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."
I think "this one" refers to the original article's title being really bad: "Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab: Vetting non-evil customers is 'time consuming, potentially distracting'"
Let's talk about how immoral it is to write headlines designed to spark controversy and outrage. Those who do so are disrupting our collective ability to discuss rationally about things- and they do it for profit- all the while posing as guardians of morality.
I'm sorry, I don't know the Register, so I might be misinterpreting the headline. And I see that many others on their homepage are similarly exaggerated.
However, unfortunately at this point I'm so used to headlines misrepresenting basic facts or taking quotes out of context to sell a political point or generate controversy, that the headline seemed perfectly plausible- my general point still stands, even if it doesn't apply to this particular case.
I can understand that if you're not familiar with them, but The Register literally predates click-bait - they've been doing satirical headlines for decades.
Wow, finally read the site guidelines. "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." I always wondered why even the world's most important news events barely register on HN!
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.
Your job is to maintain the shitty neolib echo chamber with entirely arbitrary rules. "Unsubstantive" is not a rule. You edit titles to make them more favorable to companies.
You're not a moderator, you're just a shitty censor.
We edit titles to make them less favorable to companies too. The principle is to make titles more accurate and neutral. If you know of one where we did the opposite, I'd like to see the example.
Moderation rules invariably involve interpretation. That doesn't make them arbitrary.
I agree. There were times in the past where I thought dang was favoring YC companies (it's worth mentioning GitLab is a YC company), but in retrospect I think I was seeing it because I wanted to see it.
HN continues to surprise me as the best moderated community of substantial size anywhere on the internet, and this thread exemplifies why.
Thank you dang for making HN what it is today. I know I appreciate it, and I bet 99% of everybody else here does as well.
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.)
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.
It's a routine application of HN's rules. I'm happy to hear what you find objectionable, but you're going to have to be more specific if you want a specific response.
I don't think I agree. For a tech company to officially say "don't discuss politics at work" is also a phenomenon I don't think we've seen before, and in the context of recent events/trends it seems significant.
Maybe it's a SV thing? I saw some of the documents from a recent lawsuit against Google and was pretty astounded by the sorts of things that people were willing to not only say but actually put into writing where anyone on their intranet could see (things along the lines of "I won't let anyone on my team if they have political belief X or voted for Y")
It's 100% a SV thing. It is assumed that everyone working for a SV company is on the left and hates anything on the right. Voice dissent at your own peril.
I suppose it is also assumed that everyone working for a SV company is on the left, except when it comes to wealth distribution? :) (this reply is not against you, I hope it does not come out that way)
That seems to make sense if you consider how political beliefs and preferred candidates correlate with given personality traits. Why is it stigmatized?
Generally diversity is better for a team because it brings in a variety of viewpoints. Someone with different political views might be able to offer some perspective that the rest of the group would have missed.
That we can't talk politics over alcohol? I still don't see that being an issue unless you can't be civil about conflicting beliefs. If you can't be civil when confronted with conflicting beliefs then you have larger problems I think.
There's very much a social norm in some social circles found in Silicon Valley that total political agreement is expected. Opinions are voiced in the expectation of loud and vociferous agreement.
Like any such environment where conformity is the norm, it works until someone fails to conform.
I do think it's more of a tech thing. I believe it stems from valuing "culture fit" more than other industries do. I appreciate the idea of culture fit, but feel uneasy about it because it's also discriminatory and leads to problems like this.
I wonder if it's party because of the generalness and youngness of the industry. I imagine fields like oil rigging, therapy services for children, auto repair, or military service have more self-selecting cultures than building generic CRUD apps or web design for random clients.
It may not be in the US (I couldn't tell) but in all other countries I've been it usually ranges from slightly awkward to perfectly acceptable or normal.
It should be ok to discuss politics in any and every space as it affects every single aspects of everybody's lives. Considering most adults spend around half of their awake time at work it seems silly to avoid it there.
We actually do this quite often, and that's even though our field is not concerned with politics. But maybe that's a cultural thing? (Edit: Also, views at work vary. In US terms the spectrum is probably from Bernie-Sanders-left to pre-Trump-Reps-right.)
It's only okay to discuss left-leaning policies at work. I'm libertarian leaning and keep my mouth shut because if I said how I felt about half of the things my co-workers discuss I would be ostracized.
Whenever you have reasonable adults working together?
I think I’ve, on appropriate occasion, discussed politics with friends and colleagues at every workplace I’ve ever been at. [Edit: some senior leadership] openly supports the DNC and has commented to that effect at town halls.
To pretend that people are apolitical or to ban all political discussions because some people can’t seem to handle disagreements in a professional manner is one way to handle the problem, but perhaps not the first nor optimal solution to implement.
No. The odds that I align politically with every person that will benefit financially from my work are zero, and I wouldn't want it any other way. I find mandatory political adherence much more threatening than any particular political party.
I accept political disagreements with senior leadership as a fact of life. I've worked for many companies where this was the case; one where donations to the RNC was not-so-subtling encouraged; and another that suggested we donate to the company's PAC.
Most of us can separate our politic beliefs from our work. Regardless of how we feel about certain laws and regulations, we have to work within the limitations they impose.
Certainly. What they believe and support as a private person is interesting and maybe a topic for conversation, but not determinant of whether I want to work for them.
I’m openly Libertarian; I have people on my team who are openly pro-Trump. Being in MA and in tech, there are obviously many pro-left employees.
If you can only work for and with people with whom you agree politically, you might have (or be) a problem. “Not talking politics at work” is a bandaid over this problem, at best.
I think being public about it was a deliberate choice and signaling--attracting and filtering their workforce and clientele. I'm sure vocal RNC support would work really well in other fields.
Had a coworker who openly supported Trump. Didn't affect my relationship with him or how we worked together, despite not respecting Trump at all. We had some good conversations as well. I may not agree with him politically, but I don't need to agree with someone on everything to be friends, or at least respectful.
So yeah, any place that has functioning adults, or, better, mature people, can have mature discussions. But then it takes two to make this work. For example, if you belittle or insult people freely or mock those who you might not agree with, you aren't going to ever see that mature environment.
you do you but i'd be very, very careful about volunteering your identity as well as CEO's political points of view (trivial to associate via your profile) without his consent on a widely trafficked web site
Nearly every place I've worked at (in the US) over the last 20 years has had an explicit prohibition against discussing politics or religion in the workplace.
I'm not saying if it's OK or not as a philosophical matter, but it does help make the workplace more pleasant.
Which is great, right up until you work with people that aren't straight cis white men. Nonaction is and always will be political; it's just the politics of upholding the status quo.
When a regular political talking point is whether it's ok to fire you for existing the hypocrisy of the "don't put politics in my <x>" becomes painful (and certainly less than pleasant).
Companies should be free to declare they support the status quo, but they should never get a free pass as if that's some sort of neutral, objective opinion. They've chosen to make a stance and should be appraised as such.
>>Which is great, right up until you work with people that aren't straight cis white men.
My company has a "no drama" policy. Our team could be a poster for diversity and inclusion from all across the spectrum and it works really really well. We all appreciate each other.
Ah, so anyone who doesn't agree with the existing norms in your office, like gay people being out at work and men and women working together, would just have to quietly live with it or leave.
That sounds fine to me, because I think that's a good status quo. But twenty years ago I bet the status quo was different and a totally different set of people was being made uncomfortable and encouraged out.
> Which is great, right up until you work with people that aren't straight cis white men.
I find it interesting that you make such an assumption about the places that I've worked.
Also, I should mention that I absolutely have had numerous political discussions with coworkers. They just don't usually happen in the workplace itself.
Depending on your field, it can be unavoidable. Look at the stuff Facebook is having to deal with now, deciding whether to reject specific advertisements from US presidential candidates. It's impossible to tackle that without ending up just having regular old political discussions in the workplace, if only to figure out what actions to take.
Thankfully most jobs won't touch this but if you're running internet services it'll probably come up.
When things some people classify as "politics" directly affect work. When you're trying to get your company to make improvements to the state of the world. When you're talking about corporate culture, inclusion, and solving problems. When you're arranging for your company to make a donation, or sponsor an event, or advising against doing so due to potential ramifications. When you're making travel plans and need to know more about your destination. When you're discussing salary or investments or retirement or health or hobbies and the potential impact of future legislative or political changes on those.
We're not just talking about the stereotype of people standing around a water cooler declaring affiliations and throwing political talking points past each other.
> We're not just talking about the stereotype people standing around a water cooler declaring affiliations and throwing political talking points past each other.
Who said they aren't talking about just that?
At one of my first jobs people got a bit upset in a discussion at some point about religion. My then boss said 'I have learned to never talk about politics and religion at work.'. He didn't forbid it, but the point is valid: why talk about things that gets people unreasonably fired up?
I say this as a very left-leaning person (by British standards at the very least), but in my company strong left leaning values are part of the culture and it's expected that you promote LGBTQ+ issues, promote Women in the workplace and promote immigration.
It's not a bad thing in my mind, it's heavy handed at times, I can see how it would rub some traditionalists the wrong way in an extreme way. If you held some form of conservative view then you'd almost certainly be a pariah in our company/studio.
But left-leaning politics is definitely promoted and discussed in the office.
What if you support these policies, but don't actively promote them because you're there to do work, not discuss politics?
What if you have reservations about specific things that have been lumped in with "left" politics, which you believe are inherently not "left" and do not benefit humanity?
Many things were ok to do at work not too long ago and are still ok in most work places around the world. That includes forming romantic relationships, talking about politics and all the other adult human interactions people do also outside work.
If I talk about whether it's legal to fire people for being gay, is that bringing politics to work? How can I be focused on work if I keep hearing about gay people? Also, isn't it obvious that homosexuality is seen as a severe spiritual evil to a large (if not majority) segment of the population?
What is the professional intuition on productivity when a large segment of the population considers homosexuality to be spiritually depraved?
In my mind it has always been ok to talk about your politics as long as you're respectful and you respect the differences of people who disagree.
To make it against whatever workplace "rules" there are seems overbearing and thought-controlling. Our personal beliefs and political experiences make up a lot of who we are, our individual perspective on the world and somewhat how we think.
How can you hold your organization to socially responsible policies and actions if you can't discuss what should be socially acceptable? Political beliefs form the ideas of what is the scope of the organization's responsibility.
In my recent experiences at a hedge fund and a very large investment bank, politics were discussed pretty openly in both environments (alas this was only in NYC). I found the discussions worthwhile and informative as it helped me understand my own beliefs more.
It's unwise to hold beliefs that you never have to justify. You should put in the intellectual work so that you can articulate and argue your own politics it will make sure your beliefs are well founded.
Back when it was possible to have a conservative viewpoint on social issues without being subject to public shaming by a disruptively loud minority. It wasn’t that long ago either.
Most people spend more time at work than with their actual families. This leads to all kinds of conversations, in the office, in the break room, or at a bar. Not everything is appropriate for every setting but pretending differing opinions don’t exist is ludicrous.
Depends on people, I suppose. I'm easily capable of disengaging and leaving people not upset so I have discussed politics (anarcho-capitalist views, full paternalism views, just-world views) safely and without rebuke everywhere I've worked.
This is what I'm baffled by in all of this discussion. Work is not a place for politics. Maybe some light-hearted stuff, like discussing a ribbon cutting or some generally agreeable policy change (like a change to paid parking).
Even with very, very close co-founders, politics was an extremely rare discussion. When it did come up, it was generally in the context of how certain things affected the business. Even then, it was with a deep understanding that the other parties where smart, well-meaning individuals.
I'm sure everyone who has to earn a living to support their family will appreciate this move. Nothing is worse than politics at work, where you may lose your paycheck if you don't align with the correct factions.
That's an odd thing for Linus to say. I read a lot of Peanuts comic books in my youth, and it seemed to me that Linus could never stop blabbing relentlessly about the Great Pumpkin.
I would normally consider that part of the human condition, not a problem that a company needs to solve. Trying to minimize the negative impact of it (like they are doing) seems about all they can do.
I do think that Americans in general tend to be oversensitive when it comes to politics, and this mindset bleeds into the workplace. And I say this as an American. I've heard that discussing things like politics isn't as big a deal in say Europe or Israel.
Personally I wish the discussion of things like politics wasn't considered taboo because I think it makes for a more boring work environment, but I'm also the type who loves to debate with people who have opposing viewpoints and don't get offended easily. Unfortunately American culture has moved in the opposite direction revolving around appeasing to the most sensitive "victim".
During a recent company outing, I talked about politics with like four other people. Sure, it can be a bit awkward and you kind of have to think about what you're saying, but it wasn't exactly unusual.
It probably helps that we, like many other European countries, have more parties than just two, so you're not always in an us vs. them situation like in the US of A.
Europeans in general just seem to be more open to political discussion. When traveling I've heard many Europeans tell me that Americans tend to be very sensitive when it comes to politics, and I've found that to often be the case in my experience as well.
America has become very polarized over just the past decade. We say we want diversity, but that doesn't include that one fundie Christian person who reads his or her Bible at lunch and believes that homosexuality is wrong, but still wants to be friends with and accept everyone. We want diversity of people, but not diversity of ideas or ideology.
People are afraid to talk about anything remotely controversial today, because it could result in a call for them to be fired or resign. We've seen it in academia and I feel like we're going to see it more in industry. One opinion stated on a blog or social media will be enough for others to dig up every hint of anything someone has ever posted that could be seen as negative and outright calls to have them leave.
There's almost a point system in call-out culture; a subconscious social credit system among those who participate. The Coddling of the American Mind is a great book that talks about this growth in the academic space. It's made professors afraid to talk about difficult topics with their students.
>but that doesn't include that one fundie Christian person who reads his or her Bible at lunch and believes that homosexuality is wrong, but still wants to be friends with and accept everyone.
Where is this person? In my experience, the fundies like this just can't stop from telling others how their lifestyles are "immoral" and "wrong". That's the problem with religious extremists like this, and why people who want "diversity" don't want people like this around: they're actively opposed to diversity, and because of their dogmatic religious nature, they feel the need to push their opinions on everyone.
>We want diversity of people, but not diversity of ideas or ideology.
Well, yes. The idea of "diversity" is having different people from different backgrounds together in one group, and (here's the important part) getting along well. You can't do that when some of them have a hateful ideology and they hate other members of the group and attempt to hurt them in some way. How would you have a diverse group composed of people of various nationalities, and then throw some neo-Nazis in there? It wouldn't work; you'd probably have violence, or at least some serious discord.
There is of course a danger to this as you've pointed out, that things can go too far in the other direction and people are afraid to voice any negative opinion, but I'm just pointing out why calls for "diversity" don't actually include certain groups of people, because those groups are inherently opposed to diversity in the first place, and have a long track record of causing problems with it.
Pretty much. If the religious fundie really did want to be friends with everyone they would not personally attack the people they want to be friends with. I don't see why it should be required that anyone put up with this hate when they have plenty of other decent people to be friends with.
While everyone does have to earn a living and it's fair to think that's very important, if you believe your employer is doing something wrong and yet don't either speak up or look for a new job you're effectively condoning your employers actions. That isn't particularly admirable and your peers would be right to tell you as much.
I may disagree passionately with what my employer is doing, but I also understand I may be wrong and they may be right. Or they may be wrong in some things, but still better than 90% of other employers. Or I may disagree with what they say, but wholeheartedly agree with what they do. And so on so forth.
There is only a very limited number of hills that most people are willing to die on. So saying that they're condoning something doesn't actually tell us all that much, it means that they're tolerating something that they might find disagreeable, even deeply disagreeable. One can also say North Korean citizens are condoning their government, do we think badly of them for it?
I'm well aware I'm in a very privileged position, but I've tried to make a very strong effort throughout my career to live below my means. Maybe I'm pessimistic about losing my job or my company going under, but the freeing thing is if I'm unhappy for whatever reason I have options for leaving.
I try hard not to assume or expect this from others, but I very strongly encourage it.
Because they were not living below their means like the comment said. Either because they make only just enough money to survive or they spend it on luxurys
Do they really? It seems that most people have enough money that they can afford expensive phones regularly and to drive cars. They amount of luxury people consider the bare minimum to survive is quite high now.
I'm trying to figure out what you're trying to add here. I have to do all of those things, I'm in that privileged position partly because I've made it a long term priority at the expense of other things. I don't fault people who aren't in my position, but I encourage them to do the same.
