Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
Without trying to be inflammatory in any manner, I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work.
If you disagree I’m happy to discuss this viewpoint rather than being downvoted to oblivion.
Lots of issues are deemed “political”, but imagine you fall into one of the marginalized groups:
— lgbt: Don’t discuss the possibility about being fired for your sexuality because it’s too political.
— Women in tech: Nope, let’s not go there, too political.
— Underrepresented minorities in tech: Sorry it’s a pipeline problem, don’t bring politics into this.
— Education: Too political to discuss the fact that schools are trying to balance their admissions in the face of very uneven opportunities amongst their applicants. Never mind the fact that school admissions were never fair to begin with.
We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.
Again, If you disagree I’d love to understand your viewpoint as to why.
I am glad Dang changed the title as the original one was unnecessarily inflammatory.
I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that?
> Such a declaration could run afoul of legal boundaries in some circumstances. While workers have no constitutional speech protection in the context of their employment, federal labor law requires that employees be allowed to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment and possible unlawful conduct like harassment, discrimination, and safety violations.
This seems like a false dichotomy. There is a difference between being amoral and illegal.
The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).
Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics.
I think this sounds very reasonable for the kind of tool that is being produced.
Joel Spolsky has a great article on Big Macs vs Naked Chef
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na...
In there, he talks about bespoke development vs mass market products, using McDonald's Big Macs vs a chef.
I think this provides a reasonable framework for approaching the present controversy.
For example, if McDonald's sold a Big Mac to <villain>, no one would bat an eye. However, if a chef went to work for <villain> there would be questions.
In the same way, if you are making a mass-market, generally useful tool, nobody should be excluded from using your tool. However, if you are doing custom, hi-touch development, then it might be more justified to screen your clients more.
I think Gitlab falls more into the mass-market, generally useful tool.
This is a divisive topic, but the story seems to pass the interesting-new-phenomenon test (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If you comment, note this guideline: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
We've changed the title in accordance with the site guidelines, but if anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. Edit: I took "won't exclude customers on moral grounds" out of the title above, since they apparently no longer have that policy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21275311
Technical professions are generally held responsible for what they enable. Biology: researchers can't do anything they want on plants, animals or humans. Medicine: doctors are expected to follow strict guidelines with their patients. Even engineering: implementing a cheating system for diesel tests will (rightfully) get engineers into trouble.
But software engineering seem to have a pass on how the things we build is actually used.
Dark patterns, facial recognition, mass surveillance? Just some code, a nice puzzle. It's like the profession as a whole feels only distantly connected to what they actually do.
I welcome the trend of developers taking more moral responsibility for their work. I want more ethics courses, more difficult questions, more uneasiness about what we do with our code, and what we enable. Not to be sure we build the right thing, but at least to be less wrong–and, sometimes, to know when we clearly build the wrong thing. I want us to be accountable; like other technical professions in the world.
And if in the workplace, the place where the majority of software in the world is usually produced, we can't have these discussions, what use will it be?
I personally have no problem with them making this decision. I wish more companies would take stands like this. At least it's honest. Unlike the NBA and every other company with value statements they honor only when convenient or advantageous.
Look, if you morally object to this, then don't use GitLab. If you think businesses should be held to a higher ethical standard than they are currently, get active with local or even national politics. Start a letter writing campaign to your elected officials. Do something productive.
You know what isn't productive? Getting outraged on Twitter or Hacker News, making emotional outbursts of regurgitated sound bites and platitudes.
Someone at GitLab just made a suggestion to change the wording of the policy that I merged https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...
Good, this makes me glad to be using Gitlab. Gives me confidence that I can rely on them even if I ever get into hot water politically. I also think that it's good to assert that yes, it's fine for a git host to just host people's repositories and not have to be in charge of making moral judgements. We have other tools for judging morality; things so immoral that society shouldn't allow them should be handled by the law, and things that individuals do not morally agree with should be boycotted by those individuals.
For those who are a little confused about the no politics at work thing...
If you read the policy we link to about politics, we mention people talking politics during coffee chats, 1-on-1s, etc, but as a general rule we don't lead with those topics.
We focus on inclusion, and we have been very successful at that by respecting others and making work a collaborative, judgment free place. As someone who sometimes has the minority opinion I have absolutely loved this policy, and I feel closer and more accepted by my colleagues as a result.
I'm very proud to work at GitLab.
FYI: If you say you don't care about politics and you ban political speech in your workspace - that on its own is a political statement that you're fine with the status quo.
Gitlab might have noticed that people have gotten weary of the Cancel culture and are taking a distance. Good insight.
Good thing that gitlab is fully remote because a) there is no possible way to reconcile the viewpoints of people who live in very different parts of the workd, and b) they can survive when inevitably they will become shunned from SF.
It's also smart PR to get some controversial open source projects in their platform
GitLab are being hypocritical[1][2]. Let's not pretend the "women in tech" and LGBT movements aren't political. Frankly, I think more women in tech and LGBT representation are probably good things, but GitLab is being profoundly disingenuous with their guidelines.
To clarify my point: if you open the gates to the marketplace of ideas, make sure it's an actual marketplace.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2018/10/08/stem-gems-give-girl...
I'm sure everyone who has to earn a living to support their family will appreciate this move. Nothing is worse than politics at work, where you may lose your paycheck if you don't align with the correct factions.
