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Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

where.coraline.codes

341–350 of 572 posts

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#341
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She went on a tirade against an Opal contributor a couple years back: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

It's pretty strange to read through that issue and come away thinking Coraline is the one with a problem.

Wait, so some person reads a twitter post of someone commenting on kids going through sexual reassignment surgery and how they consider it an issue.

They find a project they're associated with. They go on it's github repo and they start an issue with a title of "Transphobic maintainer should be removed from project". Not "Potentially transphobic maintainers and how their association with the project hurts it in the long run". Not even "My feelings were hurt after I interpreted some comment of one of the maintainers in some way, please let's discuss". No, they simply demanded removal of someone, based on an, at best, ambiguously "transphobic" twitter comment.

And you're here telling me that person isn't the one with the problem.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#342

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…

So suggest a public or concrete metric. Public github repos, for example.

Merits are important in engineering. If our merit measurements are low resolution, enhance them.

I don't care what team members look or sound like as long as they are good.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The thing is, at this point saying that there's discrimination and systemic bias should be about as controversial as saying that the earth orbits the sun. It's not something that should be responded to with a demand for sources, and the fact that it always is, and always devolves into people trying to shift the argument to whether there's even a problem at all (regardless of any one individual's reason for starting s…

[deleted]

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#344
post #258

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?

Nowhere do I say that I don't care at all about the quality of my staff. In fact I'm often told my hiring process is pretty rigorous.

What I am claiming is that work is generally done by teams and optimising for high performing and highly capable teams is not the same as optimising for high performing and highly capable individuals (my understanding of what most people mean by 'meritocracy').

It's not merely word games. I've observed poorly performing teams built entirely of highly capable people. That kind of dynamic can hobble a company.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm disgusted at her reflection that the question was transphobic, not that she commented on the difference. Whether the data scientist overreacted or not is irrelevant.

Calling a comment transphobic in no way implies that the speaker of that comment is transhpobic. It is a description of what's been said. The same way if someone was to say something that could possibly be construed as racist. If someone points that out and says hey that statement is racist, that's not calling that person racist. They might be. They might not, but that statement in and of itself implies no assertion…

>Calling a comment transphobic in no way implies that the speaker of that comment is transhpobic.

Then what does it imply, that the comment has a phobia of or holds hate for trans people?

If I call your post autistic, does that not imply I think less of you for making it?

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took it to indicate that she believes that she is getting so much 'feedback' specifically because of what she is and what she's trying to do. The fact that all of the people offering feedback were male is weak evidence in favour of this (consider that much of her immediate team is female). She offers as another piece of evidence that she compared notes with a colleague with a similar background who was male and who…

For purposes of neutrality, she shouldn't mention the gender or race of the reviewers. In many places that I have worked, I do not even know the ethnicity of my coworkers. As an aside, I am not white and honestly believe there is more to ethnicity than skin color.

She doesn't mention the race of the reviewers. That so many commenters seem to think she did probably indicates something but I'm not sure what.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> [My manager] went back to the issue of my lack of empathy in communications and collaboration. 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. She went on to say that I was not fulfilling my responsibiliti…

On the face of it your point seems to be entirely reasonable. The problem is that we only have one side of the story here, and it's extremely unlikely we'll ever hear or read the other side. Clearly there have been some pretty serious problems but I don't feel comfortable root-causing them based off an account from a single individual.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#349
post #274

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 co…

> 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!)

You can of course be involuntarily confined in California for over 72 hours. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80...

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#350
This gave me flashbacks to my experiences at a couple of places, and I really feel for Coraline. These kinds of experiences seem to happen very disproportionately to minorities with strong opinions (aka folks who aren't just going to grin and take it) so naturally some of the comments here aren't surprising, until you've gone through it, none of it makes sense. So naturally most people will side with the company, thats just what happens.

For me, it was these random things that would come up very suddenly seemingly from out of nowhere. Some one would have 'complained' about something. The thing would be completely ridiculous, and my manager could never tell me exactly what I should have done to fix it, but it would be a problem. One time I was told I was "unavailable to my team", even though we had slack and nobody had tried to contact me and failed or had even gotten a delayed response.

In another situation I had been having problems with 2 specific team members (couldn't handle any kind of feedback that wasn't completely onboard with their amazing ideas), and in the same exact week, my boss said (and this is a quote) ... "the problem may be that you are TOO good at your job", I got a merit based raise (after just 6 months there), and at the end of the week I was put on a PIP and told I had "no future" at the company. Hows that for consistency and your manager working to help you. lol.

The part that is absolutely maddening though?

That same communication style that everyone acts like is a huge problem. Some people get to talk like that to anyone at anytime in pretty much the same way in the same company you're at ... direct, pointed and directly opposed to some idea, sometimes even rudely. But when you do it as a minority (sans the rudeness), its a problem. I remember one Engineer, losing his shit because our company had decided to pay for only part of our parking in our new downtown location. He raised his voice, and he cussed in addressing a SENIOR FEMALE HR executive that was seated in the meeting, full of people. Nothing happened to him. If I'd tried something like that, I'd have been out of there in 1 week flat. That's the kind of double standard you have to just accept as a minority in tech, and I think its absolute trash.

Long story short, this stuff is real, it happens and its absolutely bullshit. It makes you feel like you are going batshit CRAZY (I'm an athlete, and at one point during one of these being-managed-out episodes, my blood pressure hit 140. thats hypertensive) ... and like I've alluded to before, I wouldn't be shocked if something like this played a role in that Uber engineer's suicide a few months back, because it can really wreak havoc with your mental state and sense of self if you don't have a good support system and/or therapist.

The key is to remember, you're not perfect, be humble and fix what you can, but also remember that lots of people and companies are full of shit, and quite often (especially if you're from a minority group in tech), its not you, its them that are fucked up, despite people on HN doubting your every move and intention.

Also always find a manager that will take a bullet for you, and if you're put on a PIP and you know its bullshit, just leave, don't suffer the indignity and mental anguish of getting shit on for weeks, all the way to a crappy severance if you can help it.

Cheers and Good Luck Coraline!

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