I might be wrong, but this update is addressing a real problem that company is facing. This is not some hypothetical, slippery slope kinda thing.
For instance, in Belarus right now a lot of engineers seek to get out the country due to dictatorship regime. Poland and neighbourhood countries offer emergency visa plans for people in trouble (business harbour visa).
I think what happened is that GitLab started receiving a lot of emergency requests to be relocated immediately that did not comply the existing policy. Hence the update.
> For instance, in Belarus right now a lot of engineers seek to get out the country due to dictatorship regime. Poland and neighbourhood countries offer emergency visa plans for people in trouble (business harbour visa).
Would this apply to a typical Belarusian engineer in Belarus, though? They'd be White, European, and (correct me if I'm wrong) violence there seems mainly directed at protesters and protest leaders. It seems to me like this tailored for the kinds of racial and sexual minorities the US likes to obsess about.
> Tenure of less than 1 year at GitLab may be possibly waived as a requirement if:
The racial classification found in this document seems surreal for me (I'm from SW Europe). Seen from here, the US racial categories often seem absurd.
Speaking as a citizen of the french colonial empire which has pretended since at least WWII that being blind to race would erase racism, it definitely has not. Moreover, ignoring racial issues only reinforces racism by making it harder to denounce.
Under Sarkozy's very authoritarian and racist presidency (though in retrospect Hollande and Macron have pushed those same tendencies even further), there were public debates on national television about removing racial equality from human rights declaration (or was it constitution?) because "race does not exist so mentioning it is reinforcing racism".
Putting problems under the carpet does not make them go away. It's important that race does not become the central factor in explaining things (because there's many other factors) because that would be an essentialist reduction that reinforces racism... there needs to be place for class, gender, ability and other components in social studies.
EDIT: It's common here in France to hear someone say "How can you talk about racism when there's no such thing as human races! It's scientifically proven, so your claims of racism are ridiculous!"
> Speaking as a citizen of the french colonial empire which has pretended since at least WWII that being blind to race would erase racism, it definitely has not. Moreover, ignoring racial issues only reinforces racism by making it harder to denounce.
I think this is probably one of those cases where there's a spectrum, and the extremes are both bad. It's bad to be race-blind at a policy level, since that prevents dealing with unjust race-based disparities. However, it is also bad to encourage people to be hyper-aware of race and racial categories; because that perpetuates those categories, gets in the way of forming natural connections between members of different races, and even can fuel a more explicit discriminatory racism in some people. IMHO US cultural trends are pushing for the latter bad situation (amongst other more positive reevaluations), and those trends are being exported.
It's probably not practical, but I've thought that the most effective way to ultimately solve racism would be to setup schools such that it would be difficult to impossible to have an opposite-sex romantic relationship with a classmate that was not in some respect interracial. In the short term the amount of contact that would force would blunt stereotypes, and in the medium/long term is it would hopefully lead to muddling the racial categories until they're meaningless in a contemporary context.
I should also make it clear that despite having an official policy of "no racial hierarchies" and convincing inhabitants of the colonial world (who were NOT "citizens" of the french Republic, but "Indigènes" and were governed by a different civil/criminal law called "Indegenous Code") to fight against nazism during WWII for freedom and equality for all and against racial hierarchies (that the French colonial empire had themselves setup and supported), and despite many such people being sent a cheap blood on the frontlines instead of white soldiers, the French republic has of course not recognized their sacrifice.
For example, historical celebrations and references to the resistance movement often credit American intervention for the liberation of France, which for sure played a part, but downplays the millions of indigènes involved in the armed insurrection, as well as the Spanish antifascist bridages who have been erased from history despite liberating most of Paris 24h before the Americans even set foot in it.
On the other hand, colonial and racial oppression throughout the french colonized territories has not ceased after WWII. In some cases, it dramatically increased at least compared to the past decades, with the horrors of the "war" (read: genocide) in Algeria and Indochine for example. In fact, that France promised freedom and equality for all in the struggle against nazism while not holding such promise at all is precisely one of the major fire-starters for the anti-colonial independence movements of the 50-60s.
If you'd like a fictional take on what the French occupation in Algeria looked like, the Battle of Algiers is a good introduction. The movie was banned until the 90s in France because it revealed the horrors of colonization, while even today the government and national education insist that colonization was a disinterested act of kindness to help civilize lesser people... which is of course completely false as Africa and Asia had great civilizations long before Rome was born. The writings of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who worked in Algeria (and took part in the armed struggle against colonization), open a lot of perspective on practical details of everyday occupation and resistance.
> "this guy here thinks races exist and that some are somehow better/worse"
This only covers conscious and deliberate racial discrimination, but does not cover cultural racism and other aspects of racism which are broadly studied in social sciences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism#Aspects
TLDR: works against white supremacists and nazis, doesn't work against everyday racism we've all been forcefed (through media and schools) since childhood.
Hailing from a country whose entire idea of Sub-Saharan Africa comes from a single work of fiction from the XIXth century and which has been nevertheless seeing a gradual, but visible shift in perspective in recent years(basically the colonial attitude is finally dying), I don't agree.
I think it's still possible to fight racism without resorting to putting people into these tight cubbyholes.
Especially given that people with parents from different backgrounds defy such classification.
Then again my country doesn't have much of a colonial past - we weren't even an independent state back then, so perhaps there are details that are specific to former empires, which elude me.
I think that the "tight cubbyholes" is a bit of a strawman (in general, not that you're using it as such. Its absolutely how these ideas are often presented in the mainstream).
I know a lot of feminist/anti-racist/queer activists. None of them are trying to put people into tight cubbyholes. They are actually all pushing for greater awareness of how people don't fit into these cubbyholes. The whole idea of intersectionality* (which is foundational in modern "woke" politics) is based on this.
The tight cubbyholes aspect is often either a strawman presented by people who are against making changes (at the softest end, or actively hateful at the hardest).
Or is something that the powers that be (managers, politicians, whatever) insist on when they implement any changes. Often these are either against what activists are calling for or a begrudged concession to bureaucracy and data collection.
The data analysis aspect is unfortunately important. In an ideal world it wouldn't be, but thats not where we are. It doesn't just highlight outright bigotry, but inadvertant discrimination (eg only holding interviews at times which inadvertantly don't work for people (often women) with child care responsibilities), or even problems beyond an organisation (eg the pipeline issue).
*Intersectionality is about recognising all the different aspects of a person's identity and the different ways that they priviledge/disadvantage them in different circumstances. It was explicitly developed by black women who were being let down by both black support systems which all targeted at black men, and women's support networks which targeted white women. They recognised that just adding a "black women" box only addressed the immediate issue so built a framework to analyse the Intersection of identities more generally.
> The racial classification found in this document seems surreal for me (I'm from SW Europe). Seen from here, the US racial categories often seem absurd.
They are absurd. Hispanic is not a racial category, it's an ethnic category, like being German or German-American.
