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Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

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Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NSLs apply to companies, not employees. The NSL would have to go to your companies legal office.

NSLs can be issued to any person, natural or juridical.

NSLs only bring back non-content information (eg, a call record, but not a recording of a call) and are issued under the Stored Communications Act. Unless you happen to be the owner of a sole proprietorship that falls under the act, you can't be directly issued an NSL - it's issued to the entity which holds the records (eg AT&T).

Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem very focused on China only...why is that? GP's "musing" equally affects Russians. Or are Russians not something your ideology would allow you to defend? Regardless, the GP does raise a valid point that if you have family living under the heel of a totalitarian dictatorship they can and will be used as leverage. Your whinging won't change that fact, and it has nothing to do with them being Chinese (or Russian…

I would fully defend Russians against this sort of xenophobia as well. They just don't seem to be the enemy du jour. Complaining about Russia is so 2018. America has a short attention span, and has moved on to the next great evil. > Regardless, the GP does raise a valid point that if you have family living under the heel of a totalitarian dictatorship they can and will be used as leverage. Okay, so now you can edit o…

Unfortunately I can no longer edit my reply - please take my apology for misunderstanding your argument.

Back on topic of green cards: whether you want to bury your head in the sand or face the reality that foreign dictatorships will use their own citizens to infiltrate their rivals is up to you. If you want to take the high road you can, and likely be excluded from government contract work.

Don't get me wrong on one thing, the west is in a precarious situation of openly doing the same thing in certain cases - eg: Australia's draconian backdoor law. I will not hire or recommend hiring an autralian dev working in Australia - and you can call me a racist or xenophobe if you want, it will not change the reason for the decision.

Fortunately for an australian immigrant abroad they are not going to have their family black-bagged for failure to submit to their government. I don't have this confidence for Russia, and especially not China.

Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> discriminating based on notational origin is a big no no from an ethical perspective However, discriminating based on exposure to coercive pressure from aggressive and hostile foreign powers is probably OK, even if such exposure is heavily correlated with national origin. The key is that the discrimination must be based on an individual analysis of the applicant and his/her life circumstances. It's not OK to blanke…

I disagree completely. By that reasoning, a presidential candidate of Chinese descent who was a natural born American citizen but had relatives back in china would be disqualified, and that is nowhere justified by the constitution. A private company likewise shouldn’t be able to discriminate on speculative threats alone. What if they had a relative in prison, a hostile coercive environment by any measure? I accept th…

The situation with presidential qualifications is one-of-a-kind special. Hiring at tech companies isn't spelled out in the constitution.

Constitutional requirements can also be changed, and it is long past time that we do so. The country has been around for 2.5 centuries, and now has hundreds of millions of people. We wouldn't suffer a shortage of presidential candidates if we required that all 4 grandparents (determined all possible ways) and all descendants and spouses have been born in the USA, along with all living ancestors and descendants of all of those. The job is simply too important to allow otherwise. (this would disqualify the most recent two, along with failed candidates like Romney and Cruz)

For tech companies we shouldn't be quite so extreme, but it also isn't good to ignore the problems.

Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would fully defend Russians against this sort of xenophobia as well. They just don't seem to be the enemy du jour. Complaining about Russia is so 2018. America has a short attention span, and has moved on to the next great evil. > Regardless, the GP does raise a valid point that if you have family living under the heel of a totalitarian dictatorship they can and will be used as leverage. Okay, so now you can edit o…

Unfortunately I can no longer edit my reply - please take my apology for misunderstanding your argument. Back on topic of green cards: whether you want to bury your head in the sand or face the reality that foreign dictatorships will use their own citizens to infiltrate their rivals is up to you. If you want to take the high road you can, and likely be excluded from government contract work. Don't get me wrong on one…

We're really getting into the realm of fantastical scenarios now. The idea that the Chinese government would kidnap the family of a US-based employee in order to force them to hand over data is completely hypothetical, and to my knowledge not backed up by any known case. If they're willing to go to those lengths, they could just as easily blackmail or bribe any random employee. They surely have the power to do so, as does every government with any intelligence service to speak of.

What I do know is that there's an increasing atmosphere of generalized suspicion against Chinese people in the United States, and even of people of Chinese descent. There are lots of recent examples, but to give you just one chilling one: US government pressured Emory University to fire two US-citizen medical researchers of Chinese origin, for the non-crime of pursuing research collaborations in China. The two are leading researchers into Huntington's disease. At the time they pursued their collaborations in China, such collaborations were encouraged by the university, and they pursued them openly. Their entire lab was closed down, and the more junior researchers from China were sent home. This is not an isolated case.

