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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

#991

Post by kortilla »

theon144 wrote: post #912
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. Me either! The point is everyone should be the arbiter of morality for society. Abstaining from moral judgements because it's "inefficient" is just alibistic, and leaves society worse as a whole. Tech companies are participating in society just as any other company, there's no reason they should be exempt from ethical considerations. T…

Is it ethical to cut these same people off from food, etc as well when they haven’t violated the laws our society has decided should be followed?

Companies and people “being moral arbiters” of everyone they interact with is just idiots making knee jerk reactions based on other people’s perceptions and opinions.

An employee at a software company knows far to little to meaningfully judge if ICE should be helped. Are you even aware of the duties of the ICE?

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#992

Post by codezero »

bluntfang wrote: post #990
codezero wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t make it untrue or any less valuable.

I believe the context of his employment and role completely strips the value from the statements.

Fair point. I disagree. I’ve worked with plenty of sincere and reasonable marketers. None of them have shilled publicly under their own name when they weren’t sincere. Startups are on the above average side of hard working and thoughtful people, in my experience. If you want to shit on marketers, go ahead.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#993

Post by sunderw »

madrox wrote: post #385
anarchodev wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok. Is that the world you want to live in?

Nobody here noticed the difference between "refusing to serve a customer" and "not wanting to to business with other unethical businesses". Gitlab could definitely chose with which other business they associate, and that would not mean allowing to target minorities. But every customer-facing business should not be allowed to refuse their service to anyone, because you're right, it would very easily lead to cases like the one you're describing.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#994

Post by mildweed »

sgarman wrote: post #689
pdonis wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think businesses should be held to a higher ethical standard than they are currently, get active with local or even national politics. Start a letter writing campaign to your elected officials. Do something productive. I would say the productive thing to do would be to start your own business that holds itself to a higher ethical standard, and then out-compete the other businesses.

Sadly sometimes I think having lower ethical standards gives an edge during competition.

I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but this is true and is the weakest point of capitalism.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#995

Post by Gunax »

yxhuvud wrote: post #927
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…

> Facebook control ~90% of social media. Source? That doesn't really match the numbers I've seen. Especially not for younger people.

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

#996

Post by dredmorbius »

midnighttoker3 wrote: post #383
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

In other words, you did them a favor.

HN changes (and suggests submitters edit) submission titles generally if that edit will provoke a better discussion.

Sometimes that's removing or changing clickbait phrases. Sometimes it's clarifying or sharpening focus. Sometimes it's softening, blurring, or removing provocative language. And in every case I'm aware, they've commented on having made such edits.

It's a judgement call. I've edited numerous of my own submissions, often for length, occasionally in mind of discussion. I've emailed the mods, usually for clickbait (in the original) titles. Sometimes my edits are accepted, sometimes not.

But what's been done here isn't an exceptional practice. And given the already politicised nature of the topic at hand, for HN, I fully stand by dang's edit in this case.

(Would have commented earlier if I'd had a decent keyboard available.)

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#997

Post by xyzzyz »

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…

This is the standard model used in education, military, and industry. Millions of people go through processes designed according to this model every year, and probably tens of thousands of scientific papers have been written in context of this model. Your complaints are mostly utterly false (eg. “technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin“ is in contrary of the established consensus in literature, and so is “ Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance“).

If this was indeed a shitty model, it would have been pointed out to grandparent when he brought it up, but since this model is commonly used and extremely useful, what he got instead was silencing and penalizing through anonymous back door channels.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#998

Post by kortilla »

gbanfalvi wrote: post #863
wolco wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social networks bring people together. Advertising sends a message to groups of people. Roads allow people to travel by car. Roads are being uses to bring people to places where murders happen. You can't pretend that roads have no role. So many things had a role.. power, internet, the company who made the computer they used, teachers, friends (or lack of), parents.. why decidd that social media or ads is the problem.…

Come on, there’s a difference between building a service or a tool that ends up getting used for problematic purposes (ISIS used lots of Toyotas, is Toyota evil?) and knowingly allow and even even enable problematic purposes (imagine if Toyota recognized ISIS as a rising power in the Middle East and started selling them trucks). We can always replace words in other peoples’ statements to make them sound silly, but I’…

Toyota does know their trucks are being sold to ISIS. Yet don’t do something drastic like banning all truck sales to the Middle East.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#999

Post by pdonis »

sgarman wrote: post #689
pdonis wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think businesses should be held to a higher ethical standard than they are currently, get active with local or even national politics. Start a letter writing campaign to your elected officials. Do something productive. I would say the productive thing to do would be to start your own business that holds itself to a higher ethical standard, and then out-compete the other businesses.

Sadly sometimes I think having lower ethical standards gives an edge during competition.

> sometimes I think having lower ethical standards gives an edge during competition

Which means people aren't willing to enforce higher ethical standards as customers. So is the problem the companies, or the customers?

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#1000

Post by amoitnga »

zarkov99 wrote: post #682
codeafin wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So banning conversations is reasonable imo I think that's a very sad thing to say. Say conversation is banned but "small talk" is allowed, where's the line between that? And like the guy above said, there's also no line on what's political - even talking about a video game like you said can be political. So in the end, I believe that would end up with people just avoiding talking to each other at all, to avoid any c…

It is sad indeed, that we lost the ability to discuss difficult issues. But it is true nonetheless, it is impossible to discuss politics unless we all pretend to be on the same page, and yes, in tech for the most part that is the left page. Silence makes for a dull workplace, but it is better than living in abject hypocrisy.

I'm not saying it has to be silence. I'm saying someone else shouldn't be paying for it. We have time before/after work, nothing is stopping us from having those conversations.

I was only saying if from my perspective - when I talk about anything other than work, I don't code, I don't talk about possible solutions, I don't explore... I don't work.. while being paid for it.

Short amount is ok, it helps to recharge, remain sane.

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