I work in defense (Saronic Technologies). Some people can’t handle this, and want to see me unemployed, renounce my employer as evil, and/or constantly feel ashamed about myself.
While I want to say I fundamentally do not care about what other people say, the fact is that I do, deeply, and every time someone implies to me that I’m a bad person for working in defense kinda emotionally destroys me and makes me want to engage with this community less and less. This is why I don’t collaborate with Lix anymore.
The same thing is happening within Nix community spaces. Someone will contact me for some reason or another, and talk with me until they learn I work in defense.
I do not care if someone does not want to interact with me because of this, but I care deeply when they try to argue with me and make me feel bad about it. I’m making this post to communicate that this is extremely unwelcome behavior, towards me and anyone who has a job you don’t personally like, and to please stop. Just disengage. Don’t try to get me to quit my job. Don’t try to make me feel bad. I didn’t ask.
Short edit because slow mode: thank you to everyone who has sent me kind and encouraging words. I am not morally conflicted about what I do, and I don’t mind briefly explaining my position when I can post in this thread again)
I am sorry this happened and sorry for the part Lix played in making you feel that way.
I agree that no one should be badgered about their job, followed across threads, or made to re-justify it every time they show up. Being in a public-facing role changes what it’s fair to criticize someone for but it shouldn’t allow people to hound them obviously. I’m sorry you had to deal with this.
As someone who appreciated having you in the Lix project, I never had many qualms about your affiliation to Saronic. That said, I understand why, for some folks — including on the core team — it isn’t just personal dislike of a job.
The US right now is not a neutral actor, and what gets built and who it gets sold to is not abstract for some of us. You can disagree with that and I don’t expect to talk you out of it.
What I would object to is the work. Who bears the responsibility for what an employer does is not a small question and I don’t believe the NixOS Discourse forum is the place to answer those.
For the record: even if you were contributing in the Lix project, I would not argue at you about it and I’m not going to ask you to quit your job. But, if asked, I’m not going to pretend that I have made peace with the work your employer is doing. I don’t think I’m alone in the core team thinking this way.
Separately: the Lix project genuinely misses you, and I think a few things here were better with you in them. Whatever you decide, I hope you find what you’re looking for, wherever you spend your time. Wish you the best!
@lisanna I am very sorry to hear that you are continued to be harassed by community members, in clear violation of our code of conduct. This is absolutely wrong, and must stop. No abuser’s belief system can be allowed to justify this behavior, no exceptions.
This sort of “harassment is OK when you earned it; grow a thicker skin” thinking is one of the most vile things I have ever read on this forum. No it is absolutely the fuck not.
It is especially egregious coming from an active moderator, whose very job it is to protect victims of harassment, full stop.
I just don’t believe that there’s any harassment here.
If there was actual basis to call it harassment, it could be reported and dealt with privately. Since that’s not the case here, especially since the accusations of harassment are intentionally vague, I’m inclined to belive that they’re getting disagreement for their intentional choices and people asking them to make different choices.
It smells an awful lot like the self-victimisation of prior bad actors in the community. The person whose feelings were hurt the most doesn’t automatically become more morally correct when they’re engaging ie bad faith.
I work in defense (Saronic Technologies). Some people can’t handle this
every time someone implies to me that I’m a bad person for working in defense kinda emotionally destroys me
Respectfully, this sounds like an unresolved personal conflict being projected outward. If I were in your shoes I would first dig deeper.
Speaking as the oddball non-serving kid from a mostly military family, and based on what I’ve seen in that family and from people who have worked in and left weapons and aerospace:
If you’re having trouble with the social and moral ramifications of the work you’ve chosen, which are connected things and don’t live in their own compartments (see: moral and social psychology), you may have a better time in the decades-long run if you choose another sector for future work. Needing to ask the community for allowances to avoid emotional damage in a context where harassment is already prohibited and actively moderated (if you’re getting that, report it) indicates that there’s something to fix with heart or feet, not by moving everyone else.
An effective way to mitigate this purely on the social side is not to plant a flag in a divided community, but to select groups that are better aligned with you in this aspect. Nix is originally European, as you know, and the community reflects that history, especially on Discourse. (edit for clarity: As you can also see by the next sentence, I’m not saying Europe is a monolith that’s unified against you. It’s not. Simply expect turbulence.) You won’t change the group’s conflicted response to weapon providers by saying “I’m here and I’m doing this, deal with it,” which is the tone I hear in your phrasing, “people can’t handle this.”
Personally, I don’t think moral and political sorting is a good way out, but it’s a way out.
Nix is originally European, as you know, and the community reflects that history, especially on Discourse.
As a European, I’d like to push back on the idea that Nix’s European roots mean a unified stance on these topics, or that it justifies a non-inclusive environment for certain industries. Europe is incredibly diverse. Many of us highly value pragmatism, open-mindedness, and the ability to separate technical collaboration from geopolitics.
Also as a European, I want this platform to be a professional space where anyone acting in good faith can contribute to the technology.
I never heard of Saronic until today, so I read about the company. What Saronic is building is very cool and exciting. Don’t feel bad about your job there. The work you do is good and necessary.
