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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

#381

Post by slykat »

I find it ironic that the same people protesting the contract would also protest a bakery that refuses to sell a product for say a same sex couple (or if you were in the 60s, restaurants that refused to serve blacks).

You either have a viewpoint that: 1) a business shouldn't make a moral judgement on its customers and be accessible to all 2) A business can make moral judgements on its customers and choose not to do business with customers considered immoral

If you are ok with #2 you are running into a slippery slope in my view. And if you are ok with #2 and you are one of the largest companies in the world, it is a very huge slippery slope.

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

#382

Post by shadowgovt »

malvosenior wrote: post #370
shadowgovt wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting claim, but I don't think it's true. Source?

I’m referring in part to your own comments. You said people would be debating the definition of concentration camps then you called a detention center for illegal immigrants a “concentration camp”. It is you who is trying to change the definition and fit it where it’s convenient to your politics.

I'm not changing definition; I'm going by definition used by others.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/holocaust-survivor-yes-the-bor...

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

#383

Post by zaroth »

hnaccy wrote: post #179
commandlinefan wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're assuming that legal immigrants from around the world working high paid tech jobs have common cause with "illegal" immigrants coming across the southern border. In my anecdotal experience it's not so simple.

There are massive logistical challenges with processing mass influxes of immigrants into a country, particularly people who are coming through outside of the legal process.

I would think a large contingent of GitHub employees want the people working at ICE to be using the best tools possible to achieve their mission. Many are probably quite proud of US government agencies using their tools, the same as if NASA or Executive Branch or Congress was using Github.

IMO it’s a very difficult situation when certain employees are arranging political protests against specific customers of the company, and making other employees uncomfortable to express their own potentially divergent viewpoints.

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

#385

Post by thereare5lights »

shadowgovt wrote: post #372
thereare5lights wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have no strong evidence other than "It's actually happening right now and the companies have only made minor deviations from their courses." I've yet to see anything actually happen in terms of exerting pressure aside from internal grumbling.

Several employees have left and made public they left over Dragonfly and Maven projects at Google.

Who?

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

#386

Post by zaroth »

smudgymcscmudge wrote: post #336
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…

About a quarter of the company has signed the protest letter. I signed the letter just so people would stop nagging me to sign. I don’t care about ICE. I suspect there are others who got pressured into signing.

That’s amazing to me. It seems to me like creating a hostile work environment and a form of harassment, although political rallying is not a protected category, and the employer is likely hamstrung in making any sort of response.

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

#387

Post by slykat »

kaikai wrote: post #362

"I was just doing my job" is not an excuse. It is absolutely not only our right to decide how our work is used in the world, but our duty to make sure we're not enabling human rights violations. I applaud and support tech workers making ethical calls around their work. Unfortunately we may need to put our money where our mouths are and leave employers that refuse to stand by any ethical code, and that's already happe…

But how is Github's product enabling human rights violations? I can understand if Github employees were protesting a product that created human rights violations (for example if Github offered a security service for ICE detention centers that was abusing prisoners). Would you be ok if Github was a restaurant and it had a policy of not serving anyone who is an ICE employee?

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

#388

Post by KyeRussell »

zer00eyz wrote: post #367
supernova87a wrote: post #348

I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used once it's created. You have to let certain control go after a point. Or if your product is open to everyone, you'll have to live with the fact that people may use it in ways you disagree with. Xerox or Canon (or whoever) probably makes copiers that ICE uses to make copies. Lenovo or Apple probably makes hardware that they use also t…

There is an even bigger question here. Is ICE the only thing on GitHub that is morally questionable? I would venture to guess NO. I would venture to guess that all sorts of things on GitHub are used in illicit, illegal, or morally repressible ways.

And?

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

#389

Post by malvosenior »

shadowgovt wrote: post #382
malvosenior wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m referring in part to your own comments. You said people would be debating the definition of concentration camps then you called a detention center for illegal immigrants a “concentration camp”. It is you who is trying to change the definition and fit it where it’s convenient to your politics.

I'm not changing definition; I'm going by definition used by others. https://www.thedailybeast.com/holocaust-survivor-yes-the-bor...

You’re one person trying to change the definition, but you’re correct there are others trying to do the same.

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

#390

Post by tomschlick »

KyeRussell wrote: post #374
tomschlick wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees? Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to? Why is ICE the only company that they object to? Why do some causes get their favor and not others? Wokeness and the recent trend of trying to cancel anything that doesn't align within a narrow spectrum of p…

"ICE is currently doing some bad things" is a viewpoint shared by a pretty large group of people. Honestly it just sounds like you're projecting.

ICE is getting raked over the coals in the court of public opinion because they don't have the funding nor the manpower to deal with 100k people coming over the border each month. Many asylum seekers are just exploiting the asylum system with invalid cases as economic migrants to delay the process so they don't get sent back home. All the while congress hasn't done much at all to fix the obvious problems in the law (some of which lead to family separation in detainment), nor do reasonable things like give a pathway to citizenship for the dreamers.

Simply saying they are doing bad things is reducing the problems to a soundbite.

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