GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

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.

Is ICE the only thing on GitHub that is morally questionable?

I would venture to guess NO. I would venture to guess that all sorts of things on GitHub are used in illicit, illegal, or morally repressible ways.

Aside from the compensation, anything you have implied beyond this is just augmentation derived from capitalism and acceptance of the status quo. Saying "I don't like what you are doing with the thing I am producing for you, so I may stop offering you services" is just...basic human communication. I really can't see how there is any more to this?

You speak with such absolute authority ("You have to let certain control go after a point."). However, this story (and others like it) are proof that this is untrue. Your assertion is false.

Just because somebody is an employee, it does not mean they lose all bargaining power / agency. If you are exchanging goods or services with someone else in a scenario where the power dynamic is not entirely one-sided, there is always room for negotiation. This is all that's happening.

Just because you don't care about how your stuff is used, doesn't mean that it applies to everyone.

With these kinds of contracts it feels much more akin to a partnership, so I think the feedback makes more sense. Its odd to me that we question why employees would want to have a say in how their company conducts business. Sure, its a choice for the company to make, but saying it is entitled for the employees to speak out just seems insane to me.

Why? If it's within your power to prevent your work from being put to use in service of something you find immoral, why not attempt to organize with like-minded workers and put a stop to it?

If you can force your company to make a choice between a contract and its workforce, you can achieve your goal. There's no reason to let things go.

> Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to?

Because they have, or may have, the power to do so. If they can take control of their work, there's no reason not to do so.

EDITED TO ADD:

> Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees?

They either don't object, or don't have the power within the company to object effectively.

Because those companies aren't based in the woke-wasteland of San Francisco bay area.

But I think a fair point of view is that it would be GREAT if the employees of Xerox and Canon and Lenovo and Apple and Ford and the airlines and even the farmers all took the same stance as GH employees.

If that actually happened, ICE would cease to be able to function incredibly quickly.

Which would be good. This is basically the point of these protests.

Often when moral question pops up on HN, the top comment is some variation of

> But where do we we draw the line? > I wonder whether we should even try.

Counterpoint: cynicism is too easy. Actually giving a shit is harder, it's uncomfortable, it involves compromise.

Yes, there's ambiguity.

Yes, the line the law draws is very loose. Github can't legally let someone from Iran or North Korea host repos, but just about anything else is legal. If Golden Dawn (the greek fascist party) wanted to use your product, nothing legally prevents you from having them as a customer.

This is no excuse to avoid the question.

Every person has to decide for themselves the boundaries of who they're willing to work for. If you work for a company, you have a voice in that company's decisions. I think many tech workers underestimate how much power they have. Good engineers are in tremendous demand.

The counter question is how much should a person turn a blind eye (and so implicitly endorse) the uses of your product?

In this case at least, there was a donation made that would not have happened otherwise.

The moment salaried employee start sabotaging his job and putting his views against his job description - it's clearly time for him to reconsider employment at a place that better matches his priorities.

Win-win for all, no struggle needed.

Well if a business fostered a culture where it's deemed acceptable to question who the business should or shouldn't be working with, nobody can blame the employees for doing exactly what they were incentivized to do.

Plenty of businesses would fired a rebellious employee on the spot without a second thought, or at the very least ask him to resign if he dares question managements on a matter that is neither legally questionable or related to the employee's work conditions, for instance, a group of employees that would be asking management to boycott a certain country.

Seems it is a different culture at GitHub,Google or Facebook where apparently questioning management is a virtue.

I see nothing wrong with that. It's their own doing.

Also for people who draw comparison with discrimination against individuals: Companies, agencies and organizations aren’t “discriminated” against in the same sense as individuals. I am not aware of any legislation where it’s considered wrongly discriminatory to decline B2B contracts.

I'm not under the impression that gitlab employees are complaining about the first (surely ICE employees and contractors can make use of the myriads of repositories gitlab makes available to the world at large). They are reacting negatively to specific contracts gitlab has with ICE.

