5 ms·

I wonder if free-speech or political protection in workplace can be abused by competitors to destroy your culture as proposed by people in the comments. Is ther

I wonder if free-speech or political protection in workplace can be abused by competitors to destroy your culture as proposed by people in the comments. Is there a chance of that happening or does it already happen?

an_opabinia 6y ago
> Is there a chance of that happening or does it already happen? Nah. Every Facebook employee I've met, every one that I'm reading, they are sincere about what they're angry about. It's a bad look, to assume some Facebook employee's opinions are being co-opted by... fucking Google? Apple? That's ridiculous. I'm not even going to speculate why anyone questions some random Facebook employee's sincerity. Instead I offer: Imagine if someone told you, every opinion you had, all the time, talked over you or told you to shut the fuck up and said, "Oh you're getting co-opted by Google, this is exactly what they want you to do, 'destroy our culture.'" And then, in the same breath, that guy defends, breathlessly, some idiot outraged over the removal of master/slave nomenclature, or some idiot trying to mainsplain crackpot sex difference theories to his female coworkers. C'mon, you'd be mad as hell, it's so utterly ridiculous.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  "some idiot outraged over the removal of master/slave nomenclature" Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it. I belive you need to work on your example of a bad person ;) How about we go with? And then in the same breath that gal defends selling people's secrets for pennies on the dollar and willingly accepting that they'll likely have very real negative consequences for your users once the private data in your database invariably gets leaked onto the internet. Oh wait, that wouldn't leave much left at Facebook, wouldn't it? So let's just question the moral integrity of anyone working at Facebook. Seems reasonable, given what egregious privacy infringements their work enables.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it. I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society. I think removing that is worth a little money and downtime, if it comes to that. People who are "outraged" that it cost them some time and work probably could stand to show some compassion for their fellow humans.
    - fxtentacle 6y ago
      Surely it is very easy to take the moral high ground on these issues. But if you're the one working over-hours to fix the resulting mess, you start to wonder why those knights in shining armor forgot to show you the same compassion. Usually, when open source projects introduce a breaking backwards-incompatible change, they will first deprecate things and then wait some months to give people time to update. After this nomenclature had been in use for 10+ years, I can't help but wonder why there was no time to take the user-friendly path in this instance. So to the people who are fixing the mess, it certainly feels more like you got kicked because someone else wanted to show off his/her moral superiority. There existed a reasonable way to change the nomenclature, but it wasn't taken.
      - kelnos 6y ago
        > it certainly feels more like you got kicked because someone else wanted to show off his/her moral superiority. And that's where the question of empathy and compassion comes in. As a random white dude, the "pain" I face by dealing with problems around these name changes is completely minimal and trivial when compared to the emotional pain they cause people in certain groups that actually have a lived experience of oppression. Regardless, I do agree that if there is crazy scrambling and short timelines to change these names, that's a problem in your org. There should not be reckless urgency to get this done; it should be done just as any other major change should be: with planning and risk assessments. Where I work, we are doing it slowly and with an eye toward not causing downtime. If your org is not doing that, then I agree that you have a valid complaint. But this complaint should be directed at the bad process, not at the work itself.

an_opabinia 6y ago

> Is there a chance of that happening or does it already happen? Nah. Every Facebook employee I've met, every one that I'm reading, they are sincere about what they're angry about. It's a bad look, to assume some Facebook employee's opinions are being co-opted by... fucking Google? Apple? That's ridiculous. I'm not even going to speculate why anyone questions some random Facebook employee's sincerity. Instead I offer: Imagine if someone told you, every opinion you had, all the time, talked over you or told you to shut the fuck up and said, "Oh you're getting co-opted by Google, this is exactly what they want you to do, 'destroy our culture.'" And then, in the same breath, that guy defends, breathlessly, some idiot outraged over the removal of master/slave nomenclature, or some idiot trying to mainsplain crackpot sex difference theories to his female coworkers. C'mon, you'd be mad as hell, it's so utterly ridiculous.

fxtentacle 6y ago
"some idiot outraged over the removal of master/slave nomenclature" Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it. I belive you need to work on your example of a bad person ;) How about we go with? And then in the same breath that gal defends selling people's secrets for pennies on the dollar and willingly accepting that they'll likely have very real negative consequences for your users once the private data in your database invariably gets leaked onto the internet. Oh wait, that wouldn't leave much left at Facebook, wouldn't it? So let's just question the moral integrity of anyone working at Facebook. Seems reasonable, given what egregious privacy infringements their work enables.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it. I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society. I think removing that is worth a little money and downtime, if it comes to that. People who are "outraged" that it cost them some time and work probably could stand to show some compassion for their fellow humans.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    Surely it is very easy to take the moral high ground on these issues. But if you're the one working over-hours to fix the resulting mess, you start to wonder why those knights in shining armor forgot to show you the same compassion. Usually, when open source projects introduce a breaking backwards-incompatible change, they will first deprecate things and then wait some months to give people time to update. After this nomenclature had been in use for 10+ years, I can't help but wonder why there was no time to take the user-friendly path in this instance. So to the people who are fixing the mess, it certainly feels more like you got kicked because someone else wanted to show off his/her moral superiority. There existed a reasonable way to change the nomenclature, but it wasn't taken.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      > it certainly feels more like you got kicked because someone else wanted to show off his/her moral superiority. And that's where the question of empathy and compassion comes in. As a random white dude, the "pain" I face by dealing with problems around these name changes is completely minimal and trivial when compared to the emotional pain they cause people in certain groups that actually have a lived experience of oppression. Regardless, I do agree that if there is crazy scrambling and short timelines to change these names, that's a problem in your org. There should not be reckless urgency to get this done; it should be done just as any other major change should be: with planning and risk assessments. Where I work, we are doing it slowly and with an eye toward not causing downtime. If your org is not doing that, then I agree that you have a valid complaint. But this complaint should be directed at the bad process, not at the work itself.