Yes. And putting Arabs and European whites in the same basket seems ridiculous, as there is anti-arab racism among white people (in the US) and, probably, the reverse is somewhat true too in some cases (there is a large diversity of situations among Arabs, it is not the same a poor Algerian immigrant and a rich Arabian prince). In any case, when you start using rigid classifications, you make the problem worse. Racism is there, but it is subtle and harsh at the same time.
First off, there's hardly anyone other than europeans in East European countries. And I don't see why Gitlab engineers wouldn't be involved in the protests. They're probably well-educated and therefore statistically more likely to care about the political situation.
If caring about the political situation translated into action then the US would have no issues at all. Engineers are very much less likely to take part of protests anywhere because they're busy and think they're well off.
yeah.... a good friend of mine (dual citizen) who manages a large engineering team there for US startup was picked up randomly not at the protest shortly after they started, thrown in jail, denied access to consular services, his very good lawyers got his jail term taken down from 15 days to 12 days despite the guys who picked him up not showing for the hearing or testifying that he was in fact not at the protest when they picked him up. a couple weeks after they started rubber stamping everyone picked up for protests with 2 years regardless of actual involvement. this isn't even including the extreme random violence some people are subjected to and horrible general conditions. fuck everything about this attitude - belarus is just around the corner from civil war it's not cool at all.
In Belarus we’ve had employees arrested for literally being outside at the wrong time, even if it’s just to look at what’s going on from the front of their building. Things have calmed down somewhat since then, but they’ve also put in border controls so people can’t leave the country. You literally need to get smuggled over the border. Thankfully I hear that is not too difficult. The visa situation once you get to wherever you go isn’t awesome tho, since you’re still at the mercy of a large bureaucracy.
Belarus is currently considered one of the least safe places in Europe to be LGBTQ+. I'm not sure if they enacted the Russian-style "anti gay propaganda" law they spitballed a few years ago, but even without it, it's safe to say LGBTQ+ people in Belarus are "being mistreated".
In my experience tech workers in Eastern Europe are not significantly more progressive than other residents, but if Gitlab's company culture is at least somewhat progressive, it's likely that it attracts people in those countries who tend towards the progressive end of their respective countries' political spectrum. Given that Belarus has a very low bar for what the government considers a "political activist", it's reasonable to assume that some of these people might find themselves in trouble without having to go as far as donning black masks and tossing rocks at police officers.
It's also worth keeping in mind that software development is one of the professions easiest to get into as a marginalized person because you can teach yourself enough to get started and especially when freelancing it's possible to work without ever meeting the other person face-to-face. You'd be surprised how many programmers are queer, disabled or neurodivergent.
> For instance, in Belarus right now a lot of engineers seek to get out the country due to dictatorship regime.
It’s funny cause I heard the same in 2014 in Ukraine. Why exactly is it funny? Because it seemed like a made-up problem. Engineers weren’t hunted down. Instead, they were driving new cars from their new homes to their new offices while drinking artisan coffee. But for some reason they wanted to be a victim. I guess goes in the same bucket as “I’ll leave the US if Trump gets elected!”
I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, as engineers are often very privileged positions in society and the people who suffer the most from dictatorship and civil wars are definitely not engineers, because any regime needs the engineers to collaborate with the powers that be and so treats them rather well (compared to the global population).
However, likening Trump's election with the civil war in Ukraine or dictatorship in Belarus is definitely disconnected from reality. Under Trump like before, and as in most pretend-democracies of the global north, cops have been a force of occupation of popular districts and have murdered a certain number of citizens. But in Ukraine, we're talking about an actual civil war with barricades in the city centers, with militias fighting off each other with kalashnikovs. In Belarus, we're talking about state police and intelligence services physically torturing activists to force confessions (whether true or not, who knows?).
Once again, i'm not saying such things don't exist in the global north or are perfect around here... Far from it. The power structures are very similar, but the level of repression is considerably higher. The dangers we face here are no match for what happens in BUR (Belarus-Ukraine-Russia).
What happened in Ukraine in mid-2014 was not a civil war at all. One side poorly pretended to be a militia, while the other side were regular military forces of Ukraine. It's not a civil war when one country attacks another country.
You had civil militias fighting on both sides, although both regular Ukrainian and Russian armies were involved. Of course, the Russian army always claimed it was not involved but that is another topic.
I agree there's a non-negligible dimension of foreign military invasion in the ukrainian conflict, but it's not exactly as clearcut as that. Now is a good time to mention i'm neither ukrainian nor an expert on the topic; this analysis is based on my readings and first-hand accounts from ukrainian refugees.
I get your point. But this is exactly what Russian information sources are trying to make everyone believe (that "it's not exactly as clearcut as that", almost a literal translation of the phrase they like to repeat so much). I can presume that your information sources got most of their information from Russia-influenced media, and this pretty much expected if they were in the East at the time everything started. But the truth is that, once you peel back the informational disguise, it actually is very clear-cut.
I have first-hand accounts from ukrainian refugees/comrades telling me about how it was on the streets, and how the far-right movement in Ukraine was strongly divided between those siding for Ukraine as part of a nationalist stance, and those siding for Russia because it was seen as the strong authoritarian hand they wanted.
They have even explained in length how Ukraine's government has since the civil war incorporated Azov and other nazi militias into a kind of national guard / para-military organization which now greatly threatens social/political activities on the streets.
That sounds plausible to me, unless of course these acquaintances have lied to me about their actual experiences of a civil war, but i somehow trust them more than imperialist media whether from EU side or Russia side. Disclaimer: these acquaintances of mine were on the pro-Ukraine/EU side, some of them fought as part of civil militias before becoming refugees.
A prolonged conflict is only clear-cut if you’re pushing a narrative. https://youtu.be/4pfYeDAKiyA
It’s obvious that the majority of DNR and LNR military are locals. We can speculate all we want how they joined the forces, but it is what it is.
It’s the most peculiar war ever, though. Imagine being at war with someone and importing electricity from your foe [1]. Either there’s no war or someone is demented.
I've sometimes heard the expression "non-linear war", although i haven't dug into that concept much. On a sidenote of specifically Russian government propaganda, Adam Curtis had a short video called "Oh Dearism 2" which briefly touches on Vladislav Surkov's approach to public relations.
Also worth pointing out, being at war with someone you are materially dependent on is the essence of most (all?) colonial wars. The colonizing powers depend on the colonies' resources, and further arrange to destroy local material autonomy so the colonies depend on colonial supplies (whether for electricity, operating fuel extraction sites, food, etc). This dependence on the colonizers, created by the colonizers themselves, is part of the reason why colonizing nations get away with neocolonial settings despite formal independence (see for example Françafrique or Franc CFA on wikipedia or your encyclopedia of choice).
I can't imagine I would ever actually use this type of support, but knowing it is there increases the odds that I would apply for a job at Gitlab. It makes me admire the company's culture more than probably any other benefit I have seen offered in my time in tech.
