It’s hard time for all of us now . Russia invaded Ukraine killing its citizens and occupying territory. The war that rolls across Ukraine is a terrible and disgusting thing and is completely unacceptable for every common-sense being. But it is also a case to show our professional skills.
A majority of IT-involved people have strong rational thinking skills, scientific method based analysis abilities and are inclined to a strict dichotomy of things which helps them distinguish true and false, good and evil, and follow theirs ethical and moral principles despite the propaganda.
In order to work in a team IT-professional should also master soft skills like empathy, the ability to understand other's point of view, good communication skills to explain their own position and etc.
In the situation we are in a lot of IT-related professionals in theirs personal and work communications shows a typical excited crowd’s behavior. Every Russia-related person is blamed for every possible sin and attributed opinions that they don't have. Some suggest to start discriminating people basing on their current or even former Russian citizenship and origin.
The cold logic and rationality of a typical IT-specialist and developed soft-skills of a typical IT-specialist HR to many of us didn’t help to stay calm and carry on solving problems. It is surprising how all these nice speeches, posts, and articles about tolerance, multi-culture environment, prevention of xenophobia and prejudice against foreigners turned into real origin- and citizenship-based people discrimination. Which is not less disgusting and unacceptable than the war started by Putin.
Most of us are trying to make the world a better place by our work. In these hard times it would be helpful to use our professional skills to throw away our emotions and keep developing wide-scaled projects, new technologies, something really cool that may help people across the world. Which of course requires large and well built teams of high-skilled professionals. Destroying relationships with the current and potential team-mates based on their Russian origins not only is unethical, discriminating and immoral. It will also may break teamwork and stop large-scaled projects for years.
It may sound paradoxical but IT-employees’ cold rationality which is not very typical for a human being may help us to to save work relationships, keep teams together, save businesses and after all - to establish World Peace!