I don't like to get political, and yeah I'm not re...

# random

[therealbluepandabear]

I don't like to get political, and yeah I'm not really active here so I don't think my opinion matters, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous and stupid that JetBrains shut down their offices in Russia, and suspended sales in Russia. It is meaningless virtue signaling in my opinion, and I'm going to call JetBrains out for this.

JetBrains has a right to condemn the war, they also have a right to shutdown the Russia offices and suspend Russia sales. Although they have the right to do this, I believe that this choice was ridiculous and stupid.

I am calling out the heads of JetBrains, not the low level people who are working there:

Listen, JetBrains, you had no reason to shut down your offices in Russia and suspend sales in Russia, they were under no threat whatsoever from anyone and citizens have nothing to do with the war.

I am quite surprised that no one here on this Slack channel is calling this decision out.

I was on a thread in which people were discussing the delays with Compose, not one person mentioned how stupid and nonsensical this move was. What has this become, a company-shilling server? What? Are you out of your mind 🧠 ?? There is no good 'excuse' for the reason that there is delays, the reason is because some heads at JetBrains made a weirdly ridiculous decision to 'abandon' their offices in Russia. Lmao, I just can't even stress how dumb this move is -- it only hurts your company and average citizens. This is big-tech level dumb moves that I'd expect to see from giant corporations.

This 'shutdown' of the Russia office has caused unnecessary delays with Compose for no good reason.

Your disgusting move to suspend Russia sales have affected innocent Russians. The Russian people have nothing to do with the war at all, and I was quite shocked to find out that one of the project leaders in Russia got their account terminated: again, I stress this, citizens != government. Government is evil, most citizens are not. I know many people in Russia who are against the war, et cetera.

This is directly hurting average citizens because:

• Now, those who worked for JetBrains in Russia have no job, for what good reason? Because of a war which they never even decided they wanted to happen? Because of this stupid boycott that is hurting citizens? Enough is enough. You, the heads at JetBrains, are responsible now for hundreds of people without a job, literally innocent people who had no say on any matters/government choices.
• Those in Russia who want to purchase your IDEs cannot, because you have suspend sales there. This is a bad choice at the least, and an evil choice at the most. I can't wrap my head around why anyone would want to directly hurt citizens who have nothing to do with the war. Just average citizens who never even had a say on the government's matters, and you at JetBrains think it was cool to just let Russian citizens suffer. Disgusting.
Shame on you and it's just sad that over the last couple of months no one here has the guts to call JetBrains out for this. They also suspended sales in Belarus? That's big-brain level confusion.

Dislike this, whatever (this post may get deleted as well), I don't care, this is my opinion on the matter, and I think JB's decision (and other large companies that have followed suit) was ridiculous.

This is not me shilling for Russia. I do not like Russia or Putin, they are a sh--ty, authoritarian regime that the citizens didn't even 'vote' in.

I know only a minority of people here will agree with this, but I think we can all agree that citizens have nothing to do with the war. Period.

[itnoles]

they are not only one companies to doing it.

[therealbluepandabear]

I know, many big tech companies are doing it.

Any idea as to why? It's ridiculous.

[itnoles]

other than punishing Russian people over the government decisions?

[therealbluepandabear]

Exactly, but no one is calling them out on the server for it. It's hilariously stupid.

[therealbluepandabear]

People complaining about delays but not even thinking that 'hmm, maybe it's because JetBrains made a shitty decision by shutting down the Russia offices?' 🤣

[itnoles]

Google and Apple killed NFC Payment on Russia. How we can trust those companies if they can easily shut down servers for it?

[therealbluepandabear]

We can't. That's the thing. They are just big, evil, giant corporations.

With JetBrains, though it's their free will as a company to do as they wish, I think it's ridiculous to see JetBrains going along with this stupid boycott.

All companies are evil.

[itnoles]

you know really sucks, Google prevents Russian Android users to download paid apps over it. The whole thing really stink.

[therealbluepandabear]

Agreed.

[ephemient]

it is difficult or impossible to do business between Russia and the western world. regardless of PR, JetBrains would have to choose between having Russian customers or having everywhere-else customers. guess which one is more promising.

[therealbluepandabear]

JetBrains sells IDEs, not physical products. I am really doubtful of what you're saying, JetBrains could have still sold IDEs to consumers from around the world and made profit, even if they had an office in Russia. And, it's not like JetBrains was only operating via Russia, they have global offices.

If you disagree, you need to give me a specific example as to why if JetBrains were to keep the Russian office, they wouldn't be able to sell their products to consumers around the world. I cannot think of any from the top of my head, and thus I believe this move was ridiculous virtue-signaling and at the very least unnecessary, but at the very most -- evil, as it now means that hundreds (not sure how much people work at their offices) are left without a job.