I have a pet theory that we (that is, the culture I'm familiar with, so I don't really know how widespread it is, but at least the white U.S.) have spent too long saying "don't discuss politics, sex, religion, and politics".
We literally have no practice handling differences regarding the very items people are passionate about.
The answer isn't to get into massive drama-filled flame wars, nor to drive people with minority opinions into hiding, but at the same time I don't think continuing the "enforced silence until it's considered common knowledge" is the right way to handle it.
See another comment pointing out that issues like gender equality, cognitive diversity, and workplace rights regardless of sexual preferences are ALL "political", but also directly impact the workplace. How do we decide workplace issues if not at the workplace?
What I find most amazing is less the politics aspect and more the moral/ethical issue. For a company to have an explicit stated policy of _actively_ never taking into account the moral/ethical impact of their work is just... astounding.
It is difficult to imagine a more inhuman and bloodless statement.
Reminds me of Peter Handke's recent Nobel prize in literature, where the committee were/are heavily criticized for judging only by literature, and not by Handke's political viewpoints.
Maybe politics doesn't need to be involved in every single part of society, only the political aspects of it.
There was a long stretch during the early days of the Internet when it seemed possible that tech was going to have a uniquely positive impact on the world. Certainly in the 1980s and 1990s, it was possible to think that tech was going to help people overcome the past, and move towards a world of greater understanding. These last 10 years have brought many disappointments. It is frustrating that these tech companies refuse to do the right thing. Over and over again, when we might hope they will take the ethical path, their response is something like "Don't talk about politics at work" which is the corporate way of saying that they've decided to duck their ethical obligations. Very frustrating.
> Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab: Vetting non-evil
> customers is 'time consuming, potentially distracting'
If that isn't a divisive title, I don't know what is. This should be labelled as an opinion piece.
> Code-hosting biz also bans staff from talking politics at
> work
Good, it's the work place - it's for work. Some freedoms are restricted whilst at work, for example at home I can walk around naked - that doesn't tend to do down so well at work.
> It was proposed to clarify that GitLab is committed to
> doing business with "customers with values that are
> incompatible with our own values."
This seems like a no-brainer, the article literally lists a bunch of examples where companies that get politically activate have their efforts backfire. I commend GitLab for this.
"If your values aren't used to inform who you're doing business with, why do you bother pretending to have values at all? This [merge request] demonstrates that you don't have any values except 'we want to make money, and it doesn't matter who gets hurt.'"
It sounds a lot like GitLab has a set of values that it doesn’t feel comfortable openly championing, so it just lies.
O/T: the "Blood Money" part of the article title is why I hate news media in general. Sensationalizing, editorializing headlines marked as "news" and not just opinion.
Good to see that the very non-controversial opinion of “be neutral at work and treat customers equally” is being used to compare GitHub to IBM during Nazi Germany.
Why can’t GitHub just provide code version control systems without concerning itself with who is writing code?
Given the recent implosion of StackOverflow, less politics in tech is probably a good thing.
When was it ever okay to discuss politics at work?
Selling screws to anyone who asks is one thing. Coming onsite to help build a sturdy black ops detention facility is another.
Which one will gitlab be doing?
The same people mad at ICE are fine doing business with China. Gitlab is making the right move, as the people who all of a sudden are pretending to become ethical, are mostly just posturing for their friends, otherwise ICE would be far down their list of business concerns.
I hope more tech companies follow their lead. Politics in the workplace is paralyzing to productivity and as a customer, I don't want platforms to be our morality police.
I really like the idea that as engineers, our speciality is not politics but creating technology for a company in order to maximize revenue by following the existing law. It was surprising for me coming to America that employees have the option to discuss politics (I come from South America) where my limited working experience there was if you are not happy with who the company is conducting business you either quit or build your own company. In Bay Area people come from different country, religion, social class and school to name a few. There's an intrinsic bias about what is a valid customer or not. Help ICE to detect faces, if ICE is doing it based on existing laws and it's an important contract for the future of your company, why not? There are decisions that should be discussed in the realm of legality, morality and business but makes sense to keep opinions outside work. Me as a right conservative can barely discuss topics like pronouns, Trump mistakes and achievements, religion without being tagged as a caveman. Good
Now that people in the western world have largely abandoned churches for their attitudes toward "sin" and morality, they replaced churches with corporations, media companies, and governments to dictate what is sinful in society.
Once people realize what they've done will they reject corporations, media, and government? If so, where will they turn to?
I suspect that the need for parental moralization of behavior at some tribal level is a group survival mechanism that we can't get rid of.
Regardless of whether it is the church, government, news media, social media, or some corporate policy, it all seems to end up the same from where I sit. Yet, in replacing faith with consumerism or corporatism or governmentism, it seems many people have lost a great deal of hope along the way (see the current mental health crisis for evidence).
It seems people were happier when they left this sort of moral policing to the church/temple/whatever at least they had hope in something positive to keep them going.
I worked at a company where they tried to apply a "no political discussion" policy in response to (justified) moral uneasiness with the direction of the company. Because work that has any social bearing has a political element by definition, it seems extremely counter productive.
Of course, by saying this they didn't mean that there shouldn't be political discussion. They were just using vague and overgeneralized language to say that there shouldn't be political discussion that they didn't like.
That said, I think it's a good move from Gitlab to say that they'll sell to anyone they legally can sell to. We shouldn't rely on corporations to make moral choices, because between that and making more money, they most likely won't. We should instead have airtight regulation and unions that make sure that morally reprehensible choices lead to less money.