This is fine, because employees are not in principle slaves. They do have a right to tell their employers to go fuck themselves "at will", just as the opposite is true. Anybody who takes a stand like this is exercising a privilege that not everybody enjoys, sure, but you're running with that in a suppressive direction (why should Github employees get to be special if not everyone can be special, and by the way (gasp) what if they aren't perfectly logical and fair in their activism?) while I'd go the other way: in an ideal world everybody would enjoy this privilege, and any workers who can take a stand for what they believe in certainly should.

The alternative is that corporate leaders alone are responsible for imposing ethics on the markets they play in, and we all know the sorts of decisions such people tend to make.

At the same time GitHub should absolutely pay a bit more to get engineers who don't care about this issue.

We don't need to censor employees, and at the same time we shouldn't expand the moral opinions of a vocal minority of opinions to be automatically indicative of what GitHub "should" do. What Github "should" do is replace these employees who are exercising their right to quit.

Why do you ask question in such a biased frame?

Why don't you ask instead:

Why don't other companies have moral standards?

It's not really an apples to apples comparison.

Has anyone ever believed that?

One of the many keys is aligned incentives and values. If there's even a small 1-2 degree difference in the direction you and your acquirer would like to head in, that gap will widen into a vast chasm given enough time.

Also, kudos to the leadership at Stripe. They're intelligent, well-meaning, and they get it.

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.

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.

For example, it seems reasonable to guess that they might be using their Github deployment to help run the National Child Victim Identification System:

The National Child Victim Identification System (NCVIS), owned by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is an application that assists federal, state, local, and international law enforcement agencies, INTERPOL, and other supporting organizations, such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) (hereafter, authorized partners) in the investigation and prosecution of child exploitation crimes, specifically those involving images of child sexual exploitation.

https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhsicepia-010-national-child...

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...

"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.

The argument basically boils down to supporting literally anything. If enough people start saying “no, we won’t support that”, it pushes up the price of the behaviour, and could eventually lead to the entire industry dropping support - for example when all the pharmaceutical companies decide to stop allowing their drugs to be used for executions.

What? With the ethical compass those surveillance system running, addiction-pushing assholes have? We should be talking about how to dial down their power in society.

If they want to repent for their lack of self control in their own actions by pushing their moral standards onto others, then they can go get fucked.

People will come up with all sorts of reasons to convince themselves to take blood money, but surely they're self delusions at best.

It's as if the forces of good suddenly decided that any nationalism is unacceptable in 2019.

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.

That's... that's just some incredible mental yoga there.

""" One of those employees, staff engineer Sophie Haskins, resigned Monday, stating in her resignation letter that she was leaving because the company did not cancel its contract with ICE and “shows no indication of canceling the contract,” which she wrote was “morally unacceptable.” """

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.

I mean, in the past times, we had loom-smashing, scab-beating, and private armies to force people to work.

It's an open question how much responsibility one has regarding how one's technology is used and what services one is providing to whom. There isn't universal agreement on the topic, but there are plenty of software engineers who believe "more than zero," and quite a few who believe they have more responsibility than that.

It's also, depending on who you ask, one of the few avenues left for people to affect change on a larger scale. Literally nothing else is working, and internal revolts have changed quite a few minds.

Employee activism is a necessary and under-powered force to help manage the insatiable greed of board members.

But on a broader note, I think a lot of it can be traced to the current president. He seems to go out of his way to do things that stir up deep anger in his opponents. There's a reason why millions of people hit the streets the day after his inauguration to register their dissatisfaction with the fact that he's president. That was unprecedented in US history.

Combine that with how little an average person can do to influence what happens in Washington, and you get a whole lot of angry people desperate for something they can actually impact. Tech employees have leverage over their employers, and they're using it for this because it's the only avenue they have to vent their anger at the current state of politics. The candidate they probably supported in 2016 got more votes but lost anyway. They probably don't live in a state that's competitive in the electoral college. Their local representatives probably represent their views well but are similarly limited in how much impact they can have. This is one of the only ways they can actually do something about what's making them angry, and they're taking advantage of it.

I'm surprised it's not happening at more companies.

Conflict escalation is a deliberate choice by those in charge. Such as ICE.

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.

Not serving ICE is a more legitimate moral judgement because ICE has the option to change their behavior and ICE is genuinely bad.

Slippery slope is one of those silly things I see from free speech advocates. I tend not to see the bad impacts in real life because if the government isgoing to restrict free speech, they will do it regardless of what anti-hate speech laws currently exist.

