I don't want to hear your political opinions at work. I want to work and make money for myself. Just because I have to be at work to make money for myself shouldn't mean I now have to listen to your views on politics. That is my view on it.

Democracy bestows upon you, certain responsibilities. Earlier, you did not have to worry about political stuff because someone else (the lord of the land, the king or an emperor by divine right) took care of the things for you. You just work the fields or smith around.

Since the concept of democracy, the rule of the people, politics is also one of the unwritten (or written) responsibility of the people. If you do not want to do it, then you are actively running from your responsibilities, which might make you a bad citizen in other people's eyes.

Fact: In ancient Athens, if you were a free citizen and you did not participate in politics, you would have been considered a non ideal / bad citizen

no ones talking about forcing you to talk about it, question is, if you wanted to talk about the ethics / poltical impact of what you are doing with coworkers, shouldn't you be allowed to?

I come to work for one reason -- to get a paycheck. If you want to talk about politics to your friends/coworkers, do it after work. If you don't like your company's ethics-- change companies.

I'm on board with this right up until the end.

I'm a security guy and have been a privacy person. My job is often to advocate for the customer over the immediate desires of my employer. There's no pretending that doesn't have a moral or ethical dimension. So, how am I supposed to do my job without trying to change-- steer, guide, develop, choose another word if you prefer-- my company's ethics?

Advocating for your customer is different than ranting about geo political conflict.

A lot of the time I agree. I don't think I've ever had a need to opine on the merits or demerits of the filibuster at work.

But "should we deploy in China, knowing we will have to hand over data on possible dissidents?" is something I've had to deal with repeatedly. I see no way of having that discussion without getting into politics.

Of course, you can rightly say that some people just sit down and write code without becoming embroiled in the great conflicts of our time. That's true.

But the struggle for diversity in tech and equality more broadly is one of the great struggles of our time, and I know of very few engineers who do not recruit, interview, or hire. Should those people just cash their paycheck, or should they take the time to discuss an issue that nearly all employers claim to take seriously?

I think you can continue with this line of reasoning to include things like compensation (especially health insurance, m/paternal leave, and sick leave policy). And nearly everybody has a stake in the compensation discussion.

So, while I get the desire to just do the work and go home, I don't think it's so easy to separate politics from work without doing grievous harm to both. Which suggests to me the obvious thing: that the real goal of these efforts is not to foster inclusiveness or provide a better working environment, but rather to prevent a dialogue about how to do just that.

What if your customer is a geopolitical entity involved in a conflict.

What if they are an entity having "politics done to them" by a geo political entity.

Every moral system I can think of would prescribe that, everything else being equal, you should attempt to change the behavior of the company you find unethical while you have at least some power over it, rather than removing yourself from a position of power to affect more ethical behavior. It strikes me as very strange to advocate that folks remove themselves from positions of power to effect moral progress.

How much power do you think an employee has at a global company - especially one that is now owned by Microsoft?

GitLab ≠ GitHub.

Look at Google and Maven. Individually, not that much. Collectively? More than you think.

So nobody should ever advocate for the fictional person to whom their work is assigned, whose existence is granted by the society at large only because of the theory that its existence improves and betters that society, should be a better citizen of that society?

That's not super dystopic and antisocial at all.

That has worked great at countless workplaces /s

Is this an opinion strictly about politics? Or does it apply to other topics? Sports? Art? Entertainment?

Sometimes others look for more than just a paycheque at work.

If you come to my desk while I am working and start ranting about you don’t believe how bad your sports team is, I don’t care about that either.

I have friends. I even have made friends at work (very cautiously). But we shoot the shit after work.

> If you don't like your company's ethics-- change companies

Why is that the only recourse? Attempting to change your company's mind is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. You may find that you're unable, and then would prefer to quit, but quitting in protest should always be the option of last resort.

I would go as far to say: aren't you morally obligated to? There are jobs that are inherently in political/philosophical/moral bounds. And they should be treated as such.

I didn't say anything about forcing me to talk about it, I said I shouldn't have to listen to it.

If it's important to you, you should be willing to pay for it yourself instead of insisting someone else pay for it.

Whatever activities you're doing on company time are paid for by the company.

If you're yakking about politics, it is impacting the time of coworkers around you. It's distracting and unnecessary.

Do it at lunch or on a break. During work, nope.

The health of democracy requires that individuals be able to speak their mind and advocate their beliefs.

