[kodz4]

Interesting to see as polarization increases, as it will given the environment, whether a company can break into two along political lines.

Has that happened before in history?

I wouldn't mind a seperate conservative google and a liberal google. Let the quality of the product offered decide which is better.

[lallysingh]

You end up with campuses in different areas and different products centered in each.

Happens naturally.

[geofft]

[flagged]

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. Comments like this lead to train wrecks. Presumably the trains are shipping tires because after they wreck we get tire fires.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[tvanantwerp]

Correlation != causation. Could be that, because cities become tech hubs, and because cities tend to lean left, that anyone who wants to work in tech will move to a city and be influenced by the left-leaning culture. I've known people who were farther right, went into tech, moved to cities, and are now farther left.

[geofft]

Sure, but the effect is the same. A "right-wing Google" won't succeed because left-wing policies are more beneficial to the growth of cities, which are beneficial to the success of organizations like Google.

It is actually sort of surprising to me that cities are tech hubs - you should be able to deliver fantastic products while working remotely and never meeting anyone in person. (And the free software/open source movement is an existence proof of that.) So there must be something else about cities that makes them better at not just the success of tech companies but the success of groups of tech companies.

[0815test]

> left-wing policies are more beneficial to the growth of cities

Left-wing policies like urban exclusionary zoning? Yeah right. Look at how Texas and other Sunbelt states are doing, despite them being in inherently more challenging parts of the country than CA.

[tm1265]

Texas cities are doing good in spite of the state's political culture, not because of it. All the cities except maybe DFW are in a constant struggle with the conservative state government.

[damnyou]

Or maybe the intellectual capacity required to do well in tech also makes it more likely one would recognize instances of social injustice. It's just pattern matching after all.

[malvosenior]

Until recently Silicon Valley was very libertarian (and before that conservative due to high levels of defense contracting). It wasn't until ~2010 that things started becoming overtly left wing/democrat. I can't say that period has given us a lot of technological innovation compared to the previous period.

[kodz4]

idk...their political opinions can deeply effect the product. At Intel or Microsoft for example it doesn't matter as much, what anyone's political views are. Their products can't start riots tomorrow morning.

Now ofcourse the corporate robots managing things are more interested in keeping the factory running than in anything else. So their natural instinct is to deny conservative/liberal fault lines.

But I think it will just increase the fault lines. We have conservative and liberal newspapers. There is a reason they bifurcated.

Search tech these days is really commoditized. Look at Elastic Search sure not as good as Google but it will do the job for most cases. On top of that adding a conservative or liberal layer might actually benefit people. It feels more natural anyway. Now there is a lot of cognitive dissonance. Which is not going to go away.

[snvzz]

>There are exceptions of course, but statistically, leftists are better at tech.

Citation needed.