Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

I don't get it. I grew up in Silicon Valley and I work in tech, and so do many other people I know. They run the gamut from far-left socialists to libertarians to own a bunch of guns. They have all kinds of ethnic backgrounds and religious views.

Some of my most libertarian/pro-gun friends have not been shy about their political views and it hasn't hurt their tech careers at all. They are far more welcome here than liberals are in other parts of the country.

It seems to me, from personal experience, that the people who feel alienated are the ones who bring politics to work in an overbearing contrarian way, seeking to cause offense under the guise of "debate," and then pretend to be shocked when people don't want to put up with their shit. Work is for working; it's not a debating society, and especially not when the debating is done in bad faith.

Peter Thiel has been more politically vocal than most, and he is vocal about things he knows to be unpopular. He can't be surprised that people who disagree with him are also vocal. If he can't take the heat he should stay out of the kitchen.

> It seems to me, from personal experience, that the people who feel alienated are the ones who bring politics to work in an overbearing contrarian way, seeking to cause offense under the guise of "debate," and then pretend to be shocked when people don't want to put up with their shit.

Like many other commenters in this thread, you choose a wording that would be more appropriate if the extent of the problem were obnoxious Republicans not getting invited to happy hour/their coworkers' birthday party/?. The type of situation that people complain about, whether it is accurate or not, seems to be more along the lines that if you are in the wrong half of Silicon Valley companies, being recognised as deviating from the obnoxious Democrat position on any issue of import may result in your colleagues organising to report you to HR and/or rile up a small city's worth of Twitter users to call for your company to terminate you or be boycotted itself, not to mention potential long-term consequences along the lines of easily googleable Medium articles with your name on them or entries in an unknown number of blacklists circulated to recruiters through activist backchannels. How accurate or common any of these are is completely up to discussion, but dismissing them as if any of what is alleged amounts to a normal and healthy free speech reaction just seems disingenuous.