This doesn't work if their livelihood is controlled by a group of hyper-intolerant political totalitarians.

What GitHub is doing is giving individuals rooms to breathe, think, and live. It's preventing the rule of the intolerant minority, the forced homogenization of thought and suppression of dissent. We banned these things from the government long ago; this is a good step towards reducing the power of non-governmental power centers in corporations to coerce speech and thought of people around them.

As a free-thinking person this would make me much more likely to want to work for GH. At a place like Google I know I'd have to be deeply closeted as others flagrantly denigrate my identity and ideas around me. Here at least everyone can be closeted together, and live in a pluralistic way with different beliefs alongside each other.

This is how we suppress constant political conflict. You just aren't allowed to go after people for who they are or what they believe; we accept differences. And reducing political speech at work helps with that.

At my place of work, when I brought up my opinions on diversity/inclusion/gender neutral speech, I was verbally bullied, and resent this still, after 3 years of working there. Talking politics at work is not democracy, because people with dissenting opinions get silenced by belligerent activists. I applaud gitlab for refusing to be arbiter of morals

>It's preventing the rule of the intolerant minority...

If a majority want to discuss politics and political change, isn't this just an intolerant majority enforcing their politics on everyone?

Unless someone is the type of person who would never advocate for any change no matter what happened to them, from being made King to being made a slave, then they aren't actually apolitical. Everyone who doesn't want to discuss politics or thinks they aren't political are just saying that the current political status quo fits their views.

Politics isn't an atomic unit. It's perfectly normal - and arguably the default state - to be apolitical on many if not most issues.

The default state is still a state, its not a null option. You wouldn't be apolitical if the current politics said your parents had to be executed when they hit 50 and your children had to be turned over to the state so they could best determine their use, would you?

That's a hyperbolic statement, but the intent is to show that being "apolitical" about current politics has no distinction between agreeing with the current politics. If you start telling people they can't discuss their politics because "we want to be uninvolved in politics" what you are really saying is, "My politics are in charge and the status quo. Your opinion needs to be silenced"

Your hyperbolical example notwithstanding, I disagree. Being apolitical isn't about promoting status quo, it's about being indifferent to the status quo and the whole space of adjacent options.

If I'm apolitical about issue X, it doesn't mean I'm a happy supporter of current state of X. It means I don't care whether it stays the way it is, or changes to any of the possible alternative states that are within the Overton window around X.

To use a clarifying analogy: if there's a C++ project in the company, and somebody asks me for the opinion about whether to rewrite it in Java, and I say "I don't care, I'm indifferent about this issue", it doesn't mean I support the project staying as is. It means literally what I said - go ahead and rewrite it in Java, or Python, or COBOL. Whatever, I just don't care. This is what being apolitical about an issue means.

And back to politics - I have a right to care or not care about whatever I please. You can try to convince me to care about some thing you care about, but you have no right to force me to care, and trying to do it makes me only want to oppose you out of spite. The "apolitical means just supporting status quo" meme is essentially a manipulative attempt at forcing people to care about something they don't, a rehash of the old "if you're not with us, you're against us".

>If I'm apolitical about issue X, it doesn't mean I'm a happy supporter of current state of X. It means I don't care whether it stays the way it is, or changes to any of the possible alternative states that are within the Overton window around X.

You don't have to be a happy supporter. You can be an extremely unhappy supporter if you still think the status quo is better than other options.

Saying "I don't care", is just an opinion and doesn't affect anyone. Saying "I don't care, so nobody else is allowed to talk about the subject" is implying that your world view and opinions supercede others. If you were in a group that agreed on a mechanism for deciding what could be talked about, then it would make sense for everyone in that group to follow the decision. That's not whats happening though. The people who are okay with the status quo are telling the unhappy people to be quiet, because it makes the currently okay people feel uncomfortable.

Why would anyone who disagrees with the status quo stop talking about it solely because other people didn't like it?

The situation is different. People who are apolitical on a topic tend to stay away from discussions on the topic, but do not actively prevent others from having those discussions. Except some of those who are into politics like to have this discussion everywhere, all the time. At work, at school, at church, at the bar, everywhere. Left unchecked, this makes loudest, most emotional people infect every aspect of everyone's lives with discussion on their pet topic. That's why apolitical people fight to have "safe spaces" like the workplace, where everyone is actually supposed to be working, and not constantly getting derailed into politics by someone with an axe to grind.

