It's so easy to slowly compromise your values over time when your day to day is "fix this bug, implement that feature, shepherd a few deploys". Good to take a step back sometimes and think: Is my work making a positive impact on the world? If not, is it something I can stomach? How does it align with my values?

(Am I literally helping tear families apart? https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/crying-toddler-border-v...)

If you have the financial independence and career privilege to not contribute to making the world a worse place, that's a wonderful gift, and I hope people will not squander it.

It's also easy to assume that other people have the same values and worldview that you do. The problem with moralizing your work is that morals are not black-and-white.

Viewpoints are different, but there's also some stuff that's just bad PR as well.

If my job to promotes something that I find uncomfortable or is bad for company PR - I try to avoid. If it's pretty clear it's over the line.

Maybe let the voters decide policy and the tech companies deal with the tech?

> Good to take a step back sometimes and think: Is my work making a positive impact on the world?

Good thing here that Trump is making people do this now. ICE was doing this during Obama times[1], afaik but no one cared back then which corps ICE is working with. So perhaps this is a silver lining of trump presidency? Hope media doesn't go a back to being quite when "their guy" is in office.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/obama-administration...

Check out today's episode of The Daily. They don't see Obama as having been "their guy."

The Daily isn’t representative of all media. It’s like saying, well the WSJ is economically literate, so therefore all media are good with economics.

Not sure why I didn't hear about child separation before last week then? To be fair, I didn't pay any attention to news couple of yrs ago, but I feel like i would've heard about this if it was reported like it is now.

Just hope they don't regress, that would be the real test.

Regarding "their guy" , I was thinking of MSNBC's tweet saying Opera was "their president" or something.

"Nothing but respect for MY President" is a popular meme. A joke. They retracted the tweet after explaining as much. Further, news sites covered ICE plenty during Obama's administration (a cursory Google reveals [0] and [1]) but things have undeniably gotten worse under the Trump administration[2].

[0] https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/parents-deportation_...

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/deportation-is-ripping-familie...

[2] http://theconversation.com/immigrants-deported-under-obama-s...

> ICE was doing this during Obama times

No it wasn't substantively. The facilities for children were used for unaccompanied minors; the Obama administration largely did not criminally detain parents crossing with minors (if illegal crossing was the only charge), so the family separation issue did not exist. There's a reason it only became an issue with the Trump “zero-tolerance” policy, and that's because the practice substantively did not exist before that.

What’s the difference between ICE using Azure, GCE, etc., or rolling their own Dell servers? If they went in-house would the call be for Dell to not sell to them, and if so do we then ask Ford or Toyota not to sell vehicles to them and so on?

What about Cisco, Apple and Microsoft selling to kingdom of Saudi Arabia, China, etc... let’s not fly Boeing or Airbus because their other units sell to govts we don’t like.

> However, working with ICE seems directly at odds with a company that depends on immigration and guest workers to fill out its workforce

Can we please stop conflating legal and illegal immigration? Microsoft is dependent on legal immigration through the H1B and EB programs. Furthermore, there are many business who are dependent on illegal immigration and those deserve to be shutdown for exploiting a system of indentured servitude.

ICE is misbehaving badly in some ways and scaring legal immigrants. As always, it’s not the case that if you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear. ICE has deported actual US citizens who have the wrong sort of look, never mind “mere” legal residents.

They aren’t scaring any legal immigrants except those who have their relatives living with them without authorization.

And that population tends to have used family-based or diversity-based pathways. Very rarely do employment-based immigrants live in mixed-status families.

You don’t seem to be aware of how distinct the different immigrant communities can be.

I mean, I know such people, and am even married to one. ICE is not exactly being careful to only ever go after people who are here without authorization.

I’m an actual employment-based immigrant. I have literally never heard of any other employment-based immigrant (and I know plenty, safe to assume more than you do) who was randomly arrested by ICE.

I haven’t either. I’m not saying it’s frequent, merely that the threat is there.

Do you really think H1B workers waiting in a 20-year queue for a Green Card are really scared off by ICEs actions at the border? If anything it's reaffirming the importance of obtaining citizenship legally.

Do you really think any brown person in the US who has been paying any attention is not worried about getting improperly deported by ICE? Again, they’ve deported actual citizens before.

This is an incredibly racist thing to say. Many "brown people" worked hard to come into this country legally and actively oppose illegal immigration. No one I know who legally immigrated to the US is worried at all about being deported, that's just FUD.

It’s not racist to point out the systematic racism of a federal agency. Or do you think ICE is deporting white citizens?

My friend’s wife finally got her citizenship because of all this nonsense. My wife (though not brown) is seriously considering it as well. There are many others.

At this point, opposing ICE is not about being in favor of illegal immigration, it’s about being against an abusive government agency.

Edit: to anyone doubting that ICE is racist, I propose an experiment. Leaving all of your identification at home (perfectly legal), ride the bus to, say, Nogales, AZ and then back home. Now go ask a hispanic-looking US citizen friend to join you on this journey and see what they say.

What is racist is classifying all “brown people” together and speaking for Hispanics. You should stop doing that.