The reason was never politics, but being beholden to a job because of disagreements with your boss, the work you're assigned, or being beholden to specific benefits like health insurance. I see so many people who are miserable because they're forced to do things they don't want. They're not even properly compensated because they can't say no.
> I try hard not to assume or expect this from others, but I very strongly encourage it.
While I personally agree with you that living below your means and having a safety buffer to tell your workplace to fuck off is a great idea. I think it doesn't take most people's reality into account. You and I can do that because we make enough money that "living below our means" is a possibility. For the vast majority of people, that's not an option.
Perhaps I just worded it poorly. I encourage people to make the long-term decision to live below their means so they're not put in that kind of a position. I'm sympathetic to their short-term position and very supportive of changing their long-term position.
If wage labor, “work,” is the condition of surviving in society, how could it avoid being political? Who is included in it, privileged by it, how it is organized, etc all have serious consequences that determine, again, one’s, baseline survival.
"Nothing is worse than politics at work, where you may lose your paycheck if you don't align with the correct factions."
I should bring up in this light that its still legal to fire people for being gay in much of the USA and there's a current supreme court case coming up to determine federally if discrimination on the basis of orientation or gender identity is covered under current antidiscrimination law. In that case you're at risk for losing your paycheck if you aren't born the correct orientation and are found out.
Right, people should advocate for whatever politics they want... just not at work. The issue you identify is a government one, not an individual workplace one. Even something like that is too much burden to put on your fellow co-workers to have to advocate for or pick a side.
"Even something like that is too much burden to put on your fellow co-workers to have to advocate for or pick a side."
The manager has to pick a side- they can choose to fire an LGBTQ person for being LGBTQ or not. A co-worker can choose to treat a co-worker differently if they happen to be LGBTQ. An employee who is married and gay may need to choose to leave off their wedding ring and to not allow their spouse to enter healthcare with them, because they cannot risk their jobs by being found out by HR as a homosexual.
Reminds me of Peter Handke's recent Nobel prize in literature, where the committee were/are heavily criticized for judging only by literature, and not by Handke's political viewpoints.
Maybe politics doesn't need to be involved in every single part of society, only the political aspects of it.
What are the bounds of the “political aspects” of society though and how are they negotiable? If we’re to preclude “politics” from the workplace, we would have to have also explain how most of the rights we enjoy as workers are the direct byproducts of labor struggle and its “politicization” of the economy and business practices.
Handke was hand-picked by a panel to receive some special benefit.
Gitlab offers a mass service which essentially anyone can use; any denial of the service would require searching out individuals to penalize from among the masses.
Can you expound upon which aspects of society are political and which are nonpolitical? The Supreme Court is currently considering whether or not companies can discriminate on sexual orientation, just as it had done for race and religion. What do you say to such people whose identities are inherently political?
I think his point is that any aspect of a person not directly related to the question at hand should be off-limits. In his example, that would mean that the literature should be judged on its own merits, without any reference to the character or activities of its author.
Which seems to me like a reasonable and consistent ethical position. However, it does have some consequences that might be hard to stomach. Such as, that selling computers to the Nazis would be an acceptable activity, even knowing what they intended to use them for.
I don’t understand how exactly a person can consider themselves ethical when they knowingly assist in performing actions they find unethical - it seems like a contradiction that people find bearable as long as they themselves aren’t directly impacted by that decision. It sounds more like dressing up amorality than it does a principled morality.
I suppose the viewpoint is best viewed from a system design perspective. Do we want each cog responsible for producing widgets to be making independent ethical evaluations of those up and down stream from them in the process? Or do we want to have our cogs be amoral, and have a "morality" module somewhere else that deals with those kinds of questions?
To be clear, i'm not sure if I subscribe to this perspective. But I can see its appeal.
If you’re amoral and don’t care where your revenue comes from as long as you follow the law you should say so. But you definitely shouldn’t champion yourself as having values above and beyond the letter of the law if those value don’t inform your actions. But it sounds like GitLab is trying to hide it’s amorality and market itself to perspective customers and employees that it does have some kind of moral code.
I don't think it's amorality per se. I would characterize it more as having the humility to defer to the structures society has in place for addressing those sorts of things.
Well, I think that's arguable. At least in the US, we live in a democracy. That democracy sets up the structures to regulate business. One could argue that if our democracy has not decided collectively that we should not do a certain thing, it is not the place of corporations to regulate that thing by refusing to do business with it.
Is it ethical for a doctor to provide medical help to someone they find unethical? Would it be moral if it refused to help someone because of different political stance?
If your ethical framework would approve of selling computers to the Nazis knowing they’ll use them to commit genocide… maybe find a new ethical framework?
Giving someone public recognition also gives recognition to anything that person might say. If they are known for believing that killing certain groups of people is okay, then giving them recognition is inherently political.
I tend to think of everything in life as political in some way. After all, politics is the fundamental question of how power is distributed in the world. However, even if you don't subscribe to this view, I would argue that work and the workplace are one of the more political spaces.
I agree that it isn't easy to be political in the workplace, and it is often better to keep your head down. But think about all the posts here on HN about workplace issues: compensation, toxic bosses, dubious or unethical product and design choices...and so on. All of these things are political because they involve people exercising their power on others, and other people organizing to take that power back.
Politics is very important to many people, and conflicts may arise because, when confronted on something that they value, people tend to get emotional.
These conflicts are rarely pretty, and I'd like my workplace to avoid them as much as possible.
Yes politics is about all of us. Trying to limit speech in the office to the football game last night is like saying we prefer our employees to avoid intellectual subjects in their discussions.
Politics is about what is WRONG and what is RIGHT. It is about ETHICS. Saying you can not discuss politics is saying you can not talk about what is wrong and what is right.
The logo of Gitlab should now be the 3 monkeys; See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak (about) no Evil.
I am glad Dang changed the title as the original one was unnecessarily inflammatory.
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?
> Such a declaration could run afoul of legal boundaries in some circumstances. While workers have no constitutional speech protection in the context of their employment, federal labor law requires that employees be allowed to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment and possible unlawful conduct like harassment, discrimination, and safety violations.
This seems like a false dichotomy. There is a difference between being amoral and illegal.
The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).
Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics.
yes but large organisations find the middle ground difficult to cultivate.
It requires that people avoid becoming excessively emotionally invested in the discussion; such that disagreements do not negatively impact their working relationships.
Small teams with good temperaments are easily capable of this. Large organisations tend to look for more definitive policies that can be easily laid out and enforced.
You have a point there (and hence no downvote from me ;-): GitLab is a 961-strong company (all remote, says the website). However, we have much larger nations and, as a society, we should try to get along with each other, despite differences.
Mind that this rule even prevents discussing legitimate concerns about customers with your team mates.
Where we seem to find ourselves today is in a position where if you have very progressive politics, you can say whatever you like - no matter how radical - whereas if you have conservative politics you can't even admit that without any specifics without being thought of as evil.
This is how we can get away with saying it's "encouraged" while really making sure any meaningful counter-argument is "forbidden" at the same time.
The context here is obviously tech companies and media, which appear to be entirely in control of extremists. Keeping of course in mind that it's most likely a small but very vocal minority that dictates the general perception.
> The context here is obviously tech companies and media
That's not obvious to me at all. The parent said "Where we seem to find ourselves today..." which pretty clearly implies a universalist statement, and one that happens to be dead wrong.
Probably, but what if we both got something that improved our quality of life? I don't want to hear preaching any more than you do. Wouldn't we all get along with our coworkers better if there was less of this in general?
I meant middle ground as in "you can talk about it, but you're neither forced to nor is it banned".
Also, there used to be a political spectrum and not just "progressive" and "conservative": This is something completely different than left/right - a right-wing person can easily be a progressive about his right views, while a left-wing person can be conservative [or even reactionary] about his left views.
[Edit: Note, I'm a non-native speaker: Maybe this differentiation is different between English than in German?]
Your English appears to be excellent and your original point seemed quite clear to me.
@core-question's reply under yours wasn't an indication that yours was unclear; it was just taking the conversation in a slightly different direction (which is normal).
I think you're wrong that this affects conservatives significantly more than other groups (and maybe that betrays your personal bias).
What is true is that people who are beliefs much are out of far outside the norm for their workplace are discouraged. For example, if you're someone who believes that profit is theft, and you make that clear during work, it will probably have negative effects for you. Whether "conservatives" are the victim of this depends on their workplace and just what views they espouse.
> 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 the opinions that the power structures imply with their actions.
Every lunchtime my colleagues and me solve world problems. We talk about how stupid the current leaders are, and how easy it is to fix the problems in the world. We solved world hunger a few times, and also transportation issues and other things.
Then we say "Another world problem solved!" and go back to work.
I don't want to hear your political opinions at work. I want to work and make money for myself. Just because I have to be at work to make money for myself shouldn't mean I now have to listen to your views on politics. That is my view on it.
no ones talking about forcing you to talk about it, question is, if you wanted to talk about the ethics / poltical impact of what you are doing with coworkers, shouldn't you be allowed to?
I come to work for one reason -- to get a paycheck. If you want to talk about politics to your friends/coworkers, do it after work. If you don't like your company's ethics-- change companies.
So nobody should ever advocate for the fictional person to whom their work is assigned, whose existence is granted by the society at large only because of the theory that its existence improves and betters that society, should be a better citizen of that society?
Every moral system I can think of would prescribe that, everything else being equal, you should attempt to change the behavior of the company you find unethical while you have at least some power over it, rather than removing yourself from a position of power to affect more ethical behavior. It strikes me as very strange to advocate that folks remove themselves from positions of power to effect moral progress.
I'm a security guy and have been a privacy person. My job is often to advocate for the customer over the immediate desires of my employer. There's no pretending that doesn't have a moral or ethical dimension. So, how am I supposed to do my job without trying to change-- steer, guide, develop, choose another word if you prefer-- my company's ethics?
A lot of the time I agree. I don't think I've ever had a need to opine on the merits or demerits of the filibuster at work.
But "should we deploy in China, knowing we will have to hand over data on possible dissidents?" is something I've had to deal with repeatedly. I see no way of having that discussion without getting into politics.
Of course, you can rightly say that some people just sit down and write code without becoming embroiled in the great conflicts of our time. That's true.
But the struggle for diversity in tech and equality more broadly is one of the great struggles of our time, and I know of very few engineers who do not recruit, interview, or hire. Should those people just cash their paycheck, or should they take the time to discuss an issue that nearly all employers claim to take seriously?
I think you can continue with this line of reasoning to include things like compensation (especially health insurance, m/paternal leave, and sick leave policy). And nearly everybody has a stake in the compensation discussion.
So, while I get the desire to just do the work and go home, I don't think it's so easy to separate politics from work without doing grievous harm to both. Which suggests to me the obvious thing: that the real goal of these efforts is not to foster inclusiveness or provide a better working environment, but rather to prevent a dialogue about how to do just that.
> If you don't like your company's ethics-- change companies
Why is that the only recourse? Attempting to change your company's mind is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. You may find that you're unable, and then would prefer to quit, but quitting in protest should always be the option of last resort.
I would go as far to say: aren't you morally obligated to? There are jobs that are inherently in political/philosophical/moral bounds. And they should be treated as such.
Democracy bestows upon you, certain responsibilities. Earlier, you did not have to worry about political stuff because someone else (the lord of the land, the king or an emperor by divine right) took care of the things for you. You just work the fields or smith around.
Since the concept of democracy, the rule of the people, politics is also one of the unwritten (or written) responsibility of the people. If you do not want to do it, then you are actively running from your responsibilities, which might make you a bad citizen in other people's eyes.
Fact: In ancient Athens, if you were a free citizen and you did not participate in politics, you would have been considered a non ideal / bad citizen
How is it a useful democratic exercise to inundate non political employees, or employees who don’t share the majority’s moral political views?
The types of moral politics I am thinking about is discussing the tweet-du-jour, basically celebrity gossip about politicians, etc. Worse still would be people taking strong, loud and uninformed positions on foreign policy, like Syria. I actually happen to find that triggering, given my background. I would rather that people keep their opinions outside of my cubicle so that I can focus on producing the best work I can - instead of constantly being reminded of the shithole I left behind.
What you do matters. The people on the ground turning Syria into the shithole you consider it to be were probably also "just focusing on producing the best work they could". Apparently they did a pretty good job.
Syria was an example, in practice it depends the relevant questions will depend on your company.
For example: I work at a MedTech company. I consider it supremely important that I (and everyone else) am able to say no, I am not going to work on feature X because it would breach patient privacy, or feature Y that is impossible to do without unacceptable risks of causing malpractice.
Of course, whoever proposed those projects would then be free to make a convincing case for how we could mitigate those problems, or why I might be wrong.
That’s not discussing politics - that’s keeping your company in compliance and keeping them from getting sued. That is work related.
I would go so far as advocating not manufacturing in China because of the current political climate is work related because it can have a direct impact on the bottom line.
Being work-related is orthogonal to if it is political, or the benefit it'd bring to your employer.
I'd be making the same objections if I didn't have GDPR and Patientdatalagen to point
to. Hell, I'd have been in favour of introducing those laws, even knowing that it would increase our costs (which I also care about, just not to the same degree).
The purpose of going to work is to get a paycheck and to either make your company money or save your company money. Doing what’s best for your customer is a long term investment in your company.
The health of democracy requires that individuals be able to speak their mind and advocate their beliefs.
This doesn't work if their livelihood is controlled by a group of hyper-intolerant political totalitarians.
What GitHub is doing is giving individuals rooms to breathe, think, and live. It's preventing the rule of the intolerant minority, the forced homogenization of thought and suppression of dissent. We banned these things from the government long ago; this is a good step towards reducing the power of non-governmental power centers in corporations to coerce speech and thought of people around them.
As a free-thinking person this would make me much more likely to want to work for GH. At a place like Google I know I'd have to be deeply closeted as others flagrantly denigrate my identity and ideas around me. Here at least everyone can be closeted together, and live in a pluralistic way with different beliefs alongside each other.
This is how we suppress constant political conflict. You just aren't allowed to go after people for who they are or what they believe; we accept differences. And reducing political speech at work helps with that.
At my place of work, when I brought up my opinions on diversity/inclusion/gender neutral speech, I was verbally bullied, and resent this still, after 3 years of working there. Talking politics at work is not democracy, because people with dissenting opinions get silenced by belligerent activists. I applaud gitlab for refusing to be arbiter of morals
> The health of democracy requires that individuals be able to speak their mind and advocate their beliefs.
Exactly.
> This doesn't work if their livelihood is controlled by a group of hyper-intolerant political totalitarians.
Exactly. Hence why we need to acknowledge the right to speak your mind.
> a place like Google I know I'd have to be deeply closeted as others flagrantly denigrate my identity and ideas around me.
The Google case is interesting. Maven was pretty equivalent to a peaceful demonstration. Management had one opinion, (many) employees had ethical objections and eventually got their way.
Damore's case was.. messier, and more relevant to your point. Then again, this policy would just subject everyone to the same thing, while sacrifing the previous benefits. And it's all ultimately enforced by humans anyway, so if anything I'd expect it to lead to further polarization.
> Here at least everyone can be closeted together, and live in a pluralistic way with different beliefs alongside each other.
Many decisions don't have a neutral option. This policy just means that you won't have any say once those crossroads become relevant.
>It's preventing the rule of the intolerant minority...
If a majority want to discuss politics and political change, isn't this just an intolerant majority enforcing their politics on everyone?
Unless someone is the type of person who would never advocate for any change no matter what happened to them, from being made King to being made a slave, then they aren't actually apolitical. Everyone who doesn't want to discuss politics or thinks they aren't political are just saying that the current political status quo fits their views.
The default state is still a state, its not a null option. You wouldn't be apolitical if the current politics said your parents had to be executed when they hit 50 and your children had to be turned over to the state so they could best determine their use, would you?
That's a hyperbolic statement, but the intent is to show that being "apolitical" about current politics has no distinction between agreeing with the current politics. If you start telling people they can't discuss their politics because "we want to be uninvolved in politics" what you are really saying is, "My politics are in charge and the status quo. Your opinion needs to be silenced"
Your hyperbolical example notwithstanding, I disagree. Being apolitical isn't about promoting status quo, it's about being indifferent to the status quo and the whole space of adjacent options.
If I'm apolitical about issue X, it doesn't mean I'm a happy supporter of current state of X. It means I don't care whether it stays the way it is, or changes to any of the possible alternative states that are within the Overton window around X.
