I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used once it's created. You have to let certain control go after a point. Or if your product is open to everyone, you'll have to live with the fact that people may use it in ways you disagree with.
Xerox or Canon (or whoever) probably makes copiers that ICE uses to make copies. Lenovo or Apple probably makes hardware that they use also to further their functions. Ford/GM probably supply ICE with vehicles. Farmers grow crops that get into their the meals that ICE personnel eat. Pilots and flight attendants probably have knowingly transported ICE employees.
Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees? Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to? Why is ICE the only company that they object to? Why do some causes get their favor and not others?
> Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees? Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to? Why is ICE the only company that they object to? Why do some causes get their favor and not others?
Wokeness and the recent trend of trying to cancel anything that doesn't align within a narrow spectrum of progressive viewpoints is a big reason here.
I'm sure these people have varying viewpoints across the spectrum on a variety of issues, but this is a direct contract with a client that currently has a large target on it's back. These employees agree they would prefer not to be a partner. Saying all of those who petitioned share a narrow viewpoint is reductive.
ICE is getting raked over the coals in the court of public opinion because they don't have the funding nor the manpower to deal with 100k people coming over the border each month. Many asylum seekers are just exploiting the asylum system with invalid cases as economic migrants to delay the process so they don't get sent back home. All the while congress hasn't done much at all to fix the obvious problems in the law (some of which lead to family separation in detainment), nor do reasonable things like give a pathway to citizenship for the dreamers.
Simply saying they are doing bad things is reducing the problems to a soundbite.
And both sides have been claiming it has been a problem for all of those years. Every president since Regan has talked about the problems at the border and Congress has done barely anything to both enforce the laws, and make the system smoother for immigrants.
They have the manpower, they're just doing everything as inefficiently and inhumanely as possible in order to arrive at this outcome. This is a choice that the administration is making, and ICE is implementing it.
> They have the manpower, they're just doing everything as inefficiently and inhumanely as possible in order to arrive at this outcome.
Source? Last I checked the system was still drastically in need of border patrol, immigration judges, case workers, beds to house people, etc. Those things can't just spin up in a week and be effective.
I don't have the time to look up a source at the moment, but Trump changed policy to detain immigrants until their hearing rather than releasing them. He's also keeping them in custody longer in order to force them through court proceedings rather than just deporting them.
The system was already desperately in need of resources before Trump added this strain. We could go back to an Obama-era level of need, but instead we've chosen to ramp up the problem and force this outcome.
Prior world war II the illegal immigration from Mexico was a genuine issue for America. DO you want to know how they stopped illegal immigration cold? They simply fined any business or employer who employed them severely. The problem quickly resolved itself without having to lock people up.
It is entirely possible to curtail the number of people coming here once there is NO work or services for them. It works, and we know it works, because we have done it before.
No one wants to "solve it" because our entire food supply and production (meat packing to local restaurants) is powered by illegal immigrants. Lawn care, construction, plenty of industries run on cheap (illegal) immigrant labor.
> DO you want to know how they stopped illegal immigration cold? They simply fined any business or employer who employed them severely. The problem quickly resolved itself without having to lock people up.
I'd be completely in favor of that. Especially in the recent case where ICE raided a factory in the south owned by the Koch brothers. We need congress to act on that though as AFAIK there is not a current framework to prosecute businesses for it.
> No one wants to "solve it" because our entire food supply and production (meat packing to local restaurants) is powered by illegal immigrants. Lawn care, construction, plenty of industries run on cheap (illegal) immigrant labor.
I agree. Once we stop the illegal flow we could start offering more work visas and other things to the people already here and newcomers. But without stopping the flow the people doing it the legal (hard) way are now competing against the illegal migrants leaving little incentive to do it right.
This is a very good point and I fully agree. Most migration is based on economic opportunity.
Trump is kind of a hypocrite on this point: he happily hires illegal labour because it's cheap, but then wants to put up walls politically.
FYI I believe that illegal labour is a major source of economic inequality as well: it hurts the working class the most, and the gains go to capital and middle class.
The specific concerns may be new, but the general tactics are neither new, nor specific to progressives; in fact, while the labor movement has had some notable successes with it, the general approach has been most extensively deployed in this country by, and still is extensively used by, conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives, against policies, institutions, art, personages, etc., they disapprove of.
They call it “cancel culture” when it is their ox getting gored, but it is not as if no one told them what the harvest is like when you sow the wind...
It looks like that lawsuit is alleging that prisoners only making $1-4 a day is slave labor when to my knowledge that's common in almost all prisons in the US.
The 13th amendment abolished slavery for everyone except prisoners. The fact that migrants are being treated like prison labor is evidence that they are performing slave labor.
But also other company employees are protesting! There have been news stories for multiple employee protests (including Delta refusing to deport some people)
Maybe you and GP are not seeing the stories because the outlets you read choose not to cover this
"Kids these days with their wokeness. Back in my day we didn't care about things like human rights, wealth inequality, the plights of underrepresented groups, or destroying the planet. All these damned messy ethics are interfering with business!"
All these people are saying is "I don't want people using things I make for (what I perceive to be) evil".
Aside from the compensation, anything you have implied beyond this is just augmentation derived from capitalism and acceptance of the status quo. Saying "I don't like what you are doing with the thing I am producing for you, so I may stop offering you services" is just...basic human communication. I really can't see how there is any more to this?
You speak with such absolute authority ("You have to let certain control go after a point."). However, this story (and others like it) are proof that this is untrue. Your assertion is false.
Just because somebody is an employee, it does not mean they lose all bargaining power / agency. If you are exchanging goods or services with someone else in a scenario where the power dynamic is not entirely one-sided, there is always room for negotiation. This is all that's happening.
Just because you don't care about how your stuff is used, doesn't mean that it applies to everyone.
Well put argument. A lot of posturing in comments in threads like these which try to mislead the reader into thinking that they are looking at the conflict from a higher, more rational, position.
I would think that employees at those companies would probably prefer if they weren't doing business with some of those people, but I think it is much more difficult in cases where there is just a good being purchased through retailers (there are intermediary steps).
With these kinds of contracts it feels much more akin to a partnership, so I think the feedback makes more sense. Its odd to me that we question why employees would want to have a say in how their company conducts business. Sure, its a choice for the company to make, but saying it is entitled for the employees to speak out just seems insane to me.
> You have to let certain control go after a point.
Why? If it's within your power to prevent your work from being put to use in service of something you find immoral, why not attempt to organize with like-minded workers and put a stop to it?
If you can force your company to make a choice between a contract and its workforce, you can achieve your goal. There's no reason to let things go.
> Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to?
Because they have, or may have, the power to do so. If they can take control of their work, there's no reason not to do so.
EDITED TO ADD:
> Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees?
They either don't object, or don't have the power within the company to object effectively.
This politicisation of tech that's happened at a surprisingly rapid rate since a few years ago is scary, because it threatens to split the industry and maybe even eventually society into a number of opposing factions.
I've said it before, and say it again StackOverflow has taken a huge nosedive sicne the "Time to take a stand"[1] post, where Joel stated openly that if you don't support open borders, you aren't welcome on StackOverflow.
But I think a fair point of view is that it would be GREAT if the employees of Xerox and Canon and Lenovo and Apple and Ford and the airlines and even the farmers all took the same stance as GH employees.
If that actually happened, ICE would cease to be able to function incredibly quickly.
Which would be good. This is basically the point of these protests.
> ICE would cease to be able to function incredibly quickly. Which would be good.
If you had said "ICE would be forced to reconsider its inhumane methods which have lead to its terrible reputation" - a lot more people would agree with you. There have been a number of polls done over the past year or two which show that only about 25% support abolishing ICE, the majority oppose. I think almost everyone would agree that they need to do their job with a lot more empathy and humanity, so protests are good, but the goal should be to get them to clean up their act, it would be a mistake (and not supported by the people) to try to get rid of the immigrations and customs enforcement function entirely.
I think the core idea here is: this organization is doing bad things. By not supplying them with goods and services we can stop those bad things from happening.
Whether that happens because the organization reforms or because the organization ceases to exists is a secondary concern.
>>>I think the core idea here is: this organization is doing bad things. By not supplying them with goods and services we can stop those bad things from happening.
Government programs NEVER just end, and certainly not do to simple supply disruptions. So they won't STOP doing bad things, they'll just continue to do bad things with even less resources, making the net effects even worse. Eventually you might end up with ICE detention centers that would make a FOB in Iraq look like a palace. All you need is triple-strand concertina wire, some 55-gal drums cut in half (for burning human waste), and a bunch of plywood.
"Don't ever try to stop bad people from doing bad things because if you do they will only do worse things" is not a point of view I am willing to accept.
In addition, "Government programs NEVER just end" is also obviously incorrect. Our government once had a program of segregating black people from large swaths of society. This program, thankfully, no longer exists.
Would it be really be good to prevent Homeland Security Investigations, a major division of ICE, from investigating sexual abuse of children, and rescuing children from abusive situations?
And about one of every 10 agents in Homeland Security’s investigative section — which deals with all kinds of threats, including terrorism — is now assigned to child sexual exploitation cases.
There are lots of organizations that do both good and bad things. I hear that the KKK sometimes did some good community building work in addition to lynching black people.
It is, apparently, the judgement of a large swatch of GH employees that whatever good ICE does, it is not outweighed by the bad. Given that, I believe their actions make sense.
That is completely dependent on people having an accurate assessment of the situation, and that is rarely the case in the current outrage driven political climate.
It's true that most ethical situations are not black and white.
When an organization is doing some good things, and some bad things, is the best course of action to prevent the organization from doing both good and bad things? In the case of ICE, would it not be more effective to pursue a strategy of more targeted reforms that address the unethical immigration enforcement actions without stopping the other divisions pursuing investigations into human rights violations and child exploitation cases?
My concern here is that empathy for children being negatively impacted by immigration policies, while valid, doesn't imply we should act out indiscriminately against the entire ICE organization. Balancing the needs of victims of bad immigration policies against the needs of victims of criminal activity shouldn't be a zero-sum game, and making gains for one group shouldn't come at the expense of the other.
> I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used
> Where do we start? Where do we stop?
Often when moral question pops up on HN, the top comment is some variation of
> But where do we we draw the line?
> I wonder whether we should even try.
Counterpoint: cynicism is too easy. Actually giving a shit is harder, it's uncomfortable, it involves compromise.
Yes, there's ambiguity.
Yes, the line the law draws is very loose. Github can't legally let someone from Iran or North Korea host repos, but just about anything else is legal. If Golden Dawn (the greek fascist party) wanted to use your product, nothing legally prevents you from having them as a customer.
This is no excuse to avoid the question.
Every person has to decide for themselves the boundaries of who they're willing to work for. If you work for a company, you have a voice in that company's decisions. I think many tech workers underestimate how much power they have. Good engineers are in tremendous demand.
I think you're misrepresenting the argument of people who don't think developers should interfere with the usages of their product.
The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society. What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influence for good, many other people may see as a small minority abusing their power to manipulate society for the worse.
I think many technology worker do understand the power they have, and make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice.
> The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society.
What, then, does?
Democracy is a good idea, sure. But what happens when democracy reaches a conclusion that seems obviously unjust? Do we decide that our own sense of right and wrong must be flawed? (This is a question I have no good answer to—where should we develop our sense of right and wrong?)
Moreover, historically there are many times that democracy says something is right that the people of a later era (perhaps even just a couple years later) decide was actually wrong, and that's the reason we have constitutional limits on what voters can do—but who decides what the Constitution says? We obviously need a veto over the will of the voters, but who should we trust with it?
What if instead of technical skills you have money? Is it wrong to use money in the service of influencing political goals? (In the US, neither the voters nor the Constitution believe so, by the way.) If others are influencing society with money, is it wrong to use money to counter them?
What about speech and communications media? If you have a platform (say, you're a popular entertainer or writer or talk show host), should you use it to convince others of a particular political position? If you have many listeners and your political opponents don't, is it still okay for you to speak to your listeners, or are you a minority unjustly using your influence and power?
What about weaponry? Traditionally, military might has settled many questions of whether a government should be permitted to engage in an action. Is it unjust to go to war with a country with a smaller army? Would it have been morally optimal for the US to say, we have about 5% of the world's population, the morally optimal choice is to not interfere with World War II?
I worry the argument that it's not our place to act on our principles is popular because it's easy and comfortable—keep your job, don't rock the boat—not because it's morally compelling.
And of these groups who can influence society—the politically-well-connected-200-years-ago, the rich, the media, the military, and the technical builders—if there is an argument for any of them to exert disproportionate influence, it seems to me the strongest argument would be for the builders, since technical work necessarily requires intelligence snd systems thinking more strongly than the others do. That is, if any group is to be entrusted with a veto if the rest agree and they disagree, the builders seem most likely to have a legitimate, informed, reasoned, and non-self-serving reason for the veto.
Society, incidentally, has no stories of praising people who exercised restraint when they saw an obvious injustice and the rest of the world going along with it. It usually disdains them as weak, cowardly, and opportunistic. It does have strong praise for those who took a stand even when it seemed like their position was in the minority.
> But what happens when democracy reaches a conclusion that seems obviously unjust?
In that case, we imagine a better democracy. If someone feels empathy is what makes their local democracy work better, and the further-above larger spheres of democracy no longer embody that:
We should imagine a new democracy that optimizes for empathy, no?
I'm not sure I follow concretely what is meant by "imagine a better democracy." Does it involve stopping the unjust outcomes (by persuasion, influence, or force) or just advocating a new constitutional convention at some point? And how do we make it better / "optimize for empathy" - do we change how votes are allocated and weighted? Do we enshrine empathy as a constitutional principle and ask judges to stop unempathetic laws?
Are the protesters in Hong Kong imagining a new democracy that optimizes for empathy? Did the plaintiffs in Obergefell do so? What about the soldiers at Normandy?
Is refusing to work for employers that sell to ICE part of imagining a better democracy?
> just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society.
I agree this is problematic. However, programmers are uniquely well situated to create a system for asking "the rest of society" questions about what kinds of systems they would like a programmer to support.
> make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice.
Quitting would be (as close as one gets to) refraining from exercising power. What you're describing is cooperating with the status quo, which is definitely an exercise of power.
>What you're describing is cooperating with the status quo, which is definitely an exercise of power.
Working for ICE as an engineer would be you exercising your power for ICE. But working for GitHub as an engineer, where GitHub is customer-agnostic, doesn't seem like an exercise of power to me. Anyone can use the product you build, it's not specifically for ICE. Similarly if you design a car and some cars of that design get used by ICE, that doesn't seem like an exercise of power in favor of ICE, unless you build features specifically for ICE.
Threatening to quit if GitHub continues to sell to ICE seems like an exercise of power against ICE. Silently quitting and not telling anyone why you quit I would consider a very slight exercise of power against ICE, because over time if it happens enough, businesses that deal with ICE will be less competent that businesses that don't deal with ICE, and that will harm ICE slightly.
I agree with all that I think working on a thing is continuing to bring it into being. Declining to have an opinion is the same as agreeing with the current planned direction.
In that sense, continuing to work for github forwards the net moral "output" of its work. Each wrong or right is weighted differently and though I think we can all agree that there is a direction amplitude is harder.
I just want to add that, in the same sense that quitting github quietly is a tiny blow against ICE, continuing to work for github silently is also clearly supportive of ice. Actions are rarely totally morally neutral, which is ok as long as we don't pretend they are.
>make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice
Don't you think the FSF exists as a huge counterpoint to this? The FSF deliberate makes the decision that copyleft is the morally optimal choice and forces others to comply - and I'd imagine more developers view the FSF as a good thing.
It forces developers to comply, but it doesn't impose any restrictions on the users of the software. In fact it forces developers to not impose any restrictions on the users of the software.
Your distinction between "users" and "developers" is meaningless to me. Why does FSF get to make that distinction, but GitHub cannot do the same for "ICE" and "other humans".
All in all, the FSF is arguing for restrictions about how one class of individuals may use what they produce and for the benefit of the other class. Just like how FSF prevents other developers from using their products to lock other users out of their software, similarly, the employees are asking to prevent ICE from using their products against the questionable imprisonment of other human beings.
But I think the main difference lies in that copyleft limits itself purely to the realm of controlling how modified software is distributed. The only thing it limits is how modified software is distributed. The only thing it requires is how modified software is distributed. When a developer writes software to be used by others, it's necessary for the developer to decide how to distributed it, and copyleft provides an answer. Copyleft doesn't venture past the developer's necessary role.
On the other hand, limiting providing stuff to ICE ventures out of the developer's necessary question of how to distribute software and now starts thinking about human suffering, jails, politics, etc. You've gone past the question of how to distribute software, and are now thinking about broader topics.
> What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influence for good, many other people may see as a small minority abusing their power to manipulate society for the worse.
Nevermind "good" or "bad" by the select judgement of a few privileged people -- it's whether you even bother to _consider_, or instead just claim "this is hard".
We can create influencing machines, or consensing machines. Your rightful concern is applicable to influencing machines imho. A consensing machine has no centre it's drawing people into. It's a technology for users to find and coalesce around the centres that work for them.
The things the OP is implying unnavigable are the same class of challenges we navigated hundreds of years ago with intellectual property. We thought ownership was worth controlling access over, and we made arbitrary laws to propagate that regime in the world. We could deign it worth creating processes to collectively negotiate moral right/wrong together (without presupposing the will of the steward of the tech is right/wrong) and hold ourselves to that.
The fact that we don't even bother to consider the question of "should we do this" and instead fall on "this is challenging" -- that speaks volumes to how some of us are limited in our imagining of what the sickness in society might be.
The question of what's right and wrong is a topic for religion and theologists.
I don't mean that in a cynical or nasty way. As the years go by I get more convinced that the rise of atheism is causing some of our biggest problems in western society, and I'm not religious myself. But it seems that for all its flaws, Christianity at least was an infrastructure of people and principles that hung together in some vaguely coherent manner such that people could pose the question "Is this right? Is this good?" and either answer it themselves by reference to a book, or ask it of a full time moraliser (priest).
The reason the OP is expressing unease at this kind of tech worker "morality" is because it's wafer thin in a way that makes medieval theology look like a towering pinnacle of intellectualism.
They aren't making moral judgements of their customers consistently. ICE is targeted only because a bunch of journalists started covering it extensively as part of their anti-Trump agenda. ICE did similar things before Trump but they weren't in the news, so GitHub workers ignored it.
Moreover their morality isn't universal. ICE is bad because it hurts people who only want a better life. OK, so, should there be no borders at all? What happens then to all the American workers in marginal jobs who suddenly lose their income because an immigrant willing to live in practically sub-Saharan conditions took their job? That worker only wanted a better life too, do they not matter? If not why not? Is it because they're white and GitHub workers are racist against whites? What about other border control agencies? What about governments in general?
Christian religious morals are very far from ideal but at least make a show of being universal. You forgive those who trespass against you - it doesn't matter who they are or what they did. You forgive them. You are the good Samaritan who helps those in need. Doesn't matter who they work for. You love your neighbour. Doesn't matter if they voted for the other guy.
You're arguing that tech workers should engage with morality as if it's any other hard question that can be whiteboarded out in a few hours. But tech workers have got nothing to say on this topic that hasn't already been said hundreds of years ago. They have no special insights to provide. The rigour of their moral logic is trivial compared even to a bunch of men in funny clothes reading stories about camels out of a book written anonymously 2000 years ago. Why shouldn't they be reminded of this?
That is a brilliant synthesis of the crux of the issue. Our community is powerful and full of their own virtue while simultaneously largely disconnected from issues they so protest about. No actual skin in the game, so much power, so much certainty. Its a recipe for disaster.
On the other hand, I'm one of those Free Software guys that believes that the software I write should be able to be used by anyone, for any purpose. One of the problems with causing shit storms in at your place of employment because they don't follow your preferred political views is that these views are divergent.
No matter what thing you are talking about, whether technical or political decision, a decision has to be made. Once it is made, as an employee, I think you've got to either go with it or decide to go somewhere else (perhaps starting your own company if you need to). I say this as a person who obviously holds a minority point of view in most of the companies I've worked for ;-)
At the end of the day, you've got to decide if you are aligned with the ideals of the employer you work for or not. Making suggestions is one thing, but trying to put political pressure on your employer to act in a particular manner is something I would advise people to refrain from.
The problem is few vocal employees can set the tone which comes out in public as if every employee at that company is against it. I don't think that should be the case and only the shareholders should voice/vote on companies decisions. And shareholders will always vote for what helps the bottom line. Look at what happened in NY where few vocal politicians voted out Amazon's HQ.
The argument is not "too hard to draw a line, so we should not do it", it is "too hard to draw a line, which means it is arbitrary, lacking in legitimacy, and prone to corruption."
Engineers are a powerful class of people with the opportunity to swing their weight around on political issues like this. Some believe this opportunity should be seized for good, others believe it is just a soft form of tyranny, an undemocratic exercise of power. This is particularly true when in your own country, where you ought to use the power of the vote to make a difference.
If part of the reason that employees at companies like Github get equity is to foster a sense of ownership, it's no surprise that employees concern themselves with the larger picture.
The moment salaried employee start sabotaging his job and putting his views against his job description - it's clearly time for him to reconsider employment at a place that better matches his priorities.
GH employees don't just get a salary but also equity. So in addition to being employees they are, in fact, owners of the company. It seems perfectly fair for a company owner (even a small one) to voice an opinion about how the company operates.
> I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used once it's created. You have to let certain control go after a point. Or if your product is open to everyone, you'll have to live with the fact that people may use it in ways you disagree with.
Well if a business fostered a culture where it's deemed acceptable to question who the business should or shouldn't be working with, nobody can blame the employees for doing exactly what they were incentivized to do.
Plenty of businesses would fired a rebellious employee on the spot without a second thought, or at the very least ask him to resign if he dares question managements on a matter that is neither legally questionable or related to the employee's work conditions, for instance, a group of employees that would be asking management to boycott a certain country.
Seems it is a different culture at GitHub,Google or Facebook where apparently questioning management is a virtue.
I see nothing wrong with that. It's their own doing.
GitHub doesn’t sell product in the same way as your examples. They are a service provider. I’d say different dynamics come in with services (hosting content, providing and managing infrastructure, providing support and maybe even consulting) vs products.
Also for people who draw comparison with discrimination against individuals: Companies, agencies and organizations aren’t “discriminated” against in the same sense as individuals. I am not aware of any legislation where it’s considered wrongly discriminatory to decline B2B contracts.
There is a difference between a) offering something (for free or gain) ubiquitously to the world at large regardless of any of the myriad ways we choose to distinguish one from another and b) have an arrangement with a specific entity to further their specific cause.
I'm not under the impression that gitlab employees are complaining about the first (surely ICE employees and contractors can make use of the myriads of repositories gitlab makes available to the world at large). They are reacting negatively to specific contracts gitlab has with ICE.
I don't think there is some "special right" at work here. I think some people who work at Github have decided that they don't like a deal their employer made, and presumably if said employer is trying to "quell employee anger" then enough of their employees must be angry enough to move the needle for their business.
This is fine, because employees are not in principle slaves. They do have a right to tell their employers to go fuck themselves "at will", just as the opposite is true. Anybody who takes a stand like this is exercising a privilege that not everybody enjoys, sure, but you're running with that in a suppressive direction (why should Github employees get to be special if not everyone can be special, and by the way (gasp) what if they aren't perfectly logical and fair in their activism?) while I'd go the other way: in an ideal world everybody would enjoy this privilege, and any workers who can take a stand for what they believe in certainly should.
The alternative is that corporate leaders alone are responsible for imposing ethics on the markets they play in, and we all know the sorts of decisions such people tend to make.
Why not let workers who want to "pressure" GitHub exercise their First Amendment rights and quit?
At the same time GitHub should absolutely pay a bit more to get engineers who don't care about this issue.
We don't need to censor employees, and at the same time we shouldn't expand the moral opinions of a vocal minority of opinions to be automatically indicative of what GitHub "should" do. What Github "should" do is replace these employees who are exercising their right to quit.
The comments here seem very negative compared to e.g. the Google employee protests over Project Dragonfly. [1]
There are two questions here: whether GitHub should allow ICE to buy its software, and whether employees should influence the direction of their company via protests, petitions, and threats to quit.
GitHub specifics aside, I think employees absolutely should organize and quit over issues they feel strongly about (at least when they have the flexibility to find other jobs). Company policy should be guided by the people who work there, and the a company's leadership structure is set up well to resolve the conflict.
Thats because HN is a US-based website, and that automatically entails "US = good, China = bad" comments. (Even though in this case both US and China = bad)
The important distinction is that Project Dragonfly was being built to serve a single customer and purpose, both of which employees were not comfortable with. GitHub is built to serve any customer and has a defined purpose that is generally useful. Employees are now uncomfortable with their generally useful tool being used as intended by a customer they do not approve of.
