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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 rep

• dang 7y ago
  Those are great questions. But please omit the flamebait. (Edit: dvt kindly took the flamebait out—see below.) If flames take over, only the people who enjoy flaming will remain in the debate. That's a strict loss for thread quality, which is one reason for the guideline I asked everyone to remember above: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • umvi 7y ago
    Or, more succinctly: "Generate light, not heat"
  • iikoolpp 7y ago
    Or, reworded: "Please put 300 weasel words to sneak it past the Civility Detector 3000"
    • dang 7y ago
      The GP comment can be made better simply by removing words, not adding any.
      • hanselot 7y ago
        Please omit ye words of terror, lest ye inflict your verbal assassinations upon our poor fragile temperaments. Don't know of anything more scared of a little heat than a snowflake. [1]https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-does-formation-of-snow-flakes-not-violate-entropy-law.908305/ https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-does-formation-of-...
        • dang 7y ago
          It's a question of which words to remove. Information-free swipes make for a lower signal/noise ratio and cause feedback loops that rapidly escalate. The risk isn't "a little heat", it's scorched earth. The purpose is not to suppress intelligent discourse but to keep the forum from destroying itself.
          • hanselot 7y ago
            Which words would you remove from Shakespeare to make his plays objectively better?
            • dang 7y ago
              At this point you've moved the goalposts off the pitch.
      • iikoolpp 7y ago
        I'm just pointing out that's what the civility guidelines really are. You can be as rude as you want to somebody, as long as you pretend you're not by dressing it up.
    • dangthecoward 7y ago
      lol, flagged for truth. I've seen people here advocating for crazy far right talking points. Eugenics, race based IQ, all sorts of crap. It's absolutely about civility. Course the left, the actual left, gets shut down right quick. Why? Because dang is a lib and libs are cowards. Scratch a lib, a fascist bleeds.
  • Kenji 7y ago
    Oh no, someone dares to question the left-authoritarian talking points. Better shut that discussion down.
    • dang 7y ago
      I assumed the writer was posting from the opposite ideological position. But frankly, we don't care or even much look at that. When your job is to do the same thing over and over, after a few hundred thousand times you tend to see only the relevant bits in the mask.
      • Kenji 7y ago
        The thing is: It's flame-bait simply because it's a sentiment that is so prevalent here. It's flame bait because there is a breed of people who lose their shit over it, and that breed is a large fraction of the visitors of this website. There is nothing remotely controversial in what dvt said. Nobody would bat an eye about it at my workplace, for example. You have to be aware of the monoculture here.
        • dang 7y ago
          It was flamebait because it originally included "Oh is that not political either? It must be nice having the spinal rigidity of a mollusk." dvt was thoughtful enough to edit it above.
    • pc86 7y ago
      The comment is still live with positive votes, I don't think anyone is shutting anything down.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • ergothus 7y ago
      dang has called me out for degrading a conversation in the past. dang was correct then, and the comment replied to IS degrading the conversation as described. You don't have to be wrong to be expressing it poorly or unconstructively.
• mosselman 7y ago
  What do you mean? I am honestly asking, not flaming or anything. What is the point you are making?
  • dvt 7y ago
    That they are being hypocritical. Frankly, I think more women in tech and LGBT representation are probably good things, but GitLab is being profoundly disingenuous.
    • djsumdog 7y ago
      I'm not sure if more women, minorities, LGBT, group x, group y, group z in tech .. matters as much. Sure it's good to have diversity of people and ideas, it can help people in workplaces come up with more varied ideas, and there's nothing wrong with it ... but I think we're missing something. What about more men as secondary school teachers, or in art, or as nurses/medical techs? There's an equal and opposite side to the women in tech debate: why not create a world where men feel like they can and should take jobs that pay less, but that can be potentially more fulfilling. Why is there also not a push to get women into other high-income lines of male work, that are more hazardous like construction, oil rigs, truck driving? I think that's really ignored today. Just as there are family pressures for women to take the paths they do, men similar (but different) pressures to take carers they may not want at all, in order to "provide for a family" or whatever.
      • dang 7y ago
        Please let's not open up all those cans of fiery worms. It's off topic in this context, and such threads are invariably repetitions of the previous thousand flamewars. "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • pc86 7y ago
      I think there's probably some room here to differentiate between politics (in the US, Democrat and Republican for most offices) and ideology. Ideology is the framework for politics. I don't see anything wrong with saying discussing politics (a given candidate, or a platform stance) at work is discouraged while encouraging a certain ideological stance (more people from historically marginalized communities in tech is a good thing).
• SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  I think it's fair to call women in tech initiatives nonpolitical. There's no significant political opposition to them; things like the INSPIRE Women Act (the women in tech initiative for NASA) regularly get passed with no real debate.
  • repolfx 7y ago
    Political opposition? Well, no, not visibly, but that's because "people should only get jobs if they're qualified" is already the default mainstream position. Women In Tech style initiatives claim to be about encouragement but invariably devolve into discrimination against men (in my experience at least) and that's illegal. One political faction turning a blind eye to violations of the law doesn't change the fact that it's still the default position.
    • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      This isn't about one political faction, though. Both major political parties support women in tech programs; again, bills to set up women in tech programs for government organizations generally are unopposed.
  • SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    "I think it's fair to call women in tech initiatives nonpolitical" I don't actually know if this is true? James Damore has largely been considered a political act, and James Damore was stating being skeptical of the needs of women in tech initiatives. So, if being skeptical of the initiative is a political act, wouldn't going through with the initiative (being nonskeptical) also political? (Personally I am for women in tech initiatives, FTR, I just don't know if they're not considered political.)
    • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      I see the symmetry you're referring to, but I don't think that's a useful way to think about what's a political act. In the 2008 election, there was a political controversy about whether it's snooty to eat fancy mustard; it wouldn't make sense to generalize from that and say condiment choices are always and forever political.
• djsumdog 7y ago
  It's hard to define what is and isn't political right? It can get ontological .. (i.e. if everything is political than nothing is political and if nothing is political than everything is political). It seems like in this case Gitlab is trying to avoid some of the Google/Amazon blowback for taking questionable contracts. In those cases .. tech people are in high demand. It's not that difficult for us to find work elsewhere. That being said .. it's almost impossible to be moral in customers. Everyone company does questionable stuff, has questionable clients, mixes normal with military contracts, etc. Should Gitlab not allow projects from churches who create tools to help minister to homosexuals (in trying to convert them away from homosexuality)? Is being intolerant of the intolerant .. tolerant? There are really complex questions here.
  • microcolonel 7y ago
    > Should Gitlab not allow projects from churches who create tools to help minister to homosexuals (in trying to convert them away from homosexuality)? No matter how misguided in practice, is it even immoral for people who believe that homosexuality is immoral to try convincing gay people to change? > There are really complex questions here. This is the sort of question that GitLab should not be asked to answer.
    • microtherion 7y ago
      > is it even immoral for people who believe that homosexuality is immoral to try convincing gay people to change? It depends on the details. On one end of the spectrum, a one-off conversation may be OK. On the other end, there are the horrible things inflicted on gay people in the name of "conversion therapy". And many people who believe homosexuality is illegal want to keep that practice legal (or make it legal again, respectively).
• brlewis 7y ago
  Thank you for providing those links. In both cases gitlab is partnering with a non-profit organization that AFAICT is not lobbying to pass or repeal laws. I understood "politics" in the context of this article as being about election candidates, government actions, or changes to the law. These gitlab partnerships are only "political" in the sense that people who like to argue about politics also like to argue about topics that these partnerships touch on.
  • dvt 7y ago
    I disagree. Selling LGBT T-shirts and partnering with non-profits implies discussing both of these hot-button issues at work. The corollary is that only certain viewpoints will be allowed to be discussed at work, and that's how you end up with situations like James Damore.
• sgustard 7y ago
  Topics like "who should we hire" are relevant to the business, and that overrides politics. Obviously topics like "what business should we be in," "what countries should we sell to," "what customers do we want" and on and on can have political components. But those are nonetheless important conversations to have at work.
• anarchodev 7y ago
  The difference here is the potential for revenue generation stemming from the ostensibly political stance. Gitlab's goal is to make money, and they're signalling that this goal is firm regardless of who is hurt by their customers, using their tools. So they're happy to sell you a rainbow shirt to support women in tech. If there was a similar shirt they could sell about ICE and CBP (and that would be the end of their involvement in said political stance) they'd sell that too. Instead, the moral stance is obviously to not work with these organizations, and that will potentially cost them money. This is pretty standard neoliberal politics. Just as with similar decisions at Microsoft and Palantir, this change will never come from executives. It's up to the workers to change the company's direction, and I hope they will.
• vowelless 7y ago
  How is women in tech a political thing? Just seems like an effort to make the work place more welcoming to people.
  • big_chungus 7y ago
    It's a manifestation of a larger debate between equality and equity, or put another way, equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. This is a political and ideological debate that has been going on for many years, and will continue for many more; it is split almost entirely party-line. Even if something is not originally political, enough politicians arguing about it makes it nearly impossible to disentangle the political elements.
• daxelrod 7y ago
  When setting workplace norms, there may be a substantial difference between discussing, for example, social issues, policy, partisanship, governance, and ethics. Depending on context, any of these may be "politics". It feels uncharitable to call them hypocritical without understanding what they mean.
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• deleted 7y ago
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• codetrotter 7y ago
  Could you clarify why you mean that women in tech and LGBT movements “are” political? Movements are broad, and one way of reaching the goals that people in movements seek may be through political means, but that goes for a lot of things, and there is always a lot of of other ways of reaching those goals that one can work on without bringing politics into the picture. For example, political legislation is one way that we may bring more women into tech, but there are many other ways too. The GitLab page you linked is focusing on inspiring the next generation of women to work in tech, and telling stories about successful women inside of GitLab. I did not immediately see anything inherently political on that page, though I only skimmed through it briefly so I may have overlooked something, in which case feel free to point out any examples of anything political that you see there. Certainly, blanket saying that talking about politics is not allowed may well turn out to lead to situations where something becomes challenging to talk about because politics may be intertwined. For example, a speaker might go into politics territory in some talk, and how should they handle that? But that could happen in any area of discussion. Equal opportunity, equal rights, and equal treatment, which is at the core of both the women in tech and the LGBT movements, is not political. It is about human rights. I don’t see any hypocrisy in simultaneously wanting to talk about certain issues at the company level while at the same time saying that national politics are to be avoided. But like I said, the two may intertwine more than we’d like and it could be difficult to distinguish the two in some or even a lot of cases.