Refusing To Use Windows For "Religious Reasons"

Key Takeaways

as much as I love Linux and have no plans to stop daily driving it I wouldn't be the first person to say that certain aspects are a little bit culty especially for those where their entire personality is based around them using Linux but have you ever thought hmm maybe I could use this idea to exploit it for personal gain well you wouldn't be the first person to have that idea over the past couple of days a set of posts from r slash ask HR have been circulating employee claims she can't choose Microsoft Windows for religious reasons is she a member of the Church of emacs is she trolling is this some legitimate case where it actually does make sense let's have a read on and find out now two big disclaimers disclaimer number one I don't care about your religion if you try to turn my comment section into a debate about it I just don't want to see it I might delete it I don't know second big disclaimer there is literally zero evidence that this person is real that this event ever actually happened but for the sake of the video and for the sake of the entertainment we are going to assume that this did happen and is 100 real so let's get started I recently hired a new employee for my team everyone thinks she is a great additioner and she is clearly very talented as demonstrated in her interviews it's really unclear what her position actually is but let's just assume she is the best employee they have ever had the problem came up during onboarding when we supplied her with her company laptop she said she would need it configured in a Linux based operating system because her religion does not allow use of apple or Microsoft owned operating systems we only currently have Hardware configurations for Mac OS and windows and our expectation was that she will use Windows along with the rest of our team I'm just going to assume the author of this post is not a Linux user themselves but the hardware of the laptop with the Windows laptop probably isn't going to be an issue in most cases you can wipe out windows install Linux and everything works exactly like it should now there might be issues if you're using certain webcams certain weird esoteric Hardware certain printers but the laptop itself is very unlikely to be the issue she says that she can fulfill all job duties without windows and I'm claimed to believe her but corporate policy dictates windows and my management is not on board with her request for Linux I've never come across any situation like this and I'm completely confounded as to how I should handle this now whilst Linux might be free to download and install I can understand why the management wouldn't be in exactly happy with this request this is one of those times where those videos on YouTube that are like Linux is only free if you don't value your time actually do hold a bit of weight here but in reality that's not just a downside against Linux that is a mark against every single operating system let's say for example you have a business that is entirely based around windows and you have a new employee come in that says Okay I want to use Mac OS now ignoring the cost of the device itself this is going to have a cost to the business if you're a business that's entirely Mac OS for example and one person says I want to use Linux the exact same is true yes at a core basic level all of these operating systems have the same general functionality we have word processing and spreadsheets LibreOffice is mostly great for day-to-day usage but in many any cases it might not be a one-to-one replacement for Microsoft Office many of the more advanced features in Microsoft Office won't work exactly the same way in LibreOffice leading you to have some sort of mangled up documents now most of the time you can you know deal with it but if you make a document in library office and then send it to someone in Microsoft Office and it now doesn't look like the way it should this is not a good way to handle documents in a business and you also can't forget the heavy use of macros which work a bit differently between the two software Suites but are absolutely fundamental to a lot of the automation tasks in a business context but that's just generic stuff that pretty much anybody would need to worry about as it's unclear exactly what her job entails it's hard to mention any specific software she might be using but it's almost certain the company is going to have some sort of software packages that are being used and let's say they want to go and upgrade to a newer version they want to buy a new piece of software they want to go and change some business practices to make use of some new application that is going to you know revolutionize what they're doing completely change everything up well now they need to consider this one Linux user when they go and buy it and if a business wants to do that go ahead and do so that would be awesome in fact I encourage you to do so it would make it so much easier for Linux users to keep using what they're comfortable with working in your business but by adding all of these little things that need to be worried about all of these different software changes all of these different back-end things that need to be dealt with these are going to add upkeep costs onto your it department and in many cases the IT department already has a lot of work they are should be doing anyway that is being neglected adding extra work under that you know isn't exactly going to help that work go too well plus this has the potential to spiral into a much much bigger problem for me this would depend on how burdensome this will be on it it will be far more than a one-time setting up Linux on a computer type thing and also the extent of op's refusal to use anything