> The results of GitHub’s quarterly anonymous employee survey — which showed a decline in trust of leadership ...
In 100% of cases where I've known a small company that got bought by a much bigger company, this has occurred. It's amazing anyone still believes that their small company can get bought and somehow they'll be able to preserve (what they think is) their "company culture".
Yes. I’ve worked at a couple of companies now where this has happened. It’s really hard for founders to let go of their “baby” and as such, there’s a lot of rationalization that goes into the decision when they sell the company or go public.
One of the common ones is that they will have a large enough say to keep the culture of the small company intact and often say things like “we’re just going to continue being ourselves but with more funding or resources or XYZ so it’s really great!”
In the end, they don’t accept the fact that the larger company’s values/culture is their company now and they can try to enact change as much as they want but they are no longer the key decision maker for the company overall.
For a public company at scale, it’s incredibly hard to 1.) grow exponentially or greatly and 2.) keep the hiring bar high enough to maintain your culture. There’s a trade-off made there that you’re public & you cannot slow growth at the risk of upsetting shareholders but it’s a catch-22 cause you can’t also let your salaries go out of control to hire the right talent for your culture cause you have to explain that cost increase to your stakeholders.
Fair point. I’m not sure if they did, or simply believed the benefits (financial and otherwise) of being bought outweighed the loss of company culture. They at least seemed to, in my experience.
JWZ — or maybe Spolsky — wrote about (a more general case of) this. You can either grow fast, or maintain company culture. You can’t do both.
Being bought by a larger company is just one case of growing really fast all at once.
Stripe acquired Indie Hackers two and a half years ago, and I love it. I get ample support and encouragement, while also retaining my freedom to run the community how I see fit. Most IHers would also tell you that the site has improved since then.
One of the many keys is aligned incentives and values. If there's even a small 1-2 degree difference in the direction you and your acquirer would like to head in, that gap will widen into a vast chasm given enough time.
Also, kudos to the leadership at Stripe. They're intelligent, well-meaning, and they get it.
I don't think we should dismiss your argument so quickly just because Stripe isn't a large corporation. I'd be interested to know more about the approach Stripe took. I'd imagine there are plenty of mistakes to make regardless of company size.
I'd also like to point out that a small company can be so toxic that the employees would welcome any change in leadership -- because anything different can bring temporary relief.
Huh? GitHub’s company culture has been described as toxic way before they were acquired - not at least here. The problem seems to be exactly that they’ve managed to preserve that. Kudos to the employees speaking up though!
I'm not sure if I would characterise it as toxic? There is obviously disagreement. But my impression has always been "this is a company where people have values other than technology & money, and are empowered to speak up". The alternative isn't really never having disagreements, but rather being secretive and vindictive to the point where employees fear to speak up, or consider it useless in the face of corporate bureaucracy and unaccountability. <side-eyes to IBM>
I'd like to get a feel about what volume of employees have an issue with these things.
From issue to issue I hear about various forms of employees making themselves heard but it is REALLY hard to jive with what that means.
We've seen Google employees post about some ideas that seemed to be genuinely popular (measure that how you will...) but later ideas or advocacy were reportedly far less supported by the general employees, but news reports seem to reports that don't know / specify make it sound like issue to issue "employee anger" is somehow uniform / equally supported each time.
I've worked enough places to see a popular topic / concern taken by the same employee advocates into new topics that very much were not popular.
I also have to wonder what percentage of GitHub’s employees _are_ non-US citizens. Every programming job I’ve ever had in the U.S. was for a company that was staffed by at least 90% foreigners; if they see U.S. immigration as an adversary, they may be opposing any contract on personal grounds.
And I don't think one should restrict that reasoning to only the foreign-born employees. Native-born US citizens working side-by-side with employees who have regular contact with our immigration process get a second-row seat to how broken it is.
(Spoilers: personal observation, it's pretty broken.)
> Every programming job I’ve ever had in the U.S. was for a company that was staffed by at least 90% foreigners.
Where the hell are you working? I'm going to call bullshit, because it's really not that easy to get a work visa in the US. You're saying 90% of your colleagues weren't US citizens?
At every large company where I have worked (Intel, Qualcomm, Google, Facebook) the majority of my colleagues have been non-citizens. In some cases (Qualcomm SD, Google) 100% of the people on my team were non-citizens.
It's heavily team-dependent. I was on a team at Google where I was the only American citizen, with teammates from Iceland, England, Vietnam, India (4), Taiwan (2), and China (2). I was also on a team where there were basically zero non-citizens, and most of my teammates were from places like Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc.
Teams do self-segregate. What often happens is that the team manager ends up recruiting people they are comfortable with, which in practice means recruiting people who are culturally similar. If the team grows, the same dynamic works on the next level of managers, and so on. So immigrant managers tend to recruit other immigrants, native-born managers tend to recruit other native-born Americans, and so on. The manager of the first team was an Icelandic immigrant; the manager of the second was an American-born person of Indian descent.
A similar dynamic works on sex, as well. About half of the teams I worked at were roughly 40% women; the other half of them had zero women. Women are generally reluctant to join a team where they will be the only woman, and also word gets around about who the female-friendly managers are. So those female-friendly managers get teams that are close to 50% female, while other managers get teams of zero women. (Statistically, Google Engineering was about 10% female and IIRC 50-60% foreign-born, which means that I encountered about twice as many women that I would've been predicted to and about half as many foreigners. I wonder what that says about my personality.)
Pretty much true for most large tech companies, at least in the SF Bay Area. I've worked at 2 large and 1 small tech co and it was only the small company that had mostly US citizens (mostly because of the cost of dealing with immigration lawyers etc)
Will people please consider a moment's thought before using this adolescent phrase? People throwing it around are probably not using it with its most precise and defensible meaning (a la Harry Frankfurt). So the most charitable alternative gloss is that it's used carelessly to mean someone is just wrong. It's a very poor (because ambiguous) word choice for that. I suspect it's usually deployed to suggest someone is lying, for which you need specific evidence beyond believing a statement to be incorrect. That evidence is very rarely available in an HN comment.
It's hard to be thoughtful about using language, and I'm no exemplar. But a good start is just avoiding reflexively spitting out some rarely useful prefabricated phrases. This is one.
My current team is at least 80% foreign-born-and-rasied, myself included, but I don't know everyone's immigration status. But this is the "whitest", most American team I've worked with in the last 8 years in Silicon Valley. Prior to that I was in the mid-west and I was the only foreign engineer.
One of my first SW jobs (mid-scale startup in Palo Alto) I had multiple canadians on my team and we had some chinese and indian immigrants on other teams. I wouldn't say 90%, but a sizable percentage.
At other companies like Google and Microsoft I've had plenty of immigrant colleagues along with colleagues at offices overseas. Some eventually choose to return to their home country, some migrate here after starting at the employer.
The main game studio I worked for also had lots of chinese and korean immigrants on staff, but I suspect that was influenced by the parent company being korean.
You're assuming that legal immigrants from around the world working high paid tech jobs have common cause with "illegal" immigrants coming across the southern border.
There are massive logistical challenges with processing mass influxes of immigrants into a country, particularly people who are coming through outside of the legal process.
I would think a large contingent of GitHub employees want the people working at ICE to be using the best tools possible to achieve their mission. Many are probably quite proud of US government agencies using their tools, the same as if NASA or Executive Branch or Congress was using Github.
IMO it’s a very difficult situation when certain employees are arranging political protests against specific customers of the company, and making other employees uncomfortable to express their own potentially divergent viewpoints.
Every non-citizen I know keeps their head down and doesn't express their personal opinions on political matters (particularly relating to ICE) because they don't want to jeopardize their visa. It would be strange and kinda stupid for a foreign programmer on an H1B to oppose a contract with ICE because they do eventually want to get that Green Card and eventually citizenship, and they know who holds the power in that relationship.
(It's also amusing to see that sometimes shift when they get their citizenship; I had a Japanese classmate in college who was on first a student visa, then an H1B, then a green card for about 15 years. He had zero political opinions for the whole time I knew him. As soon as he got his citizenship, he's active in local politics. It's more about urban planning, transit, and YIMBY efforts than immigration, though.)
You are correct. As someone who used to be on very restrictive visas for a while - your job is not “just a job” anymore. It was very much a source of constant stress for me knowing that political shifts at work or a terrible boss could very well send you packing in a matter of days.
This will be less likely to shift in the coming years, since the US government is openly investigating the ability to revoke citizenship. It's depressing to see, but I guess it shouldn't be surprising because the US approach to citizenship - birthright and/or naturalization - is not universally the case in other countries.
a lot of non citizens support ice because if they are working at a company like github they got here legally and don’t see it as fair that others just get to skip the line
I deeply suspect that large swathes of the employees at a lot of these large companies don't really care either way.
As with any large community of people, there are some who are more vocal than others. Call them what you want (protestors/agitators/woke/etc), but I get the feeling that they're getting a disproportionately large amount of focus from the media and I guess management.
Certainly in my experience at an unnamed employer, the first I heard about protests and problems at my work place was when I read about it on the internet - there was nothing in my immediate workplace at all to suggest any of what was reported was actually even happening, let alone pervasive.
> Call them what you want (protestors/agitators/woke/etc), but I get the feeling that they're getting a disproportionately large amount of focus from the media and I guess management.
Explicitly so. Loud voices make headlines, headlines get clicks, clicks get ad revenue. The entire industry is geared to produce maximum clicks and, ergo, maximum loud voice. This has been the theme for a while now.
The issue, though, is that Management can ignore a couple of angry cranks -- or just fire them -- but they can't avoid news articles.
It's obviously the small noisy minority. Most people don't have any expectation that their employer should have anything like a coherent moral vision; they just want to do their job, get their paycheck, and go home.
Even names on a petition don't mean much - the kind of people that like to solicit for signatures on petitions are often so insufferable that you sign to make them go away and leave you in peace.
About a quarter of the company has signed the protest letter. I signed the letter just so people would stop nagging me to sign. I don’t care about ICE. I suspect there are others who got pressured into signing.
That’s amazing to me. It seems to me like creating a hostile work environment and a form of harassment, although political rallying is not a protected category, and the employer is likely hamstrung in making any sort of response.
I wonder about that, too - how far will the rabble-rousers go, if they can get away with it? Will they insist on the firing of the people who _didn’t_ sign the petition? Will they blacklist people who have ever worked with ICE in the future? Will this spread beyond github? Will we have an unelected, unaccountable group of “the woke” dictating the terms of our employment?
"I was just doing my job" is not an excuse. It is absolutely not only our right to decide how our work is used in the world, but our duty to make sure we're not enabling human rights violations. I applaud and support tech workers making ethical calls around their work. Unfortunately we may need to put our money where our mouths are and leave employers that refuse to stand by any ethical code, and that's already happening all across the tech industry.
But how is Github's product enabling human rights violations? I can understand if Github employees were protesting a product that created human rights violations (for example if Github offered a security service for ICE detention centers that was abusing prisoners). Would you be ok if Github was a restaurant and it had a policy of not serving anyone who is an ICE employee?
Hello, I'm a real boy! I happen to support both of these positions, but it is indeed possible to condemn ICE without feeling the same about the GOP in general, and jumping immediately from one to the next is exactly the kind of thing people mean when they talk about moving the goalposts.
I just wanted to see if dunstad would support such a ban. And they did, as you can see by their agreement. This shows how real that slippery slope is for many people...
You are right - I always forget that political affiliation is not a protected class within our legal system. However, I think it should be, because we've seen the whole ugly side of persecution and discrimination that came about during the McCarthy era and beyond where people like MLK, Chaplin, WEB Du Bois, and Linus Pauling were targeted for their political beliefs.
Can you point to some sources so I can understand how they are concentration camps? I’ve been to Dachau and nothing on the news shows anything like what I saw there.
> In 2019, many experts, including Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, have acknowledged the designation of the detention centers as "concentration camps" [227] [228] particularly given that the centers, previously cited by Texas officials for more than 150 health violations [229] and reported deaths in custody,[230] reflect a record typical of the history of deliberate substandard healthcare and nutrition in concentration camps.[231] Though some organizations have tried to resist the "concentration camp" label for these facilities, [232] [233] hundreds of Holocaust and genocide scholars rejected this resistance via an open letter addressed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [234]
There always seems to be a conflation of concentration camps with Nazi death camps in these discussions. ICE running concentration camps (a facility for holding "people, commonly in large groups, without charges") seems wholly unremarkable.
Judging by the definition of "internment" linked from that wiki page....Japan runs "concentration camps", as it regularly imprisons people without charges and without trial for up to 23 days, under harsh conditions.
Seems like a pretty low bar for defining the term, and obscures the pretty real distinctions in overall human suffering that occur at different places.
Do we know that Github is being used to enable human rights violations, and that their use of Github for potentially negative actions outweighs potentially beneficial actions, given that ICE has a wide variety of responsibilities beyond immigration enforcement?
For example, it seems reasonable to guess that they might be using their Github deployment to help run the National Child Victim Identification System:
The National Child Victim Identification System (NCVIS), owned by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is an application that assists federal, state, local, and international law enforcement agencies, INTERPOL, and other supporting organizations, such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) (hereafter, authorized partners) in the investigation and prosecution of child exploitation crimes, specifically those involving images of child sexual exploitation.
Topics like this, I think, give us an opportunity to go deeper on the issues and concepts surrounding what's going on.
I realize that the common quick answer these days is to harshly reject people and organizations we deeply disagree with.
But, there may be some things worth pondering, like...
Is there a way technology companies can influence these organizations and the situations of the people they touch for the better? For example, ICE is going to do what's it's going to do whether or not GitHub has a contract with them. Is there a way that technologies from companies can help ICE and organizations like it treat the people they deal with better? Does that make a difference?
I'm not suggesting an opinion on this particular case. Just offering this up as an opportunity to go deeper than we tend to these days.
> Is there a way that technologies from companies can help ICE and organizations like it treat the people they deal with better?
One thing GitHub could have done, if it was serious about its "but ICE also stops human trafficking and terrorists" narrative, is insisted on selling them professional services / consulting work (perhaps at a discount - they'd already decided to donate more than the revenue of the contract, so working for ICE out of the goodness of their hearts is definitely not out of the question) which let them understand what teams and projects at ICE are using their work and how. But in their letter to employees, they listed it as a positive that they weren't doing this, they just gave ICE the product and told them to have fun. https://github.blog/2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-deve...
"GitHub does not have a professional services agreement with ICE, and GitHub is not consulting with ICE on any of their projects or initiatives. GitHub has no visibility into how this software is being used, other than presumably for software development and version control."
I think if you believed you could make some change for the better working within the system, the way to start is by, first, deciding what your principles are and what your approach is when your customer wants to be at odds with that (refuse to support projects you disagree with? try to change hearts and minds? etc.) in a codified way and getting agreement within the company on it, and second, insisting on a close enough consulting relationship where you can enforce that. (I also suspect that unless you have an uncommonly good product, most customers won't be a fan and will just buy from someone else.)
Also GitHub, being a platform and not a direct tool for work, isn't really in a great position to influence ICE's work. "You can check in the code you use to track terrorists, but not the code you use to track DACA recipients" isn't particularly technically meaningful.
Arguing that “they’ll do it anyway” is why IBM supported the holocaust, why companies like NSO sell to to human rights rights abusers, etc.
The argument basically boils down to supporting literally anything. If enough people start saying “no, we won’t support that”, it pushes up the price of the behaviour, and could eventually lead to the entire industry dropping support - for example when all the pharmaceutical companies decide to stop allowing their drugs to be used for executions.
>Is there a way technology companies can influence these organizations and the situations of the people they touch for the better?
What? With the ethical compass those surveillance system running, addiction-pushing assholes have? We should be talking about how to dial down their power in society.
If they want to repent for their lack of self control in their own actions by pushing their moral standards onto others, then they can go get fucked.
I think it's not restricted to White Nationalism. We see a lot of pushback against Hong Kong nationalism and Catalonian nationalism and Uyghur nationalism and Kurdish nationalism recently.
It's as if the forces of good suddenly decided that any nationalism is unacceptable in 2019.
That is surely in the mix. To me, its about human decency. I support immigration, but even if you do not support immigration you should support human decency. Making people sleep in cages on concrete, limiting supplies, limiting legal assistance, separating families - those are horrible ways to treat other humans, other humans simply seeking a better life.
We are largely a nation of immigrants. We've lost sight of our roots. Its proper to stand up against this inhumane and unnecessary behavior. The government is experiencing social consequences of its own making.
I think the problem is an attribution of intent. You see "white nationalism" but:
> Making people sleep in cages
There was a spike in the number of illegal immigrants in the last few years, facilities were swamped. This was an unfortunate but temporary measure. It would be more irresponsible to just release people into the country without establishing their identity, criminal history, or a suitable guardian (for children).
> Limiting supplies / legal assistance
There are a finite resources, especially when one party sees every penny spent on immigration matters as "racist". Politicians were sounding the alarms months before this reached crisis-levels, but the other side refused to release a single penny until after it reached critical levels.
> Separating families
When an adult and a child arrive illegally with no documents you have two major facts to deal with: the adult has just broken a law, and you cannot establish familial ties. Given the extent of child trafficking, would you rather just give any adult that says "that's my child" custody, or would you rather separate the child from the adult until you can establish if that is actually a parent? You are damned either way because your critics will say you're "separating families" or "you're a pedophile helping traffic children". Personally, I would rather be told I'm splitting families than enabling child trafficking, but I could see the argument against that preference.
So at the end of the day none of these things are happening because of white nationalism. They are happening because of an inability to control illegal immigration rates, a lack of funding for facilities, materials, and legal aid; and in order to protect minors who may be trafficked.
To me, that is the real problem. One side of the media/political spectrum has decided it's white nationalism. The other sees it as something that has to be done because the alternative is worst. And to be charitable, I am sure there is a tiny fraction of a percent of a segment of the population and people involved who are white nationalists, but to think that's the motivating force is to dismiss the vast majority of people who have good intentions.
What is also exponentially annoying is that both sides have become so polarized that they will never work together on this.
I didn't actually use the words 'white nationalism' and tried to make a different point about decency without blaming any one group other than maybe those that oppose immigration. There are other options besides putting people in cages, we could make it easier and much quicker to accept them legally for example. To me, its not so much about white people, its about how we choose to handle immigration. Current immigration rates are far from unprecedented, https://www.history.com/news/immigrants-ellis-island-short-p....
We could choose to do things differently and treat people with the dignity and respect that we all deserve as humans. No matter the color of our skin.
How weird that you didn't mention asylum in this entire post, not even once. You keep talking about "illegal immigrants" and "breaking the law", completely ignoring the fact that claiming asylum is legal.
Many of these people who were being caged are people who claimed asylum at the border points of entry; they were not illegal immigrants, nor did they try to sneak in. The correct thing to do in this situation of not having enough room would be to release them into the country pending their asylum hearing, rather than locking them up in substandard, inhumane, occasionally deadly accommodations.
About 20-30,000 people are granted asylum each year, versus about 60,000-100,000 people a month apprehended at the southern border by CBP. The vast majority of “inadmissibles” are not qualified refuges.
> The asylum seeker must prove to the officer that there is a “significant possibility” he or she is eligible for asylum, and must also be subject to a credibility assessment. If the officer makes a positive finding, the asylum seeker is referred to an immigration court where they will have the opportunity to apply for asylum before an immigration judge. If the individual does not meet the credible fear screening standard, he or she can be deported.
That process ideally happens in a few days, but a system to designed to handle 5,000 people a month getting 100,000 requests a month is going to take longer. In the meantime, those applicants cannot simply be released into the interior.
The onus is on Congress to appropriate the necessary funding to allow for expedited and humane treatment and proper facilities for processing the number of people who are crossing. As long as Congress refuses to provide the funds, the agencies are left to enforce the nations immigration laws without the proper resources, staffing, or even possibly basic sanitation, bedding, clothes, etc.
> There was a spike in the number of illegal immigrants in the last few years, facilities were swamped. This was an unfortunate but temporary measure.
It is still going on. It is not okay.
> It would be more irresponsible to just release people into the country without establishing their identity, criminal history, or a suitable guardian (for children).
They are not keeping people until they "established their identity". There is not a process where they keep people asking for asylum locked up only until they establish their identity and no longer, that's just not how it works.
These are weird excuses for taking people fleeing danger imprisoning them in truly abominable conditions, for the sin of asking for asylum.
"These things" are happening because the government intentionally decided to treat people asking for asylum _as bad as they could_, in order to discourage people from doing it, and look good to those who just want to treat them bad. This is all well-documented. It was not some kind of forced hand, the level of asylum seekers and other migrants was not substantially different from the past couple decades. Whether it was because of "white nationalism" I suppose depends on what was in the hearts and minds of the decision-makers, but it's pretty darn clear they consciously decided to treat migrants like animals (worse than you are allowed to treat pets really) and it is disgusting, and it is TERRIFYING to me that so many Americans like you think it's okay, because if it's okay to treat anyone like that, why couldn't any of us be next?
We are setting a terrible precedent on the international stage for how people fleeing danger are treated. That's a lot of false confidence that nobody we know will ever be in that situation. More and more of us will be though.
>>>the level of asylum seekers and other migrants was not substantially different from the past couple decades.
What's your source for this? This site[1] indicates otherwise (even the 10-year chart shows a huge growth in applications). And this article[2] states 800,000 people detained so far this year. I'm sure ICE and CBP's infrastructure and processes were never meant to handle populations of this size. Also, note that in [2] many of these people are asylum shopping.
>>>We are setting a terrible precedent on the international stage for how people fleeing danger are treated.
The precedent has already been set: impoverished people the world over know that if they are willing to accept some risk, they can lie their way into the US and get free stuff. People are kidnapping kids so they can pretend they are family. Migrants from central Africa have NGOs providing them with French-language documents on not cooperating with ICE or the US government. These people are buying plane tickets to Brazil, then taking buses ALLLLLL the way up Central America (lots of places to stop and apply for asylum there) so they can illegally cross the border into the US. Who is paying the salaries for these NGOs? And WHY? Those are the hard questions that aren't being asked. The narrative is one that appeals to empathy in order to obscure deeper issues.
Look at this article[4]. It tries to paint a picture that the rights of African migrants are somehow being infringed upon because Mexico is not enabling them to move onward to the US. But this is specifically discouraged once you are out of your country of origin and no longer in immediate danger.[5] So again, ask yourself, why is this narrative being pushed? And why now?
Because if you haven't noticed, there is a general sense among the younger generations that the many, many ills of yesteryear are actually bad, not just "business as usual" and instead of tolerating them we should start to fight back.
The people who are carrying the torch of this mentality were teenagers and twenty-something during the Obama administration. Now they are all grown ups.
The better question is, why were Boomers so willing to go along with these policies (and far worse) for decade after decade?
Oh BS. It’s clearly apparent over the last few election cycles that if your side does something, “it’s unfortunate, but we’re trying to fix it” and if the other side does something “they are horrible people who are monsters”.
It comes down to nothing more than scoring political points.
I'm curious what side you perceive standardUser to be on. They are making the case that this wasn't acceptable under the Obama administration either to younger generations, but they lacked the political power and voice to do anything about it. Voice and political power that they are now finding as they age into voting enfranchisement and build political action blocs.
Bush started Guantanamo as an extrajudicial prison and stocked it full of prisoners. Obama managed to release many of those prisoners and tried (and failed) to shut it down.
Obama got plenty of criticism from the left for things like drone strikes, extrajudicial killings, deportations, the intervention in Libya, the weakness of Obamacare and TPP to name a few. Most of this was during his second term (when that massive group of people I keep mentioning started becoming politically active).
> Gitmo’s a great example. Under Bush it was immoral. Under Obama? Barely heard a thing.
Anecdotes are just that. Just because you weren't paying attention to it doesn't mean it didn't happen.]
Left wing media I paid attention to definitely did not drop the issue of Guantanamo during that time. Just google some common sites - MotherJones, commondreams, Obama, and Guantanamo and you will see the criticism did not disappear for Obama not forcing the issue to an unwilling Congress.
> Gitmo’s a great example. Under Bush it was immoral. Under Obama? Barely heard a thing.
Your history is off. Obama tried to shut it down until it was overturned by Congress.
As soon as the political reality of transferring the prisoners became apparent, all Congressmen blocked the closure of Gitmo. No one wanted to take the prisoners into their own state. No one wanted to be the Senator or Representative to say "I accepted 100 Al-Qaeda detainees into our local prisons! And now our local judges have to put into public trial under our protection, with jury members selected from our State / Cities"
So on the one hand, we had President Bush literally open Gitmo. In the other hand, we have President Obama who tried to close it... but failed because of other more powerful political forces. And yet, you draw a false equivalence between the two.
EDIT: This hits a political pet peeve of mine. False equivalence and whataboutisms. Instead of seeing the differences, a political group deploys propaganda to get their side to believe that there's a false-equivalence on an issue.
