It's been almost 8 years now since the Microsoft acquisition, should it still be seen as an independent culture ?

GitHub is owned by Microsoft which covers most of what GP is alluding to…

Microsoft is currently a target of BDS, which calls it "perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza." This isn't about some hobbyist's wonky code. https://bdsmovement.net/microsoft

Yeah, that was bizarre to read. I thought “wait, Sean works for Palantir?!”

I believe what you are running up against is a tendency to externalize shame as anger.

Part of the tradeoff the parent comment references is a lack of thinking about the moral ramifications. Thus, when you mention your position which is grounded in that tradeoff's opposite, the reaction is not surprising. They are largely incompatible. Because your position hinges on a moral component, you are thus passing a moral judgement on others. This is often met with scorn, most especially because people have an aversion to shame, and it doesn't help if it's on the behalf of someone essentially randomly declaring they are morally better than you anytime the topic of their employment comes up.

So really, I'm not sure why you would be surprised, though I sympathize with your general sentiments, in a way you should know better. Surely you are aware of the aversion to shame writ large. That seems a logical predicate of your own conceptualization of your position.

Your comment really resonates with me, I’m in a similar position though much more junior. My colleagues in tech can’t fathom that I actively choose to stay where I am and make 50% of their salary.

I’ve found talking about ethics and moral responsibility with people working in big tech is futile and frustrating. Almost everyone takes it as a personal attack though I never hold anyone else to my moral standards.

I think the heart of the problem is that we’ve somehow conflated the highest paying Eng jobs with being the most prestigious.

People feel like if they want to climb the prestige ladder, they need some way of justifying the business practices of the megacorps.

In contrast, I feel like it’s well established that gigs in big law or finance or medicine have found a way to decorrelate pay from social status. You can make a choice between chasing money OR prestige.

For what it's worth, I personally have a lot of respect for people who do this (or at the very least, people who forego higher salaries to avoid working for companies they find morally objectionable).

its because it hurts peoples feelings to confront the truth

I don't think he's morally bankrupt. I am disagreeing with his attempt to handwave away a moral analysis of these organizations as 'cynicism'. I think these analyses are really important.

I don't live in the US. But if I did, and I was capable enough to be a successful software engineer, I would try to work for an organisation that was not implicated in abhorrent behaviour. If I was to work for one, I would not attempt to dismiss criticisms of it as cynicism.

Were individual Germans responsible for the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime? If they weren't there because they were resisting, then I say yes. And if we go on living our lives without resisting the current government -- especially if you work at Google, with your leader bowing down to Trump and doing his bidding -- then, yes, you are morally culpable. Most people are shitty, so it's not surprising so many are still going along with it. The engines of commerce are still going. The ports are not blockaded and the government buildings are not being burned. We aren't marching on Washington and liberating the buildings. We are culpable.

Democratic voters are culpable; their politicians are all about keeping the system going but tweaking it. No, the system is bad. A system that results in trump being elected a second time is prima facie evil and must be torn down. If you have power and aren't working to treat down this system, you are culpable.

> Framing an agreement between companies to not poach each others top talent as a means to “crush their employees” is very discrediting.

How exactly would you frame major corporations colluding to suppress wages?

> What military action is GitHub involved with.

GitHub has been part of Microsoft for the better part of a decade now, and Microsoft is pretty broadly involved with the military (across a wide swathe of countries)

Perceiving corpos as "simple profit seeking entities" is some of the most naive Milton Friedman crap. Corporations operate as an amalgamation of the desires of a group of powerful enough influencers, of which your rank and file investor is NOT making a meaningful contribution. Milton Friedman has done more harm to capitalism than Marx has done to socialism.

except they do understand it of course but choose not to accept it :)

OSS is your legacy!

If you write proprietary code, everything you do dies with that company. I certainly don't want my life's work locked away like that. Working on OSS means a better chance to put the engineering first and do something that will last.

I did my few years and Silicon Valley too, and when it came to decide between money and code, I chose the code. Haven't regretted a thing.

> Let's not make everything political.

Everything is political, though. Establishing a barrier for cynicism so it doesn’t have to tackle the tough questions is understandable but it’s not that justifiable.