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Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

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Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#291

Post by tomjen3 »

jdboyd wrote: post #255
kevintb wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are so sadly mistaken to think that you can "stay away from social justice sphere". Taking the example of a survey question in the blog post, > What is your gender?" The multiple-choice options were "Male", "Female", and "Transgender" What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case? I would think, at the very least, an "Other" field would be a 1000x imp…

Politically neutral would be to not ask the question at all.

exactly. It is also in line with the idea of a meritocracy.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#292

Post by acjohnson55 »

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…

I don't necessarily agree with this. This can be true in a place where management is poor at coaching and development, or simply wants to cover their asses. But at its best, it can serve as a way to add explicitness where implicit assumptions of expectations aren't working out.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#293

Post by patrickfreed »

myko wrote: post #79
azinman2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The maintainers instant reply was super flippant and worthy of retort. Never really wanted to use opal before, but if this is who is behind it...

Wow. That particular maintainer is really off the deep end - here is their writeup on the incident (which is pretty fucked up reading IMO): http://meh.schizofreni.co/random/lulz/2016/01/08/tales-from-...

well that's really shitty.

I read about the first 50 replies or so and found myself agreeing with the 'meh' user, but after reading that blog post, it seems aredridel was on to something...

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#294

Post by foobiekr »

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…

As a manager and employee this has also been my experience. it was even raised that effectively no employee survives a PIP due to the deliberate treatment of compensation (such as bonuses, which are immediately zeroed out) in the mandatory manager training by people who had been managers for 12, 15 years, much to the chagrin of the presenter from HR.

In the company I work for now, we genuinely try and recover people and we don't call it a PIP. But that is the exception for my personal experience over 20 years.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#295

Post by jghn »

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…

I've seen it work out once. I used it as a voice of hope to other people I knew on PIPs for a long while until the numbers kept adding up over the years. 1 out of 3 doesn't seem so bad. 1 out of 20 or so, them's not good odds.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#296

Post by tootie »

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've known people all up and down the spectrum of "curt" and you just have to reset your expectations. I have coworkers who talk like this all the time whether they are actually grumpy or not. I just try to act according to how I feel I should and try not to reflect whatever I'm getting from them.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#297

Post by hosh »

pyre wrote: post #227
thehardsphere wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess the other issue is why was the review happening 4 months after the period ended, especially if they had started working on improvements in the meantime. What was the point of all that work / those improvements, if they were just going to ignore it because it wasn't in the "correct period?" Shouldn't the review have happened closer to the end of the period, so that all of that progress could be part of improve…

There's a book (I can't recall the name) written by a former HR professional on the actual function of HR in a corporation: a way to mitigate liability when firing people. That seems like the most plausible scenario given what I am reading from this blog post. If you were going to fire a well-known activist and you did not want to give away any ammunition for getting sued, there's a whole song and dance to make sure it happens. This way, you can be fired for legal reasons rather than the real reason.

I'm obviously taking a cynical take on this -- there are lots of organizations that try to use performance reviews to help an employee's career, and HR that is there to help the employees, not to bail the company out of litigation.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#298

Post by tptacek »

the_watcher wrote: post #272
tptacek wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the same kind of thing as "never accept a counteroffer from your current employer", but with a much higher epistemological certainty level. Both are self-fulfilling to some extent. That doesn't make is 100% true, but it does make it the kind of hand you bet strongly on.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#299

Post by TheLilHipster »

myko wrote: post #79
azinman2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The maintainers instant reply was super flippant and worthy of retort. Never really wanted to use opal before, but if this is who is behind it...

Wow. That particular maintainer is really off the deep end - here is their writeup on the incident (which is pretty fucked up reading IMO): http://meh.schizofreni.co/random/lulz/2016/01/08/tales-from-...

Eh, it's only brass if you don't get "lulz" humor/culture.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#300

Post by rnprince »

How many large tech companies decide to fire programmers because they communicate directly? For male programmers, that's actually a stereotype.

The reason they gave for firing her is just bizarre, making me wonder if there was a different reason that they didn't want to admit.

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