And now that you're aware of false-equivalences, I hope that moving forward you'll be better equipped to avoid them in the future. Its an exceptionally powerful propaganda technique. In general, if a group is desperately deploying propaganda to make you believe that two things are equivalent... they probably aren't equivalent.
"On 20 May 2009, the United States Senate passed an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009 (H.R. 2346) by a 90–6 vote to block funds needed for the transfer or release of prisoners held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp" [0]
Your sarcasm is noted, but I don't believe it is in the spirit of this forum to talk in that manner. Its much better to leave the sarcasm in Reddit.
If you do not wish to discuss a matter seriously, then there's no real point in discussing it at all. This website mostly aims at a higher level of discussion than other websites.
I think it's a mistake to look at "the last few election cycles".
The people making all of this noise were children during that time. Just about everything has changed in the last 5 or so years, and a lot of that change appears to be driven by the historically massive and historically diverse Millennial generation.
That's absurd. Politics changes all the time, we just happen to be in a more tumultuous moment than in the last 3 or 4 decades. Nothing spectacularly unique, but different enough across countless metrics to warrant a fresh look at the very least. The trends and patterns we relied on for many decades just don't stand up any longer.
> many, many ills of yesteryear are actually bad, not just "business as usual" and instead of tolerating them we should start to fight back
And somehow that moment of clarity by pure coincidence happened on January 20, 2017? Sorry, not buying that particular bridge.
> The people who are carrying the torch of this mentality were teenagers and twenty-something during the Obama administration.
Literally the same people in the press who promoted the "people in cages" thing were working at the same placed during Obama admin and virtually none of them said anything. There were some very small number that did, but the overwhelming majority said nothing and certainly there was no widespread public outrage about it and no employees told their employers they wouldn't work for any contract with Obama administration because it puts people in cages. No, not buying this bridge either - it was several years ago, it's not decades. They were the same grown ups then as they are now. Only back then their tribe was in power, so outrage wouldn't be appropriate.
There has been an increase both in public awareness and degree under this administration. Ironically, it seems to me that that is partially due to the words of the administration. The previous administration had a tendency to talk a good game about immigration but then in practice implemented some policies that should have been unacceptable. But whereas the previous administration was able to cultivate and air of "We don't want to do it this way, but we're not seeing any practical alternatives," The current administration has been far too cozy with anti-hispanic nationalism and cannot maintain that fig-leaf of "good people acting under a bad situation" in the public consciousness.
Rhetoric matters, and planting the concept in the public discourse that they see undocumented immigrants as rapists and murderers has done this administration no favors.
Illegal immigrants aren't coming here and enjoying the full perks of America. They are coming here and being exploited by employers who know their status and dangle it over their head.
I love that I can count on the Top Minds of Hacker News to tie themselves into knots debating whether or not it is morally and ethically justifiable to try to stop the We-Kidnap-Children-And-Put-Them-In-Cages Agency from doing their job.
Indeed. In another comment, someone suggests that it might be immoral, as someone in a position to exert some small influence on the situation, to impose their judgement on the rest of us who are not in a position to do anything at all.
That's... that's just some incredible mental yoga there.
As as for the ICE thing, wouldn't the thing to do be to complain to the legislature or IG of ICE if they wanted to see change?
What is trying to be accomplished? Just relieving stress by acting out against authority figures? Or are they trying to improve the law?
What part of immigration law / regulation is at issue? Is it the actions of particular employees? Is it with CBP, ICE, or USCIS?
I am of the understanding this is about undocumented immigrants. Isn't filling out a landing form required by every country?
What specifically needs changing? If you want to get together and "replace ICE", why not? People love improvement. Go and write a better law than Joe Lieberman, he created DHS.
(He also also was the independent that voted against the public healthcare option in ACA, 59 votes, he said something like, "I'm going to be stubborn on this one")
I don't understand wealthy Americans at all. It seems like they want to abolish the concepts of borders and immigration control entirely. I assume it's so they can more readily access cheaper labour, which would explain why poorer americans generally take the opposite stance.
"""
One of those employees, staff engineer Sophie Haskins, resigned Monday, stating in her resignation letter that she was leaving because the company did not cancel its contract with ICE and “shows no indication of canceling the contract,” which she wrote was “morally unacceptable.”
"""
Depends on whether they believe they are in a position to make the company more moral by their presence, and whether their particular branch of philosophy says that matters.
This points to the heart of my internal debate on philosophical positioning: When is it the most moral option to not resign from companies that openly conflict with your moral compass but to fight from the inside and struggle day-by-day?
I haven't come to any definitive conclusion, but my basic thought is:
(A) If you and your allies have a decent opportunity to build a worthy competitor or work for one (ie: a similar company that aligns with your purpose), do it and shout about it from the rooftops.
(B) If you and your allies don't have enough resources to build something better, fight from the inside until you do.
Maybe the most moral thing to do would be, should you find yourself employed at an immoral company -- Fight to do everything in your power to change the company's course, while drawing your salary (and thus their resources), and not contributing towards the immoral actions at all? Basically you'd be forcing them to fire you at some point, but until then, you're fighting against it for as long as possible and thus hopefully maximizing the chance of changing course.
I don't get the sense it's the abstract concept people are up in arms about, but the implementation.
The US has a long history of implementation pessimizing desired outcome at the Southern border. For example, the number of undocumented permanent residents in the US went up when border control was tightened in previous administrations. Under lax border control, people could border-hop for a day or a week, take care of some business (mostly quite legal with the one exception of the failure to go through the entire process of a temporary visa), and go back. But when inspection constraints were tightened and checkpoints and fences went up, lots of hoppers decided that if they had to choose, they'd rather be trapped in the US than in Mexico. The intended effect of lowering undocumented residency boosted the numbers on undocumented residency. Oops. :-p
Trying to understand the opinion being communicated here. People shouldn't protest things they disagree with? People have a duty to be loyal to their employer's every decision?
Yet, strangely, these people curiously will often protest loudly about things they personally disagree with, rather than taking their own advice of shutting up and leaving.
It's really about disagreeing with the views being espoused by the employees in question, not their methodology.
I think people just don't often get the chance to think about what principle or virtue first impulse drives them to say one thing or another when an issue comes up. I think it's a strong and productive to prompt ourselves/others to put those into words...
Fight's the other one. It really depends on whether you have more power to enact change by taking blood out of the system or diverting where it's pumped.
Why should they give up and run away instead of staying and fighting? Why is the former better than the latter? Personally I prefer to tackle challenges head-on rather than giving up.
To be fair this is a natural philosophical position to take in a country founded after a bunch of people left some tea crates where they were on a ship and just moved to another empire's colony
It seems that these kinds of demands are becoming more common. Is it because conflict resolution is becoming a dying art, is it because people don't rise to the level of maturity of past times? I just find it to be confusing.
I think it's just more awareness of employee power - or, perhaps, technological advancement making it such that employees actually do have meaningful power and much more liquidity in the job market, that GitHub is GitHub because of the technical skills of ICs and not the organizational skills of management, whereas your stereotypical successful company 50-100 years ago was successful because of infrastructure and business relationships that were hard to replicate. The Traitorous Eight was fairly unexpected, but today, Deadspin writers can walk even in a bad job market.
Effective conflict resolution is always going to be lined up with who's got the power in the negotiation. If management has significant power and workers very little, most conflicts quickly resolve in the direction of what management wants. If management doesn't have quite as much power, you'll see the conflict last longer and not resolve quite as obviously.
The tech industry does have a strong fungibility / "seller's market for labor" advantage.
A software engineer who leaves a position at a company (especially in the cities where the companies we've heard of have offices) is extremely likely to get snapped up quickly by another company, often at about the same salary. That gives individual employees a lot of freedom to exit on ideological grounds that other industries with tighter labor markets may not have.
You're not considering the entire history of the labor movement in the United States, then. There were massive protests, literal battles, and many died, all to bring about better working conditions, shorter workweeks, higher pay, etc., not just for those inside those companies but across the entire economy.
Workers fighting for the rights of themselves and others isn't a new thing. Hell, it even happened in the era of medieval serfdom following the Black Death; there was suddenly a serious shortage of labor, and the serfs realized they could push for reform because the landed gentry now needed them more than they needed the gentry.
Genuine question, but are there many examples from the labour movement where there were labour actions directed at the company's general business practices rather than the rights of the workers working in those companies? It feels like the obvious difference here is that GitHub employees aren't arguing for their own rights so much as the rights of people outside of GitHub.
Genuine answer, you should read books on this stuff. It's a fascinating, complex history, and no one is gonna be able to summarize it well in a low effort Internet comment like I'm making now. But the answer is yes, there are very many.
To pick just one example though, labor unions were heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, and fought against racist/discriminatory actions by those companies.
There's also been a noted change in how people handle things thrown at them that make them uncomfortable. A little over a decade ago universities started to notice that students, when presented with something they didn't agree with, would attack the messenger in an attempt to discredit what they were communicating.
There has been a shift in how people interact. Studies have found an increase in narcissism [1] and a decrease in empathy [2].
There is more than manager / IC power shifts going on here.
I think also in the age of internet, cell phones, constant surveillance, and more, we're also much more aware of these atrocities and the governments do not always have the power to simply hide it.
"It seems that these kinds of demands are becoming more common. Is it because conflict resolution is becoming a dying art, is it because people don't rise to the level of maturity of past times?"
I mean, in the past times, we had loom-smashing, scab-beating, and private armies to force people to work.
It's because circumstances in the United States regarding how the government interfaces to the world are getting dangerously fascist, and people in the tech sector are sensitive to the risk of repeating the history of IBM and the Nazi party (i.e. enabling a government's ability to commit atrocities at scale).
It's an open question how much responsibility one has regarding how one's technology is used and what services one is providing to whom. There isn't universal agreement on the topic, but there are plenty of software engineers who believe "more than zero," and quite a few who believe they have more responsibility than that.
That's very weird to conflate employees of tech companies caring more about other people's rights with a loss of "the maturity of past times". It wasn't the maturity of past times, it was the status quo of not really caring about anyone else's rights at all. The civil rights movement was only half a century ago!
The clear answer is that one should never just be following orders and if your company is doing something that you personally feel uncomfortable with, you should try to stop it. And failing that, quit.
I completely agree that if you do not feel comfortable with the work you are doing, then you should stop. If you feel comfortable with it because you've compartmentalized, then I imagine you would not stop. And, unfortunately, there's often some reason to compartmentalize some situations: because your competitor will just as soon take the business.
It certainly would have been better if we could have gotten US policy on Nazi Germany to change much earlier than it did. It would have solved the coordination problem--for US companies, anyway. This would have required direct political action.
> Harry Truman, was quoted in the pages of New York Times in June 1941 as saying, “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible …”
> because your competitor will just as soon take the business.
So what? You might as well be a hitman because, if you're not, somebody else will. You're just leaving money on the table by not being a killer for hire.
Your own principles don't depend on what your competitors will do.
I stated that in the beginning and then moved on because the world is not black and white like the case of being a hitman (besides that is already solved politically). You are going to face situations that are ambiguous as I believe was the case for most Americans at the time of the IBM sales for the Nazi censuses.
That specific point was about the importance of using your political power to act as a group in a way that will actually affect the world, rather than solely appeasing your conscience/principles.
My hypothesis is that this is because so much governmental business is done by private corporations. The problem this brings is that there are very few ways you can influence the behavior of corporations.
As well as a dramatically shifted power dynamic whereby the 40 hour workweek is a relic of the past, and people work 2-3 jobs just to scrape by. It's easier to say "burn it down" when you're already in the flames.
It's also, depending on who you ask, one of the few avenues left for people to affect change on a larger scale. Literally nothing else is working, and internal revolts have changed quite a few minds.
Employee activism is a necessary and under-powered force to help manage the insatiable greed of board members.
One man's maturity of past times is another man's unwillingness to confront injustice in society.
But on a broader note, I think a lot of it can be traced to the current president. He seems to go out of his way to do things that stir up deep anger in his opponents. There's a reason why millions of people hit the streets the day after his inauguration to register their dissatisfaction with the fact that he's president. That was unprecedented in US history.
Combine that with how little an average person can do to influence what happens in Washington, and you get a whole lot of angry people desperate for something they can actually impact. Tech employees have leverage over their employers, and they're using it for this because it's the only avenue they have to vent their anger at the current state of politics. The candidate they probably supported in 2016 got more votes but lost anyway. They probably don't live in a state that's competitive in the electoral college. Their local representatives probably represent their views well but are similarly limited in how much impact they can have. This is one of the only ways they can actually do something about what's making them angry, and they're taking advantage of it.
I'm surprised it's not happening at more companies.
The way a lot of non tech employees vented their anger was by electing Trump. Just as ICE is an injustice to you, Trump's targets (corrupt media, lax immigration enforcement...) are seen as injustices by his supporters.
He is not the cause but the proposed solution to existing injustices. You may not agree he's a good one but that's how his supporters see him.
> Conflict escalation is a deliberate choice by those in charge. Such as ICE.
To be fair, the decision on a policy of conflict escalation in ICE’s domain was, quite overtly, made several steps above the head of ICE in the chain of command.
In response to a lot of the comments here, isn't the whole "people with power have the moral imperative to defend (their view of) morality" how the US got into the "America, World Police" problem in the first place?
> isn't the whole "people with power have the moral imperative to defend (their view of) morality" how the US got into the "America, World Police" problem in the first place?
Since that didn't actually happen (the US has never been particularly enthusiastic about applying power internationally for any reason except it's own geopolitical interest, and has never been particularly shy about ignoring moral constraints to do so—though it's often struck with moral pangs after the fact), I don't think any explanation for why it happened can be accepted.
The “America, World Police” problem is a fiction railed against by advocates of even more aggressively amoral foreign policy, not something that actually concretely exists or existed.
The upside here, is that maybe this will mean growth of in-house government IT departments? There are already large IT departments, but there is a growing trend to outsource work. Perhaps the gov will start hiring good people and let them use modern tooling, now they realise that tech companies wield too much power. I'd love to get a job for a big gov department and be in charge of integrating GitLab into their workflow and modernising the infrastructure.
At the Federal level? Highly unlikely IMO. The GS payscale is sub-par by my understanding of SFBA compensation. There are some lean/start-up influenced offices that are trying to change the culture and modernize things but I expect progress to be BRUTALLY slow, unless another tech bubble bursts and for some reason rock star coders are on USAJobs.gov trying to get positions that pay ~$50k-$60k (plus a substantial housing subsidy).
I find it ironic that the same people protesting the contract would also protest a bakery that refuses to sell a product for say a same sex couple (or if you were in the 60s, restaurants that refused to serve blacks).
You either have a viewpoint that:
1) a business shouldn't make a moral judgement on its customers and be accessible to all
2) A business can make moral judgements on its customers and choose not to do business with customers considered immoral
If you are ok with #2 you are running into a slippery slope in my view. And if you are ok with #2 and you are one of the largest companies in the world, it is a very huge slippery slope.
The difference is not serving black or queer people isn't a moral judgement -- it's just discrimination (there isn't anything inherently wrong with being Black the same way there isn't anything wrong with being queer or Asian or Indian, those things aren't a choice unlike being a Nazi). At best, not serving minorities is a shitty moral judgement.
Not serving ICE is a more legitimate moral judgement because ICE has the option to change their behavior and ICE is genuinely bad.
Slippery slope is one of those silly things I see from free speech advocates. I tend not to see the bad impacts in real life because if the government isgoing to restrict free speech, they will do it regardless of what anti-hate speech laws currently exist.
Capitalism is nothing but an economic system where you own the means to production. There is no inherent morality.
Nobody has an issue with you making choices and voting with your dollars. The issue is forcing those choices on everyone else (as in a business, especially as a non-owner) through your own interpretation of morality.
It refers to "you" vs the state. You create a factory or a business or a new patent and you're responsible. You gain the profits or suffer the losses and nobody else can take it from you.
Workers are obviously not business owners, but they do own their own labor and are free to take whatever job they want, not be assigned to it from some central authority.
There is nothing inherently wrong with serving ICE. You might not like it, but many of your compatriots do.
I don't like what they do at all, I think it's reprehensible, backwards, and purely uncivilised. But people you utterly hate have friends too, and they see something different than you do, and we do not have a singular moral world-view.
This situation with ICE should totally change, but that change is a function of your vote, not a function of protesting against Gitlab.
I very strongly argue that there should never be a single perspective on morality, in the way that these posts suggest there should.
> But people you utterly hate have friends too, and they see something different than you do, and we do not have a singular moral world-view.
So because shitty people have friends, we should throw in the towel and refrain from enforcing moral codes in our own lives, behavior, and economic decisions? That's pretty weak stuff.
Lots of people support ICE, maybe, but that doesn’t prevent a lot of people from thinking it’s inherently wrong.
The more clear cute example is weapons research. Loads of researchers and institutions outright rule out weapons research, because they find it wrong.
Besides, “inherently wrong” is a subjective thing anyways, if only by the fact some people agree to your statement and some people don’t, despite everyone having the same set of facts
The actual (IMO correct) position most of these people share is the following two points at once:
- businesses should have a moral position, since businesses are just a set of people
- that moral position should be right!
This isn’t rocket science! Stuff like “don’t support a business doing bad stuff” and “support businesses doing good stuff” is just really basic consumer activism.
There’s no need to go deep in metaphysics. It’s literally just “support good things, don’t support bad things”
Even others (a plurality I think) don't have strong feelings on the laws, but know one of the following:
- the executive has selective enforcement rights
- (at the time) congress + the WH could change laws!
- the laws were written with an understanding of selective enforcement
and so rightly recognized that this was a bad thing that could be made right.
There is an n-sided die about how people see this problem, and people acted in accordance to it. And yeah, it means that some sides don't believe in the legitimacy of other sides. They're incompatible after all.
Besides, it's not the point. The point of the game isn't to make a set of meta-rules for defining what is morally right. It's for, on a case-by-case basis, to say "this thing is good/bad" and then act on that.
I don't need to be able to answer every moral hypothetical to be able to say that _this one specific thing is bad_. To bring it back to HN, it's a P=/=NP problem. I can say one thing is good/bad without providing the full strategy for determining every thing. And then we work from there.
I think your entire argument would make a lot more sense if you replaced “right” with “what I think is right”. Your position is just one side of the dice (as you say).
That's fine, that doesn't change anything. If GitHub and their employees disagree so strongly on right and wrong that one side believes doing X is immoral and the other believes not doing X is immoral, GitHub can either attempt to convince their employees that they are in fact right, or let them leave.
(If GitHub does not believe they have a moral obligation to sell to ICE, they can drop the contract and keep their employees. It's a very small contract, less than one engineer's salary, and they committed to donating that money anyway. So I'm assuming that GitHub feels a moral or equivalently strong obligation to keep the contract, possibly of the form of feeling an obligation not to let employees influence moral direction. If not, this is just a story of bad business sense.)
This is the whole point of everything. If you believe strongly in a thing, then you should fight for it. And other people in society will judge you for it (rightly so!)
So yeah, you decide that you care enough about "sanctity of marriage" so you decide to not sell cakes. So everyone who disagrees with you boycotts your business. Others believe that sexual orientation is such an important thing that they make it illegal for you to do this! This is how stuff happens!
There isn't some sort of rules-based pre-judgement for this sort of stuff. It gets played out over time. And you're responsible for your decisions in this front.
It's a colossal problem because it is an authoritarian stance hidden behind incoherent arguments of morality. There is no morality or ethics. There is only pushy people trying to strong-arm everyone around to comply with their personal world view under the threat of being cut off from a product/service.
You envision society as a battleground for various moral perspectives. I think there's some truth to that. But are there any ground rules? If so, what are they? Are you giving me license to firebomb ICE facilities because I "believe strongly" that ICE is evil? Or is the law a red line that no one can cross? If so, what about "bad laws"? What about civil disobedience?
Another perspective on this is that, for a society to function, people need to be able to agree to disagree about most things. This means that we are all morally compromised and we all must be morally compromised in order to live together. A society in which everyone follows their own moral impulses is a society that will not function.
I find myself wavering between these two perspectives (the first being yours). I don't mind people protesting. But how about blocking roads? How about vandalizing your ideological opponent's office? How about smashing windows? How about preventing your ideological opponents from speaking? It seems to me that your perspective minimizes the danger here. There's no guarantee that things will just work out. We might reach a level of polarization after which we simply won't be able to cooperate.
right, it's impossible to establish a universal, objective framework for morality. instead, we can only make compromises between majorities and vocal minorities, codify them as laws and ethics, and enforce them.
however, that doesn't absolve you of sticking up for your moral code, depending on what it is. for example, I'm gay. I know that Chik-Fil-A is complying with the law, and that its owners are funding advocacy for conversion therapy and other anti-LGBT issues. I wouldn't want Chik-Fil-A to be dismantled, since it's lawful, but I refuse to eat there, since my personal morals prevent me from giving money to people who want to hurt people like me. I'd also support protests of Chik-Fil-A, since protest is a lawful action (at least, social media campaigns and picket lines.)
Don't be lazy. Stand up for what you believe in. The law is the lowest common denominator, and legality doesn't absolve you of your actions.
So what are you saying then? That there are no moral absolutes? Or just that because people disagree on what is moral business should be allowed to act in interest of profit only?
That's nonsense. Philosophers will debate subtleties around morality until the end of time, but that shouldn't prevent us from taking a stand against evil when we see it.
> That's nonsense. Philosophers will debate subtleties around morality until the end of time, but that shouldn't prevent us from taking a stand against evil when we see it.
"evil" is exactly what religious people called homosexuality for centuries, which is ironic considering your statement. Morality is purely an opinion, just like religion.
Except that "evil" is just a loaded word that tries to pin an absolute take on morality on a personal opinion. There are people who take stances against evil by persecuting others based on religion, gender, race, and even political leanings, and they feel so strongly about the morality of their positions that they feel that even extreme violence is justified.
Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. They lead to shallow, predictable discussions. A public internet forum is not, as a medium, capable of addressing such questions. If you really want to discuss something like that, write an essay (or a book) and then post it here, or maybe someone will.
That moral position should be right? According to who? The business itself? Then that second point is redundant. Everybody thinks their moral position is right, that's what morals are. It's a tautology otherwise.
GitHub employees think their moral position on ICE is right. Many disagree. But according to them that's fine, because they think they're right so should be able to boycott who they like.
Replace Github with bakery refusing to serve same-sex couples. Bakery thinks they're right. Many disagree. But according to them that's fine, because they think they're right so should be able to boycott who they like.
You only think it's a false dichotomy because you personally disagree with the bakery and (presumably?) agree with Github. By saying "the moral position should be right", is you simply saying "and they should agree with me otherwise they are wrong".
> GitHub employees think their moral position on ICE is right. Many disagree. But according to them that's fine, because they think they're right so should be able to boycott who they like.
A lot of music artists in the 50s and 60s refused to play on segregated crowds (where black people is separated from white people, usually blacks in the back), they did it because they though they were right and should be able to boycott doing business with those who disagree (despite their record-label or manager thinking otherwise) you think those artists should have done otherwise?
I didn't say they should have done otherwise. I'm actually arguing in favour of private individuals/businesses being able to make the decision on what they sell and who they sell to.
I'm simply pointing out what is almost definitely hypocrisy on the part of these Github employees. Tech companies are usually more progressive, and no doubt these employees would object to a private company, such as a family run bakery, choosing who they sell to. When the Github employees are advocating for their own company to do just that.
I do not think the dichotomy you outlined accurately describes how things work
I mean, this is why we have developed the idea of a "protected class."
Because you're correct that, at the end of the day, judgement is judgement and sentiment is sentiment and everyone is the hero of their own story.
But to place the limits of proper action at sentiment is solipsism.
So there is a set of protected classes which we, as a society, have decided are inappropriate reasons to discriminate against people. The quick reasons it is wrong to discriminate: sex, race, age, religion[1]. There are many reasons we allow people to discriminate: lack of money, being violent to employees, being unacceptably rude, setting off explosives, etc. These are all discriminatory practices that often involve moral judgement.
We are always in the process of trying to decide if we should have a new protected class and how that class should be defined. I also suspect we will, at some point, talk about removing protected classes.
Businesses should (and in fact always do) make moral judgements about their clients. The people at Github who chose to work with ICE decided it was morally right for them to do so. You can tell because they did it. They might say they were sad about it and had "moral qualms" but at some point it does seem like it comes down to yes or no.
So do you think we should have a government agency class? Or perhaps a law enforcement class? I personally do not.
[1] Some exceptions here, of course, a mosque does not have to hire a catholic priest who applies to be an imam.
>> She rejected the argument that “tips,” or admissions advantages, received by some black and Hispanic students were unfair. While some racial groups did receive tips...
They get them, and Asian/Asian-Americans are excluded from this, placing them in the "advantaged group" as I stated above (usually reserved for white people).
