Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work • Hacker News Board

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#631

Post by legostormtroopr » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:20 PM UTC

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.

> barely allowed into workplaces in general within the last 50 years

Pardon? 50 years ago was 1969. Not discounting the fact that lower class women have always worked, the 60s saw a huge growth in Women's liberation, with the first woman to be a Fortune 500 CEO happening in the 1972.

To say Women were "barely allowed in the workplace" during the 60's, 70's 80's and 90's needs significant proof.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#632

Post by jariel » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:20 PM UTC

wonnage wrote: post #602

unscrupulous_sw wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pipel…

You can't use statistics without a model. The problem is that you have a shitty model and it's annoying when you keep parroting it like you're so logical. Your model as inferred from this comment is that there's some way to quantify the current applicants, and that applicants below a certain value are always rejected. The remaining applicants are "above the bar" and could be hired. The current "above the bar" group i…

You did not actually refute any of his claims or demonstrate in any way that his argument 'does not hold water'.

If you truly believe that 'interviewing is completely random' then I have some other, far deeper concerns you might want to address before we even remotely broach the subject of gender disparity.

Moreover - you're totally missing the point: it's not sexist to merely make the argument that 50/50 hiring can lower the bar. It's just intellectual rhetoric. Maybe it's good maybe it's bad, but it's not inherently sexist.

Ergo: if you don't agree with the PC, even if you make a reasonable argument (or even one that's very good) you're put out to pasture.

This is just one example of PC insane enforcement, there are many.

Which is why it's probably better to avoid such subjects because even intelligent people seem to have difficulty being tolerant, or even navigating the issues.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#633

Post by kelnos » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:20 PM UTC

ericdykstra wrote: post #520

kelnos wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The telephone analogy is terrible. Phone calls are usually between two people, or a small number of people. At the very least, they're bounded to some relatively small number. When you post something on Twitter, unless your account is private, you've broadcasted your speech to anyone in the world who cares to see it. Not moderating any speech at all is a quick way to allow a community to turn into a cesspit of spam a…

Twitter isn’t a phone call, but it also isn’t a message board. You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow; it doesn’t matter if there are 100 billion spam accounts posting ads to nobody. There are millions of Twitter accounts in Japanese, but if you don’t follow any of them, and nobody you follow retweets them, you’d never know they exist. You can also block or mute specific accounts, mute…

That is a vast oversimplification of how Twitter works. People absolutely see tweets from people they don't follow, all the time. Sometimes it's a promoted tweet, sometimes a retweet, sometimes just by browsing through trending topics. It's pretty much impossible to use the platform in such a way that you'll only see tweets from people you follow, and nothing else.

Agreed that Twitter isn't a message board, but that's a much closer analogy than calling it a phone call.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#634

Post by prepend » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:20 PM UTC

adamsea wrote: post #580

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…

To quote someone quoted in the article, "As a commenter identified as "casiotone" observed, "If your values aren't used to inform who you're doing business with, why do you bother pretending to have values at all? This [merge request] demonstrates that you don't have any values except 'we want to make money, and it doesn't matter who gets hurt.'""

Because values are useful for different things. I think casiotone is confusing lack of values with specific values. GitLab has values but they don’t include stopping specific companies or orgs from using their service, other than illegal stuff.

They even call out efficiency as a value. That’s not the same as “we want to make money.” An artist may value art more than relationships so they are a jerk to helpers.

This doesn’t mean the artist lacks values or that the artist wants to make money. It just shows specific values.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#635

Post by mikedilger » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:21 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #545

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…

When people go and talk to women who started out in the tech pipeline but left, many say that the reasons they left are that they felt unwelcome in some way: they were harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc. Too many women choose to leave not because they didn't like the work, but because they didn't like all the bullshit they were implicitly asked to put up with, in order to do the work. If ver…

Your hypothesis regarding harassment or being made to feel unwelcome is reasonable and always needs to be explored. But it is not the only hypothesis, and other factors are probably also in play. I disagree that there "is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry" and I suppose the argument would then hang on the word "obvious".. are the other hypotheses obvious? Perhaps not to people who don't study evolutionary psychology.

There is evidence that more freedom and equality for everyone to be in any job they want leads to even less women choosing STEM careers (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...) That might be because of social issues you mention (harassment, under valued, talked over, underpaid, stalked, etc). It might also be a result of natural selection causing women and men to differentiate in useful ways wherein women were more attracted to nurturing roles, and men more attracted to technical challenges.

I don't think it's useful to pick one reasonable hypothesis and ignore other reasonable hypotheses. Let's explore all the useful ideas and recognize how little we actually know for sure.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#636

Post by grzm » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:22 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #622

falcolas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't normally agree with such editorial changes, but this one is really bad. Thanks.

The article has an intentionally inflammatory title and is more opinion than journalism. It's not a good faith exploration of the topic. Dang's editorialized title is.

I believe you and your parent are saying the same thing. (You can see this same discussion playing out in this same thread.)

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#637

Post by munmaek » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:23 PM UTC

It's impossible for a company to be entirely non-political. By choosing to stay quiet and not vet potential clients, Gitlab just made a large political statement. Choosing to not discuss politics means implicitly endorsing the current status quo.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#638

Post by SkyPuncher » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:23 PM UTC

jswizzy wrote: post #3

When was it ever okay to discuss politics at work?

This is what I'm baffled by in all of this discussion. Work is not a place for politics. Maybe some light-hearted stuff, like discussing a ribbon cutting or some generally agreeable policy change (like a change to paid parking).

Even with very, very close co-founders, politics was an extremely rare discussion. When it did come up, it was generally in the context of how certain things affected the business. Even then, it was with a deep understanding that the other parties where smart, well-meaning individuals.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#639

Post by busterarm » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:24 PM UTC

andreimuntean wrote: post #590

snowwrestler wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people go and talk to women who started out in the tech pipeline but left, many say that the reasons they left are that they felt unwelcome in some way: they were harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc. Too many women choose to leave not because they didn't like the work, but because they didn't like all the bullshit they were implicitly asked to put up with, in order to do the work. If ver…

And what happens when people go and talk to men who started out in the tech pipeline but left? Don’t they say similarly negative things?

Yeah. I'm pretty sure being harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc. are universally true.

I've encountered at least two at every single one of the 15 or so jobs I've had prior to this one. Most of them weren't in tech and I'm a man. Having a shitty job isn't exclusive to being a female in tech.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#640

Post by bluntfang » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:24 PM UTC

SkyBelow wrote: post #496

XPKBandMaidCzun wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work. Having a discussion is hard. While you come to this well-intended, participants bring their own life experiences and hardships. They may not agree on the starting point of the conversation: How is "marginalized' and "privileged" is defined? Some may not take that perspective on the above issues, and people with thes…

>Casting a group as marginalized draws broad strokes about others, because who isn't marginalized? How could someone know how someone else feels or what they have faced in life? If you don't like having your hardship belittled, why potentially do the same thing to others? We all have feelings and their own unique stories. Let me give you a real world example. In the US, the average white person goes to a better funde…

>This is an assumption they make about me based on my race, and which some use against me (thinking me privileged in relation to school system).

Conversely, they might use it FOR you. They might assume you're smarter because you're white and went to a better school, and give you that promotion or that job or that loan.