Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "last straw" literally means a last small thing, FYI.
Isn't that how I used it?
Yes, but a last straw is by definition a small thing, so of course it's going to be a small thing. Real life is not a novel.
Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
541–550 of 1001 posts
Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It sounded very familiar. I have several friends and many acquaintances who work at Valve. One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disag…
The essay "The Tyranny of Stucturelessness" is an excellent analysis of this problem: http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm
Wow. Thanks! Submitting this as a story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611
Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It sounded very familiar. I have several friends and many acquaintances who work at Valve. One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disag…
> The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity th…
If your spouse is helping contribute to the business on that level, you should hire them. Otherwise you're really doing a disservice to everyone by having your spouse work without compensation or recognition.
Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It sounded very familiar. I have several friends and many acquaintances who work at Valve. One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disag…
> The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity th…
If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach. If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do.
I've definitely seen this in the past. At startups where I've worked or friends have worked, the founder's wives have played important support roles in ways that are easy to observe but hard to quantify.
When one spouse is a startup founder, then it's a true "family effort" whether the other spouse likes it or not. And if it's "or not" ... well, then, that substantially hinders the chances of success.
Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's really a huge stretch to go from oogling of hula hoopers to "feeling unsafe". What, after watching some women do hoola hoop men suddenly turn into rapists? That's 100% in her head and sounds slightly crazy to me, to be honest. Not even going to strip clubs turns men into rapists on a regular basis... I think that accusation is completely unwarranted (from the sounds of it).
After reading the article, it became pretty clear to me that whatever manner of "culture" github appears to be permeating internally, she was very far from it. This indicates she was a bad hire from the get-go. Hiring isn't just about talent, it's also about cultural fit, and while it's difficult to know with precision who fits a cultural dynamic, 1) such an issue is bound to arise as a company grows and 2) there had…
Isn't the point she's making that she didn't fit the culture primarily because of her gender? And that any work culture where one's gender matters is a toxic culture in itself?
A workplace just filled with happy young male developers is not necessarily a healthy environment, or one that necessarily has a good culture.
Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
#546Some geeky types will be tempted, upon founding a startup, to thus not have ANY women in significant roles in the company, and to keep it as guys-only as possible; outsourcing as needed and doing the other legal legwork as required to stay under the headcount (is it >50 people?) to avoid the EEOC.
This is the sort of fucked up attitude that's turning the public increasingly against the tech industry. The attitude seems to be "we can do anything that we want, because we're smart and we know the loopholes"
If you really believe that the public considers watching women hula-hoop or a rug that says "meritocracy" to be sexual harassment, please give some thought to the possibility that you might be living in a bubble.
Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once quit a senior dev role as the tech architect at the company had veto power on all code and blocked my work because I'd spelled the word dialog the US way, rather than the UK way (dialogue). This was not in a public interface, this was in variable names. Ignoring that every word in programming is in US English: color, gray, program. We were deadlocked for weeks, with him refusing to ship working code that fulfi…
It's a good thing for hackers/programmers/engineers to be stubborn.... up to a point, but the one thing an architect should not be is stubborn. And yet architects usually originate from promoted engineers. And that means they are stubborn, and the result is all kinds pointless conflicts with all the other developers.
The fact that the tech architect spent any time at all contemplating this issue is a massive red flag to me.
Technical Architecture should be about making the right set of trade offs given the business goals of the system being developed. That involves spending a lot of time talking to people both inside and outside of dev team about what the goals are and how the decisions that devs are making are impacting everyone else in the company. That stuff is time consuming, but if there's any time left you should really be keeping up with the latest frameworks and tools.
If you're spending your time reviewing commits and enforcing coding standards, you're doing it wrong.
Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It sounded very familiar. I have several friends and many acquaintances who work at Valve. One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disag…
> The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity th…
I guess I'm too jaded, but I question getting married. If
you hit the lottery and you become a successful Founder, your wife will own 1/2 of all those aching hours sitting
in front of that screen. If she's the type of chick that
will stick with you when you loose everything and work
the paint booth at HD, by all means marry her, but those
women just don't exist anymore. Women look at men so
differently than we judge them--it's not worth taking a chance.
Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
#549I'm not entirely sure the hula-hooping incident - merely observing girls hula hooping is not a crime, is it? - by itself constitutes a hostile atmosphere for women, unless inappropriate comments were being made. What we have here is some completely inappropriate, cloak and dagger, soap opera shit being perpetrated by the wife of the cofounder, who has no business meddling in the affairs of his employees. (If true, th…
Look, I don't know about you. But people can usually tell the difference between someone casually watching another, and someone gawking at them.
If you're already primed, through some other form of hostility, to think that you're surrounded by a bunch of sexists, then innocent watching can look at a lot like gawking.
It is too open to interpretation, and thus not objective.
Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It sounded very familiar. I have several friends and many acquaintances who work at Valve. One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disag…
> The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity th…
>> The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly.
> Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.
What, their point is to encourage death-match power struggles? And that's their strength?
In nature, the fittest survive, but that's because nature is cruel (indifferent, actually). But a business must nurture its employees and make them feel safe – not send them into a battlefield.