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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

#721

Post by klyrs »

gknapp wrote: post #678
burtonator wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it was that simple honestly. If Google is doing business with nazis then as a consumer I have absolutely every right to boycott Google.

In this case, it's likely that Nazis would be labeled a terrorist organization, or a wartime enemy, and would be subject to federally-enforced economic sanctions. It actually would be illegal for Google to do business with Nazis.

I'm not so sure. During WW2, Nazis enjoyed strong political support from the American Right, and the discussion is known as The Great Debate. It was the ambush at Pearl Harbor, and not a clear moral consensus, which closed the debate.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#722

Post by flukus »

davidw wrote: post #511
Mvandenbergh wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with at least Facebook and Twitter (and possibly Google) in this analysis is that their attention-grabbing model requires them to analyse and interfere with the data which is coming through their systems. The only way not to do that would be for FB timelines and Twitter feeds to be strictly sequential feeds which at some point in the past they may have been but they are not now. Once you start basing your…

The problem is also that they are advertisers, and I'll be damned if I want ads for my company appearing next to "Illinois Nazis" or ISIS or whatever other garbage. There's another problem: it becomes a race to the bottom if it's nothing but trolls and garbage content.

And the problem this creates for society is that we censor content that isn't advertiser friendly. We've already seen where this leads with broadcast television, lowest common denominator trash that is safe for advertisers, escaping that advertiser optimum made youtube good in the first place.

I subscribe to a lot of history channels so I've seen the effects of this filtering directly, history contains a lot of talk about nazis and hitler and you can't even mention the big H without being demonetized.

But this is just another example of how advertising is a cancer on society.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#723

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

fzeroracer wrote: post #685
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to call women in tech initiatives nonpolitical. There's no significant political opposition to them; things like the INSPIRE Women Act (the women in tech initiative for NASA) regularly get passed with no real debate.

If it was non-political, then you would expect to see no debates on the issue. Given that there was a post here on HN [1] about an initiative for women devolving into flamebait and arguments about reverse sexism, I think one cannot say it's non-political. As most things are political. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269

I'm not sure why I would expect that. People have heated debates on lots of nonpolitical things. Have you seen the HN threads on microservices?

Perhaps more on point, Gitlab surely doesn't have a policy that you can't discuss anything people disagree on at work.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#724

Post by journalctl »

p4bl0 wrote: post #683
journalctl wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is ostensibly illegal to prevent employees from unionizing in the United States.

Then the requirement to not discuss politics at work must be illegal too.

No? You can’t forbid people from forming a union, but you can forbid things like arguing about the president.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#725

Post by overgard »

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…

Well, the problem is that practically anything can be "politics", I don't think it's a useful way to frame thinking around what you can or can't say at work.

Generally though, when people say something is "politics" what it means is it comes down to a value judgement, rather than there being a middle solution, or the issue is too complicated for there to be a general consensus. As an example that probably wouldn't come up at work, consider the abortion question. If you're of the fundamentalist religious sort, your values practically demand you believe that aborting a baby is wrong. If you're not, then it's a lot more grey. Something like that is a value issue, there isn't really a compromise that doesn't involve one side changing fundamental beliefs about the world and the universe.

To answer your specific issues though:

- lgbt: not relevant. It's illegal to discriminate on that, so... either your company is following the law or it's not. Also: nobody needs to know. It doesn't need to be discussed, it just either needs to be litigated or not litigated. But no smart company wants their employees talking about their personal views on that because that could be a huge liability if someone has intolerant personal views (even if they don't apply them professionally).

- Women in tech & underrepresented minorities: ... well it IS a pipeline problem. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of companies would love to have more diversity, but you can only hire the people that apply. I see a lot of the SJ types make offices miserable hammering on this stuff that frequently can't be fixed locally. I mean yeah, if someone is scaring away people, then address that behavior, but that's more of a "having respectful competent management" issue.

- Education - Never really heard of this being an issue that isn't allowed to be talked about. I don't think anyone would really get upset about this though.

Also, as others have mentioned... a lot of times when people say these issues should be "discussed" they don't really mean that. The far left generally hates "discussion" on their pet issues if there's even a hint of not towing the party line, and it quickly escalates into people being called racist. So frequently, avoiding "politics" is just saying, "please pick your fight somewhere else"

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#726

Post by Gunax »

wolco wrote: post #649
Gunax wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 other services (or roll their own) and gitlab can't do anything about that. Neither would it be overreaching for the workers building that product to request a say in how it's used. I think this is the crux of the issue. Anyone is of course free to…

I didn't realize facebooi owned 90%. If you exclude twitter/reddit what's left snapchat?

Eh, I guess this is not true. To me, 'social media' always meant websites like MySpace and Orkut where friends connect, and not just 'website where users can communicate in some way' a la Pinterest/Reddit/YouTube.

But I realise now that isn't the right definition... still not sure what the word is for the Friendster/MySpace clones--but among those I am pretty sure Facebook is more than 90% of the market (outside of China), possibly more than 99% with Google+ closing.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#727

Post by journalctl »

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?

Perhaps men and women in tech face different challenges, and the challenges that women face are unique to women and related to their sex/gender expression.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#728

Post by pnako »

Theo said it best: "But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia." -- Theo de Raadt

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#729

Post by pryce »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #326
neonate wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it. Here's the main part of what Naval says: "If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It's like the phone company.…

The phone company analogy doesn't really work, because phone calls are by default private, between exactly two parties, usually just two people. If you look at the tech company equivalent of that, like FB messenger, or Hangouts, or other messaging systems, they behave more similarly to the phone company. It'd be difficult to get in trouble for something you said in a private message. If you want the analogy to make s…

The "we're not being political" approach also fails at an earlier hurdle; which is that the decision to not allow "political" discussion at work -and the decision to refuse to review taking business from hate groups are themselves inescapably political decisions.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#730

Post by sld »

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/...

- Engaging in illegal, unlawful behavior. - Encouraging violence or discrimination against legally protected groups.

You might need to clarify what legal jurisdiction you apply to those rules. California's definitions? Another U.S. state? Another country? As a global company where illegality varies by country, I think those statements present an opportunity for different interpretations without clarification.

- Related topic: We generally don't discuss religion or politics.....

Too much waffling added. Political discussion in the workplace can devolve into a hostile work environment.

I'd suggest this simplification of the two versions: We do not discuss politics in the workplace. However, we encourage discussion and iteration on any company policy.

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