This is so hilariously wrong that I don't even know where to start.
Google's culture was predicated on hiring intelligent, emotionally-continent adults. Free discussion of politics wasn't banned during my time there because everyone was capable of understanding precisely the opposite of what you're describing: that differing views on the world exist and are attributable to more than just whether someone is a good or bad person.
When you scale to a hundred thousand employees, you can't keep your bar that high, and you have to start letting in people who more closely resemble the average narrow-minded, maximalizing dumbass. For a little while that meant the company needed to bow to the more culturally-powerful regressive left (esp when things leaked, for PR reasons), but as the culture war heats up, the only winning move for a company with a (classical) liberal founding culture is to discourage political engagement at all.
I've worked for a lot of small startups some mid-sized companies in California over the last decade.
I would never ever share any views that are non-liberal because when I've seen anyone else do it it didn't go well for them at all. And I'm not at work to change people's political views so there's no reason to take the risk.
I don't think this is a new shift at all. I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers.
"Over the last decade" is a critical qualification, I think. This phenomenon emerged in the early 2010s, by my best reckoning.
This sounds an awful lot like nostalgic pining for the good old days, but there was a time not too long ago that daring to hold an opinion that others around you disagreed with wasn't an existential threat to your career. Things shifted really hard, really fast.
> I would never ever share any views that are non-liberal because when I've seen anyone else do it it didn't go well for them at all. And I'm not at work to change people's political views so there's no reason to take the risk.
I'm not making any statement about "small and mid sized California companies". I'm talking specifically about Google. The more time I spend away from there, the more I realize what an incredibly unique place Google is (or perhaps, was).
> I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers.
The distribution of "techies" has changed dramatically as everyone else in the world discovered how much money was in it, but this couldn't be further from the truth as far as classic tech culture goes. Perhaps they were "smart but insecure", but it manifested as a hyperindividualist, chaotic marketplace of ideas culture, precisely because you could be fairly confident that the people you were talking with were intelligent enough to handle disagreement without thinking of everyone as heretics, infidels, or faithful to the dogma.
It's the mainstreaming of tech, and the influx of people more in thrall to social conformity over independent thought that's tempered tech culture's famously anarchic tendencies. (I know this is a little reductive but I don't want to write an essay in a single comment. If you have a particular complaint about the way I phrased this, I'd be happy to clarify).
I should note that, to the extent that I'm focusing on the left's abandonment of liberalism, it's because I am and always have been a left-liberal, and most of my milieu has been as well. I hope it's not controversial that the right is abandoning liberalism too: I just don't have exposure to spaces where they're culturally powerful enough to illiberally enforce their dominance.
I'm the first to say how horribly broken tech hiring is, but that's relative to an ideal. I frankly don't know of any other way to hire at large scale and ensure a baseline of quality across the company. Google leaned heavily on whiteboard interviews during my time there too, so that doesn't explain shifts in employee norms and culture.
I think they should give the option of completing a larger project on their own instead of whiteboarding questions. For example, Symantec gave a practice problem where you had to basically build a mini-virus checker with wildcards (* and ?) and they selected the submissions with the fastest times to interview. I really enjoy performance-based problems and trying to optimize threading, memory, and caching but whiteboard interviews don't really give me that opportunity to showcase those talents. I like solving big problems and whiteboard questions really test your ability to memorize trivial ones.
The actual interview was much less whiteboarding and more explaining your code to make sure you actually wrote it. It felt like a more classical interview where they aren't trying to see if you are full of BS because they already had an actual work sample that was representative of an actual type of problem likely to be experienced on the job.
I think that's usually used to describe group dynamics, but my model here has less to do with that and more to do with having to lower the bar for each individual, because scaling hiring massively (in an increasingly competitive labor market) is difficult without lowering standards.
Google's culture was predicated on hiring intelligent, emotionally-continent adults. Free discussion of politics wasn't banned during my time there because everyone was capable of understanding precisely the opposite of what you're describing: that differing views on the world exist and are attributable to more than just whether someone is a good or bad person.
When you scale to a hundred thousand employees, you can't keep your bar that high, and you have to start letting in people who more closely resemble the average narrow-minded, maximalizing dumbass. For a little while that meant the company needed to bow to the more culturally-powerful regressive left (esp when things leaked, for PR reasons), but as the culture war heats up, the only winning move for a company with a (classical) liberal founding culture is to discourage political engagement at all.