There's really two mandates to workers here:
1: Don't discuss politics at work. This seems reasonable, when the discussion has a good chance of getting heated and making it more difficult to work with colleagues.
2: Don't vet potential customers (in part because it might get political)
This second one is less defensible. Avoiding politics is fine when it's unrelated to the work, but when it intrudes on work, it becomes relevant, and avoiding the issue is a lapse of ethical responsibility. That people might disagree on the boundaries of that responsibility is precisely why the discussions are needed.
I'm not saying this is easy, that it won't lead to conflict, but it can be done in a structured fashion that minimizes the ability for conversation to blow up into flame wars. Again, not easy, but necessary to avoid abdicating moral responsibility for your actions.
I find it kind of weird that this has to be stated.
Work-- and commerce in general-- should be a place where people can put aside differences which are irrelevant to their enterprise and work together for a common benefit.
Extensive discussion of divisive topics which are unrelated to working conditions can really get in the way. Twenty+ years ago it seemed like it was the norm to me, I'm not sure why people seem to have lost this insight.
This doesn't mean that you have to be totally neutral to mass murderers or what not, but it's prudent to think carefully about where your political and moral hard stops are. If they're not significantly more extreme than your preferred views then you're probably adopting a position which is overly intolerant to a diversity of opinions and you're probably wasting a lot of time by failing to cooperate with others.
Whenever I think about this topic, my gut says that a service provider's moral obligation to refuse service to customer relates linearly with the customer's reliance on the service in conducting its morally odious behavior. In other words, I see McDonalds selling cheeseburgers to ICE differently than I see a physical security company selling cages to them.
Is this defensible? From a utilitarian standpoint there's an argument that your refusal of service has greater moral impact as the customer becomes more reliant on it. Practically speaking there's the argument about efficiency. A lot of people need cheeseburgers and so the list of companies you have an issue with is going to be pretty damned large. But other than that is there a philosophical basis for this way of thinking?
Discussing politics at work has NEVER been a routine thing for me and as far as I know that's always been the cultural norm, at least where I live. It's handled very carefully. So I just assumed that this was the norm and discussing politics at work was the exception.
Don't be yourself at work. Don't live at work. Don't say what you think at work. You have been hired to do your job, not to enjoy your time.
I get it, it's totally normal, I'm honestly not judging anyone or saying it should be otherwise: it's most probably the matter of that it couldn't be otherwise. But I find it kind of sardonic, that you take the fact you don't really belong to yourself for most of your life much more naturally, than the fact you have been told you cannot discuss politics by one of your potential temporary owners. Because, yeah, politics is special, obviously.
Oh, and I'm totally fine with treating customers as "just customers" by the way.
They're Ukrainians. Slav people are pretty blunt about these issues. Simply put, they don't care. Work is work. Politics is not work.
The idea that even spam is does not fall into "content moderation" is very interesting.
A fake Rolex email is an interesting advertisement to some people and belongs in the garbage for others.
Research has shown that buyers of spam advertised products will literally dig through their spam folder to find a store to buy from.
As this (naturally, pun intended) expands to green coffee, açai, news articles about Florida man, and on up to what we see as disinformation, the difficulty in identifying intent becomes equally as challenging.
There's no way to "just host content", and anyone attempting to do this will face a range of laws, user challenges, and more that introduce "content moderation" into the platform.
I disagree with GitLab on this one, but that title is one crazy leap in logic... "Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab"
This article seems to be laced with innappropriate bias. It appears to be judging gitlab for this decision.
Beyond that, its weird that this is not only an uncontroversial position to take but anything other than the only legal option. The government should be the only arbiter of morality with regards to business, where judging your business or actions to be illegal and/or issuing a court order to a company to stop service or remove content should be the _only_ legal way a company can refuse you service.
I do not think putting these kinds of decisions into the hands of unelected people or companies is a good idea.
I wonder if they're trying to pre-empt the issues Chef has been facing recently in selling to ICE.
However, if your organization has any lobbyists under their pay, your organization is inherently political.
I can accept that ideological divisions within a team sows disorder and that businesses want to avoid that.
I would also suggest that in an age where we are again facing the threat of totalitarianism, the threat of treasonous acts, human rights violations that evoke memories of the holocaust, we, the adults, citizens, and guardians of civil society have to cast aside our professionality for moral duty.
It would be preferable of course if we were able to take our moral convictions and take to the streets instead of arriving at work each day, but many of us do not have the luxury to take time off.
Politics is often the practical pursuit of our moral convictions. It's kind of surreal to me that our pattern of livelihood forces us to stop considering and dismiss the moral consequences of our daily actions.
The frank truth is that work is 1/2 of our waking lives. Acting without prior moral deliberation for half our lives seems immoral.
I do not want to be calculating the moral value of everything I do, but having become aware of the impact of my decisions in so many different areas, the individual contribution I make to what is acceptable in our society, I cannot help but be motivated to be more morally conscious - even if I fall short all the time. At least, I am aware of it and disgust myself at times.
This is a biased article written in an inflammatory style. Also, there is a mistake in the first 5 letters (Gitlab is not "San Francisco based" being remote-only)
Politics could be discussed at work, if parties didn't decide to go for super extreme, polarizing positions. These days it feels like you cannot speak with the other side of the wall without getting into a fight. What happened to pragmatism and centrists? Politicians need divisiveness to keep their chairs.