To use a clarifying analogy: if there's a C++ project in the company, and somebody asks me for the opinion about whether to rewrite it in Java, and I say "I don't care, I'm indifferent about this issue", it doesn't mean I support the project staying as is. It means literally what I said - go ahead and rewrite it in Java, or Python, or COBOL. Whatever, I just don't care. This is what being apolitical about an issue means.
And back to politics - I have a right to care or not care about whatever I please. You can try to convince me to care about some thing you care about, but you have no right to force me to care, and trying to do it makes me only want to oppose you out of spite. The "apolitical means just supporting status quo" meme is essentially a manipulative attempt at forcing people to care about something they don't, a rehash of the old "if you're not with us, you're against us".
>If I'm apolitical about issue X, it doesn't mean I'm a happy supporter of current state of X. It means I don't care whether it stays the way it is, or changes to any of the possible alternative states that are within the Overton window around X.
You don't have to be a happy supporter. You can be an extremely unhappy supporter if you still think the status quo is better than other options.
Saying "I don't care", is just an opinion and doesn't affect anyone. Saying "I don't care, so nobody else is allowed to talk about the subject" is implying that your world view and opinions supercede others. If you were in a group that agreed on a mechanism for deciding what could be talked about, then it would make sense for everyone in that group to follow the decision. That's not whats happening though. The people who are okay with the status quo are telling the unhappy people to be quiet, because it makes the currently okay people feel uncomfortable.
Why would anyone who disagrees with the status quo stop talking about it solely because other people didn't like it?
The situation is different. People who are apolitical on a topic tend to stay away from discussions on the topic, but do not actively prevent others from having those discussions. Except some of those who are into politics like to have this discussion everywhere, all the time. At work, at school, at church, at the bar, everywhere. Left unchecked, this makes loudest, most emotional people infect every aspect of everyone's lives with discussion on their pet topic. That's why apolitical people fight to have "safe spaces" like the workplace, where everyone is actually supposed to be working, and not constantly getting derailed into politics by someone with an axe to grind.
You have the picture of the battleground completely wrong on this. It's not apolitical people shutting down oppressed minorities. It's a minority of people with an opinion on a topic fighting it out with a different minority with a different opinion on the subject, and both sides try to recruit followers to their side from the larger population of people indifferent to the issue, using the "if you're not with us you're against us" argument. Whereas what the larger population wants to say to both groups is, "fight it out among yourself and leave as alone, and for the love of everything that's holy, mind the collateral damage".
(See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21276788 for another take on how a political side feels to both those who disagree with it and those who just want to be left alone.)
Democracy is fine. So is your freedom to choose a different job where you can discuss and do what you want.
The fact that other companies exist without this policy means there is no "power structure" other than a private company deciding what's best for its own culture.
The health of the democracy is independent of discussing politics in the workplace. There are plenty of other opportunities to discuss politics and otherwise tend to the democracy.
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?
Why do titles have to be sanitized for this audience? I can't remember of too many other sites whereby the admins have to essentially scrub the original titles. That makes me question the userbase more than it does the writers of said article.
Because as much as we'd like to believe that everyone reads the articles and that editorialized headlines don't affect us, they do. Sanitizing headlines helps people stay on topic.
>America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).
This is a very confusing position to me. It is a bad thing to pick and choose your customers based on moral agreement, unless that morality is defined by the government in which case it's good?
Morality is not defined by the government - legality is. There're a lot of things that a lot of different people deem immoral - based on their religion, upbringing, media consumption and whatnot - which are not illegal. There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view. It's a free country after all.
> There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view.
Right and wrong are subjective, legal and illegal are objective.
From the perspective of the business owner who is focused primarily on maximising revenue / profits for their business, there is nothing wrong with simply focusing on legal compliance.
From the perspective of the employee who is motivated by things other than maximising revenue / profits / their own salary, there could be plenty wrong.
It’s a free country cuts both ways. Both parties are free to see things as right and wrong as they see fit.
I'm not sure if we're in disagreement about what living in a free country means. Everyone has their opinion on right and wrong, but as a society we agree that there's a specific set of laws that we all follow, so we all could get along.
All true. But additionally, it is not quite right to say that morality and legality have nothing to do with each other. Legality, generally speaking, is the subset of morality that a sustainable majority has codified into objective laws.
In other words, legality is basically the subset of morality that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. Which is why going beyond legality into subjective morality so often becomes polarizing.
> legality is basically the subset of morality that Republicans and Democrats can agree on
I largely agree with this, except when we start looking at uncharted territory.
Generally speaking, we are (legally) free to do as we please. As people do things we (as a sufficiently large group) disagree with, laws may eventually pass to restrict the freedoms to do those things.
Just because something hasn't been codified into law, doesn't necessarily mean it's not likely to be largely condemned, it could just mean nobody anticipated anyone actually doing the thing prior to it happening.
Combine that with a legal system that works on the letter of the law, rather than the intent of the law, and incentives can (and when capital is concerned, often do) skew away from morality entirely.
Consider that the falsehood that a corporation CEO has a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders at all costs continues to perpetuate, for a consideration of the mindset that simply works on the basis that if it hasn't been outlawed, then it's okay.
Trying to choose your customers based on some moral framework is entirely pointless in most situations. Putting aside the fact that whatever framework you decide upon is going to be completely arbitrary. If you take the position that you should only do business with people who’s values are consistent with yours, then you can’t stop at your customers. You need to examine the customer base of your customers, and the customer base of the customer base of your customers, and your entire supply chain, and the supply chain of your supply chain, ad infinitum. To apply this idea consistently is impossible, and to apply it inconsistently is just meaningless virtue signalling.
The idea that you should never do anything that provides utility to any party who’s values are incompatible with your own is not tenable, and it’s simply incompatible with any sort of open or tolerant society.
I think it’s much more sensible to look at the impact you’re having on society as a whole. I wouldn’t work for Facebook or Google, because I disagree with what they’re trying to achieve. But I’d sell them a service if I was offering one on the open market. If I ran a gun factory I probably wouldn’t want to sell them to <insert government that I think is evil>, because I know they’ll take that product and do evil things with it, but I’d sell that same government an SCM service.
> If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries
I dont believe most democracies really represent the public. They do on paper, in theory, but in practice there are lobbies that lobby for big biz and their main owners. They have much more influence in political decisions. Hence I dont believe the "public" wants sanctions on Iran/Syria/Cuba/etc, but that it is merely convenient for big biz to have those sanctions.
I don't think even Google actually encouraged people to discuss politics at work. They never did when I was there. It was more a side-effect of decentralising the power to create forums. Anyone could create discussion lists there without asking permission, this was highly useful for coordination, making it easy to spin up new projects and avoiding siloing of information into people's private mail accounts. The flip side was nothing stopped anyone creating lists to discuss whatever divisive topics they wanted.
There's also been a cultural shift over time. When I first joined Google I remember feeling that it was a pretty libertarian sort of place. In my team several colleagues were openly and proudly very pro-capitalist, anti-communist, small government types. If anyone was left wing it wasn't visible and I don't recall encountering identity politics, ever. There was a very strong cultural commitment to neutrally serving every user with every query, and ranking being completely algorithmic, to the extent that the company agonised over hot-patching "Googlewhacks" where pranksters manipulated results for unusual searches to offend their ideological opponents.
This didn't seem strange, it was just how it was. I have a vague feeling I thought other tech firms were the same. Twitter declared they were the free speech wing of the free speech party after all, and anything internet or web related had a strong vibe of "communication will make us stronger".
This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments.
I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers. The hard shift leftwards in academic institutions has been well documented. Even in 2006 I remember a recruiter telling me they'd "run out" of candidates in the USA and that's why they were expanding more into Europe. The concept you could "run out" of candidates in a place as big as America was pretty shocking to me - on probing, he explained that almost all people with the skills they needed were in well paid happy jobs already and few were interested in moving, even with the great perks on offer. Whilst there were always a small flow of people coming onto the market due to natural churn, "everyone who cares knows Google is hiring" he said, and they'd already interviewed vast numbers of them.
This change in culture would inevitably lead to this situation due to the way that conservatives see leftists as naive, but leftists see conservatives as evil. Combined with leftists generally understanding conservatives much worse than the other way around (this has been shown by large scale ITTs), and together it means flooding your firm with new grads is a surefire way to create massive internal conflicts.
>I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers.
Could this not have easily been a backlash against the companies no longer operating neutrally? You describe a timeline here that goes neutral Google -> hard left because of the employees. That doesn't jive with what I've seen in the news. Google and other tech companies were the ones trying to get into China and building systems that censor users. The big data companies started surreptitiously tracking everyone, whether or not you had agreed to ala Facebook's shadow profiles. That doesn't really mesh up with libertarian ideas of free trade. Based on the employee backlash these all seem like they were management driven decisions that employees didn't agree with. Wouldn't a natural reaction be to push hard in the opposite side of the direction the companies management was going towards?
Isn't that push exactly what's happening? The decision making power is still concentrated and many of original hires are still there so I'd imagine there's plenty of oversight and momentum involved in the company's direction. But the ongoing and increasing protests clearly show there's a change in attitude, or at least by a very vocal minority.
I didn't describe a neutral Google internally: looking back, it's possible there were a bunch of closet Marxists who felt uncomfortable admitting that. I doubt it because in other offices I've never seen people on the left hold back from publicly announcing their views (it's called virtue signalling for a reason!), but I guess it's possible.
The companies policies were neutral though. There was no concept that helping people find information might hurt them, as you see in modern day Google.
During the time period I'm talking about Google got banned from China because they refused to continue censoring the search engine. That was circa 2010, I think. So consistent with a company having a very free speech, libertarian view. It made waves because so few companies were willing to sacrifice the Chinese market on the altar of free speech, but Google was. Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out.
As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers. But the news industry was shrinking, and editors/owners in particular felt hugely threatened by Google News, which effectively replaced them with an algorithm and commoditised news almost overnight. The media went from being very positive about Google (great company to work for) to trying everything they could to attack and destroy it. What they wanted was money, pure and simple, and eventually as the attacks stepped up they stopped pretending otherwise. Hence the new EU Copyright directive and "link taxes" that started popping up.
The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently. There were always pointed questions at TGIF when I was there, but disagreement with management was largely congenial. Things started going downhill around the time Colin McMillen created Memegen. It was basically an internal Twitter but worse, I don't think you can ever fit 140 characters into an image macro. That introduced and encouraged Tweet-sized thinking/viral liking campaigns whereas previously disagreement had been surfaced in email debates (the famous "centi-threads") or through face-to-face discussion. Long email discussions did annoy some people, but they at least had an expectation you'd contribute by writing something useful. After Memegen got big I started seeing people unironically cite that they got highly voted memes as evidence of creating value in their internal CV and promotion packets, which was ridiculous.
>Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out.
>The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently.
Yes and concurrent with the executive change, Google employees have started becoming openly more liberal. I am saying that its just as plausible that the change in tone from the employees as a group, was a reaction to the managerial decisions that were themselves a change in tone.
>As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers.
That's three separate ideas that are not coupled together. Nothing has to change about the privacy policies if they were always tracking, and most users can be happy with the product even with the privacy intrusions.
I will disagree with you that they were happy though. It seems more like a matter of ignorance as there has been a rise in ad blockers and deleting Facebook since the privacy violations of major tech companies has become more widely known
Also for this claim specifically
>As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off.
Are you really trying to claim that Google does not track user data? That it does not suck up every bit of data it can from all the traffic they have access to? How exactly does Google target their ads and make their revenue then?
Edit: Literally at the top of the front page as I am writing this comment
You're right that it is hard to disentangle cause and effect, but Google's senior leadership has been very stable over time. Pichai was clearly the continuity candidate. The things I've named were all bottoms up - Google's leadership has always been quite reactive hence policies like 20% time. But when I joined the whole company was 10k people and only 5k in engineering. Now it's over 100k people.
Google does track user data but if you aren't logged in it's anonymous, resets frequently and is a very noisy dataset. That's why they create lots of good incentives to be logged in, like useful products.
Facebook isn't suffering at all, it continues to do great. To the extent users get bored of the classical product they move to Instagram which Facebook also owns. There's no evidence of any real change in user behaviour: free is a great price.
But most as targeting isn't based on personal data. The core Google cash cow is ads targeted to your current searches. That works even if you're anonymous. The rest is worth doing but not that massive. It's certainly not worth worrying about. Bear in mind the media had for years been claiming Google "sells your personal data to advertisers" which as I'm sure you know is totally misleading (really is just a lie).
Took me a bit to figure that out, he's referring to "Ideological Turing Tests" https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.htm... ... use of the term is kind of a dog whistly connection to a number of internet communities where that idea is considered very persuasive.
[The few times I've seen the term used have largely been cases where the speaker is really embarrassing themselves by claiming ignorance on the part of their opponents while demonstrating an absurd amount of their own...]
Experiments that ask people to fill out surveys as themselves, or as they imagine a liberal would, or as they imagine a conservative would, in equal proportion.
Jonathan Haidt did one of these experiments with about 2000 participants. It's social science so it should come with all the usual disclaimers, but the results can be found here and have apparently been replicated since (though I'm having trouble rapidly re-locating a study I found that replicated it, for some reason I can't find the right keywords to surface it).
> When I first joined Google I remember feeling that it was a pretty libertarian sort of place. In my team several colleagues were openly and proudly very pro-capitalist, anti-communist, small government types.
JEsus that sounds like a nightmarish pack of ghouls.
> This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments.
Huh? Can you link some substantiations to these claims, it seems way bizarre?
There was recently a large trove of google documents leaked, comments linking to them get vanished on most sites (including HN).
They were a mishmash of various things but included e.g. descriptions of various programs and employee activities such as influencing search results to inaccurately reflect the world in the interest of 'justice', e.g. if you search for CEO a neutral search engine mostly men in the results because there are more male CEOs, but a 'fair' search engine would return more women or at least equal numbers. The documents also described google's use of demographically targeting election notices for the benefit of particular candidates (and great consternation with significant number of the targeted demographic voted for the other candidate)... stuff like that. The documents also included lists of penalized news sites which unsurprisingly was largely conservative sites, but wasn't just the more extreme alex jones type stuff.
A lot of it was culled off these internal political lists that the earlier poster was mentioning... so it's probably pretty dubious that many of the things in it actually reflected google company positions. (That said, the 'fairness' and news penalties appear to be active programs and not just smack talk by internal political activists).
More smoke than fire overall, but the more extreme right wing has been promoting it as a pretty substantial bit of evidence of unethical (and in some cases unlawful) conduct by google. Thoughtful discussion of it hasn't been aided by the widespread suppression of the subject.
Erasing gendered pronouns from comments: no, because that's a story I heard from former colleagues who are still there.
Arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring: this is what Damore did, but he wrote it much more formally and cited lots of studies. It boiled down to though, "most women find tech boring because they're women". Damore's essay is here: https://firedfortruth.com/2017/08/08/first-blog-post/
An example of bias in this context is if the incoming message is "Did the engineer finish the project?" and the model scores the response "Yes he did" higher than "Yes she did." These associations are learned from the data used to train the embeddings, and while they reflect the degree to which each gendered response is likely to be the actual response in the training data (and the degree to which there's a gender imbalance in these occupations in the real world), it can be a negative experience for users when the system simply assumes that the engineer is male.
This logic is broken and wouldn't have happened in the old Google. If you're predicting what response the user is most likely to type next, then "Yes he did" is a more useful prediction by any objective measure because most engineers are men. But here, Google AI Research concludes that the most likely prediction would be "a negative experience for users" and sets out to "debias" their models. Debias in this context means to bias the model away from learned reality and towards what liberal intersectionalists want the world to be, in the hope that by subtly manipulating people through AI predictions they can actually bring that world about.
I want to play devil advocate for a moment and defend a wildly optimistic view of what some googlers might intend to do.
Already a way to debias a model (I know nothing of ML in specific, it is just an overview) would be to have the model explicitly realize that "engineer" need to be assigned a gender in certain situations. So in this sense the correct answer should be to try and understand whether this engineer is a specific human whose gender you should know so not to make wrong assumptions.
Whether this defense applies to this specific case I do not know, my point is that sometimes it is possible to actually partly debias something. The fact that it can be done in the wrong way does not mean it should not be done.