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”

I mean, this is why we have developed the idea of a "protected class."

Because you're correct that, at the end of the day, judgement is judgement and sentiment is sentiment and everyone is the hero of their own story.

But to place the limits of proper action at sentiment is solipsism.

So there is a set of protected classes which we, as a society, have decided are inappropriate reasons to discriminate against people. The quick reasons it is wrong to discriminate: sex, race, age, religion[1]. There are many reasons we allow people to discriminate: lack of money, being violent to employees, being unacceptably rude, setting off explosives, etc. These are all discriminatory practices that often involve moral judgement.

We are always in the process of trying to decide if we should have a new protected class and how that class should be defined. I also suspect we will, at some point, talk about removing protected classes.

Businesses should (and in fact always do) make moral judgements about their clients. The people at Github who chose to work with ICE decided it was morally right for them to do so. You can tell because they did it. They might say they were sad about it and had "moral qualms" but at some point it does seem like it comes down to yes or no.

So do you think we should have a government agency class? Or perhaps a law enforcement class? I personally do not.

[1] Some exceptions here, of course, a mosque does not have to hire a catholic priest who applies to be an imam.

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).

But you are also being compensated for them having the right to use the product of your labor as they see fit.

Implicitly, and probably explicitly in any decent work contract, is that they are the sole owners of the product of your labor and get to decide how it is used.

I think a lot of problems caused by unions trace back to that.

Unions should come back to help recreate the middle class.

It's the same thing with the Google sexual harassment problem and the Facebook disinformation problem. Without organised labor power, the employees are realising they've had to sell out their values for a wage.

If that doesn't work, then you should leave.

Labor is not nearly as transactional in reality as you make it sound. "Just quit" is like "just leave the country" in politics.

And if an employee can't shake the feeling that they're helping to repeat IBM's mistakes in the '30s and '40s, they'll walk. Company doesn't even need to fire them.

(This suggests one could possibly use "employee churn at major software companies" as a secondary indicator to societal upheaval).

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.

See Deadspin for an example of the inverse of what you're calling for: people sticking to their guns and letting a company go for conflicts like this.

TLDR: it's really unwise for a company to fire people for disagreeing with its controversial choices. It's a great way to accidentally damage your brand and lose a lot of staff to competitors.

Only if you take the most simplistic view of how a company should work.

Almost every company is successful due to the people that work there. Without the people, the organization (whether its a for profit corporation or otherwise) are completely useless.

Human beings deserve to have a voice in the governance of institutions that they spend their time and labor to make successful.

It could just be that if we want a democratic society, we'll need to directly attack the idea that we have no democracy in the place where we spend most of our lives.

Employees don't deserve a job; they work for cash. And employers, similarly, don't deserve labor; they give cash for work.

well, no, we know this isn't true because people take various forms of non-financial compensation (such as working from home, choosing your own technologies).

compensation is a vector that has a variety of inputs; it's not unreasonable to think that "association with company mission" is one of them that's subject to change over time, and as a result, can be protested, similar to e.g. working from home no longer allowed

The last time this was true for me, I was a teenager working at Taco Bell. In my professional life, I don't just work in exchange for cash, and never have.

It's about being a team player for humans first, corporations second. You seem like a bootlicker to the capital class (or an "entrepreneur" trying to LARP). It's the shitty boomer attitude of "you should be grateful to have a job at all." To that, I say "fuck you."

It's a great way to make extremist toxic echo chambers.

And even if it is purely symbolic, lots of symbolic actions do more than nothing.

At the very least it may improve employee morale to not support ICE which may increase Github’s employee retention rate, which may not be a big deal for ICE but may be a bigger deal for Github.

And finally, death by a thousand cuts is certainly a thing.

As for “only being symbolic”, no, it wouldn’t. It would allow workers to be in an environment where their work supports their values. A lot of these workers are going to leave the org to go work for a company that doesn’t so conflict with their values, as is absolutely their prerogative in a free labor market. This is actually a mature way to let GitHub understand the full costs of their actions, so that they can make an informed decision. There’s literally no problem here, this is a functioning labor dynamic.

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...