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Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

where.coraline.codes

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Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#271

Post by the_watcher »

ubernostrum wrote: post #235
dropstickle wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The post asked for sources. Presumably to facilitate research. The post did not ask anyone to relitigate anything.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#272

Post by the_watcher »

tptacek wrote: post #195
DannyBee wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is super-cynical. If you want to get rid of them, you don't have to have success criteria at all. You could just document the behavior that makes them want to fire them ("you smell funny") and followups in an email, and call it a day after a week or so. Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an…

I don't think you're correct here. As I've understood the concept for something like a decade, PIPs are almost universally understood to be a soft form of firing. The correct response to receiving a PIP, probably in most SV companies, is to start looking for another job. It's easy to turn your own logic back around on you. Since it's a more-or-less open secret that most PIPs are part of managed termination, every com…

> The correct response to receiving a PIP, probably in most SV companies, is to start looking for another job.

While you are almost certainly correct about this, particularly from a pure risk mitigation standpoint, it's also somewhat self-fulfilling.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#273

Post by wutbrodo »

opportune wrote: post #110
erikpukinskis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere I suspect you will find yourself publicly involved in another kind of justice sphere by accident. That said, there is something to your hesitancy. I did a big part of my education in the social justice sphere, and while I believe in pretty much all of the core theories, in practice I don't think most activists have much of a pla…

I think the reason my employer is successful at recruiting women is actually precisely because they stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. You think that entails "giving up on that crew entirely", when in reality it does the exact opposite. I think a lot of women/transgender/POC employees don't want to be thought of as an X software developer, just to be thought of as a developer who happens…

> They've pissed off "broflakes"

What does this mean? I've never heard the term.

Tbh,i don't really understand the "brogrammer" thing either. I got my CS degree, then was at Google, and then the first employee at a tiny startup and none of those experiences gave me any inkling of what the brogrammer stereotype might be. Isn't the programmer stereotype literally the opposite of a "bro"?

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#274

Post by det0x »

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…

> 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.

>This was the first instance of what came to be referred to as my "non-empathetic communication style".

I like how she was pissed when she was "out victim-ed" HA!

I think you are right, employees like this have an bigger agenda they are focused on rather than doing work of the company.

And the fact that she says she has bipolar depression (and she was on involuntarily mental commitment for 8-days!?! A 5150 in California is 72-hours!) and yet she can't imagine why somebody would say she is not doing well at work, is also ridiculous on the face of it.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#275

Post by angelbob »

thehardsphere wrote: post #208
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…

That's addressed later by her boss: > I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count. So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period. Here's another question: Why were weekly one-on-o…

Weekly one-on-ones are pretty common in companies I've been part of, and GitHub has a lot of remote workers. Weekly one-on-ones seem more likely than not, in general.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#276

Post by notacoward »

pc86 wrote: post #129
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…

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.

> why not fix the way the mentioned biases

What if the biases are deep-rooted and subtle and difficult to address without destroying productivity with endless ceremony? What if the biases exist beyond that single organization's control, but still affect them? If the waves are pushing you in one direction, pointing your bow slightly in the opposite direction might really be the right thing to do.

> The idea that the best way...

Few think it's the best way. The problem is, eliminating systemic bias will take a long time. During that time, new victims of that bias will continue to be created. If the introduction of a contrary bias helps more people than it harms, is that really so crazy?

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#277

Post by s73ver »

eqdw wrote: post #258
kybernetikos wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Word games. "Best people" can mean the best team. I mean like honestly, if you don't care _in principle_ about the quality of your staff, how are you deciding who to hire?

Then define "Best". The problem is, you can't come up with an objective metric for it.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#278

Post by 6nf »

nojvek wrote: post #270
specialist wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hi cholantesh! Just saw your new survey. Looks great! Hey, have you seen the HRC's recommendations for surveying gender? I've used their guidelines in the past. Very helpful! http://www.hrc.org/resources/collecting-transgender-inclusiv... TLDR: They suggest splitting the gender question into two parts. As you know, this is a super important issue for me. Progress! Exciting! If you're busy, I'll make a pull request.…

Why so much sugarcoating? Feedback was straightforward. I didn't see any aggressive words. Most of out PRs are to the point. Sometimes the big problem I find is that in some companies people are just scared of each other that they fail to communicate. Best places where I worked: people were to the point, they had healthy debates even with strong opinions.

Some people need the sugar, some do not. It's not always easy to work out which is which so you may need to err on the side of caution until you know your co-workers better.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#279

Post by jdbernard »

s73ver wrote: post #277
eqdw wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word games. "Best people" can mean the best team. I mean like honestly, if you don't care _in principle_ about the quality of your staff, how are you deciding who to hire?

Then define "Best". The problem is, you can't come up with an objective metric for it.

I can't create a comprehensive definition for it, but I can identify many components that are objective and purely technical in nature:

* Able to clearly communicate technical concepts. Evidenced by seeing displaying in wiring logical ordering of thought, separation of complex pieces into smaller, less complicated, and clearly delineated pieces, effective and actuate command of technical vocabulary.

* Able to code. Evidenced by watching them code.

* Familiarity with the data structures and algorithmic approaches native to the problem domain. Evidenced by discussion around that domain, perhaps a psuedo-code exercise with a relevant problem paired with discussion of design tradeoffs of different approaches.

* Understanding of the cross-cutting concerns related to maintainable software: testing, documentation, modularity, etc. Evidenced by Socratic discussion of said topics. "Given this problem common to sustainable software development, what would you do/have you done?"

I still believe in the value of meritocracy. Actually pursuing meritocracy solves a lot of the inclusivity problems we think we have. The problem is that people are inherently biased and unless we are purposeful in accounting for these biases it is easy to weave then into any system you design, no matter what the name or started goals.

Doesn't change the value of an actual meritocracy. Just highlights one of the challenges of being human.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#280

Post by wutbrodo »

microtherion wrote: post #161
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 Q…

I'm sorry, but this is just stupid. You can take literally anyone who hypocritically asserts a belief in an ideal and use it to huffily dismiss the concept overall. And you can find such a person for literally any ideal.

For example, I could say: whenever I think of anti-racism, I think of [insert quote about someone who claims to be anti-racist and then says/does something racist]. Does that say anything about the concept of anti-racism itself? Or is it just irrelevant commentary about the fact that there are dishonest people claiming the mantle of every ideal while not living up to it?

Just because Irving Kristol is too dumb to understand the concept of meritocracy doesn't mean the concept is without merit.

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