September 17th, 2020
If you happen to follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me bang on about the Major League Hacking Fellowship, an educational program that (until now) helped students learn real world software engineering practices by contributing to open source projects.
This summer, I mentored 20 students working across multiple projects, and was in the process of transitioning to a MLH maintainer role by hosting a group of students on my own open source project, Foam.
Earlier this week MLH announced their new “Externship” track called Tour of Duty, where instead of contributing to open source projects, the students are assigned to work on projects for the United States Department of Defense, also know as the U.S. Military. You may remember the DoD by their greatest hits like Drone Warfare, Over Half a Million Casualties Since 9/11, and the infamous 2003 Illegal Invasion of Iraq tour.
I can not in good faith support MLH’s decision to partner with the U.S. Department of Defense, and as of today I’m no longer working with MLH.
This announcement is not intended as a call to mob, boycott, publicly shame or “cancel” MLH. I’ve spoken with MLH CEO Mike Swift about this at length, and I trust that their intentions are good. I’ve seen first hand the impact an initiative like the open source fellowship can have on individual lives and careers, and I hope they’re able to continue that mission.
So, why write about this publicly?
I’ve spoken very highly of MLH in public. I’ve directly helped them recruit students and future mentors via my own social network. I’ve personally reached out to friends and acquaintances to encourage them to apply to mentor roles.
I believe these folks deserve an errata. If you trust my reputation, and I endorse some third party, you are now more likely to trust that party. This invisible mechanic of reputation transfer is why influencer marketing is so valuable to brands and corporations.
I voiced my support for a brand that helps students and open source projects, not one that supports the military industrial complex, so I’m discontinuing my reputation transfer to that brand, as small and insignificant as it may be.
I don’t imagine my decision will have much of an impact on MLH, or the world at large. They’ll find other open source maintainers to replace me, and mentors to succeed me. They can even use that sweet DoD money to pay them for it. And even if MLH decided to discontinue their collaboration with the DoD (which I hope they would), the military industrial complex would be just fine, too. A few student engineers working on spec projects is hardly going to materially impact their effectiveness.
In fact, the biggest loser in this transaction is going to be me. I’m closing doors to professional opportunities, harming personal relationships, and ending a collaboration which I’ve on multiple occasions called one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.
It’s not easy, but living by your principles never is. It’s easy to boycott McDonald’s because their food is bad for your health and doesn’t taste very good, but it’s much harder to give up things when it constitutes a personal sacrifice. Especially, when the relationship of cause and effect are so abstract and far removed.
But as individuals, we must still stand for our beliefs, and use our time and effort to support companies whose actions align with those beliefs.
Companies are fundamentally dependent on people. Tech companies are able to create unprecedented amount of economic value with fewer people than ever before in the history of humanity, but still, for the time being, they need people to build the technology that acts as the value multiplier.
So by publicly discontinuing to work with this company, I’m sending message to them, and all companies:
Collaborating with the U.S. military industrial complex makes you less attractive as an employer (for me).
If enough of us stood for what we believed, it would be harder for companies to fly under the radar and make economically expedient decisions without having to consider their ethical ramifications or impact on the world. Most of them would still probably find enough warm bodies to fill the scrum, but they should have to work harder to find quality engineers.
And it’s a message to you:
You can act on your beliefs, too. If you find yourself working for a company that’s not acting according to your beliefs, they don’t deserve your labour. You too have options.
If you work for Facebook and you’re horrified at the company’s inaction to prevent a national and global crisis they’ve been instrumental in causing, you can choose not to work for them.
If you believe GitHub’s contract with ICE makes them complicit in the real-life Handmaid’s Tale re-enactment playing out at immigrant concentration camps, you don’t have to be a part of it.
You may think, it’s okay, you’re not one of the bad guys. You don’t build the part of the product that’s harmful, you just work on their infrastructure. Does that make you complicit?
Let’s say you work the breakfast shift at the employee canteen of the Death Star. Sure, you didn’t personally pull the lever that shot the superlaser that exploded the planet Alderaan and killed its 2 billion inhabitants, but thanks to you, the guy who did had the energy to get through the day.
This is why I find the MLH collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense so troubling. Not only are they’re placing students to wash the dishes in the kitchen of the Death Star, but they’re setting an example that working for the military industrial complex is a fun, harmless activity and a good career option. We need future generations of developers to have a higher bar of morality than us, and this sets a terrible precedent.
You can perform your own moral calculus and tally up the benefits and harms of the organisation you work for, and your role in it, and choose accordingly. Personally, for me, minimising harm is more important than maximising a benefit. You can’t put dirty money in some sort of moral laundry and have it come out clean. You can’t buy carbon offsets for loss of human life.
You must choose how you spend your time on this planet.
You can choose however you want, but don’t pretend it’s not a choice that you make.
I wish Major League Hacking and all the incredible people who work there all the best, and that they make good choices.
Written and published on Foam by @jevakallio