Here's my unpopular opinion - good riddance. It's not a free speech issue because SpaceX isn't a public square. It's a company, and companies are top down. If these employees are at Musk's company, then they had better be prepared to play by Musk's rules, and they did the exact opposite, essentially leading a mutiny against the boss and sowing discord within the company in the process. SpaceX isn't an activist organization and has no obligation to kowtow to the demands of internal activists. Not all companies are like this, but again, you should know what you're signing up for when you join a Musk company.
And I'd also be willing to bet cash that all these employees were very low level, likely new hires out of college, and are all of the political activist type. Because for all his bluster, Musk really hasn't done anything THAT objectionable besides openly shit on Democrats. (No, I don't believe the bogus sexual assault allegation from an anonymous friend of a friend, there's no evidence).
We created a rule that politics and religion were not appropriate topics at work. A couple of people quit in response, and morale improved dramatically.
Honestly, this is the way to go. Discussing politics or religion opens a can of worms because people can never agree on these things.
I don't care about the political or religious beliefs (if any) of people I work with, and they shouldn't care about mine. If I really cared, then we could have off-work discussions...which I've done a few times (and they were respectful and productive).
I also think it's important to say that I'm not in the US of A, where political discussions seem to penetrate every aspect of life.
Believe me, as an American citizen, a huuuge contingent of us wish they didn't penetrate every aspect of life. However, I'd argue most times it's the corporate executives themselves who are pushing politics at work (read: wokeism) and not employees. It seems like nearly everyone's in on it.
Are you advocating for change in your workplace that isn't strongly linked to workplace peformance? (E.g. pronouns in email signatures or having the company take a public stance on some contempory issue like BLM) And is what you're advocating for considered "lefty"? And wasn't even on the public radar 20 years ago? Then it's woke.
I see you’re being facetious, but in all honesty, my mega large media conglomerate forced us to attend an equity presentation where we were told precisely: if you’re not actively working to quell this particular initiative that we right now find important, you’re then working against it and 100% part of the problem.
Were they talking about green peace? Climate change? Save the whales? Homelessness? Air pollution? Food preservatives? Obesity? Genocide? Under-representation of Jews in the NBA? No.
No apparently you can not be actively working to better those situations and you’re just fine and definitely not part of the problem. Oh but this one cause? Yeah we declare you’re part of the problem.
Sorry but there are a lot of causes in the world. You simply cannot pick and try to guilt me into actively supporting it in leau of all the other causes I might be personally connected with.
I'm not sure what's up with these people who go around commenting asking people to "define X" or "define Y" or "cite Z", but IMO it seems they generally have nothing interesting to say and aren't worth responding to. Just my 2c.
Certainly sometimes it's good to debate a word but this crossed the line into incessant requests for people to do work to come up with ever more definitions and citations.
My issue is with your style of debate, because it takes work to come up with these definitions and citations that you will inevitably disagree with. It's a waste of time. To imply that this means I am against civil rights, women's suffrage, and free speech... all I can say is go fuck yourself.
Flamewar comments like this are obviously completely unacceptable and will get you banned here. I'm not going to ban you right now, because you haven't been using HN primarily for this. Please don't do it again.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily (exclusively?) for flamewar and ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of ideology, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
I get the feeling you've misunderstood my comment.
From my perspective you asked "What does woke mean?" and I drew from my personal experience to answer how I have seen it used. The examples I choose of pronouns in signatures and having a BLM position were very common ones that also occurred at my current company.
Does that make sense now? I'm not actually sure what you want a citation on... that people push for pronouns in email signatures? That this does not have a direct and obvious link to workplace performance? That pushing for such was unheard of in 2001? That this is how people use the word "woke"?
Wokeism (ˈwəʊkɪzəm), noun: 1) a type of progressive activism whose adherents like to play word games about whether or not they exist.
Humor aside, when there's even dictionary and Wikipedia entries about wokeism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke) that outlines common themes of woke progressivism, that sort of rhetorical trickery just comes off as disingenuous.