The same way there is a nice middle point between corporate anarcho-capitalism and totalitarian regimes.
I give you points for optimism and arguing in good faith :)
Unfortunately the extract I quoted is very clear. They aren't talking about understanding that engineer is a person adjective and thus could refer to an entity of unknown gender, which is a separate subfield of AI to word vectors (it'd entity analysis/knowledge graph). They're talking pure probabilities here: given a sequence of words, what is the most probable following sequence? The model gets the answer correct but Googlers are weak and cannot handle the truth, so in an Orwellian twist they label measured reality "biased" and set out to edit the model to convince it that there's no difference in probability between "Yes he did" and "Yes she did".
> Combined with leftists generally understanding conservatives much worse than the other way around (this has been shown by large scale ITTs)
This seems the opposite of true, but I'd be interested to see some sources to back that up. One of the few reasons I still use Google News is because it oddly links me to conservative news sites more often than I'd expect. I'll click on some of those links just to see what the "other side" is talking about, and I find their characterizations of liberal viewpoints to be pretty bizarre most of the time.
On the flip side, what I read (as a liberal) from conservative sources tends to be what I expect.
> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues
I am not familiar with companies that encourage discussing politics.
Politics is about how people ought to be organised. I find it strange that this would not be something to discuss in the context of many persons primary organisational structure.
Part of my remuneration is the effect I may have on the world. Positive or negative.
> The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions
While you correctly note that governments can pass sanctions against countries to facilitate trade restrictions, it's worth considering the full context of the article when considering their descent into proving Godwin's law.
They explicitly state the example of Chef working with arguably contentious and/or politicized domestic organisations. Given that recent employee protests are based around domestic government organisations, that have (rightly or wrongly) been compared to nationalist and/or protectionist organisations in history, what is the correct course of action there?
If you disagree so strongly with your own government, and/or believe your own government cannot be trusted to tell you the truth, what is the correct response? In recent history, we had marches against going to war on what wasn't considered believable grounds. Despite the best intentions of the leaders at the time, who ultimately ignored the peaceful and legitimate protests, the protestors were later proven to be true.
Given that backdrop, and the corporate / commercial capture of legislative interests, how is employee activism not a logical next step of 'vote with your wallet' combined with 'change it from the inside'?
> Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics.
This cuts both ways: If your employer is known to take millions from ICE to support what ICE does, and your opinion is that ICE is an evil organization, that can also make you "quite uncomfortable". It might also make you want to leave that employer, which would make it harder to "support yourself and your family".
I would suggest leaving, in that case. If not your employer, some other company will fulfill that contract anyway.
Millions of people work in the defense industry. I did too, in a different life. I left due to moral reasons (Not that i am doing anything moral today).
Well, that's the thing. If that's such a simple thing to do, I would suggest that you leave if you're uncomfortable in a company where employees are allowed to voice their opinions on company policies. You supporting your family is not more important than me supporting mine.
> 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 issue is the null stance is functionally equivalent to support for the status quo which at this moment includes a lot of stuff people would not actively sign on to but often feel very content with passively signing off on it.
> If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).
This ignores both just how much the business tail wags the legislative dog in the US and the mountain of other factors that prevent or slow Congress from taking action against specific countries.
You are right. We should not allow any discussion at work that is not about the work itself.
There are so many things that can disturb team cohesion! Even non political ones like talking about if you prefer rain or sun, or fries with mayo or ketchup.
Depends on how it was received by actual employees. We don't know how many received this positively vs. negatively.
Evaporative cooling of group beliefs does actually work to increase cohesion. If, given a controversial decision like this, people who disagree with it pack up and leave, the variance of opinion within the company will actually decrease, improving cohesion.
I see. Your scope of "cohesion" is at whatever remains of the team AFTER the divisive action by the CEO. My scope was the ORIGINAL team.
I agree that decreeing a divisive policy and prohibiting dissent tends to leave one with a more "cohesive" team. I very much doubt that it's a commercially optimal strategy. You end up with (a) true believers, who build up group think and (b) yes-people and the spineless, neither of which strike me as high value contributors. You've optimized for agreement, rather than excellence, as a hiring criterium.
I would much rather see "cohesion" in the form of a team that, DESPITE widely diverging views, manages to agree on a common vision.
> The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries
You're talking countries--that's one case but it's not the only case. America also has Nazis. Here. They are Americans. Even if they weren't, it's an abdication one's core moral responsibilities to one's community and society with this kind of "oh, ask your [bought] legislator [about something unrelated]" do-nothingism. But they are.
I'd make damned sure that an executive team knew it was them or me before I took one thin dime that might've come from Richard Spencer or one of our other homegrown Nazis. When I was a consultant I fired clients for less and I slept great for doing so. It's literally the minimum duty I have to my community and to the human race at large--the denial of custom to hostis humanis generis wherever they rear their heads? A bare minimum of decency.
I'd do the same, but this is just describing the choice of every worker in a free labor market. And almost nobody in the US has more labor market power than tech workers. Some people leave their jobs because their leadership is too Christian, or their boss is an adulterer, or whatever reason.
I don’t think the issue is politics itself really, it’s more of a lack of maturity or compassion when it comes to having the conversation.
If people engaged in the conversation aren’t prepared to take every participant seriously, no matter their politics stance, then it’s a sure-fire way to create a toxic work environment. You can’t go into it with the assumption that everyone needs to be a left-leaning liberal, or that it’s okay to bully a Trump voter (or vice-versa with right-leaning and Obama).
If at that point you can hold a conversation about politics without losing your shit as soon as someone supports something you don’t like, then encouraging it is fine. If you’re still in the mindset of having compassion for only the people on your own side then some growing up needs to happen first. Otherwise all it does is alienate those colleagues with marginal beliefs. Not exactly diverse and inclusive then.
And it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll enable far-right nutjobs or neo-Nazis as a result. HR tends to frown on things like racism and such like, it wouldn’t really get very far.
I had plenty of conversations at work about differing tax policies, libertarian vs authoritarian policies in regards to land ownership, drug legalization, military action, etc.
The problem is the willingness of people to engage in civil discourse has fallen off a cliff. "Thought leaders" on both sides are making serious $$$ by convincing their followers that the other side is to be truly despised and that all opposition must be met with aggression of some sort (if not physical, verbal, spiritual, etc). Creating an us vs. them mentality has proven (yet again in history) to be very profitable.
Every time this happens, the results are regrettable and 50 years later everyone is looking at history books going "what the holy hell were they thinking?"
tl;dr the problem isn't discussing politics at work, the problem is that society in general has turned into a team sport where people pick sides and start acting like hooligans when they meet someone from the other side.
>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?
Fail early. You can achieve cohesion by letting go of everybody who cannot discuss politics in a civilized manner. Then you can be sure that the remaining team can discuss anything without any problems.
On the other hand, is it cohesion when the team is held together by outer influences?
> 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?
I'm not usually a "the people in power are actively trying to keep the workers divided amongst themselves and seeing one another as the enemy, so they don't organize against the people who are actually keeping them down" sort, but in this specific case... well, there might be a bit of that going on, at least for what "political discussion" usually means in the context of SV-type workplaces.
Good to see that the very non-controversial opinion of “be neutral at work and treat customers equally” is being used to compare GitHub to IBM during Nazi Germany.
Why can’t GitHub just provide code version control systems without concerning itself with who is writing code?
Given the recent implosion of StackOverflow, less politics in tech is probably a good thing.
The Register has a special mix of technology reporting and satire. As with the title, that bit is obviously there to maximize provocation. Yet the article itself has some diligent research behind it, poking through commit logs and internal threads that few other journalists would. As a result it appears to be a scoop. Googling doesn't reveal any other media piece on this. I bet there will be others after this thread, though.
Basically, it's their job to provoke and our job as a community not to take the bait.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted but no comments addressing the points you raised.
Can anyone provide an example of Nazi code being hosted on Gitlab? It might be nice to justify what otherwise looks like an absurd comparison made by this article. What would nazi code even look like? Or is "nazi" in this case just a catch-all for wrongthink?
What if for example the People's Republic of China was hosting its code on Gitlab? This is a state that has "re-education camps" (interment camps) for a specific group of people and it reported to be engaging in organ harvesting.
I don't find it too hard to draw parallels between Nazi Germany and China at the moment.
Sure, we can all agree that China is involved in human rights violations.
But if we are going to ban anything, we need a very clear list of what is banned, when and for how long.
We know that CloudFlare has banned all Nazi-esque/White Supremacist material. China is a communist state, and Communism (in all real world implementations) requires violent redistribution of wealth. Should GitLab or Cloudflare remove all Communist material?
Who is the arbiter for which political opinions are not allowed in tech? Or should we just neutral towards customers?
So every time somebody signs up for any service you need to provide your address, name, date of birth, 2 forms of id, maybe even your SSN so they can run a background check on you?
At any random point in the future they can just revoke your access to the service if they decide something you were previously doing is no longer acceptable.
I asked for an example and you're still arguing hypotheticals. And the PRC would not host its code on Gitlab, that's not even a realistic comparison.
So far the only pattern I see is people making up hypothetical situations and using them to claim Gitlab is complicit in enabling human rights violations. But last I checked free speech is a human right!
Well the USG can always sanction China and make it illegal to do business with them. Feel free to lobby your congressman if it bothers you so much. Or just quit. Or get raised to a level where you can make a call whether to do business or not with someone.
There are a lot of ways to influence someone. Leaving general politics at the door is good idea. You are getting paid to work - so unless you have standing of being harmed directly by company action - just do your job or quit.
Well, uh, it's not on GitLab I don't think, but Plankalkül... "a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945."
> While Zuse never became a member of the Nazi Party, he is not known to have expressed any doubts or qualms about working for the Nazi war effort. Much later, he suggested that in modern times, the best scientists and engineers usually have to choose between either doing their work for more or less questionable business and military interests in a Faustian bargain, or not pursuing their line of work at all.
GitLab are being hypocritical[1][2]. Let's not pretend the "women in tech" and LGBT movements aren't political. Frankly, I think more women in tech and LGBT representation are probably good things, but GitLab is being profoundly disingenuous with their guidelines.
To clarify my point: if you open the gates to the marketplace of ideas, make sure it's an actual marketplace.
Those are great questions. But please omit the flamebait. (Edit: dvt kindly took the flamebait out—see below.)
If flames take over, only the people who enjoy flaming will remain in the debate. That's a strict loss for thread quality, which is one reason for the guideline I asked everyone to remember above: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
It's a question of which words to remove. Information-free swipes make for a lower signal/noise ratio and cause feedback loops that rapidly escalate. The risk isn't "a little heat", it's scorched earth. The purpose is not to suppress intelligent discourse but to keep the forum from destroying itself.
I'm just pointing out that's what the civility guidelines really are. You can be as rude as you want to somebody, as long as you pretend you're not by dressing it up.
I assumed the writer was posting from the opposite ideological position. But frankly, we don't care or even much look at that. When your job is to do the same thing over and over, after a few hundred thousand times you tend to see only the relevant bits in the mask.
The thing is: It's flame-bait simply because it's a sentiment that is so prevalent here. It's flame bait because there is a breed of people who lose their shit over it, and that breed is a large fraction of the visitors of this website. There is nothing remotely controversial in what dvt said. Nobody would bat an eye about it at my workplace, for example. You have to be aware of the monoculture here.
It was flamebait because it originally included "Oh is that not political either? It must be nice having the spinal rigidity of a mollusk." dvt was thoughtful enough to edit it above.
dang has called me out for degrading a conversation in the past. dang was correct then, and the comment replied to IS degrading the conversation as described. You don't have to be wrong to be expressing it poorly or unconstructively.
This is not true. Left/Right and Authoritarian/Liberty are separate and overlapping spectrums. Pick your favorite post-communist-revolution country as an example of Left-authoritarianism.
I think antifascism is probably more the common thread on the left than anti-authoritarian; the distinction being that fascism is largely associated with right wing authoritarianism. The left still supports authoritarian policies. Some examples of this include gun control and censorship of hate speech.
That they are being hypocritical. Frankly, I think more women in tech and LGBT representation are probably good things, but GitLab is being profoundly disingenuous.
I think there's probably some room here to differentiate between politics (in the US, Democrat and Republican for most offices) and ideology.
Ideology is the framework for politics. I don't see anything wrong with saying discussing politics (a given candidate, or a platform stance) at work is discouraged while encouraging a certain ideological stance (more people from historically marginalized communities in tech is a good thing).
This is what you should have posted in the first place, along with the links. Here you make your point in a way that people can actually understand and that does not destroy the container here.
There's a common phenomenon where a user's later defense of a flamebait post is often the high-quality, substantive explanation that they should have posted in the first place. I almost want to write software to replace the one with the other.
While you're at it, add a feature to delete just the last sentence of posts.
Someone pointed the phenomenon out the other day and I've noticed it all over here since: a lot of posts are great but then the last sentence goes too far, off the rails. I've been watching for it in my own posts. I think it's just hard to get the right rhetorical flourish.
(BTW, awesome job here dang. I don't know how you do it.)
Typically, "no politics" ends up being enforced as "no politics that contradict the office norm".
It is clear how this ends up happening. When people express an opinion generally supported in the office, it is unlikely someone will complain. When someone expresses a contrary opinion, they will appear to be the one "making trouble".
I'm not sure if more women, minorities, LGBT, group x, group y, group z in tech .. matters as much. Sure it's good to have diversity of people and ideas, it can help people in workplaces come up with more varied ideas, and there's nothing wrong with it ... but I think we're missing something.
What about more men as secondary school teachers, or in art, or as nurses/medical techs? There's an equal and opposite side to the women in tech debate: why not create a world where men feel like they can and should take jobs that pay less, but that can be potentially more fulfilling.
Why is there also not a push to get women into other high-income lines of male work, that are more hazardous like construction, oil rigs, truck driving?
I think that's really ignored today. Just as there are family pressures for women to take the paths they do, men similar (but different) pressures to take carers they may not want at all, in order to "provide for a family" or whatever.
Please let's not open up all those cans of fiery worms. It's off topic in this context, and such threads are invariably repetitions of the previous thousand flamewars.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
That most of human society is inherently political, and that trying to pretend there is some arbitrary line dividing political and nonpolitical is disingenuous.
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.
"I think it's fair to call women in tech initiatives nonpolitical"
I don't actually know if this is true? James Damore has largely been considered a political act, and James Damore was stating being skeptical of the needs of women in tech initiatives. So, if being skeptical of the initiative is a political act, wouldn't going through with the initiative (being nonskeptical) also political?
(Personally I am for women in tech initiatives, FTR, I just don't know if they're not considered political.)
I see the symmetry you're referring to, but I don't think that's a useful way to think about what's a political act. In the 2008 election, there was a political controversy about whether it's snooty to eat fancy mustard; it wouldn't make sense to generalize from that and say condiment choices are always and forever political.
No. I'm not sure whether I think they ultimately are political (is it political for a company which employs lots of Christians to talk about Jesus?), but it's a harder case at the least.
Political opposition? Well, no, not visibly, but that's because "people should only get jobs if they're qualified" is already the default mainstream position. Women In Tech style initiatives claim to be about encouragement but invariably devolve into discrimination against men (in my experience at least) and that's illegal. One political faction turning a blind eye to violations of the law doesn't change the fact that it's still the default position.
This isn't about one political faction, though. Both major political parties support women in tech programs; again, bills to set up women in tech programs for government organizations generally are unopposed.
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.
> 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.
More specifically, an initiate that explicitly excluded non-females elicited comments that said this program was sexist and exclusionary.
It's hard to define what is and isn't political right? It can get ontological .. (i.e. if everything is political than nothing is political and if nothing is political than everything is political).
It seems like in this case Gitlab is trying to avoid some of the Google/Amazon blowback for taking questionable contracts. In those cases .. tech people are in high demand. It's not that difficult for us to find work elsewhere.
That being said .. it's almost impossible to be moral in customers. Everyone company does questionable stuff, has questionable clients, mixes normal with military contracts, etc. Should Gitlab not allow projects from churches who create tools to help minister to homosexuals (in trying to convert them away from homosexuality)? Is being intolerant of the intolerant .. tolerant?
> is it even immoral for people who believe that homosexuality is immoral to try convincing gay people to change?
It depends on the details.
On one end of the spectrum, a one-off conversation may be OK.
On the other end, there are the horrible things inflicted on gay people in the name of "conversion therapy". And many people who believe homosexuality is illegal want to keep that practice legal (or make it legal again, respectively).