[therealbluepandabear]

They also suspended sales in Belarus... Gosh...

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

I'm pretty sure since Jetbrains definitely have some legal status in the US, all US companies were forced legally by the government to suspend sales in Russia. If not forced, they at least faced huge pressures from both NA and EU governments to do so.

I believe also that the Russian offices that were terminated the employees either are working remotely right now or either were mostly relocated.

When it comes to Compose, it's both a Jetbrains and a Google thing, so not only Jetbrains is responsible, and I believe that Jetbrains's Russian operation was only a fraction of their workforce.

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

At the end of the day yes, it is in a way "evil", but it's the kind of evil that is usually warranted or can at least be justified in extreme cases. It's similar to McDonald's suspending sales in Russia even before sanctions on Russia had reached their fullest: the Russian government doesn't directly benefit from McDonald's existing obviously, but the idea is that the Russian population will grow more and more dissatisfied with their conditions and isolation from the rest of the world to the point that they'll be difficult to control by the government and therefore will help in de-escalating the war.

For the Belarus thing, Belarus and Russia do have extremely close ties, and Belarus itself definitely has a history of being quite authoritarian and also being aggressive towards the EU.

[therealbluepandabear]

I agree on most things, but I disagree on the fact that Russian citizens have a chance at stopping the war.

You and I know that the citizens are completely helpless when it comes to government choices, especially in authoritarian countries such as Russia.

Other than that, I get where you're coming from.

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

(Side note, but I'm really glad that the conversation here is staying quite civil and respectful. I'm definitely of the opinion that such a discussion can happen here in #C09222272 peacefully just as long as there's the capacity to "agree to disagree")

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

I think that Russian citizens do have some influence, although it is minor. It might also be just leading way into some form of takeover where Putin's men turn against him or something, and in such a case having a dissatisfied population could help. This is definitely going into foreign government intervention territory, but in a way it can be justified through Russia's much stronger "intervention" i.e. literal war.

I think at the end of the day that, as a purely governmental and strategic decision, pressuring companies to cut ties with Russia helps and doesn't hurt.

For the humanitarian aspect of it, keep in mind that since Russia isn't playing nice with international law anymore, piracy has definitely been more widespread, and so Russian programmers do have "access" to paid Jetbrains products, just not in the usual sense. The vacuum that's left by the world pulling everything out of Russia is being filled by inelegant replacements that cause dissatisfaction, that's sort of the point.

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

Now personally, I don't take much issue with that decision of suspending sales and cutting ties. It seems to me that it causes inconvenience for the majority of Russians. That's definitely not ideal, but there's some chance that it can help prevent much more horrendous human tragedies.

For people losing their jobs, this is where I think Jetbrains did better than other companies, but maybe they could've done more. I do know that JB announced that they will be helping relocate their Russian employees, and I can imagine that post-Covid they might've offered them to work remotely instead. However, unless there's a legal reason, I can't see why they didn't leave the offices and development teams intact in Russia and simply disbanded anything sales-related.

[therealbluepandabear]

I get where you're coming from. But there are also massive double standards which are hard to ignore. Look at what's happening in China (horrible crimes against the Uyghurs), Yemen, I haven't seen JetBrains take any stance on that by suspending sales in Saudi Arabia (country that invaded Yemen) or China. Why just Ukraine? If China invades Taiwan, I would expect JetBrains to boycott China, but what if China gives them massive profits? Hmm, what will they choose?

Why did JetBrains step up and not help support Yemen or other countries? It's not like they need to, but there's still double standards here and horrible crimes happening in many different countries. In a sense, I believe the right word for it is hypocrisy: you claim to be supporting one thing but are actually supporting another. You can call what I am saying 'whataboutism', and you may be right, but I think I have a point. If JetBrains is supposedly 'anti-war', then boycott other countries which are fuelling wars in other countries. Simple as that. But again, I agree with you on your last point, they had no reason to leave the Russian offices, and though I disagree with your main points, I partly understand your perspective.

[darkmoon_uk]

@Youssef Shoaib [MOD] I imagine the simple answer to that is having any presence in Russia whatsoever entails paying taxes to the Russian government; which equates to funding the war.

[ephemient]

the sanctions on Russia are nearly unprecedented. at least for now, you can guarantee business continuity in China (e.g. paying your workers salaries); this is not true for western companies in Russia.

[Ignat Beresnev]

Hi! This is not an official position whatsoever and I don't wanna come off as defensive, I probably shouldn't be doing this at all, but you seem to be centering this around the war and making a statement, and I just want to point out a few things that perhaps folks take for granted and are missing from the overall picture.