This is a broad term that different people might understand differently. Please define it first, then use it.
> politics and religion
This is off-topic. The mentioned discussions and disagreements at SpaceX were unrelated to these matters.
In general, it is in my opinion dangerous to say that an opinion different than the one of the boss is unwelcome at a company. This is how cults and autocracies operate. It amplifies the opinion of the leader and unjustly silences everything else.
Respectful discussions about the topics of disagreement are in my opinion essential for a company to preserve its defined ethical standards and not deteriorate into a community ruled by herd mentality and groupthink influenced predominantly by a single person.
> dangerous to say that an opinion different than the one of the boss is unwelcome at a company
That's not what seemed to have happened here. Basically a bunch of employees said they were embarrassed by Musk's behavior. It's like saying the CEO is a clown. If you expect to still have a job after expressing publicly such opinions, well that's very naive.
Agitating fellow employees to push for condemning the company's owner and CEO's public statements in another forum is not in the same category as pushing for a different material to be used for landing struts. I think SpaceX will be fine.
Your boss gets accused of something by someone’s friend who told them in confidence, never said anything for years, and then suddenly when your boss does something one side of the political spectrum hates, the other loves, this person goes to the press.
It used to be social decorum to not talk about politics and religion at work. But the past 10 years everyone wants to be an activist now. I'd like to see more rules around this in every company. It kills productivity and really distracts from the company goals.
While your point around tacit acceptance is a good one I don't know if it follows that it's productive/appropriate to inject this debate into all of these situations. For one, the exact issues you care about could be very different from someone else's and having all these discussions is pretty distracting.
The method in this case, writing an open letter, seems like a way to weaponize network effect and have an outsized influence over say simply talking to your manager or using an internal feedback system. I think SpaceX is right to say this causes social pressure internally to sign on and not be on the wrong side of the "if you're not with us you're against us" attitudes of politics today.
No, internal channels can accomplish these things as well. Or political initiatives and lawsuits. Saying that the only choices are a larger open letter type airing, or else an exploitation of minorities, that's a false dichotomy and the tired exaggeration.
Not talking about cars is talking about having no car, and walking everywhere. You cannot avoid that.
Well, no. Not talking about something, is nothingness, silence, an absence of speech. I can demand that void of speech be filled with literally anything.
At some point common sense kicks in and you realize that talking to your wife about the colour of her favourite mug, is not politics. You realize, deciding what bread to eat for breakfast hasn't been calculated on how many votes Ron Paul got in the last primary, or whatever.
Making politics everything and making everything about politics, turns it into a religion. It isn't one, it's not a cosmology, and it'll never satisfy as a 'theory of everything'. Politics is one category out of many.
It's just a method of wrangling everybody's desires together for the purpose of governance. That's it. It's got nothing to do with coding up a widget for some factory and it's economic aim to serve the entire population with quality mugs at a cheaper price.
this is literalist, black and white thinking that is one of the foundations of fascism
if there is a social conflict (and boy are there social conflicts), not talking about those social problems is tacit support for the dominant position. pretending that one's work life can be neatly compartmentalized and has no bearing on the rest of the world is a fantasy of those who value their own comfort over the well being of others
I can disagree with the current policy and not say anything about it. Most of the time actions speak louder than words. A lot of people mentally tune out political 'hot air'. Focusing on making a better company and getting better paid can generate more effective political outcomes for you than dying on every single hill. You can't win every debate.
It is not politics to avoid talking about politics and religion. Stop imposing your personal view onto others and leave people alone. Work is work. Most of us work for the check and try to work on cool projects and keep the politics and religion for private discourse with people at home or at the pub.
This is coercion and it does the exact opposite of convincing others. Making people understand one's politics is surefire way to get the opposite result.
Also, if someone does that to me, the first thing that comes to mind is "Fuck off". Unapologetically.
Not talking about politics specifically at work (which is the scope they were addressing of which is pretty concretely indicated two sentences later with "work is work") does not mean they never talk about politics at other times in their life.
