Facebook is afraid of a Facebook Boise office , Facebook Salt Lake City office, Facebook Houston office, etc. Their office locations are based on the political preferences of their board members and management. With no offices, they can't control the political makeup of the company.
Salt Lake City and Boise are pretty liberal and both vote blue. Houston is overall pretty split, but has voted for a Democrat mayor for more than 30 years.
What "political preferences" are you suggesting Facebook is afraid of from that focuses on the 3 named regions?
Facebook managers, who a large portion of are foreign nationals, prefer foreign nationals manage US offices. US citizens might not be as in favor of that and probably prefer US nationals manage US offices.
That seems like a pretty outrageous claim. Do you have any evidence to support that? My friend works for FB Seattle and the "site manager" is definitely a white US citizen. What benefit would FB have from having "foreign nationals" run domestic offices?
I'm trying to interpret your comment as anything but xenophobic, but I'm having a really tough time doing so.
Just go look at your Seattle org chart. I never said there was a "benefit," just that foreign national managers prefer that foreign national managers manage US offices and that is why they fear offices in areas that don't adhere to this globalist orthodoxy that is in the bay area and Seattle. That should be self evident.
There is no "Seattle org chart." A given office may have a lead, but only small percentage of people in the office will report to the lead. In some cases the lead isn't even a manager.
Personally, across four teams and six managers, only one has been a non-citizen and he was a permanent resident from an anglosphere country. Looking around, pick a random manager and you'll probably find a white guy from the US.
It's the modern technological economy that produces the political culture of SF rather than the other way around. Marx' idiom of "all that is solid melts into air" is relevant here, tech and the modern urban economy aren't liberal by accident. They're liberal because technology and the logic of economic development itself erodes barriers.
The political and economic divide isn't some artefact that happened by accident and when all the tech people bring their capital and tech to conservative regions they'll see the light and become god fearing Christians, it's the regions that will undergo the same cultural change as any other region absorbed into the modern economy.
it's a process independent of the US or FAANGs. Doesn't matter if you go to Shenzhen, the UAE, Berlin or London. Wherever the global economy takes hold traditional values are pretty much torn apart because they're functionally incompatible.
Non-American Conservatives were much more aware of this than their American peers and are generally much more capitalism sceptic than conservatives across the pond. But you can full on expect that there'll be a very funny new political divide in the US as people start to realise how quickly economic modernisation erodes conservative values. It was already visible in 2016 if you listened to Bannon, say.
Your theory is easily proven wrong. Go to any tech office in high tech China. Notice how barriers have not been eroded, all the managers AND employees are Chinese, and some of the managers are required to be part of the Chinese Communist party. Where is the melting pot of liberalism in high tech China, or India, or Japan, etc, etc.
I've worked and lived in China. If you think China hasn't changed then you should have seen China 30-40 years ago when everyone was wearing the party uniform and carrying Mao's little red book in their chest pocket. And I mean that literally, not metaphorically.
Today you have women running companies, Starbucks and makerspaces in every city where people sit and talk in English. You've got to be kidding me if you think China hasn't changed, it has changed faster than virtually any other place. Beijing (the only city I can personally speak of) has a surprisingly large gay nightlife. It's astonishing how much that country changes even year to year.
Sure, it's not liberal in a political sense yet but it has liberalised dramatically, in virtually all aspects of life. Same goes for Japan, it's a much more open, global country now.
Facebook's board and senior management doesn't seem to have a clear political bias from what I can tell. It would be bad for business if they did; a company that is ultimately seeking to attract the entire world onto its platforms needs to be able to operate across the political spectrum.