That they ruled this was "not unfair" doesn't make it "not discrimination." They admit as such that it happens to the detriment to Asian/Asian-Americans.
I haven't read enough on the Harvard admission scandal to have an opinion.
That said, there are lots of services that consider protected class in ways that aren't currently considered discriminatory. Ladies nights, for instance, are not illegal. Giving discounts to senior citizens is not considered discriminating against others.
All that said - those corner cases are always being considered and questioned. There are instances where I think the official decision is right and ones where I think it's wrong, but I'm no more perfect than anyone else.
Aristotle divided causality into four kinds that are useful to remember: material, formal, efficient, and final. Consider a table: the material cause is the wood from which it's made; the formal cause is the concept or design of a table; the efficient cause is the act of carpentry that resulted in its construction; and the final cause is the intention to have the table to use.
The workers of github are an incremental part of the material cause of ICE's actions and the consequences thereof. Any individual employee's contributions are fractional at best, but they clearly own a share of the results of ICE's use of their product, and were I in their position, I'd be balancing whether I want to own some of those shares or not.
Sure you have a say, you also (likely) have the luxury of having a skill set that makes you able to make these choices.
A while back there was an ask HN post about surviving through the first bubble (2001). If you find a group of engineers of that vintage it is likely that you can quickly find someone who worked putting up adult content. (Note I don't have an objection to the topic but realize that some do and this isn't exactly the most glamorous work in tech).
I tend to think labor should have more power over what it creates. I'm not sure how an example of being required to work on something they objected to due to economic factors outside of their control is an example that helps your case.
> I'm not sure how an example of being required to work on something they objected to due to economic factors outside of their control is an example that helps your case.
Quitting on moral grounds is a luxury in the scope of human history, and is a luxury for MOST Americans today. Im not sure it is a realistic stance for most people (but probably for most of HN).
I don't think GitHub is going to (or should) change its stance. I'm sure there are plenty of things on GitHub that are worse, or have been used to worse ends than providing source control for ICE.
> I tend to think labor should have more power over what it creates.
I do a lot of contract/freelance work.
The trade off is that control means I am also liable in the event that my work causes an issue (legally as well as from the stand point of being a good citizen and business person).
Indemnity is a wonderful thing. Indemnity is why we have open source. Lots of things work because labor, and its products are decoupled from the end use. Should we stop making guns because someone might kill another person? Should we stop making fertilizer because it can be turned into a bomb? The end result of both products is the same but the intent in the production of either is not HARM.
Guns and fertilizer are very different products. Guns were specifically developed with the purpose of killing. Their main use besides recreation is killing people.
Don’t understand the downvotes to my comment. The person I am responding to said “Should we stop making guns because someone might kill another person”. That is in fact one of the main reasons of guns, specifically because they are used to kill other people. I didn’t downvote that comment, I did not pass any moral judgement on guns. Instead of silently downvoting, it would be better to explain why you disagree with my comment. I believe I am operating in good faith here.
> Quitting on moral grounds is a luxury in the scope of human history
So what? Freedom of speech is a luxury in the scope of human history as well.
Moreover, someone is making these choices. If it's within your power to have an effect on the choice, and one choice is more moral in your estimation, you're practically obliged to act, even if other people don't have that power.
I agree it's a luxury, and I'm happy people at github can do it. I don't think it _should_ be a luxury. They are quitting because they have a direct relationship they feel is immoral. If people aren't supposed to take stands what they can work for, you're advocating for the vast majority of the population (ie. ~non CEOS) having no moral agency in the place where they spend a huge fraction of their lives.
> Indemnity is a wonderful thing. Indemnity is why we have open source.
What do you mean by this? I don't see any necessary connection between open source and indemnities. Professional developers might want to release free software but accept payment to guarantee its fitness for purpose. Conversely, malware authors shouldn't be able to disclaim responsibility for their actions simply by publishing source code.
I mean, we carve out special exceptions for race, gender, sexual orientation, etc...
Beyond those special carve outs, laborers should have the freedom to follow their ethics.
We carve out those special exceptions for reasons of striving to create a fairer world for everyone: people in this country have historically been (and contemporarily are) discriminated against for race, gender, sexual orientation. The discrimination, both from people personally and encoded into laws and large-scale businesses processes, makes society unfair for those groups, e.g. redlining put people of color at a significant disadvantage for home-buying and building intergenerational wealth for their communities. Those are also things people are born with. Discriminating against people for how they're born, individually and systematically, runs counter to creating a fair, just, equal society.
Additionally, the freedom argument in the Jim Crow era, "let racist businesses remain racist and eventually they'll be replaced by non-racist businesses" was tried out for a hundred years, and the status quo did not change for people of color. It took the civil rights era and outright banning of discriminatory behavior by businesses for the status quo to change for the better/fairer/more equal. I don't think it would be a good idea to return to that older state of affairs, even if it means business owners must serve people of color, gay people, whatever, because, from my reading of history, that experiment failed.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say that in opposition to you -- it was more of a preemptive explanation of why those came to exist, since on HN there seems to be a lot of opposition to freedom-restraining laws (like compelling business owners to serve members of a historically disadvantaged class), even when there's a (to me) clear social benefit and historical reasoning behind those laws.
You have the right to express your opinion to your employer and ultimately to leave the company.
But you are also being compensated for them having the right to use the product of your labor as they see fit.
Implicitly, and probably explicitly in any decent work contract, is that they are the sole owners of the product of your labor and get to decide how it is used.
There is a well-known strategy by which employees can exert influence over their employer and change the decisions it makes. It is called a union. Unionization has been slow for various reasons in the tech sector; when it comes to rich, well-known companies, people don't want to go through the effort to unionize and get more money when they already are being paid a lot. But if workers want to influence decisions like these, they're going to have to organize.
It's not clear to me why tech unions would do this. People keep bringing this up, but there's no reason tech unions would ever have to be structured in this particular manner. Given that, I don't find it a compelling argument against unionization in our sector. Most importantly, of all the people who are working on organizing the tech sector, to my knowledge none of them are trying to implement tenure-based seniority or pay scales.
There's no reason they have to be structured this way, but unions usually work through voting, and the tech sector has a LOT of pretty shitty people coasting, and they'll get a vote that's worth the same as anyone else's. They'll vote to protect their coasting.
> It's not clear to me why tech unions would do this.
As soon as you have a union, you have 2 groups. People are who are in the union and people who are not. Tenure-based seniority obviously benefits people who are in the union to the determent of those not yet part of the union.
It's probably a solvable problem but I think it's pretty obvious why most unions end up with seniority-based policies; It's the natural consequence of a democratic organization.
I think, at least traditionally, unions have tended to reward seniority over merit because seniority is something that can be tracked with relative objectivity, while merit is something a bit slippery to nail down.
Of course the business owner has strong opinions on what constitutes employee merit. To the business owner, the merit of an employee is largely a proxy for whatever is profitable for the business. That's fine for the business, but if the union uses that same metric as merit, they'd become little more than a proxy for the intention of the business owners. For a union to be merit-based rather than seniority-based, they'd need to find a measure of merit that was in the interest of the workers, not the business.
The job of the union is to take the business interests and then keeping that as a constraint, maximizing labor's share of income.
This usually directly means having the right people in the right places, to do an effective job, so there's not much time wasted. (Which is their time.) And so on.
Unions shouldn't try to keep everyone on board, they should simply counteract shareholder pressure to keep labor costs down.
Of course, the union should help members to retrain and then should help those members to find their place where they can contribute value.
Of course, the union can and should represent the political values of its members.
Are GitHub's decisions being made by AI robots that only respond to purely quantitative monetary incentives? It's real people on the other side of the issue. I don't see how sending letters and working with the press is worthless...
Unions are majority rule democratic. When I worked at a plant for one of the big 3, the candidates the union submitted for trades promotions were universally white men. The union didn’t look out for women or minorities particularly well because the majority rules. People assume a tech union will lead to things being somehow more just, but be careful for what you wish for. James Damore might just have the votes.
Yes. Organizing doesn't mean you fire everybody and hire new pro-union workers. It's the same people. They're just given a more direct power structure for dealing with management.
When you take people who are already vocally upset with the company's ICE contracts, and give them negotiating power with management, you're not going to suddenly see them turn pro-ICE just because they have a union and ICE also has a union. That makes no sense.
I hope in future engineers aren't reflexively thinking "compensation" and "promotions" when it comes to Unions. What's happening with Github here is clearly a labor power vs capital+management power problem.
It's the same thing with the Google sexual harassment problem and the Facebook disinformation problem. Without organised labor power, the employees are realising they've had to sell out their values for a wage.
The reason that this kind of protest is happening now is that companies like GitHub have to continuously serve the product, they can’t just sell into a channel and forget about what happens like a boxed software vendor or a furniture company.
I wonder if this can create a new business model for an arms-length distributor, a company that maintains GitHub deployments for customers and pays royalties to GitHub. This distributor could sell to all kinds of unsavories while giving GitHub plausible deniability.
Refusing to give business to a government department because you personally morally object to what they do? Perfectly fine, Github is a private business, nothing to see here.
Refusing to give business to a same-sex couple because you personally morally object to what they do? Utterly bigoted, bake the cake or go to prison. Private businesses can only make decisions on who they serve if I agree with them.
It's a good example that many people know about due to the wide-spread media coverage it got. But it won't be the last. Perform the sex-change, bigot. Perform the abortion, bigot. Perform the Git upgrade for the Ministry of Truth, bigot.
A lot of these companies need to start sticking to their guns and simply letting people go for conflicts like this.
If you’re not gonna be a team player there are a billion other tech companies you can go be a part of.
I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with the core issue here – but at some point the message needs to be sent that you don’t deserve a job and aren’t owed anything. You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple. If you aren’t on board with the company mission, go find a different one.
It depends. At a small company? Sure. But no individual employee, or even small collective of employees that aren't VP or key contributor in an irreplaceable knowledge-base, have the clout to turn a Microsoft or a Google.
At a major company? The only thing you can do as an individual is take the wind out of their sales or refrain from working for them. Which these companies do notice; Google hiring keeps tabs on candidates who tell them "I won't work for you for ethical reason X."
> It depends. At a small company? Sure. But no individual employee, or even small collective of employees that aren't VP or key contributor in an irreplaceable knowledge-base, have the clout to turn a Microsoft or a Google.
I see this claim thrown around a lot with no evidence for it.
I have no strong evidence other than "It's actually happening right now and the companies have only made minor deviations from their courses."
That second half is purely subjective, and we won't really have a good idea on how much of a difference it made until historians can look back on this era with a quarter-century of hindsight.
Why? Why shouldn't employees have principles at work? Why shouldn't employees of a company work to affect positive outcomes at a place to which they have invested a lot of social and time capital?
Labor is not nearly as transactional in reality as you make it sound. "Just quit" is like "just leave the country" in politics.
because this is how they shield themselves while thinking tha half the folks in the office around them deserve to be deported or detained and actively think of most of their peers as less than human.
It's not nearly automated enough to run on its own without an army of engineers to keep the corner cases from becoming the common cases. ;) We're nowhere near that close to a technological singularity.
I think that's exactly what we're seeing. Software engineers at the big-name companies are exceptionally well off; even low-tier hires are generally above national median of income. In that environment, the most significant thing keeping a lot of people at the job is pretty high up the Maslow Hierarchy, closer to self-actualization.
And if an employee can't shake the feeling that they're helping to repeat IBM's mistakes in the '30s and '40s, they'll walk. Company doesn't even need to fire them.
(This suggests one could possibly use "employee churn at major software companies" as a secondary indicator to societal upheaval).
In the end, companies are made of people. If you want to affect positive change in the world, leaving does almost nothing to help your cause.
Companies are made of people, you are one of those people, and thus you have ability to affect change. You could either choose to give up, pick up your bags, and flee for greener pastures, or you could try to actually make an effort to improve society by affecting change from within. And, at worst, you could do nothing, and be complacent with whatever the company is doing.
Tech workers affecting change from within is nothing new, either. Your comment seems out-of-touch - employee protests can and have worked in this industry.
A lot of what you are saying is true and resonates with me. However, at some point you transition from trying to affect change to biting the hand that feeds. At that point it becomes totally unreasonable and you should go elsewhere.
If they aren't ok having their hand bit, they'll either stop feeding (fire them) or protect themselves (capitulate).
Companies fire the whiners and radicals all the freakin' time. The fact that these folks are still there says that they weren't, in fact, biting that hand.
the reverse is also true: companies that work in bad faith don't deserve employees. They exist to employ people so that they can sell product. If the company's not going to be a team player, then there are billions of other tech companies its employees might choose to go work for.
See Deadspin for an example of the inverse of what you're calling for: people sticking to their guns and letting a company go for conflicts like this.
TLDR: it's really unwise for a company to fire people for disagreeing with its controversial choices. It's a great way to accidentally damage your brand and lose a lot of staff to competitors.
The Deadspin situation is in complete alignment with my original comment. One person was let go and a ton of other people left becuase they weren't going to put up with the same BS any more.
Deadspin is better off, they can continue to do whatever it is they are doing and it is either going to work or they'll fizzle out and die. Employees are better off because they can go seek a different environment where they are happy.
> You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple. If you aren’t on board with the company mission, go find a different one.
Only if you take the most simplistic view of how a company should work.
Almost every company is successful due to the people that work there. Without the people, the organization (whether its a for profit corporation or otherwise) are completely useless.
Human beings deserve to have a voice in the governance of institutions that they spend their time and labor to make successful.
Companies are dictatorships. Get in line peasants.
It could just be that if we want a democratic society, we'll need to directly attack the idea that we have no democracy in the place where we spend most of our lives.
Depends on how you look at it. You have the freedom to leave your job and go work somewhere else. You can voice your opinion within the company but at some point the company is its own living breathing entity that is not behooven to you, unless your name is on the building.
Nothing is stopping companies from doing this. But they need talented engineers more than talented engineers need sales staff with red hats. That's why the firings haven't started. It'll be worse for the company, and it won't be any worse for the employees - as you say there are a billion other tech companies they can join.
Employees don't deserve a job; they work for cash. And employers, similarly, don't deserve labor; they give cash for work.
> You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple.
well, no, we know this isn't true because people take various forms of non-financial compensation (such as working from home, choosing your own technologies).
compensation is a vector that has a variety of inputs; it's not unreasonable to think that "association with company mission" is one of them that's subject to change over time, and as a result, can be protested, similar to e.g. working from home no longer allowed
> You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple.
The last time this was true for me, I was a teenager working at Taco Bell. In my professional life, I don't just work in exchange for cash, and never have.
The amount I am recruited and asked for various forms of interviews -- "grab coffee?", "grab lunch?", "quick 15 minute conversation?" -- can be seen as a counter-example that while cash is our payment, we are not "blessed" to have jobs. They are blessed that I chose to work for them. I can choose to work anywhere at this point. The money isn't the point. I'm not going to contribute to more human suffering, and you won't get to take advantage of my talents if you do.
It's about being a team player for humans first, corporations second. You seem like a bootlicker to the capital class (or an "entrepreneur" trying to LARP). It's the shitty boomer attitude of "you should be grateful to have a job at all." To that, I say "fuck you."
If company owners aren't team players then the message needs to be sent that they don't deserve a charter or a labor force and aren't owed anything. Businesses that are party to the destruction of human rights have no basis for existence.
It's not an employee's role to determine with whom the employer does business. The employee is always free to switch to a different employer if they can't support the work.
If anyone thinks Github boycotting ICE will change anything of ICE's conduct, that to me is some kind of Delusions of Grandeur. The money involved are a tiny part of a forgotten section of their budget.
If they don't think it will change anything, we can agree that this boycott is purely symbolic and will accomplish nothing.
This feels like a pretty defeatist attitude to me. Just because your portion of ICE’s budget is insignificant doesn’t mean you have to support ICE.
And even if it is purely symbolic, lots of symbolic actions do more than nothing.
At the very least it may improve employee morale to not support ICE which may increase Github’s employee retention rate, which may not be a big deal for ICE but may be a bigger deal for Github.
And finally, death by a thousand cuts is certainly a thing.
Username checks out. No, but you really don't want to be a collaborator either. If other parties are willing to step up then they can be addressed if and when that time comes. Principles always were a 'circle of influence' thing.
Nowhere in the article is the viewpoint that they’re going to change ICEs conduct mentioned. Inventing opposing viewpoints is one of the lowest rhetorical devices, and I really wish people would post with more care around here.
As for “only being symbolic”, no, it wouldn’t. It would allow workers to be in an environment where their work supports their values. A lot of these workers are going to leave the org to go work for a company that doesn’t so conflict with their values, as is absolutely their prerogative in a free labor market. This is actually a mature way to let GitHub understand the full costs of their actions, so that they can make an informed decision. There’s literally no problem here, this is a functioning labor dynamic.
I don't know if companies realize that contracts with ICE are going to hurt their talent recruitment too, but they do. I recently decided against applying to a role I saw posted for Wayfair because they ignored employee demands to end their ICE contract, and I know I'm not alone.
Sad to see you get downvoted... I guess one would need to send an "anti-job application" to HR to let them know that their policy has turned you off to them (and I guess you'd need to attach your CV to show them what they'll be missing out on...).
It would be the right thing to do, IMO, but I would be scared to do it in case the company does become more attractive (shall we invent the newspeak phrase "more morally compatible"?) for me in the future, but they still have that letter of mine on file...
I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used once it's created. You have to let certain control go after a point. Or if your product is open to everyone, you'll have to live with the fact that people may use it in ways you disagree with.
Xerox or Canon (or whoever) probably makes copiers that ICE uses to make copies. Lenovo or Apple probably makes hardware that they use also to further their functions. Ford/GM probably supply ICE with vehicles. Farmers grow crops that get into their the meals that ICE personnel eat. Pilots and flight attendants probably have knowingly transported ICE employees.
Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees? Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to? Why is ICE the only company that they object to? Why do some causes get their favor and not others?
Where do we start? Where do we stop?
> Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees? Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to? Why is ICE the only company that they object to? Why do some causes get their favor and not others?
Wokeness and the recent trend of trying to cancel anything that doesn't align within a narrow spectrum of progressive viewpoints is a big reason here.
I'm sure these people have varying viewpoints across the spectrum on a variety of issues, but this is a direct contract with a client that currently has a large target on it's back. These employees agree they would prefer not to be a partner. Saying all of those who petitioned share a narrow viewpoint is reductive.
"ICE is currently doing some bad things" is a viewpoint shared by a pretty large group of people. Honestly it just sounds like you're projecting.
ICE is getting raked over the coals in the court of public opinion because they don't have the funding nor the manpower to deal with 100k people coming over the border each month. Many asylum seekers are just exploiting the asylum system with invalid cases as economic migrants to delay the process so they don't get sent back home. All the while congress hasn't done much at all to fix the obvious problems in the law (some of which lead to family separation in detainment), nor do reasonable things like give a pathway to citizenship for the dreamers.
Simply saying they are doing bad things is reducing the problems to a soundbite.
K.
Glad to see reasonable discussion is still alive and well on HN. /s
There are plenty of good rebuttals you’ve conveniently missed. Also, 300k/year was the maximum in 2000.
> There are plenty of good rebuttals you’ve conveniently missed.
I got 5 replies in a span of 5 minutes. I can't respond that fast with the detail and nuance of my positions.
> Also, 300k/year was the maximum in 2000.
And now we are up to 500k last year, and another 950k this year. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration
Yep, we’re having a record year but it’s been much lower for the last 20 years (going by memory).
And both sides have been claiming it has been a problem for all of those years. Every president since Regan has talked about the problems at the border and Congress has done barely anything to both enforce the laws, and make the system smoother for immigrants.
They have the manpower, they're just doing everything as inefficiently and inhumanely as possible in order to arrive at this outcome. This is a choice that the administration is making, and ICE is implementing it.
> They have the manpower, they're just doing everything as inefficiently and inhumanely as possible in order to arrive at this outcome.
Source? Last I checked the system was still drastically in need of border patrol, immigration judges, case workers, beds to house people, etc. Those things can't just spin up in a week and be effective.
I don't have the time to look up a source at the moment, but Trump changed policy to detain immigrants until their hearing rather than releasing them. He's also keeping them in custody longer in order to force them through court proceedings rather than just deporting them.
The system was already desperately in need of resources before Trump added this strain. We could go back to an Obama-era level of need, but instead we've chosen to ramp up the problem and force this outcome.
Prior world war II the illegal immigration from Mexico was a genuine issue for America. DO you want to know how they stopped illegal immigration cold? They simply fined any business or employer who employed them severely. The problem quickly resolved itself without having to lock people up.
It is entirely possible to curtail the number of people coming here once there is NO work or services for them. It works, and we know it works, because we have done it before.
No one wants to "solve it" because our entire food supply and production (meat packing to local restaurants) is powered by illegal immigrants. Lawn care, construction, plenty of industries run on cheap (illegal) immigrant labor.
> DO you want to know how they stopped illegal immigration cold? They simply fined any business or employer who employed them severely. The problem quickly resolved itself without having to lock people up.
I'd be completely in favor of that. Especially in the recent case where ICE raided a factory in the south owned by the Koch brothers. We need congress to act on that though as AFAIK there is not a current framework to prosecute businesses for it.
> No one wants to "solve it" because our entire food supply and production (meat packing to local restaurants) is powered by illegal immigrants. Lawn care, construction, plenty of industries run on cheap (illegal) immigrant labor.
I agree. Once we stop the illegal flow we could start offering more work visas and other things to the people already here and newcomers. But without stopping the flow the people doing it the legal (hard) way are now competing against the illegal migrants leaving little incentive to do it right.
This is a very good point and I fully agree. Most migration is based on economic opportunity.
Trump is kind of a hypocrite on this point: he happily hires illegal labour because it's cheap, but then wants to put up walls politically.
FYI I believe that illegal labour is a major source of economic inequality as well: it hurts the working class the most, and the gains go to capital and middle class.
The specific concerns may be new, but the general tactics are neither new, nor specific to progressives; in fact, while the labor movement has had some notable successes with it, the general approach has been most extensively deployed in this country by, and still is extensively used by, conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives, against policies, institutions, art, personages, etc., they disapprove of.
They call it “cancel culture” when it is their ox getting gored, but it is not as if no one told them what the harvest is like when you sow the wind...
You are defending literal slave labor.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/us/immigrant-detention-forced...
It looks like that lawsuit is alleging that prisoners only making $1-4 a day is slave labor when to my knowledge that's common in almost all prisons in the US.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/
That's not to say its a good practice or policy but nothing there looks like its any different for ICE detainees.
The 13th amendment abolished slavery for everyone except prisoners. The fact that migrants are being treated like prison labor is evidence that they are performing slave labor.
Slavery is still allowed for jury duty as well. You are forced to work and if you don't go they can throw you in prison and/or fine you.
Oh Hacker News, you never cease to disappoint.
"Prisoners are being forced to work for almost no pay, its modern day slavery."
"Yeah but think about jury duty, I'm the real slave labour in my middle class lifestyle, having to participate the function of my democracy."
I'm sure you think that taxation is theft as well.
But also other company employees are protesting! There have been news stories for multiple employee protests (including Delta refusing to deport some people)
Maybe you and GP are not seeing the stories because the outlets you read choose not to cover this
"Kids these days with their wokeness. Back in my day we didn't care about things like human rights, wealth inequality, the plights of underrepresented groups, or destroying the planet. All these damned messy ethics are interfering with business!"
There is an even bigger question here.
Is ICE the only thing on GitHub that is morally questionable?
I would venture to guess NO. I would venture to guess that all sorts of things on GitHub are used in illicit, illegal, or morally repressible ways.
And?
All these people are saying is "I don't want people using things I make for (what I perceive to be) evil".
Aside from the compensation, anything you have implied beyond this is just augmentation derived from capitalism and acceptance of the status quo. Saying "I don't like what you are doing with the thing I am producing for you, so I may stop offering you services" is just...basic human communication. I really can't see how there is any more to this?
You speak with such absolute authority ("You have to let certain control go after a point."). However, this story (and others like it) are proof that this is untrue. Your assertion is false.
Just because somebody is an employee, it does not mean they lose all bargaining power / agency. If you are exchanging goods or services with someone else in a scenario where the power dynamic is not entirely one-sided, there is always room for negotiation. This is all that's happening.
Just because you don't care about how your stuff is used, doesn't mean that it applies to everyone.
Well put argument. A lot of posturing in comments in threads like these which try to mislead the reader into thinking that they are looking at the conflict from a higher, more rational, position.
I like the way you have framed the argument.
I would think that employees at those companies would probably prefer if they weren't doing business with some of those people, but I think it is much more difficult in cases where there is just a good being purchased through retailers (there are intermediary steps).
