Item — HN Reader

I don't know if that's true among top-tier applicants. And even if the ratio were 24:1, it still not a meaningless gesture. It puts an economic pressure on a company when finding candidates is harder.

But really being able to be proud of the work you do in your life is its own reward.

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I disagree. In my experience (graduated from Stanford in 2015) at least as many people, probably more, are put off by "woke" culture and corporate activism. Opinions that are commonly voiced are not necessarily widely held because people with strong opinions tend to speak a disproportionately large amount.

You're drawing a false dichotomy. "Don't be evil" isn't at all the same as "wokeness."

Just as one example, some of us would never build an unconstitutional mass-surveillance system, and it has nothing to do with "wokeness."

I'd wager it's even more true among top-tier candidates. Anecdotally the best engineers I've ever worked with have been among the most uninterested in politics.

My experience is that they're interested in politics somewhat orthogonal to the mainstream discourse.

Anecdotally, several of the smartest people I knew as a grad student at Stanford are now working for an international nonprofit seeking to reduce bigotry, working in politics focused on privacy, working on encrypted communications, and working as faculty at another top tier university focused on accessibility and ml fairness.

Not many of the excellent programmers I know went to grad school. It's probably self-selected for people interested in social issues.

It's pretty meaningless, and top-tier at that level is fit based, the objective geniuses have a way of not working for other people for very long at all.