I think one of the reasons should be that Gitlab does not have many enterprise customers in China and Russia. Native Chinese or Russian speakers are not needed for Support.
Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia
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Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
In china, not from China. The former is easy to justify, and would affect even Americans of non Chinese descent. The latter would be incredibly difficult to justify, and could easily be seen as unwarranted discrimination.
Well, technically it is discrimination, but not racism. I.e. you can still hire a Japanese developer, and with a Chinese regime change you might be able to hire Chinese developers. However, federal law prohibits discrimination based on national origin. This is a touchy subject, but maybe this no longer makes sense? As burfrog pointed out, a Chinese employee living in America isn't free from Chinese control; the gov't…
It doesn’t matter. As long as a security clearance isn’t required, discriminating based on notational origin is a big no no from an ethical perspective, even if it was legal.
I hope we learned our lesson during WW2.
Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia
#93See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/... for more discussions. Here's one from sytses (CEO/co-founder) > @cciresi this is a request from a customer considering using GitLab.com. @mmcb has more context on the why. We should probably add that to the MR. Probably the US government or something like that?
>Probably the US government or something like that? The requirement to block some class of people off from some customers is nothing new, and back at Sun there was separate Sun Federal which was dedicated for such clean business. GitLab's approach (and i think it is just a start of the trend in the industry, time to get rid of the accent :) while theatrically good isn't practically efficient. A Chinese or Russian res…
The next obvious step is to block any employees married to a Russian or Chinese person.
Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider the exact same scenario at any non-remote company. If Bob wants to move to China, where the company doesn't have an office, he's going to have to resign or take a leave of absence. This decision on Gitlab's part would be moving their incredibly generous "you can work from anywhere you want except places where we legally can't let you like Crimea and Iran" to a nearly as generous "you can work from anywhere y…
I may be reading into things here but it sounds a lot like the reason for this is to gain business from the US Government. Limiting reach from governments such as China and Russia is already standard practice for most security/defense related functions of the government.
Yes, and didn’t they also just have a fairly abrupt about-face in terms of doing business with ethically-questionable customers?
MSFT just recently won a 10B cloud deal from the DoD, perhaps the purse is still open there?
Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Debacle? The week hasn't even started yet. Let's take a moment to breathe. China and Russia are known to put pressure or watch/listen on nationals who work in key positions in foreign companies. As US allys Australia, Israel don't pose the same threat. A lot of information that could be gained would be available through the US government and shared with the those parties if there was a need.
That is a load of cow manure aka confirmation bias. Israel has no compunction spying on the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2019/... There are definitely Chinese and Russian spies but there are spies from many countries besides those. The question is why are you singling out those countries and why now. The reason is that there is a Cold War…
Spying is happening between all nations and the leaked cables showed this.
Why those two countries specifically? In Russia you can get imprisoned for a variety of political/strategic reasons if you refuse to cooperate. China implemented there own internet for spying.
When you visit these countries you are advised to buy new devices and throw them out on return to avoid backdoors.
General Powell misleading the UN and TV networks was based on having chemical weapons. Nuclear weapons is the fear with Iran. It was believed because the UN weapon inspector Hans Blix was being railroaded with fake traffic jams and other tactics preventing him from investigating. After he pulled out and Sadam had a history of using these types of weapons on his own people, it made the claim easier to accept without more proof.
Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia
#96I'm shocked (in a positive way) about the amount of transparency Gitlab provides. Even as a reader, it almost feels as if someone misconfigured the ACLs or I'm reading leaked internal documents, not an intentional decision to make this open. Some of the discussions seem highly sensitive, and yet it seems to work for them. Thank you, Gitlab, for being so open! I've learned a lot about compliance from just reading this…
I also learned a lot and some of the employees made great points.
I’m wondering, can the US government legally issue a National Security Letter to an individual employee that forces them to comply and spy for them?
If they can, does this also mean the employee has no legal recourse since NSLs must be kept secret?
Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider the exact same scenario at any non-remote company. If Bob wants to move to China, where the company doesn't have an office, he's going to have to resign or take a leave of absence. This decision on Gitlab's part would be moving their incredibly generous "you can work from anywhere you want except places where we legally can't let you like Crimea and Iran" to a nearly as generous "you can work from anywhere y…
there aren't that many countries. turning the black-list into a white-list is not hard, so it really wouldn't make any practical difference.
There are a lot of countries.
Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually in the discussion: > There is an unacceptably high risk that these nations may apply pressure to individuals living within their borders with sensitive data access (based their role at GitLab). It is our concern. And it is the stated concerns of several customers. The discussion is actually pretty significant, as they sort out how they might manage the _customer demand_ that is creating these hiring blo…
After activating JS I could see the discussion, sorry. Going a bit deeper, it seems to be a specific demand by a potential client. Can make sense for activists, journalists, humanitarians. Makes sense for gitlab to push back too though.
Why does it make sense for Gitlab to push back on a reasonable request from customers?
Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! We try to be transparent by default and even when it is difficult. I think the OP is a good example of something that is hard to be transparent about because the decision isn't obvious and it takes discussion to come to the best conclusion.
Congratulations on taking a step in the right direction, even if it is a very small step. Nobody else seems to take the threat seriously, somewhat excepting defense contractors of course. I can understand being reluctant to deal with the full extent of the problem. Somebody from China, with a family in China and subject to Chinese law, does not cease to be a security threat by moving to the USA and getting a green ca…
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Re: Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I've ever 180'd on a compliance practice as quickly as I have with GitLab's compliance policy repo transparency. When I first stumbled across it during the telemetry situation last week I thought they were nuts. Absolutely nuts. But reading through this thread and the one posted last week it seems like an incredibly effective approach. People from all areas of the company, not just legal/compliance are g…
This one actually makes me scared for Gitlab. I feel like their exposing themselves to a lot of extra liability by making these discussions public. For instance - it's been suggested (I don't know if rightly or wrongly) that they have a customer who asked them to do something that would violate the US boycott laws. I'll assume that it is the case that they've been asked to violate these laws. According to a plain rea…
You're concerned because you're worried if they violate the law they'll be held legally accountable? Isn't that the entire point of transparency / accountability?