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Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

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Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#231

Post by pyre »

eqdw wrote: post #213
pyre wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engineer…

I'm reading between the lines a lot, and therefore am probably wrong, but I suspect what happened was one of the two following scenarios: 1. (Less likely) She did a lot of work, but it was not high priority work. It was good engineering but on things that the company did not consider important. She was given this freedom and then, in the company's eyes (fairly or unfairly) considered to have wasted it. 2. (More likel…

  > This could be because she is an unpleasant person, or because they are
  > unpleasant people, or it could be an honest misunderstanding or personality
  > conflict, but in every case it detracts from the productivity of everyone,
  > generally.
This could also become a "Tyranny of the Majority" type situation though. If all of the other people are unpleasant, and they are being unpleasant because the new hire is a minority, then the company's easiest course of action (i.e. fire the one person rather than fire the many) becomes oppressive and enabling.

I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case here, but the behaviour of "well let's just fire this one person, no matter who was in the wrong" is only good from a "anything for the company's bottomline" perspective.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#232

Post by roguecoder »

opportune wrote: post #226
roguecoder wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those consequences are only present for women or people of color: white men don't take the same reputation hit for promoting diversity and fairness: https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-f...

Sorry, could you clarify what you mean by "those consequences"?

For women and people of color, supporting diversity was found to have a negative impact on how effective they were perceived to be, lowering performance ratings and reducing the chance of promotion. The same wasn't true for white men, so even though white dudes weren't rewarded for it, we can support marginalized people without sacrificing our careers.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#233

Post by roguecoder »

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…

If you are put on a PIP and hold out for severance, in exchange for not writing this kind of post you can at least get a pretty nice vacation out of it.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#234

Post by drewrv »

eqdw wrote: post #214
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators. I wish we could have discussions like this in the wider community without people going knee-jerk against the idea of it, itself. I'd be willing to accept that a lot of companies here are nepotistic. I'd even be willing to accept that they cloak their nepotism in the rhetoric of meri…

Your comment reminds me of a story I heard on NPR a while back, about an effort to reclaim the word "jihad". Basically, jihad is a concept of struggling or striving for something worthwhile but most Americans only hear the word coming from the mouths of horrible people.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/268598-struggle-reclaim-word-jihad...

I think the word meritocracy is in a similar situation. It's an interesting and useful concept, but the word tends to get thrown around by people you probably don't want to get associated with or confused with, so if you want to be heard and understood maybe try a different word.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#235

Post by ubernostrum »

dropstickle wrote: post #187
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have any sources on this bias in tech? Genuinely curious.

If you're curious, consider doing research on the subject rather than asking people to re-litigate the whole thing from first principles every time the topic comes up. It gets exhausting because most people operate from a position of "a belief that there is no significant bias/significant effect from bias is the correct default assumption unless/until someone demonstrates otherwise through overwhelming evidence". And each individual person expects the whole thing to be proven for them from scratch each time.

Instead you could do some research on your own and find the information that's out there.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#236

Post by RangerScience »

openmosix wrote: post #157
RangerScience wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> she dismisses PRs or code reviews because made by white males. I didn't see this and can't find it. Can you point me at where this happens?

[...] For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written. [...] Shortly after this happened to me, the code review feature was prioritized. This functionality was rolled out internally pretty quickly. From that point on I didn't get dogpiled anymore [...] Re: who cares if they were all male? If I open a PR…

@kybernetikos definitely already said it, but to be clear:

That doesn't sound like she dismissed the PRs, or that she dismissed them for gender reasons, and there's no mention of race anywhere in there.

> if a colleague would say... wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?

Yes, yes it would. I'd look at the feedback, the thing receiving feedback, and then go ask the people who gave the feedback. Then I'd probably circle back around to the colleague for more information, because clearly, something is wrong, but from just that information? Cannot tell what.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#237

Post by Jare »

eqdw wrote: post #214
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators. I wish we could have discussions like this in the wider community without people going knee-jerk against the idea of it, itself. I'd be willing to accept that a lot of companies here are nepotistic. I'd even be willing to accept that they cloak their nepotism in the rhetoric of meri…

If the idea sounds great and is arguably great on all accounts, but in practice proves to not work, time and time again, perhaps the idea needs to be parked until the environment is fixed. Otherwise, arguing about it becomes a distraction while, in its corrupted form, the idea actively damages the things it should be improving.

So you just say "don't do >" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#238

Post by throw201707 »

badcede wrote: post #203
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…

Have a look at this, by the guy who invented the word. Maybe it'll change your mind like it did mine. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

That's really interesting!

I'm not sure whether this is sufficient to convince me to stop using the term "meritocracy" — the term is already ingrained in popular usage, irrespective of its provenance, and quite nice in that the word conveys the idea behind it relatively well, so I'm not sure whether the baggage associated with it is sufficiently toxic to justify dropping it.

As for the idea of meritocracy, at least in the narrow sense of selecting people based on their (potential) skills and abilities, I don't really see any better alternatives. The issues of social stratification, lack of inter-generational mobility, unequal access to education, income inequality and self-satisfaction are very severe, but with the partial exception of the last one, I don't agree that they're exacerbated by meritocracy (and regarding the last one, people will always find a reason to be self-satisfied/self-congratulatory).

The problem of political representatives not actually being representative of the population as a whole is indeed worrying. Perhaps sortition [0] might work (???). (If sortition were shown to be functional and implemented, but "meritocracy" continued to be used everywhere else, then meritocracy would become a terrible misnomer...)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

As an aside, assuming that the word "meritocracy" was coined in a book satirising the concept, as stated in the article (as well as wikipedia), why did it start being used in a positive sense?

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#239

Post by ForHackernews »

roguecoder wrote: post #217
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…

Those consequences are only present for women or people of color: white men don't take the same reputation hit for promoting diversity and fairness: https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-f...

HBR also claims that "Diversity policies rarely make companies fairer, and they feel threatening to white men" https://hbr.org/2016/01/diversity-policies-dont-help-women-o...

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#240

Post by kybernetikos »

eqdw wrote: post #214
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators. I wish we could have discussions like this in the wider community without people going knee-jerk against the idea of it, itself. I'd be willing to accept that a lot of companies here are nepotistic. I'd even be willing to accept that they cloak their nepotism in the rhetoric of meri…

> Don't you want the best people, at least in principle?

Maybe not. In many situations you want the best team, and the best team is not necessarily the team that has the most top flight individual contributors.

The best teams I've been on seem stronger than the sum of their individual members, and I've definitely been on teams I rate less highly that had some very strong individual contributors.

Along these lines, I found this article interesting: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-mak...

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