other than Linux as her faith grows is she going to be unwilling to accept documents that were created on a different computer on a computer running Windows or Mac OS unwilling to email with people or use communication like Slack you've backed yourself into a corner here I don't really care about the management here but I do kind of feel bad for the IT team having to accommodate the demands of one random person who wants to use Linux and considering modern churn rates I wouldn't be surprised if she's gone from the company and like a year or two moving on to somewhere different just for the sake of Linux if possible I would like them to accommodate this person but it's kind of their choice to decide whether they want to try and do so or risk the person you know filing some sort of lawsuit against them because whilst this might all sound completely ridiculous and you want to throw the entire story in the bin assuming this is happening in the United States there might actually be some validity to making that claim in the US there's something known as Title VII this prohibits employment discrimination based on religion now you might think there is some like predefined list on what is an accepted religion and what counts as a religious practice and all that fun stuff but no it's actually like really up for interpretation Title VII defines religion very broadly it includes traditional organized religions such as Christianity Judaism Islam Hinduism and Buddhism it also includes religious beliefs that a new uncommon not part of a formal church or sect or only held by a small number of people some practices are religious for one person but not religious for another person such as not working on Saturday or Sunday one person may not work on Saturday for religious reasons another person may not work on Saturday for family reasons under Title VII a practice is religious if the employee's reason for the practice is religious so basically it's religious if the person says it's religious social political or economic philosophies or personal preferences are not religious beliefs under Title VII but you can frame it in a way that makes it seem like it is so even though the free software movement is probably a social political possibly economic depending on how you want to look at it and definitely a personal preference you could possibly frame it as a religion even if nobody else out there considers it as such now that doesn't give you free reign Gino get a full-time salary and work one day a week but with weird edge cases like this where it sounds like it might be kind of reasonable this is something that would need to be followed up in court and followed up with HR and you'd need to actually like chase this one down to see if they would actually accommodate it and the author ended this thread replying to a comment saying understandable thanks I will give her an ultimatum tomorrow as much as I like her I don't have a problem losing her for this because she should have made it clear in her interviews slash before taking the job now of course she's not gonna do that because she's not going to get the job you would never make something that absolutely outrageous clear before you're actually hired where then it becomes a little bit harder for them to get rid of you now in many places they still could fire you on the spot but it at least requires a bit of paperwork rather than telling you to just go away but this is not the end of the story there is also a follow-up post and the author changed his mind about the ultimatum update after many meetings yesterday with management HR legal and I.T we decide to give her a shot it's working come up with a configuration for her that we will also make available to other employers who want to use it I really feel bad for this I.T team that has got thrown this extra work it's like go ahead do it guys we know you can do it no extra budget just get it done eight show and legal felt that although she is able to request accommodations for a sincerely held religious belief this would have been an undue hardship to the company and it would be okay for us to deny her request but ultimately we decided that she can fulfill job requirements without Windows that's pretty much it thank you for all the helpful advice read it I cannot be the only person who thinks that HR and legal didn't want to deal with this blowing up as like a giant story and didn't want to deal with the drama so they're like you know what let's just it's fine if we deal with this it's fine if we don't let's just make this go away and do something else I am not encouraging you to do this I am not encouraging you to do anything but if you don't mind making yourself basically on higher in certain industries and you happen to be working in the USA in other countries that have really strong religious protections maybe you could see how it goes maybe you could see what would happen if you go to like I don't know a Dev Studio that's all based around windows and you say I can do this job on Linux see what will happen and try to make the claim there is some sort of religious reason why that has to be the case but don't come back to me when you're stuck working at McDonald's so let me know your thoughts do you think that she has any reasonable claim to be saying that she has to use Linux because of religious reasons maybe you think she does maybe you're a member of the Church of emacs as well I would love to know so let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below if you like this video I'm gonna go and like the video and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here go check out my patreon scrub Sally Bara pay Linked In the description down below that's gonna be it for me and install Linux [Music] [Applause] [Music]