Thank you for providing those links. In both cases gitlab is partnering with a non-profit organization that AFAICT is not lobbying to pass or repeal laws. I understood "politics" in the context of this article as being about election candidates, government actions, or changes to the law. These gitlab partnerships are only "political" in the sense that people who like to argue about politics also like to argue about topics that these partnerships touch on.
I disagree. Selling LGBT T-shirts and partnering with non-profits implies discussing both of these hot-button issues at work. The corollary is that only certain viewpoints will be allowed to be discussed at work, and that's how you end up with situations like James Damore.
Topics like "who should we hire" are relevant to the business, and that overrides politics. Obviously topics like "what business should we be in," "what countries should we sell to," "what customers do we want" and on and on can have political components. But those are nonetheless important conversations to have at work.
The difference here is the potential for revenue generation stemming from the ostensibly political stance. Gitlab's goal is to make money, and they're signalling that this goal is firm regardless of who is hurt by their customers, using their tools. So they're happy to sell you a rainbow shirt to support women in tech. If there was a similar shirt they could sell about ICE and CBP (and that would be the end of their involvement in said political stance) they'd sell that too. Instead, the moral stance is obviously to not work with these organizations, and that will potentially cost them money.
This is pretty standard neoliberal politics. Just as with similar decisions at Microsoft and Palantir, this change will never come from executives. It's up to the workers to change the company's direction, and I hope they will.
It's a manifestation of a larger debate between equality and equity, or put another way, equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. This is a political and ideological debate that has been going on for many years, and will continue for many more; it is split almost entirely party-line. Even if something is not originally political, enough politicians arguing about it makes it nearly impossible to disentangle the political elements.
When setting workplace norms, there may be a substantial difference between discussing, for example, social issues, policy, partisanship, governance, and ethics. Depending on context, any of these may be "politics".
It feels uncharitable to call them hypocritical without understanding what they mean.
Could you clarify why you mean that women in tech and LGBT movements “are” political?
Movements are broad, and one way of reaching the goals that people in movements seek may be through political means, but that goes for a lot of things, and there is always a lot of of other ways of reaching those goals that one can work on without bringing politics into the picture.
For example, political legislation is one way that we may bring more women into tech, but there are many other ways too. The GitLab page you linked is focusing on inspiring the next generation of women to work in tech, and telling stories about successful women inside of GitLab. I did not immediately see anything inherently political on that page, though I only skimmed through it briefly so I may have overlooked something, in which case feel free to point out any examples of anything political that you see there.
Certainly, blanket saying that talking about politics is not allowed may well turn out to lead to situations where something becomes challenging to talk about because politics may be intertwined. For example, a speaker might go into politics territory in some talk, and how should they handle that? But that could happen in any area of discussion.
Equal opportunity, equal rights, and equal treatment, which is at the core of both the women in tech and the LGBT movements, is not political. It is about human rights.
I don’t see any hypocrisy in simultaneously wanting to talk about certain issues at the company level while at the same time saying that national politics are to be avoided. But like I said, the two may intertwine more than we’d like and it could be difficult to distinguish the two in some or even a lot of cases.
While this seems self-evident, this claim is only made possible by a mass politics and organization to defend its “non-negotiability.” Arendt wrote about this problem as the “right to have rights”
Human rights are massively political. Saying anything else is either ignorant or naive.
Soviet bloc countries didn't vote for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because of the right of citizens to leave their countries. And let's not get into the human rights of Uyghurs and the worldwide approval/disapproval to China's re-education camps.
Right, and when different human rights conflict, then we resolve the conflict through a political process.
Simple example: Religious freedom/freedom of speech and gay rights. So should the Christian baker be _forced_ to make a cake with words explicitly against his religious beliefs? Which human rights come first here?
Human rights exist only as a political construct formed by many treaties and agreements which have been thoroughly negotiated. I could not come up with anything more political than international law if I tried.
I was born under a dictatorship (that fortunately became again a democracy while I was still a child) and I can tell you human rights don't exist unless you have enough people willing and able to stand up for them.
More broadly, laws aren't worth the paper they're written on if you don't have a police and armed forces willing and able to uphold them.
I understand what your point is; I've talked to several people who voice the same opinion when discussing my country's dark past, but trust me, when the bullies get to power, you can't shout "it's a human right!" back at them. You either have to fight back, hide, or run away.
I might agree with you that human rights are non-negotiable, but we're probably going to get into a fight when it comes time to list those human rights.
Rights are absolutely negotiable; it's part of your right to be able to trade some of your rights for some benefit.
If you're employed at a desk job, you've traded much of your human right to be wherever the heck you want between the hours of 9 and 5, Monday through Friday, in exchange for a salary.
I feel like discussing politics at work has always been something most folks try to avoid.
On the other hand your company telling you not to is a whole other situation. I'm not sure a policy really solves much. Anyone who wouldn't think twice before discussing such things ... probabbly isn't going to read / care about the policy.
It's one of those rules that no matter how well intentioned, I'm not sure it works well as a policy.
I personally have no problem with them making this decision. I wish more companies would take stands like this. At least it's honest. Unlike the NBA and every other company with value statements they honor only when convenient or advantageous.
Look, if you morally object to this, then don't use GitLab. 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.
You know what isn't productive? Getting outraged on Twitter or Hacker News, making emotional outbursts of regurgitated sound bites and platitudes.
> You know what isn't productive? Getting outraged on Twitter or Hacker News, making emotional outbursts of regurgitated sound bites and platitudes.
Genuine question: you're making a strong statement on Hacker News expressing your disagreement with how other people are acting; what do you think distinguishes this from the behavior that you're describing that makes it more productive?
> 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.
O/T: the "Blood Money" part of the article title is why I hate news media in general. Sensationalizing, editorializing headlines marked as "news" and not just opinion.
It's companies like GitLab that are propping up Saudi and Chinese empires. Hope one day they get their Scrooge moment. Anyhow, most companies probably do this by default and quietly but what is interesting about Gitlab is they felt like they needed to announce publicly that they'll support all customers regardless of their morality.
In there, he talks about bespoke development vs mass market products, using McDonald's Big Macs vs a chef.
I think this provides a reasonable framework for approaching the present controversy.
For example, if McDonald's sold a Big Mac to <villain>, no one would bat an eye. However, if a chef went to work for <villain> there would be questions.
In the same way, if you are making a mass-market, generally useful tool, nobody should be excluded from using your tool. However, if you are doing custom, hi-touch development, then it might be more justified to screen your clients more.
I think Gitlab falls more into the mass-market, generally useful tool.
I think that the point is McDonalds doesn't empower $villain to do $badstuff (that is, unless he is literally starving - in which case it would be inhumane to not give him food). However, technology empowers us to do things that would not be possible without it.
Sometimes, a company can not choose who uses their tools - e.g. if it is open source, you can hardly prevent $villain from using it. This is similar to a hammer: If $villain buys a hammer at a hardware store, the hardware store is not to blame if $villain smites people (unless maybe $villain is known to be villainous, but that's not the point right now).
On the other hand, if a known $villain comes to you, and asks you to help him commit $atrocities: You can make the decision not to help.
(So, to put it short: I think your analogy is bad).
I think the analogy still stands if the goods/service is a commodity. It's not like $evil_corp will just forego using version control if GitLab doesn't offer it; there are tons of version control offerings.
The interesting spot is where you're selling off-the-shelf goods/ services that nobody else can provide. I would say that it's morally wrong to provide those services in that case since it's directly attributable to you that $villain did $bad_thing because of your offering, even though you had little personal involvement in the interaction.
So if $villain goes to the hardware store, says he needs a good hammer since $villain is feeling like hitting $someone with it - then the hardware store should sell a hammer? After all, $villain may go to the competing hardware store and get a hammer there, or even build his own hammer.
If $villain has outright said he’s going to do that with it, then the $salesperson might still sell the $hammer if their personal safety is endangered. But they should also notify the $police so that $someone can be warned and $villain can be apprehended.
I think this $scenario is outside the $effective area of the $metaphor.
Here the metaphor breakdown for a very simple reason: crimes are crimes and not crimes are not crimes.
the villain part is irrelevant. If $hero/heroine wants to buy an hammer to smite $villain, the hardware store is in the same situation: protect your safety and call the police.
The analogy avoids the difference that food is a consumable that everyone, from minimum-wage workers and billionaires, uses and getting better quality food doesn’t make you orders of magnitude more powerful than everyone else. Computer technology is different, it enhances the differences between people. An artist working for a villain to make propaganda posters doesn’t raise as many protests as Facebook being open to villains because through Facebook your campaign can get orders of magnitude stronger.
If Happy Meals came with an assault riflevpeopke would probably be more angry at McDonalds for catering to bad guys.
It's tough to make appropriate analogies (which are hyperbolic) without the topic being blasphemous. But companies like IBM, Hugo Boss, and Volkswagen still get talked about as supporting Nazis during WWII. BASF even has a page about their involvement manufacturing Zyklon B gas [1]. I do think you have a point of bespoke vs mass market, but I still think there's a line. Even in the bespoke category you hear about celebrities taking large paychecks to attend parties for questionable people and often get defended because they're not formally supporting them but are draining their wealth by some amount.
I think the difference might be a commodity relationship; nobody would question <villain> using Windows, but a business account with Microsoft would. Even with <villain> using Windows, if it was a prominent and ongoing thing I imagine people would expect Microsoft to intervene.
I am not sure why you include Volkswagen in this list. VW was founded by Nazis, it would be strange if it did not support them during WW2. On the other hand IBM had a choice.
It was mentioned more as long-term baggage because of the association. I honestly have no idea if relationships, like IBM's, were frowned upon at the time. I believe most of those close relationships were clandestine at the time and only publicized later. The others, being German companies, even if they weren't founded by Nazis probably would no longer exist if they hadn't cooperated.
Gitlab falls into both - what you are referring to is the cloud offering, the self-serve one.
I doubt anyone (employee or otherwise) would bat an eye if ICE or the U.S. military would open a private repository on Gitlab cloud.
But Gitlab also does enterprise sales (I assume it does enterprise sales at least since they have enterprise software) - which usually means customized integration, bizdev and account management. More often than not organizations like Gitlab approach the companies to sell to them.
In the case of government agencies they often can't even approach legally, Gitlab would have to apply into an open bid contract.
What I find most amazing is less the politics aspect and more the moral/ethical issue. For a company to have an explicit stated policy of _actively_ never taking into account the moral/ethical impact of their work is just... astounding.
It is difficult to imagine a more inhuman and bloodless statement.
It's more like a pressure cooker company saying "We build kitchen tools. We don't care who buys them. We will not spend any resources vetting customers to make sure they won't blow up a marathon with our product. Yes, even neo nazis are allowed to buy our product even though we executives disagree with them politically/morally/etc."
That's definitely a position worth considering, but I don't think it relates to the reasons behind this change.
For one, the straw-man argument you put forward relies on the seller not knowing the customer's intention with their product. Given the timing, I think it's absolute reasonable to assume why they put forward this change (though I'd be happy to be told otherwise).
An appliance seller can reasonably deduce that their pressure cooker will reasonably be used for cooking if there's no evidence to the contrary.
If a neo-nazi recently featured on the news for blowing up some people with a pressure cooker turns up at your pressure-cooker store asking to buy a pressure cooker and you knowingly sell them a pressure cooker, yes, you are absolutely complicit if they blow up some people.
Similarly, if a government organisation, recently in the news for putting children in cages, wants to buy or license your software, it's reasonable to assume that they're going to use your software to directly or indirectly further their goals, which may or may not include caging children.
Washing your hands of it, in a pull-request, is a moral and ethical choice, as much as they wish it wasn't.
FYI: If you say you don't care about politics and you ban political speech in your workspace - that on its own is a political statement that you're fine with the status quo.
Which status quo? Say what your interpretation of the "status quo" is, and I'll read it as a political statement. Say that you shouldn't accept it, and I'll read that as a political statement too.
Not really, though - the “status quo” at the moment is that everybody should shun U.S. government agencies, whereas gitlab appears to be taking the exact opposite stance; that is, bucking popular opinion.
Is it? You can not be fine with the status quo but still have a multitude of reasons to ban political speech in your workspace:
- you think political speech isn't useful for changing the status quo
- you think the political speech that will probably take place will lead to a world worse than the status quo, in the opposite direction of which you want it to go (this doesn't just mean "I think my coworkers are of the wrong party" but also "I think the world should be less politically divided")
- you think political speech will change the world for the better, but you also just hate political speech even more than you hate the status quo
> The workplace is an extension of the society it exists it.
The workplace is a place for getting work done. Arguing about politics is not getting work done. Unless your workplace is Congress, I guess, although they seem to argue a lot but don't get any work done.
When I see people saying things like "everything is political so politics is part of the workplace", I translate that as "I would rather argue about politics than be productive". Or, alternatively, "I would rather argue about how other people should use their time and energy and money, than actually do the hard work of using my own".
The workplace has always been an extension of society. Humans are not robots and what's happening in society will impact how they work somewhere.
Trump making it harder for h1bs to get citizenship will impact how h1b workers feel in the company.
Supreme Court deciding on if abortion should remain legal or not will impact a lot of people in their workplace.
I'm sorry, but you seem like the type of person who knows the country isnt going to drastically make it harder to live for them. It's easy for people in that position to see work as...just work.
If that's not the case with you I apologize. But what happens with politics 100 percent impacts me at work and I should be able to talk about it.
> what happens with politics 100 percent impacts me at work and I should be able to talk about it
What happens with politics impacts me at work too, but my response is not to spend time talking about it at work. My response at work is to make my work valuable to my employer. My response outside of work is none of my employer's business.
The costs outweigh the benefits to you, probably because the status quo is pretty favorable to you. This may not hold for other people, except now they're gagged from doing anything about it.
No, that doesn't follow from "not at work". You can engage in political activism outside work, even if somebody from the same company is active on the other side. Both of you are asked to not turn work into the battle ground however.
There are many places and times that people do not want to discuss the politics of the outside world. Examples could include while giving birth, while shopping alone at the grocery store, while sitting alone on a city bus, while performing surgery, while discussing your raise with your boss.
Just because someone does not want to discuss something here and now, doesn't invalidate that they have original opinions. Not everything is a dichotomy all the time. Plenty of people who are not fine with the status quo don't want to discuss it at work.
Which toilet (if any) I use is political. Being dressed as myself is a political statement. My right to have documentation that matches me is political. Whether or not I can be fired for being myself is political. So since one side has decided to make my very existence political then I think I have the right to talk about it. If you don’t want me talking about it at work then convince the GOP to stop trying to take away my rights, women’s rights, and so on. Until then tough cookies.
This reply is an example of exactly why people don't want to discuss things like this at work. People rarely want to have such a combative discussion with our coworkers, especially when framed as an all-or-nothing, very high stakes conversation.
If these issues, such as where you use the toilet, what you wear to work, what documentation you are provided, are relevant to your work-place, I would suggest that they are not "political" topics, but instead workplace topics and could, and should, be broached. However, I don't know GitLab's stance on this.
That being said, I do agree with you that all of these things are political, as well as who is causing the issues. However, your coworkers might not, and there might be very good reasons to continue to work with such people.
I disagree. There are a variety of reasons to prohibit political speech in the workplace even if one desires to change the status quo:
* A company might find that it's employees become toxic when political disagreements happen.
* A company might find itself alienating people with minority viewpoints.
* A company may find itself losing customers because political views discussed in the workplace is attributed to the company.
This mentality that lack of political discussion in the workplace implies agreement with the status quo has negative consequences, and makes employees feel pressured to voice support for things they don't actually support in order to avoid losing face with coworkers.
This is a biased article written in an inflammatory style. Also, there is a mistake in the first 5 letters (Gitlab is not "San Francisco based" being remote-only)
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 418 ms ] threadWe've changed the title in accordance with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but if anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. Edit: I took "won't exclude customers on moral grounds" out of the title above, since they apparently no longer have that policy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21275311
Not sure where you are from, but maybe this kind of humour doesn't translate well to the US?
However, unfortunately at this point I'm so used to headlines misrepresenting basic facts or taking quotes out of context to sell a political point or generate controversy, that the headline seemed perfectly plausible- my general point still stands, even if it doesn't apply to this particular case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21275051
Hacker News is for subject matter that you would definitely not see in the regular.