This is an operational policy document - they’re making specific guarantees to their employees about how they will support them. That’s a lot stronger than claiming to uphold some set of values because it means that they’re willing to risk losing the trust of their employees if they don’t stick to this.
Mistreatment is how pay is adjusted to location assuring poor areas stay poor even though the developer is performing the same task any others in higher paying regions. If cost of living is really a factor why does their product cost the same globally?
I wouldn't say that is mistreatment. It is a business transaction where one party has more leverage than the other. 99% of the time the employee in the lower income region gets a far high salary than they expect to get at another employer. So it is not like they are being coerced into a "unable to make ends meet" levels of income.
Realistically, the upper limit of a salary is usually determined by the average value the employee will bring to the company because profit is derived from surplus value. This value may range from very direct (number of product produced per unit of time) or very indirect (making the rest of the team happy to increase their overall productivity and reduce employee turnover).
The lower limit is generally whatever the company can get away with. This has legal factors (e.g. minimum wage laws) as well as regional (e.g. "market rate", unemployment rates) but ultimately the candidate has to make the call what they can (or have no other choice but to) accept.
Crucially, the surplus value only hinges on the value generated and the expenses of employing that person (mostly salary and benefits but cross-state and internationally there may be legal costs avoidable by hiring locally).
If you live in an area with a low cost of living and the company's upper limit is defined by the relative cost of living, they're going to extract a lot more surplus value from your labor than if you live in an area with a high cost of living but maintain the same personal cost of living because you manage to be extraordinarily frugal.
That you make a lot of money relative to your local peers does not mean the company isn't disproportionately extracting surplus value from you (or in other words: paying you in lower proportion to the value you generate than others). If everyone else in your neighborhood is paid a penny and you earn a dime that does not mean I'm not exploiting you when I pay the locals a dollar for the same generated value.
That GitLab only varies pay and not the cost of their software and services demonstrates that they understand this. The value their services provide depends entirely on the customer's market (which is btw why a lot of initial SaaS pricing is based on US startup culture where company expenses are measured as burn rates rather than profitability, even if it makes the services cost prohibitive in other markets).
Also of course geographically distributed employees will find it harder to unionize (even more so formally because of different jurisdictions and labor laws) or organize and are less likely to seriously develop solidarity in a way that could get in the way of making a profit.
There are arguments for the destructive impact of foreign companies paying above market rate but it's absurd to think companies that use geographical salary ranges do so out of concern for regional competitors.
Sure, and I'm talking about how much a company is willing to pay. A company acting economically is not going to pay more for a developer than the value they will provide, or else hiring them will lose them money.
Note that as I said, value can be much less straightforward to calculate. An employee may provide no direct value but have a positive effect on the other employees, increasing their value generation. Or an employee may provide excellent value but drive down everyone else's productivity (e.g. by making them unhappy or constantly demanding attention) thus reducing overall value. Or an employee may initially provide low value but have massive potential.
Additionally the problem with hiring is that the candidate has yet to generate any value at all for the company and even if they do have massive potential there is no guarantee that the company can tap into that potential fully. So we're not even talking value (as when considering a pay rise) but expected value.
The cost of labor is caused by paying employees wages/expenses/benefits and having administrative and legal overhead for doing that. The wages and benefits are to a degree subject to demand and, to an even lesser degree, supply.
What a candidate is willing to accept on the other hand depends on what they think they could get elsewhere, how much they want to work for the company in question in particular, what their personal expenses are and how badly they need money.
Companies generate profit by extracting surplus value by simply paying employees less than the value they generate (companies don't produce value, labor does, profit is surplus value left in the company by paying labor less than the value it generates, adjusted for the cost of doing business).
Geographical salaries work by placing the company in one location (usually with a relatively high cost of living) and hiring employees in various other locations (usually with a relatively lower cost of living).
If you can get people from poorer countries producing the same amount of value for your company as people from your richer country, and you can use geographical salaries to justify paying them less, you increase your profit margin on that labor simply by replacing a highly paid local position with a less highly paid remote position.
In the 90s we used to call this "outsourcing" except we did it with entire teams of people rather than individuals (to mixed success because it hinged on the team lead not only understanding you correctly but also propagating the information correctly and also usually reduced overall visibility outside the team). It was widely understood as the blatant cost-cutting measure it was.
Calling it "geographical salaries" and doing it at a finer resolution doesn't change its nature.
And yeah, you won't get a fairer share of your value just by asking for it individually. You'll just get fired and replaced by someone who's happy with what they're offered. This is what you need collective bargaining for -- except that's much harder to organize or even decide on when you're geographically distributed and mostly using company controlled channels for communication.
I like this idea but I wonder whether the company has considered how many people would qualify, or if they just don’t employ enough people for it to be an actual slippery slope for them.
All women in America, for starters, per their definition. Not that qualified Americans have any problem moving to Europe. But maybe Arabs in Israel, Copts in Egypt, Russians in Ukraine, Zoroastrians in Iran, lots and lots of ethnicities in China, atheists in most countries…
Nice to know their training materials are free from bias though!
I don‘t know if the slippery slope goes far enough to be a problem. Effectively, if you‘re in a position to work at GitLab, the netherlands are happy to have you. They could relocate the entire company there and it might not be a problem.
Slippery slope towards what exactly? What problems do you foresee? Do you foresee that all women in america, per your example, would:
1. Start working for GitLab
2. Want to move to the Netherlands?
If they employ enough people, the slippery slope is that every employee who wants to live in NL has a claim on help to do so, and so the company is no longer geo-neutral but ends up, like so many other companies, having the “talent” in a rich country and all the “fungibles” elsewhere.
But as others have pointed out, in real life NL would probably be happy to have up to 100% of their actual employees immigrate so it may be just well-intentioned virtue signaling.
It’s already easy to move to the EU even without GitLab. You can get a jobseeker visa for Germany which allows you to search for employment for 6 months. I don’t think everyone will just suddenly rush to the Netherlands.
Considering the big disclaimer "you still need to qualify to immigrate to the Netherland under the visa process", what do they have to lose? All they are doing is saying they will support anyone who wants to make the move.
Yeah, I read that, but it still wasn't clear to me.
>Underrepresented Group This can be defined as a group whose percentage of the population in a given group is lower than their percentage of the population of country, community, organization or otherwise.
I don't know what the "given group" is here. Is it Gitlab employees? Gitlab software engineers? Software engineers in the US? Software engineers in the Netherlands? Software engineers in the world?
I also don't know what larger population they're referring to. The cities with Gitlab employees? The US? The Netherlands? Countries with Gitlab employees? The world? Gitlab employees?
For some pairs of values atheist is likely underrepresented, but for most pairs I think atheist wouldn't be underrepresented.
I don't think their culture aligns with the definitions written in the definitions section:
Women is [a] gender term based on self-identification.
but then immediately after when defining Privilege we get
On average women were paid $0.78 for every $1 a man makes.
