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Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

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Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#41

Post by itafroma »

StavrosK wrote: post #34
itafroma wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original issue was a pull request[1] made to the libuv code base to change "him" to "them". It was rejected[2] by one of the committers, Ben Noordhuis, as being too trivial. That decision was reversed by Isaac Schlueter (another committer) and committed[3]. Noordhuis reverted that commit[4], chiding Schlueter for not following procedure, but that revert was quickly reverted itself. Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, one o…

When did Ben say pronouns should be gendered? I saw nothing on GitHub like that, yet the Joyent post mentions it more than once.

I couldn't find any explicit statement by Noordhuis that could be characterized as what Cantrill called an "insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered". I took that to be something Cantrill thought was implied by the revert.

However, there's a deleted GitHub comment from Noordhuis that nevertheless still appears on his public activity stream[1]. I starts with:

> For the record, I reverted the merge in 804d40e. Isaac may be a committer but that does not mean he is free to land patches at will. Patches have t…

Perhaps it was stated there?

[1]: https://github.com/bnoordhuis?tab=activity

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#42

Post by aaronem »

Having recently been considering Node for a major new project in my organization, I'm greatly encouraged to see that the folks in its developer community so thoroughly refuse to let themselves be distracted by irrelevancies from such a laserlike focus on improving their code.

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#43

Post by protomyth »

ijroth wrote: post #30
adriancooney wrote: post #8

> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. That statement feels a little to intimate for an outsider to the company. Ben made a mistake but to single out and threaten him like that in public would surely alienate him further. This entire situation has gotten extremely out of hand. It shows how activists can turn into extremists when faced with an adversary. I'm in no way advocating what Ben did but it's despicable how eve…

I wrote that. I didn't mean it literally. It’s a response to Bryan saying that failure to be sensitive to gender issues would be a firing offense at his company. We take it really seriously, and I’d like to point out that two of our senior leaders are women and we are proud to employ talented women engineers. If this remained an issue, I’d need to find a way to rectify it with Ben, and that could get as serious as fi…

"I wrote that. I didn't mean it literally."

Then you shouldn't have wrote it because most people and every reporter are going to take it literally.

Since pronouns are an issue that you want the node.js community to be correct about, would words with significance in certain cultures also be high on your priority list?

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#44

Post by aviraldg »

yetanotherphd wrote: post #36
aviraldg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much ado over nothing. "Them" in that context just sounds odd to me (perhaps not in American English?) A 50/50 mix of him/her sounds way more natural.

Not all people belong to the categories "Male" and "Female". Luckily you won't be fired for this post, but be warned for the future.

I'm all for diversity, but I like my pronouns as they are, thank you.

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#45

Post by Brakenshire »

aviraldg wrote: post #26
itafroma wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original issue was a pull request[1] made to the libuv code base to change "him" to "them". It was rejected[2] by one of the committers, Ben Noordhuis, as being too trivial. That decision was reversed by Isaac Schlueter (another committer) and committed[3]. Noordhuis reverted that commit[4], chiding Schlueter for not following procedure, but that revert was quickly reverted itself. Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, one o…

Much ado over nothing. "Them" in that context just sounds odd to me (perhaps not in American English?) A 50/50 mix of him/her sounds way more natural.

It's actually the other way around, the objection to the use of singular 'them/they' as a gender indeterminate pronoun is a relatively recent shift apparently originating from American English. It is a form which was otherwise well-established:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_they

(There are example quotes in the link from Shakespeare, Austen, Twain, and Bernard-Shaw)

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#46

Post by austinz »

mintplant wrote: post #31

From Joyent's blog post [1]: > But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent. For comparison, here is bnoordhuis's comment from the pull request thread [2] that the post is referencing:…

Ben was called a bigot and his rejection of the pull request was ascribed to the "principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered" (from the Joyent blog). The problem is, all of this is being extrapolated from his statement "sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that", which could be seen as a flippant dismissal of gender issues in the tech industry - or it could be simply a curt response acknowledging standard practice ('rejecting pull requests that only correct typos or comments'). Only Ben really knows Ben's intention - and he didn't clarify it in either of the long comment threads on github. (If he did make explicitly misogynistic follow-up comments please correct me; I didn't see any myself.)