That said, I would exclude any customer that has extreme views. Why support their platform, especially with a product like Gitlab, and help them spread hate?
In practice, "don't discuss politics" policies imply "don't discuss it (below a certain pay-grade)."
Corporations are political entities (even the decision to do business with people regardless of their politics is a political position), so someone at every corporation is considering that angle. Or the corporation is adrift on seas of change without attempting to navigate them.
I think most of this discussion has missed the point. The point of the memo is that Gitlab isn’t sorting customer into morally “good” or “bad” buckets and choosing to do business with them.
The decision making process required to do that will necessarily be filled with politics and value judgments.
He’s right, that is a huge distraction from the business of making money.
The important question is whether that distraction is worth it.
As of yesterday, GitLab's marketing team have made some changes to their Customer Acceptance policy:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...
In particular this seems to clarify that the company may under some circumstances not work with particular customers, and that employees can - in private contexts - discuss such issues.
In addition, the justification of 'efficiency' as a reason not to spend time vetting customers has been removed.
It'll still be interesting to watch how GitLab behaves in future, since the original policies stated may remain their true direction, even if the externally-facing language has changed.
HN to me is the ideal model of modern, democratic publisher for the times we live in. Content here is self-moderated and slightly editorialized. The community strives for a civil, educated debate and penalizes who doesn't follow suit. I don't know if HN would scale in a larger context, like in FB/Twitter feed scale, or on more personal networks ie Whatsapp or Telegram. Also comment sections of newspapers or Youtube should have a more HN-like moderation and overall charter to make it more civil.
It really drives me nuts to not be able to vote or moderate down or my family members that publish fake news to Whatsapp, or read racist and mysogenist comments in YouTube that seems to persist regardless of downvoting and flagging.
It sounds idealistic, but I really think the world would be a much better place if the HN culture and processes could be somehow automated and embedded into public and private threads everywhere as some sort of nearly inescapable standard.
I think it's concerning that everybody seems to think it's okay for companies to clamp down on political discourse. Where do people think we're supposed to talk about this shit? Who's supposed to champion these causes if not companies? Who has actual power in this world other than companies? Companies dominate the media, the way we consume media and everything that we see.
All this means is nothing changes, nothing improves and companies are free to profit off of suppressing rights in authoritarian countries without blowback from people using their platform (like Blizzard/Riot) or people that work for them. Companies are not and never have been neutral entities. If your goal is profit maximization to the detriment of the social fabric and moral principles, then sure, go ahead and pretend to be neutral. But I'm not sure that should be the goal and we shouldn't be helping companies pursuing this goal.
Utilities are forbidden to deny service based on similar reasoning. It would not be right for Verizon or ConEdison or similar to deny services to ICE etc.
However Gitlab is not a utility or regulated as anything remotely close to one.
A company that takes pro-active steps to declare that they will do business without any scruples or ethical concerns is just plain disgusting.
The author Thomas Claburn is not entirely correct when he writes: "GitLab, a San Francisco-based provider of hosted git software, recently changed its company handbook to declare it won't ban potential customers on "moral/value grounds," and that employees should not discuss politics at work."
The segment on discussing politics within the company has not changed for a while and doesn't explicitly exclude discussing politics at work, but does so in a public context. From the handbook:
"Religion and politics at work We generally don't discuss religion or politics in public forums because it is easy to alienate people that have a minority opinion. It's acceptable to bring up these topics in social contexts such as coffee chats and real-life meetups with other coworkers, but always be aware of cultural sensitivities, exercise your best judgement, and make sure you stay within the boundaries of our Code of Conduct."
I regularly discuss topics like politics and religion when I feel free to do so as it's part of my identity, of course I try to be considerate to opposing viewpoints.
And I get the point to do business with others regardless of their political views. For example
"A pro-democracy restaurant in #HongKong offers free meal to student protesters. A pro-Beijing woman took her daughter there for the free meal, but kept complaining the “rioters” are “destroying” things etc. Restaurant owner waived her bill and told her to leave. "
He said... “This is a private property. I can call #HongKongPolice to get u out but I won’t, coz I don’t believe in them.” Later on he said “u asked why we are doing this (to her daughter)? Then ask yourself why did u say those things (about the young #HongKongers)? I don’t want your biz!” https://twitter.com/ajmm19923493/status/1184173217474207744
It's reasonable to not want to get into exhausting political battles at work. But such a policy falls apart fast. What about when a coworker asks about your dating life and you talk about a same-sex partner? A lot people see that as political because it's not status quo.
"We're not going to be political" sounds so simple, but a whole lot of status quo politics spills out when you try to apply it in reality.
Another example: a coworker is from a country bombed by the branch of government you're selling stuff to. What then?
Aside: Hacker News rightfully sees a lot of criticism, but it has improved some. This thread is full of people pointing out that apolitical is synonymous with support of the political status quo, making apolitical an oxymoron.
I would encourage Github, Gitlab, and all the rest to continue working with ICE. There's a good chance the next administration will want to prosecute ICE for human rights violations and good version-controlled records of who did what when will be essential.
Observation: It seems like we have lost faith in the legal system in recent times based on everything from call-out/cancel culture to protests over contracts. My question to the world is, are we right to feel this way?
I certainly feel at least in the U.S. that the legal system has done a poor job of protecting humanities interests on many occasions, though I do not think pushing the responsibilities of policing morality to businesses and society is really a good thing over all. It has come with a lot of negative side effects.
