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Chef CEO Defends Contract with ICE

blog.chef.io

51–60 of 126 posts

Re: Chef CEO Defends Contract with ICE

#51
post #2

Terrible response, companies totally can pick and choose who they work with and who their customers are. > I want to be clear that this decision is not about contract value — it is about maintaining a consistent and fair business approach in these volatile times. Doublespeak for, this decision is 100% about contract value. I am interested more in the former employee that removed the ruby gem though. Cool form of prot…

exactly, especially when the sentence before it mentions he worked with their executive team to make the decision.

This is entirely about money.

> former employee that removed the ruby gem

I hadn’t heard of this, do you have a link to that by chance?

Re: Chef CEO Defends Contract with ICE

#52
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see where he's coming from: if he refuses to do business with ICE because he disagrees with something they're doing (whether he or they are actually wrong), he's implicitly endorsing every aspect of every customer he does choose to do business with.

By this logic no one can ever take a stand, lest they be criticized for being inconsistent in the application of their principles. Gotta start somewhere, no?

That’s what these types want, though. They want to have plausible deniability and a solid excuse while they’re cashing their checks, they don’t actually want to make hard choices.

Re: Chef CEO Defends Contract with ICE

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anyone claiming that

> badrequest 17 minutes ago [-] > > to be clear: I also find policies such as separating families and detaining children wrong and contrary to the best interests of our country. > "I simply have all the ability and none of the desire to do anything about it" The root commenter seems to be saying that the CEO of chef has "all the ability" to change this situation.

As CEO of Chef, Barry Crist has the authority to say, "Chef will withdraw from all ICE contracts. We cannot change ICE's policies, but we are not obligated to remain complicit in the harm these policies cause."

He could have said this. He could have taken a stand and set an example. He chose to take the easy way out, and I think there are too many people in this thread willing to make excuses for his moral cowardice.

He may have done the right thing as a CEO, but he has failed miserably as a human being and an American citizen.

Re: Chef CEO Defends Contract with ICE

#54
This is a case that could set a precedent for other companies and is worth a good debate. I believe it comes down to values. Here's a simple example to explain.

Suppose I am a CEO of a consulting firm. I have a client who pays us a lot of money and have had a good relationship with for years. Now suppose I've hired and brought another person to meet this client for several months. The meetings seem to go well but (let's say 9 months later), Another employee brings to my attention that the client had been consistently harassing the person I hired to manage the account.

I now have two choices, re-assign the person I just hired or "fire" the client, permanently ending the relationship. What are the values of my company? That's the question that needs to be asked. What's the right thing to do?

If I choose to re-assign the person I hired, I would not be addressing the problem, not holding the client to the same bar I would have for my own employees. I'm telling the client and my employees that I value the contract more than them and more than the values of my company. The side effect is that it reinforces the bad behavior.

This is essentially what has occurred in this scenario. Except the harassment is not towards Chef's employees it's towards civilian children and their parents.

Having said that, companies don't always get it right the first time but it's our job to inform them of their error. Executive teams often are flooded pools of confirmation bias where dissent rarely occurs. I don't think "combing" is really necessary but like anything else, when the spotlight shows up. It's usually in the company's best interest to distance itself.

[edit: fix grammar]

Re: Chef CEO Defends Contract with ICE

#55
post #2

Terrible response, companies totally can pick and choose who they work with and who their customers are. > I want to be clear that this decision is not about contract value — it is about maintaining a consistent and fair business approach in these volatile times. Doublespeak for, this decision is 100% about contract value. I am interested more in the former employee that removed the ruby gem though. Cool form of prot…

exactly, especially when the sentence before it mentions he worked with their executive team to make the decision. This is entirely about money. > former employee that removed the ruby gem I hadn’t heard of this, do you have a link to that by chance?

Here is the developer's statement: https://github.com/sethvargo/chef-sugar

Article: https://www.zdnet.com/article/developer-takes-down-ruby-libr...