Maybe he was insensitive or tone-deaf, maybe he should have made an exception (because perhaps commits like these have some sort of special significance that goes beyond simply fixing spacing issues in comments), maybe people should have talked to him and explained why others might have found his actions questionable - and, some of this did happen - but the hysterical response is really sort of scary. Wikipedia has an "assume good faith" principle - maybe something similar would be a good idea for open-source communities, so that problems and differences in opinion could be resolved before escalation into a screaming match?

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#47

Post by aviraldg »

Brakenshire wrote: post #45
aviraldg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much ado over nothing. "Them" in that context just sounds odd to me (perhaps not in American English?) A 50/50 mix of him/her sounds way more natural.

It's actually the other way around, the objection to the use of singular 'them/they' as a gender indeterminate pronoun is a relatively recent shift apparently originating from American English. It is a form which was otherwise well-established: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_they (There are example quotes in the link from Shakespeare, Austen, Twain, and Bernard-Shaw)

I was comparing against Indian English, but point noted.

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#48

Post by yetanotherphd »

[deleted] wrote: post #38
yetanotherphd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important that everyone knows that violations against political correctness are serious things. Whether a person calls a commit that changes "he" to "they" trivial, or refuses to assert that women are at least as intelligent, if not more, than men, or attributes Africa's problems to something other than racism and exploitation, it is important that that person loses their job. Otherwise, how will people know who…

[deleted]

Those people are already far beyond the pale, but I was referring to more benign cultural explanations. A professor was fired for his "racist" suggestion that cultural differences could help explain the relative poor performance of Black Kenyans relative to Indian Kenyans in running local businesses.

The sad irony is that this man committed suicide over this, and that he was a committed liberal anti-racist. In this case the progressives had no compunction in sacrificing one of their own.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6705401 http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/09/since-s...

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#49

Post by paulrademacher »

ijroth wrote: post #30
adriancooney wrote: post #8

> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. That statement feels a little to intimate for an outsider to the company. Ben made a mistake but to single out and threaten him like that in public would surely alienate him further. This entire situation has gotten extremely out of hand. It shows how activists can turn into extremists when faced with an adversary. I'm in no way advocating what Ben did but it's despicable how eve…

I wrote that. I didn't mean it literally. It’s a response to Bryan saying that failure to be sensitive to gender issues would be a firing offense at his company. We take it really seriously, and I’d like to point out that two of our senior leaders are women and we are proud to employ talented women engineers. If this remained an issue, I’d need to find a way to rectify it with Ben, and that could get as serious as fi…

You didn't fire him publicly. You only belittled him in public.

> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.]

Your correction doesn't make the statement much better. This whole debate is about how words matter, and yet your words put him on notice in a public place. All of Ben's friends now know his employer will fire him if he "can't learn." Is he so stubbornly misogynistic that that should be in question?

You could have conveyed the same message by saying "he was following the commit rules, no offense intended, won't happen again" and left it at that.

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#50

Post by jnbiche »

ijroth wrote: post #30
adriancooney wrote: post #8

> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. That statement feels a little to intimate for an outsider to the company. Ben made a mistake but to single out and threaten him like that in public would surely alienate him further. This entire situation has gotten extremely out of hand. It shows how activists can turn into extremists when faced with an adversary. I'm in no way advocating what Ben did but it's despicable how eve…

I wrote that. I didn't mean it literally. It’s a response to Bryan saying that failure to be sensitive to gender issues would be a firing offense at his company. We take it really seriously, and I’d like to point out that two of our senior leaders are women and we are proud to employ talented women engineers. If this remained an issue, I’d need to find a way to rectify it with Ben, and that could get as serious as fi…

Yeah, I'm sorry, but you guys have just proven everyone right in criticizing the node.js community as a bunch of arrogant, immature hotheads. What is it with this discussing of firing someone in public?

And please don't tell me you didn't mean it literally. If you're joking or bluffing about firing someone, it's going to make you look even worse.

Don't you remember how everyone viewed that AOL CEO who fired someone in public a few months back? Well, please understand that people view this public threatening of firing in exactly the same way.

For what it's worth, I completely agree with the pull request. But you all couldn't have possibly handled this any worse.

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