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I get that this post is likely to have a large degree of conflict in the comments, but I think it belongs here.
I can see it either way, honestly. I think the issues raised are worth discussing here. I don't know that the post itself is.
Am I reading this correctly? Fired for lack of empathetic communication? Is that really a thing?
"Give me a man, I'll find a paragraph for them." Old Polish [0] saying, back from the days when Poland was a communist country. [0] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dajcie_mi_cz%C5%82owieka,_a_pa...
Dzienkuje
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…
I think many social activists, esp. those I see on social media, could use a heavy dose of this kind of thinking. People are human, humans make mistakes, and most people I run into in life are too busy with their own affairs to always be perfectly conscious about their words and actions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it sexism when the one who reported her and the manager herself is a female employee?
It's completely possible for a woman to behave in a sexist way towards another woman. There's an argument about whether one can be sexist against men (or racist against white people, etc.) that has to do with how the terms are defined, but I don't think that applies here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm disgusted at her reflection that the question was transphobic, not that she commented on the difference. Whether the data scientist overreacted or not is irrelevant.
It's not irrelevant because it's the reason she was fired, and hence the reason the post exists. The fact that you disagree with her assertion about the question seems to be the irrelevant thing to me.
"The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication." I'm all for being compassionate and helping people through tough times, but does this sound like a stable person?
If you're ever put on a PIP, get out -- it's a sign someone in the company doesn't want you there. I've never heard of a PIP working out and both the company and employee being happy -- maybe you only hear about the bad cases, but a PIP often seems to me like a cover your ass plan on the part of the company. They want to get rid of a person, but they're afraid of getting sued, so a PIP is a way to document why a pers…
> This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why. Because sometimes it's a genuine desire for someone who is a good cultural fit to improve. > If you're ever put on a PIP, get out -- it's a sign someone in the company doesn't want you there. I've put folks on PIPs before (we don't call them that and we're much more straightforward about it t…
I don't see what's wrong with meritocracy as opposed to an unspecified "management system".
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> Feature releases such as these are frequently promoted on the GitHub blog, and the product manager on my team encouraged me to write a post announcing what I had shipped. Since it was so important to me personally, I wrote an impassioned piece talking about how this feature closed a security gap that had directly affected and provided an abuse vector against me. The post also served as an announcement to the world of the new team and the kinds of problems that we were charged with solving.
>
> The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone of what I had written was too personal and didn't reflect the voice of the company. The reviewer insisted that any mention of the abuse vector that this feature was closing be removed. In the midst of my discussions with the editorial team, trying to reach a compromise, a (male) engineer from another team completely rewrote the blog post and published it without talking to me.
GitHub was correct here. Feature announcements on the company blog should remain neutral in tone. In addition, the published feature announcement seems to mention the motivations behind the feature quite well:
> Previously, anyone could automatically add other developers to their repositories without explicit permission. This model openly provided some users with opportunities to harass members of our community by inviting them to offensive or attention-seeking repositories.
So, it was rewritten to a neutral explanation of why this feature is a benefit to those who have had experiences like that of the author.
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> In addition to my development work, I had started weekly mentoring sessions with one of my teammates (a recent boot camp graduate) on Ruby and Rails fundamentals that she had not been exposed to in her program. When I talked to my manager about how she was progressing, I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to "learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you." I was mystified: mentoring is an essential part of being a senior engineer, and this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it.
No quote was given from the manager telling the author to stop mentoring entirely, just that they wanted the _formal_ mentoring to stop (by formal, I assume it to mean it was initiated by the author, not the student). It's possible the manager's intention was as quoted: to see how this "recent boot camp graduate" was able to grow on her own.
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> I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake, and sadly opened an issue referencing the question.
This has a presumptuous tone to it.
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> The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication. When I reached out to my therapist for help, she recommended that I go to the emergency room. This was the start of an eight day ordeal involving involuntary commitment to a mental health facility. I shared this experience on Twitter and won't rehash it here, but suffice it to say that I was severely traumatized by what happened to me in the hospital.
I read the "experience on Twitter". It sounds to me that the author's judgement was impaired (re: the author's self-described overdose of anti-anxiety medication) and the hospital/psychiatrist believed they were enough of a risk to themselves to warrant admitting them as a patient.
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> Thursday and Friday were not good days. I had a lot of trouble focusing. I was making simple mistakes and in some cases doing the wrong work. Friday afternoon I reached out to my boss to tell her that I was having trouble and that I didn't know what to do. She suggested that I take medical leave, but I told her what my therapist had said about the importance of getting back to normal life. My manager was adamant that if I couldn't work at full capacity that I had no choice but to take medical leave.
> ...
> The following week I had scheduled conferences to attend, so my focus on work was put on hold.
> ...
> After the meeting I messaged her and shared the more personal aspects of what I was going through, the trauma that I had experienced in the hospital and its lingering effects on my mental health. I was told that I should have accepted the offer of medical leave, and she said she felt like I was trying to manipulate her by sharing my feelings in the hopes of influencing the PIP. I was dismayed.
The author "had a lot of trouble focusing". It was recommended multiple times that she take medical leave. Instead, the author's "focus on work was put on hold" in order to attend conferences. I'm as suspicious of PIPs as much as the next person, but this seems pretty cut-and-dry to me as unsatisfactory work performance.
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Regarding the firing on grounds of lack of empathetic communication, perhaps it was related to why this person was hired in the first place?
> They wanted to offer me a job. They had just created a team called Community & Safety, charged with making GitHub more safe for marginalized people and creating features for project owners to better manage their communities.
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> I think back on the lack of options I was given in response to my mental health situation and I see a complete lack of empathy.
As stated above, they provided the option of medical leave. The author chose not to take it.
> In the past several months GitHub has fired at least three transgender engineers and many more cisgender women.
Why were they fired? How many others were fired in the past several months? What's the ratio there?
> In a return to its meritocratic roots, the company has decided to move forward with a merit-based stock option program despite criticism from employees who tried to point out its inherent unfairness.
Again, what's unfair about rewarding based on merit? Should people who contribute relatively little compared to others get just as much reward? Why would the higher-performers bother to burden themselves in that case?
> So yes, in looking back over my year at GitHub I see that there was, in fact, a real problem with empathy.
>
> But that problem wasn't mine.
So in the end, the author seems to absolve themselves of responsibility. This shows a lack of growth; in my opinion you should _always_ try to fault yourself if you're going to fault others.
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…
The way things fell apart when that cocoon was breached -- both from within and without -- was entirely predictable.
How was this supposed to work in the first place? What did they hope to accomplish with this design?
There must be better designs for these sorts of initiatives, right? What are Microsoft, Apple, or Google doing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not irrelevant because it's the reason she was fired, and hence the reason the post exists. The fact that you disagree with her assertion about the question seems to be the irrelevant thing to me.
No, it is irrelevant. The fact that the incident got her fired is a failing with GitHub's management and dearth of communication. Playing the victim card and shitting on the data scientist is misguided.