Pretty likely that what they mean here is female and male rather than man and woman - the person writing this is probably not that used to talking about women and females differently.
Pretty likely trans women make less than cis women.[1] Pretty unlikely the source data gendered trans people consistently. And pretty likely rounding affected the number more. Under 1% of people are trans.
> Underrepresented Group This can be defined as a group whose percentage of the population in a given group is lower than their percentage of the population of country, community, organization or otherwise.
So basically they dictate policy based on population representation instead of what's actually coming through education. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Could you clarify what you mean by “coming through education”?
I would’ve thought that population representation is the definition of underrepresented because it shows they are underrepresented in the population.
But I am interested if there is another way to measure this.
Does that mean less qualified woman get jobs that based on merit alone rightfully are deserved by men?
What about Asians? They're over represented in engineering roles, should we stop hiring them and hire more white males to "even it out"? Or is it because they're a minority it's ok to have over representation? Do you realise that makes white people under represented? Do you just not care because they have privilege and this evens it out?
Don't get me wrong, I love seeing woman in tech, I'm aware of the history of toxic behavior that prevents them from joining and pushed them out in the 70s and I do encourage initiatives to improve their representation but I draw the line at negative discrimination, that Marxist crap does nobody any good ever.
> Gitlab created the goal of 50% of all senior leadership should be women by December 2021 to address the imbalance within this underrepresented group.
I wouldn't be too thrilled having my career advancement sacrificed in the pursuit of 50/50 men/woman representation.
> It could equally have been a fear that if more than 50% of women are qualified for the job some will have to be excluded.
It could not equally have been that.
Tech executives are vastly more male than female, and Gitlab specifically is trying to increase the ratio of women to men.
That means if Gitlab considers a group of similarly qualified men and women for an upcoming opening in "senior leadership" (whatever that means), a woman is guaranteed to get the job.
The only reason this would be unfair is if you pre-suppose that, more than 50% of the time, the "most qualified" person is a man.
I’ve seen this 50/50 split used based on ideology alone. Color me naïve, but shouldn’t the board have the same proportions as the population of people who want to work at GitLab? All this is running on assumptions, would be interesting to see some data.
> I’ve seen this 50/50 split used based on ideology alone
The ratio is not based on ideology, it's based on the ratio of humans.
The "ideology" that makes them care about that ratio is the belief that someone's gender is not a determining factor in their qualification for senior leadership at GitLab.
If you also consider the number of adult men who are in prison or don't have an advanced education, you would actually expect to see more than 50% women to be representative of the general eligible population.
> shouldn’t the board have the same proportions as the population of people who want to work at GitLab?
No. "Want to work at GitLab" is also going to encode undesirable traits, such as "perceives GitLab to be a bad place for women to work".
If you know the company is mostly men at the top, you might assume women have a hard time getting promoted -- regardless of the reasons. That means you might not want to work at GitLab as much as an equally qualified man.
For the candidate: that's fine! No problem, there are lots of other places to work.
For GitLab: it's something they have decided is not desirable, and their quota system is how they are attempting to fix it.
What you're proposing would just be a vicious cycle that would reinforce what GitLab sees as a problem.
> If you know the company is mostly men at the top, you might assume women have a hard time getting promoted -- regardless of the reasons. That means you might not want to work at GitLab as much as an equally qualified man.
I don't agree. The tech industry is predominantly male and everybody knows it. Anybody who's ever been to a computer science class knows why- more men are interested.
If you assume that male and female employees have a similar distribution in merit, than you'd expect the top of the company to have a similar percentage to that of women interested in technology in general, which is to say it would mostly be men and you'd still assume that promotions are fair.
But promotions aren't fair or strictly meritocratic, and there's often good reasons for that. For instance, if you get more women in leadership the tail can wag the dog and you can get more women interested in tech.
> Anybody who's ever been to a computer science class knows why- more men are interested.
It's also true that men are vastly more likely to be autistic, and the social challenges with autism can make someone a fantastic engineer, but not a fantastic manager.
That's not true of all autistic people, but there's certainly a correlation.
Again, GitLab is talking about senior leadership -- not people who are writing code or ever needed to have done it well. Most tech execs don't even have CS degrees, because most senior leadership positions are in organizational things (operations, management, HR, sales, etc.)
> I don't agree. The tech industry is predominantly male and everybody knows it. Anybody who's ever been to a computer science class knows why- more men are interested.
If this were true, and gender were the only variable, then we'd see stable ratios of men to women in computer science. We haven't seen that. There used to be far more women up until the 1980s.
> If you assume that male and female employees have a similar distribution in merit, than you'd expect the top of the company to have a similar percentage to that of women interested in technology in general
You're assuming many things here:
A. "interest in tech" is a stable personality trait and not influenced by opportunity
B. "senior leadership" at a tech company like GitLab is mostly technical roles
C. merit at tech companies is primarily a function of interest in technology
All of those are debatable at best, although I'd say they tend more toward the side of being obviously false once you actually write them out.
I see you have further built conclusions on-top of an incorrect assumption about my OP.
> The only reason this would be unfair is if you pre-suppose that, more than 50% of the time, the "most qualified" person is a man
I actually think discriminatory promotions is pretty unfair. Just because you think it's justified doesn't make it "fair". You can tell it is because of the term "discriminatory".
> Removing barriers to meritocracy would do just as well.
Meritocracy is not an objective, defined term, even in rote, technical jobs.
Further, people are very, very bad at hiring based on merit. There have been tons of studies showing that people tend to hire people who are like them (culturally, racially, gender, etc.)
Quotas are not harmful unless there are too few qualified people to meet the quota, resulting in a less-qualified person getting a job.
GitLab has hundreds of millions of people to choose from. They're not going to run out of qualified women.
neither is race or gender, yet these initiatives still manage to exist.
> There have been tons of studies showing..
there are tons of studies that are non reproducible too, so which studied are the strongest evidence of this claim?
> Quotas are not harmful unless there are too few qualified people
if you reduce it to a binary definition of "qualified", maybe. But if the best person for a role, their qualification, is a continuum, then you can do harm simply by hiring qualified candidates over better qualified candidates.
> GitLab has hundreds of millions of people to choose from
I appreciate the effort to smear my comment with a lazy assumption, painting me as kind of a sexist. No i haven't decided that anyone is only hired for roles because of their gender.
I just assume that in the situation where I was interviewing for a promoted role alongside an equally qualified female candidate also interviewing for that promoted role that I would have 0% chance of getting it.
Why would anyone ambitious want to put themselves in that position?
The sentence you quoted makes no such assumption. This kind of quota can either be fulfilled by hiring significantly more women, or by rejecting men and only hiring women. Since gitlab or any other company can't suddenly conjure female candidates out of thin air, it follows that they must reject men irrespective of their qualification and based purely on sex.
Here's a couple of examples from other areas:
* a university department in the EU announced that they will no longer hire males until they fulfil their quota.