Also not talking about politics doesn't mean not engaging with politics at all. One could still be listening, thinking and voting which means not simply embracing the status quo despite not talking about it readily.
Nope. Keep your religion to yourself please and thank you. Define it however you want, but most people see through the bs strong arm tactic to try to force people to engage in this shit, and don’t want it.
This should be standard practice. Politics these days are toxic as it is, why would you want to drag that into the workplace? Even if it wasn't toxic, it just seems highly inappropriate.
If one wants to be a political activist, perhaps go find a job that's better suited for that type of behavior.
One thing that might make a difference here is how subjective "the boss is acting like a huge turd" can be.
If almost everyone would agree on the turdishness given a couple of facts on the case (none of this "heard from a friend of a friend" bullshit) then discussing and raising might be possible (though I'd probably still just leave).
But if people's assessment of the truth of that statement will depend hugely on that network of beliefs and values called "worldview" as well as exposure to different facts on the subject... then it's going to be hard.
> politics and religion were not appropriate topics at work
if executives were bringing these topics into the company through their outside interactions on twitter, would it be a violation of the policy?
> Activist employees are toxic to company culture.
I would argue that musk's personal "activism" (or whatever you want to call his twitter account) is far more harmful than this letter is to company culture
So, firing James Damore was the correct thing to do, after all? Him and his manifesto, and his subsequent behaviour were pretty distracting, political, toxic, critical of his employer, and wasted workplace resources...
The context was different. He responded to internal politics-discussion-board, and that was leaked many months later. The email in the OP is (from what we can see) creating the discussion.
Also, in the end Damore's continued employment became political thing, so it was probably inevitable he had to go. But the form - especially the crazy doublespeak - of his firing was the problem.
Sounds like a deal might be possible! Maybe Google doesn't fire Damore and Mozilla doesn't fire Eich and Elon doesn't fire ... whoever these people are! We can call this agreement "liberalism"! Or "free speech"!
And yet, all I've heard from the left over the past decade is that corporate employees have no free speech because oh it's not covered by the first amendment, as if that gave you the right rather than acknowledging it, and how oh actually it's not a free speech issue, it's a safety issue, or whatever excuse of the week, and anyway the company can do what it wants regardless. (In this one instance only, of course.)
So! Fine, normally I'd be against this sort of thing of people being fired for voicing opinions, but in this case there is a big heaping of schadenfreude involved.
Leopard fence was good for something after all, was it!
I think I would respect someone that said Damore, Eich, and these activists shouldn't have been fired. And I would respect someone that said each of them should have been.
Most on progressive twitter though were pro Damore being shot into the moon, but are defending these SpaceX activists (by CORRECTLY pointing out that Musk is a hypocrite with his interpretation of 'free speech')
And most on HackerNews were defending Damore, yet today think it's absolutely correct to expect to be fired from a private company for the smallest sign of dissent.
I don't have proof it's the same people, but the upvotes tell a narrative.
Me, personally, I'm in the first group. If you work for Musk you have to understand he's a petulant child who will take every slight way too seriously than what would be expected from The Richest Man In The World.
And I'm not even mad that he's a hypocrite. I know he is. Everyone with a braincell knows he is.
But it is wild to see how deep Musk's cult goes that he can inverse Eurasia and Eastasia and people just fall in line.
There never was a leopard fence, though. Capricious firings being the norm have been par for the course in this country for as long as it's been one.
The solution is, of course, employment protections and unionization, but 'free-speech liberals' aren't actually very liberal, and dogmatically hate both of those things.
> Activist employees are toxic to company culture.
Like leading an effort to unionize? I know that's socialism talking, but democracy in the workplace is as important as it is outside of it. And the free sharing of ideas (up to a point) is paramount for that process. A company could well benefit from active and engaged employees that make a company and its goals their own.
Of course, if your company has a top-down leadership culture fostering exchangeable employees (and let them feel that), then maybe employees that do have an opinion about the company and its leadership are indeed "toxic".
