwork with "this was a huge waste of everyone's time and money and it makes me ashamed to be employed here."
In the vast majority of employment cases you're going to be fine being honest, as long as you're not an asshole about it. "Thanks for the input, I'll take it under advisement" is wonderfully noncommittal. "Is there any specific thing you would like me to do at this time?" is also a great way to scatter vacuous calls for increased wokism, which often never make it past the "raise awareness" stage of organizational activism. I do this with my own superiors every year: "Is there anything I am doing that you would like me to stop doing, or anything I am not doing that you would like me to start doing?" They have rarely considered my performance in those terms, and so they have nothing to say, and so I am free to continue doing as I please. Of course, you might get specific feedback ("add some damn pronouns to your signature block!") and then you'll want to follow it (or start sending out resumes, depending on your value to the company), but extracting specific feedback also gives you an opportunity to demonstrate compliance, which is itself a form of currency in employment negotiations.
Basically: you'll be fine, don't worry. But if you can't help but worry, you should keep in mind that you may be better off looking for a different job.
Thank you, this is exactly what I needed to hear. Especially the specific responses/tactics you used, that makes me feel somewhat armed for when I deal with this stuff.
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