I do not pick a side strongly here, though. I sure as hell wouldn’t feel good about helping an entity I feel is highly immoral. Is a mutual contract “helping?” You can really get into the weeds fast.
This is honestly a breath of fresh air. It seems that in the past 5 or so years, most tech companies have begun to radicalize and become more authoritarian. It's great to have neutral platforms for people who don't particularly identify as far-left.
Regardless of whether they are just talking about not looking into the background of their clients, or they are banning all discussion of politics in their offices, this is incredibly shitty. Ignoring politics doesn't make it go away.
As many here seem to like the idea of not a non political workplace couple quick questions:
- If I work at a workplace which produces a deadly weaponize-able Gas (lets for random reasons call it Zyklon B) should I care for politics or just do my job and provide any customer with my product?
- If I offer storage (e.g. for Cars, Git-Repos, Shoes, ...) should I care if maybe one of my customers is this Gas producing company which needs some storage?
You see where I am getting? There seems to be this trend that politics is some side business which people should only think about when they do either nothing or do it as a job. I don't think Democracies will survive this way.
Switching to Gitlab from GitHub. I wish they added a stackoverflow-like product too.
I was wondering why something that I thought so obvious that I would consider GitLab making it official a formality, gathered over a thousand comments. And then I read the article and quite a few of the comments.
The second top comment (which starts with the assumption that anyone who wouldn't walk to talk politics at work must be "privileged") cleared up why this subject got so many comments pretty quickly. In hindsight, I should not have expected any different.
Appropriately enough, though, this thread is probably evidence of why politics should not be discussed at work, I think.
There is an issue opened to revert this:
> [...] I understand the motivations behind the
> policy change but they are misguided: GitLab,
> please show that the concerns of your community and
> staff are our first priority by reverting
> this change.
I think this is a good decision. I actually hold similar beliefs to many of my coworkers in SF but I find it horrifying how common it is to dehumanize nearly half the country. I've lived in three major cities in the US, two on the east coast. San Francisco is the only city where co workers routinely disparaged people living in other states. I do not think employees in tech companies have the capability to be arbiters of anything cultural in this country. Leave that to governments.
Not discussing politics at work seems like it's missing a pretty key point here. Saying we will not choose our customers is not a realistic stance in this world. Choices will have to be made and when they are it is helpful to have a framework in place to make them. This just kicks the can down the road. I have no doubt that a future article will feature gitlab in a situation where they have had to choose and find themselves having to wordsmith or spin their way out of it.
This is awesome. Generally, Politics is opinion based which change with time. I have seen people who have spoiled their long term relationship in politics debates
I feel like discussing politics at work has always been something most folks try to avoid.
On the other hand your company telling you not to is a whole other situation. I'm not sure a policy really solves much. Anyone who wouldn't think twice before discussing such things ... probabbly isn't going to read / care about the policy.
It's one of those rules that no matter how well intentioned, I'm not sure it works well as a policy.
Companies are not divorced from politics or reality no matter how much they want to be. Trying to be non-political is a political act and one that is usually means "I benefit from the status quo, please don't change anything". It's the corporate version of the white guying saying "I don't see color" when he means "I don't want to think about issues of race"
I know many of you work in tech in areas of the country that lean very far one way. I go back and forth on this: is this guideline more important in state like Virginia where you will start to see a more diverse and potentially time wasting or is it more important in Silicon Valley where some minority opinions should be protected if only unpopular? And if unpopular they would respect users views more?
An organization is not a tool, it's a group of people thus it reflects the morals of those people. Software is also not a tool, it's a continual process in an organization of people. Just think, is the code you wrote today a rock? Will it survive without you supporting it? I used to think that was the case but after decades have never seen that to be true.
The Reddit thread, IDK why, feels more to the point than HN’s one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dj1048/gitlab_...
Who are you to judge someone? Unless someone is proved to be a terrorist or something everything else is subjective. I support Gitlab.
If your policy is going to be, "we'll take your money in exchange for goods or services, no matter who you are", it seems that you'd be better off not making your policy public. It just draws attention to you, and it's not going to positive.
Gitlab is also a remote workplace, so it's not like there's much opportunity for water-cooler talk.
Thanks for the clarification - gives people like me yet another reason to champion using GitHub at the companies we work for
I agree with casiotone; why pretend you have an important, guiding set of enshrined morals and ethics at all when there’s a clause that nullifies everything by saying ”some people might be fundamentally against our values but if they’re loaded, and they want to do evil stuff more efficiently, we’re the company for them!”?
Companies are not neutral entities. People work there and have values. If a company thinks it’s ok to serve people that commit crimes against humanity, in the case of ICE and the Drumpf administration, than they have a serious problem. Maybe send the guy a link to the story about IBM and the nazi regime for context.
Theo said it best: "But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia." -- Theo de Raadt
Gitlab, being a remote first workplace probably has a more politically diverse workplace than most and probably realizes that not everyone agrees with everyone else on many things.
Most SV companies, on the other hand, are political monocultures that assumes that west coast liberal politics is the norm and everyone are just Nazis.
It seems no one has yet mentioned the potential illegality of this policy. The rights of employees to discuss their working conditions at work, a largely political discussion, is protected by the NLRA. Google got whacked by the NLRB for their ban on political discussion as well.
They have changed it already: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/c69d6dc2...