It doesn't have to do with JetBrains, it's overall getting increasingly more difficult to be an international developer while residing in Russia, with some serious threats hanging over you. For starters, there's unreasonable blocking of internet services and websites simply because they refuse to comply with (mostly absurd) government regulations: twitter, instagram and linkedin are are internally blocked and you can't access it without a VPN (there's been reports of banning VPN protocols as well), basically websites that speak out and spread unwanted information have a chance of being blocked. Many services are leaving the russian market, for instance Miro and GitHub are banning accounts of people who work for sanctioned entities and many services (like AWS) prohibit creating new accounts from Russia (other examples are SAP and VMware stopping support of Russian customers). Not to say that even if you do manage to open an account, you wouldn't be able to pay for it since russian mastercard/visa cards are not accepted worldwide. Not only are there talks of Russian sovereign internet being put into place with the great firewall or something, but externally there's a possibility of it being crippled (for example, big internet service provider Cogent cutting off access to Russian customers), which can result in at the very least some slow down. There's also talks of "nationalizing" foreign companies (with companies leaving the market and speaking out being on the list), so seizing assets, introducing pro-government management, etc. There's also the question of money: external SWIFT transfers are not only blocked for certain banks, but some banks outright refuse to do SWIFT transfers due to how difficult it is nowadays (take Tinkoff as an example), so it's quite difficult getting money in and out of the country (not sure what McDonalds would do with all the hard earned rubles), and of course euro/ruble exchange rate is such now that previously profitable international companies are now struggling to pay salaries in rubles and have to fire people (gamedev studios are closing left and right), so if you earned 2272 euros before the war (in rubles), it's currently equivalent to 3113 euros. With hardware companies like Lenovo and Dell leaving Russia, it's also difficult now to buy hardware (severs, PCs, laptops, etc). And, lastly, you can't ignore the fact that it's an ongoing war and there's a threat of a military draft for men.

Take all this and many other threats and limitations that I didn't mention and can't see as an average developer, and ask yourself if it's worth for an international company to have a huge chunk of developers in Russia (which was previously cheaper). If some of the big threats do happen, I think the delay for Compose and whatever other products would be much greater 🙂

[mcpiroman]

And that early on it was very unclear (and still isn't) whether it is going to be 'just' Ukraine.

we can all agree that citizens have nothing to do with the war

Well, unfortunately it's in big part the citizens as a whole, and the economy that they are part of, who, although seldom willingly, empower what is happening. It's hard to tell when losses will be the lowest, even if one would truly care about that, but overall the actions do have some sense.
I suppose all of that strongly depends on where you live though.
As to JB, even though international, they seem to be geographically connected to the central/eastern Europe, so that's why they care about that region, but yes, that probably does not justify them on being so selective.

[Oliver.O]

Is the primary motivation for the original poster's rant a real concern for the Russian people or a rather selfish one ("I want my Compose now")? Let's assume for a moment that staying would have been possible economically. Wouldn't staying in business have meant to economically support the regime as it is sacrificing lives en masse for its imperialistic ambitions? Would there have been a way to weaken such an aggressor without hurting its population? As there are other suppressive regimes out there, it is fair to argue that we could all do more. It is not a good excuse for doing less.

[elect]

Unfortunately with things as big as the war in Ukraine there are always collateral consequences for people who has nothing to do with the war, both in Russia and outside.
But this is an illegal invasion and annexation of third territories (together with cultural and physical genocide and hunger/energy weaponization, things we thought belonged to the last century), and sanctions to Russia and helps to Ukraine is the bare minimum reaction before direct intervention.
Least but not last, it's a deterrent for many others who are watching and have the temptation to do the same

[itnoles]

in my mind, sanctions wouldn't work if every countries don't support it. so far, some countries are stand with Russia.

[deviant]

probably that's why. most of russians support the invasion (blue and dark blue bars)

[Oliver.O]

This is just disinformation: In a country where opposing war is a crime there can be no representative poll results about anything war related.

[deviant]

you can just go to russia and speak real people, not software developers, try to ask teachers, drivers, farmers, foundry workers. what they think about war and about the rest of the world. i suppose you all guys will be shocked how dark this nation is.

[Oliver.O]

Anecdotes do not make representative evidence. Sure, there are supporters of the war, and watching state-controlled TV is horrible. There is also the opposite. Overall, you cannot know. It's also a vast country with very inhomogenuous regions. There is so much to learn about the political system, sociological background, history, military capabilities, you name it. The information is out there and this Slack is probably not the right place to find adequate information, as we are mostly a bunch with a very different set of expertise.

[elect]

I think the propaganda plays a vital role here: that is, give those people all the right background and information and see how those graphs would change
In another universe, I may also be supporting the invasion if I had been living in Russia my hole life under the continuous propaganda