* the German Green party has a rule that only women can occupy the top position at various levels.
Both of these are clear cases of sexual discrimination.
> the German Green party has a rule that only women can occupy the top position at various levels.
Uh, no.
The party is co-led by a man and a woman. The leaders of their parliamentary group is a man and a woman. The Green Party minister-president of Baden Württemberg is a man.
They do support quotas on executive boards, but that is a damn far cry from your claims of "only women can occupy the top position".
Internally in the party, they strive towards a 50/50 quota, but it's not a strict policy and the actual membership composition varies between elections.
> a university department in the EU announced that they will no longer hire males until they fulfil their quota.
Which university and which department? Also, a single department at a single university does not a widespread policy make.
I don't have enough interest in German politics to get into a deep discussion about it, but for the record I was referring to election lists and the "Mindestquotierung" where odd election list spots, including the first spot are reserved for women.
This is confirmed for example by the situation in Saarland, where a man was chosen on the first spot. In the end there was so much pressure on that person from party colleagues (including one of the co-leads that you mentioned) that they had to step back, even if they had won fair and square.
The party-internal positions are mostly irrelevant, as the male co-lead of the Greens has found out when they had to make place for the chancellorship candidacy for his equal footed colleague with no government experience.
And Kretchmann is probably one of the most successful Greens, it would be political suicide not to let him run loose :)
I don't remember which University, it was in a newspaper article. I have no idea if it's wide spread or not, the point was that the department(?) lead was comfortable not just mentioning, but advertising that practice in a newspaper, whereas the reverse would have gotten him in trouble immediately.
I think I have heard this before, Have you defended any bakeries discriminating against gay couples recently? Because it seems like the same reasoning.
Given that they've specifically said "advancement", the original poster must be referring to people which are already working for the stated company and will be skipped for promotion.
I believe they would have grounds to sue for discrimination in such a case though.
As someone who does not live in the US, that strikes me as an incredibly spoiled and American-centric perspective. You do realize that the US is not the only country with human rights issues, and that the domestic issues in the US pale in comparison to much of the world? Consider the domestic issues in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
I’m Indian, settled in Malaysia and a very strong supporter of China. Lived or been to several countries in East Asia or Oceania. Strongly leftist and socialist. So it is unlikely that I have an American perspective.
And no, I disagree that other countries pale in comparison to US on human rights abuses. To me, for example, the very existence of the 2nd amendment (at least its current interpretation) is a human rights abuse.
No these countries do not conduct terrorist activities or war crimes on foreign soil like the US does. Generally the first who come to mind are the ones who treat the whole world badly, in addition to their own people.
Oh, I see, you thought of the US as the mistreater of people in foreign countries rather than domestically? That I can agree with — someone being mistreated in their country is very unlikely to be in the US (except for a very expansive definition of mistreated) but quite likely to be in a country where the US is harming people.
Syria is in a civil war, with Russia and Iran assisting the Assad government and various other nations including the US having intervened at various points.
South Sudan's civil war ended last year.
Venezuela is not at war but is being embargoed by the US while facing an economic crisis.
I have no idea what Honduras is supposed to be doing except that it's overrun with crime.
Belarus is facing civil unrests and political upheaval.
I'm not sure what you're referring to with your claim of "several" of them being in the middle of "actual wars". The US is in the middle of several actual wars and military actions outside war in foreign territories (mostly drone strikes). The comment you responded to clearly stated:
> No these countries do not conduct terrorist activities or war crimes on foreign soil like the US does.
The US does both of these things. As do several of its allies. We just tend to not to think of these things this way because we're "the good guys". Let's not forget Guantanamo (which despite Obama's promises still exists) and that US prisons routinely use "solitary confinement" which is considered torture by the UN.
Iran? Last I checked they were trying to destabilize Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen.
Syria? Lebanon comes to mind again
Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan? All of them are involved in "foreign soil" in some way
Egypt and Turkey vis-a-vis Libya (and Cyprus)?
Serbia/Albania vis-a-vis Kosovo
Morocco (Mali, Western Sahara)?
All of them are better than the US?
Not to mention that the behavior of a country "on foreign soil" is often very different than its behavior with its own citizens. That's why this division of good/evil countries often does not make sense.
I think the point here is that US always wages wars far away from their land, so they don’t have to worry about consequences or casualties. For most other countries war is something quite different from the usual business.
For Americans part of disproportionately disenfranchised groups, this is better than asylum applications to EU/EFTA/EEA countries because with asylum you have to work a shitty job for a while to prove you can integrate. Whereas with a VC backed tech company you already have a familiar experience and comfortable relatable surroundings.
Yes, US citizens get accepted into asylum processes. No, not all countries offer transparency into their asylum process or metrics.
> asylum applications to EU/EFTA/EEA countries because with asylum you have to work a shitty job for a while to prove you can integrate
Which countries are those? While the UK was an EU member, it required that asylum applicants not work, and I believe that's not an unusual restriction.
Same in Germany, but our immigration system is pretty ridiculous in general. It's all based on the idea that refugees don't want to live in the country and only stay here until things have calmed down, and that immigrants either really are Germans in exile or only come here to work for a while and then leave. I'm not sure whether to call it xenophobic or simply naïve, but the problem echoes throughout German bureaucracy as well as many people's attitudes.
Somehow the idea that someone who flees to Germany because they lost their home and livelihood and then lives her for a decade may want to go on living here and that barring people from being productive members of society guarantees crime and illegal work. Germany learned nothing from the surprise of "guest workers" from Turkey and Italy moving to Germany to help us build cars suddenly having families and staying here forever back in the 70s.
Other way round, they want to disincentive people who want to come and live and work in Germany from applying on the grounds of seeking asylum.
Assessing an asylum application is an lengthy, arduous process, there are plenty of people who would take the chance.
So what you're saying is that if Germany were more efficient at handling asylum applications, we wouldn't need to prohibit refugees from taking jobs? I can understand not allowing asylum seekers to take a job because their application is still being processed but once they're granted refugee status, we've determined that they have some other reason for seeking asylum than trying to find a job, right?
Of course arguably the slowness and arduousness of the process is intended as a deterrence in itself, regardless of what that says about Germany's ideas about human rights and how they apply to foreigners.
No, the inability to work is still a disincentive from wrongfully claiming refugee status.
If you were able to apply for refugee status whilst working, there's literally tens of millions of people that would gladly try their luck in going to Germany. If they get kicked out, hey-ho we tried and atleast we got to briefly work and probably saved a ton (relatively speaking).
Edit: I'm in Europe now, my former domestic worker would earn her monthly salary in 2-3 days here and she was paid well relative to others in Africa.
Throw-away account, but this is good. Wish more companies did this kind of thing. I've been mistreated most of my life for my sexuality, even here in Sweden. Can't stand it much longer...
EDIT: To clarify, I'm being bullied, not oppressed by the govt. Swedes are known to not reach out and are truly the worst kind of friends that leave you on a whim if they don't relate to you.
