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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

#141

Post by mattsfrey »

baggy_trough wrote: post #121
shadowgovt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of characterization is definitional. See: the Japanese Internment camps the US ran during World War II.

It's really outrageous to characterize them that way. It minimizes the Holocaust.

It is outrageous because in both instances we're talking about actual legal citizens being persecuted by their own government for belonging to an ethnic group, not a group of foreign nationals that illegally entered the country and are being held temporarily for criminal prosecution.

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

#142

Post by whalesalad »

tehjoker wrote: post #82
whalesalad wrote: post #31

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…

Companies are dictatorships. Get in line peasants. It could just be that if we want a democratic society, we'll need to directly attack the idea that we have no democracy in the place where we spend most of our lives.

Depends on how you look at it. You have the freedom to leave your job and go work somewhere else. You can voice your opinion within the company but at some point the company is its own living breathing entity that is not behooven to you, unless your name is on the building.

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

#143

Post by whalesalad »

chadlavi wrote: post #59
whalesalad wrote: post #31

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…

the reverse is also true: companies that work in bad faith don't deserve employees. They exist to employ people so that they can sell product. If the company's not going to be a team player, then there are billions of other tech companies its employees might choose to go work for. See Deadspin for an example of the inverse of what you're calling for: people sticking to their guns and letting a company go for conflict…

> See Deadspin for an example of the inverse

The Deadspin situation is in complete alignment with my original comment. One person was let go and a ton of other people left becuase they weren't going to put up with the same BS any more.

Deadspin is better off, they can continue to do whatever it is they are doing and it is either going to work or they'll fizzle out and die. Employees are better off because they can go seek a different environment where they are happy.

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

#144

Post by shadowgovt »

mattsfrey wrote: post #141
baggy_trough wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really outrageous to characterize them that way. It minimizes the Holocaust.

It is outrageous because in both instances we're talking about actual legal citizens being persecuted by their own government for belonging to an ethnic group, not a group of foreign nationals that illegally entered the country and are being held temporarily for criminal prosecution.

That's irrelevant. The root cause of running a concentration camp is unimportant; they're human beings and deserve to be treated with dignity.

As it stands, the US is failing to hold them to the standards we hold even incarcerated prisoners, and they haven't been convicted of any crime. That's outrageous.

Treating some humans under one's jurisdiction as more "human" because they are citizens is a severe anti-pattern.

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

#145

Post by whalesalad »

xvector wrote: post #58
whalesalad wrote: post #31

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…

What a defeatist attitude. In the end, companies are made of people. If you want to affect positive change in the world, leaving does almost nothing to help your cause. Companies are made of people, you are one of those people, and thus you have ability to affect change. You could either choose to give up, pick up your bags, and flee for greener pastures, or you could try to actually make an effort to improve society…

A lot of what you are saying is true and resonates with me. However, at some point you transition from trying to affect change to biting the hand that feeds. At that point it becomes totally unreasonable and you should go elsewhere.

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

#146

Post by JohnFen »

ratsmack wrote: post #130
JohnFen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White Nationalism is an entirely different thing than nationalism. But both are objectionable.

Please explain what you believe White Nationalism is.

White Nationalism (in the US) is a political movement that asserts that the US should be a nation run by and for Caucasians.

There are people of other ethnicities that are part of the White Nationalist movement.

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

#147

Post by shadowgovt »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #139
shadowgovt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the edge of a definitions rabbit-hole looming. To short-circuit it, let's establish as ground-truth that some people think "neutral" is the same has having no position, and some people think "neutral" is a position one can try to take that will have consequences, same as any other position, and at the end of the day, the effects are the same whether it's not a position or a position so the question of "positi…

> " If a company declares selling computers to the legitimate government of a country is "Just doing business," then, well, that's IBM during the reign of the Nazi party, and history has held them accountable regardless. " Seems more like a historical footnote than any real accountability. IBM is still around and the era where "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" and had a immense workforce occurred well after the…

The fact they're noted in the history books as aiding the Holocaust carries a weight to it different than the dollars-and-cents accounting, but if you're interested more in practical effect: they still have to push harder than peer companies to hire because they have a mixed reputation (that younger companies don't have, even if that's merely because they haven't had time to grow one yet).

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

#148

Post by masonic »

andyburke wrote: post #97
zozbot234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If separating children from their parents (who have committed a crime) is "child abuse", then our government is responsible for a whole lot of abuse. It's not clear what this has to do with ICE specifically.

Children are generally not separated from their parents when their parents commit non-violent minor offenses. Crossing a border is, at the least, non-violent. How major or minor it is is debatable. The basis of your argument is wrong. What else ya got?

  Children are generally not separated from their parents when their parents commit non-violent minor offenses
Children are separated from parents every damn day in cases of neglect or endangerment. Hell, we get CPS involved when a kid is left unattended in a car or alone at home, or even if a home is dangerously unkempt.

Dragging children across two thousand miles of desert and multiple borders (where many die en route) is far worse endangerment.

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

#149

Post by masonic »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #51
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.

That is surely in the mix. To me, its about human decency. I support immigration, but even if you do not support immigration you should support human decency. Making people sleep in cages on concrete, limiting supplies, limiting legal assistance, separating families - those are horrible ways to treat other humans, other humans simply seeking a better life. We are largely a nation of immigrants. We've lost sight of ou…

  Making people sleep in cages on concrete
That was during the Obama Administration, yet those in outrage over ICE now were utterly silent then. Why is that?

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

#150

Post by pas »

catalogia wrote: post #92
godzillabrennus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions have historically tended to reward seniority over merit. Tech workers should work to solve that if they organize. I think a lot of problems caused by unions trace back to that. Unions should come back to help recreate the middle class.

I think, at least traditionally, unions have tended to reward seniority over merit because seniority is something that can be tracked with relative objectivity, while merit is something a bit slippery to nail down. Of course the business owner has strong opinions on what constitutes employee merit. To the business owner, the merit of an employee is largely a proxy for whatever is profitable for the business. That's f…

The job of the union is to take the business interests and then keeping that as a constraint, maximizing labor's share of income.

This usually directly means having the right people in the right places, to do an effective job, so there's not much time wasted. (Which is their time.) And so on.

Unions shouldn't try to keep everyone on board, they should simply counteract shareholder pressure to keep labor costs down.

Of course, the union should help members to retrain and then should help those members to find their place where they can contribute value.

Of course, the union can and should represent the political values of its members.

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