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Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#551

Post by belorn »

jetpks wrote: post #502
legostormtroopr wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive. Except Cancel Culture is making it that these can't be discussed without complete agreement. Take for example, "Women in Tech", personally I don't see underrepresentation of women in tech as a problem that can be or should be 'solved'. For the better part of 15 years, there has been a massive movement to encourage w…

Women were barely allowed into workplaces in general within the last 50 years and are still fighting biases that have existed for millennia. Fixing the lack of women in tech is a multi-century process, not something that's just knocked out in as little as 15 years. We'd be lucky to start seeing the needle move in such a short amount of time.

This does nothing to explain why 85% of women and 85% of men in Sweden work in gender segregated professions, with gender segregation getting worse for every year. It does nothing to explain why out of 5 professions with 99% or higher gender segregation, 3 is female dominated and 2 is male dominated. It also does not explain why the only university program that ended up single gender a few years ago was female dominated.

The gender paradox is also poorly explained through the narrative that historical gender roles is the cause of gender segregation today.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#552

Post by friendlybus »

jka wrote: post #463
anm89 wrote: 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…

The trouble with libertarianism is, ultimately, that libertarians only care about themselves. The kind of policy that GitLab is proposing here is fine - or even aspirational, under a certain lens - until one day you wake up and find that the same software is being used to destroy your community and compatriots. How could that happen? Isn't this free speech to max utility? Isn't that flawless? No, it's free utility to…

You say that like the rest of the gov does not exist. The mere knowledge that a dangerous program exists can be reported to the FBI with all relevant information without Github having to run a gestapo firewall on all content it hosts.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#553

Post by cgiles »

oarsinsync wrote: post #411
jimbobimbo wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morality is not defined by the government - legality is. There're a lot of things that a lot of different people deem immoral - based on their religion, upbringing, media consumption and whatnot - which are not illegal. There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view. It's a free country after all.

> There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view. Right and wrong are subjective, legal and illegal are objective. From the perspective of the business owner who is focused primarily on maximising revenue / profits for their business, there is nothing wrong with simply focusing on legal compliance. From the perspective o…

All true. But additionally, it is not quite right to say that morality and legality have nothing to do with each other. Legality, generally speaking, is the subset of morality that a sustainable majority has codified into objective laws.

In other words, legality is basically the subset of morality that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. Which is why going beyond legality into subjective morality so often becomes polarizing.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#554

Post by brandmeyer »

madrox wrote: post #385
anarchodev wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use othe…

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok. Is that the world you want to live in?

> This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok.

That's not what the Supreme Court ruled. They ruled that the CO commissioners who decided against the baker in the first place were being blatantly flippant about the baker's religious beliefs. They should have at least considered those beliefs. They explicitly did not rule that the baker's religious beliefs were enough on their own to prevent the sale.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-ru...

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#555

Post by megous »

madrox wrote: post #385
anarchodev wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use othe…

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok. Is that the world you want to live in?

Ever read ToC on free services? They have the right to terminate the service at any time for any reason. It doesn't matter if you've connected 100s of services to your free Google login, or keep thousands of mails and contacts in your gmail, or made a great business grabing eyes on youtube so that Google can sell ads on your videos and share a bit of profits with you.

For example today we've seen Google terminate a service of distributing an app on AppStore because it disagreed with a developer having a donation link, despite that not being excluded in ToS (or so I heard). And it doesn't really matter, how you company refuses a service. ToS just makes reasons for refusal codified and ToS can change at any time.

This is already a world we live in, SV companies practice this daily, and I doubt tech companies want this to change.

Moral arbiter is society at any rate. Tech workers are part of society, and their companies can't really make rules like you suggested (no service for gays) at scale without getting a major backlash from the public, or internally. Or if they could, it would indicate a much wider societal acceptance for such rules.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#556

Post by peterashford »

Companies are not divorced from politics or reality no matter how much they want to be. Trying to be non-political is a political act and one that is usually means "I benefit from the status quo, please don't change anything". It's the corporate version of the white guying saying "I don't see color" when he means "I don't want to think about issues of race"

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#557

Post by hnuser54 »

sytse wrote: post #542
sytse wrote: post #143

Someone at GitLab just made a suggestion to change the wording of the policy that I merged https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

We added a second clarification https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

This seems like a knee-jerk backtrack that is a step or two too far. "Gitlab Inc is full of wishy-washy dudes and I think old people always drive slow." I guess I'm banned from paying for Gitlab now if anyone chooses to "assess" me, since I made derogatory statements about your community and encouraged discrimination, however trivial, against the elderly.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#558

Post by skybrian »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #168

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…

The problem is getting hooked on politics that doesn't actually affect you personally, other people on your team, or how you do your job. Just like we do on Hacker News, you can have employees reading about stuff happening elsewhere in the world, commenting on it, and getting upset over it.

At large companies, this can include things going on in different parts of the company. You don't know them or how they work, but you start taking it personally because it affects the company's reputation.

I'm retired, but if I went back to work, I would want to pay more attention to helping my co-workers and accomplishing the team's mission (which of course involves some politics) and pay a lot less attention to other, less relevant politics.

You can say it's privileged to want to shut out the world and concentrate on improving one thing, but I prefer to think of this as an aspirational goal.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#559

Post by jchw »

Observation: It seems like we have lost faith in the legal system in recent times based on everything from call-out/cancel culture to protests over contracts. My question to the world is, are we right to feel this way?

I certainly feel at least in the U.S. that the legal system has done a poor job of protecting humanities interests on many occasions, though I do not think pushing the responsibilities of policing morality to businesses and society is really a good thing over all. It has come with a lot of negative side effects.

I do not pick a side strongly here, though. I sure as hell wouldn’t feel good about helping an entity I feel is highly immoral. Is a mutual contract “helping?” You can really get into the weeds fast.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#560

Post by unscrupulous_sw »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #465
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #168

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…

> We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive. Except Cancel Culture is making it that these can't be discussed without complete agreement. Take for example, "Women in Tech", personally I don't see underrepresentation of women in tech as a problem that can be or should be 'solved'. For the better part of 15 years, there has been a massive movement to encourage w…

Just to chime in, I also unknowingly got myself labeled sexist when the topic came up during a random lunch with "friends" (company provided lunch so it had random people from HR and recruiting).

Somehow or another the topic of whether going for 50/50 will "lower the bar". So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all. The more I said I am leaning towards that it will lower the bar, the more uncomfortable people around me looked.

I was too socially ignorant to realize we aren't talking about math problem here and that they don't want anything said that might weaken their cause, good faith argument or not.

After that I got no more women in my interview pipeline and a "talk" from my manager.

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