Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#331

Post by kybernetyk » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 5:41 AM UTC

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #75

problems wrote: post #12

Isn't this the person who ran a code of conduct that has a website which includes things like "thoughtless use of pronouns" and mentions meritocracy as an evil, not a goal to strive for? Can't really say I'm expecting someone like that to be low friction.

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…

>Meritocracy is actually a very damaging thing

I got a new computer. Where news.ycombinator.com hasn't been set to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts yet. So I wanted to check what changed in the last year or so...

And your post reminded me why I stopped visiting here. Thanks.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#332

Post by spraak » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 5:43 AM UTC

TaizWeb wrote: post #330

>tell data scientist their poll is flawed because it only includes "transgender" instead of "transgender female" and that makes them transphobic. >data scientist is upset and tells management. >management tells you to stop being a jerk. >proceed to be toxic in all your PRs and on Slack. >management tells you to stop being a jerk. >they put you under review. >start getting emotional and say you have emotional trauma.…

Besides all that drama, being sensitive to gender is important and awesome.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#333

Post by ninjaboy2 » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 5:44 AM UTC

acobster wrote: post #305

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 was right, and as a senior engineer she was in a mentor role. I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight. Where you see an instance of her co-workers being accused of attack…

To play devil's advocate:

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> As a senior engineer she was in a mentor role.

Being in a mentor role does not mean you have to right to mentor. Assuming you have a superior position, and deciding to use it to explain something obvious to someone else as "educating" them is not a good social interaction for the other person, and may make them feel trapped and uncomfortable. The author never said the junior developer expressed interest in mentorship, merely that "this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it." Not willing engaged, but "benefiting." Without context, it is imaginable that said mentoree didn't want these interactions or this relationship and the author never identified this social cue.

> I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight.

The article starts by complaining about "drive-by issue comments", then described opening what might be considered a drive-by issue. That could be construed as contradictory. Moreover, said issue may be construed as a (company-)public dressing-down. A developer came though and, in a public manner observable by all their peers, informed another that they were not being sensitive enough. It's reasonable, I think, to be upset in that context.

> A simple one-on-one conversation probably could have resolved that situation very easily, but GH management seems in this case to have insulated that person from learning from their mistake

The author could have initiated such a conversation herself in lieu of the issue.

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My point is that a lot of things are a matter of perception, and one person's is seldom the whole story. Caroline clearly had a bad go of it at GitHub, that isn't deniable. But individuals' perceptions are fickle things, and it is seldom the case that any one tells the whole story.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#334

Post by HelloWorldInWS » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 5:44 AM UTC

sethrin wrote: post #314

pfooti wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could imagine just putting a text entry field for gender, so as to not other any gender identity that doesn't align with the male-female binary. One could also imagine putting other fields in for respondents to self-identify as trans, should they want. That said, it seems a very neutral approach to gender self-reporting is self-defeating (consider that, at least for bathroom laws in some US states), the very noti…

Right, the problem of the gender binary is that it never existed. What we have is trans-erasure. More generally it seems to me to prove that, with respect to Mr Burke, all that is necessary for evil to be done to a person is for good people to do nothing.

This isn't _entirely_ accurate. Gender binary may be an oversimplification or diminutive concept, but the idea that it "never existed" is a little extreme. It would almost be like saying religion never really existed because it's a figment of human imagination. In that sense, sure, binary genders are a bandaid over a complex subject, but it does exist. In fact, it is quite literally birthed from the genesis of more than a few religious ideologies. It exists just as much as the religions that buy into them exist.

Anyway back on topic:

Open field text boxes come with a practical cost of being much more difficult to aggregate, and let's be honest, the gender data is probably not important enough for GitHub to expend too much energy on. The more costly you make the data to mine, the less likely that the data will be used effectively.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#335

Post by nathanasmith » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 5:45 AM UTC

eropple wrote: post #192

pc86 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people who generally push for that "meritocracy" are the ones who benefit from it not being fixed in the first place .

Does the converse not slip just as easily off the tongue?

> The people who generally push against that "meritocracy" are the ones who benefit from it not being implemented in the first place.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#336

Post by TaizWeb » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 5:48 AM UTC

spraak wrote: post #332

TaizWeb wrote: post #330

>tell data scientist their poll is flawed because it only includes "transgender" instead of "transgender female" and that makes them transphobic. >data scientist is upset and tells management. >management tells you to stop being a jerk. >proceed to be toxic in all your PRs and on Slack. >management tells you to stop being a jerk. >they put you under review. >start getting emotional and say you have emotional trauma.…

Besides all that drama, being sensitive to gender is important and awesome.

yes, we should be sensitive to it, but let's say this story came from a straight white man. if you were github, would you want someone toxic working for you? someone who's accused someone of being transphobic over a form they made? someone who's toxic in Slack with all the other members? someone who starts writing bad code (failing at their own job)? no, you wouldn't. just because someone's a minority doesn't give them the right to be treated above others. it's a little something called equality.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#337

Post by kaosjester » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 5:49 AM UTC

RangerScience wrote: post #145

The experience she relates reminds me a hell of a lot of the way my previous job ended, which amounted to a handful of offended people uninterested in (directly) talking, and (my direct) management largely uninterested in reconciliation / facilitating. All of the problems she relates are with people who are not directly communicating with her, usually after she's directly communicating with them. Whereas, according t…

To be fair, GitHub is large enough that they'll have a dozen applicants by the time you're out the door. If resolving a problem is harder than firing part of it, well... that's the layer cake.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#338

Post by spraak » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 5:52 AM UTC

briholt wrote: post #17

djohnston wrote: post #3

Should I assume that all characters not parenthetically emphasized as male are female?

Are the parenthetical males all cis or do transmen earn that badge as well?

You're grossly uninformed about what that means. And if you do know and you're just trolling, you're disgusting

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#339

Post by pdonis » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 5:57 AM UTC

HelloWorldInWS wrote: post #328

nojvek wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why so much sugarcoating? Because empathy is important to communicating effectively. You're looking at the words, but you're not looking at phrasing and tone, which are just as important. Try this exercise: read the sentence out loud to yourself. Taking a line out of Myers-Briggs, does it sound more perceptive or judging, to you, when read aloud? To me it sounds judging, as if Coraline already has pre-conceived not…

> empathy is important to communicating effectively.

Yes, but that applies just as well to the data scientist--who, when she saw this comment, didn't do what any reasonable person would do and call up/message/whatever the coworker who made the comment and straighten out any confusion/misunderstanding, but instead went right to her boss and complained. That should not be the first resort--it should be the last resort. A little empathy on the data scientist's part would have led to: "Hm, that seemed abrasive at first glance, but she does have a valid point..."

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#340

Post by pdonis » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 6:00 AM 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…

> I do get the impression from this kind of expose that she might be difficult to work with.

I get that impression as well, but I also get the impression that GitHub is a difficult place to work (from things like the data scientist going straight to her boss to complain, instead of trying to resolve any issue at the coworker level first, which is what would happen in a professional workplace).