Actions have consequences (or: why I'm not fixing Intel's bugs any more)

[mjg59]

Edit: About two months after this was written, Intel committed to a large scale diversity initiative. Actions speak louder than words, and this was an effective repudiation of the behaviour described below. I've happily worked on Intel-related issues since then.

A lot of the kernel work I've ended up doing has involved dealing with bugs on Intel-based systems - figuring out interactions between their hardware and firmware, reverse engineering features that they refuse to document, improving their power management support, handling platform integration stuff for their GPUs and so on. Some of this I've been paid for, but a bunch has been unpaid work in my spare time[1].

Recently, as part of the anti-women #GamerGate campaign[2], a set of awful humans convinced Intel to terminate an advertising campaign because the site hosting the campaign had dared to suggest that the sexism present throughout the gaming industry might be a problem. Despite being awful humans, it is absolutely their right to request that a company choose to spend its money in a different way. And despite it being a dreadful decision, Intel is obviously entitled to spend their money as they wish. But I'm also free to spend my unpaid spare time as I wish, and I no longer wish to spend it doing unpaid work to enable an abhorrently-behaving company to sell more hardware. I won't be working on any Intel-specific bugs. I won't be reverse engineering any Intel-based features[3]. If the backlight on your laptop with an Intel GPU doesn't work, the number of fucks I'll be giving will fail to register on even the most sensitive measuring device.

On the plus side, this is probably going to significantly reduce my gin consumption.

[1] In the spirit of full disclosure: in some cases this has resulted in me being sent laptops in order to figure stuff out, and I was not always asked to return those laptops. My current laptop was purchased by me.

[2] I appreciate that there are some people involved in this campaign who earnestly believe that they are working to improve the state of professional ethics in games media. That is a worthy goal! But you're allying yourself to a cause that disproportionately attacks women while ignoring almost every other conflict of interest in the industry. If this is what you care about, find a new way to do it - and perhaps deal with the rather more obvious cases involving giant corporations, rather than obsessing over indie developers.

For avoidance of doubt, any comments arguing this point will be replaced with the phrase "Fart fart fart".

[3] Except for the purposes of finding entertaining security bugs

Comments

[tim]

So you're saying Intel is just lazy and unable to perform a few minutes of due diligence, rather than taking a principled stand against women in games? If anything, that's worse.

[(Anonymous)]

Having worked for Intel, I can say that, IMO, yup, that's about right.

[(Anonymous)]

Likewise (though only contingent worker), and 'unaware/out-of-touch' sounds, yup, absolutely right.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't see AMD taking a stance on this issue. Are they lazy and morally bankrupt too?

[(Anonymous)]

Has AMD backed out of working with sites that are anti-GG? If not, they're not actively supporting GG the way Intel did, which was the precipitating event for this.

That would be a 'Yes' from me

[(Anonymous)]

Take a look at the recent events over on Facebook where a whole slew of accounts were banned because they didn't comply with the "Real Name" policy. This happened because a large number of accounts were reported and Facebook had a strict line on "If the name for the account doesn't match the documentation provided". That was the level of "due dilligence". Facebook has since apologized, told people what happened and has made changes to try and stop something like that from happening in the future.

Now... Intel is a very large company and the person who made this decision likely saw the complaints and pulled the advertising without even looking at the controversy. That is how most marketing and business-intelligence people act. (in my experience, at least - it's always a 'react immediately, backtrack later' situation)

Not that I am condoning this method of action - companies like Intel have a lot of responsibility because their name is known worldwide and the way the public sees the company act will influence decisions. Whether it is to boycott Intel or to cheer them on - and whether the publics response is right or wrong - it will happen and have a much larger effect than if a smaller company did similar. This is one of the reasons that decisions like this should be made by upper-level management - or even the board of directors - and not the low-level management that likely chose the current course. Of course, as I've never taken a business course and have just based all of this off personal experience I could be totally wrong.

[(Anonymous)]

The problem is that there's been so much bad journalism about this that it's entirely possible to do a few minutes of research and come to the conclusion that there really is an evil gaming cabal doing evil things, and the misogyny is just an unfortunate part of the (otherwise entirely accurate) conversation. :-/