You do realize that making broad sweeping criticizing of an entire group of people based on your personal experiences with a limited amount of members of their group is exactly why these situation happen?
I wish the best for you and nobody should be discriminated for their sexual preference as long as everybody is consenting, and if we want the situation to become better we must all work to improve it, so make you sure you don't do that sort of over generalization and simplification just like you wish people wouldn't do it towards you.
You're right. I didn't set out to "win an argument", just share my personal experience.
In terms of the limitations that applies to what I said, it is clear from context. And they are the majority; their voices will get heard anyway.
People think that Sweden is some kind of humanitarian utopia, while in reality there is more homophobia than people realize, and e.g. a relatively high-profile anti-Semitic case just recently...
I do think people think of Sweden like that, even here in the UK. Recently my brother went on a business trip to Sweden, and was quite surprised at the amount of "casual" racism he encountered - although I wasn't sure whether because he was from the UK they were a little more open with him, perhaps?
Anyway, not slinging mud. UK is just as bad (probably worse..).
Oh, I'm not judging Sweden at all. I'm just agreeing that a lot of people (myself included)feel that Sweden is 'otherworldly' and does not have many of the same problems that we experience in our home countries.
Being an all-remote company allows team members to choose to live and work where they want. This benefit provides folks more choices when deciding where to live and work.
"No, this is Netherlands only since this is easier for GitLab Inc. to do. We have more team members in the Netherlands and we got accepted in the local European Blue card program years ago (after a business plan review by the government, it wasn't trivial at the time I remember)."
Normally a work visa requires a local "visa sponsor" or employer so Gitlab would only be able to offer relocation to countries where they have a fiscal presence.
CEO is Dutch and probably has a Dutch entity. Work related immigration is relatively easy for Netherlands, especially compared to USA. Recently the salary requirements have been lowered.
Edit: Anyways I like this. Love the idea of companies taking over for helping out the underrepresented in their ranks. This is a natural progression from remote work.
1. 1. 1. is on purpose, the Markdown rendering software will number it. This has the advantage that you don't need to update the numbers in the source if you move/add/remove lines.
The lack of official spec is really holding back markdown, I always find it grating when someone mentions that their site renders "Github Flavored Markdown". It should just be markdown. It would be great if Github didnt have this vendor lock in on markdown
"Vendor lock-in" implies that by choosing GitHub flavored markdown apps are somehow beholden to GitHub. Plenty of independent markdown parsers support GFM. Using GitHub flavored markdown is no more "locked in" than using the Airbnb style guide for JS is. It's just a convenient shorthand for "here are the conventions we use".
I'd argue the official spec is now https://commonmark.org/ - it was partially reversed from the actual implementations in use and their behaviours, and is very highly specific compared to the original guide.
The purpose is to give the indication that it's a numbered list to the rendering engine in each case. If the spec was to use # # # for a numbered list and a * * * for a bulleted list, it would have have the same result.
That 1. 1. 1. and 1. 2. 3. are both rendered the same is a statement to the loosens of the spec, not the incorrectness of 1. 1. 1.
I’d argue that seeing 1. 1. 1. Is actually better than seeing them increasing but being out of order. Less of a hack and while reading them unformatted you just think of it like a HTML OL with list items. Or of the 1 as a keyword meaning ordered list item.
Interesting. With editable docs, things sometimes get added above the points or reordered and then re-numbered which makes the discussion misleading. The reason I prefer bullets is that it encourages people to quote the relevant section when discussing.
The judgement about whether an email needs a response is left to the receiver who would be responding, in their statement. I like that mental model of things. :)
That leaves room for miscommunication, though. If someone expects a response from me, I'd rather they make sure to ask it at the very top so that I don't miss that request with everything else that's going on.
Re-reading the statement, maybe they simply mean replies should be above the original e-mail rather than inline?
The core purpose of Markdown is for the source to look decent and readable, not match the output exactly. You can tell it's a numbered list, so it works.
To me (and, I suspect, to Gitlab), "underrepresented" means "present in lower proportions than in the general population".
South Africa, to use one of your examples, has a majority Black African population (80%), but business management is overwhelmingly White[1] (67%).
That means Black African people are simultaneously the majority of the country and also underrepresented minorities that struggle with systemic, institutional racism.
"Underrepresented" is in parentheses. So I'm interpreting this as saying that the policy is not specific to members of underrepresented groups, but was crafted with underrepresented groups in mind.
I think it does matter whether you're a member of a group that is mistreated as a group vs. whether you are mistreated as a person; it's easier to be confident that you're understanding the situation correctly if there's a lot of data about an entire group vs. a claim that you individually are unsafe/mistreated (which could just be "I am mistreated because my community is ostracizing me for having committed a crime" or whatever). It is obviously possible to be mistreated as a group even if you are from a local-majority group (cf. apartheid in South Africa).
As to why they mentioned it even if it's in parentheses - there's a link to a page, and elsewhere on the page they mention that it's a cultural value to include more people from "underrepresented groups" in their definition (https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/#gitlabs-...).
> - Violence in your country does not provide a safe environment.
Why "violence" as opposed to political persecution? It doesn't quite fit the Hong Kong situation, yet it is clear that Hong Kong should be one of the top countries to relocate from. Nor does political opposition count as an "underrepresented group" by their definition.
I'm not 100% sure this is the intent but normally (in the Netherlands) political prosecution would not require a work visa and/or immigration requirements and you can follow the normal asylum process. Maybe they would want you to follow that and this is only meant for the edge cases not covered by the normal asylum process.
As with all these things, there is a huge list of asterisks involved.
Violence is a broad term and I'm sure if you ask for relocation because of fear of persecution they'll help you out. It's not a computer processing these requests, it's a person. And this document is not code or law, but guidelines.
Well, did gitlab forget how it explicitly said to not hire chinese or russian in fear of paranoid espionage concerns, that resulted in a hiring manager quitting gitlab? I wonder how it would do it people are mistreated in GitLab.
Ultimately gitlab has a duty of care to the customers whose code they host. If most of your customers are in the West, and there are persistent security and IP threats from certain national governments, I don't see an alternative here.
There is a lot more nuance than that, and the danger is more about well placed nationals who can be recruited than government trained spies.
This is what risk assesnments are for. The consequence of every piece of gitlab hosted code, much of it which runs on publically visible servers, falling into adveserial hands is catastrophic. A government may well make an offer too good to refuse.
On the otherhand, there are pleanty of other software jobs out there which pose minimal risk, and many companies demonstrably are more than willing to hire Russians or outsource to Russia.
I have to disagree with the idea that it's not a solution, governments refuse to hire foreign nationals all the time and even regulate the private sector through things like ITAR.
Now I agree it's an unfortunate solution in some respects. There are moral issues both utilitarian (1000 Einsteins) and idealistic (all humans are equal). There are also work arounds. For most purposes if you naturalize and renounce your previous citizenship you will legally be treated as a national. ITAR only requires a green card.
