forced inclusion

> companies become more obliged to follow the "inclusion" policy held up by the vocal minority that feels excluded from _everything_, or so it seems

my company, a 120 people company in the health sector, has grown across a decade or so, steadily but not speedily. having worked in a startup before, that grew from 30 to 60 people in 3 years while i was there, the "problems" those company sizes are dealing with are different. it's about survival mostly. and growth, whatever that is.

when a company seems to grow past a certain point, the culture it had cannot be kept automagically, it needs nurishment and processes and support. that's the first moment when a company (or their leaders) actually wonder about values. before that moment they sort of lived by example, but after a certain size, this is no longer possible. then workshops are planned to write down a dna, a company culture, or company values, whatever they call it then. into this they pour (hopefully) the things they lived by example, but usually they come up with new things, that'd be really nice to have, or that society demands. and one of these things is inclusion.

certainly i am not saying that before that moment a company is exclusive. i'd argue that most companies are actually quite inclusive on an individual basis, and that's what counts in my book. treat the individual with respect and include them. with the company dna this becomes an agenda in written form, a template to be applied to everything.

and guess what happens to my company now. except that the founders didn't exactly sit down and define a dna. they just left office culture as company culture. thanks to covid, multi-cultural hiring increased, we now have 25? 30? different nationalities? i'm not complaining, we're all getting along nicely. it's just that now the political side of things waves over from the social networks, where self-presentation and likes are all so important. except that it feels very superficial, hypocritical even.

examples examples. there's this master-slave debate in software, how my redis cluster is now suddenly offensive to people with a slavery background (i am quite certain that not only afro-americans ever had a slavery background across the globe). how git cannot have a master branch, instead it has a default branch and they usually call it main. how the company (in central europe!!) needs to show solidarity with Ukraine (don't get me started on the misuse of solidarity here, as you need to be specific what you're talking about. the aversion against war? i am sure not all of Russia went hooray, and there's countless other wars going on that we're not mentioning in the company. it could be anything, but my company decided to just throw a random slide about solidarity into the management update, bam, done) without actually doing anything, no time off, no involvement, no donations, so why even bother.

it feels like the companies want to be part of the movements, without taking a stance or position that might be disagreeable. so we announce "we no longer use master in git", because there's a management guideline that all new repositories are called "main" in their default branch now. we don't bother to rename the other existing 80 repositories (i am not kidding here) because that'd be worktime and we need that to be used for "other" things.

being part of a movement is never "simple" and without opposition. you can't promote women first into management positions without some backlash from men who think they got cheated. you can't demand gender-inclusive speed without removing the toxic social interaction in teams. and whatever you choose, you will alienate someone. you will offend someone. because there is no right to be not offended, that'd be ridiculous. language transfers intent, it doesn't have that without the user, and the interpretation and the intent can differ, and because this is so obvious, as soon as you take a position, you'll offend someone. i wish companies got their shit together and just lived with it. not everyone needs to hop on every single woke-inclusion-support-train as a company.

> not taking a position in a certain debate as a company doesn't mean that all the employees can be assholes. but there is a huge difference between an individual being inclusive and a company taking a political (sometimes political, more often than not) position on inclusion. why is it different? because a company is no person. a person can live inclusion, a company can only position itself but that will reflect back on the employees, just like any company culture would.