2 weeks ago, an issue called “ WIP: blocking engineering posts by country of residence ” appeared in the public tracker of GitLab, behind the popular Open Source-solution for developers and DevOps-engineers of the same name. Today, it became known to the general public, and this event caused a huge resonance in the English-speaking Internet. Suffice it to say that on the original page of the ill-fated issue alone, more than 100 comments have already been left, and their number is increasing literally every minute ...
So, we publish the translation of the culprit of heated discussions:
Correction: this is still a discussion, and there is no final confirmation of the adopted policy.
In a group discussion on Monday October 15, 2019, we decided to activate “blocking jobs by country” for team members who have access to customer data. The reason for this was the expressed concern about the situation of some corporate clients, as well as the fact that it is already becoming common practice in our industry due to the current geopolitical situation.
This applies to the following countries:
- China,
- Russia.
This issue is designed to track the process of relevant additions to the support guide and everything related to changing hiring processes, with the ultimate goal of achieving the following:
- We do not make job offers to individuals living in these countries.
- Current team members are not allowed to move to such countries, remaining in positions where this is prohibited.
To date, we have no technical way to achieve what is needed with the help of a system of rights. Using it will also force us to create “second-class citizens” in certain teams who cannot fulfill 100% of their obligations, which, according to the experience of some of us in other companies, leads to very negative consequences. Therefore, we believe that blocking the country is the most humane solution at the moment, especially for the reason that it will not affect any of the existing employees.
It is also necessary to investigate the possibility of such an implementation based on access rights. To such an extent that everyone understands how to do this and how much time it will take approximately.
The discussion is held in # job-family-country-blocks (Slack channel in the GitLab project - approx. Transl.) , Since many related problems are open, the contents of which should be, if not general, then at least consistent.
Note: in addition to the Support team, this change also affects Infrastructure SRE engineers, as well as SecOps and Anti-Abuse in the Security department - see the corresponding issue.
Emoji to this issue, perhaps, speak for themselves:
PS from the translator
Finally, how can we not recall another case of a significant interference of political events in the world of decisions so close to the developer community: in December 2018, Slack began banning user accounts from the Crimea (and some other regions of the world).