Can you imagine? CNN newsflash: "Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham proposes new Lisp dialect."
Maybe it's around here already, but I'd like to hear the CEO actually state how the title is inaccurate.
Dang's editorialized title is.
You've change it away from the story title, which is normally the site guideline isn't it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Must have missed something - what was retracted?
You're not a moderator, you're just a shitty censor.
Moderation rules invariably involve interpretation. That doesn't make them arbitrary.
HN continues to surprise me as the best moderated community of substantial size anywhere on the internet, and this thread exemplifies why.
Thank you dang for making HN what it is today. I know I appreciate it, and I bet 99% of everybody else here does as well.
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.)
Is it now the policy of HN to keep titles up to date as events change?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/study-predicts...
That we can't talk politics over alcohol? I still don't see that being an issue unless you can't be civil about conflicting beliefs. If you can't be civil when confronted with conflicting beliefs then you have larger problems I think.
There are plenty of examples of relatively insular cultures (e.g. Sweden, Paypal) producing great stuff.
I don't hate diversity, I just don't buy this unquestioned "diversity is good" idea. It has pros and cons.
Like any such environment where conformity is the norm, it works until someone fails to conform.
I wonder if it's party because of the generalness and youngness of the industry. I imagine fields like oil rigging, therapy services for children, auto repair, or military service have more self-selecting cultures than building generic CRUD apps or web design for random clients.
It should be ok to discuss politics in any and every space as it affects every single aspects of everybody's lives. Considering most adults spend around half of their awake time at work it seems silly to avoid it there.
I think I’ve, on appropriate occasion, discussed politics with friends and colleagues at every workplace I’ve ever been at. [Edit: some senior leadership] openly supports the DNC and has commented to that effect at town halls.
To pretend that people are apolitical or to ban all political discussions because some people can’t seem to handle disagreements in a professional manner is one way to handle the problem, but perhaps not the first nor optimal solution to implement.
Most of us can separate our politic beliefs from our work. Regardless of how we feel about certain laws and regulations, we have to work within the limitations they impose.
I’m openly Libertarian; I have people on my team who are openly pro-Trump. Being in MA and in tech, there are obviously many pro-left employees.
If you can only work for and with people with whom you agree politically, you might have (or be) a problem. “Not talking politics at work” is a bandaid over this problem, at best.
So yeah, any place that has functioning adults, or, better, mature people, can have mature discussions. But then it takes two to make this work. For example, if you belittle or insult people freely or mock those who you might not agree with, you aren't going to ever see that mature environment.
...so basically, acting like Trump.
I'm not saying if it's OK or not as a philosophical matter, but it does help make the workplace more pleasant.
When a regular political talking point is whether it's ok to fire you for existing the hypocrisy of the "don't put politics in my <x>" becomes painful (and certainly less than pleasant).
Companies should be free to declare they support the status quo, but they should never get a free pass as if that's some sort of neutral, objective opinion. They've chosen to make a stance and should be appraised as such.
My company has a "no drama" policy. Our team could be a poster for diversity and inclusion from all across the spectrum and it works really really well. We all appreciate each other.
That sounds fine to me, because I think that's a good status quo. But twenty years ago I bet the status quo was different and a totally different set of people was being made uncomfortable and encouraged out.
I find it interesting that you make such an assumption about the places that I've worked.
Also, I should mention that I absolutely have had numerous political discussions with coworkers. They just don't usually happen in the workplace itself.
Thankfully most jobs won't touch this but if you're running internet services it'll probably come up.
We're not just talking about the stereotype of people standing around a water cooler declaring affiliations and throwing political talking points past each other.
Who said they aren't talking about just that?
At one of my first jobs people got a bit upset in a discussion at some point about religion. My then boss said 'I have learned to never talk about politics and religion at work.'. He didn't forbid it, but the point is valid: why talk about things that gets people unreasonably fired up?
It's not a bad thing in my mind, it's heavy handed at times, I can see how it would rub some traditionalists the wrong way in an extreme way. If you held some form of conservative view then you'd almost certainly be a pariah in our company/studio.
But left-leaning politics is definitely promoted and discussed in the office.
What if you have reservations about specific things that have been lumped in with "left" politics, which you believe are inherently not "left" and do not benefit humanity?
( Not trying to reach for the 1984 language, but it's the most accurate terminology I can come up with.. :\ )
What is the professional intuition on productivity when a large segment of the population considers homosexuality to be spiritually depraved?
To make it against whatever workplace "rules" there are seems overbearing and thought-controlling. Our personal beliefs and political experiences make up a lot of who we are, our individual perspective on the world and somewhat how we think.
How can you hold your organization to socially responsible policies and actions if you can't discuss what should be socially acceptable? Political beliefs form the ideas of what is the scope of the organization's responsibility.
In my recent experiences at a hedge fund and a very large investment bank, politics were discussed pretty openly in both environments (alas this was only in NYC). I found the discussions worthwhile and informative as it helped me understand my own beliefs more.
It's unwise to hold beliefs that you never have to justify. You should put in the intellectual work so that you can articulate and argue your own politics it will make sure your beliefs are well founded.
Most people spend more time at work than with their actual families. This leads to all kinds of conversations, in the office, in the break room, or at a bar. Not everything is appropriate for every setting but pretending differing opinions don’t exist is ludicrous.
Even with very, very close co-founders, politics was an extremely rare discussion. When it did come up, it was generally in the context of how certain things affected the business. Even then, it was with a deep understanding that the other parties where smart, well-meaning individuals.
Personally I wish the discussion of things like politics wasn't considered taboo because I think it makes for a more boring work environment, but I'm also the type who loves to debate with people who have opposing viewpoints and don't get offended easily. Unfortunately American culture has moved in the opposite direction revolving around appeasing to the most sensitive "victim".
It probably helps that we, like many other European countries, have more parties than just two, so you're not always in an us vs. them situation like in the US of A.
People are afraid to talk about anything remotely controversial today, because it could result in a call for them to be fired or resign. We've seen it in academia and I feel like we're going to see it more in industry. One opinion stated on a blog or social media will be enough for others to dig up every hint of anything someone has ever posted that could be seen as negative and outright calls to have them leave.
There's almost a point system in call-out culture; a subconscious social credit system among those who participate. The Coddling of the American Mind is a great book that talks about this growth in the academic space. It's made professors afraid to talk about difficult topics with their students.
Where is this person? In my experience, the fundies like this just can't stop from telling others how their lifestyles are "immoral" and "wrong". That's the problem with religious extremists like this, and why people who want "diversity" don't want people like this around: they're actively opposed to diversity, and because of their dogmatic religious nature, they feel the need to push their opinions on everyone.
>We want diversity of people, but not diversity of ideas or ideology.
Well, yes. The idea of "diversity" is having different people from different backgrounds together in one group, and (here's the important part) getting along well. You can't do that when some of them have a hateful ideology and they hate other members of the group and attempt to hurt them in some way. How would you have a diverse group composed of people of various nationalities, and then throw some neo-Nazis in there? It wouldn't work; you'd probably have violence, or at least some serious discord.
There is of course a danger to this as you've pointed out, that things can go too far in the other direction and people are afraid to voice any negative opinion, but I'm just pointing out why calls for "diversity" don't actually include certain groups of people, because those groups are inherently opposed to diversity in the first place, and have a long track record of causing problems with it.
Donald Knuth for one: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/things.html
I may disagree passionately with what my employer is doing, but I also understand I may be wrong and they may be right. Or they may be wrong in some things, but still better than 90% of other employers. Or I may disagree with what they say, but wholeheartedly agree with what they do. And so on so forth.
I try hard not to assume or expect this from others, but I very strongly encourage it.
This is indeed a very privileged position. Most people need to pay rent, buy food, save for retirement, pay for their kids clothes...
Most people in the US live paycheck to paycheck and make price-sensitive decisions on things like food and rent.
The reason was never politics, but being beholden to a job because of disagreements with your boss, the work you're assigned, or being beholden to specific benefits like health insurance. I see so many people who are miserable because they're forced to do things they don't want. They're not even properly compensated because they can't say no.
> I try hard not to assume or expect this from others, but I very strongly encourage it.
While I personally agree with you that living below your means and having a safety buffer to tell your workplace to fuck off is a great idea. I think it doesn't take most people's reality into account. You and I can do that because we make enough money that "living below our means" is a possibility. For the vast majority of people, that's not an option.
I should bring up in this light that its still legal to fire people for being gay in much of the USA and there's a current supreme court case coming up to determine federally if discrimination on the basis of orientation or gender identity is covered under current antidiscrimination law. In that case you're at risk for losing your paycheck if you aren't born the correct orientation and are found out.
The manager has to pick a side- they can choose to fire an LGBTQ person for being LGBTQ or not. A co-worker can choose to treat a co-worker differently if they happen to be LGBTQ. An employee who is married and gay may need to choose to leave off their wedding ring and to not allow their spouse to enter healthcare with them, because they cannot risk their jobs by being found out by HR as a homosexual.
These are all political workplace choices.
Maybe politics doesn't need to be involved in every single part of society, only the political aspects of it.
Handke was hand-picked by a panel to receive some special benefit.
Gitlab offers a mass service which essentially anyone can use; any denial of the service would require searching out individuals to penalize from among the masses.
Which seems to me like a reasonable and consistent ethical position. However, it does have some consequences that might be hard to stomach. Such as, that selling computers to the Nazis would be an acceptable activity, even knowing what they intended to use them for.
To be clear, i'm not sure if I subscribe to this perspective. But I can see its appeal.
Sure, but when the "political aspect" involves denying a known genocide that's something that many of us aren't willing to ignore.
And I say that as someone who has enjoyed Handke's work.
Sorry, but he shouldn't get a pass for what he said in the 90's. He, of all people, should have known better.
I agree that it isn't easy to be political in the workplace, and it is often better to keep your head down. But think about all the posts here on HN about workplace issues: compensation, toxic bosses, dubious or unethical product and design choices...and so on. All of these things are political because they involve people exercising their power on others, and other people organizing to take that power back.
These conflicts are rarely pretty, and I'd like my workplace to avoid them as much as possible.
Politics is about what is WRONG and what is RIGHT. It is about ETHICS. Saying you can not discuss politics is saying you can not talk about what is wrong and what is right.
The logo of Gitlab should now be the 3 monkeys; See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak (about) no Evil.
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?
> Such a declaration could run afoul of legal boundaries in some circumstances. While workers have no constitutional speech protection in the context of their employment, federal labor law requires that employees be allowed to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment and possible unlawful conduct like harassment, discrimination, and safety violations.
This seems like a false dichotomy. There is a difference between being amoral and illegal.
The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).
Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics.
There is a middle-ground between "talking about politics" is "encouraged" and "forbidden".
It requires that people avoid becoming excessively emotionally invested in the discussion; such that disagreements do not negatively impact their working relationships.
Small teams with good temperaments are easily capable of this. Large organisations tend to look for more definitive policies that can be easily laid out and enforced.
Mind that this rule even prevents discussing legitimate concerns about customers with your team mates.
This is how we can get away with saying it's "encouraged" while really making sure any meaningful counter-argument is "forbidden" at the same time.
That's not obvious to me at all. The parent said "Where we seem to find ourselves today..." which pretty clearly implies a universalist statement, and one that happens to be dead wrong.
If you can't see how the tech/media industry have a larger influence over the general culture then I don't know what to say.
Also, there used to be a political spectrum and not just "progressive" and "conservative": This is something completely different than left/right - a right-wing person can easily be a progressive about his right views, while a left-wing person can be conservative [or even reactionary] about his left views.
[Edit: Note, I'm a non-native speaker: Maybe this differentiation is different between English than in German?]
@core-question's reply under yours wasn't an indication that yours was unclear; it was just taking the conversation in a slightly different direction (which is normal).
What is true is that people who are beliefs much are out of far outside the norm for their workplace are discouraged. For example, if you're someone who believes that profit is theft, and you make that clear during work, it will probably have negative effects for you. Whether "conservatives" are the victim of this depends on their workplace and just what views they espouse.
So I shut up.
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 the opinions that the power structures imply with their actions.
The health of my family is more important than your politics.
Then we say "Another world problem solved!" and go back to work.
That's not super dystopic and antisocial at all.
I'm a security guy and have been a privacy person. My job is often to advocate for the customer over the immediate desires of my employer. There's no pretending that doesn't have a moral or ethical dimension. So, how am I supposed to do my job without trying to change-- steer, guide, develop, choose another word if you prefer-- my company's ethics?
What if they are an entity having "politics done to them" by a geo political entity.
But "should we deploy in China, knowing we will have to hand over data on possible dissidents?" is something I've had to deal with repeatedly. I see no way of having that discussion without getting into politics.
Of course, you can rightly say that some people just sit down and write code without becoming embroiled in the great conflicts of our time. That's true.
But the struggle for diversity in tech and equality more broadly is one of the great struggles of our time, and I know of very few engineers who do not recruit, interview, or hire. Should those people just cash their paycheck, or should they take the time to discuss an issue that nearly all employers claim to take seriously?
I think you can continue with this line of reasoning to include things like compensation (especially health insurance, m/paternal leave, and sick leave policy). And nearly everybody has a stake in the compensation discussion.
So, while I get the desire to just do the work and go home, I don't think it's so easy to separate politics from work without doing grievous harm to both. Which suggests to me the obvious thing: that the real goal of these efforts is not to foster inclusiveness or provide a better working environment, but rather to prevent a dialogue about how to do just that.
Sometimes others look for more than just a paycheque at work.
I have friends. I even have made friends at work (very cautiously). But we shoot the shit after work.
Why is that the only recourse? Attempting to change your company's mind is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. You may find that you're unable, and then would prefer to quit, but quitting in protest should always be the option of last resort.
Whatever activities you're doing on company time are paid for by the company.
If you're yakking about politics, it is impacting the time of coworkers around you. It's distracting and unnecessary.
Since the concept of democracy, the rule of the people, politics is also one of the unwritten (or written) responsibility of the people. If you do not want to do it, then you are actively running from your responsibilities, which might make you a bad citizen in other people's eyes.
Fact: In ancient Athens, if you were a free citizen and you did not participate in politics, you would have been considered a non ideal / bad citizen
The types of moral politics I am thinking about is discussing the tweet-du-jour, basically celebrity gossip about politicians, etc. Worse still would be people taking strong, loud and uninformed positions on foreign policy, like Syria. I actually happen to find that triggering, given my background. I would rather that people keep their opinions outside of my cubicle so that I can focus on producing the best work I can - instead of constantly being reminded of the shithole I left behind.
For example: I work at a MedTech company. I consider it supremely important that I (and everyone else) am able to say no, I am not going to work on feature X because it would breach patient privacy, or feature Y that is impossible to do without unacceptable risks of causing malpractice.
Of course, whoever proposed those projects would then be free to make a convincing case for how we could mitigate those problems, or why I might be wrong.
I would go so far as advocating not manufacturing in China because of the current political climate is work related because it can have a direct impact on the bottom line.
I'd be making the same objections if I didn't have GDPR and Patientdatalagen to point to. Hell, I'd have been in favour of introducing those laws, even knowing that it would increase our costs (which I also care about, just not to the same degree).
This doesn't work if their livelihood is controlled by a group of hyper-intolerant political totalitarians.
What GitHub is doing is giving individuals rooms to breathe, think, and live. It's preventing the rule of the intolerant minority, the forced homogenization of thought and suppression of dissent. We banned these things from the government long ago; this is a good step towards reducing the power of non-governmental power centers in corporations to coerce speech and thought of people around them.
As a free-thinking person this would make me much more likely to want to work for GH. At a place like Google I know I'd have to be deeply closeted as others flagrantly denigrate my identity and ideas around me. Here at least everyone can be closeted together, and live in a pluralistic way with different beliefs alongside each other.
This is how we suppress constant political conflict. You just aren't allowed to go after people for who they are or what they believe; we accept differences. And reducing political speech at work helps with that.
Exactly.
> This doesn't work if their livelihood is controlled by a group of hyper-intolerant political totalitarians.
Exactly. Hence why we need to acknowledge the right to speak your mind.
> a place like Google I know I'd have to be deeply closeted as others flagrantly denigrate my identity and ideas around me.
The Google case is interesting. Maven was pretty equivalent to a peaceful demonstration. Management had one opinion, (many) employees had ethical objections and eventually got their way.