Arguing against discrimination in a security context though, when nationality is indeed a reliable discriminant, is difficult.
The threats you’ve mentioned usually come from Western governments. China is often accused, but attacks by US have actually been proven - numerous times. Same with backdoors.
AFAIR, they do hire Chinese and Russians; they just don't hire anyone residing in China or Russia. That's something the relocation policy is supposed to help with.
How does it help if you shd have worked for one year (well this can be waved). But you need to discuss with your manager so you need to be hired anyway.
Paranoid concerns? I mean the Russian conspiracy theories put forth by CIA-aligned agencies are often over the top, but China is indeed a dangerous communist dictatorship. It's not paranoia when it's true.
Is there a reason the requests aren’t centralized? Needing a manager to approve first seems like a recipe for very haphazard application of the policy.
Netherlands is keen on receiving 'highly skilled migrants', aka tax paying citizens. There is a temporary tax discount for expats called the 30% ruling. But I think the discount is only fair because expats coming to Netherlands didn't receive benefits yet, and moving in general is also expensive.
It very much is, they skip the part of someone's life where they just cost (a lot of) money and get right to the part where they are making money of them.
Expats even get tax breaks to incentivize them to come here. Which is fair IMO. However it sucks big time for the countries they leave behind (brain drain, net negative financial impact).
This may be contentious but no matter the system, if your manager doesn't like you and decides to kick you out - you're in a tough spot. No PIP system means they just straight-up fire you. PIP system means they let you know you're being fired and give you the chance to quit. Either way you're in a pickle. The only real defense against either is pre-existing political capital.
From an HR perspective I'm not sure there's any meaningful way to objectively separate an under-performer from someone whose manager has it out for them.
So, I'm kind of with them on this one. If you're going to get fired, then I doubt their sponsorship of your transfer would do you much good - you'd still be forced to return on departure would you not?
Pro tip: If you're being fired, don't quit. Quitting is on you, firing is on the employer. If you get fired, you're (more?) entitled to benefits and if you feel like it was unjust you have a chance to appeal in court.
Keep in mind that you are not obligated to disclose that you were fired to future employers. However your new employer may ask your previous for information which will likely be shared.
Most big employers in my experience also have a neutral reference policy, meaning they won't opine on your tenure there except to say you worked there, for X dates and $Y salary. You're welcome to solicit a more specific reference from your choice of former coworkers.
For the TLDR; "GitLab has the right to migrate to the Netherlands for qualifying team members. Just added we can waive the 1 year tenure requirement if you are a member of an underrepresented group that is unsafe or if here is a lot of violence in your country" https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1417601595668275201
If I'm reading right, it looks like a company can become a "recognised sponsor," which allows them to sponsor as many of their employees as they want for relocation, provided they meet salary requirements etc. It doesn't look like there is a government-side discretionary approval like the US green card or (at least in the Netherlands) a quota or lottery like the US H-1B. There's a background check but that's it.
Anecdata: when I worked at a US tech company, one of our teammates got transferred to the Netherlands because he couldn't get a visa renewal in time. I believe it's a common country to stash anyone who's having visa issues.
Canada is also popular, especially BC - it's where Amazon, Google, and Microsoft move people who couldn't get a H-1B renewal but want to keep them in the same time-zone. It's only a 2-hour drive from Seattle so having in-person meetings is still possible.
My understanding is that this goes back to Rotterdam being a free or open port, since the late Renaissance period. The Netherlands has been a proponent of free trade and what we'd call international citizenship for a very long time
Right, but I don't think GitLab can enforce the right to come to the Netherlands. Presumably if the Dutch security services have a reason to stop someone coming in there's nothing that GitLab can do about that.
Yes, that would be a better way to say it. When I wrote the header for https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/visas/#right-... years ago I was still processing that there is a human right to leave your country but that only works if there is another country that will have you, which isn't the case for the vast majority of people.
I hope GitLab will make a commitment to cut economic ties with countries from which they will accept "refugees", something which Europe generally does not seem to have the courage to do.
I'm pleased that more is being done to help migrants, especially refugees.
What I don't understand is why this must be the responsibility of private companies. The United Nations specifically asks governments to care for people. But asylum seekers are imprisoned if they go to Australia, or stuck in limbo for 27 years of processing time if they come to New Zealand. So now capitalism is triumphing, and visas are issued to (rich, powerful) private companies and the people who work for them, instead of to people based on their skills.
I'm tremendously grateful for the (large, powerful) company who hired me just in time for my visa to be processed, after waiting in an immigration queue for 2.5 years. The case officer was treating me quite harshly until I had the new job offer. To any company managers wondering whether this affects employee loyalty: I literally owe my entire career and future to you. Thank you for taking a chance on me.
I agree. The state of international migration is very worrying indeed. More people are dying on migration routes then by terrorism ~by a factor of two~ by 50%. That is, hostile border policy by western nations are causing at least many more deaths then global terrorists. And this seems to be getting worse. The global pandemic saw countries double down on their harsh border policy, and there is little reason to believe there is relief in sight.
The climate crisis is rendering more and more places inhospitable which will only deepen the ongoing migration crisis. European nations seem indifferent to this fact and continue their hostile border policy even though a global emergency is imminent.
I indeed applaud any private efforts to offer any help they are able through this crisis, as much help is needed. But I do wish governments would take this humanitarian crisis more seriously. People are dying, there is an emergency, and we governments need to change their immigration policies to reflect that. We need to open our borders and stop this needless suffering of migrants.
But while governments are hellbent on keeping theirs borders this closed, hopefully we will see more companies take action like GitLab here and offer help where they can.
> More people are dying on migration routes then by terrorism ~by a factor of two~ by 50%. That is, hostile border policy by western nations are causing at least many more deaths then global terrorists.
So the west is responsible for people being killed outside of the west? Why don't you blame the countries where these people are getting killed in?
And how many of the people dying on migrant routes actually qualify as refugees according to the definition used by UNHCR?
How many countries do migrants to the west pass through on average, and if it one or more, why not blame those? Why is it not the countries these people are fleeing from that hold the ultimate responsibility? And if they are indeed refugees, why are they passing through more than one country?
I am an immigrant to the west, I would love to have my family here, but I can't because they would not qualify as refugees, why do people who break the laws get favorable treatment here? Why are they entitled to me having to pay for them while my family have to struggle with violence and poverty where they live?
That's a very confused argument. Refugees are not a problem? Your family struggle with violence and poverty, yet the West should have tighter border controls? Who's 'officially' a refugee and who isn't?
The game is called 'blamethrowing' and it accomplishes nothing.
> Your family struggle with violence and poverty, yet the West should have tighter border controls?
What does my family's living conditions have to do with the west's border control policy?
> Who's 'officially' a refugee and who isn't?
I do not define this and you can find the definition used by various authorities readily available on the internet.