With these kinds of contracts it feels much more akin to a partnership, so I think the feedback makes more sense. Its odd to me that we question why employees would want to have a say in how their company conducts business. Sure, its a choice for the company to make, but saying it is entitled for the employees to speak out just seems insane to me.
Yes. Something tells me that if ICE just signed up to Github, nobody would even notice.
> You have to let certain control go after a point.
Why? If it's within your power to prevent your work from being put to use in service of something you find immoral, why not attempt to organize with like-minded workers and put a stop to it?
If you can force your company to make a choice between a contract and its workforce, you can achieve your goal. There's no reason to let things go.
> Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to?
Because they have, or may have, the power to do so. If they can take control of their work, there's no reason not to do so.
EDITED TO ADD:
> Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees?
They either don't object, or don't have the power within the company to object effectively.
> Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees
Because those companies aren't based in the woke-wasteland of San Francisco bay area.
so edgy.
also, quite wrong. microsoft [1], amazon [2], not bay area companies.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/we-did-not-sign-devel... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/business/dealbook/amazon-...
This politicisation of tech that's happened at a surprisingly rapid rate since a few years ago is scary, because it threatens to split the industry and maybe even eventually society into a number of opposing factions.
Everything is political.
A pernicious notion.
If everything is political, politics is just background noise.
I've said it before, and say it again StackOverflow has taken a huge nosedive sicne the "Time to take a stand"[1] post, where Joel stated openly that if you don't support open borders, you aren't welcome on StackOverflow.
[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take...
Can you point me to the part where he said that?
I am not a GH employee nor do I speak for them.
But I think a fair point of view is that it would be GREAT if the employees of Xerox and Canon and Lenovo and Apple and Ford and the airlines and even the farmers all took the same stance as GH employees.
If that actually happened, ICE would cease to be able to function incredibly quickly.
Which would be good. This is basically the point of these protests.
> ICE would cease to be able to function incredibly quickly. Which would be good.
If you had said "ICE would be forced to reconsider its inhumane methods which have lead to its terrible reputation" - a lot more people would agree with you. There have been a number of polls done over the past year or two which show that only about 25% support abolishing ICE, the majority oppose. I think almost everyone would agree that they need to do their job with a lot more empathy and humanity, so protests are good, but the goal should be to get them to clean up their act, it would be a mistake (and not supported by the people) to try to get rid of the immigrations and customs enforcement function entirely.
I think the core idea here is: this organization is doing bad things. By not supplying them with goods and services we can stop those bad things from happening.
Whether that happens because the organization reforms or because the organization ceases to exists is a secondary concern.
>>>I think the core idea here is: this organization is doing bad things. By not supplying them with goods and services we can stop those bad things from happening.
Government programs NEVER just end, and certainly not do to simple supply disruptions. So they won't STOP doing bad things, they'll just continue to do bad things with even less resources, making the net effects even worse. Eventually you might end up with ICE detention centers that would make a FOB in Iraq look like a palace. All you need is triple-strand concertina wire, some 55-gal drums cut in half (for burning human waste), and a bunch of plywood.
Law of unintended consequences....
"Don't ever try to stop bad people from doing bad things because if you do they will only do worse things" is not a point of view I am willing to accept.
In addition, "Government programs NEVER just end" is also obviously incorrect. Our government once had a program of segregating black people from large swaths of society. This program, thankfully, no longer exists.
Ok I probably should have phrased that as "rarely" instead of "never". There are, after all, always exceptions...
At least then we can call it what it is. Remove the façade.
Would it be really be good to prevent Homeland Security Investigations, a major division of ICE, from investigating sexual abuse of children, and rescuing children from abusive situations?
And about one of every 10 agents in Homeland Security’s investigative section — which deals with all kinds of threats, including terrorism — is now assigned to child sexual exploitation cases.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
https://www.ice.gov/predator
There are lots of organizations that do both good and bad things. I hear that the KKK sometimes did some good community building work in addition to lynching black people.
It is, apparently, the judgement of a large swatch of GH employees that whatever good ICE does, it is not outweighed by the bad. Given that, I believe their actions make sense.
That is completely dependent on people having an accurate assessment of the situation, and that is rarely the case in the current outrage driven political climate.
It's true that most ethical situations are not black and white.
When an organization is doing some good things, and some bad things, is the best course of action to prevent the organization from doing both good and bad things? In the case of ICE, would it not be more effective to pursue a strategy of more targeted reforms that address the unethical immigration enforcement actions without stopping the other divisions pursuing investigations into human rights violations and child exploitation cases?
My concern here is that empathy for children being negatively impacted by immigration policies, while valid, doesn't imply we should act out indiscriminately against the entire ICE organization. Balancing the needs of victims of bad immigration policies against the needs of victims of criminal activity shouldn't be a zero-sum game, and making gains for one group shouldn't come at the expense of the other.
Why? That's like saying the police should cease to function in their enforcement of the law.
Came to add my two cents and found this. Ditto to what you said.
> I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used > Where do we start? Where do we stop?
Often when moral question pops up on HN, the top comment is some variation of
> But where do we we draw the line? > I wonder whether we should even try.
Counterpoint: cynicism is too easy. Actually giving a shit is harder, it's uncomfortable, it involves compromise.
Yes, there's ambiguity.
Yes, the line the law draws is very loose. Github can't legally let someone from Iran or North Korea host repos, but just about anything else is legal. If Golden Dawn (the greek fascist party) wanted to use your product, nothing legally prevents you from having them as a customer.
This is no excuse to avoid the question.
Every person has to decide for themselves the boundaries of who they're willing to work for. If you work for a company, you have a voice in that company's decisions. I think many tech workers underestimate how much power they have. Good engineers are in tremendous demand.
I think you're misrepresenting the argument of people who don't think developers should interfere with the usages of their product.
The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society. What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influence for good, many other people may see as a small minority abusing their power to manipulate society for the worse.
I think many technology worker do understand the power they have, and make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice.
> The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society.
What, then, does?
Democracy is a good idea, sure. But what happens when democracy reaches a conclusion that seems obviously unjust? Do we decide that our own sense of right and wrong must be flawed? (This is a question I have no good answer to—where should we develop our sense of right and wrong?)
Moreover, historically there are many times that democracy says something is right that the people of a later era (perhaps even just a couple years later) decide was actually wrong, and that's the reason we have constitutional limits on what voters can do—but who decides what the Constitution says? We obviously need a veto over the will of the voters, but who should we trust with it?
What if instead of technical skills you have money? Is it wrong to use money in the service of influencing political goals? (In the US, neither the voters nor the Constitution believe so, by the way.) If others are influencing society with money, is it wrong to use money to counter them?
What about speech and communications media? If you have a platform (say, you're a popular entertainer or writer or talk show host), should you use it to convince others of a particular political position? If you have many listeners and your political opponents don't, is it still okay for you to speak to your listeners, or are you a minority unjustly using your influence and power?
What about weaponry? Traditionally, military might has settled many questions of whether a government should be permitted to engage in an action. Is it unjust to go to war with a country with a smaller army? Would it have been morally optimal for the US to say, we have about 5% of the world's population, the morally optimal choice is to not interfere with World War II?
I worry the argument that it's not our place to act on our principles is popular because it's easy and comfortable—keep your job, don't rock the boat—not because it's morally compelling.
And of these groups who can influence society—the politically-well-connected-200-years-ago, the rich, the media, the military, and the technical builders—if there is an argument for any of them to exert disproportionate influence, it seems to me the strongest argument would be for the builders, since technical work necessarily requires intelligence snd systems thinking more strongly than the others do. That is, if any group is to be entrusted with a veto if the rest agree and they disagree, the builders seem most likely to have a legitimate, informed, reasoned, and non-self-serving reason for the veto.
Society, incidentally, has no stories of praising people who exercised restraint when they saw an obvious injustice and the rest of the world going along with it. It usually disdains them as weak, cowardly, and opportunistic. It does have strong praise for those who took a stand even when it seemed like their position was in the minority.
> But what happens when democracy reaches a conclusion that seems obviously unjust?
In that case, we imagine a better democracy. If someone feels empathy is what makes their local democracy work better, and the further-above larger spheres of democracy no longer embody that:
We should imagine a new democracy that optimizes for empathy, no?
I'm not sure I follow concretely what is meant by "imagine a better democracy." Does it involve stopping the unjust outcomes (by persuasion, influence, or force) or just advocating a new constitutional convention at some point? And how do we make it better / "optimize for empathy" - do we change how votes are allocated and weighted? Do we enshrine empathy as a constitutional principle and ask judges to stop unempathetic laws?
Are the protesters in Hong Kong imagining a new democracy that optimizes for empathy? Did the plaintiffs in Obergefell do so? What about the soldiers at Normandy?
Is refusing to work for employers that sell to ICE part of imagining a better democracy?
> just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society.
I agree this is problematic. However, programmers are uniquely well situated to create a system for asking "the rest of society" questions about what kinds of systems they would like a programmer to support.
> make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice.
Quitting would be (as close as one gets to) refraining from exercising power. What you're describing is cooperating with the status quo, which is definitely an exercise of power.
>What you're describing is cooperating with the status quo, which is definitely an exercise of power.
Working for ICE as an engineer would be you exercising your power for ICE. But working for GitHub as an engineer, where GitHub is customer-agnostic, doesn't seem like an exercise of power to me. Anyone can use the product you build, it's not specifically for ICE. Similarly if you design a car and some cars of that design get used by ICE, that doesn't seem like an exercise of power in favor of ICE, unless you build features specifically for ICE.
Threatening to quit if GitHub continues to sell to ICE seems like an exercise of power against ICE. Silently quitting and not telling anyone why you quit I would consider a very slight exercise of power against ICE, because over time if it happens enough, businesses that deal with ICE will be less competent that businesses that don't deal with ICE, and that will harm ICE slightly.
I agree with all that I think working on a thing is continuing to bring it into being. Declining to have an opinion is the same as agreeing with the current planned direction.
In that sense, continuing to work for github forwards the net moral "output" of its work. Each wrong or right is weighted differently and though I think we can all agree that there is a direction amplitude is harder.
I just want to add that, in the same sense that quitting github quietly is a tiny blow against ICE, continuing to work for github silently is also clearly supportive of ice. Actions are rarely totally morally neutral, which is ok as long as we don't pretend they are.
>make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice
Don't you think the FSF exists as a huge counterpoint to this? The FSF deliberate makes the decision that copyleft is the morally optimal choice and forces others to comply - and I'd imagine more developers view the FSF as a good thing.
It forces developers to comply, but it doesn't impose any restrictions on the users of the software. In fact it forces developers to not impose any restrictions on the users of the software.
Your distinction between "users" and "developers" is meaningless to me. Why does FSF get to make that distinction, but GitHub cannot do the same for "ICE" and "other humans".
All in all, the FSF is arguing for restrictions about how one class of individuals may use what they produce and for the benefit of the other class. Just like how FSF prevents other developers from using their products to lock other users out of their software, similarly, the employees are asking to prevent ICE from using their products against the questionable imprisonment of other human beings.
Yeah I do see there are a lot of similarities.
But I think the main difference lies in that copyleft limits itself purely to the realm of controlling how modified software is distributed. The only thing it limits is how modified software is distributed. The only thing it requires is how modified software is distributed. When a developer writes software to be used by others, it's necessary for the developer to decide how to distributed it, and copyleft provides an answer. Copyleft doesn't venture past the developer's necessary role.
On the other hand, limiting providing stuff to ICE ventures out of the developer's necessary question of how to distribute software and now starts thinking about human suffering, jails, politics, etc. You've gone past the question of how to distribute software, and are now thinking about broader topics.
> Just like how FSF prevents other developers from using their products to lock other users out of their software
Developers are allowed to create commercial or otherwise restricted software with FSF tools like gcc.
> What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influence for good, many other people may see as a small minority abusing their power to manipulate society for the worse.
Nevermind "good" or "bad" by the select judgement of a few privileged people -- it's whether you even bother to _consider_, or instead just claim "this is hard".
We can create influencing machines, or consensing machines. Your rightful concern is applicable to influencing machines imho. A consensing machine has no centre it's drawing people into. It's a technology for users to find and coalesce around the centres that work for them.
The things the OP is implying unnavigable are the same class of challenges we navigated hundreds of years ago with intellectual property. We thought ownership was worth controlling access over, and we made arbitrary laws to propagate that regime in the world. We could deign it worth creating processes to collectively negotiate moral right/wrong together (without presupposing the will of the steward of the tech is right/wrong) and hold ourselves to that.
The fact that we don't even bother to consider the question of "should we do this" and instead fall on "this is challenging" -- that speaks volumes to how some of us are limited in our imagining of what the sickness in society might be.
The question of what's right and wrong is a topic for religion and theologists.
I don't mean that in a cynical or nasty way. As the years go by I get more convinced that the rise of atheism is causing some of our biggest problems in western society, and I'm not religious myself. But it seems that for all its flaws, Christianity at least was an infrastructure of people and principles that hung together in some vaguely coherent manner such that people could pose the question "Is this right? Is this good?" and either answer it themselves by reference to a book, or ask it of a full time moraliser (priest).
The reason the OP is expressing unease at this kind of tech worker "morality" is because it's wafer thin in a way that makes medieval theology look like a towering pinnacle of intellectualism.
They aren't making moral judgements of their customers consistently. ICE is targeted only because a bunch of journalists started covering it extensively as part of their anti-Trump agenda. ICE did similar things before Trump but they weren't in the news, so GitHub workers ignored it.
Moreover their morality isn't universal. ICE is bad because it hurts people who only want a better life. OK, so, should there be no borders at all? What happens then to all the American workers in marginal jobs who suddenly lose their income because an immigrant willing to live in practically sub-Saharan conditions took their job? That worker only wanted a better life too, do they not matter? If not why not? Is it because they're white and GitHub workers are racist against whites? What about other border control agencies? What about governments in general?
Christian religious morals are very far from ideal but at least make a show of being universal. You forgive those who trespass against you - it doesn't matter who they are or what they did. You forgive them. You are the good Samaritan who helps those in need. Doesn't matter who they work for. You love your neighbour. Doesn't matter if they voted for the other guy.
You're arguing that tech workers should engage with morality as if it's any other hard question that can be whiteboarded out in a few hours. But tech workers have got nothing to say on this topic that hasn't already been said hundreds of years ago. They have no special insights to provide. The rigour of their moral logic is trivial compared even to a bunch of men in funny clothes reading stories about camels out of a book written anonymously 2000 years ago. Why shouldn't they be reminded of this?
That is a brilliant synthesis of the crux of the issue. Our community is powerful and full of their own virtue while simultaneously largely disconnected from issues they so protest about. No actual skin in the game, so much power, so much certainty. Its a recipe for disaster.
On the other hand, I'm one of those Free Software guys that believes that the software I write should be able to be used by anyone, for any purpose. One of the problems with causing shit storms in at your place of employment because they don't follow your preferred political views is that these views are divergent.
No matter what thing you are talking about, whether technical or political decision, a decision has to be made. Once it is made, as an employee, I think you've got to either go with it or decide to go somewhere else (perhaps starting your own company if you need to). I say this as a person who obviously holds a minority point of view in most of the companies I've worked for ;-)
At the end of the day, you've got to decide if you are aligned with the ideals of the employer you work for or not. Making suggestions is one thing, but trying to put political pressure on your employer to act in a particular manner is something I would advise people to refrain from.
The problem is few vocal employees can set the tone which comes out in public as if every employee at that company is against it. I don't think that should be the case and only the shareholders should voice/vote on companies decisions. And shareholders will always vote for what helps the bottom line. Look at what happened in NY where few vocal politicians voted out Amazon's HQ.
The argument is not "too hard to draw a line, so we should not do it", it is "too hard to draw a line, which means it is arbitrary, lacking in legitimacy, and prone to corruption."
Engineers are a powerful class of people with the opportunity to swing their weight around on political issues like this. Some believe this opportunity should be seized for good, others believe it is just a soft form of tyranny, an undemocratic exercise of power. This is particularly true when in your own country, where you ought to use the power of the vote to make a difference.
Perhaps you start here and not stop until a government and it's agencies cease abusive practices.
The counter question is how much should a person turn a blind eye (and so implicitly endorse) the uses of your product?
In this case at least, there was a donation made that would not have happened otherwise.
If part of the reason that employees at companies like Github get equity is to foster a sense of ownership, it's no surprise that employees concern themselves with the larger picture.
Totally second that.
The moment salaried employee start sabotaging his job and putting his views against his job description - it's clearly time for him to reconsider employment at a place that better matches his priorities.
Win-win for all, no struggle needed.
GH employees don't just get a salary but also equity. So in addition to being employees they are, in fact, owners of the company. It seems perfectly fair for a company owner (even a small one) to voice an opinion about how the company operates.
I can't really buy a few shares of Apple and get on a high horse trying to steer AAPL revenue strategy to my liking and beliefs.
Shareholder I am - but lets get realistic.
Sure you can:
https://www.fastcompany.com/40514341/two-activist-apple-shar...
>> ... which together own around $2 billion of Apple stock, have published an open letter urging Apple to think differently about ...
Lol, there is a small difference between few shares and few $billion worth of shares. Latter' voice is easier to be heard.
> I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used once it's created. You have to let certain control go after a point. Or if your product is open to everyone, you'll have to live with the fact that people may use it in ways you disagree with.
Well if a business fostered a culture where it's deemed acceptable to question who the business should or shouldn't be working with, nobody can blame the employees for doing exactly what they were incentivized to do.
Plenty of businesses would fired a rebellious employee on the spot without a second thought, or at the very least ask him to resign if he dares question managements on a matter that is neither legally questionable or related to the employee's work conditions, for instance, a group of employees that would be asking management to boycott a certain country.
Seems it is a different culture at GitHub,Google or Facebook where apparently questioning management is a virtue.
I see nothing wrong with that. It's their own doing.
GitHub doesn’t sell product in the same way as your examples. They are a service provider. I’d say different dynamics come in with services (hosting content, providing and managing infrastructure, providing support and maybe even consulting) vs products.
Also for people who draw comparison with discrimination against individuals: Companies, agencies and organizations aren’t “discriminated” against in the same sense as individuals. I am not aware of any legislation where it’s considered wrongly discriminatory to decline B2B contracts.
There is a difference between a) offering something (for free or gain) ubiquitously to the world at large regardless of any of the myriad ways we choose to distinguish one from another and b) have an arrangement with a specific entity to further their specific cause.
I'm not under the impression that gitlab employees are complaining about the first (surely ICE employees and contractors can make use of the myriads of repositories gitlab makes available to the world at large). They are reacting negatively to specific contracts gitlab has with ICE.
I don't think there is some "special right" at work here. I think some people who work at Github have decided that they don't like a deal their employer made, and presumably if said employer is trying to "quell employee anger" then enough of their employees must be angry enough to move the needle for their business.
This is fine, because employees are not in principle slaves. They do have a right to tell their employers to go fuck themselves "at will", just as the opposite is true. Anybody who takes a stand like this is exercising a privilege that not everybody enjoys, sure, but you're running with that in a suppressive direction (why should Github employees get to be special if not everyone can be special, and by the way (gasp) what if they aren't perfectly logical and fair in their activism?) while I'd go the other way: in an ideal world everybody would enjoy this privilege, and any workers who can take a stand for what they believe in certainly should.
The alternative is that corporate leaders alone are responsible for imposing ethics on the markets they play in, and we all know the sorts of decisions such people tend to make.
Why not let workers who want to "pressure" GitHub exercise their First Amendment rights and quit?
At the same time GitHub should absolutely pay a bit more to get engineers who don't care about this issue.
We don't need to censor employees, and at the same time we shouldn't expand the moral opinions of a vocal minority of opinions to be automatically indicative of what GitHub "should" do. What Github "should" do is replace these employees who are exercising their right to quit.
> Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent ... ?
Why do you ask question in such a biased frame?
Why don't you ask instead:
Why don't other companies have moral standards?
The comments here seem very negative compared to e.g. the Google employee protests over Project Dragonfly. [1]
There are two questions here: whether GitHub should allow ICE to buy its software, and whether employees should influence the direction of their company via protests, petitions, and threats to quit.
GitHub specifics aside, I think employees absolutely should organize and quit over issues they feel strongly about (at least when they have the flexibility to find other jobs). Company policy should be guided by the people who work there, and the a company's leadership structure is set up well to resolve the conflict.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18542830
Thats because HN is a US-based website, and that automatically entails "US = good, China = bad" comments. (Even though in this case both US and China = bad)
The important distinction is that Project Dragonfly was being built to serve a single customer and purpose, both of which employees were not comfortable with. GitHub is built to serve any customer and has a defined purpose that is generally useful. Employees are now uncomfortable with their generally useful tool being used as intended by a customer they do not approve of.
It's not really an apples to apples comparison.
> The results of GitHub’s quarterly anonymous employee survey — which showed a decline in trust of leadership ...
In 100% of cases where I've known a small company that got bought by a much bigger company, this has occurred. It's amazing anyone still believes that their small company can get bought and somehow they'll be able to preserve (what they think is) their "company culture".
> It's amazing anyone still believes
Has anyone ever believed that?
Management implies, the old owners imply this, and some large fraction of the rank and file employees buy this.
When the rank and file realize there is no lottery ticket for them, or that they are the lottery ticket, then there's a lot of burnout.
And yes, I am fun in interviews. :)
Yes. I’ve worked at a couple of companies now where this has happened. It’s really hard for founders to let go of their “baby” and as such, there’s a lot of rationalization that goes into the decision when they sell the company or go public.
One of the common ones is that they will have a large enough say to keep the culture of the small company intact and often say things like “we’re just going to continue being ourselves but with more funding or resources or XYZ so it’s really great!”
In the end, they don’t accept the fact that the larger company’s values/culture is their company now and they can try to enact change as much as they want but they are no longer the key decision maker for the company overall.
For a public company at scale, it’s incredibly hard to 1.) grow exponentially or greatly and 2.) keep the hiring bar high enough to maintain your culture. There’s a trade-off made there that you’re public & you cannot slow growth at the risk of upsetting shareholders but it’s a catch-22 cause you can’t also let your salaries go out of control to hire the right talent for your culture cause you have to explain that cost increase to your stakeholders.
There was that time Apple “acquired” NeXT...
But for all n where n > 1, no.
Fair point. I’m not sure if they did, or simply believed the benefits (financial and otherwise) of being bought outweighed the loss of company culture. They at least seemed to, in my experience.
JWZ — or maybe Spolsky — wrote about (a more general case of) this. You can either grow fast, or maintain company culture. You can’t do both.
Being bought by a larger company is just one case of growing really fast all at once.
Stripe acquired Indie Hackers two and a half years ago, and I love it. I get ample support and encouragement, while also retaining my freedom to run the community how I see fit. Most IHers would also tell you that the site has improved since then.
One of the many keys is aligned incentives and values. If there's even a small 1-2 degree difference in the direction you and your acquirer would like to head in, that gap will widen into a vast chasm given enough time.
Also, kudos to the leadership at Stripe. They're intelligent, well-meaning, and they get it.
Stripe (2,000 employees) is not really comparable to Microsoft (144,106 employees) when the context is corporate issues.
I don't think we should dismiss your argument so quickly just because Stripe isn't a large corporation. I'd be interested to know more about the approach Stripe took. I'd imagine there are plenty of mistakes to make regardless of company size.
I'd also like to point out that a small company can be so toxic that the employees would welcome any change in leadership -- because anything different can bring temporary relief.
Huh? GitHub’s company culture has been described as toxic way before they were acquired - not at least here. The problem seems to be exactly that they’ve managed to preserve that. Kudos to the employees speaking up though!
I’m simply going off what the article says.
If it was “toxic” before and still managed to decline, that sounds even worse!
I'm not sure if I would characterise it as toxic? There is obviously disagreement. But my impression has always been "this is a company where people have values other than technology & money, and are empowered to speak up". The alternative isn't really never having disagreements, but rather being secretive and vindictive to the point where employees fear to speak up, or consider it useless in the face of corporate bureaucracy and unaccountability. <side-eyes to IBM>
I'd like to get a feel about what volume of employees have an issue with these things.
From issue to issue I hear about various forms of employees making themselves heard but it is REALLY hard to jive with what that means.
We've seen Google employees post about some ideas that seemed to be genuinely popular (measure that how you will...) but later ideas or advocacy were reportedly far less supported by the general employees, but news reports seem to reports that don't know / specify make it sound like issue to issue "employee anger" is somehow uniform / equally supported each time.
I've worked enough places to see a popular topic / concern taken by the same employee advocates into new topics that very much were not popular.
I also have to wonder what percentage of GitHub’s employees _are_ non-US citizens. Every programming job I’ve ever had in the U.S. was for a company that was staffed by at least 90% foreigners; if they see U.S. immigration as an adversary, they may be opposing any contract on personal grounds.
