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Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

where.coraline.codes

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Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#351

Post by fsloth »

pmiller2 wrote: post #306
hosh wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I believe the book you're referring to is called _Corporate Confidential_. People think I'm cynical when I talk about that book, but I've seen the scenarios you mention play out word for word multiple times.

Corporate confidential is fantastic. Everyone employed should read it. It's not about cynicism, it's about understanding the typical incentives and expectations driving the operations of a function affecting everyone in a typicsl large corp. I think the legal environment in US ups the ante thus incentivizing for wily maneuvers.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#352

Post by Sorreah »

invalidfunction wrote: post #265
roywiggins wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake, and sadly opened an issue referencing the question. The body of my issue read: > "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question." She was disappointed. She explained her problem with the survey in a non-judgmental way- "…

Sure, we just have to reword it - something like this may be less confrontational: > "Hi! I have a suggestion on question #14. I think we can improve this to be more inclusive by replacing the options w ith "male", "female", "gender queer" "non-binary", (...) Since transgender people may or may not associate with a gender, we have be a little careful when asking for a gender. Hope this helps!" When I write emails, I…

That's actually great advice.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#353

Post by [deleted] »

nunobrito wrote: post #184
DanBC wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was diagnosed with bi-polar Nice bit of stigma there.

Unfortunately one of my little brothers is bipolar and will soon turn 27 years old. It is awful, I love him so much and yet we are unable to help him more. If nobody in our family is there to talk with him immediately when he demands, then something drastic happens such as burning parts of his body (e.g. nipples) or anything that forces our attention to focus on him. Every week is a struggle, he dreams on becoming a…

[deleted]

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#354

Post by jdorfman »

nunobrito wrote: post #184
DanBC wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was diagnosed with bi-polar Nice bit of stigma there.

Unfortunately one of my little brothers is bipolar and will soon turn 27 years old. It is awful, I love him so much and yet we are unable to help him more. If nobody in our family is there to talk with him immediately when he demands, then something drastic happens such as burning parts of his body (e.g. nipples) or anything that forces our attention to focus on him. Every week is a struggle, he dreams on becoming a…

I was diagnosed with Bipolar 1 disorder 14 years ago. I take my meds everyday, go to therapy and stay sober. If you ask anyone I work/worked with they will tell you I have it together and my career thus far has exceeded my (and others) expectations.

I'm sorry your brother is going through hell right now, trust me I have been there. I know the burden it can put on friends and family, but you really shouldn't lump all people with mental illness like they are useless. If treated you wouldn't even know they are diagnosed.

You can contact me directly if you would like to chat about your brother. I know with treatment he can turn his life around. He just needs to do the work.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#355

Post by bartread »

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…

This sort of bugged me as well. Why was the review done in April but the review period ended in January?

Whilst the article is (as I've pointed out elsewhere) only one side of the story, GitHub isn't that big a company, so how crap do your management processes have to be that you only get around to reviewing somebody 3 months after the review period ended? It doesn't sound like the scheduling of the review was a surprise to Coraline: she saw it coming, it wasn't late, etc. So why didn't it cover the period up to the date of the review?

Bashing somebody with months old feedback when they've been working with you to improve against goals that you've both agreed specifically related to that feedback is an extremely poor way to operate, and obviously hugely demotivating to the reviewee.

Problem is, as I've already said, we've only read one side of the story.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#357

Post by quanticle »

LordHumungous wrote: post #356

>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. This is common practice for new devs, at least where I work.

Oh god, that sounds horrible. As a new dev, I already know that I don't know anything. I don't need hundreds of people pointing out every little flaw in my code.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#358

Post by nice_byte »

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…

> Without concrete and public metrics of "merit",

But there are such metrics. For example:

* "I implemented feature X, which increased CTR by Y% thus increasing revenue by Z"

* "New compression scheme reduces bandwidth usage by this much, allowing team B to implement their new feature without worrying about badnwidth usage too much"

* "Team C, who uses our library, needed urgent help investigating a performance issue. I dove in and found that the interface we were providing them didn't allow the most efficient usage; designed, tested and deployed an alternative, which resulted in team C being satisfied with performance"

I could keep going with these examples (I'm paraphrasing these from some actual work my colleagues did). My point is, it's pretty easy to measure merit in earned dollars, shipped features, fixed bugs, saved engineering hours, and resource usage. Those metrics are concrete and public.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#359

Post by dogecoinbase »

DannyBee wrote: post #215
tptacek wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not denying that you've worked in places where HR convinced line managers that PIPs were a "legitimate" management tool. But I am saying that in making that decision, HR at those places exhibited incompetence: they left a reasonable developer with significant professional experience in a position to wonder whether continuing to work on that team was rational. More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reaso…

"But I am saying that in making that decision, HR at those places exhibited incompetence: they left a reasonable developer with significant professional experience in a position to wonder whether continuing to work on that team was rational." I'm going to strongly disagree with this one, but it's clear you and i will not agree about this. "More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that some…

I still believe think it's incredibly cynical to assume and write that the only purpose of a PIP is to formally make up evidence so you can fire someone. Precisely because i've worked at places where that is very specifically not the intent.

Every single employee assumes that's the intent, and this is obvious to literally everyone.

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