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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

#971

Post by dahart »

unscrupulous_sw wrote: post #560
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…

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…

> So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all.

This is one of the problems a lot of engineers have, and I make this mistake too more often than I want to admit.

Cultural discrimination isn't a math problem, and however you modeled it, your logic doesn't map well to history at all. When you double down on a math argument, what it sounds like to other people is that you're not open to the possibility that you made a logic or modeling mistake, that you've decided men are better than women, and that you're trying to confuse the argument with a technicality.

FWIW, there might be math problem with your suggestion that 50/50 would lower the bar. The ratio is not absolute, and this isn't zero sum. More women participating doesn't mean fewer men, it means more people. When there are more people, in general, the absolute number of excellent people goes up.

I don't know what you mean by "the bar". What does it mean to lower the bar? Are you talking about how hard it is to get a job, get promoted, be in the top 10%? I don't understand your argument.

No matter what math/logic you used, the layman translation of saying the bar goes down with inclusion of more women is that you believe women to be inferior. That may not be your intent, but that's what people are hearing you say.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#972

Post by axilmar »

I don't think there is a right or wrong approach in this one. In my opinion, each organization shall be left to do whatever they want: if they want sensorship, so be it, if they don't want sensorship, so be it. Let the market decide what's best.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#973

Post by elbrian »

neonate wrote: post #280
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…

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.…

Excellent analogy! I'm so happy that telephone carriers do nothing to prevent my phone from being called by spammers 10x daily.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#974

Post by dang »

tedivm wrote: post #431
dang wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site guideline is " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. " Since Gitlab retracted that part of their policy, that part of the title became misleading. That's why I edited it. As always, we're open to suggestions for a better, i.e. more accurate and neutral, title. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It wasn't misleading at the time that the article was written though, or even at the time that it was submitted. This article was posted here two hours ago, and the changes on the Gitlab repository were made an hour ago. Is it now the policy of HN to keep titles up to date as events change?

Sure. We've always tried to do that. Actually we have to, because once a title becomes inaccurate, the thread will fill up with complaints about its inaccuracy until it's corrected. It's less important for stories not on the front page.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#975

Post by galaxyLogic »

alkonaut wrote: post #875
galaxyLogic wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this (news not your comment) sounds like a very slippery slope. What happened to freedom of speech? And who is to decide what is "political" what is not? As long as speech is not offensive, I think it should be protected.

Agree - and workplace rules shouldn’t be “don’t talk about X” but rather ”please avoid talking about X unless strictly necessary.

Sounds good, more like "speech etiquette".

It could also be phrased in terms of "Everyone has a right to decline to talk politics". If people agree to talk politics I don't see problem, except of course it can lead to lower productivity perhaps.

So then maybe all non-work-related speech should be forbidden? That just sounds inhumane.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#976

Post by anm89 »

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."

This is similar rhetoric to what people would have used to justify segregated restaurants and schools. I'm not saying you sympathize with this but there is a reason why we don't want public businesses turning people away for political speech or other categories. It's not a nice place to end up as a society.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#977

Post by luord »

I was wondering why something that I thought so obvious that I would consider GitLab making it official a formality, gathered over a thousand comments. And then I read the article and quite a few of the comments.

The second top comment (which starts with the assumption that anyone who wouldn't walk to talk politics at work must be "privileged") cleared up why this subject got so many comments pretty quickly. In hindsight, I should not have expected any different.

Appropriately enough, though, this thread is probably evidence of why politics should not be discussed at work, I think.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#978

Post by camel_Snake »

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…

> 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.

Is this actually occurring? I haven't seen anyone get deplatformed because the company disagrees with the message, but rather because they violated ToS with regard to how they were communicating their message.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#979

Post by dominotw »

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 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.

isn't that true for all voice in the soicety though.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#980

Post by wpietri »

dcolkitt wrote: post #847
wpietri wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't discuss politics at work," is a political statement. It rules particular views in bounds and rules others out. Similarly any business ends up making moral choices. It's unavoidable. To act in the world is to have impact. To consciously act is to intend particular impact. Commerce is inherently social; you choose to serve certain people in certain ways, with particular outcomes intended. These choices are inher…

You're stretching the definition of "political" to such a degree that it renders the word meaningless. You're basically claiming that any act that has any impact on anyone is political. That it's basically impossible for an organization to be non-political or even less political than any other organization. And that simply flies in the face of common sense. Only the most hardcore post-modernist would deny that the NR…

I agree "politicalness" is a spectrum. I just disagree that it's possible to be anywhere close to zero if you are running a company.

The current American notion of "nonpolitical" is based on a post-WWII period where there was a broad consensus on a bunch of issues, and I think that consensus was in large part driven by the moral clarity provided by the war. But that started to decline circa 1980: https://xkcd.com/1127/large/

It was still propped up for a while by common interests between southern Democrats and non-northeastern Republicans. A big common interest being an opposition to civil rights. But most of the blue dog Democrats are now Republicans and liberal Republicans are basically extinct, so that middle ground has basically vanished.

For you "common sense" is doing a ton of work here, as is "widely considered". But as far as I can tell, it's tautological. You want your priors (or those of dominant groups) to be considered nonpolitical, while those of others to be political.

> claiming that any act that has any impact on anyone is political

What is politics if not people regulating the impacts we have on one another? Of societies deciding whose pain and whose gain is most important?

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