Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#161

Post by microtherion » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 6:41 PM UTC

throw201707 wrote: post #70

This is not a comment on the experiences described in the article, but it makes me extremely sad that the word "meritocratic/meritocracy" is used pejoratively, almost as if it were damning in itself. To me, meritocracy is something to be cherished, being far preferable to the systems that came before it, and being inherently anti -discriminatory. (Yes, people's hardships which prevent them achieving their full potent…

Whenever I hear appeals to "meritocracy", I'm reminded of this anecdote (http://www.bradford-delong.com/2009/09/republicans-to-the-ma...):

  I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an   
  eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a 
  guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with 
  Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

  The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief 
  of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving 
  recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at 
  Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an 
  undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat 
  Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got 
  William an internship at the White House; how he talked to 
  friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and  
  secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and  
  how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach 
  at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

  With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving 
  what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving 
  replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.'

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#162

Post by pyre » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 6:42 PM UTC

thatswrong0 wrote: post #133

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…

> assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them. 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.

Well, the other issue is that if they are constantly barraged by trolls trying to offend them on social media (just because they find offending people to be funny), then it could be more of a "if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail" situation.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#163

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 6:44 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #127

s73ver wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Seems to me she directly suggested the improvement, after explaining both the reason the existing version was bad and the reason the improvement was better (the two reasons being the same):

Quoting directly from the issue she raised, which was not merely quoted but emphasized as a pull-quote in the article: “‘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.”

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#164

Post by Diamons » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 6:44 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…

The main takeaway should be a company has one obligation to you: a job to do and money to be paid. You as an adult bring your services to fix the problem in exchange for said compensation. Personal tesponbility is everything and Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired and removed from any workplace where they act as a menace to their coworkers.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#165

Post by Diamons » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 6:44 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…

The main takeaway should be a company has one obligation to you: a job to do and money to be paid. You as an adult bring your services to fix the problem in exchange for said compensation. Personal tesponbility is everything and Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired and removed from any workplace where they act as a menace to their coworkers.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#166

Post by Diamons » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 6:44 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…

The main takeaway should be a company has one obligation to you: a job to do and money to be paid. You as an adult bring your services to fix the problem in exchange for said compensation. Personal tesponbility is everything and Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired and removed from any workplace where they act as a menace to their coworkers.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#167

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 6:44 PM UTC

rjbwork wrote: post #84

mattbillenstein wrote: post #47

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…

Guy on my team at my last company was - he was non-technical, but was in charge of looking at raw data and finding discrepancies and things we could write code to fix on an ongoing basis as he was a domain expert. He had a rough time with technical topics, and so part of his PIP, as I understand it, was to become basically proficient in using SQL to query, and understand the basics of RDBMS. He did so, and was remove…

[deleted]

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#168

Post by cholantesh » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 6:46 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #97

dsr_ wrote: post #46

" The next day I got an urgent request for a call with my manager. She told me that the data scientist who had written the survey questions was very upset and had gone to her manager to complain about me. I asked my manager what had happened to upset her and was told that it was the feedback I provided on the gender question. I read back to her the body of the issue that I had opened and asked what I should have done…

Here's Coraline's feedback, from the article: "'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." For contrast, this reminds me of Gene Wilder's feedback about his Willy Wonka costume: https://www.bustle.com/articles/181340-this-letter-gene-wild... I now try to emulate…

Was there really something wrong with that phrasing? How would you improve it? Genuinely curious; I think I'd have phrased it the same way (though at every place I've worked we'd have done a review like this face to face), and I find it pretty non-confrontational.

Enjoyed the letter you shared. Gene is truly missed.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#169

Post by foota » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 6:46 PM UTC

thehardsphere wrote: post #131

foota wrote: post #107

I get that this post is likely to have a large degree of conflict in the comments, but I think it belongs here.

Ehh... 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.

While it may seem like semantics, I think discussing the issues raised by the post is more or less discussing the post.

I would go so far as to say that explicitly discarding the context of the post as many are doing is rude and ironically lacking in empathy. How can we say that the issues raised by something are worth discussing while simultaneously putting down the post?

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#170

Post by pyre » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 6:49 PM UTC

thehardsphere wrote: post #142

throwaway8800 wrote: post #128

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 insen…

This one way street also extends to the way Coraline's accomplishments at GitHub are presented in the article. There's all of this talk about all of the code she pushed and all of the popular features she wrote, but there's no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured, e.g. what her management was expecting her to do. So when the negative review is mentione…

You're saying:

> no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured

But per the blog post:

> Based on the positive feedback from my one-on-ones and how well I was tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level, I was hopeful of getting a promotion and a raise.

I'm confused as to how one could be "tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level" but not be measured by those metrics.