I can't see what's changed to warrant this crackdown in the last few years, other than the quite open discussion in US foreign policy circles about the need to maintain US hegemony, and the long-term threat to that hegemony from a rising China. This has been accompanied in recent months by increasingly hysterical media coverage. One of the most consistently frustrating things about the US is the susceptibility of the public to these periodic campaigns of demonization. Obama laughed about Russia in 2012, but in 2016, Americans suddenly discovered that Russia is the root of all evil in the world - they're even responsible for racial tension in the US! Something similar is happening with China now, and it's reached such proportions that even a Chinese app that teenagers use to share lip-sync videos is a national security risk.

Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I can no longer edit my reply - please take my apology for misunderstanding your argument. Back on topic of green cards: whether you want to bury your head in the sand or face the reality that foreign dictatorships will use their own citizens to infiltrate their rivals is up to you. If you want to take the high road you can, and likely be excluded from government contract work. Don't get me wrong on one…

We're really getting into the realm of fantastical scenarios now. The idea that the Chinese government would kidnap the family of a US-based employee in order to force them to hand over data is completely hypothetical, and to my knowledge not backed up by any known case. If they're willing to go to those lengths, they could just as easily blackmail or bribe any random employee. They surely have the power to do so, as…

That you find this scenario so fantastical is naive...and yes, the Chinese government openly threatening its own citizens abroad is documented. What do you think of the following article, is it cause for concern for you, or do you believe it's just our media misrepresenting China?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/17/think-of-your-...

They also have no problem black-bagging non-compliant citizens, no matter how high-profile they seem to be:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-45806904

Blackmailing any random employee (with their family safely in the US or another western country) is absolutely not the same as blackmailing an employee with the family still living in China or Russia.

If you have family in China and you have access to government information or IP they want it is not at all far fetched they will do this.

Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nationalism has always been high in China ever since the CCP took control. Not being a nationalist would be a good way to suddenly disappear off the face of the Earth. China has always had double standards. They make it hell for U.S companies to do business there. The only thing that has changed is that the U.S has started pushing back somewhat as of late, but things are still currently in favor of China. When China…

> They make it hell for U.S companies to do business there. That's not evidenced by the massive presence of US companies in China. American companies do vastly more business in China than vice versa. Whenever I see these sorts of claims, I ask what specific restrictions or hurdles are being discussed.

I tried to buy my $2.50 Old Spice deodorant in Shanghai. The price tag when translated to dollars was over $8.

If you are ever in China, go into a grocery store and look at the aisles. The main reason why American products are priced at 200%-300% the competition is because of tariffs. Tariffs designed to make ordinary middle class American products only affordable by rich elites. It's a very effective cap on market share.

Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The South China Sea part really isn't debatable. Absolutely everyone outside China thinks the Line is bullshit.

That's not actually true. Taiwan agrees with China, because China's claims are simply those that successive Chinese governments held throughout the 20th Century. The United States used to agree with China - that is, until China went from being the ROC to the PRC. As for what China is actively doing to assert these claims, I suggest you look at a map of which countries occupy which islands in the South China Sea. The…

Self-interested motivations (TW) or transitory diplomatic policies aside, I mean that it is plainly a bullshit claim. "We're big and we want it really bad" is not a justifiable standard of resolving resource and territory disputes.

Let's compare island occupation to island-building, island militarization and bullying tactics with vessels. Whatever combination of ways different parties are jostling over trying to de facto claim parts of the Sea, a pretty thorny root of the problem is one actor trying to claim all the marbles.

Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

#509
post #455
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't you heard about Russell's teapot? The burden of proof lies on you. For one thing, such isolation of Russian internet would have negative economic effect and it's the last thing Putin needs.

Search the news. No need go to the Mars orbit.

I read this as "I looked for the proof of my words and failed to find any".

Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

#510
post #21

I'm shocked (in a positive way) about the amount of transparency Gitlab provides. Even as a reader, it almost feels as if someone misconfigured the ACLs or I'm reading leaked internal documents, not an intentional decision to make this open. Some of the discussions seem highly sensitive, and yet it seems to work for them. Thank you, Gitlab, for being so open! I've learned a lot about compliance from just reading this…

Thanks! We try to be transparent by default and even when it is difficult. I think the OP is a good example of something that is hard to be transparent about because the decision isn't obvious and it takes discussion to come to the best conclusion.

If you don't mind me asking, why is this conversation open to comments from non-employees? Having discussions be publicly viewable seems valuable, but letting anyone at all participate seems disruptive and unhelpful (as an outside party, I was having trouble following the thread of employee discussion interrupted as it was by internet furor).
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