Locking horns is useful if the nature of discourse were better. If you are going to be called sexist or racist (insert choice moralising label) every time you remotely resemble an outlier group strawman, with possibly real implication on your career (esp with the current progressive political tech climate), it's better to leave the platform. It's the same as leaving any other messaging board because of the toxicity.
I wouldn't say that's the current climate so much as the nature of publicly discussing politics under your real name. The number of people who've been fired from their jobs for advocating unions for example is terrifying.
I'd agree with you if you could show me when someone in the valley was fired for professing identity politics. I can show you examples the other way around, from FAANG companies nevertheless.
It's a change of times, go back a couple of decades and all the firings were in the opposite direction. If you want one example, look at Lynn Conway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
People have always been fired for publicly going against whatever is at the time politically correct, all that's changed is what's politically correct.
What really amuses me about this is that the people complaining about firings over political correctness don't seem (to me at least) to actually want to stop firings for political correctness, but just to change the definition of political correctness back to what suited them.
> The number of people who've been fired from their jobs for advocating unions for example is terrifying.
Terrifying?
Has this word lost its real meaning? Terrifying is having an angry mob show up at your house chanting "we know where you sleep" [1] or a group of Antifa terrorists physically attacking people like Brownshirts. [2]
Terrifying is having your life literally put at risk because you don't go along with the gospel of the day.
Terrifying is academics who are framing climate skepticism as some kind of criminal act worthy of prosecution.
> Denial is profoundly ideological in nature; how it is conveyed and transmitted is of importance to those who wish to reorient collective thinking to not only recognizing the urgency and seriousness of the problem but also recasting it in criminal terms. [3]
"Reorient collective thinking...recasting it in criminal terms"
Now that's terrifying: Academics advocating that skepticism of the orthodoxy should be quite literally criminalized! Now that should terrify people in the most Orwellian of ways.
Being fired for unionization is quite different than advocating Thought Police as actual police. One of the few cases I could find for Silicon Valley employees being fired for union activities, resulted in a nice pay-day from the lawsuit. [4]
If you're a left-wing person, a socialist, a Democrat, a purveyor of identity politics, you'll have no problems working in Silicon Valley assuming you have the relevant skills for the job. However, if you espouse any sort of ideas that even hint of conservatism or, (gasp!) free market capitalism, or even consider other viewpoints on something like climate -- your job security is far less than someone of the opposite political persuasion. In Silicon Valley, being a conservative is not unlike being part of a secret society. [5]
As far as people getting fired for "advocating unions," -- while I haven't actually seen many cases of that among tech companies, getting fired for organizing what amounts to a worker mutiny doesn't seem like a surprising outcome. However, there are definitely conservatives that have been fired for nothing more than their beliefs. [6]
Getting fired for opinions is far more "terrifying" than getting fired for actively trying to disrupt the workplace by telling people to essentially rebel/organize against the company. Getting fired for what you believe is a vastly different story than getting fired for what you actually do. Kevin Cernekee got fired from Google because of a viewpoint, not because of any action he took (such as encouraging people to walk out or "organize.") How about getting blacklisted because of political beliefs? [7]
However, getting fired isn't "terrifying" -- especially if you're a software engineer where one can literally find a new job in less than a week, assuming a modicum of recent experience.
Calling things terrifying has become such a cliché [8] that it diminishes the seriousness of things that are actually terrifying -- such as being subjected to violence, a threat of violence, or people advocating the arrest of dissidents by Thought Police and being sent to the Ministry of Love.
