Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#121

Post by thex10 » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 5:50 PM UTC

cloverich wrote: post #105

tyingq wrote: post #8

I've seen this a few times. People with a naturally terse way of communicating eventually end up offending someone with the power to retaliate.

This is a good point but I think under-discussed. Ultimately what separates a well intentioned person with terse communication, (perhaps) poor empathy skills (i.e. lots of programmers), etc, from an asshole, is intentions. If we could read minds, it would be easier. But we can't, so we read words (and facial expressions, when available). If those signals line up with "asshole", whether or not its true, the person wil…

Terse communication style seems like an awfully low bar to establish "asshole" to me.

(But then.. I have a terse style myself. But I'm glad we're discussing this.)

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#122

Post by rndmwlk » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 5:50 PM UTC

ivraatiems wrote: post #78

rndmwlk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it is possible that there is some sexism here in that I'm not confident a male employee at Github would ever be challenged over failing this communication standard. What leads you to this conclusion? Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence. > Al…

> Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence. It comes back to that implicit expectation. Something I've been bringing up a lot in this thread as I read the comments throughout it is that whether we consider somebody rude or not seems to depend a lot on a)…

>However, as an organization, Github can and should do better than that, and I think here that it did not.

Consider if the situations were reversed. What if some white male engineer was simply being terse in an email to her. Might she attribute it to rudeness, sexism, or transphobia? If the company fired the engineer would you be arguing that she should be a bit more charitable in her interpretations?

It can be very hard to capture the subtleties of spoken word in text form. The onus has pretty much always been on the individual to ensure they are being professional. I definitely think something is fishy here. It may very well be that Github has some serious issues, but the flip side of that coin (and Occam's razor) is that she sent out some rude emails and was fired.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#123

Post by MichaelBurge » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 5:51 PM UTC

thex10 wrote: post #102

MichaelBurge wrote: post #73

> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question." I Imagine this read to the survey writer like: "Hello, I'd like to complain about your use of the term Linux on the corporate intranet. A page provides instructions for running the data parsing scripts "on Linux". Si…

I mean, I see the point you're trying to make. But that error could be pretty damning in the context of a detailed survey about, like, operating systems and their utilities. In that case, wouldn't you expect to survey writer to know those details, or at least not completely lose their shit when told about them from someone who knows more about the topic?

We don't know the purpose of the survey, but it's described as an "open source developer survey". I imagine gender was thrown in because, hey maybe the women use vim and the men use emacs for some reason, and that's kind of interesting to know.

I briefly checked the Stack Overflow survey as a comparison: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#124

Post by erikpukinskis » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 5:52 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #37

I fear this blog post was more revealing than its author intended.

Your comment is too.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#125

Post by openmosix » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 5:53 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #49

The main thing I've taken away from the whole github situation is that, as a tech company, you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. That doesn't mean exclusively hiring white men and sending out Kalanick-style emails; it means keeping your work environment as professional and politically neutral as possible unless absolutely necessary. My employer does a good job of thi…

Reading the full article, it strikes me how you can be "inclusive" if you are constantly highlighting the differences. The fact, for example, she dismisses PRs or code reviews because made by white males. Or the blog post on her first deliverable, rewritten by a white male. I don't see what could be the benefit to point that out in every sentence: that all of that is made in malice because of gender and race?

If I had a white male colleague who would constantly point out - in a work environment - that a PR should be dismissed because made by a woman or that a deliverable sucks because made by a black guy, I would not tolerate that behavior for a second. I don't get why the opposite should be considered "inclusion and safety".

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#126

Post by faizmokhtar » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 5:53 PM UTC

puranjay wrote: post #15

tyingq wrote: post #8

I've seen this a few times. People with a naturally terse way of communicating eventually end up offending someone with the power to retaliate.

I know it sounds like a joke, but I've taken to using a lot of exclamation marks in my communication lately for this very reason. It feels dumb to me but I know for a fact that some people who are quick to take offense ease when they see it.

