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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I deeply suspect that large swathes of the employees at a lot of these large companies don't really care either way.

As with any large community of people, there are some who are more vocal than others. Call them what you want (protestors/agitators/woke/etc), but I get the feeling that they're getting a disproportionately large amount of focus from the media and I guess management.

Certainly in my experience at an unnamed employer, the first I heard about protests and problems at my work place was when I read about it on the internet - there was nothing in my immediate workplace at all to suggest any of what was reported was actually even happening, let alone pervasive.

> Call them what you want (protestors/agitators/woke/etc), but I get the feeling that they're getting a disproportionately large amount of focus from the media and I guess management.

Explicitly so. Loud voices make headlines, headlines get clicks, clicks get ad revenue. The entire industry is geared to produce maximum clicks and, ergo, maximum loud voice. This has been the theme for a while now.

The issue, though, is that Management can ignore a couple of angry cranks -- or just fire them -- but they can't avoid news articles.

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.

Every non-citizen I know keeps their head down and doesn't express their personal opinions on political matters (particularly relating to ICE) because they don't want to jeopardize their visa. It would be strange and kinda stupid for a foreign programmer on an H1B to oppose a contract with ICE because they do eventually want to get that Green Card and eventually citizenship, and they know who holds the power in that relationship.

(It's also amusing to see that sometimes shift when they get their citizenship; I had a Japanese classmate in college who was on first a student visa, then an H1B, then a green card for about 15 years. He had zero political opinions for the whole time I knew him. As soon as he got his citizenship, he's active in local politics. It's more about urban planning, transit, and YIMBY efforts than immigration, though.)

You are correct. As someone who used to be on very restrictive visas for a while - your job is not “just a job” anymore. It was very much a source of constant stress for me knowing that political shifts at work or a terrible boss could very well send you packing in a matter of days.

This will be less likely to shift in the coming years, since the US government is openly investigating the ability to revoke citizenship. It's depressing to see, but I guess it shouldn't be surprising because the US approach to citizenship - birthright and/or naturalization - is not universally the case in other countries.

> 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?

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.

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.

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

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.)

It's absolutely not bullshit. I've worked places where this is true and places where it isn't. In my experience, the former is more common.

Pretty much true for most large tech companies, at least in the SF Bay Area. I've worked at 2 large and 1 small tech co and it was only the small company that had mostly US citizens (mostly because of the cost of dealing with immigration lawyers etc)

It feels like closer to 50% noncitizen where I work, but could be closer to 90% if you include naturalized citizens.

One of my first SW jobs (mid-scale startup in Palo Alto) I had multiple canadians on my team and we had some chinese and indian immigrants on other teams. I wouldn't say 90%, but a sizable percentage.

At other companies like Google and Microsoft I've had plenty of immigrant colleagues along with colleagues at offices overseas. Some eventually choose to return to their home country, some migrate here after starting at the employer.

The main game studio I worked for also had lots of chinese and korean immigrants on staff, but I suspect that was influenced by the parent company being korean.

My current team is at least 80% foreign-born-and-rasied, myself included, but I don't know everyone's immigration status. But this is the "whitest", most American team I've worked with in the last 8 years in Silicon Valley. Prior to that I was in the mid-west and I was the only foreign engineer.

> I'm going to call bullshit,

Will people please consider a moment's thought before using this adolescent phrase? People throwing it around are probably not using it with its most precise and defensible meaning (a la Harry Frankfurt). So the most charitable alternative gloss is that it's used carelessly to mean someone is just wrong. It's a very poor (because ambiguous) word choice for that. I suspect it's usually deployed to suggest someone is lying, for which you need specific evidence beyond believing a statement to be incorrect. That evidence is very rarely available in an HN comment.

It's hard to be thoughtful about using language, and I'm no exemplar. But a good start is just avoiding reflexively spitting out some rarely useful prefabricated phrases. This is one.

This is true in a lot of places. In my PhD program (in a US university), the vast majority of us are not US citizens.

I suspect they’re saying anyone who looks/sounds different must be foreign.

There is a rule about inferring the most charitable interpretation IIRC.

And I don't think one should restrict that reasoning to only the foreign-born employees. Native-born US citizens working side-by-side with employees who have regular contact with our immigration process get a second-row seat to how broken it is.

(Spoilers: personal observation, it's pretty broken.)

You're assuming that legal immigrants from around the world working high paid tech jobs have common cause with "illegal" immigrants coming across the southern border.

In my anecdotal experience it's not so simple.

There are massive logistical challenges with processing mass influxes of immigrants into a country, particularly people who are coming through outside of the legal process.

I would think a large contingent of GitHub employees want the people working at ICE to be using the best tools possible to achieve their mission. Many are probably quite proud of US government agencies using their tools, the same as if NASA or Executive Branch or Congress was using Github.

IMO it’s a very difficult situation when certain employees are arranging political protests against specific customers of the company, and making other employees uncomfortable to express their own potentially divergent viewpoints.

a lot of non citizens support ice because if they are working at a company like github they got here legally and don’t see it as fair that others just get to skip the line

A good portion of GitHub’s employees live in Europe. Of the employees who live in America, most are citizens.

How would you even know that? Assuming you weren't high up in HR?

It's obviously the small noisy minority. Most people don't have any expectation that their employer should have anything like a coherent moral vision; they just want to do their job, get their paycheck, and go home.

Even names on a petition don't mean much - the kind of people that like to solicit for signatures on petitions are often so insufferable that you sign to make them go away and leave you in peace.

About a quarter of the company has signed the protest letter. I signed the letter just so people would stop nagging me to sign. I don’t care about ICE. I suspect there are others who got pressured into signing.

That’s amazing to me. It seems to me like creating a hostile work environment and a form of harassment, although political rallying is not a protected category, and the employer is likely hamstrung in making any sort of response.

I wonder about that, too - how far will the rabble-rousers go, if they can get away with it? Will they insist on the firing of the people who _didn’t_ sign the petition? Will they blacklist people who have ever worked with ICE in the future? Will this spread beyond github? Will we have an unelected, unaccountable group of “the woke” dictating the terms of our employment?

https://xkcd.com/2159/

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