That they are being hypocritical. Frankly, I think more women in tech and LGBT representation are probably good things, but GitLab is being profoundly disingenuous.
Typically, "no politics" ends up being enforced as "no politics that contradict the office norm".
It is clear how this ends up happening. When people express an opinion generally supported in the office, it is unlikely someone will complain. When someone expresses a contrary opinion, they will appear to be the one "making trouble".
This is what you should have posted in the first place, along with the links. Here you make your point in a way that people can actually understand and that does not destroy the container here.
There's a common phenomenon where a user's later defense of a flamebait post is often the high-quality, substantive explanation that they should have posted in the first place. I almost want to write software to replace the one with the other.
While you're at it, add a feature to delete just the last sentence of posts.
Someone pointed the phenomenon out the other day and I've noticed it all over here since: a lot of posts are great but then the last sentence goes too far, off the rails. I've been watching for it in my own posts. I think it's just hard to get the right rhetorical flourish.
(BTW, awesome job here dang. I don't know how you do it.)
I'm not sure if more women, minorities, LGBT, group x, group y, group z in tech .. matters as much. Sure it's good to have diversity of people and ideas, it can help people in workplaces come up with more varied ideas, and there's nothing wrong with it ... but I think we're missing something.
What about more men as secondary school teachers, or in art, or as nurses/medical techs? There's an equal and opposite side to the women in tech debate: why not create a world where men feel like they can and should take jobs that pay less, but that can be potentially more fulfilling.
Why is there also not a push to get women into other high-income lines of male work, that are more hazardous like construction, oil rigs, truck driving?
I think that's really ignored today. Just as there are family pressures for women to take the paths they do, men similar (but different) pressures to take carers they may not want at all, in order to "provide for a family" or whatever.
Please let's not open up all those cans of fiery worms. It's off topic in this context, and such threads are invariably repetitions of the previous thousand flamewars.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
I think there's probably some room here to differentiate between politics (in the US, Democrat and Republican for most offices) and ideology.
Ideology is the framework for politics. I don't see anything wrong with saying discussing politics (a given candidate, or a platform stance) at work is discouraged while encouraging a certain ideological stance (more people from historically marginalized communities in tech is a good thing).