And I don't think one should restrict that reasoning to only the foreign-born employees. Native-born US citizens working side-by-side with employees who have regular contact with our immigration process get a second-row seat to how broken it is.
(Spoilers: personal observation, it's pretty broken.)
> Every programming job I’ve ever had in the U.S. was for a company that was staffed by at least 90% foreigners.
Where the hell are you working? I'm going to call bullshit, because it's really not that easy to get a work visa in the US. You're saying 90% of your colleagues weren't US citizens?
At every large company where I have worked (Intel, Qualcomm, Google, Facebook) the majority of my colleagues have been non-citizens. In some cases (Qualcomm SD, Google) 100% of the people on my team were non-citizens.
It's heavily team-dependent. I was on a team at Google where I was the only American citizen, with teammates from Iceland, England, Vietnam, India (4), Taiwan (2), and China (2). I was also on a team where there were basically zero non-citizens, and most of my teammates were from places like Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc.
Is that sort of distribution typical? Do teams tend to self-segregate?
Teams do self-segregate. What often happens is that the team manager ends up recruiting people they are comfortable with, which in practice means recruiting people who are culturally similar. If the team grows, the same dynamic works on the next level of managers, and so on. So immigrant managers tend to recruit other immigrants, native-born managers tend to recruit other native-born Americans, and so on. The manager of the first team was an Icelandic immigrant; the manager of the second was an American-born person of Indian descent.
A similar dynamic works on sex, as well. About half of the teams I worked at were roughly 40% women; the other half of them had zero women. Women are generally reluctant to join a team where they will be the only woman, and also word gets around about who the female-friendly managers are. So those female-friendly managers get teams that are close to 50% female, while other managers get teams of zero women. (Statistically, Google Engineering was about 10% female and IIRC 50-60% foreign-born, which means that I encountered about twice as many women that I would've been predicted to and about half as many foreigners. I wonder what that says about my personality.)
I suspect they’re saying anyone who looks/sounds different must be foreign.
There is a rule about inferring the most charitable interpretation IIRC.
Pretty much true for most large tech companies, at least in the SF Bay Area. I've worked at 2 large and 1 small tech co and it was only the small company that had mostly US citizens (mostly because of the cost of dealing with immigration lawyers etc)
It feels like closer to 50% noncitizen where I work, but could be closer to 90% if you include naturalized citizens.
It's absolutely not bullshit. I've worked places where this is true and places where it isn't. In my experience, the former is more common.
This is true in a lot of places. In my PhD program (in a US university), the vast majority of us are not US citizens.
> I'm going to call bullshit,
Will people please consider a moment's thought before using this adolescent phrase? People throwing it around are probably not using it with its most precise and defensible meaning (a la Harry Frankfurt). So the most charitable alternative gloss is that it's used carelessly to mean someone is just wrong. It's a very poor (because ambiguous) word choice for that. I suspect it's usually deployed to suggest someone is lying, for which you need specific evidence beyond believing a statement to be incorrect. That evidence is very rarely available in an HN comment.
It's hard to be thoughtful about using language, and I'm no exemplar. But a good start is just avoiding reflexively spitting out some rarely useful prefabricated phrases. This is one.
My current team is at least 80% foreign-born-and-rasied, myself included, but I don't know everyone's immigration status. But this is the "whitest", most American team I've worked with in the last 8 years in Silicon Valley. Prior to that I was in the mid-west and I was the only foreign engineer.
One of my first SW jobs (mid-scale startup in Palo Alto) I had multiple canadians on my team and we had some chinese and indian immigrants on other teams. I wouldn't say 90%, but a sizable percentage.
At other companies like Google and Microsoft I've had plenty of immigrant colleagues along with colleagues at offices overseas. Some eventually choose to return to their home country, some migrate here after starting at the employer.
The main game studio I worked for also had lots of chinese and korean immigrants on staff, but I suspect that was influenced by the parent company being korean.
You're assuming that legal immigrants from around the world working high paid tech jobs have common cause with "illegal" immigrants coming across the southern border.
In my anecdotal experience it's not so simple.
There are massive logistical challenges with processing mass influxes of immigrants into a country, particularly people who are coming through outside of the legal process.
I would think a large contingent of GitHub employees want the people working at ICE to be using the best tools possible to achieve their mission. Many are probably quite proud of US government agencies using their tools, the same as if NASA or Executive Branch or Congress was using Github.
IMO it’s a very difficult situation when certain employees are arranging political protests against specific customers of the company, and making other employees uncomfortable to express their own potentially divergent viewpoints.
How would you even know that? Assuming you weren't high up in HR?
Every non-citizen I know keeps their head down and doesn't express their personal opinions on political matters (particularly relating to ICE) because they don't want to jeopardize their visa. It would be strange and kinda stupid for a foreign programmer on an H1B to oppose a contract with ICE because they do eventually want to get that Green Card and eventually citizenship, and they know who holds the power in that relationship.
(It's also amusing to see that sometimes shift when they get their citizenship; I had a Japanese classmate in college who was on first a student visa, then an H1B, then a green card for about 15 years. He had zero political opinions for the whole time I knew him. As soon as he got his citizenship, he's active in local politics. It's more about urban planning, transit, and YIMBY efforts than immigration, though.)
You are correct. As someone who used to be on very restrictive visas for a while - your job is not “just a job” anymore. It was very much a source of constant stress for me knowing that political shifts at work or a terrible boss could very well send you packing in a matter of days.
This will be less likely to shift in the coming years, since the US government is openly investigating the ability to revoke citizenship. It's depressing to see, but I guess it shouldn't be surprising because the US approach to citizenship - birthright and/or naturalization - is not universally the case in other countries.
a lot of non citizens support ice because if they are working at a company like github they got here legally and don’t see it as fair that others just get to skip the line
A good portion of GitHub’s employees live in Europe. Of the employees who live in America, most are citizens.
https://xkcd.com/2159/
I deeply suspect that large swathes of the employees at a lot of these large companies don't really care either way.
As with any large community of people, there are some who are more vocal than others. Call them what you want (protestors/agitators/woke/etc), but I get the feeling that they're getting a disproportionately large amount of focus from the media and I guess management.
Certainly in my experience at an unnamed employer, the first I heard about protests and problems at my work place was when I read about it on the internet - there was nothing in my immediate workplace at all to suggest any of what was reported was actually even happening, let alone pervasive.
> Call them what you want (protestors/agitators/woke/etc), but I get the feeling that they're getting a disproportionately large amount of focus from the media and I guess management.
Explicitly so. Loud voices make headlines, headlines get clicks, clicks get ad revenue. The entire industry is geared to produce maximum clicks and, ergo, maximum loud voice. This has been the theme for a while now.
The issue, though, is that Management can ignore a couple of angry cranks -- or just fire them -- but they can't avoid news articles.
It's obviously the small noisy minority. Most people don't have any expectation that their employer should have anything like a coherent moral vision; they just want to do their job, get their paycheck, and go home.
Even names on a petition don't mean much - the kind of people that like to solicit for signatures on petitions are often so insufferable that you sign to make them go away and leave you in peace.
About a quarter of the company has signed the protest letter. I signed the letter just so people would stop nagging me to sign. I don’t care about ICE. I suspect there are others who got pressured into signing.
That’s amazing to me. It seems to me like creating a hostile work environment and a form of harassment, although political rallying is not a protected category, and the employer is likely hamstrung in making any sort of response.
I wonder about that, too - how far will the rabble-rousers go, if they can get away with it? Will they insist on the firing of the people who _didn’t_ sign the petition? Will they blacklist people who have ever worked with ICE in the future? Will this spread beyond github? Will we have an unelected, unaccountable group of “the woke” dictating the terms of our employment?
"I was just doing my job" is not an excuse. It is absolutely not only our right to decide how our work is used in the world, but our duty to make sure we're not enabling human rights violations. I applaud and support tech workers making ethical calls around their work. Unfortunately we may need to put our money where our mouths are and leave employers that refuse to stand by any ethical code, and that's already happening all across the tech industry.
But how is Github's product enabling human rights violations? I can understand if Github employees were protesting a product that created human rights violations (for example if Github offered a security service for ICE detention centers that was abusing prisoners). Would you be ok if Github was a restaurant and it had a policy of not serving anyone who is an ICE employee?
Yeah, I would love that actually. ICE runs concentration camps. Not enough people treat them how they deserve.
Ok so would you ok with a restaurant not serving republicans because the party currently supports ICE's actions?
A bit of Slippery Slope combined with Strawman fallacy here.
It's some great irony that two minutes before you posted this, a man of straw himself appeared and agreed with the statement.
I don't think you can call something a strawman if the idea seems to actually have wide support.
Hello, I'm a real boy! I happen to support both of these positions, but it is indeed possible to condemn ICE without feeling the same about the GOP in general, and jumping immediately from one to the next is exactly the kind of thing people mean when they talk about moving the goalposts.
I just wanted to see if dunstad would support such a ban. And they did, as you can see by their agreement. This shows how real that slippery slope is for many people...
Political alignment isn't a protected class.
You are right - I always forget that political affiliation is not a protected class within our legal system. However, I think it should be, because we've seen the whole ugly side of persecution and discrimination that came about during the McCarthy era and beyond where people like MLK, Chaplin, WEB Du Bois, and Linus Pauling were targeted for their political beliefs.
Can you point to some sources so I can understand how they are concentration camps? I’ve been to Dachau and nothing on the news shows anything like what I saw there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_inte...
From the article:
> In 2019, many experts, including Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, have acknowledged the designation of the detention centers as "concentration camps" [227] [228] particularly given that the centers, previously cited by Texas officials for more than 150 health violations [229] and reported deaths in custody,[230] reflect a record typical of the history of deliberate substandard healthcare and nutrition in concentration camps.[231] Though some organizations have tried to resist the "concentration camp" label for these facilities, [232] [233] hundreds of Holocaust and genocide scholars rejected this resistance via an open letter addressed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [234]
41,000 deaths in Dachau.[1]
15 deaths in ICE detention centers.[2] If you add 2017 it would be about 25.[3]
I have family who immigrated to the US last year with their children. We have the largest immigrant population and we want people to come here.[4]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp
[2]https://www.ice.gov/death-detainee-report#wcm-survey-target-...
[3] https://www.cato.org/blog/annual-death-rate-immigration-dete...
[4] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/which-countries-have-...
There always seems to be a conflation of concentration camps with Nazi death camps in these discussions. ICE running concentration camps (a facility for holding "people, commonly in large groups, without charges") seems wholly unremarkable.
Judging by the definition of "internment" linked from that wiki page....Japan runs "concentration camps", as it regularly imprisons people without charges and without trial for up to 23 days, under harsh conditions.
Seems like a pretty low bar for defining the term, and obscures the pretty real distinctions in overall human suffering that occur at different places.
Do we know that Github is being used to enable human rights violations, and that their use of Github for potentially negative actions outweighs potentially beneficial actions, given that ICE has a wide variety of responsibilities beyond immigration enforcement?
For example, it seems reasonable to guess that they might be using their Github deployment to help run the National Child Victim Identification System:
The National Child Victim Identification System (NCVIS), owned by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is an application that assists federal, state, local, and international law enforcement agencies, INTERPOL, and other supporting organizations, such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) (hereafter, authorized partners) in the investigation and prosecution of child exploitation crimes, specifically those involving images of child sexual exploitation.
https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhsicepia-010-national-child...
Topics like this, I think, give us an opportunity to go deeper on the issues and concepts surrounding what's going on.
I realize that the common quick answer these days is to harshly reject people and organizations we deeply disagree with.
But, there may be some things worth pondering, like...
Is there a way technology companies can influence these organizations and the situations of the people they touch for the better? For example, ICE is going to do what's it's going to do whether or not GitHub has a contract with them. Is there a way that technologies from companies can help ICE and organizations like it treat the people they deal with better? Does that make a difference?
I'm not suggesting an opinion on this particular case. Just offering this up as an opportunity to go deeper than we tend to these days.
> Is there a way that technologies from companies can help ICE and organizations like it treat the people they deal with better?
One thing GitHub could have done, if it was serious about its "but ICE also stops human trafficking and terrorists" narrative, is insisted on selling them professional services / consulting work (perhaps at a discount - they'd already decided to donate more than the revenue of the contract, so working for ICE out of the goodness of their hearts is definitely not out of the question) which let them understand what teams and projects at ICE are using their work and how. But in their letter to employees, they listed it as a positive that they weren't doing this, they just gave ICE the product and told them to have fun. https://github.blog/2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-deve...
"GitHub does not have a professional services agreement with ICE, and GitHub is not consulting with ICE on any of their projects or initiatives. GitHub has no visibility into how this software is being used, other than presumably for software development and version control."
I think if you believed you could make some change for the better working within the system, the way to start is by, first, deciding what your principles are and what your approach is when your customer wants to be at odds with that (refuse to support projects you disagree with? try to change hearts and minds? etc.) in a codified way and getting agreement within the company on it, and second, insisting on a close enough consulting relationship where you can enforce that. (I also suspect that unless you have an uncommonly good product, most customers won't be a fan and will just buy from someone else.)
Also GitHub, being a platform and not a direct tool for work, isn't really in a great position to influence ICE's work. "You can check in the code you use to track terrorists, but not the code you use to track DACA recipients" isn't particularly technically meaningful.
Arguing that “they’ll do it anyway” is why IBM supported the holocaust, why companies like NSO sell to to human rights rights abusers, etc.
The argument basically boils down to supporting literally anything. If enough people start saying “no, we won’t support that”, it pushes up the price of the behaviour, and could eventually lead to the entire industry dropping support - for example when all the pharmaceutical companies decide to stop allowing their drugs to be used for executions.
>Is there a way technology companies can influence these organizations and the situations of the people they touch for the better?
What? With the ethical compass those surveillance system running, addiction-pushing assholes have? We should be talking about how to dial down their power in society.
If they want to repent for their lack of self control in their own actions by pushing their moral standards onto others, then they can go get fucked.
Has this ever worked?
People will come up with all sorts of reasons to convince themselves to take blood money, but surely they're self delusions at best.
I think that a lot of people see a rise and mainstreaming of White Nationalism and want to push back.
I think it's not restricted to White Nationalism. We see a lot of pushback against Hong Kong nationalism and Catalonian nationalism and Uyghur nationalism and Kurdish nationalism recently.
It's as if the forces of good suddenly decided that any nationalism is unacceptable in 2019.
That is surely in the mix. To me, its about human decency. I support immigration, but even if you do not support immigration you should support human decency. Making people sleep in cages on concrete, limiting supplies, limiting legal assistance, separating families - those are horrible ways to treat other humans, other humans simply seeking a better life.
We are largely a nation of immigrants. We've lost sight of our roots. Its proper to stand up against this inhumane and unnecessary behavior. The government is experiencing social consequences of its own making.
I think the problem is an attribution of intent. You see "white nationalism" but:
> Making people sleep in cages
There was a spike in the number of illegal immigrants in the last few years, facilities were swamped. This was an unfortunate but temporary measure. It would be more irresponsible to just release people into the country without establishing their identity, criminal history, or a suitable guardian (for children).
> Limiting supplies / legal assistance
There are a finite resources, especially when one party sees every penny spent on immigration matters as "racist". Politicians were sounding the alarms months before this reached crisis-levels, but the other side refused to release a single penny until after it reached critical levels.
> Separating families
When an adult and a child arrive illegally with no documents you have two major facts to deal with: the adult has just broken a law, and you cannot establish familial ties. Given the extent of child trafficking, would you rather just give any adult that says "that's my child" custody, or would you rather separate the child from the adult until you can establish if that is actually a parent? You are damned either way because your critics will say you're "separating families" or "you're a pedophile helping traffic children". Personally, I would rather be told I'm splitting families than enabling child trafficking, but I could see the argument against that preference.
So at the end of the day none of these things are happening because of white nationalism. They are happening because of an inability to control illegal immigration rates, a lack of funding for facilities, materials, and legal aid; and in order to protect minors who may be trafficked.
To me, that is the real problem. One side of the media/political spectrum has decided it's white nationalism. The other sees it as something that has to be done because the alternative is worst. And to be charitable, I am sure there is a tiny fraction of a percent of a segment of the population and people involved who are white nationalists, but to think that's the motivating force is to dismiss the vast majority of people who have good intentions.
What is also exponentially annoying is that both sides have become so polarized that they will never work together on this.
I didn't actually use the words 'white nationalism' and tried to make a different point about decency without blaming any one group other than maybe those that oppose immigration. There are other options besides putting people in cages, we could make it easier and much quicker to accept them legally for example. To me, its not so much about white people, its about how we choose to handle immigration. Current immigration rates are far from unprecedented, https://www.history.com/news/immigrants-ellis-island-short-p....
We could choose to do things differently and treat people with the dignity and respect that we all deserve as humans. No matter the color of our skin.
How weird that you didn't mention asylum in this entire post, not even once. You keep talking about "illegal immigrants" and "breaking the law", completely ignoring the fact that claiming asylum is legal.
Many of these people who were being caged are people who claimed asylum at the border points of entry; they were not illegal immigrants, nor did they try to sneak in. The correct thing to do in this situation of not having enough room would be to release them into the country pending their asylum hearing, rather than locking them up in substandard, inhumane, occasionally deadly accommodations.
About 20-30,000 people are granted asylum each year, versus about 60,000-100,000 people a month apprehended at the southern border by CBP. The vast majority of “inadmissibles” are not qualified refuges.
> The asylum seeker must prove to the officer that there is a “significant possibility” he or she is eligible for asylum, and must also be subject to a credibility assessment. If the officer makes a positive finding, the asylum seeker is referred to an immigration court where they will have the opportunity to apply for asylum before an immigration judge. If the individual does not meet the credible fear screening standard, he or she can be deported.
That process ideally happens in a few days, but a system to designed to handle 5,000 people a month getting 100,000 requests a month is going to take longer. In the meantime, those applicants cannot simply be released into the interior.
The onus is on Congress to appropriate the necessary funding to allow for expedited and humane treatment and proper facilities for processing the number of people who are crossing. As long as Congress refuses to provide the funds, the agencies are left to enforce the nations immigration laws without the proper resources, staffing, or even possibly basic sanitation, bedding, clothes, etc.
>> Making people sleep in cages
> There was a spike in the number of illegal immigrants in the last few years, facilities were swamped. This was an unfortunate but temporary measure.
It is still going on. It is not okay.
> It would be more irresponsible to just release people into the country without establishing their identity, criminal history, or a suitable guardian (for children).
They are not keeping people until they "established their identity". There is not a process where they keep people asking for asylum locked up only until they establish their identity and no longer, that's just not how it works.
These are weird excuses for taking people fleeing danger imprisoning them in truly abominable conditions, for the sin of asking for asylum.
"These things" are happening because the government intentionally decided to treat people asking for asylum _as bad as they could_, in order to discourage people from doing it, and look good to those who just want to treat them bad. This is all well-documented. It was not some kind of forced hand, the level of asylum seekers and other migrants was not substantially different from the past couple decades. Whether it was because of "white nationalism" I suppose depends on what was in the hearts and minds of the decision-makers, but it's pretty darn clear they consciously decided to treat migrants like animals (worse than you are allowed to treat pets really) and it is disgusting, and it is TERRIFYING to me that so many Americans like you think it's okay, because if it's okay to treat anyone like that, why couldn't any of us be next?
We are setting a terrible precedent on the international stage for how people fleeing danger are treated. That's a lot of false confidence that nobody we know will ever be in that situation. More and more of us will be though.
>>>the level of asylum seekers and other migrants was not substantially different from the past couple decades.
What's your source for this? This site[1] indicates otherwise (even the 10-year chart shows a huge growth in applications). And this article[2] states 800,000 people detained so far this year. I'm sure ICE and CBP's infrastructure and processes were never meant to handle populations of this size. Also, note that in [2] many of these people are asylum shopping.
>>>We are setting a terrible precedent on the international stage for how people fleeing danger are treated.
The precedent has already been set: impoverished people the world over know that if they are willing to accept some risk, they can lie their way into the US and get free stuff. People are kidnapping kids so they can pretend they are family. Migrants from central Africa have NGOs providing them with French-language documents on not cooperating with ICE or the US government. These people are buying plane tickets to Brazil, then taking buses ALLLLLL the way up Central America (lots of places to stop and apply for asylum there) so they can illegally cross the border into the US. Who is paying the salaries for these NGOs? And WHY? Those are the hard questions that aren't being asked. The narrative is one that appeals to empathy in order to obscure deeper issues.
Look at this article[4]. It tries to paint a picture that the rights of African migrants are somehow being infringed upon because Mexico is not enabling them to move onward to the US. But this is specifically discouraged once you are out of your country of origin and no longer in immediate danger.[5] So again, ask yourself, why is this narrative being pushed? And why now?
[1]https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/asylum-applicatio...
[2]https://www.voanews.com/usa/immigration/us-bound-migrants-as...
[3]https://youtu.be/mJlOmMj21uM
[4]https://prospect.org/power/african-asylum-seekers-u.s.-stuck...
[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugee#Restriction_of_onward_...
That was during the Obama Administration, yet those in outrage over ICE now were utterly silent then. Why is that?
Because if you haven't noticed, there is a general sense among the younger generations that the many, many ills of yesteryear are actually bad, not just "business as usual" and instead of tolerating them we should start to fight back.
The people who are carrying the torch of this mentality were teenagers and twenty-something during the Obama administration. Now they are all grown ups.
The better question is, why were Boomers so willing to go along with these policies (and far worse) for decade after decade?
Oh BS. It’s clearly apparent over the last few election cycles that if your side does something, “it’s unfortunate, but we’re trying to fix it” and if the other side does something “they are horrible people who are monsters”.
It comes down to nothing more than scoring political points.
I'm curious what side you perceive standardUser to be on. They are making the case that this wasn't acceptable under the Obama administration either to younger generations, but they lacked the political power and voice to do anything about it. Voice and political power that they are now finding as they age into voting enfranchisement and build political action blocs.
Gitmo’s a great example. Under Bush it was immoral. Under Obama? Barely heard a thing.
Sure standardUser might have thought it immoral all along, but did he attack both parties (when in power) with the same zeal?
Bush started Guantanamo as an extrajudicial prison and stocked it full of prisoners. Obama managed to release many of those prisoners and tried (and failed) to shut it down.
Obama got plenty of criticism from the left for things like drone strikes, extrajudicial killings, deportations, the intervention in Libya, the weakness of Obamacare and TPP to name a few. Most of this was during his second term (when that massive group of people I keep mentioning started becoming politically active).
> Gitmo’s a great example. Under Bush it was immoral. Under Obama? Barely heard a thing.
Anecdotes are just that. Just because you weren't paying attention to it doesn't mean it didn't happen.]
Left wing media I paid attention to definitely did not drop the issue of Guantanamo during that time. Just google some common sites - MotherJones, commondreams, Obama, and Guantanamo and you will see the criticism did not disappear for Obama not forcing the issue to an unwilling Congress.
> Gitmo’s a great example. Under Bush it was immoral. Under Obama? Barely heard a thing.
Your history is off. Obama tried to shut it down until it was overturned by Congress.
As soon as the political reality of transferring the prisoners became apparent, all Congressmen blocked the closure of Gitmo. No one wanted to take the prisoners into their own state. No one wanted to be the Senator or Representative to say "I accepted 100 Al-Qaeda detainees into our local prisons! And now our local judges have to put into public trial under our protection, with jury members selected from our State / Cities"
So on the one hand, we had President Bush literally open Gitmo. In the other hand, we have President Obama who tried to close it... but failed because of other more powerful political forces. And yet, you draw a false equivalence between the two.
EDIT: This hits a political pet peeve of mine. False equivalence and whataboutisms. Instead of seeing the differences, a political group deploys propaganda to get their side to believe that there's a false-equivalence on an issue.
And now that you're aware of false-equivalences, I hope that moving forward you'll be better equipped to avoid them in the future. Its an exceptionally powerful propaganda technique. In general, if a group is desperately deploying propaganda to make you believe that two things are equivalent... they probably aren't equivalent.
It originated under Obama, and his party controlled Congress at the time.
"On 20 May 2009, the United States Senate passed an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009 (H.R. 2346) by a 90–6 vote to block funds needed for the transfer or release of prisoners held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp" [0]
[0] - https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/senate-overwhelmingly...
Of course! Obama tried as hard as he could to close it, but darn that other party wouldn’t let him. Obviously he’s off the hook.
Your sarcasm is noted, but I don't believe it is in the spirit of this forum to talk in that manner. Its much better to leave the sarcasm in Reddit.
If you do not wish to discuss a matter seriously, then there's no real point in discussing it at all. This website mostly aims at a higher level of discussion than other websites.
I think it's a mistake to look at "the last few election cycles".
The people making all of this noise were children during that time. Just about everything has changed in the last 5 or so years, and a lot of that change appears to be driven by the historically massive and historically diverse Millennial generation.
