Scrolling through HN while your code compiles != full on political debates at work.

I’m on a group chat with a couple old friends and when someone starts a debate on a topic I’m passionate about we go hard and we go deep. Suddenly it’s two hour later and here I am trying to do some quick demography with raw data from the census bureau to prove a point.

I’ve started blocking the chat until after work because debates do tend to rage sometimes. And we’re old friends with a grounding empathy and shared experiences to fall back on. Doing the same thing with coworkers during work hours? I would’ve banned it too.

But one is just unproductive (you being idle) the other one is counterproductive (you upset others and divert their attention) and multiply the counter-productivity.

Yeah, I've met people with views so different from mine that our professional relationship was at stake.

Once it was a woman who seriously thought white men needed to be excluded from things to make up for all the time they oppressed everyone else. It was like socially-acceptable maliciousness.

When you talk politics, you risk having people reveal extreme views that really accomplish nothing but put a wedge in an environment what's supposed to be collaborative.

I think this is a major point, because even when you deal with really strong sports rivalries, it seems to be mostly play acting like they hate each other's teams. Actual hurt feelings are pretty rare expect for anger at particular events in a game (for example, bad ref call). With politics, it hits something much deeper in people and gets people to be side tracked for far longer, as well as possibly causing reductions in mood that translate to worse productivity.

Right, if counterproductive conversation was the real problem, then Google should shut down access to HN, b/c I'm sure the aggregate drain on Googlers' productivity is much more than point to point office conversations...

I read HN to remain current. This is work for me.

And I'm going to brag that my company was lightyears ahead of Google on this one. We don't allow political debates. Such a time waster. But HN is educational.