The country where I reside uses UNHRC definitions and does not consider applications of people who are not already in the country. But as far as I know, struggling with violence and poverty is generally not enough to qualify for refugee status.
Seeking shelter is a protected human right. Crossing borders to seek asylum is not breaking the law. Being a refugee does not make you a criminal. Your question “why do people who break the laws get favorable treatment here?” is a loaded question based on false premise and should not be answered.
However, even with a right to seek asylum many refugees need to smuggle them self into their prospected host country. This is an extremely dangerous activity, and is often done through actual criminal groups and costs a fortune. This business would not exist if the border policies in European and North American countries weren’t so hostile. Over half of confirmed migrant deaths occur while crossing the Mediterranean in unsafe conditions. These crossings could be done using far safer transit if Europe had humane border policies. So yes, you can blame the west for these deaths.
On top of that European and North American countries often influence the border policies in the pass through counties such as Turkey and Mexico.
> why do [refugees] get favorable treatment here?
They most often don’t. But they should. The reason being is that their homes are not safe. They need to flee to a new country or risk a worse fate. In other words, they need help. A humane society would give everyone help that needs it.
Protected by who? Where does it come from? If you live in the real world you will know that "protected human rights" are lies westerners tell themselves while they buy cheap goods from china made by slaves.
> Crossing borders to seek asylum is not breaking the law.
If I bring my family here without following immigration procedures they will be deported and I will likely lose my residence permit or be rejected on renewal.
> Your question “why do people who break the laws get favorable treatment here?” is a loaded question based on false premise and should not be answered.
No false premise. Most people who come to Europe without following immigration procedures are not refugees. Just because they think they should have the right to live in Europe does not make them refugees, and circumventing immigration laws is the definition of breaking the law.
> However, even with a right to seek asylum many refugees need to smuggle them self into their prospected host country.
If they come from countries not bordering Europe, why do they have to come to Europe? Is Europe the only safe place in the world? And why is Europe responsible for their safety in the rest of the world?
> Over half of confirmed migrant deaths occur while crossing the Mediterranean in unsafe conditions.
How many of these migrants would qualify as refugees? And how is it Europe's fault if they get killed outside of Europe.
> why do [refugees] get favorable treatment here?
> They most often don’t. But they should. The reason being is that their homes are not safe. They need to flee to a new country or risk a worse fate. In other words, they need help. A humane society would give everyone help that needs it.
You conflate refugees and people who illegally enter Europe with no legal basis and do not qualify as refugees. And there are many more of the second category than the first.
Not having a safe home does is not even considered in the definition of a Refugee by UNHRC, and even if it was, generally UNHRC does not recognize the right of those with legitimate refugee status to just decide where they would like to go.
Everyone who needs money is not entitled to mine. I would much rather send it to my family than give it to people who break the laws and enter the country where I reside with no legal basis which places additional tax burdens on me.
I don’t know what you are talking about. You are free to enter Europe and ask for asylum. This is a protected human right under international law, protected by the UN. Your asylum may be rejected and you may be deported, however you never entered the country illegally, as you were asking for asylum, which is not illegal in most (all?) countries in Europe.
What often happens in Europe is that you are illegally deported however. Often an asylum claim is illegally dismissed by authorities, a person has a right to a hearing but is deported before they have a chance, a person is sick and is not allowed to be deported under some conditions etc. A person may have entered using a fake ID, however this is still not a crime if they are fleeing, as official IDs are not something one can easily get when fleeing ones home, and the law most often reflects that (but is then broken by the authorities).
When you hear about what refugees have to go through in the real world you would be surprised by how little authorities abide by their own law and how easily they are willing to break their own laws to evade helping people that need it.
> I don’t know what you are talking about. You are free to enter Europe and ask for asylum. This is a protected human right under international law, protected by the UN.
Are you talking about Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? This reads "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." Note the qualification, "asylum FROM PERSECUTION."
If you enter Europe, and you do not qualify as persecuted, how exactly does this right apply to you? And if this right does not apply, how exactly is it legal? What law gives you that right?
What limiting principle is there to this right you think exists? Can I travel to any country in the world and just say I'm seeking Asylum without any basis? Where do you get this notion?
I think this dialog is entering some legal territory and I am not a lawyer and can only offer speculation. I’m sure a human rights lawyer can actually fill us in on the specifics here. So my speculation is as follows:
I was under the impression that if you cannot ask for asylum outside of a country’s border, and there are no legal ways for you to enter it (e.g. you need a visa but there is no way for you to acquire one since there is no embassy that will grant you one; or you don’t have a passport since your country’s government won’t issue you one), then you are not exactly committing a crime if you enter “illegally”.
I think you might be assuming that many (most?) asylum seekers are actually doing so under a false premise, and they have no grounds for the asylum application. I’m sure there are some for which this applies, but I doubt it is a sizable number. At least I would need to see some credible source before I would belief so.
I would speculate that by far the majority asylum seekers that are rejected their application and deported, are rejected on technical grounds, not because they applied under a false premise. If that is the case, the majority of refugees, even those that enter illegally, and are eventually rejected and deported, commit no crime in the process.
I don’t think people are concentrating into a small number of countries at all. I don’t know where you get your numbers but according to IOM international migration was 280.6 million in 2020, of which 33.8 million were refugees. Most refugees stayed in the geographic region (e.g. a tenth of the entire refugee destination was to Turkey followed by Jordan at 3 million).
True normal migration lead by culture, love, opportunities, etc. is a lot bigger factor in migration then the climate crisis, but those are not the people suffering from hostile border policies (well not on the same scale as refugees) and don’t need the same help to bypass said policies. But it would be foolish to dismiss climate change and not expect the proportion of refugees to go up in the next years compared to other migrants.
This is fantastic. I wonder if they could partner with the Canadian government to make this easier for their employees who need to gtfo from their home country.
1) Canada is easy for immigrants with a degree and a job offer since it's a points-based system.
The historical reason is that Canada is underpopulated for its size. As far as STEM, a large percentage move to the US, so foreign STEM workers are needed.
In addition, Canada is doing a lot of PC/SJW activism today, so there's that too.
2) The easiest US work visa is the TN-1 for a Canadian citizen to work in the US. Note that it's a non-immigrant visa, so if you want to stay long-term in the US, you would need to do further immigration paperwork.
True, the cost of typing 1 is the same, but the cost of changing the numbering on all consecutive items if you break one up or add one or remove one is higher. It's just unfortunate Markdown used that syntax to indicate a numbered list in order to be "human readable".
My point is: why do you have automatic number in a list of 3 items that you mention in the text that there are 3 items? It is locked to 3! You said that in the text! And yet the commit removed the first indication of this 3 elements but not the second!
For instance, in Belarus right now a lot of engineers seek to get out the country due to dictatorship regime. Poland and neighbourhood countries offer emergency visa plans for people in trouble (business harbour visa).
I think what happened is that GitLab started receiving a lot of emergency requests to be relocated immediately that did not comply the existing policy. Hence the update.