Please don't. Ideological flamewar is against the site guidelines and we ban accounts that do it.
Also, these generalizations are entirely in the eye of the beholder. They're a creation of your own passions, based on whatever data sample happened to activate them. This explains why the people with opposite passions to yours see HN in exactly the opposite way: it's a big enough place to encounter a data sample that will activate any pre-existing perception. I've written about this many times:
If we're to have a community that doesn't suck, at some point we all need to understand these mechanisms well enough to avoid repeating them uncritically.
Sorry bro, I forgot that it is verboten to point out the rampant right-wing / libertarian philosophy which took over HN as the YC bros got wealthier and wealthier.
Yes massah, we have a really nice pseudo-intellectual, crypto-fascist bulletin board here massah!
11th commandment: Though shall not suggest that a bunch of upper middle-class white American tech bros cannot solve all the world's problems with greed.
Well that was a little unexpected! I happened to write a long response to a similar comment yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922311. I don't suppose it will convince you but a guy can dream.
The short version is that what you've posted here is actually the same, even though it seems opposite on the surface, as how people with one ideological bit flipped call HN a "leftist SJW and socialist haven", "always politically left", "they don't like conservative opinions here", "a liberal echo chamber", "the HN crowd is mostly woke", "heavily leaning to the left", "HN has a very anti-libertarian echo chamber", "HN has a heavy socialist lean, you are not allowed to have a differing perspective", "dang is an SJW cunt", and "any thought that differs from SV, left-leaning orthodoxy, is instantly flagged, downvoted, or deleted".
Quote quality 100% guaranteed—links available on request!
I'm in the same boat. Before Covid finding a company which would hire me (American) while living in Istanbul was easy. Now the competition with unemployed Americans has made me leave the tech industry, as I'm no longer employable.
There's a big caveat here: Middle-eastern engineers will have significant problems working with more liberal/woke companies. They have a strong tendency to be homophobic/transphobic/misogynist.
Last year I fired an off-shored team of 10 otherwise excellent Egyptian engineers because their homophobic statements on LinkedIn and in Slack made people in the company uncomfortable.
If your company's engineers lean more right-wing/republican, then middle-eastern engineers are probably a great untapped resource. If your company is more of a Silicon Valley company, they are a liability which can get you sued.
I think your one(?) experience with Middle-eastern engineers has unfortunately given you a bad impression, but I'm not sure that necessitates making such a dogmatic and blanket "caveat".
Following the logic in your own statement equating Republicans to Middle-eastern homophobes, mid-west engineers will(!) have significant problems working with more liberal/woke companies. They have a strong(!) tendency to be homophobic/transphobic/misogynist. They are a liability which can get you sued.
Does that sound like a correct, or even fair, assessment to you?
I'm a Republican software engineer from Kansas and it doesn't to me.
Beyond that, from my time living in Beirut and traveling the Middle-east I can assure you there are many, many liberal (in both the Western and US sense) and metropolitan software engineers who would have no "problems working with more liberal/woke" companies".
> I think your one(?) experience with Middle-eastern engineers has unfortunately given you a bad impression, but I'm not sure that necessitates making such a dogmatic and blanket "caveat".
I've directly managed 6 teams in Istanbul / Beirut / Cairo, another 4 in Belarus / Kiev, and one somewhere in Russia (I forget, it's been 20 years). Those in Belarus were by far the best, probably because they aren't mobile (it's very difficult to emigrate from Belarus into Europe or the USA). They work hard, are paid well and retention is great.
The worst were in Cairo, by far. I enjoy working with Istanbul engineers, but I steer away from Ankara / Konya teams because they tend to be conservative and just aren't great for startup environments, they're more well suited to work for the financial industry or the large retail holdings.
Beirut isn't a fair comparison, because it's a fairly liberal / western city (heck, they even do their day to day transactions in dollars instead of lira). Most of the engineers I've recruited there were also female.
And yes, my preference is to avoid mid-western / southern engineers. I don't hire people I wouldn't want to socialize with after work. I always vet hires and contractors on LinkedIn / Facebook. If I see pro-trump / anti-lgbt / proudly / qanon activity, their resumes are round-filed. If the firm's owners donated to trump, those firms are blacklisted.
I wouldn't hire you into the companies where I tend to work. If I worked in something more soulless like advertising / finance / government where I just wouldn't care about my job or employer, I would hire you because you'd fit in.
Call it discriminatory hiring, I don't care, my projects succeed, my teams are successful, and my engineers are loyal, some have followed me around for 25 years.
Proof? My understanding is that the Twitter block in 2016 had less to do with Twitter as a company and more to do with Tayipp not being able to control the flow of information.
Remember Wikipedia was blocked because Tayipp's page was painted honestly, which he found to be very unflattering, and because Wikimedia refused to remove references to the recorded/leaked conversations about money laundering with his (Berkeley-educated) nitwit song Bilal (There is a saying here when somebody does not understand what you are saying: "Explain it as if you are explaining it to Bilal".
This is also why soundcloud was blocked for 3 years, because people used it to post the recordings of him telling Bilal to remove all of the cash from the family houses in case they were searched.
Depends on the AKP supporters. Those who are barely literate, live in Asherates (villages which are run by often corrupt patriarchs and are told how to vote), and who go to school at imam-hatips? Probably not. The Turks who are educated in the conservative universities in Konya? You'd be surprised. AKP is basically the post-Bush GOP, but Muslim instead of Christian.
I'm not defending the AKP, but painting all of them as rednecks is a huge mistake.
Hacker News: I know! Let's ask Ayn Rand to solve it!