
GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract - ilamont
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-10-31/github-ice-contract-defense
======
supernova87a
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?

~~~
tomschlick
> 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.

~~~
chillwaves
You are defending literal slave labor.

[https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/us/immigrant-detention-
forced...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/us/immigrant-detention-forced-labor-
lawsuit/index.html)

~~~
tomschlick
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/](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.

~~~
dandanqu82
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.

~~~
bcheung
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.

~~~
admax88q
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.

------
azirbel
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18542830)

~~~
dta5003
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.

------
ken
> 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".

~~~
paulddraper
> It's amazing anyone still believes

Has anyone ever believed that?

~~~
braythwayt
There was that time Apple “acquired” NeXT...

But for all n where n > 1, no.

------
duxup
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.

~~~
commandlinefan
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.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
> 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?

~~~
mgraczyk
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.

~~~
nostrademons
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.

~~~
Rebelgecko
Is that sort of distribution typical? Do teams tend to self-segregate?

~~~
nostrademons
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.)

------
kaikai
"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.

~~~
slykat
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?

~~~
dunstad
Yeah, I would love that actually. ICE runs concentration camps. Not enough
people treat them how they deserve.

~~~
slykat
Ok so would you ok with a restaurant not serving republicans because the party
currently supports ICE's actions?

~~~
andrei_says_
A bit of Slippery Slope combined with Strawman fallacy here.

~~~
viridian
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.

~~~
dunstad
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.

------
mfer
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.

~~~
geofft
> _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...](https://github.blog/2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-developers/)

"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.

------
tj-teej
I think that a lot of people see a rise and mainstreaming of White Nationalism
and want to push back.

~~~
annoyingnoob
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.

~~~
tenpies
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.

~~~
CydeWeys
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.

~~~
zaroth
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.

------
allday
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.

~~~
fatbird
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.

------
no_opinions
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")

------
lacampbell
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.

------
rpmisms
Whoop-de-do. If you don't like the company, leave.

~~~
vertex-four
If all the employees with morals leave, GitHub will be left with no employees
with morals. That is _probably_ a worse situation.

~~~
rpmisms
Or some people don't feel that border control is incompatible with morality.
Both opinions are valid.

~~~
shadowgovt
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

------
ratsmack
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](https://archive.ph/IkYQ3)

~~~
geofft
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.

~~~
ratsmack
Just sitting here thinking about it, I can't remember anything specific like
this outside of the tech industry... I may be wrong though.

~~~
CydeWeys
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.

~~~
ryanbrunner
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.

~~~
CydeWeys
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.

------
nimbius
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.

~~~
jassmith87
They already were doing this before Microsoft, so yes... yes they would.

------
Teknoman117
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?

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

------
Thorentis
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.

~~~
CapricornNoble
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).

------
slykat
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.

~~~
rtpg
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”

~~~
Sophistifunk
> \- that moral position should be right

You do realise that what this _actually_ means is "this person agrees with me"

~~~
rtpg
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.

~~~
rumanator
> 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.

------
fatbird
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.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/Rx1kG](http://archive.is/Rx1kG)

------
bookofjoe
[http://archive.is/9pIAh](http://archive.is/9pIAh)

------
opnitro
God forbid I have some sort of say in how my labor is used.

~~~
zer00eyz
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).

~~~
opnitro
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.

~~~
zer00eyz
> 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.

~~~
watt3rpig
Guns and fertilizer are very different products. Guns were specifically
developed with the purpose of killing. Their main use besides recreation is
killing people.

~~~
watt3rpig
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.

------
RickJWagner
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.

------
75dvtwin
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?

------
nintendo1889
9/11.

------
nrook
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.

~~~
godzillabrennus
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.

~~~
CydeWeys
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.

~~~
wvenable
> 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.

------
paggle
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.

------
Thorentis
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?

~~~
justanotherjoe
Yes. You will never let that go will you?

~~~
Thorentis
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.

------
whalesalad
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.

~~~
xvector
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.

~~~
whalesalad
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.

~~~
killface
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.

------
ganitarashid
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.

~~~
the_pwner224
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.

~~~
ganitarashid
It’ll be their only choice

------
BurningFrog
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.

~~~
yazboo
It’s not “nothing” to refuse to profit, directly or indirectly, from behaviors
you find unethical.

~~~
BurningFrog
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.

------
sneak
It’s really sad that GitHub, once a great company, sold to total military-
industrial complex bastards.

~~~
killface
You knew when it was sold to MS that this was gonna happen. It's why that was
the day github died.

~~~
sneak
You’re 100% correct, it’s still just sad to watch.

------
joshypants
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.

~~~
netsharc
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...

~~~
joshypants
I’ve thought about doing it anonymously, and might now. Thanks for the
encouragement.

