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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

#221

Post by killface »

whalesalad wrote: post #145
xvector wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they aren't ok having their hand bit, they'll either stop feeding (fire them) or protect themselves (capitulate).

Companies fire the whiners and radicals all the freakin' time. The fact that these folks are still there says that they weren't, in fact, biting that hand.

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

#223

Post by refurb »

shadowgovt wrote: post #181
refurb wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh BS. It’s clearly apparent over the last few election cycles that if your side does something, “it’s unfortunate, but we’re trying to fix it” and if the other side does something “they are horrible people who are monsters”. It comes down to nothing more than scoring political points.

I'm curious what side you perceive standardUser to be on. They are making the case that this wasn't acceptable under the Obama administration either to younger generations, but they lacked the political power and voice to do anything about it. Voice and political power that they are now finding as they age into voting enfranchisement and build political action blocs.

Gitmo’s a great example. Under Bush it was immoral. Under Obama? Barely heard a thing.

Sure standardUser might have thought it immoral all along, but did he attack both parties (when in power) with the same zeal?

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

#224

Post by wvenable »

CydeWeys wrote: post #55
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.

It's not clear to me why tech unions would do this. People keep bringing this up, but there's no reason tech unions would ever have to be structured in this particular manner. Given that, I don't find it a compelling argument against unionization in our sector. Most importantly, of all the people who are working on organizing the tech sector, to my knowledge none of them are trying to implement tenure-based seniority…

> It's not clear to me why tech unions would do this.

As soon as you have a union, you have 2 groups. People are who are in the union and people who are not. Tenure-based seniority obviously benefits people who are in the union to the determent of those not yet part of the union.

It's probably a solvable problem but I think it's pretty obvious why most unions end up with seniority-based policies; It's the natural consequence of a democratic organization.

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

#225

Post by killface »

unethical_ban wrote: post #49
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…

Why? Why shouldn't employees have principles at work? Why shouldn't employees of a company work to affect positive outcomes at a place to which they have invested a lot of social and time capital? Labor is not nearly as transactional in reality as you make it sound. "Just quit" is like "just leave the country" in politics.

because this is how they shield themselves while thinking tha half the folks in the office around them deserve to be deported or detained and actively think of most of their peers as less than human.

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

#226

Post by [deleted] »

mgraczyk wrote: post #159
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every programming job I’ve ever had in the U.S. was for a company that was staffed by at least 90% foreigners. Where the hell are you working? I'm going to call bullshit, because it's really not that easy to get a work visa in the US. You're saying 90% of your colleagues weren't US citizens?

At every large company where I have worked (Intel, Qualcomm, Google, Facebook) the majority of my colleagues have been non-citizens. In some cases (Qualcomm SD, Google) 100% of the people on my team were non-citizens.

[deleted]

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

#228

Post by whalesalad »

killface wrote: post #217
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 amount I am recruited and asked for various forms of interviews -- "grab coffee?", "grab lunch?", "quick 15 minute conversation?" -- can be seen as a counter-example that while cash is our payment, we are not "blessed" to have jobs. They are blessed that I chose to work for them. I can choose to work anywhere at this point. The money isn't the point. I'm not going to contribute to more human suffering, and you wo…

This is a great response, your humility is profound. Screenshotting for posterity.

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

#229

Post by ken »

gok wrote: post #76
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…

Hm so you think a GitHub union would be less likely to work with a unionized government agency?

Yes. Organizing doesn't mean you fire everybody and hire new pro-union workers. It's the same people. They're just given a more direct power structure for dealing with management.

When you take people who are already vocally upset with the company's ICE contracts, and give them negotiating power with management, you're not going to suddenly see them turn pro-ICE just because they have a union and ICE also has a union. That makes no sense.

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

#230

Post by pj_mukh »

commandlinefan wrote: post #125
duxup wrote: post #19

I'd like to get a feel about what volume of employees have an issue with these things. From issue to issue I hear about various forms of employees making themselves heard but it is REALLY hard to jive with what that means. We've seen Google employees post about some ideas that seemed to be genuinely popular (measure that how you will...) but later ideas or advocacy were reportedly far less supported by the general em…

I also have to wonder what percentage of GitHub’s employees _are_ non-US citizens. Every programming job I’ve ever had in the U.S. was for a company that was staffed by at least 90% foreigners; if they see U.S. immigration as an adversary, they may be opposing any contract on personal grounds.

How would you even know that? Assuming you weren't high up in HR?
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