I think it's unprofessional for developers to try and bring down production services just because they disagree with a company move. It's also a bit immature. The thing to do in this case is to quit. Down your tools and quit, but don't destroy the hard work of your teammates and betray the trust of all your investors and customers.
Speaking of crafted and amplified rhetoric, let's get back to Barry Crist's justification for allowing Chef to continue to due business with ICE.
He invokes principle to seem high-minded, but his guiding principle is not patriotism but profit. He is merely hiding behind patriotism.
All I am doing is drawing upon literature (I am using the term loosely, but I suspect it is probable that more HN members have read The Fountainhead than the Iliad) to show that being able to live with yourself and the uses to which your work is put is more important than seeming "professional" or "reasonable".
More fundamentally, this was an attempt to damage the customers of a former employer. In effect, it's no different from logic bombs and tech vandalism in general. While there may be a case for "their public work, they can do whatever" I'd put money on this person announcing their intent to take down customer systems which makes it malicious.
It sounds you're saying that the developer who deleted their gems in protest shouldn't actually own their work, because exercising their rights as owners might inconvenience others.
Unfortunately, when you work for a company, you've, in most cases, chosen to trade your rights to your work over to the company. The company owns the intellectual property
I am aware of how work-for-hire works. I've been in this trade for twenty years. It is why I only pretend to be passionate about "my" work. I know it is not truly mine, and embrace alienation from my labor as a coping mechanism.
I think it's our moral imperative to prevent our work from being used for acts that betray our values. Take a second and remember that the gas chambers used by Hitler to inflict a genocide were designed by engineers. I think we all agree that those engineers should have sabotaged their own work to prevent harm coming to the victims of the Holocaust, and it's very surprising to me that you're defending profits and investors over moral values.
I'm not surprised. There are a lot of techies who took Ayn Rand a little too seriously and think that profits are themselves a moral value, and that investors are somehow beyond reproach by virtue of their wealth.
I might paraphrase Rand to suit my purpose as the Devil quotes Scripture, but I have to say that for such an ardent atheist, Ayn Rand's worship of wealth and those who possess sounds a lot like prosperity gospel.
Then again, if you're trying to get a startup off the ground or hope to work for a rising startup, it probably isn't smart to bite the hand that might feed you.
I think it's unprofessional for developers to try and bring down production services just because they disagree with a company move. It's also a bit immature. The thing to do in this case is to quit. Down your tools and quit, but don't destroy the hard work of your teammates and betray the trust of all your investors and customers.