Let them go or plan to phase them out of the firm regardless of what happens?
These sorts of events keep happening. At this point the pattern is very clear: if you hire very left wing employees then you're building the firm on an unexploded bomb. You can't predict what will cause it to go off or when it will occur, but it seems likely that at some point it will. How do you as an executive build robustness to this type of event? You can't simply "do the right thing" because the left's definition of "right thing" changes on a near weekly basis, and is often so outright deranged that doing the right thing would cause you to end up doing quite evil things to other people. Or you can wait then cave, but that just encourages them and means you'll carry the can for the company's performance even though you won't actually have decision making power, and responsibility without power is a terrible place to be.
So there doesn't seem to be an easy fix, except ensuring you never get into that position in the first place by limiting your intake of very left wing employees. In the current environment it's probably enough to simply make yourself unattractive to these people via public announcements and policy, but for example when WhatsApp was rolling out encryption it was doing ideological screening interviews to ensure they wouldn't hire anyone who would freak out over a hardline privacy stance. Such interviews may quietly become more common. At the very least we should not be surprised if we see a raft of Coinbase style "we are a mission focused company" moves in the coming years.
Maybe companies should adopt a practice of only hiring middle-of-the-road rational, calm, level-headed people, instead of people who are far left or far right?
Problem is, how do you know? It's not like people talk about their leanings during technical interviews. I'm sure a set of conventions and tactics will evolve over time to handle this.
A background check that includes even a cursory review of the candidate's public social media presence would probably go pretty far in terms of weeding out the most extreme right or left wing people (who often tend to be vocal with their viewpoints).
There's a reason why I never post ANYTHING political on my public social media anymore. I keep all my controversial opinions limited to my alternate profiles.
These sorts of events keep happening. At this point the pattern is very clear: if you hire very left wing employees then you're building the firm on an unexploded bomb. You can't predict what will cause it to go off or when it will occur, but it seems likely that at some point it will. How do you as an executive build robustness to this type of event? You can't simply "do the right thing" because the left's definition of "right thing" changes on a near weekly basis, and is often so outright deranged that doing the right thing would cause you to end up doing quite evil things to other people. Or you can wait then cave, but that just encourages them and means you'll carry the can for the company's performance even though you won't actually have decision making power, and responsibility without power is a terrible place to be.
So there doesn't seem to be an easy fix, except ensuring you never get into that position in the first place by limiting your intake of very left wing employees. In the current environment it's probably enough to simply make yourself unattractive to these people via public announcements and policy, but for example when WhatsApp was rolling out encryption it was doing ideological screening interviews to ensure they wouldn't hire anyone who would freak out over a hardline privacy stance. Such interviews may quietly become more common. At the very least we should not be surprised if we see a raft of Coinbase style "we are a mission focused company" moves in the coming years.