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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.
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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