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Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

theregister.co.uk

531–540 of 1001 posts

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#531

Without trying to be inflammatory in any manner, I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work. If you disagree I’m happy to discuss this viewpoint rather than being downvoted to oblivion. Lots of issues are deemed “political”, but imagine you fall into one of the marginalized groups: — lgbt: Don’t discuss the possibility about being fired for your sexuality becau…

> If you disagree I’d love to understand your viewpoint as to why.

I don't disagree, but I'm "privileged" and want to keep it that way for me and my posterity. Not ashamed in the least because its not bad to be privileged.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#532
post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which actually really boils down to what the word "white male privilege" really means. If you think politics is annoying, then it's because you're privileged enough for it to not matter. ^^^ privileged white male

I've worked at a company that heavily encouraged discussion of politics at work, and it was a nightmare. The things management sponsored (at the request of employees) included: - A women-only Slack channel. - Women-only events, such as a free screening of Wonder Woman. The men at the company were expected to work during that time. - An "ally skills workshop"[1], which attempted to indoctrinate us with an explicitly r…

I didn't find the slides so bad. But..

> Ally is a verb, not an identity

That's... that's a noun.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#533
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted but no comments addressing the points you raised. Can anyone provide an example of Nazi code being hosted on Gitlab? It might be nice to justify what otherwise looks like an absurd comparison made by this article. What would nazi code even look like? Or is "nazi" in this case just a catch-all for wrongthink?

What if for example the People's Republic of China was hosting its code on Gitlab? This is a state that has "re-education camps" (interment camps) for a specific group of people and it reported to be engaging in organ harvesting. I don't find it too hard to draw parallels between Nazi Germany and China at the moment.

Well the USG can always sanction China and make it illegal to do business with them. Feel free to lobby your congressman if it bothers you so much. Or just quit. Or get raised to a level where you can make a call whether to do business or not with someone.

There are a lot of ways to influence someone. Leaving general politics at the door is good idea. You are getting paid to work - so unless you have standing of being harmed directly by company action - just do your job or quit.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it. Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws. What if China goes after a political dissident through Facebook? Even worse, what if Facebook propaganda is used to incite genocide by the government of Myanmar? Where do you get the court order to take it down? U…

> Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws. Even better! Stop trying to act like global companies, and pick a jurisdiction to work out of. If Facebook is an American company (which they are), they are held to and follow US laws. Maybe this means that Facebook doesn't remove Nazi propaganda because of the US 1st Amendment. What follows is actual…

So give up Germany (lost: billions in revenue) or give up Nazi propaganda (lost:thousands in revenue).

Companies are trying to make money. That's the purpose of a company.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#535
post #217

Technical professions are generally held responsible for what they enable. Biology: researchers can't do anything they want on plants, animals or humans. Medicine: doctors are expected to follow strict guidelines with their patients. Even engineering: implementing a cheating system for diesel tests will (rightfully) get engineers into trouble. But software engineering seem to have a pass on how the things we build is…

Software development is not actually a profession , it's just an occupation. That's not necessarily a bad thing but let's not pretend that it's something that it isn't. In order to be a profession on the level of law, civil engineering, medicine, arms, accounting, etc it would need — among other things — a clear code of ethics. Years ago the IEEE made some tentative steps toward turning software development into a pr…

I think you're confusing "being a profession" with "having the trappings of a profession".

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#536

Without trying to be inflammatory in any manner, I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work. If you disagree I’m happy to discuss this viewpoint rather than being downvoted to oblivion. Lots of issues are deemed “political”, but imagine you fall into one of the marginalized groups: — lgbt: Don’t discuss the possibility about being fired for your sexuality becau…

As a wealthy white male, I couldn't agree more. For people like me, politics is a choice. But as my female friends of color often remind me, politics is not a choice for them.

My neighbor is a wealthy white male and I'm willing to bet he's less like you than your female friends of color are.

The problem with this kind of identity framing is that politics is central to it. One wrong step and your enemies of color (for instance) may play their victimhood against your prosperity and it'll become brutally obvious how political you are by merely existing within a demographic.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#537
post #129

I personally think this is awesome. I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product. If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal mea…

While I largely agree, history has shown this wont fair well for humanity either. Look at IBM and the Holocaust [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#538
post #129

I personally think this is awesome. I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product. If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal mea…

You are the kind of guy who would see a murder, would says "Not my problem." Not great. Everyone should be the moral compass of everyone else. The society nowadays seems fucking terrible.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#539
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think even Google actually encouraged people to discuss politics at work. They never did when I was there. It was more a side-effect of decentralising the power to create forums. Anyone could create discussion lists there without asking permission, this was highly useful for coordination, making it easy to spin up new projects and avoiding siloing of information into people's private mail accounts. The flip s…

> This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments. Huh? Can you link some substantiations to these claims, it seems way bizarre?

There was recently a large trove of google documents leaked, comments linking to them get vanished on most sites (including HN).

They were a mishmash of various things but included e.g. descriptions of various programs and employee activities such as influencing search results to inaccurately reflect the world in the interest of 'justice', e.g. if you search for CEO a neutral search engine mostly men in the results because there are more male CEOs, but a 'fair' search engine would return more women or at least equal numbers. The documents also described google's use of demographically targeting election notices for the benefit of particular candidates (and great consternation with significant number of the targeted demographic voted for the other candidate)... stuff like that. The documents also included lists of penalized news sites which unsurprisingly was largely conservative sites, but wasn't just the more extreme alex jones type stuff.

A lot of it was culled off these internal political lists that the earlier poster was mentioning... so it's probably pretty dubious that many of the things in it actually reflected google company positions. (That said, the 'fairness' and news penalties appear to be active programs and not just smack talk by internal political activists).

More smoke than fire overall, but the more extreme right wing has been promoting it as a pretty substantial bit of evidence of unethical (and in some cases unlawful) conduct by google. Thoughtful discussion of it hasn't been aided by the widespread suppression of the subject.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it. Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws. What if China goes after a political dissident through Facebook? Even worse, what if Facebook propaganda is used to incite genocide by the government of Myanmar? Where do you get the court order to take it down? U…

> Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws. Even better! Stop trying to act like global companies, and pick a jurisdiction to work out of. If Facebook is an American company (which they are), they are held to and follow US laws. Maybe this means that Facebook doesn't remove Nazi propaganda because of the US 1st Amendment. What follows is actual…

Pretty much what happened with Google in China ?
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