{"id":965,"date":"2014-04-01T08:14:40","date_gmt":"2014-04-01T15:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/?p=965"},"modified":"2014-04-04T11:57:22","modified_gmt":"2014-04-04T18:57:22","slug":"your-job-and-your-beliefs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/?p=965","title":{"rendered":"Your Job And Your Beliefs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Dang it, Walter, this isn’t a First Amendment issue!”
– The Dude to Walter Sobcek in “The Big Lebowski”<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

April 4, 2014 author’s note: A short time after I posted this a story broke on JavaScript inventor and Mozilla chief Brendan Eich related to this topic. \u00a0I have a comment at the finish of this article.<\/em><\/p>\n

It was some years ago when I worked on a project at a business that specialized in one of the myriad of health care services and after talking with many of my coworkers was quite surprised that about 80% or so — most of them — had a philosophical problem with what we were doing and did not believe in our product at all. Their actions outside the company were in direct conflict with our mission.:<\/p>\n

This type of situation brings up an interesting point: how close do we coders need to be in line with the mission statement of our companies to do our job, and what interest does that company have to regulate anything other than our granular job performance especially outside the workplace? You can see the road this will head down.<\/p>\n

In the news all of us coding janes and joes read about — information laws, privacy laws, and business practices –we all have our ethical thresholds for what we will and will not do. I myself have refused to do the work on a few different projects and although helped the companies find replacements, graciously, I felt after that I had to leave. But it doesn’t just stop at work you may or may not think ethical.<\/p>\n

Sometimes things get a little ridiculous from the developer end of things. \u00a0You ever see the Louis CK episode with Joan Rivers where he wouldn’t do a gig in Las Vegas because he had to do the right jokes for the gig and not what he wanted to do? \u00a0He had to come to the realization that … \u00a0you know, when you are hired, most of the time you just do it and there is no big picture, it’s just work. \u00a0It’s called *work*. \u00a0I’ve seen places though where the little things drive a few people mad, then those people, mad, have to leave or won’t work for others. \u00a0Things like “you aren’t a total buy-in for such and such brand of computer” even though you are coding in Eclipse and the OS doesn’t matter; or you can do python but its not really your favorite, etc. \u00a0One place I was at some coders hated Flex and ActionScript so bad they wouldn’t do it even though it was required. \u00a0Joan Rivers said to Louis CK — “You get to be a comedian — why complain? Be grateful!”<\/p>\n

At some places they do in-house fundraisers and managers will come around and ask people to give from their checks, maybe as a deduction. I know United Way has shown up at my cube on two different sites; however, I have my own charities and had to refuse but certainly this hurt reviews of mine because there was an incentive for management to get a lot of donations.<\/p>\n

Then you have personal behaviors. Some places screen for tobacco in your system — a legal substance — and will not hire you even if you use it outside of work. \u00a0 They say its for health care reasons but they are also, IMHO, trying to build a culture. \u00a0At other places there are biases for and against nose rings, tattoos, expansion rings, clothes that are too much or too little conservative, etc.<\/p>\n

It’s the outside the work place things I am now seeing creeping into the job sites. For instance, if your politics don’t jazz with a thing your company is doing; for instance, maybe they have an outside political or business interest not directly related to your job — are you supposed to be held accountable for your beliefs on the job? Do you have to give up your vote for them or face unemployment? Even if your job performance is minimally adequate for what they need?<\/p>\n

How about this situation: you have a blog or social media site that you publicly are speaking out against a political interest of the company you work for. YOu are a great worker who works hard on their product, and you believe in that — but they want you to suit up in a gray jumpsuit and hand pamphlets out for “save the birds” or “freedom to dump sludge” or “fracking for children” or whatever. What’s the threshold for this, if it has nothing to do with making widgets?<\/p>\n

\n

Is agile about “people before process” as long as all the people are the same?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My thought on this is — yes, it is starting to matter to employers. There are books describing how culture matters at companies. And while we know that race, partner preference, religion, and age aren’t supposed to come up in interviews well, they do indirectly.<\/p>\n

I enjoy and respect my co-workers personal beliefs. I feel pain when I see co-workers outed or any cliquing that excludes people. Some writers like Joel Spolsky say you have to eat lunch with each other, but so often this isn’t possible. You have Asian Indians who want to hear their languages and rap about an Aamir Khan flick, jock coders talking about the White Sox vs. Detroit, gamers discussing Minecraft, athletes discussing a great kayak run or a climb; what have you.<\/p>\n

And therein lies the dilemma — a company wants a good culture, but it also wants diversity. But in order to have the good productive culture some companies think they may have to have homogenity beyond diversity.<\/p>\n

Maybe this matters more for some companies than others, that is, that their business is directly related to believing in their mission. If someone works at the Piggly Wiggly Grocer but shops at Kroger maybe it’s not such a big deal. But if someone works for a non-profit of any sort and does not believe in the mission maybe it does. Maybe.<\/p>\n

I say – embrace the diversity. And diversity means more than just other countries outside of our own, it can mean the subcultures within our respective countries. Embrace.<\/p>\n

\n

About Brendan Eich. News got out of a political donation he made<\/a><\/span> on his own time that ruffled opposing views. Also this is interesting<\/a>. \u00a0From that he decided to quit his c-panel post at Mozilla, especially because some websites decided to take retaliatory action against Mozilla for his beliefs.<\/p>\n

His belief certainly had nothing to do with making Firefox better; but another group decided that they would use it as a political statement. I guess that we all have a public persona that can damage us and the world is not getting any more accepting; in this sense, maybe anonymity is the best rule with tenuous topics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

April 4, 2014 author’s note: A short time after I posted this a story broke on JavaScript inventor and Mozilla chief Brendan Eich related to this topic. \u00a0I have a comment at the finish of this article. It was some years ago when I worked on a project at a business that specialized in one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=965"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":986,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions\/986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}