Damore's case was.. messier, and more relevant to your point. Then again, this policy would just subject everyone to the same thing, while sacrifing the previous benefits. And it's all ultimately enforced by humans anyway, so if anything I'd expect it to lead to further polarization.
> Here at least everyone can be closeted together, and live in a pluralistic way with different beliefs alongside each other.
Many decisions don't have a neutral option. This policy just means that you won't have any say once those crossroads become relevant.
If a majority want to discuss politics and political change, isn't this just an intolerant majority enforcing their politics on everyone?
Unless someone is the type of person who would never advocate for any change no matter what happened to them, from being made King to being made a slave, then they aren't actually apolitical. Everyone who doesn't want to discuss politics or thinks they aren't political are just saying that the current political status quo fits their views.
That's a hyperbolic statement, but the intent is to show that being "apolitical" about current politics has no distinction between agreeing with the current politics. If you start telling people they can't discuss their politics because "we want to be uninvolved in politics" what you are really saying is, "My politics are in charge and the status quo. Your opinion needs to be silenced"
If I'm apolitical about issue X, it doesn't mean I'm a happy supporter of current state of X. It means I don't care whether it stays the way it is, or changes to any of the possible alternative states that are within the Overton window around X.
To use a clarifying analogy: if there's a C++ project in the company, and somebody asks me for the opinion about whether to rewrite it in Java, and I say "I don't care, I'm indifferent about this issue", it doesn't mean I support the project staying as is. It means literally what I said - go ahead and rewrite it in Java, or Python, or COBOL. Whatever, I just don't care. This is what being apolitical about an issue means.
And back to politics - I have a right to care or not care about whatever I please. You can try to convince me to care about some thing you care about, but you have no right to force me to care, and trying to do it makes me only want to oppose you out of spite. The "apolitical means just supporting status quo" meme is essentially a manipulative attempt at forcing people to care about something they don't, a rehash of the old "if you're not with us, you're against us".
You don't have to be a happy supporter. You can be an extremely unhappy supporter if you still think the status quo is better than other options.
Saying "I don't care", is just an opinion and doesn't affect anyone. Saying "I don't care, so nobody else is allowed to talk about the subject" is implying that your world view and opinions supercede others. If you were in a group that agreed on a mechanism for deciding what could be talked about, then it would make sense for everyone in that group to follow the decision. That's not whats happening though. The people who are okay with the status quo are telling the unhappy people to be quiet, because it makes the currently okay people feel uncomfortable.
Why would anyone who disagrees with the status quo stop talking about it solely because other people didn't like it?
You have the picture of the battleground completely wrong on this. It's not apolitical people shutting down oppressed minorities. It's a minority of people with an opinion on a topic fighting it out with a different minority with a different opinion on the subject, and both sides try to recruit followers to their side from the larger population of people indifferent to the issue, using the "if you're not with us you're against us" argument. Whereas what the larger population wants to say to both groups is, "fight it out among yourself and leave as alone, and for the love of everything that's holy, mind the collateral damage".
(See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21276788 for another take on how a political side feels to both those who disagree with it and those who just want to be left alone.)
The fact that other companies exist without this policy means there is no "power structure" other than a private company deciding what's best for its own culture.
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?
This is a very confusing position to me. It is a bad thing to pick and choose your customers based on moral agreement, unless that morality is defined by the government in which case it's good?
Right and wrong are subjective, legal and illegal are objective.
From the perspective of the business owner who is focused primarily on maximising revenue / profits for their business, there is nothing wrong with simply focusing on legal compliance.
From the perspective of the employee who is motivated by things other than maximising revenue / profits / their own salary, there could be plenty wrong.
It’s a free country cuts both ways. Both parties are free to see things as right and wrong as they see fit.
In other words, legality is basically the subset of morality that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. Which is why going beyond legality into subjective morality so often becomes polarizing.
I largely agree with this, except when we start looking at uncharted territory.
Generally speaking, we are (legally) free to do as we please. As people do things we (as a sufficiently large group) disagree with, laws may eventually pass to restrict the freedoms to do those things.
Just because something hasn't been codified into law, doesn't necessarily mean it's not likely to be largely condemned, it could just mean nobody anticipated anyone actually doing the thing prior to it happening.
Combine that with a legal system that works on the letter of the law, rather than the intent of the law, and incentives can (and when capital is concerned, often do) skew away from morality entirely.
Consider that the falsehood that a corporation CEO has a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders at all costs continues to perpetuate, for a consideration of the mindset that simply works on the basis that if it hasn't been outlawed, then it's okay.
The idea that you should never do anything that provides utility to any party who’s values are incompatible with your own is not tenable, and it’s simply incompatible with any sort of open or tolerant society.
I think it’s much more sensible to look at the impact you’re having on society as a whole. I wouldn’t work for Facebook or Google, because I disagree with what they’re trying to achieve. But I’d sell them a service if I was offering one on the open market. If I ran a gun factory I probably wouldn’t want to sell them to <insert government that I think is evil>, because I know they’ll take that product and do evil things with it, but I’d sell that same government an SCM service.
I dont believe most democracies really represent the public. They do on paper, in theory, but in practice there are lobbies that lobby for big biz and their main owners. They have much more influence in political decisions. Hence I dont believe the "public" wants sanctions on Iran/Syria/Cuba/etc, but that it is merely convenient for big biz to have those sanctions.
There's also been a cultural shift over time. When I first joined Google I remember feeling that it was a pretty libertarian sort of place. In my team several colleagues were openly and proudly very pro-capitalist, anti-communist, small government types. If anyone was left wing it wasn't visible and I don't recall encountering identity politics, ever. There was a very strong cultural commitment to neutrally serving every user with every query, and ranking being completely algorithmic, to the extent that the company agonised over hot-patching "Googlewhacks" where pranksters manipulated results for unusual searches to offend their ideological opponents.
This didn't seem strange, it was just how it was. I have a vague feeling I thought other tech firms were the same. Twitter declared they were the free speech wing of the free speech party after all, and anything internet or web related had a strong vibe of "communication will make us stronger".
This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments.
I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers. The hard shift leftwards in academic institutions has been well documented. Even in 2006 I remember a recruiter telling me they'd "run out" of candidates in the USA and that's why they were expanding more into Europe. The concept you could "run out" of candidates in a place as big as America was pretty shocking to me - on probing, he explained that almost all people with the skills they needed were in well paid happy jobs already and few were interested in moving, even with the great perks on offer. Whilst there were always a small flow of people coming onto the market due to natural churn, "everyone who cares knows Google is hiring" he said, and they'd already interviewed vast numbers of them.
This change in culture would inevitably lead to this situation due to the way that conservatives see leftists as naive, but leftists see conservatives as evil. Combined with leftists generally understanding conservatives much worse than the other way around (this has been shown by large scale ITTs), and together it means flooding your firm with new grads is a surefire way to create massive internal conflicts.
Could this not have easily been a backlash against the companies no longer operating neutrally? You describe a timeline here that goes neutral Google -> hard left because of the employees. That doesn't jive with what I've seen in the news. Google and other tech companies were the ones trying to get into China and building systems that censor users. The big data companies started surreptitiously tracking everyone, whether or not you had agreed to ala Facebook's shadow profiles. That doesn't really mesh up with libertarian ideas of free trade. Based on the employee backlash these all seem like they were management driven decisions that employees didn't agree with. Wouldn't a natural reaction be to push hard in the opposite side of the direction the companies management was going towards?
The companies policies were neutral though. There was no concept that helping people find information might hurt them, as you see in modern day Google.
During the time period I'm talking about Google got banned from China because they refused to continue censoring the search engine. That was circa 2010, I think. So consistent with a company having a very free speech, libertarian view. It made waves because so few companies were willing to sacrifice the Chinese market on the altar of free speech, but Google was. Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out.
As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers. But the news industry was shrinking, and editors/owners in particular felt hugely threatened by Google News, which effectively replaced them with an algorithm and commoditised news almost overnight. The media went from being very positive about Google (great company to work for) to trying everything they could to attack and destroy it. What they wanted was money, pure and simple, and eventually as the attacks stepped up they stopped pretending otherwise. Hence the new EU Copyright directive and "link taxes" that started popping up.
The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently. There were always pointed questions at TGIF when I was there, but disagreement with management was largely congenial. Things started going downhill around the time Colin McMillen created Memegen. It was basically an internal Twitter but worse, I don't think you can ever fit 140 characters into an image macro. That introduced and encouraged Tweet-sized thinking/viral liking campaigns whereas previously disagreement had been surfaced in email debates (the famous "centi-threads") or through face-to-face discussion. Long email discussions did annoy some people, but they at least had an expectation you'd contribute by writing something useful. After Memegen got big I started seeing people unironically cite that they got highly voted memes as evidence of creating value in their internal CV and promotion packets, which was ridiculous.
>The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently.
Yes and concurrent with the executive change, Google employees have started becoming openly more liberal. I am saying that its just as plausible that the change in tone from the employees as a group, was a reaction to the managerial decisions that were themselves a change in tone.
>As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers.
That's three separate ideas that are not coupled together. Nothing has to change about the privacy policies if they were always tracking, and most users can be happy with the product even with the privacy intrusions.
I will disagree with you that they were happy though. It seems more like a matter of ignorance as there has been a rise in ad blockers and deleting Facebook since the privacy violations of major tech companies has become more widely known
Also for this claim specifically
>As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off.
Are you really trying to claim that Google does not track user data? That it does not suck up every bit of data it can from all the traffic they have access to? How exactly does Google target their ads and make their revenue then?
Edit: Literally at the top of the front page as I am writing this comment
https://www.pulse.ng/bi/tech/google-exec-says-nest-owners-sh...
Google does track user data but if you aren't logged in it's anonymous, resets frequently and is a very noisy dataset. That's why they create lots of good incentives to be logged in, like useful products.
Facebook isn't suffering at all, it continues to do great. To the extent users get bored of the classical product they move to Instagram which Facebook also owns. There's no evidence of any real change in user behaviour: free is a great price.
But most as targeting isn't based on personal data. The core Google cash cow is ads targeted to your current searches. That works even if you're anonymous. The rest is worth doing but not that massive. It's certainly not worth worrying about. Bear in mind the media had for years been claiming Google "sells your personal data to advertisers" which as I'm sure you know is totally misleading (really is just a lie).
[The few times I've seen the term used have largely been cases where the speaker is really embarrassing themselves by claiming ignorance on the part of their opponents while demonstrating an absurd amount of their own...]
Jonathan Haidt did one of these experiments with about 2000 participants. It's social science so it should come with all the usual disclaimers, but the results can be found here and have apparently been replicated since (though I'm having trouble rapidly re-locating a study I found that replicated it, for some reason I can't find the right keywords to surface it).
You can find a writeup here: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/sympathy-for-the...
JEsus that sounds like a nightmarish pack of ghouls.
Huh? Can you link some substantiations to these claims, it seems way bizarre?
They were a mishmash of various things but included e.g. descriptions of various programs and employee activities such as influencing search results to inaccurately reflect the world in the interest of 'justice', e.g. if you search for CEO a neutral search engine mostly men in the results because there are more male CEOs, but a 'fair' search engine would return more women or at least equal numbers. The documents also described google's use of demographically targeting election notices for the benefit of particular candidates (and great consternation with significant number of the targeted demographic voted for the other candidate)... stuff like that. The documents also included lists of penalized news sites which unsurprisingly was largely conservative sites, but wasn't just the more extreme alex jones type stuff.
A lot of it was culled off these internal political lists that the earlier poster was mentioning... so it's probably pretty dubious that many of the things in it actually reflected google company positions. (That said, the 'fairness' and news penalties appear to be active programs and not just smack talk by internal political activists).
More smoke than fire overall, but the more extreme right wing has been promoting it as a pretty substantial bit of evidence of unethical (and in some cases unlawful) conduct by google. Thoughtful discussion of it hasn't been aided by the widespread suppression of the subject.
Arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring: this is what Damore did, but he wrote it much more formally and cited lots of studies. It boiled down to though, "most women find tech boring because they're women". Damore's essay is here: https://firedfortruth.com/2017/08/08/first-blog-post/
Manipulating ML models: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-mod... with their stated example:
An example of bias in this context is if the incoming message is "Did the engineer finish the project?" and the model scores the response "Yes he did" higher than "Yes she did." These associations are learned from the data used to train the embeddings, and while they reflect the degree to which each gendered response is likely to be the actual response in the training data (and the degree to which there's a gender imbalance in these occupations in the real world), it can be a negative experience for users when the system simply assumes that the engineer is male.
This logic is broken and wouldn't have happened in the old Google. If you're predicting what response the user is most likely to type next, then "Yes he did" is a more useful prediction by any objective measure because most engineers are men. But here, Google AI Research concludes that the most likely prediction would be "a negative experience for users" and sets out to "debias" their models. Debias in this context means to bias the model away from learned reality and towards what liberal intersectionalists want the world to be, in the hope that by subtly manipulating people through AI predictions they can actually bring that world about.
Already a way to debias a model (I know nothing of ML in specific, it is just an overview) would be to have the model explicitly realize that "engineer" need to be assigned a gender in certain situations. So in this sense the correct answer should be to try and understand whether this engineer is a specific human whose gender you should know so not to make wrong assumptions.
Whether this defense applies to this specific case I do not know, my point is that sometimes it is possible to actually partly debias something. The fact that it can be done in the wrong way does not mean it should not be done.
The same way there is a nice middle point between corporate anarcho-capitalism and totalitarian regimes.
Unfortunately the extract I quoted is very clear. They aren't talking about understanding that engineer is a person adjective and thus could refer to an entity of unknown gender, which is a separate subfield of AI to word vectors (it'd entity analysis/knowledge graph). They're talking pure probabilities here: given a sequence of words, what is the most probable following sequence? The model gets the answer correct but Googlers are weak and cannot handle the truth, so in an Orwellian twist they label measured reality "biased" and set out to edit the model to convince it that there's no difference in probability between "Yes he did" and "Yes she did".
This seems the opposite of true, but I'd be interested to see some sources to back that up. One of the few reasons I still use Google News is because it oddly links me to conservative news sites more often than I'd expect. I'll click on some of those links just to see what the "other side" is talking about, and I find their characterizations of liberal viewpoints to be pretty bizarre most of the time.
On the flip side, what I read (as a liberal) from conservative sources tends to be what I expect.
I am not familiar with companies that encourage discussing politics.
Politics is about how people ought to be organised. I find it strange that this would not be something to discuss in the context of many persons primary organisational structure.
Part of my remuneration is the effect I may have on the world. Positive or negative.
While you correctly note that governments can pass sanctions against countries to facilitate trade restrictions, it's worth considering the full context of the article when considering their descent into proving Godwin's law.
They explicitly state the example of Chef working with arguably contentious and/or politicized domestic organisations. Given that recent employee protests are based around domestic government organisations, that have (rightly or wrongly) been compared to nationalist and/or protectionist organisations in history, what is the correct course of action there?
If you disagree so strongly with your own government, and/or believe your own government cannot be trusted to tell you the truth, what is the correct response? In recent history, we had marches against going to war on what wasn't considered believable grounds. Despite the best intentions of the leaders at the time, who ultimately ignored the peaceful and legitimate protests, the protestors were later proven to be true.
Given that backdrop, and the corporate / commercial capture of legislative interests, how is employee activism not a logical next step of 'vote with your wallet' combined with 'change it from the inside'?
This cuts both ways: If your employer is known to take millions from ICE to support what ICE does, and your opinion is that ICE is an evil organization, that can also make you "quite uncomfortable". It might also make you want to leave that employer, which would make it harder to "support yourself and your family".
Millions of people work in the defense industry. I did too, in a different life. I left due to moral reasons (Not that i am doing anything moral today).
Well, that's the thing. If that's such a simple thing to do, I would suggest that you leave if you're uncomfortable in a company where employees are allowed to voice their opinions on company policies. You supporting your family is not more important than me supporting mine.
The issue is the null stance is functionally equivalent to support for the status quo which at this moment includes a lot of stuff people would not actively sign on to but often feel very content with passively signing off on it.
> If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).
This ignores both just how much the business tail wags the legislative dog in the US and the mountain of other factors that prevent or slow Congress from taking action against specific countries.
There are so many things that can disturb team cohesion! Even non political ones like talking about if you prefer rain or sun, or fries with mayo or ketchup.
Thank you! And now let’s go back to work...
