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Tesla sued for severe harassment of black workers at California plant

theguardian.com

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Re: Tesla sued for severe harassment of black workers at California plant

#61

Post by [deleted] »

tticvs wrote: post #45
padjo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the idea is to convert neo-nazis. People feel pretty powerless to help fight racism and doing small things like this help them feel a bit better. Also, changing language that explicitly says “white good”, “black bad” can’t really hurt. It takes very little effort and “allow list” is actually clearer anyway.

But it does hurt since it equates anti-racism with meaningless nonsense therefore directly undermining the purported cause. Unless of course the real motivation isn't to help but instead to demonstrate power and status...

[deleted]

Re: Tesla sued for severe harassment of black workers at California plant

#62

Post by [deleted] »

thereare5lights wrote: post #21
tomlockwood wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's not even the worse part. The refusal to make a change that costs you nothing in order to stick it to people you don't like is much worse and indicates all sorts of behaviors you do not want on your team.

[deleted]

Re: Tesla sued for severe harassment of black workers at California plant

#64

Post by [deleted] »

thereare5lights wrote: post #21
tomlockwood wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's not even the worse part. The refusal to make a change that costs you nothing in order to stick it to people you don't like is much worse and indicates all sorts of behaviors you do not want on your team.

[deleted]

Re: Tesla sued for severe harassment of black workers at California plant

#65

Post by threeseed »

literallyroy wrote: post #27
thereare5lights wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even the worse part. The refusal to make a change that costs you nothing in order to stick it to people you don't like is much worse and indicates all sorts of behaviors you do not want on your team.

Does that shift not regularly annoy other people? I work on several projects throughout the week and not all had their primary branch moved from master to main. I end up getting the branch name wrong a few times a week when context switching.. Is there a better solution than updating some of the older projects and automation?

Be serious here. It takes a few seconds to change the branch on a Git repository.

This isn't a technical problem that needs some complex processes and automation.

Re: Tesla sued for severe harassment of black workers at California plant

#66

Post by [deleted] »

thereare5lights wrote: post #21
tomlockwood wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's not even the worse part. The refusal to make a change that costs you nothing in order to stick it to people you don't like is much worse and indicates all sorts of behaviors you do not want on your team.

[deleted]

Re: Tesla sued for severe harassment of black workers at California plant

#67

Post by blueflow »

gumballindie wrote: post #58
sleiben wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho. Even 15 years ago, when I started my professional journey (in Germany) there were a lot of people who were gay, trans and so on in the dev community … and nobody cared about it. We were all passioned about technologies and respected each other based on commitment/engagement/skill level. At the end most of the true full blood developers were always «…

Yeah I dont think germany is a good example of mutual respect. Far from it actually. Racism and discrimination are rampant in that country, including in tech. Any german moralising americans on racism should first look at their own 10x issues.

Germany is not the one with the "black person shot by police" protests setting stuff ablaze.

Re: Tesla sued for severe harassment of black workers at California plant

#68

Post by olalonde »

roenxi wrote: post #42
sleiben wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho. Even 15 years ago, when I started my professional journey (in Germany) there were a lot of people who were gay, trans and so on in the dev community … and nobody cared about it. We were all passioned about technologies and respected each other based on commitment/engagement/skill level. At the end most of the true full blood developers were always «…

But it is also a technical improvement. main is easier to type. It takes a lot of effort to overcome the inertia of a default, so even if the reasoning is a bit suspect the outcome is going to be a win eventually.

Inertia is not merely caused by a psychological block, overcoming it carries real tangible costs. There are countless examples where technically superior solutions exist, but the benefits they offer do not outweigh the cost of overcoming inertia.

Consider the QWERTY keyboard, which is far from the most efficient design. JavaScript is notorious for its quirks. Unix commands often lack intuitiveness, suffering from poor naming conventions. Linux is coded in a language that has memory safety issues. Even the English language itself, is riddled with inconsistencies and arbitrary exceptions. The list goes on.

To surmount the inertia for any of the mentioned examples, the replacement solution has better be significantly superior. A marginal improvement simply won't suffice, given the large costs of change.

To many people, the switch from "master" to "main" had benefits that were, at best, debatable, while introducing substantial costs such as fragmentation, outdated tutorials and scripts, and confusion for beginners, among others. That's what got people worked up.

Re: Tesla sued for severe harassment of black workers at California plant

#69

Post by abenga »

olalonde wrote: post #39
nine_k wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it follows the pattern of nationality names, and more general ethnic or geographical groups, like "Japanese", or "American", or "African"'. Please note that not all Africans have black skin (look at Egypt or Libya), and not all people with black skin are Africans (see India, Micronesia, Philippines, etc). So, to my mind, "Black" with a capital B is not people with black skin. They are by far not all black-s…

The criticism is that putting people in buckets based on their DNA and ancestry is what racists do and not something that we should encourage and normalize in 2023. We should minimize the importance of ethnicity and race, not emphasize it. As a staunch individualist and someone who fervently opposes racism, it's disheartening to observe the USA trending in such a direction.

Hand wringing about "placing people in buckets" is one the last things we need to worry about when it comes to dealing with racism and it's effect on victims of racism. Like, "now we are colourblind, hooray! racism is finished!" While ignoring how disadvantaged people who suffered discrimination in the past (and still do) continue to feel the effects of institutionalised racism, regardless of any changes in law.

Re: Tesla sued for severe harassment of black workers at California plant

#70

Post by richbell »

theodric wrote: post #56
thereare5lights wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even the worse part. The refusal to make a change that costs you nothing in order to stick it to people you don't like is much worse and indicates all sorts of behaviors you do not want on your team.

Not diving into the debate about whether this is a useful change, but I do want to push back on the notion that this "costs you nothing." It costs effort, which means it costs billable hours, and therefore money. The question is if that spend pays dividends.

It also creates downstream impacts. Reddit famously had a major outage caused by this; my team had all of our builds break because a transitive dependency changed methods from "blacklist" to "allowlist".
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