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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

#801

Post by dahart »

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…

> the numbers have barely budged in more than 10 years

What are you talking about? The numbers have varied wildly in the last 50 years. In the US it was almost 40% women in CS in 1984. Now it’s 18%. Why? The numbers also vary wildly from country to country, and in India some years have seen greater than 50% women in CS. Why?

Cherry picking numbers to make it seem like it’s not changing and make it seem like today’s numbers are the natural order of things, when that’s very very far from the truth, is a way to ensure people who think will interpret your argument as sexist.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#803

Post by cloverich »

MFLoon wrote: post #303
Nullabillity wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that? The health of the democracy is far more important than your company's profit margin. And besides, enforcing silence is still a political move that strongly favours th…

Since when are businesses responsible for the health of democracy? Have most business in American history been hotbeds of political discussion and activity? Have we previously attributed the relative health of American democracy to this characteristic of American businesses?

Probably since at least Citizens United and social media provided a medium for spreading targeted propaganda.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#804

Post by Eleopteryx »

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…

>Twitter isn’t a phone call, but it also isn’t a message board.

Well, Twitter is Twitter. But Twitter is probably closer to a message board than it is to a phone call.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#805

Post by hamhock666 »

jyrkesh wrote: post #430
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…

Exactly. At face value, I'm firmly in favor of what Ravikant was saying, but even the simple example of a spam filter proves how it's impossible in practice: without basic spam filtering, something like Twitter would be absolutely unusable in the face of endless crypto and malware spam. At some level, Twitter/FB/et al have to do SOMETHING to shape/filter the volume of traffic they receive.

I think if there are going to be filters, then it would make sense for users to be able to opt in or out of filters. That way you can choose what you want to see, instead of having an almighty force that determines what you see. Having global filters that users can't turn off, besides to filter out illegal content, needlessly take away freedom from users.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#806

Post by tomnipotent »

anarchodev wrote: post #331
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…

> 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."

The civil rights movement and suffrage prove this is patently untrue. The biggest difference is that gender, religion and ethnicity are easy things to point out, while ideologic belief systems are tricky.

Where do you draw the line on what grounds a business can refuse service? Should I be able to refuse service to republicans? How about amputees? I hate the color yellow, so I'm not going to sell to anyone with an outfit on that has that color. I live in Los Angeles, where it's still plenty common to see signs saying "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service" - which, btw, is not aimed at scantily clad beach goers but targets the poor and homeless population. Same with silly dress codes around baggy pants and hats - all clear examples of bullshit rules intended to single out an "undesirable" customer. Except it's not race/religions/gender so it's cool, right?

I'm in the camp that the reasons businesses should have to refuse service should be a whitelist, not a blacklist.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#807

Post by AnimalMuppet »

eranimo wrote: post #752
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take underrepresented minorities in tech (presuming yours is a tech workplace): You can work on that in a "nonpolitical" way. (It is, as you say, still politics, in a way, but it's not being done like it's politics.) You say, "You know that Android developer position that's been open for four months, that we can't find anyone for? I wonder if there might be some non-traditional candidates that would fit that role. Ho…

Serious question: why do you think work shouldn't be about discussing the issues that matter? Why dance around the issues?

Behind your question seems to be the idea that all places should be places for discussing the "ideas that matter". I don't think that is correct.

Work isn't a debating society. It isn't part of a political campaign. It's a place for efficiently producing things that people want. If it fails at that, society suffers, even if some really good debates happen. We have other places for those debates; we don't have other places for producing the things that society needs.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#808

Post by XorNot »

quotemstr wrote: post #659
graeme wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised at what is "not illegal". Every community moderates. You can make an argument that some sites have moderated too much, or been too overtly political. But every community moderates, and has to. This can be demonstrated with a simple example. Guess what isn't illegal? Spam! It should be obvious that FB and Twitter etc have to take spam down though. Then there's abusive behaviour. Stalking, harassment…

> Spam Spam, pornography, and profanity are not viewpoints. The problem with social media is not censorship of unwanted content that an ordinary person can identify without reference to viewpoint. What bothers civil libertarians, myself included, is censorship of specific points of view, even when these points of view are expressed in a calm and civil manner. > Horrifying Who gets to decide what's horrifying? You? Wh…

Ah yes, the civil point of view that the state should systemically exterminate entire groups of people. That someone should do something about those people. That critic.

But you know, totally fine if they're polite about it...

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#809

Post by kgwxd »

dang wrote: post #2

This is a divisive topic, but the story seems to pass the interesting-new-phenomenon test ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). If you comment, note this guideline: " Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. " We've changed the title in accordance with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , but if anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more a…

If they no longer have that policy then it no longer passed the interesting-new-phenomenon test and almost all of the article is irrelevant.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#810

Post by rbavocadotree »

slg wrote: post #601
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…

>personally I don't see underrepresentation of women in tech as a problem that can be or should be 'solved' I say the below not as an attempt to criticize you for this viewpoint, but as a way to try to explain why this viewpoint is often interpreted as sexist. The question is why do you believe this? The possible explanations for why women are underrepresented in tech basically comes down to either nature or nurture.…

> nature or nurture

This has been studied now, and the data points strongly towards nature. Country's with a higher level of gender equality have more gender disparity in fields such as STEM, not less. The country's that have done the most to alleviate the issues you've mentioned have the lowest percentage of women engineers.

It was the exact opposite of what everyone thought would happen. These results were so unexpected that we called it the Gender-equality paradox.

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