I always liked the rules that one prominent local web design company has: they don't work with political or religious organizations. They don't seem to include state organizations in that, but I would. I think this removes lots of potential headache right away.
I don't think there is a right or wrong approach in this one. In my opinion, each organization shall be left to do whatever they want: if they want sensorship, so be it, if they don't want sensorship, so be it. Let the market decide what's best.
Banning staff from talking politics at work shouldn't be allowed under the First Amendment.
How does a rule like “can’t discuss politics” even work? Anything and everything is political. Not allowing political discussions is in itself political activism for the status quo. Are GitLab employees allowed to discuss the rule?
Based on the title alone, anyone who gets offended by this has not read what GitLab actually states in their "values" page.
In case you don't want to go dig for it here it is: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#religion-and-polit...
TL;DR: it says that generally there shouldn't be discussions about religion or politics on PUBLIC forums, but that such discussions are OK in social context, like during coffee breaks. Also goes to say to keep in mind not to exclude people due to their minority political/religious views.
This seems very reasonable and this whole issue seems almost like a hit piece. GitLab hasn't done anything wrong, but since their world view isn't completely black and white like people-in-the-current-year should have according to the same people who get offended time after time from the most minute things (and even about things that happened decades ago) they must be bad.
About 6 months ago, when the deplatforming conversation seemed to be at its peak, people couldn't spit out "free speech only applies to the government" fast enough. Well, reap what you sow.
The wording of this statement sounds very poorly thought out. Does a customer have to pay them? What if I argue I don't believe I should have to pay, or I have a moral objection? What if my belief in freedom says it's OK to ddos them? Presumably they'll fall back on something like "our contract says you have to pay us to use our services". Great. So you can and will refuse to work with a customer for a reason you chose, not an externally imposed restriction. The intended meaning is probably more like "we will work with anyone who works within our core beliefs about how society and payment for services should work, but we have not done the work of figuring out what those are in advance".
Didn't google do something similar? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20779004
>This [merge request] demonstrates that you don't have any values except 'we want to make money, and it doesn't matter who gets hurt.'
Well, considering gitlab is a publicly traded company and as they state clearly on their website
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/stock-options/#stock-optio...
>We are in business to create value for our shareholders
I personally appreciate their blunt honesty. Watching corporations pretend they have morals and obligations other than providing profit to their shareholders, while continually doing the opposite of said stated morals gets tiring.
There seem to be a lot of extremely left-biased el-reg articles coming from the SF office.
e.g: "James Damore's labor complaint went over about as well as his trash diversity manifesto"
In my perfect workplace, people would be able to have political discussions by mutual consent, or opt out of any political discussion, and not get penalized for either.
I think more companies should avoid politics in the workplace. It is really easy to create a divisive or more likely, a one-sided org that is generally less healthy.
Discussing politics at work is very crass, and people who do it should know better. Politics is a draining subject, and employees should not be draining each other.
Corporations have become hotbeds for oppression and self-censorship. They will devolve towards mediocrity.
At least it should become easier for startups to compete against them.
Good for them. Work is about getting things done.
A comment I thought was insightful on the NBA subreddit with regard: "You cannot be global and apolitical at the same time".
I just need to laugh at this point remembering the fanbois who said we had to use gitlab because it was open source and ethical.
Meta, what actually upsets me is how we seem to be avoiding the need to use human judgment.
By definition, every time some process or code is adopted, it takes the human element out a little bit. You have to look case-by-case whether that's a good thing. In some cases, where speed, consistency, precision, or efficiency are valuable, that's a good idea. Leaving humans in the loop is probably better in situations involving most kinds of moral judgment, situations that vary a lot, or things involving a heavy emotional/social component.
Sidenote, I work in self-driving, so this is actually a big question that comes up in my work: what's best to automate vs. what will humans do long-term? It's an interesting question.
It's germane here because, I don't think anyone is really going to suggest, oh, let's sell tools to people who are committing genocide, or pedophilia, or rape, or a variety of other things considered harmful in most cultures. But that's a very hard thing to put into a "code", or a statement of what you will and won't do, precisely because (a) it involves moral judgment, and (b) situations vary a lot.
So we get statements of policy that are black-and-white, perhaps enforceable, but totally absurd. There is no way any reasonable person can take "don't discuss politics at work", at face value. As a straight man, am I supposed to not mention that I'm married? Is that "political"? Of course it is. But I can make the human judgment that that's not likely to offend someone if I mention that I'm married.
There are good and bad effects to a lot of this. Codifying things probably does reduce bias, such as in hiring, or university admissions. But I think we also need to be cognizant of the cost: forcing unnecessarily rigid decision-making into things that are better left a bit fluid.
The best outcomes are probably in the middle, but I don't think we should be as scared as we are of human judgment, whether in university admissions, work promotions, who companies do business with, etc. And yes, there is a thing called "bad judgment" - not all judgments are the right ones, or good, but not all are bad, either.
That article took the least charitable interpretation possible in order to achieve the most clickbait it could possibly be.
Semi-related, but supposedly one of the developers at GitLab also happens to be an African Tribal Warlord.
Don't ask me why I know this
Diversity is good, remember?
When did diversity instantiate as “if you don’t agree with X without qualifications, you’re Hitler”?
Good, right? This allows the consumer to make the decision without distracting GitLab from product building.
