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...
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
There's a common phenomenon where a user's later defense of a flamebait post is often the high-quality, substantive explanation that they should have posted in the first place. I almost want to write software to replace the one with the other.
Someone pointed the phenomenon out the other day and I've noticed it all over here since: a lot of posts are great but then the last sentence goes too far, off the rails. I've been watching for it in my own posts. I think it's just hard to get the right rhetorical flourish.
(BTW, awesome job here dang. I don't know how you do it.)
It is clear how this ends up happening. When people express an opinion generally supported in the office, it is unlikely someone will complain. When someone expresses a contrary opinion, they will appear to be the one "making trouble".
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.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
It feels uncharitable to call them hypocritical without understanding what they mean.
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.)
Perhaps more on point, Gitlab surely doesn't have a policy that you can't discuss anything people disagree on at work.
More specifically, an initiate that explicitly excluded non-females elicited comments that said this program was sexist and exclusionary.
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.