But the overall point is that unions rely on solidarity, and any coder adding filters to an amazon chat app or whatever dystopian crap amazon is pulling next is displaying a massive lack of solidarity with their fellow humans
I can also see the ticket being written with examples of “disallow a dictionary of forbidden words”, with a sample dictionary of [“motherfucker”, “slut”, <list of racial epithets>] and then the dictionary function being used later to include “union” etc.
If I got a ticket to block the dictionary containing MF and racial epithets, I’d also think it was pointless, would point out it was easily able to be evaded, but would implement it and implementing it would not be obviously evil or showing a lack of solidarity.
So yeah, this specific case might have flown under the radar - and got implemented unwittingly - but unless a top level exec got in there and edited the dictionary file themselves, there was opportunities in this being implemented to show solidarity and throw some clogs into the machinery
What’s the level of dev who should show allegiance to fellow coworkers by refusing to implement that?
Then some non-dev employee realizes you can block these other words…
Actually we’re having problems with the whole filtering system, it turns out it relies on a library that has some security vulnerabilities and it’s no longer operational.
Or if you must, wait until it breaks on its own, and then refuse to fix it. “Suppressing labour organizing isn’t part of my job description”
I.e. Grow a spine and stand up for what’s right
(The exception would be, when the person who coded the API goes on-call. Still there's lots of checks and balances there and any such change would be quickly undone.)