Not FUD to those to whom it happened. Can you clarify your arguments? To say that some/many immigrants oppose illegal immigration says nothing about whether power and profiling is abused, and your 3rd hand anecdote over legal immigrants having no fear of misidentification from a (I think we'd agree) provenly overburdened system does not do much convincing.

It is quite possible and even reasonable to have a goal and hate/fear the methods that some use to achieve those ends.

It's not racist at all, it's the reality of the situation.

I don't worry about it that much. I'm much more worried that would end up arrested and held without trial for however long ice feels like it only to be deported. The deported part is not that big a deal, since I'm from Canada.

The idea that any small fuckup on my part could turn into months of hell because the US federal government doesn't really consider me a person, that scares me.

I think of H1B— or any immigration that’s tied to employment status—as a form of indenture as well. Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical.

Oh, absolutely. But letting illegal immigrants into the country as a cheap source of labor, knowing that they can be deported whenever the winds change, is even less ethical. At least H1B workers have some semblance of protection for the term of their employment.

In other news, Ford is supplying trucks, Google is supplying search, PG&E is supplying electricity, Amazon is supplying office supplies, and Apple corporate iPhones to ICE. Not sure why Microsoft is getting singled out here.

Because you don't to sign a contract to buy office supplies from amazon?

If you are working in Microsoft and reading this: Don't give up! Google managed to get an ethical charter. It was done once. And it can be done in Microsoft too. Just don't get distracted and carry on pushing for the change.

Are fence companies going to get backlash next? This is ridiculous...

Actually I want to say in next anyone living US pay tax should be blamed as well, as their tax fund US government and ICE do those.

the progressive madness has no boundaries

This is the third time this has been submitted today (the others were killed):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17341478

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17339017

Every version of this story posted has been flagged - whats the point?? Why is this one flagged, but has the most upvotes? If you're gonna flag every post of a story, nobody is going to see it...

Stock is up 1.18% today, not sure if thats related.

> working with ICE seems directly at odds with a company that depends on immigration and guest workers to fill out its workforce

Why? ICE doesn’t deport legal immigrants.

Yet another article dishonestly conflating legal and illegal immigration.

“ICE doesn’t deport legal immigrants.”

Of course they do. They’ve even deported citizens. The agency is out of control, and the fact that they mostly enforce civil infractions means they’d not held to account nearly as much as traditional law enforcement, and not nearly as much as they should be.

What’s happening is that there is no central database of all US citizens, but there is information on every lawful immigrant.

I think you’re trying to say: “they have no qualms deporting x, and x has a stronger claim to being here than y, so clearly they’d have no qualms deporting y”.

The reality is completely different. If you’re a lawful immigrant, they have your fingerprints, photograph, travel history, address, and a whole lot of other information already, and you can use that to prove your identity. Of course, you may then be subject to a fine for not carrying your documents, as all aliens are required to pursuant to INA 264(e) and other provisions.

There have been cases where the citizen held by ICE had easy proof of citizenship but ICE just refused to consider it.

And you might remember green card holders getting refused entry and deported by the hundreds during the weekend of Trump’s abortive “travel ban,” although strictly speaking that’s not ICE.

I would assume that’s because they hear the “I’m totally a US Citizen” claim all the time. I see you haven’t attempted to address my point of fingerprints showing a match.

As for the travel ban affecting green card holders, that was stupid but irrelevant to the point at hand. That part was reversed very quickly, I might add.

In one case, the guy had somebody bring his US passport. They wouldn’t look at it. What makes you think they’re certain to dig into their files based on the word of someone who says “I’m totally a green card holder” if they won’t even look at a passport that’s brought to them?

I’m not saying they’d “dig into their files based on the word of someone”.

Here’s what I am saying: ICE runs the fingerprints of everyone they arrest, and the system will show a match for anyone who went through the legal immigration process.

Must be a great system if it never makes mistakes and the operators always believe it.

And once they do, as long as you didn’t make a typo on a form, or accidentally make a misstatement to an officer, or the president decides people from your country aren’t welcome here anymore, you’ll be free to go!

> Of course they do. They’ve even deported citizens.

Wow didn't know about this.

edit:

https://www.aclu.org/blog/speakeasy/yes-us-wrongfully-deport...

Ok found what you are talking about. This is from 2008 but i assume its still happening.

But why weren't people who are supposedly watching this quite before trump. It really boggles my mind.

when you endow an agency with the ability and belief that it can completely and totally disregard due process, all sorts of horrible things happen.

It helps that being in the country illegally is merely a civil infraction, meaning it doesn’t have the same standard of guilt that an actual crime does. No “beyond a reasonable doubt” here!

> But why weren't people who are supposedly watching this quite before trump. It really boggles my mind

Because Trump is upping the level of cruelty and rhetoric.

Lots of people were fighting this long before Trump. With things like his ridiculous “travel ban” and now his policy of separately imprisoning children, Trump is drawing attention from less involved people too.

Uh... see here: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-ice-201804...

> Why? ICE doesn’t deport legal immigrants.

They have detained citizens. What the hell makes you think they give 2 shits if someone is here legally or not?