I’m sorry that anyone would give you a hard time because of where you work. Unfortunately, a lot of people have unrealistic opinions about defense, and unserious views of the world. When such people become convinced of the moral righteousness of their opinion, they find it easy to be terrible to those they disagree with, but please do not mistake their zealotry for competence.
Defense (a.k.a. “offense”, a.k.a. “military”), weapons production, and surveillance are a lot more complex than “oh my god there is violence involved!”, and it’s what we-Nixpkgs specifically have been learning and internalizing at least since Darmstadt and/or the beginning of the full-scale phase of the invasion of Ukraine, and/or Trump’s re-election and Iran affair, if not longer.
We better start acknowledging that, by participating in Nixpkgs and Nixpkgs governance, by choosing whose money to take and on what terms, by choosing what contributions to accept or refuse, by choosing which projects and employers we collaborate with, we all are combatants, including those of us advocating for the (very understandable and relatable, but still debatable) hard-line German University-style “no MIC” stance.
Thank you for sponsoring me on GitHub for these past few months, Lisanna. I really appreciate the support you’ve given me. I have never gotten the chance to say thank you. It might seem small but you helped me pay for my medication in a difficult time.
I hope you are okay, and that you can reconcile these thoughts and move forward with whatever choice you make in the future.
Raito… goddamnit thank you you have helped me immensely today
I’m talking with the Lix team again and I couldn’t be happier.
I guess I’m trying to figure out the best way to maintain my own boundaries around this topic. It’s impossible to know in advance how someone willl act when this gets brought up, so I’m still trying to figure out the best way to navigate that.
I’m not morally conflicted about what I do. I’m not stupid though. I don’t have to like the current US administration to find fulfillment in what I do for work even as a defense contractor. I’m aware that our customer considers me to be a man in a dress. I’m aware the war in Iran is stupid. It hurts more when it feels like people from my own communities are turning on me though. I don’t really know how to handle that.
(this largely doesn’t happen with queer and trans communities in the DC area, people who live here are used to all their friends having security clearances and working for DoD or NSA - the rejection is mostly just a phenomenon of meeting people online)
Thank you especially to everyone who reached out over DM and in the comments, your kind words are encouraging.
Is this a factual statement of what has been happening, or an assumption on your& part? OP’s post mentions neither, only naming “people stop talking to me when they learn” and “people try to argue with me about it” as problems, so we don’t know which account to trust here.
Regardless, there’s a lot of people in this community who are very deeply and personally impacted by wars that are enabled and waged using products of MIC employees’ labors. A lot of those wars are unjust and absurd; people who’ve come to learn that from hard experience do not and will not view perpetrators as “good” or even “neutral” actors. And the weight of losing close and loved ones does not really compare to being viewed with disapproval.
That is to say, we don’t think it is possible to create a safe and welcoming environment for MIC employees in this community. There’s no respectable dialog to be had when the topic is murder. We think it’s for the mutual benefit to just admit that no compromise is possible and that either party is unwelcome, lest otherwise this conflict will occur again and again with a lot of hurt feelings.
I’m not going to repost the two hidden comments, they’re really nasty and I’m very glad John spoke up about this sort of thing being harassment.
Feeling uncomfortable about someone working in defense is okay. Speaking out about the industry or a company is also okay! Trying to make someone feel bad on purpose, which is what has been happening, is harassment and anything implying that sort of behavior is welcome here is off base.
It is important to clarify that “we” does not speak for the entire community. There are many users and contributors who prioritize technical collaboration over ideological boundaries.
Everyone is entirely entitled to their own legit opinion, but the topic of this platform is code.
We are all (right now) running code on our machines that was written and maintained by defense and defense-adjacent contributors. They have already contributed so much to this project that they cannot simply be treated as unwanted guests after we already accepted their contributions. If the community were to actually reject/remove all commits from these contributors after the fact, NixOS would be significantly smaller and support much fewer hardware platforms. Actually, i think it is pretty cool that i am running my laptop and all my servers on code that was written and is maintained collaboratively by people who are from the left, from the right, from all kinds of religion and non-religion, from everywhere in the world. It seems like we can’t have peace on this planet, but it doesn’t hinder people from everywhere to collaborate on cool and valuable technology.
Because this is quite literally everyone’s code, built collectively over years:
Who gets to act as the ultimate moral authority to decide who is allowed to participate? Since we are already collaborating at a structural level, the most pragmatic approach is to let people work and keep the forum focused on technical merits.
@lisanna thank you for the clarification. I misread your initial post as “the opinions of other people are making me feel bad”, which is something very different than “people trying to make you feel bad on purpose”. I am sorry about that.
To keep this topic from derailing into ye olde grande discussions, please try to stay focused on discussing OP’s described issues and things directly related to that. The stance of NixOS at large towards MIC workers in general will be considered off-topic here.
OP and others brought the stance of the community at large in topic by being vague and claiming some section of the community is violating the community values by preferring to disassociate with MIC and MIC workers.
Trying to steer the conversation in one way because you’re biased to OPs stance is not fair.
I would argue working in offense (often referred to as defense) is the actual violation of our community values. Can’t really be inclusive and appreciative of differences in perspective when you’re working on bombs and robot systems to kill people.