That's how it should be. I'm not enjoying while I play WOW nowadays because of damn politics
At the end of the day, you can either put your customers first, or your employees. Gitlab has made their choice. Microsoft has made their choice.
Cancel culture is cancerous, but this is a case where if I can avoid Gitlab, I will, on the grounds that I wouldn't want to recommend them to another entity given their CEO's readiness to do business with the worst scum on the planet.
It's much better than Apple not hiring people based on their political views expressed online.
I think this is perfectly acceptable, especially since they've announced it ahead of time.
for everyone who thinks this is good, google has a child pornography problem that they haven't taken seriously. With great power, comes great responsibility, but unfortunately it's with great power, comes great ignorance.
Many political issues are so heated and have become so divisive that they can create barriers to team cohesion (and societal cohesion for that matter), and occasionally turn into outright intolerance.
Unless you work directly in politics, why are you talking about it at work anyway?
>If ICE has violated the law, he argues, there are legal processes to deal with that.
Well, problem solved then. It's a good thing that the law is always right, and that it is regularly applied in full force to punish law enforcement agencies guilty of wrongdoings.
"Don't discuss politics at work" seems an eminently reasonable position to me. You're on the clock at work.
The second portion about KNOWINGLY doing business with entities that don't share the company's values is extremely difficult to defend.
It's impossible for a company to be entirely non-political. By choosing to stay quiet and not vet potential clients, Gitlab just made a large political statement. Choosing to not discuss politics means implicitly endorsing the current status quo.
a sound strategy. Don't mess with other people problems.
The argument "if you don't engage in politics then you might be part of the problem", is itself a political argument, therefore it is irrelevant in the context of a no-politics rule.
I guess they can't talk about anything then.
It’s funny how these modern companies are rediscovering the old rules for behavior. When I was young it was a given that you didn’t discuss politics, religion, etc...
A society that has decided to become unforgiving is halfway to becoming a police state. The intent to arrest is the same.
Foreword: I am not suggesting that general political discussion should be allowed at work; it has traditionally been taboo since it gets people riled up.
I am concerned that developers and companies are attempting to somehow opt out and divorce themselves of ethics, and to be amoral. This is not possible.
Ethical considerations are present in all work, especially ours - our work as programmers, leaders, technologists, and so on has the potential to affect large masses of people, even indirectly. Society has rapidly changed due to the advancement of technology and it will continue to do so. I'm not suggesting that every single agreement or project needs to be deeply evaluated for its ethical implications, but projects or sales for questionable organizations ought to have some thought put into them.
I will give an example: should GitLab sell its product to the American Nazi Party, or other fascist organizations across the globe, should they request? It is reasonably uncontroversial to say that fascist parties are vile, wrong, unethical, even evil. Therefore, aiding these organizations and their missions by selling them helpful products is unethical. Saying "we sell to everybody" does not magically make the sale ethical.
To suppress the discussion of ethics as it pertains to a company and its actions is itself unethical, as the impact of a company's actions can be wide-ranging and the implications cannot be divorced from ethics.
This is why gitlab isn’t a company to work for. Nice folks but culture of explicit silence is corruptive.
As much as I love Gitlab I've heard more than one rumor that they have weird values internally.
Well, Gitlab just became even more irrelevant in my book.
Pulling GitLab into the "ICE is literally Hitler" smear campaign; nice smear campaign.
Everything is politics.
sorry is this real ? It read as satire
Human rights aren't politics, they're non-negotiable.
So this doesn't preclude discussion of HK Police beating protesters or the Uighur concentration camps operating in Xinjiang? Or is this also politics now?
Has anyone read the pull request? For those that didn't, here it is:
+ We do business with customers with values that are incompatible with [our own values](/handbook/values/) for the following reasons:
+
+ 1. Our mission is 'everyone can contribute', while there is a [code of conduct for contributing](https://about.gitlab.com/community/contribute/code-of-conduct/) we want to get as close to everyone as possible.
+ 1. We [do not discuss politics in the workplace](/handbook/values/#religion-and-politics-at-work-) and decisions about what customer to serve might get political.
+ 1. [Efficiency is one of our values](/handbook/values/#efficiency) and vetting customers is time consuming and potentially distracting.
+ 1. It maps to the MIT expat open source license we use that [doesn't discriminate against fields of endeavor](https://apebox.org/wordpress/rants/456).
We generally don't discuss religion or politics in public forums because it is easy to alienate people
that have a minority opinion. It's acceptable to bring up these topics in social contexts such as
coffee chats and real-life meetups with other coworkers, but always be aware of cultural sensitivities,
exercise your best judgement, and make sure you stay within the boundaries of our Code of Conduct.
On the one hand, you can use this policy to prevent white people from loudly supporting a white supremacist political leader in an office with a very small percentage of people of color. Banning talk of politics here will make it easier to stop dog-whistle racism before it even starts.
On the other hand, you can also use this policy to shut conversations by minority groups who want to support politicians who are improving the lives of people of color. If one goal your company has is, for example, to make your company more ethnically diverse, it would perhaps behoove you to allow different ethnic groups to discuss the political issues they face, and raise awareness of issues critical to them. Banning such speech makes it much harder for them to advocate for better treatment, and educate people in the workplace about the issues they face.
Everyone who thinks this is controversial is falling into the trap of trying to judge a complex issue with emotion, rather than complex rational thought. If you literally decided your opinion about this within 30 seconds, chances are it wasn't very well thought out. I'm willing to bet the CEO is just as guilty of such rushed decision-making.