Do you think the Gitlab CEO's policy declaration helped or hurt team cohesion?
Evaporative cooling of group beliefs does actually work to increase cohesion. If, given a controversial decision like this, people who disagree with it pack up and leave, the variance of opinion within the company will actually decrease, improving cohesion.
I agree that decreeing a divisive policy and prohibiting dissent tends to leave one with a more "cohesive" team. I very much doubt that it's a commercially optimal strategy. You end up with (a) true believers, who build up group think and (b) yes-people and the spineless, neither of which strike me as high value contributors. You've optimized for agreement, rather than excellence, as a hiring criterium.
I would much rather see "cohesion" in the form of a team that, DESPITE widely diverging views, manages to agree on a common vision.
You're talking countries--that's one case but it's not the only case. America also has Nazis. Here. They are Americans. Even if they weren't, it's an abdication one's core moral responsibilities to one's community and society with this kind of "oh, ask your [bought] legislator [about something unrelated]" do-nothingism. But they are.
I'd make damned sure that an executive team knew it was them or me before I took one thin dime that might've come from Richard Spencer or one of our other homegrown Nazis. When I was a consultant I fired clients for less and I slept great for doing so. It's literally the minimum duty I have to my community and to the human race at large--the denial of custom to hostis humanis generis wherever they rear their heads? A bare minimum of decency.
If people engaged in the conversation aren’t prepared to take every participant seriously, no matter their politics stance, then it’s a sure-fire way to create a toxic work environment. You can’t go into it with the assumption that everyone needs to be a left-leaning liberal, or that it’s okay to bully a Trump voter (or vice-versa with right-leaning and Obama).
If at that point you can hold a conversation about politics without losing your shit as soon as someone supports something you don’t like, then encouraging it is fine. If you’re still in the mindset of having compassion for only the people on your own side then some growing up needs to happen first. Otherwise all it does is alienate those colleagues with marginal beliefs. Not exactly diverse and inclusive then.
And it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll enable far-right nutjobs or neo-Nazis as a result. HR tends to frown on things like racism and such like, it wouldn’t really get very far.
The problem is the willingness of people to engage in civil discourse has fallen off a cliff. "Thought leaders" on both sides are making serious $$$ by convincing their followers that the other side is to be truly despised and that all opposition must be met with aggression of some sort (if not physical, verbal, spiritual, etc). Creating an us vs. them mentality has proven (yet again in history) to be very profitable.
Every time this happens, the results are regrettable and 50 years later everyone is looking at history books going "what the holy hell were they thinking?"
tl;dr the problem isn't discussing politics at work, the problem is that society in general has turned into a team sport where people pick sides and start acting like hooligans when they meet someone from the other side.
Fail early. You can achieve cohesion by letting go of everybody who cannot discuss politics in a civilized manner. Then you can be sure that the remaining team can discuss anything without any problems.
On the other hand, is it cohesion when the team is held together by outer influences?
I'm not usually a "the people in power are actively trying to keep the workers divided amongst themselves and seeing one another as the enemy, so they don't organize against the people who are actually keeping them down" sort, but in this specific case... well, there might be a bit of that going on, at least for what "political discussion" usually means in the context of SV-type workplaces.
Why can’t GitHub just provide code version control systems without concerning itself with who is writing code?
Given the recent implosion of StackOverflow, less politics in tech is probably a good thing.
Basically, it's their job to provoke and our job as a community not to take the bait.
Can anyone provide an example of Nazi code being hosted on Gitlab? It might be nice to justify what otherwise looks like an absurd comparison made by this article. What would nazi code even look like? Or is "nazi" in this case just a catch-all for wrongthink?
I don't find it too hard to draw parallels between Nazi Germany and China at the moment.
But if we are going to ban anything, we need a very clear list of what is banned, when and for how long.
We know that CloudFlare has banned all Nazi-esque/White Supremacist material. China is a communist state, and Communism (in all real world implementations) requires violent redistribution of wealth. Should GitLab or Cloudflare remove all Communist material?
Who is the arbiter for which political opinions are not allowed in tech? Or should we just neutral towards customers?
At any random point in the future they can just revoke your access to the service if they decide something you were previously doing is no longer acceptable.
So far the only pattern I see is people making up hypothetical situations and using them to claim Gitlab is complicit in enabling human rights violations. But last I checked free speech is a human right!
There are a lot of ways to influence someone. Leaving general politics at the door is good idea. You are getting paid to work - so unless you have standing of being harmed directly by company action - just do your job or quit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl
> While Zuse never became a member of the Nazi Party, he is not known to have expressed any doubts or qualms about working for the Nazi war effort. Much later, he suggested that in modern times, the best scientists and engineers usually have to choose between either doing their work for more or less questionable business and military interests in a Faustian bargain, or not pursuing their line of work at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
To clarify my point: if you open the gates to the marketplace of ideas, make sure it's an actual marketplace.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2018/10/08/stem-gems-give-girl...
[2] https://shop.gitlab.com/products/womens-rainbow-shirt
If flames take over, only the people who enjoy flaming will remain in the debate. That's a strict loss for thread quality, which is one reason for the guideline I asked everyone to remember above: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've seen people here advocating for crazy far right talking points. Eugenics, race based IQ, all sorts of crap.
It's absolutely about civility.
Course the left, the actual left, gets shut down right quick. Why? Because dang is a lib and libs are cowards.
Scratch a lib, a fascist bleeds.
Actually - worse - it's a talking point used to defang actual authoritarianism rising in the world today via false equivalence.
Ideology is the framework for politics. I don't see anything wrong with saying discussing politics (a given candidate, or a platform stance) at work is discouraged while encouraging a certain ideological stance (more people from historically marginalized communities in tech is a good thing).
There's a common phenomenon where a user's later defense of a flamebait post is often the high-quality, substantive explanation that they should have posted in the first place. I almost want to write software to replace the one with the other.
Someone pointed the phenomenon out the other day and I've noticed it all over here since: a lot of posts are great but then the last sentence goes too far, off the rails. I've been watching for it in my own posts. I think it's just hard to get the right rhetorical flourish.
(BTW, awesome job here dang. I don't know how you do it.)
It is clear how this ends up happening. When people express an opinion generally supported in the office, it is unlikely someone will complain. When someone expresses a contrary opinion, they will appear to be the one "making trouble".
What about more men as secondary school teachers, or in art, or as nurses/medical techs? There's an equal and opposite side to the women in tech debate: why not create a world where men feel like they can and should take jobs that pay less, but that can be potentially more fulfilling.
Why is there also not a push to get women into other high-income lines of male work, that are more hazardous like construction, oil rigs, truck driving?
I think that's really ignored today. Just as there are family pressures for women to take the paths they do, men similar (but different) pressures to take carers they may not want at all, in order to "provide for a family" or whatever.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't actually know if this is true? James Damore has largely been considered a political act, and James Damore was stating being skeptical of the needs of women in tech initiatives. So, if being skeptical of the initiative is a political act, wouldn't going through with the initiative (being nonskeptical) also political?
(Personally I am for women in tech initiatives, FTR, I just don't know if they're not considered political.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269
Perhaps more on point, Gitlab surely doesn't have a policy that you can't discuss anything people disagree on at work.
More specifically, an initiate that explicitly excluded non-females elicited comments that said this program was sexist and exclusionary.
It seems like in this case Gitlab is trying to avoid some of the Google/Amazon blowback for taking questionable contracts. In those cases .. tech people are in high demand. It's not that difficult for us to find work elsewhere.
That being said .. it's almost impossible to be moral in customers. Everyone company does questionable stuff, has questionable clients, mixes normal with military contracts, etc. Should Gitlab not allow projects from churches who create tools to help minister to homosexuals (in trying to convert them away from homosexuality)? Is being intolerant of the intolerant .. tolerant?
There are really complex questions here.
No matter how misguided in practice, is it even immoral for people who believe that homosexuality is immoral to try convincing gay people to change?
> There are really complex questions here.
This is the sort of question that GitLab should not be asked to answer.
It depends on the details.
On one end of the spectrum, a one-off conversation may be OK.
On the other end, there are the horrible things inflicted on gay people in the name of "conversion therapy". And many people who believe homosexuality is illegal want to keep that practice legal (or make it legal again, respectively).
This is pretty standard neoliberal politics. Just as with similar decisions at Microsoft and Palantir, this change will never come from executives. It's up to the workers to change the company's direction, and I hope they will.
It feels uncharitable to call them hypocritical without understanding what they mean.
Movements are broad, and one way of reaching the goals that people in movements seek may be through political means, but that goes for a lot of things, and there is always a lot of of other ways of reaching those goals that one can work on without bringing politics into the picture.
For example, political legislation is one way that we may bring more women into tech, but there are many other ways too. The GitLab page you linked is focusing on inspiring the next generation of women to work in tech, and telling stories about successful women inside of GitLab. I did not immediately see anything inherently political on that page, though I only skimmed through it briefly so I may have overlooked something, in which case feel free to point out any examples of anything political that you see there.
Certainly, blanket saying that talking about politics is not allowed may well turn out to lead to situations where something becomes challenging to talk about because politics may be intertwined. For example, a speaker might go into politics territory in some talk, and how should they handle that? But that could happen in any area of discussion.
Equal opportunity, equal rights, and equal treatment, which is at the core of both the women in tech and the LGBT movements, is not political. It is about human rights.
I don’t see any hypocrisy in simultaneously wanting to talk about certain issues at the company level while at the same time saying that national politics are to be avoided. But like I said, the two may intertwine more than we’d like and it could be difficult to distinguish the two in some or even a lot of cases.
The salient point being that indifference at scale is worse than individuals with explicit bias.
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2019/07/12/hannah-arendt-ri...
Soviet bloc countries didn't vote for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because of the right of citizens to leave their countries. And let's not get into the human rights of Uyghurs and the worldwide approval/disapproval to China's re-education camps.
Simple example: Religious freedom/freedom of speech and gay rights. So should the Christian baker be _forced_ to make a cake with words explicitly against his religious beliefs? Which human rights come first here?
More broadly, laws aren't worth the paper they're written on if you don't have a police and armed forces willing and able to uphold them.
I understand what your point is; I've talked to several people who voice the same opinion when discussing my country's dark past, but trust me, when the bullies get to power, you can't shout "it's a human right!" back at them. You either have to fight back, hide, or run away.
If you're employed at a desk job, you've traded much of your human right to be wherever the heck you want between the hours of 9 and 5, Monday through Friday, in exchange for a salary.
On the other hand your company telling you not to is a whole other situation. I'm not sure a policy really solves much. Anyone who wouldn't think twice before discussing such things ... probabbly isn't going to read / care about the policy.
It's one of those rules that no matter how well intentioned, I'm not sure it works well as a policy.
Look, if you morally object to this, then don't use GitLab. 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.
You know what isn't productive? Getting outraged on Twitter or Hacker News, making emotional outbursts of regurgitated sound bites and platitudes.
Genuine question: you're making a strong statement on Hacker News expressing your disagreement with how other people are acting; what do you think distinguishes this from the behavior that you're describing that makes it more 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.
Which means people aren't willing to enforce higher ethical standards as customers. So is the problem the companies, or the customers?
Joel Spolsky has a great article on Big Macs vs Naked Chef
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na...
In there, he talks about bespoke development vs mass market products, using McDonald's Big Macs vs a chef.
I think this provides a reasonable framework for approaching the present controversy.
For example, if McDonald's sold a Big Mac to <villain>, no one would bat an eye. However, if a chef went to work for <villain> there would be questions.
In the same way, if you are making a mass-market, generally useful tool, nobody should be excluded from using your tool. However, if you are doing custom, hi-touch development, then it might be more justified to screen your clients more.
I think Gitlab falls more into the mass-market, generally useful tool.
Sometimes, a company can not choose who uses their tools - e.g. if it is open source, you can hardly prevent $villain from using it. This is similar to a hammer: If $villain buys a hammer at a hardware store, the hardware store is not to blame if $villain smites people (unless maybe $villain is known to be villainous, but that's not the point right now).
On the other hand, if a known $villain comes to you, and asks you to help him commit $atrocities: You can make the decision not to help.
(So, to put it short: I think your analogy is bad).
The interesting spot is where you're selling off-the-shelf goods/ services that nobody else can provide. I would say that it's morally wrong to provide those services in that case since it's directly attributable to you that $villain did $bad_thing because of your offering, even though you had little personal involvement in the interaction.
I think this $scenario is outside the $effective area of the $metaphor.
the villain part is irrelevant. If $hero/heroine wants to buy an hammer to smite $villain, the hardware store is in the same situation: protect your safety and call the police.
If Happy Meals came with an assault riflevpeopke would probably be more angry at McDonalds for catering to bad guys.
I think the difference might be a commodity relationship; nobody would question <villain> using Windows, but a business account with Microsoft would. Even with <villain> using Windows, if it was a prominent and ongoing thing I imagine people would expect Microsoft to intervene.
[1] https://www.basf.com/global/en/who-we-are/history/chronology...
I doubt anyone (employee or otherwise) would bat an eye if ICE or the U.S. military would open a private repository on Gitlab cloud.
But Gitlab also does enterprise sales (I assume it does enterprise sales at least since they have enterprise software) - which usually means customized integration, bizdev and account management. More often than not organizations like Gitlab approach the companies to sell to them. In the case of government agencies they often can't even approach legally, Gitlab would have to apply into an open bid contract.
It is difficult to imagine a more inhuman and bloodless statement.
It's more like a pressure cooker company saying "We build kitchen tools. We don't care who buys them. We will not spend any resources vetting customers to make sure they won't blow up a marathon with our product. Yes, even neo nazis are allowed to buy our product even though we executives disagree with them politically/morally/etc."
That's an entirely reasonable stance.
This policy just says if you're the wrong somebody, you can be fired for taking about it.
We know what kind of person the CEO is and it's not good. Not a person i would ever want to associate with.
Literally anything that can affect someone's life is political.
- you think political speech isn't useful for changing the status quo
- you think the political speech that will probably take place will lead to a world worse than the status quo, in the opposite direction of which you want it to go (this doesn't just mean "I think my coworkers are of the wrong party" but also "I think the world should be less politically divided")
- you think political speech will change the world for the better, but you also just hate political speech even more than you hate the status quo
You left out a reason: that the workplace is for getting work done, not for arguing about politics.
It does not exist in a vacuum no matter how hard you try to put it there.
The workplace is a place for getting work done. Arguing about politics is not getting work done. Unless your workplace is Congress, I guess, although they seem to argue a lot but don't get any work done.
When I see people saying things like "everything is political so politics is part of the workplace", I translate that as "I would rather argue about politics than be productive". Or, alternatively, "I would rather argue about how other people should use their time and energy and money, than actually do the hard work of using my own".
Trump making it harder for h1bs to get citizenship will impact how h1b workers feel in the company.
Supreme Court deciding on if abortion should remain legal or not will impact a lot of people in their workplace.
I'm sorry, but you seem like the type of person who knows the country isnt going to drastically make it harder to live for them. It's easy for people in that position to see work as...just work.
If that's not the case with you I apologize. But what happens with politics 100 percent impacts me at work and I should be able to talk about it.
What happens with politics impacts me at work too, but my response is not to spend time talking about it at work. My response at work is to make my work valuable to my employer. My response outside of work is none of my employer's business.
Just because someone does not want to discuss something here and now, doesn't invalidate that they have original opinions. Not everything is a dichotomy all the time. Plenty of people who are not fine with the status quo don't want to discuss it at work.
If these issues, such as where you use the toilet, what you wear to work, what documentation you are provided, are relevant to your work-place, I would suggest that they are not "political" topics, but instead workplace topics and could, and should, be broached. However, I don't know GitLab's stance on this.
That being said, I do agree with you that all of these things are political, as well as who is causing the issues. However, your coworkers might not, and there might be very good reasons to continue to work with such people.
* A company might find that it's employees become toxic when political disagreements happen.
* A company might find itself alienating people with minority viewpoints.
* A company may find itself losing customers because political views discussed in the workplace is attributed to the company.
This mentality that lack of political discussion in the workplace implies agreement with the status quo has negative consequences, and makes employees feel pressured to voice support for things they don't actually support in order to avoid losing face with coworkers.
When did diversity instantiate as “if you don’t agree with X without qualifications, you’re Hitler”?
Which one will gitlab be doing?
(Edit: media name correction. Egg on my face!)