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GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

latimes.com

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Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#31

Post by whalesalad »

A lot of these companies need to start sticking to their guns and simply letting people go for conflicts like this.

If you’re not gonna be a team player there are a billion other tech companies you can go be a part of.

I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with the core issue here – but at some point the message needs to be sent that you don’t deserve a job and aren’t owed anything. You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple. If you aren’t on board with the company mission, go find a different one.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#32

Post by Miner49er »

mc32 wrote: post #22
geofft wrote: post #14

> With the issue refusing to go away, GitHub executives have changed their internal messaging, including a memo to employees saying barring ICE from “access to GitHub could actually hurt the very people we all want to help,” in the words of Chief Operating Officer Erica Brescia. > “We have learned from a number of nonprofits and refugee advocates that one of the greatest challenges facing immigrants is a lack of tech…

It’s the opposite of politics. They’re leaving politics out of it and saying, if it’s legit business we won’t deny you business.

That is very much a political decision.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#33

Post by im3w1l »

tj-teej wrote: post #4

I think that a lot of people see a rise and mainstreaming of White Nationalism and want to push back.

I think it's not restricted to White Nationalism. We see a lot of pushback against Hong Kong nationalism and Catalonian nationalism and Uyghur nationalism and Kurdish nationalism recently.

It's as if the forces of good suddenly decided that any nationalism is unacceptable in 2019.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#34

Post by _bfhp »

nrook wrote: post #9

There is a well-known strategy by which employees can exert influence over their employer and change the decisions it makes. It is called a union. Unionization has been slow for various reasons in the tech sector; when it comes to rich, well-known companies, people don't want to go through the effort to unionize and get more money when they already are being paid a lot. But if workers want to influence decisions like…

Are GitHub's decisions being made by AI robots that only respond to purely quantitative monetary incentives? It's real people on the other side of the issue. I don't see how sending letters and working with the press is worthless...

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#35

Post by shadowgovt »

ratsmack wrote: post #25
geofft wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just more awareness of employee power - or, perhaps, technological advancement making it such that employees actually do have meaningful power and much more liquidity in the job market, that GitHub is GitHub because of the technical skills of ICs and not the organizational skills of management, whereas your stereotypical successful company 50-100 years ago was successful because of infrastructure and bus…

Just sitting here thinking about it, I can't remember anything specific like this outside of the tech industry... I may be wrong though.

The tech industry does have a strong fungibility / "seller's market for labor" advantage.

A software engineer who leaves a position at a company (especially in the cities where the companies we've heard of have offices) is extremely likely to get snapped up quickly by another company, often at about the same salary. That gives individual employees a lot of freedom to exit on ideological grounds that other industries with tighter labor markets may not have.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#36

Post by shadowgovt »

baggy_trough wrote: post #27
jacobsenscott wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is because human rights abuses by the US government are becoming more common. Or at least more brazen.

What an absurd thing to believe.

There are concentration camps on the southern US border.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#37

Post by mfer »

geofft wrote: post #5
ratsmack wrote: post #2

It seems that these kinds of demands are becoming more common. Is it because conflict resolution is becoming a dying art, is it because people don't rise to the level of maturity of past times? I just find it to be confusing. Non PW link: https://archive.ph/IkYQ3

I think it's just more awareness of employee power - or, perhaps, technological advancement making it such that employees actually do have meaningful power and much more liquidity in the job market, that GitHub is GitHub because of the technical skills of ICs and not the organizational skills of management, whereas your stereotypical successful company 50-100 years ago was successful because of infrastructure and bus…

There's also been a noted change in how people handle things thrown at them that make them uncomfortable. A little over a decade ago universities started to notice that students, when presented with something they didn't agree with, would attack the messenger in an attempt to discredit what they were communicating.

There has been a shift in how people interact. Studies have found an increase in narcissism [1] and a decrease in empathy [2].

There is more than manager / IC power shifts going on here.

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.... [2] http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/7724-empathy-college-studen...

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#38

Post by CydeWeys »

_bfhp wrote: post #10
rpmisms wrote: post #3

Whoop-de-do. If you don't like the company, leave.

Trying to understand the opinion being communicated here. People shouldn't protest things they disagree with? People have a duty to be loyal to their employer's every decision?

Yet, strangely, these people curiously will often protest loudly about things they personally disagree with, rather than taking their own advice of shutting up and leaving.

It's really about disagreeing with the views being espoused by the employees in question, not their methodology.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#39

Post by J5892 »

mc32 wrote: post #22
geofft wrote: post #14

> With the issue refusing to go away, GitHub executives have changed their internal messaging, including a memo to employees saying barring ICE from “access to GitHub could actually hurt the very people we all want to help,” in the words of Chief Operating Officer Erica Brescia. > “We have learned from a number of nonprofits and refugee advocates that one of the greatest challenges facing immigrants is a lack of tech…

It’s the opposite of politics. They’re leaving politics out of it and saying, if it’s legit business we won’t deny you business.

Saying "stay out of their way" about ICE seems pretty political to me.

And I believe the same applies to anyone else who does not support the way that ICE is being run currently.

I can't speak to the perspective of the other side of this issue, though.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#40

Post by geofft »

mfer wrote: post #20

Topics like this, I think, give us an opportunity to go deeper on the issues and concepts surrounding what's going on. I realize that the common quick answer these days is to harshly reject people and organizations we deeply disagree with. But, there may be some things worth pondering, like... Is there a way technology companies can influence these organizations and the situations of the people they touch for the bet…

> Is there a way that technologies from companies can help ICE and organizations like it treat the people they deal with better?

One thing GitHub could have done, if it was serious about its "but ICE also stops human trafficking and terrorists" narrative, is insisted on selling them professional services / consulting work (perhaps at a discount - they'd already decided to donate more than the revenue of the contract, so working for ICE out of the goodness of their hearts is definitely not out of the question) which let them understand what teams and projects at ICE are using their work and how. But in their letter to employees, they listed it as a positive that they weren't doing this, they just gave ICE the product and told them to have fun. https://github.blog/2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-deve...

"GitHub does not have a professional services agreement with ICE, and GitHub is not consulting with ICE on any of their projects or initiatives. GitHub has no visibility into how this software is being used, other than presumably for software development and version control."

I think if you believed you could make some change for the better working within the system, the way to start is by, first, deciding what your principles are and what your approach is when your customer wants to be at odds with that (refuse to support projects you disagree with? try to change hearts and minds? etc.) in a codified way and getting agreement within the company on it, and second, insisting on a close enough consulting relationship where you can enforce that. (I also suspect that unless you have an uncommonly good product, most customers won't be a fan and will just buy from someone else.)

Also GitHub, being a platform and not a direct tool for work, isn't really in a great position to influence ICE's work. "You can check in the code you use to track terrorists, but not the code you use to track DACA recipients" isn't particularly technically meaningful.

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