--
But there were three other points in the PR!! The last of which I think is really worth considering: "The MIT expat open source license [..] doesn't discriminate against fields of endeavor."
The most common example given is that "you cannot stop an abortion clinic, or an anti-abortion activist, from using the source code". This is an incredibly important part of our society that protects minority groups.
In 2012, in Colorado, a bakery discriminated against a gay couple by refusing to make their wedding cake, because the bakery owners didn't approve of gay marriage. This was (rightly, I think) found by the courts to be illegal discrimination. But you could also consider this case a form of discrimination of field of endeavor, if what you're endeavoring-for is to be married while gay. You can't refuse to make the gay couple a wedding cake - so should you be able to refuse a white supremacist from using your version control tool?
This is where we walk into ethical quicksand. There is a l o n g philosophical rabbit hole you can fall down trying to figure out how to treat people you disagree with. People have spent their whole lives going over these issues and literally nobody has figured it out for certain. And that's why I think the policy, based on the third reason, is acceptable.
The third reasoning, "vetting customers is time consuming and potentially distracting", is clearly true. We could spend our entire lives arguing the moral philosophy of how to treat people we disagree with, but we'd never get any work done. Sure, you could start an ongoing process of defining who can and can't be a customer, but if it takes any amount of discussion at all, and impacts your business, you're losing money and time, and not necessarily achieving an increase in value, either for society, or your customers/stockholders.
So for the sake of expediency, for simplicity, for being the Switzerland of open source, this one company can allow that particular conversation to go on outside its walls, and continue to just bake cakes and write version control tools, and let history be the ultimate arbiter.
Did I miss something? Is there a reason why you have to qualify that you're not advocating for Joe Rogan? Did he get "cancelled"?
Politics are the new religion anyway: all rational thought has long been abandoned by both camps, at least in the US. So if it's mauvais ton to discuss religion at work (an it is), politics should follow the same rules. Same with political activism: do it on your own time and dime, if it's not related to e.g. worker rights and such.
Good for them for trying to avoid the "Get woke go broke" phenomenon.
Telling people not to discuss politics at work IS discussing politics at work.
Holy moly that's a disgusting piece of very inflammatory propaganda.
Why is this hacker news?
In short, STFU SJW! Awesome.
Talking politics at work is lame anyways.
Excellent policy, but they could stand to realize how political their offices have already become. Maybe the culture of the company blinds them to this, but GitLab's overtly involved in politics.
This is such spineless bs.
It was proposed to clarify that GitLab is committed to doing business with "customers with values that are incompatible with our own values."
So...that means that GitLab will allow code to be hosted on their servers that powers AI/face recognition that puts people in concentration camps. Or have their organs harvested while they are alive.
This is no different than IBM giving accounting operations to the Nazis. Truly despicable, but hey at least they're making a buck.
Assholes.
I agree with that statement. California's collective conscious has been such a mess after the democrat loss. Everyone my colleague's vilified who knew how to play the game was temporarily promoted to powerful positions. Thinking Peter Thiel specifically.
Administrations globally change all the time.
When I enter a new market I'm just excited to be there and figure it out, I don't stop and say "waaait a minute, did extremists just come into power here?" I think, looks like there's some opening in high level positions.
But if you do ask yourself that and prefer to do something about it, don't bring it into the workplace.
Gitlab is willing to support evil.
I will no longer support Gitlab.
IBM circa 1936: Don’t discuss politics at work, just keep building that database we are being paid to build.
HN: In favour of free speech except for when it comes to politics that they might disagree then they really like banning it
And inb4 "free speech doesnt apply to private companies" I imagine the users that are for this change and the users that believe being banned for saying racial slurs should be illegal have a very very large overlap
So when do you imagine they'll be implementing Navajo language support in their UI?
Or is someone going to have to make the judgement call that Navajo users don't constitute a big enough political block to influence their l10n priorities?
Someone has to make those calls
"Trump just got impeached!". When that happens, are we not allowed to mention it in the coffee-room?
I understand it is not good to ARGUE about things loudly. But no more "free speech" sounds alarming.
Silence is politics.
"Efficiency is one of our values and vetting customers is time consuming and potentially distracting."
Always thinking about efficiency and performance, even to justify a decision for vetting a costumer that may be evil. Money.
I just gained a lot of respect for Git.
We really need more companies to take a stance against all this moral posturing.
It's like at some point people forgot that publishers should not take sides, and only remove things that are illegal.
Burning books has a long, dark history. Even if those non-criminal books are truly nasty. At one time books portraying miscegenation were the nasty ones. One generations nasty books are the next generations accepted ones. Internet media is no different.
It's companies like GitLab that are propping up Saudi and Chinese empires. Hope one day they get their Scrooge moment. Anyhow, most companies probably do this by default and quietly but what is interesting about Gitlab is they felt like they needed to announce publicly that they'll support all customers regardless of their morality.
I personally think this is awesome. I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product.
If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal means. Otherwise why would I wan't gitlab to have anything to do with this process?
The tech unicorns screwed themselves over BIG TIME, the second they stopped claiming they were just infrastructure and platforms and got into content moderation. They will now forever be a pawn of whoever has some power and has some agenda. It's an obviously unwinnable game for everyone involved besides maybe some politicians.
I don't want this to become a Joe Rogan debate but Naval Ravikant got this exactly right on his Rogan Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44&t=3661