We love to think we live in unique times, but we don’t.
Politics hasn’t really changed in the US in the last 100 years.
That's absurd. Politics changes all the time, we just happen to be in a more tumultuous moment than in the last 3 or 4 decades. Nothing spectacularly unique, but different enough across countless metrics to warrant a fresh look at the very least. The trends and patterns we relied on for many decades just don't stand up any longer.
> many, many ills of yesteryear are actually bad, not just "business as usual" and instead of tolerating them we should start to fight back
And somehow that moment of clarity by pure coincidence happened on January 20, 2017? Sorry, not buying that particular bridge.
> The people who are carrying the torch of this mentality were teenagers and twenty-something during the Obama administration.
Literally the same people in the press who promoted the "people in cages" thing were working at the same placed during Obama admin and virtually none of them said anything. There were some very small number that did, but the overwhelming majority said nothing and certainly there was no widespread public outrage about it and no employees told their employers they wouldn't work for any contract with Obama administration because it puts people in cages. No, not buying this bridge either - it was several years ago, it's not decades. They were the same grown ups then as they are now. Only back then their tribe was in power, so outrage wouldn't be appropriate.
Then trump comes along and says publicly and gets elected by stoking people up over what is already happening under the force of law.
It's just like JFK, how the media looked the other way at his affairs.
There has been an increase both in public awareness and degree under this administration. Ironically, it seems to me that that is partially due to the words of the administration. The previous administration had a tendency to talk a good game about immigration but then in practice implemented some policies that should have been unacceptable. But whereas the previous administration was able to cultivate and air of "We don't want to do it this way, but we're not seeing any practical alternatives," The current administration has been far too cozy with anti-hispanic nationalism and cannot maintain that fig-leaf of "good people acting under a bad situation" in the public consciousness.
Rhetoric matters, and planting the concept in the public discourse that they see undocumented immigrants as rapists and murderers has done this administration no favors.
those in outrage over ICE now were utterly silent then
Not true. You just weren't listening.
Illegal immigrants aren't coming here and enjoying the full perks of America. They are coming here and being exploited by employers who know their status and dangle it over their head.
I love that I can count on the Top Minds of Hacker News to tie themselves into knots debating whether or not it is morally and ethically justifiable to try to stop the We-Kidnap-Children-And-Put-Them-In-Cages Agency from doing their job.
Indeed. In another comment, someone suggests that it might be immoral, as someone in a position to exert some small influence on the situation, to impose their judgement on the rest of us who are not in a position to do anything at all.
That's... that's just some incredible mental yoga there.
As as for the ICE thing, wouldn't the thing to do be to complain to the legislature or IG of ICE if they wanted to see change?
What is trying to be accomplished? Just relieving stress by acting out against authority figures? Or are they trying to improve the law?
What part of immigration law / regulation is at issue? Is it the actions of particular employees? Is it with CBP, ICE, or USCIS?
I am of the understanding this is about undocumented immigrants. Isn't filling out a landing form required by every country?
What specifically needs changing? If you want to get together and "replace ICE", why not? People love improvement. Go and write a better law than Joe Lieberman, he created DHS.
(He also also was the independent that voted against the public healthcare option in ACA, 59 votes, he said something like, "I'm going to be stubborn on this one")
I don't understand wealthy Americans at all. It seems like they want to abolish the concepts of borders and immigration control entirely. I assume it's so they can more readily access cheaper labour, which would explain why poorer americans generally take the opposite stance.
Whoop-de-do. If you don't like the company, leave.
I believe that is the reason this is news, yes.
""" One of those employees, staff engineer Sophie Haskins, resigned Monday, stating in her resignation letter that she was leaving because the company did not cancel its contract with ICE and “shows no indication of canceling the contract,” which she wrote was “morally unacceptable.” """
Great. That's what should happen.
If all the employees with morals leave, GitHub will be left with no employees with morals. That is probably a worse situation.
Aren't those who stay by definition are not moral people ? (provided they see the behavior of Github as immoral)?
Depends on whether they believe they are in a position to make the company more moral by their presence, and whether their particular branch of philosophy says that matters.
This points to the heart of my internal debate on philosophical positioning: When is it the most moral option to not resign from companies that openly conflict with your moral compass but to fight from the inside and struggle day-by-day?
I haven't come to any definitive conclusion, but my basic thought is:
(A) If you and your allies have a decent opportunity to build a worthy competitor or work for one (ie: a similar company that aligns with your purpose), do it and shout about it from the rooftops.
(B) If you and your allies don't have enough resources to build something better, fight from the inside until you do.
Maybe the most moral thing to do would be, should you find yourself employed at an immoral company -- Fight to do everything in your power to change the company's course, while drawing your salary (and thus their resources), and not contributing towards the immoral actions at all? Basically you'd be forcing them to fire you at some point, but until then, you're fighting against it for as long as possible and thus hopefully maximizing the chance of changing course.
This might considerably lower the chance of you being employed ever again.
That is, employed in larger companies.
Or some people don't feel that border control is incompatible with morality. Both opinions are valid.
I don't get the sense it's the abstract concept people are up in arms about, but the implementation.
The US has a long history of implementation pessimizing desired outcome at the Southern border. For example, the number of undocumented permanent residents in the US went up when border control was tightened in previous administrations. Under lax border control, people could border-hop for a day or a week, take care of some business (mostly quite legal with the one exception of the failure to go through the entire process of a temporary visa), and go back. But when inspection constraints were tightened and checkpoints and fences went up, lots of hoppers decided that if they had to choose, they'd rather be trapped in the US than in Mexico. The intended effect of lowering undocumented residency boosted the numbers on undocumented residency. Oops. :-p
Trying to understand the opinion being communicated here. People shouldn't protest things they disagree with? People have a duty to be loyal to their employer's every decision?
Yet, strangely, these people curiously will often protest loudly about things they personally disagree with, rather than taking their own advice of shutting up and leaving.
It's really about disagreeing with the views being espoused by the employees in question, not their methodology.
I think people just don't often get the chance to think about what principle or virtue first impulse drives them to say one thing or another when an issue comes up. I think it's a strong and productive to prompt ourselves/others to put those into words...
> Yet, strangely, these people curiously will often ...
I don't think you have any data to back that up. I could just as easily see a lot of these people deferring to the "wisdom" of management.
I think the number of people who have left jobs when confronted with an ethical problem from their employer is quite small.
I've done it, several times.
No, people should leave situations they're uncomfortable with. Vote with your feet.
Flight is an option.
Fight's the other one. It really depends on whether you have more power to enact change by taking blood out of the system or diverting where it's pumped.
Why should they give up and run away instead of staying and fighting? Why is the former better than the latter? Personally I prefer to tackle challenges head-on rather than giving up.
To be fair this is a natural philosophical position to take in a country founded after a bunch of people left some tea crates where they were on a ship and just moved to another empire's colony
https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definit...
Whoop-de-do. If you don't like the company, fight to change what you don't like.
It seems that these kinds of demands are becoming more common. Is it because conflict resolution is becoming a dying art, is it because people don't rise to the level of maturity of past times? I just find it to be confusing.
Non PW link:
https://archive.ph/IkYQ3
I think it's just more awareness of employee power - or, perhaps, technological advancement making it such that employees actually do have meaningful power and much more liquidity in the job market, that GitHub is GitHub because of the technical skills of ICs and not the organizational skills of management, whereas your stereotypical successful company 50-100 years ago was successful because of infrastructure and business relationships that were hard to replicate. The Traitorous Eight was fairly unexpected, but today, Deadspin writers can walk even in a bad job market.
Effective conflict resolution is always going to be lined up with who's got the power in the negotiation. If management has significant power and workers very little, most conflicts quickly resolve in the direction of what management wants. If management doesn't have quite as much power, you'll see the conflict last longer and not resolve quite as obviously.
Just sitting here thinking about it, I can't remember anything specific like this outside of the tech industry... I may be wrong though.
The tech industry does have a strong fungibility / "seller's market for labor" advantage.
A software engineer who leaves a position at a company (especially in the cities where the companies we've heard of have offices) is extremely likely to get snapped up quickly by another company, often at about the same salary. That gives individual employees a lot of freedom to exit on ideological grounds that other industries with tighter labor markets may not have.
You're not considering the entire history of the labor movement in the United States, then. There were massive protests, literal battles, and many died, all to bring about better working conditions, shorter workweeks, higher pay, etc., not just for those inside those companies but across the entire economy.
Workers fighting for the rights of themselves and others isn't a new thing. Hell, it even happened in the era of medieval serfdom following the Black Death; there was suddenly a serious shortage of labor, and the serfs realized they could push for reform because the landed gentry now needed them more than they needed the gentry.
Genuine question, but are there many examples from the labour movement where there were labour actions directed at the company's general business practices rather than the rights of the workers working in those companies? It feels like the obvious difference here is that GitHub employees aren't arguing for their own rights so much as the rights of people outside of GitHub.
Genuine answer, you should read books on this stuff. It's a fascinating, complex history, and no one is gonna be able to summarize it well in a low effort Internet comment like I'm making now. But the answer is yes, there are very many.
To pick just one example though, labor unions were heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, and fought against racist/discriminatory actions by those companies.
There's also been a noted change in how people handle things thrown at them that make them uncomfortable. A little over a decade ago universities started to notice that students, when presented with something they didn't agree with, would attack the messenger in an attempt to discredit what they were communicating.
There has been a shift in how people interact. Studies have found an increase in narcissism [1] and a decrease in empathy [2].
There is more than manager / IC power shifts going on here.
[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.... [2] http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/7724-empathy-college-studen...
I think it is because human rights abuses by the US government are becoming more common. Or at least more brazen.
I don't think there is evidence to back that up, especially once you dig in to the actions of the federal government in the 60's, 70's and 80's.
But people, mostly young people, are clearly more vocal about pushing back when abuses come to light.
I think also in the age of internet, cell phones, constant surveillance, and more, we're also much more aware of these atrocities and the governments do not always have the power to simply hide it.
I mean: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-01/satellite-images-expo...
It's hard to imagine the average person having access to this kind of reporting 40 years ago. (the 1990 was 30 years ago next year...)
"It seems that these kinds of demands are becoming more common. Is it because conflict resolution is becoming a dying art, is it because people don't rise to the level of maturity of past times?"
I mean, in the past times, we had loom-smashing, scab-beating, and private armies to force people to work.
It's because circumstances in the United States regarding how the government interfaces to the world are getting dangerously fascist, and people in the tech sector are sensitive to the risk of repeating the history of IBM and the Nazi party (i.e. enabling a government's ability to commit atrocities at scale).
It's an open question how much responsibility one has regarding how one's technology is used and what services one is providing to whom. There isn't universal agreement on the topic, but there are plenty of software engineers who believe "more than zero," and quite a few who believe they have more responsibility than that.
Chase Bank and Citi are in the Nazi mix. And the Bush family.
That's very weird to conflate employees of tech companies caring more about other people's rights with a loss of "the maturity of past times". It wasn't the maturity of past times, it was the status quo of not really caring about anyone else's rights at all. The civil rights movement was only half a century ago!
> caring more about other people's rights
Except when those rights involve things like freedom of speech. Or even privacy.
Or the rights of people they don't like.
The maturity could be the ability to compartmentalize. Whether that's a good thing is up for debate.
Should we keep religion out of politics? Should we keep politics out of work? I doubt there are any clear answers.
I think if your work is to construct the machines sent to the Nazi's to help perpetrate the Holocaust, you should probably not compartmentalize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
The clear answer is that one should never just be following orders and if your company is doing something that you personally feel uncomfortable with, you should try to stop it. And failing that, quit.
I completely agree that if you do not feel comfortable with the work you are doing, then you should stop. If you feel comfortable with it because you've compartmentalized, then I imagine you would not stop. And, unfortunately, there's often some reason to compartmentalize some situations: because your competitor will just as soon take the business.
It certainly would have been better if we could have gotten US policy on Nazi Germany to change much earlier than it did. It would have solved the coordination problem--for US companies, anyway. This would have required direct political action.
> Harry Truman, was quoted in the pages of New York Times in June 1941 as saying, “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible …”
> because your competitor will just as soon take the business.
So what? You might as well be a hitman because, if you're not, somebody else will. You're just leaving money on the table by not being a killer for hire.
Your own principles don't depend on what your competitors will do.
I stated that in the beginning and then moved on because the world is not black and white like the case of being a hitman (besides that is already solved politically). You are going to face situations that are ambiguous as I believe was the case for most Americans at the time of the IBM sales for the Nazi censuses.
That specific point was about the importance of using your political power to act as a group in a way that will actually affect the world, rather than solely appeasing your conscience/principles.
My hypothesis is that this is because so much governmental business is done by private corporations. The problem this brings is that there are very few ways you can influence the behavior of corporations.
Or is it because people are becoming more morally aware?
As well as a dramatically shifted power dynamic whereby the 40 hour workweek is a relic of the past, and people work 2-3 jobs just to scrape by. It's easier to say "burn it down" when you're already in the flames.
It's also, depending on who you ask, one of the few avenues left for people to affect change on a larger scale. Literally nothing else is working, and internal revolts have changed quite a few minds.
Employee activism is a necessary and under-powered force to help manage the insatiable greed of board members.
One man's maturity of past times is another man's unwillingness to confront injustice in society.
But on a broader note, I think a lot of it can be traced to the current president. He seems to go out of his way to do things that stir up deep anger in his opponents. There's a reason why millions of people hit the streets the day after his inauguration to register their dissatisfaction with the fact that he's president. That was unprecedented in US history.
Combine that with how little an average person can do to influence what happens in Washington, and you get a whole lot of angry people desperate for something they can actually impact. Tech employees have leverage over their employers, and they're using it for this because it's the only avenue they have to vent their anger at the current state of politics. The candidate they probably supported in 2016 got more votes but lost anyway. They probably don't live in a state that's competitive in the electoral college. Their local representatives probably represent their views well but are similarly limited in how much impact they can have. This is one of the only ways they can actually do something about what's making them angry, and they're taking advantage of it.
I'm surprised it's not happening at more companies.
The way a lot of non tech employees vented their anger was by electing Trump. Just as ICE is an injustice to you, Trump's targets (corrupt media, lax immigration enforcement...) are seen as injustices by his supporters.
He is not the cause but the proposed solution to existing injustices. You may not agree he's a good one but that's how his supporters see him.
> I think a lot of it can be traced to the current president.
It is happening outside of America too, so I don't think it is entirely due to domestic politics.
> conflict resolution is becoming a dying art
Conflict escalation is a deliberate choice by those in charge. Such as ICE.
> Conflict escalation is a deliberate choice by those in charge. Such as ICE.
To be fair, the decision on a policy of conflict escalation in ICE’s domain was, quite overtly, made several steps above the head of ICE in the chain of command.
The question I am most curious about is this: would Github have done this before Microsoft acquired them?
Redmond has a long running history of doing backflips for Washington.
They already were doing this before Microsoft, so yes... yes they would.
In response to a lot of the comments here, isn't the whole "people with power have the moral imperative to defend (their view of) morality" how the US got into the "America, World Police" problem in the first place?
> isn't the whole "people with power have the moral imperative to defend (their view of) morality" how the US got into the "America, World Police" problem in the first place?
Since that didn't actually happen (the US has never been particularly enthusiastic about applying power internationally for any reason except it's own geopolitical interest, and has never been particularly shy about ignoring moral constraints to do so—though it's often struck with moral pangs after the fact), I don't think any explanation for why it happened can be accepted.
The “America, World Police” problem is a fiction railed against by advocates of even more aggressively amoral foreign policy, not something that actually concretely exists or existed.
The upside here, is that maybe this will mean growth of in-house government IT departments? There are already large IT departments, but there is a growing trend to outsource work. Perhaps the gov will start hiring good people and let them use modern tooling, now they realise that tech companies wield too much power. I'd love to get a job for a big gov department and be in charge of integrating GitLab into their workflow and modernising the infrastructure.
At the Federal level? Highly unlikely IMO. The GS payscale is sub-par by my understanding of SFBA compensation. There are some lean/start-up influenced offices that are trying to change the culture and modernize things but I expect progress to be BRUTALLY slow, unless another tech bubble bursts and for some reason rock star coders are on USAJobs.gov trying to get positions that pay ~$50k-$60k (plus a substantial housing subsidy).
I find it ironic that the same people protesting the contract would also protest a bakery that refuses to sell a product for say a same sex couple (or if you were in the 60s, restaurants that refused to serve blacks).
You either have a viewpoint that: 1) a business shouldn't make a moral judgement on its customers and be accessible to all 2) A business can make moral judgements on its customers and choose not to do business with customers considered immoral
If you are ok with #2 you are running into a slippery slope in my view. And if you are ok with #2 and you are one of the largest companies in the world, it is a very huge slippery slope.
The difference is not serving black or queer people isn't a moral judgement -- it's just discrimination (there isn't anything inherently wrong with being Black the same way there isn't anything wrong with being queer or Asian or Indian, those things aren't a choice unlike being a Nazi). At best, not serving minorities is a shitty moral judgement.
Not serving ICE is a more legitimate moral judgement because ICE has the option to change their behavior and ICE is genuinely bad.
Slippery slope is one of those silly things I see from free speech advocates. I tend not to see the bad impacts in real life because if the government isgoing to restrict free speech, they will do it regardless of what anti-hate speech laws currently exist.
If racists had self awareness, they wouldn't be racists.
Do you not see the negative repercussions for businesses serving the public to be allowed to make a moral judgement on who they do business with?
If that's the case then there's no room whatsoever for capitalism to be anything other than an amoral system we should be ashamed of.
Vote with your dollar. You're allowed to make your own moral choices and refuse to contribute to evil.
Capitalism is nothing but an economic system where you own the means to production. There is no inherent morality.
Nobody has an issue with you making choices and voting with your dollars. The issue is forcing those choices on everyone else (as in a business, especially as a non-owner) through your own interpretation of morality.
I'm not an economist, but I'm pretty sure the system where workers own the means of production isn't capitalism.
It refers to "you" vs the state. You create a factory or a business or a new patent and you're responsible. You gain the profits or suffer the losses and nobody else can take it from you.
Workers are obviously not business owners, but they do own their own labor and are free to take whatever job they want, not be assigned to it from some central authority.
> There is no inherent morality.
Not inherent; we have to make it so.
Capitalism dominates, what, 80% of our waking lives? The idea that morality should only be relegated to the other 20% is madness.
Dominates? I don’t even know what means. It’s an economic system. What is the other 20% exactly?
So can a business refuse to serve democrats?
Yes, they can, and should have that right.
They absolutely can; political affiliation is not a protected class. Probably not good for their bottom line, though.
There is nothing inherently wrong with serving ICE. You might not like it, but many of your compatriots do.
I don't like what they do at all, I think it's reprehensible, backwards, and purely uncivilised. But people you utterly hate have friends too, and they see something different than you do, and we do not have a singular moral world-view.
This situation with ICE should totally change, but that change is a function of your vote, not a function of protesting against Gitlab.
I very strongly argue that there should never be a single perspective on morality, in the way that these posts suggest there should.
queue IBM and the holocaust.. I mean... wtf ???
> But people you utterly hate have friends too, and they see something different than you do, and we do not have a singular moral world-view.
So because shitty people have friends, we should throw in the towel and refrain from enforcing moral codes in our own lives, behavior, and economic decisions? That's pretty weak stuff.
People who have different views than you are “shitty”?
Some views, yes.
We're talking about concentration camps for children, not monetary policy.
Lots of people support ICE, maybe, but that doesn’t prevent a lot of people from thinking it’s inherently wrong.
The more clear cute example is weapons research. Loads of researchers and institutions outright rule out weapons research, because they find it wrong.
Besides, “inherently wrong” is a subjective thing anyways, if only by the fact some people agree to your statement and some people don’t, despite everyone having the same set of facts
This is a false dicothomy
The actual (IMO correct) position most of these people share is the following two points at once:
- businesses should have a moral position, since businesses are just a set of people
- that moral position should be right!
This isn’t rocket science! Stuff like “don’t support a business doing bad stuff” and “support businesses doing good stuff” is just really basic consumer activism.
There’s no need to go deep in metaphysics. It’s literally just “support good things, don’t support bad things”
Many, many people feel that enforcing existing immigration laws is morally right and a "good thing".
I think defining what is morally right is harder than rocket science and literally impossible in some cases.
others think the laws are fundamentally unjust.
Even others (a plurality I think) don't have strong feelings on the laws, but know one of the following: - the executive has selective enforcement rights - (at the time) congress + the WH could change laws! - the laws were written with an understanding of selective enforcement
and so rightly recognized that this was a bad thing that could be made right.
There is an n-sided die about how people see this problem, and people acted in accordance to it. And yeah, it means that some sides don't believe in the legitimacy of other sides. They're incompatible after all.
Besides, it's not the point. The point of the game isn't to make a set of meta-rules for defining what is morally right. It's for, on a case-by-case basis, to say "this thing is good/bad" and then act on that.
I don't need to be able to answer every moral hypothetical to be able to say that _this one specific thing is bad_. To bring it back to HN, it's a P=/=NP problem. I can say one thing is good/bad without providing the full strategy for determining every thing. And then we work from there.
I think your entire argument would make a lot more sense if you replaced “right” with “what I think is right”. Your position is just one side of the dice (as you say).
That's fine, that doesn't change anything. If GitHub and their employees disagree so strongly on right and wrong that one side believes doing X is immoral and the other believes not doing X is immoral, GitHub can either attempt to convince their employees that they are in fact right, or let them leave.
(If GitHub does not believe they have a moral obligation to sell to ICE, they can drop the contract and keep their employees. It's a very small contract, less than one engineer's salary, and they committed to donating that money anyway. So I'm assuming that GitHub feels a moral or equivalently strong obligation to keep the contract, possibly of the form of feeling an obligation not to let employees influence moral direction. If not, this is just a story of bad business sense.)
> - that moral position should be right
You do realise that what this actually means is "this person agrees with me"
How is this a problem? Like.... seriously.
This is the whole point of everything. If you believe strongly in a thing, then you should fight for it. And other people in society will judge you for it (rightly so!)
So yeah, you decide that you care enough about "sanctity of marriage" so you decide to not sell cakes. So everyone who disagrees with you boycotts your business. Others believe that sexual orientation is such an important thing that they make it illegal for you to do this! This is how stuff happens!
There isn't some sort of rules-based pre-judgement for this sort of stuff. It gets played out over time. And you're responsible for your decisions in this front.
> How is this a problem? Like.... seriously.
It's a colossal problem because it is an authoritarian stance hidden behind incoherent arguments of morality. There is no morality or ethics. There is only pushy people trying to strong-arm everyone around to comply with their personal world view under the threat of being cut off from a product/service.
You envision society as a battleground for various moral perspectives. I think there's some truth to that. But are there any ground rules? If so, what are they? Are you giving me license to firebomb ICE facilities because I "believe strongly" that ICE is evil? Or is the law a red line that no one can cross? If so, what about "bad laws"? What about civil disobedience?
Another perspective on this is that, for a society to function, people need to be able to agree to disagree about most things. This means that we are all morally compromised and we all must be morally compromised in order to live together. A society in which everyone follows their own moral impulses is a society that will not function.
I find myself wavering between these two perspectives (the first being yours). I don't mind people protesting. But how about blocking roads? How about vandalizing your ideological opponent's office? How about smashing windows? How about preventing your ideological opponents from speaking? It seems to me that your perspective minimizes the danger here. There's no guarantee that things will just work out. We might reach a level of polarization after which we simply won't be able to cooperate.
right, it's impossible to establish a universal, objective framework for morality. instead, we can only make compromises between majorities and vocal minorities, codify them as laws and ethics, and enforce them.
however, that doesn't absolve you of sticking up for your moral code, depending on what it is. for example, I'm gay. I know that Chik-Fil-A is complying with the law, and that its owners are funding advocacy for conversion therapy and other anti-LGBT issues. I wouldn't want Chik-Fil-A to be dismantled, since it's lawful, but I refuse to eat there, since my personal morals prevent me from giving money to people who want to hurt people like me. I'd also support protests of Chik-Fil-A, since protest is a lawful action (at least, social media campaigns and picket lines.)
Don't be lazy. Stand up for what you believe in. The law is the lowest common denominator, and legality doesn't absolve you of your actions.
So what are you saying then? That there are no moral absolutes? Or just that because people disagree on what is moral business should be allowed to act in interest of profit only?
The whole point of morality is that it is subjective. You can not determine what is right as a rule.
That's nonsense. Philosophers will debate subtleties around morality until the end of time, but that shouldn't prevent us from taking a stand against evil when we see it.
> That's nonsense. Philosophers will debate subtleties around morality until the end of time, but that shouldn't prevent us from taking a stand against evil when we see it.
"evil" is exactly what religious people called homosexuality for centuries, which is ironic considering your statement. Morality is purely an opinion, just like religion.