I think the idea here is that all companies are top-down by nature. We can argue about whether they ideally should be, but none of us alive today set up these realities.
> We created a rule that politics and religion were not appropriate topics at work. A couple of people quit in response, and morale improved dramatically.
On one hand, I agree with you. I've personally seen low level people at a large corporation believe they were unequivocally in the right, and tried to use the weight of their moral conviction to impose their view of things onto everyone else. It's not your job to do this, and it's not my job to care.
On the other hand, there has to be some capacity for this type of discussion to occur. Musk owns less than 50% of SpaceX, and I generally think employees should have some manner of input into the operations of the company they work for. History is full of cases where the justified party tried to convey their problems politely, were ignored or quietly silenced, and had to raise the problem loudly to get any traction. I think it's a reasonable desire to want to work for SpaceX, but not want someone's first reaction to hearing that you work at SpaceX to be bringing up whatever stupid thing Elon has done this week.
If someone has the answer on how to find this balance, please popularize it. In the meantime, I've left the large corp I was at and joined a small company with 7 others where I don't have to deal with such problems or such activists.
> I think it's a reasonable desire to want to work for SpaceX, but not want someone's first reaction to hearing that you work at SpaceX to be bringing up whatever stupid thing Elon has done this week
Like a lot of things, the blame for this falls on the news media.
Or, Musk could behave like a decent, mature human being.
The man is the richest person on the planet. The media is going to report on what he says because, you know, he's the richest person on the planet.
I heard the exact same arguments about how the media shouldn't cover Trump spouting off, and it's absurd for the exact same reasons.
These people hold incredibly sway over industry, politics, public policy, etc. Hell, Musk's behaviour has led to the Texas AJ investigating Twitter! Not shining a light on their behaviour would be journalistic malpractice.
The very idea that journalists should just ignore these people when they behave badly betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of journalism in an open and democratic society, while also failing to appreciate how much sway these people have over the way our world works.
Exposing the rich and powerful is a way to protect existing and future victims. It removes the perpetrators sense of invincibility and empowers victims to speak up.
But let's face it, you don't actually care about any of this. It's clear from the comments you're shilling for Elon. The thing I don't understand is why.
> It removes the perpetrators sense of invincibility and empowers victims to speak up.
That wasn't an angle I'd thought of (making the rich and powerful in general seem like they are accusable) and it makes things a lot of people have said in the last make more sense, so I thank you for suggesting it and have an upvote.
That said, the pattern of what the media publishes about celebrities in general, and Musk in particular doesn't fit. I am also skeptical it actually accomplishes this goal or that the benefits outweigh the costs.
> It's clear from the comments you're shilling for Elon. The thing I don't understand is why.
Taking this in the most charitable light of "what is motivating you to make all these somewhat pro-Elon posts over the last day?" I did some introspection.
Unfortunately, the answer is very long and complex and I couldn't figure out any way to condense it without being misleading and giving you the wrong impression (seriously, I tried! Unless you have a similar memeplex every shortening pattern matches to something I don't believe!).
I can say a bit about what the reasons aren't: I gain nothing tangible for this (I hold no stock in any Musk companies and am not employed in anything relevant). I have no person connection to Elon and he may indeed be an arsehole, I don't know. Colonizing mars is a fools dream. TSLA is overvalued by at least 2x.
> On the other hand, there has to be some capacity for this type of discussion to occur. Musk owns less than 50% of SpaceX, and I generally think employees should have some manner of input into the operations of the company they work for.
The workers have a right to organize a labor union. They have a right to go on strike and shut the company down. They have a right to critique any process or rule in the company that they might wish to stop. They have a right to weigh in on the consequences of any of the company's processes, goals, or aims. The workers have had these rights recognized in law for most of the last century.
Your first two “rights” (form a union, and if they do, to organize a strike) are in fact legally protected behavior in the US. Latter two are just made-up nonsense. No, they in fact do not have those “rights”, you just wish they did.
We are not talking about internal company problems here. We are talking about letter about behaviour of the boss outside of the company which is of no concern of employees.