You have the picture of the battleground completely wrong on this. It's not apolitical people shutting down oppressed minorities. It's a minority of people with an opinion on a topic fighting it out with a different minority with a different opinion on the subject, and both sides try to recruit followers to their side from the larger population of people indifferent to the issue, using the "if you're not with us you're against us" argument. Whereas what the larger population wants to say to both groups is, "fight it out among yourself and leave as alone, and for the love of everything that's holy, mind the collateral damage".

(See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21276788 for another take on how a political side feels to both those who disagree with it and those who just want to be left alone.)

> The health of democracy requires that individuals be able to speak their mind and advocate their beliefs.

Exactly.

> This doesn't work if their livelihood is controlled by a group of hyper-intolerant political totalitarians.

Exactly. Hence why we need to acknowledge the right to speak your mind.

> a place like Google I know I'd have to be deeply closeted as others flagrantly denigrate my identity and ideas around me.

The Google case is interesting. Maven was pretty equivalent to a peaceful demonstration. Management had one opinion, (many) employees had ethical objections and eventually got their way.

Damore's case was.. messier, and more relevant to your point. Then again, this policy would just subject everyone to the same thing, while sacrifing the previous benefits. And it's all ultimately enforced by humans anyway, so if anything I'd expect it to lead to further polarization.

> Here at least everyone can be closeted together, and live in a pluralistic way with different beliefs alongside each other.

Many decisions don't have a neutral option. This policy just means that you won't have any say once those crossroads become relevant.

Not sure if/what Github is doing, but I think you meant Gitlab.

How is it a useful democratic exercise to inundate non political employees, or employees who don’t share the majority’s moral political views?

The types of moral politics I am thinking about is discussing the tweet-du-jour, basically celebrity gossip about politicians, etc. Worse still would be people taking strong, loud and uninformed positions on foreign policy, like Syria. I actually happen to find that triggering, given my background. I would rather that people keep their opinions outside of my cubicle so that I can focus on producing the best work I can - instead of constantly being reminded of the shithole I left behind.

What you do matters. The people on the ground turning Syria into the shithole you consider it to be were probably also "just focusing on producing the best work they could". Apparently they did a pretty good job.

Will someone talking about Syria at Gitlab have any meaningful affect?

Syria was an example, in practice it depends the relevant questions will depend on your company.

For example: I work at a MedTech company. I consider it supremely important that I (and everyone else) am able to say no, I am not going to work on feature X because it would breach patient privacy, or feature Y that is impossible to do without unacceptable risks of causing malpractice.

Of course, whoever proposed those projects would then be free to make a convincing case for how we could mitigate those problems, or why I might be wrong.

That’s not discussing politics - that’s keeping your company in compliance and keeping them from getting sued. That is work related.

I would go so far as advocating not manufacturing in China because of the current political climate is work related because it can have a direct impact on the bottom line.

Being work-related is orthogonal to if it is political, or the benefit it'd bring to your employer.

I'd be making the same objections if I didn't have GDPR and Patientdatalagen to point to. Hell, I'd have been in favour of introducing those laws, even knowing that it would increase our costs (which I also care about, just not to the same degree).

The purpose of going to work is to get a paycheck and to either make your company money or save your company money. Doing what’s best for your customer is a long term investment in your company.

Democracy is fine. So is your freedom to choose a different job where you can discuss and do what you want.

The fact that other companies exist without this policy means there is no "power structure" other than a private company deciding what's best for its own culture.

Since when are businesses responsible for the health of democracy?

Have most business in American history been hotbeds of political discussion and activity? Have we previously attributed the relative health of American democracy to this characteristic of American businesses?

Probably since at least Citizens United and social media provided a medium for spreading targeted propaganda.

Democracy is fine.

The health of my family is more important than your politics.

The health of politics has a massive impact on the health of your family.

Every lunchtime my colleagues and me solve world problems. We talk about how stupid the current leaders are, and how easy it is to fix the problems in the world. We solved world hunger a few times, and also transportation issues and other things.

Then we say "Another world problem solved!" and go back to work.

What exactly is the "health of politics"? And what does some discussion in the workplace where you're paid for productivity have to do with it?

The health of the democracy is independent of discussing politics in the workplace. There are plenty of other opportunities to discuss politics and otherwise tend to the democracy.