Note this is the same developer who left Chef in 2014 because he received death threats from their open source community.

Re: Chef CEO Defends Contract with ICE

#56
post #39

For the record (if it matters) I am very pro-immigration and pro-immigrant rights, but I don't think denying chef services to ICE will actually do anything - let me explain. Lets look at this from another perspective (couldn't hurt, right?). I am a company that sells paper. Some companies might use this paper for very bad things (printing out patents?). Do I comb through all my clients and determine what they are usi…

They don't have to look at the moral behavior of every person they work with, they just need to listen to their employees. The likelihood of employees being able to actually abuse that privilege is pretty low since it requires a lot of collaboration. Also this is not about "doing anything" in the sense of stopping ICE. This is about an individuals right to choose who they want to support and work with. Would you real…

That's fair, but we are diving into subjective territory. Lets say (hypothetically) that half of the employees support ICE. Who decides then whether or not the contract is maintained? (Unlikely scenario in this case, but I am more interested in the general precedent than this specific scenario, so just playing devil's advocate)

Also, lets say you are the CEO who proposes that you should NOT work with ICE, but all of your employees believe you should. In that case, it is obviously not as simple as just listening to what your employees want.

Re: Chef CEO Defends Contract with ICE

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper is an interchangeable commodity with many suppliers. Specific software products often are not. Furthermore, there's a difference between "someone bought this commodity from a distributor" and "we have a contract specifically with this entity".

I agree, I think its not an apples-to-apples comparison, and that is slightly intentional. I want to highlight the same decision to be made under a less frictional commodity to ask the question: where does one draw the line on what they supply? There are some obvious lines probably. You would not want to be a gun manufacturer that sold guns directly to drug cartels, for example.

I think it's reasonable to say "this software is open and anyone can use it, and we don't control who downloads and runs it themselves".

I also think it's reasonable, given an entity you don't want to do business with, to say "we don't enter into contracts (even our standard contracts) with these entities, and we don't provide any kind of support to these entities".

Re: Chef CEO Defends Contract with ICE

#58

Regarding the deleted Ruby gems: I think it's unprofessional for developers to try and bring down production services just because they disagree with a company move. It's also a bit immature. The thing to do in this case is to quit. Down your tools and quit, but don't destroy the hard work of your teammates and betray the trust of all your investors and customers.

It sounds you're saying that the developer who deleted their gems in protest shouldn't actually own their work, because exercising their rights as owners might inconvenience others.

Re: Chef CEO Defends Contract with ICE

#59
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what he's saying at all. He's saying that Chef is in the business of providing devops software. They're not a government watchdog. They're not the ethics police. They're not political or social activist organization. I fail to see the problem. Finally, not selling chef to ICE won't change anything.

I bet that's the same sort of sophistry that allowed IBM's management to justify doing business with the Nazi regime. I know what Crist is saying. And it smells like self-serving bullshit to me. He doesn't want to do the right thing as a human being and as an American citizen because it would cut into Chef's revenues and upset the company's shareholders and investors. As far as I am concerned, this is unforgivable mo…

Pretty much every tech company, hundreds of consulting firms, dozens of construction firms, etc, etc do business with DoHS and ICE. These are huge organizations with thousands of employees that buy products and services from thousands of suppliers. Everything from software to sock. Are you gonna get angry with all of those companies too? And what about the DEA, FBI, NSA, CIA and DoD? They all do things that some Americans consider evil. And they all buy from the hundreds of tech firms big and small. Everyone from Amazon to Oracle. From HP to Cisco. It just seems mean and petty to pick on Chef to me.

Re: Chef CEO Defends Contract with ICE

#60
I am pro-ICE, pro-immigration, and anti-human-trafficking. Ice separates children from human traffickers and parents alike. Human traffickers bring children to the U.S. for sale by the tens of thousands every year. We should praise ICE for their commitment to protect children & their families who have traveled to America illegally. If they want to seek refuge, they should use our immigration system to seek refuge instead of sneaking into our country.
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