>One side wants to build cool shit and the other side wants to shit post on Twitter.
Do we know in which department the sacked employees worked? For all we know, they could have been employed in marketing or HR, not exactly the area that "builds cool shit" but often those that are active on social media and bent on bringing SJW politics into the working place.
Have you read what's supposed to be in the letter? Sounds like you're victim blaming to me.
I didn't see any SJW politics in that letter but concern that Elon's behavior would reflect badly on the company itself. Which is certainly true but if you have a megalomaniac boss I guess you also need to expect to be fired for telling the truth.
This is sort of a meta comment, but if you look across history the men and women who forced civilization and technology forward were typically gigantic assholes. I'm not sure what to make of that, and Musk definitely is an asshole, but that doesn't mean I don't root for his space company that's finally returned the United States to the stars.
My understanding is the same and I believe it's pretty obvious why they always seem to be that way. It takes a tremendous amount of self-confidence to push through "the system" in any meaningful way and that often comes off as assholish. It also causes them to behave the same in every aspect of their life. They don't compartmentalize being an asshole in business, but they're a Mr. Rogers for everything else.
That kind of confidence is pervasive in every aspect of their being. They don't have room for doubt.
Reading about wartime generals solidified the thought in me. Many generals like Patton weren't even very gifted strategically, but they were confident and authoritative in their decisions. Oftentimes, that's enough to pull off a victory.
How do you know there weren't equally capable non-assholes that the assholes pushed out of the way? Isn't that the story of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison?
That's a really excellent historical example to bring up, and, "no".
Edison and Tesla were definitely NOT equally capable. Tesla was an absolutely genius inventor and scientist, and Edison was a genius businessperson and good inventor. (Or something like that, TBH it wasn't Edison's biographies I poured over in highschool!)
Tesla received life-long backing and support from Westinghouse, major investment from JP Morgan, and more.
Edison tried, and for a chunk of time, did succeed at pushing Tesla out of the way, but I'd strongly argue that the things that sunk Tesla were not ways that Edison pushed him out of the way, nor would I argue that Edison ever really succeeded at pushing him out of the way.
Thanks for the correction. I think the overall point still stands though. Maybe the reason we think that mostly only assholes are game changers is because they pushed aside, or wrote out of history, equally capable non-assholes. It's definitely the kind of thing an asshole would do.
For most of civilization we've been able to overlook the fact that our leaders and heroes are gigantic assholes, and judge them by their great deeds rather than minutiae of their private interactions.
I think the particular argument is that this exact lack of accountability was a mistake and allowed a lot of bad outcomes for a lot of people and only worked for those who already had the power to begin with.
Generally OK, but I'm not sure if we should have different perspective for SpaceX considering it's funded by taxpayers' money, it's not out there competing in the free market...
SpaceX isn’t funded by taxpayers anymore than Amazon is (for JEDI) or the local gas station that sells fuel to federal fleet vehicles. Just because the government is a customer doesn’t put it in the “funded by taxpayers’” camp in the sense that the public has any say in the company.
That's a fair point. But I'd say that then the issue is decided by the voters and our elected representatives - if we wanted, we could get the government to cancel their contracts if Musk does something really terrible (not saying it would be easy). I'd prefer it be done that way rather than internal activists pushing their own beliefs onto the company unilaterally and disrupting operations - that's one way we can be SURE our tax dollars would be wasted.
false, spacex is a contractor with bounding contracts, who cares which organization spend the money. The contract matter, if you want to argue, there is starliner to criticize
Sure. Someone who directly depends on Musk not going to jail for their employment to not disappear isn't exactly the best judge of character. She can even be a tech sis if you want, or a 10xer, pick your favorite.
And I'd also be willing to bet cash that all these employees were very low level, likely new hires out of college, and are all of the political activist type. Because for all his bluster, Musk really hasn't done anything THAT objectionable besides openly shit on Democrats. (No, I don't believe the bogus sexual assault allegation from an anonymous friend of a friend, there's no evidence).