> taking a stand against evil when we see it.
Except that "evil" is just a loaded word that tries to pin an absolute take on morality on a personal opinion. There are people who take stances against evil by persecuting others based on religion, gender, race, and even political leanings, and they feel so strongly about the morality of their positions that they feel that even extreme violence is justified.
Ask what "evil" means in different parts of the world and you will come to vastly different definitions.
Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. They lead to shallow, predictable discussions. A public internet forum is not, as a medium, capable of addressing such questions. If you really want to discuss something like that, write an essay (or a book) and then post it here, or maybe someone will.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This is not a false dichotomy at all.
Businesses should have a moral position, sure.
That moral position should be right? According to who? The business itself? Then that second point is redundant. Everybody thinks their moral position is right, that's what morals are. It's a tautology otherwise.
GitHub employees think their moral position on ICE is right. Many disagree. But according to them that's fine, because they think they're right so should be able to boycott who they like.
Replace Github with bakery refusing to serve same-sex couples. Bakery thinks they're right. Many disagree. But according to them that's fine, because they think they're right so should be able to boycott who they like.
You only think it's a false dichotomy because you personally disagree with the bakery and (presumably?) agree with Github. By saying "the moral position should be right", is you simply saying "and they should agree with me otherwise they are wrong".
> GitHub employees think their moral position on ICE is right. Many disagree. But according to them that's fine, because they think they're right so should be able to boycott who they like.
A lot of music artists in the 50s and 60s refused to play on segregated crowds (where black people is separated from white people, usually blacks in the back), they did it because they though they were right and should be able to boycott doing business with those who disagree (despite their record-label or manager thinking otherwise) you think those artists should have done otherwise?
I didn't say they should have done otherwise. I'm actually arguing in favour of private individuals/businesses being able to make the decision on what they sell and who they sell to.
I'm simply pointing out what is almost definitely hypocrisy on the part of these Github employees. Tech companies are usually more progressive, and no doubt these employees would object to a private company, such as a family run bakery, choosing who they sell to. When the Github employees are advocating for their own company to do just that.
I do not think the dichotomy you outlined accurately describes how things work
I mean, this is why we have developed the idea of a "protected class."
Because you're correct that, at the end of the day, judgement is judgement and sentiment is sentiment and everyone is the hero of their own story.
But to place the limits of proper action at sentiment is solipsism.
So there is a set of protected classes which we, as a society, have decided are inappropriate reasons to discriminate against people. The quick reasons it is wrong to discriminate: sex, race, age, religion[1]. There are many reasons we allow people to discriminate: lack of money, being violent to employees, being unacceptably rude, setting off explosives, etc. These are all discriminatory practices that often involve moral judgement.
We are always in the process of trying to decide if we should have a new protected class and how that class should be defined. I also suspect we will, at some point, talk about removing protected classes.
Businesses should (and in fact always do) make moral judgements about their clients. The people at Github who chose to work with ICE decided it was morally right for them to do so. You can tell because they did it. They might say they were sad about it and had "moral qualms" but at some point it does seem like it comes down to yes or no.
So do you think we should have a government agency class? Or perhaps a law enforcement class? I personally do not.
[1] Some exceptions here, of course, a mosque does not have to hire a catholic priest who applies to be an imam.
>> race
Unless you're Asian/Asian-American, of course. Then it is fine to negatively discriminate against you.
https://www.stanforddaily.com/2019/10/03/judge-rules-in-favo...
That's not at all what that decision says. Finding that it did not happen is not the same as finding that it is legal for it to happen.
No, it happens.
>> She rejected the argument that “tips,” or admissions advantages, received by some black and Hispanic students were unfair. While some racial groups did receive tips...
They get them, and Asian/Asian-Americans are excluded from this, placing them in the "advantaged group" as I stated above (usually reserved for white people).
That they ruled this was "not unfair" doesn't make it "not discrimination." They admit as such that it happens to the detriment to Asian/Asian-Americans.
I haven't read enough on the Harvard admission scandal to have an opinion.
That said, there are lots of services that consider protected class in ways that aren't currently considered discriminatory. Ladies nights, for instance, are not illegal. Giving discounts to senior citizens is not considered discriminating against others.
All that said - those corner cases are always being considered and questioned. There are instances where I think the official decision is right and ones where I think it's wrong, but I'm no more perfect than anyone else.
>> Ladies nights
>> Senior citizens
These discriminate against advantaged parts of the protected classes, which is generally seen as reasonable. Men and young people, respectively.
Including Asians/Asian-Americans in the "advantaged group" is... something of a stretch.
Aristotle divided causality into four kinds that are useful to remember: material, formal, efficient, and final. Consider a table: the material cause is the wood from which it's made; the formal cause is the concept or design of a table; the efficient cause is the act of carpentry that resulted in its construction; and the final cause is the intention to have the table to use.
The workers of github are an incremental part of the material cause of ICE's actions and the consequences thereof. Any individual employee's contributions are fractional at best, but they clearly own a share of the results of ICE's use of their product, and were I in their position, I'd be balancing whether I want to own some of those shares or not.
http://archive.is/Rx1kG
http://archive.is/9pIAh
God forbid I have some sort of say in how my labor is used.
I'm baffled by this statement.
Sure you have a say, you also (likely) have the luxury of having a skill set that makes you able to make these choices.
A while back there was an ask HN post about surviving through the first bubble (2001). If you find a group of engineers of that vintage it is likely that you can quickly find someone who worked putting up adult content. (Note I don't have an objection to the topic but realize that some do and this isn't exactly the most glamorous work in tech).
I tend to think labor should have more power over what it creates. I'm not sure how an example of being required to work on something they objected to due to economic factors outside of their control is an example that helps your case.
> I'm not sure how an example of being required to work on something they objected to due to economic factors outside of their control is an example that helps your case.
Quitting on moral grounds is a luxury in the scope of human history, and is a luxury for MOST Americans today. Im not sure it is a realistic stance for most people (but probably for most of HN).
I don't think GitHub is going to (or should) change its stance. I'm sure there are plenty of things on GitHub that are worse, or have been used to worse ends than providing source control for ICE.
> I tend to think labor should have more power over what it creates.
I do a lot of contract/freelance work.
The trade off is that control means I am also liable in the event that my work causes an issue (legally as well as from the stand point of being a good citizen and business person).
Indemnity is a wonderful thing. Indemnity is why we have open source. Lots of things work because labor, and its products are decoupled from the end use. Should we stop making guns because someone might kill another person? Should we stop making fertilizer because it can be turned into a bomb? The end result of both products is the same but the intent in the production of either is not HARM.
Guns and fertilizer are very different products. Guns were specifically developed with the purpose of killing. Their main use besides recreation is killing people.
Don’t understand the downvotes to my comment. The person I am responding to said “Should we stop making guns because someone might kill another person”. That is in fact one of the main reasons of guns, specifically because they are used to kill other people. I didn’t downvote that comment, I did not pass any moral judgement on guns. Instead of silently downvoting, it would be better to explain why you disagree with my comment. I believe I am operating in good faith here.
> Quitting on moral grounds is a luxury in the scope of human history
So what? Freedom of speech is a luxury in the scope of human history as well.
Moreover, someone is making these choices. If it's within your power to have an effect on the choice, and one choice is more moral in your estimation, you're practically obliged to act, even if other people don't have that power.
I agree it's a luxury, and I'm happy people at github can do it. I don't think it _should_ be a luxury. They are quitting because they have a direct relationship they feel is immoral. If people aren't supposed to take stands what they can work for, you're advocating for the vast majority of the population (ie. ~non CEOS) having no moral agency in the place where they spend a huge fraction of their lives.
> Indemnity is a wonderful thing. Indemnity is why we have open source.
What do you mean by this? I don't see any necessary connection between open source and indemnities. Professional developers might want to release free software but accept payment to guarantee its fitness for purpose. Conversely, malware authors shouldn't be able to disclaim responsibility for their actions simply by publishing source code.
So why are you baffled by that statement?
The rest of your comment seems irrelevant.
Should that baker bake the cake or not?
I mean, we carve out special exceptions for race, gender, sexual orientation, etc... Beyond those special carve outs, laborers should have the freedom to follow their ethics.
They can, by working elsewhere.
We carve out those special exceptions for reasons of striving to create a fairer world for everyone: people in this country have historically been (and contemporarily are) discriminated against for race, gender, sexual orientation. The discrimination, both from people personally and encoded into laws and large-scale businesses processes, makes society unfair for those groups, e.g. redlining put people of color at a significant disadvantage for home-buying and building intergenerational wealth for their communities. Those are also things people are born with. Discriminating against people for how they're born, individually and systematically, runs counter to creating a fair, just, equal society.
Additionally, the freedom argument in the Jim Crow era, "let racist businesses remain racist and eventually they'll be replaced by non-racist businesses" was tried out for a hundred years, and the status quo did not change for people of color. It took the civil rights era and outright banning of discriminatory behavior by businesses for the status quo to change for the better/fairer/more equal. I don't think it would be a good idea to return to that older state of affairs, even if it means business owners must serve people of color, gay people, whatever, because, from my reading of history, that experiment failed.
I think you misunderstand me. I don't think those carve outs are a bad thing.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say that in opposition to you -- it was more of a preemptive explanation of why those came to exist, since on HN there seems to be a lot of opposition to freedom-restraining laws (like compelling business owners to serve members of a historically disadvantaged class), even when there's a (to me) clear social benefit and historical reasoning behind those laws.
You do. Take your labor elsewhere. Other than that? Pretty much, no.
You have the right to express your opinion to your employer and ultimately to leave the company.
But you are also being compensated for them having the right to use the product of your labor as they see fit.
Implicitly, and probably explicitly in any decent work contract, is that they are the sole owners of the product of your labor and get to decide how it is used.
If enough of this happens, the government will begin to act as a monolith-- refuse services to organization A, you get no business from orgs B-Z.
I think it's a temporary thing. When the economy turns down and jobs are harder to find, people won't feel so strongly about such things.
what would HN commentators would recommend to conservatives in tech sector, who want to show their support for Brexit, for MAGA, for US ICE ?
What can be done to combat the left activism, but in a civil way, yet be effective, and without endangering careers in tech & entertainment?
.. asking for a friend...
Or is the ballot box, anonymous posts and their own kitchen table, are the only places to express?
9/11.
There is a well-known strategy by which employees can exert influence over their employer and change the decisions it makes. It is called a union. Unionization has been slow for various reasons in the tech sector; when it comes to rich, well-known companies, people don't want to go through the effort to unionize and get more money when they already are being paid a lot. But if workers want to influence decisions like these, they're going to have to organize.
People complain when they're unhappy and most tech people are happy enough to not complain. That's how revolutions work on a micro and macro scale.
Unions have historically tended to reward seniority over merit. Tech workers should work to solve that if they organize.
I think a lot of problems caused by unions trace back to that.
Unions should come back to help recreate the middle class.
It's not clear to me why tech unions would do this. People keep bringing this up, but there's no reason tech unions would ever have to be structured in this particular manner. Given that, I don't find it a compelling argument against unionization in our sector. Most importantly, of all the people who are working on organizing the tech sector, to my knowledge none of them are trying to implement tenure-based seniority or pay scales.
Every developer thinks their salary will be dragged down to "the average" -- aka they think they're all above-average.
Libertarianism was the cancer of our generation.
There's no reason they have to be structured this way, but unions usually work through voting, and the tech sector has a LOT of pretty shitty people coasting, and they'll get a vote that's worth the same as anyone else's. They'll vote to protect their coasting.
> It's not clear to me why tech unions would do this.
As soon as you have a union, you have 2 groups. People are who are in the union and people who are not. Tenure-based seniority obviously benefits people who are in the union to the determent of those not yet part of the union.
It's probably a solvable problem but I think it's pretty obvious why most unions end up with seniority-based policies; It's the natural consequence of a democratic organization.
I think, at least traditionally, unions have tended to reward seniority over merit because seniority is something that can be tracked with relative objectivity, while merit is something a bit slippery to nail down.
Of course the business owner has strong opinions on what constitutes employee merit. To the business owner, the merit of an employee is largely a proxy for whatever is profitable for the business. That's fine for the business, but if the union uses that same metric as merit, they'd become little more than a proxy for the intention of the business owners. For a union to be merit-based rather than seniority-based, they'd need to find a measure of merit that was in the interest of the workers, not the business.
The job of the union is to take the business interests and then keeping that as a constraint, maximizing labor's share of income.
This usually directly means having the right people in the right places, to do an effective job, so there's not much time wasted. (Which is their time.) And so on.
Unions shouldn't try to keep everyone on board, they should simply counteract shareholder pressure to keep labor costs down.
Of course, the union should help members to retrain and then should help those members to find their place where they can contribute value.
Of course, the union can and should represent the political values of its members.
Are GitHub's decisions being made by AI robots that only respond to purely quantitative monetary incentives? It's real people on the other side of the issue. I don't see how sending letters and working with the press is worthless...
Unions are majority rule democratic. When I worked at a plant for one of the big 3, the candidates the union submitted for trades promotions were universally white men. The union didn’t look out for women or minorities particularly well because the majority rules. People assume a tech union will lead to things being somehow more just, but be careful for what you wish for. James Damore might just have the votes.
Did they do secret ballots, or did they do public votes like voice or card check?
Internal union elections were secret ballot.
What is a trades promotions - is this jargon for the executive ?
No, going from an assembly worker to a skilled trade like an electrician fixing robots. Compensation roughly doubles.
Hm so you think a GitHub union would be less likely to work with a unionized government agency?
Yes. Organizing doesn't mean you fire everybody and hire new pro-union workers. It's the same people. They're just given a more direct power structure for dealing with management.
When you take people who are already vocally upset with the company's ICE contracts, and give them negotiating power with management, you're not going to suddenly see them turn pro-ICE just because they have a union and ICE also has a union. That makes no sense.
Why do you think no major union is boycotting ICE?
I hope in future engineers aren't reflexively thinking "compensation" and "promotions" when it comes to Unions. What's happening with Github here is clearly a labor power vs capital+management power problem.
It's the same thing with the Google sexual harassment problem and the Facebook disinformation problem. Without organised labor power, the employees are realising they've had to sell out their values for a wage.
The reason that this kind of protest is happening now is that companies like GitHub have to continuously serve the product, they can’t just sell into a channel and forget about what happens like a boxed software vendor or a furniture company.
I wonder if this can create a new business model for an arms-length distributor, a company that maintains GitHub deployments for customers and pays royalties to GitHub. This distributor could sell to all kinds of unsavories while giving GitHub plausible deniability.
Refusing to give business to a government department because you personally morally object to what they do? Perfectly fine, Github is a private business, nothing to see here.
Refusing to give business to a same-sex couple because you personally morally object to what they do? Utterly bigoted, bake the cake or go to prison. Private businesses can only make decisions on who they serve if I agree with them.
See the problem here?
Yes. You will never let that go will you?
It's a good example that many people know about due to the wide-spread media coverage it got. But it won't be the last. Perform the sex-change, bigot. Perform the abortion, bigot. Perform the Git upgrade for the Ministry of Truth, bigot.
A lot of these companies need to start sticking to their guns and simply letting people go for conflicts like this.
If you’re not gonna be a team player there are a billion other tech companies you can go be a part of.
I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with the core issue here – but at some point the message needs to be sent that you don’t deserve a job and aren’t owed anything. You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple. If you aren’t on board with the company mission, go find a different one.
Nah, turn tail and leave when you could fight to change the company? Not gonna happen.
It depends. At a small company? Sure. But no individual employee, or even small collective of employees that aren't VP or key contributor in an irreplaceable knowledge-base, have the clout to turn a Microsoft or a Google.
At a major company? The only thing you can do as an individual is take the wind out of their sales or refrain from working for them. Which these companies do notice; Google hiring keeps tabs on candidates who tell them "I won't work for you for ethical reason X."
> It depends. At a small company? Sure. But no individual employee, or even small collective of employees that aren't VP or key contributor in an irreplaceable knowledge-base, have the clout to turn a Microsoft or a Google.
I see this claim thrown around a lot with no evidence for it.
I have no strong evidence other than "It's actually happening right now and the companies have only made minor deviations from their courses."
That second half is purely subjective, and we won't really have a good idea on how much of a difference it made until historians can look back on this era with a quarter-century of hindsight.
> I have no strong evidence other than "It's actually happening right now and the companies have only made minor deviations from their courses."
I've yet to see anything actually happen in terms of exerting pressure aside from internal grumbling.
Several employees have left and made public they left over Dragonfly and Maven projects at Google.
Who?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.engadget.com/amp/2018/05/14...
The other clear option being to attempt to affect what you believe would be a positive change in the organization.
If that doesn't work, then you should leave.
Why? Why shouldn't employees have principles at work? Why shouldn't employees of a company work to affect positive outcomes at a place to which they have invested a lot of social and time capital?
Labor is not nearly as transactional in reality as you make it sound. "Just quit" is like "just leave the country" in politics.
because this is how they shield themselves while thinking tha half the folks in the office around them deserve to be deported or detained and actively think of most of their peers as less than human.
Or, recognize that the company is worthless without its laborers, and that the laborers can use collective bargaining to change the company mission.
Ah yes, nothing says collective bargaining by labor like "Worker leaves company where most value is generated by automation."
It's not nearly automated enough to run on its own without an army of engineers to keep the corner cases from becoming the common cases. ;) We're nowhere near that close to a technological singularity.
Workers leave. That's the "collective" part.
As a current GitHub employee, I can assure you that the value we produce is not through automation. ;)
I think that's exactly what we're seeing. Software engineers at the big-name companies are exceptionally well off; even low-tier hires are generally above national median of income. In that environment, the most significant thing keeping a lot of people at the job is pretty high up the Maslow Hierarchy, closer to self-actualization.
And if an employee can't shake the feeling that they're helping to repeat IBM's mistakes in the '30s and '40s, they'll walk. Company doesn't even need to fire them.
(This suggests one could possibly use "employee churn at major software companies" as a secondary indicator to societal upheaval).
What a defeatist attitude.
In the end, companies are made of people. If you want to affect positive change in the world, leaving does almost nothing to help your cause.
Companies are made of people, you are one of those people, and thus you have ability to affect change. You could either choose to give up, pick up your bags, and flee for greener pastures, or you could try to actually make an effort to improve society by affecting change from within. And, at worst, you could do nothing, and be complacent with whatever the company is doing.
Tech workers affecting change from within is nothing new, either. Your comment seems out-of-touch - employee protests can and have worked in this industry.
A lot of what you are saying is true and resonates with me. However, at some point you transition from trying to affect change to biting the hand that feeds. At that point it becomes totally unreasonable and you should go elsewhere.
If they aren't ok having their hand bit, they'll either stop feeding (fire them) or protect themselves (capitulate).
Companies fire the whiners and radicals all the freakin' time. The fact that these folks are still there says that they weren't, in fact, biting that hand.
the reverse is also true: companies that work in bad faith don't deserve employees. They exist to employ people so that they can sell product. If the company's not going to be a team player, then there are billions of other tech companies its employees might choose to go work for.
See Deadspin for an example of the inverse of what you're calling for: people sticking to their guns and letting a company go for conflicts like this.
TLDR: it's really unwise for a company to fire people for disagreeing with its controversial choices. It's a great way to accidentally damage your brand and lose a lot of staff to competitors.
> See Deadspin for an example of the inverse
The Deadspin situation is in complete alignment with my original comment. One person was let go and a ton of other people left becuase they weren't going to put up with the same BS any more.
Deadspin is better off, they can continue to do whatever it is they are doing and it is either going to work or they'll fizzle out and die. Employees are better off because they can go seek a different environment where they are happy.
the "Deadspin is better off" part is what I disagree with.
> You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple. If you aren’t on board with the company mission, go find a different one.
Only if you take the most simplistic view of how a company should work.
Almost every company is successful due to the people that work there. Without the people, the organization (whether its a for profit corporation or otherwise) are completely useless.
Human beings deserve to have a voice in the governance of institutions that they spend their time and labor to make successful.
Agree that doing political activism on company time to get the company to ban targets of your partisan political agenda seem highly inappropriate.
Companies are dictatorships. Get in line peasants.
It could just be that if we want a democratic society, we'll need to directly attack the idea that we have no democracy in the place where we spend most of our lives.
Depends on how you look at it. You have the freedom to leave your job and go work somewhere else. You can voice your opinion within the company but at some point the company is its own living breathing entity that is not behooven to you, unless your name is on the building.
That's kinda the point. The person whose name is on the building is a dictator. I am advocating that we live in a more democratic society.
Nothing is stopping companies from doing this. But they need talented engineers more than talented engineers need sales staff with red hats. That's why the firings haven't started. It'll be worse for the company, and it won't be any worse for the employees - as you say there are a billion other tech companies they can join.
Employees don't deserve a job; they work for cash. And employers, similarly, don't deserve labor; they give cash for work.
> You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple.
well, no, we know this isn't true because people take various forms of non-financial compensation (such as working from home, choosing your own technologies).
compensation is a vector that has a variety of inputs; it's not unreasonable to think that "association with company mission" is one of them that's subject to change over time, and as a result, can be protested, similar to e.g. working from home no longer allowed
> You work in exchange for cash, plain and simple.
The last time this was true for me, I was a teenager working at Taco Bell. In my professional life, I don't just work in exchange for cash, and never have.
The amount I am recruited and asked for various forms of interviews -- "grab coffee?", "grab lunch?", "quick 15 minute conversation?" -- can be seen as a counter-example that while cash is our payment, we are not "blessed" to have jobs. They are blessed that I chose to work for them. I can choose to work anywhere at this point. The money isn't the point. I'm not going to contribute to more human suffering, and you won't get to take advantage of my talents if you do.
It's about being a team player for humans first, corporations second. You seem like a bootlicker to the capital class (or an "entrepreneur" trying to LARP). It's the shitty boomer attitude of "you should be grateful to have a job at all." To that, I say "fuck you."
If company owners aren't team players then the message needs to be sent that they don't deserve a charter or a labor force and aren't owed anything. Businesses that are party to the destruction of human rights have no basis for existence.
It's not an employee's role to determine with whom the employer does business. The employee is always free to switch to a different employer if they can't support the work.
Having 'leave if you don't like it' be the only choice never ends well (except for those who do leave).
It's a great way to make extremist toxic echo chambers.
It’ll be their only choice
If anyone thinks Github boycotting ICE will change anything of ICE's conduct, that to me is some kind of Delusions of Grandeur. The money involved are a tiny part of a forgotten section of their budget.
If they don't think it will change anything, we can agree that this boycott is purely symbolic and will accomplish nothing.
It’s not “nothing” to refuse to profit, directly or indirectly, from behaviors you find unethical.
What I mean is that it does nothing to help the victims of ICE.
It only helps some rich people feel morally superior. That doesn't impress me much, but I see others find it important. To each their own, I guess.
This feels like a pretty defeatist attitude to me. Just because your portion of ICE’s budget is insignificant doesn’t mean you have to support ICE.
And even if it is purely symbolic, lots of symbolic actions do more than nothing.
At the very least it may improve employee morale to not support ICE which may increase Github’s employee retention rate, which may not be a big deal for ICE but may be a bigger deal for Github.
And finally, death by a thousand cuts is certainly a thing.
Username checks out. No, but you really don't want to be a collaborator either. If other parties are willing to step up then they can be addressed if and when that time comes. Principles always were a 'circle of influence' thing.
Nowhere in the article is the viewpoint that they’re going to change ICEs conduct mentioned. Inventing opposing viewpoints is one of the lowest rhetorical devices, and I really wish people would post with more care around here.
As for “only being symbolic”, no, it wouldn’t. It would allow workers to be in an environment where their work supports their values. A lot of these workers are going to leave the org to go work for a company that doesn’t so conflict with their values, as is absolutely their prerogative in a free labor market. This is actually a mature way to let GitHub understand the full costs of their actions, so that they can make an informed decision. There’s literally no problem here, this is a functioning labor dynamic.
It’s really sad that GitHub, once a great company, sold to total military-industrial complex bastards.
You knew when it was sold to MS that this was gonna happen. It's why that was the day github died.
You’re 100% correct, it’s still just sad to watch.
I don't know if companies realize that contracts with ICE are going to hurt their talent recruitment too, but they do. I recently decided against applying to a role I saw posted for Wayfair because they ignored employee demands to end their ICE contract, and I know I'm not alone.
Sad to see you get downvoted... I guess one would need to send an "anti-job application" to HR to let them know that their policy has turned you off to them (and I guess you'd need to attach your CV to show them what they'll be missing out on...).
It would be the right thing to do, IMO, but I would be scared to do it in case the company does become more attractive (shall we invent the newspeak phrase "more morally compatible"?) for me in the future, but they still have that letter of mine on file...
I’ve thought about doing it anonymously, and might now. Thanks for the encouragement.