Yeah, I always tried to include an emoji at the end of my messages just so that it won't be interpret differently.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#127

Post by specialist » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 5:55 PM UTC

s73ver wrote: post #91

vdnkh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was also the line that stuck out to me. I've had some personal experiences with coworkers in my recent career that has turned me on to issues of harassment in the workplace; I understood the issues before, but it wasn't until it affected someone close did I actually care. As I've been more involved I've seen how fast those active in making workplaces safer/more inclusive outpace those who merely empathize and un…

But... she didn’t. She pointed out that the question was a bad one, and that the question itself (not the writer of the question, just the question) was transphobic. Further, she provided the straightforward, no none sense feedback that most people here advocate for, especially when the issues of someone like Linus’ gruffness and straight up meanness comes up. Here we have a story of someone doing just that, without…

Whatever the perceived tone, what Caroline didn't do was suggest improvements, provide examples. It was a teachable moment.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#128

Post by throwaway8800 » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 5:55 PM UTC

There's a couple of issues that stand out to me: Github is engaging in risky behaviour by reaching out to individuals (specifically activists) for hire explicitly on the basis of "diversity" and trying to incorporate those individuals in a highly merit-based environment.

Secondly, Coraline seems to think that human relationships are a one way street: that she is entitled to be direct and even confrontational or insensitive, especially if she believes she is "right" or in a "mentor" role, and yet her peers are expected to walk on eggshells around her, lest they be accused of attacking her.

One part that stood out as particularly odd was her insistence to stay at work while she was suffering with a mental health issue that was clearly affecting her job performance, in spite of her manager's request that she take mental health leave. It sounds like she just flat out ignored her manager under the assumption that her manager just needed to accept whatever her therapist advised her to do, which is kind of ridiculous on the face of it.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#129

Post by pc86 » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 5:55 PM UTC

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #75

problems wrote: post #12

Isn't this the person who ran a code of conduct that has a website which includes things like "thoughtless use of pronouns" and mentions meritocracy as an evil, not a goal to strive for? Can't really say I'm expecting someone like that to be low friction.

Meritocracy is actually a very damaging thing, the way we tend to implement it in tech. Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators. Particularly in tech, those biases tend to favor white, upper middle class, males. This kind of bias is demonstrated over and over in studies, even (and in some cases, especially) among people who…

So fix the implementation. Rather than say "well there's not a lot of brown people contributing to this JS package so we need to get some more" why not fix the way the mentioned biases (which I agree 100% exist) are affecting how merit is decided?

The idea that the best way to fix biases in favor of wealthy white men is to add new biases against wealthy white men is crazy.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#130

Post by ivraatiems » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 5:56 PM UTC

rndmwlk wrote: post #122

ivraatiems wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence. It comes back to that implicit expectation. Something I've been bringing up a lot in this thread as I read the comments throughout it is that whether we consider somebody rude or not seems to depend a lot on a)…

>However, as an organization, Github can and should do better than that, and I think here that it did not. Consider if the situations were reversed. What if some white male engineer was simply being terse in an email to her. Might she attribute it to rudeness, sexism, or transphobia? If the company fired the engineer would you be arguing that she should be a bit more charitable in her interpretations? It can be very…

> Consider if the situations were reversed. What if some white male engineer was simply being terse in an email to her. Might she attribute it to rudeness, sexism, or transphobia? If the company fired the engineer would you be arguing that she should be a bit more charitable in her interpretations?

These are good questions, and I don't know the answers. I'd like to tell you how I'd react, but I think given the current context it'd be hard for me to do so without my opinion of this whole thread coloring my answer.

> It can be very hard to capture the subtleties of spoken word in text form. The onus has pretty much always been on the individual to ensure they are being professional. I definitely think something is fishy here. It may very well be that Github has some serious issues, but the flip side of that coin (and Occam's razor) is that she sent out some rude emails and was fired.

What I'll say is this: I can see how her comments could be perceived as rude, or "unempathetic." I cannot see how - especially at Github, a place not known for cultural sensitivity - they were firable. I think there is a double/triple/quadruple standard going on here where people are, without even realizing it, passing their opinions of somebody through ideological blinders. I think this issue may be part of a core problem with Github's culture.