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Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

where.coraline.codes

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Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#381

Post by alexashka »

This is an unfortunate smear piece.

Not everyone is going to like everyone else, and it has nothing to do with gender.

Some people are just not very likeable, others are very likeable.

Coraline based on my impression, is just not terribly likeable.

Github wants people they like, to be part of Github. How can you blame them?

People who don't get that, and go around writing long winded blogs of how they've been mistreated, and claim it has to do with some social justice issue, are unfortunately oblivious to what the real issue is.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#382

Post by danpalmer »

tonymke wrote: post #81

The impression I have after reading this that Ms. Ehmke had a shit attitude and people got sick of it. And that she hasn't seen that yet. I'm sorry if this seems unempathetic - getting fired sucks, and is extremely painful. But there's no other way I can put it. A long time ago, when my career first started, I also went through the "PIP deathspiral", and it took months... maybe years after my termination to realize I…

What made you get that impression? Obviously the text is going to be somewhat biased, but from what's described I got the impression that she cares about her work, cares about being a good engineer/mentor/manager, has the skills to be good at all of those, and cares about improving even when she doesn't fully agree with the situation.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#383

Post by danpalmer »

Maybe the UK, or my company, has a different communication style, but from the examples she gave of her communication I think we would have considered her to have very clear, concise and efficient communication, things we look for and value.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#384

Post by artumi-richard »

Back in 2006 I read that people don't understand the intended tone in emails. I'm assuming it applies to most text based communication, and is one of the reasons I have devalued email and comments.

The key quote:

"According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time."

I think this means we overlay what we think the intended tone was meant to be on top of the email, and usually it's more to do with us than the content of the email, and I suspect in Coraline's case it was uniformly negative due to unrecognised prejudice. I would suggest that in the corporate setting, if you've not got a relationship with the author of code you shouldn't be able to feedback initially as text, but instead either in person or on the phone. In that way you get the relationship between reporter and coder off to a good start, and follow up text communications will have a better chance of working.

I would actually go so far as to say no-one in a corporate setting should be communicating with each other as text without a phone call or a meeting to introduce each other.

Here's the article that's stuck with me so long:

https://www.wired.com/2006/02/the-secret-cause-of-flame-wars...

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#385

Post by rmc »

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.

> mentions meritocracy as an evil, not a goal to strive for?

I think the main objection to "meritocracy" is that often there is no real meritocracy, and people use it as a way to ignore claims that the place isn't a meritocracy.

Organisation: We're a meritocracy! Member: I'm getting unfairly treated based on race/gender/etc. Org: That's impossible, we're a meritocracy!

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#386

Post by minusSeven »

bartread wrote: post #348
joatmon-snoo wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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.

you will likely never know the whole story. Its entirely up to you to believe what you want.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#387

Post by 5thaccount »

ubernostrum wrote: post #361
kybernetikos wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gam…

Don't just look to companies for examples -- look to sports. There are professional sports franchises who go out and just throw money at "the best" players in their leagues. And the track record of doing that is pretty mixed; it turns out that just hiring a bunch of top individuals easily loses to putting together a group of players who are each objectively "worse" but whose play as a team is superior.

That's pretty rare! Almost all great teams have great players - and the teams that don't, usually have chronically underrated players, e.g. the Pistons with Ben Wallace - one of the greatest defenders ever.

HOWEVER, I will say that, rather than a great team, strategic / tactical innovation can cover for flaws. The Sydney Swans pioneered "flooding" and made a grand final with a sub-standard team. Next season though, the league caught up and the Swans did poorly. It wasn't the team or the players that got there, rather it was a tactical innovation, and that is usually short lived.

In similar ways, a coding change - new library, microservices etc can all be short term gains. Ultimately, though, when everyone starts using those tactics, what you want is the best people, fullstop.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#388

Post by rmc »

Thorazul wrote: post #71
CJefferson wrote: post #4

Obviously this article is a single personal viewpoint, but I have heard similar stories from two other github employees (one of whom still works for github). Their interpretation was that github is upset they are viewed as sexist, so they want to figure out how to change their public reputation, without actually changing anything.

This feels like the mostly likely scenario, quickly change your image by hiring a bunch of 'diverse' people and soak up the PR, then quietly let them go over the next few years if they don't conform.

That'll work for a year or so. The problem is that they will write about it afterwards (like this), and then you're reputation (in this area) is even worse, because now people won't be believe you.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#389

Post by rmc »

YorickPeterse wrote: post #246
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…

> What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case? * "Male" * "Female" * "Other (feel free to specify in the text field below)" Or something along those lines, it's not that hard.

That doesn't tell how many trans people there are. Which seemed to be one of the initial point of the survey.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#390

Post by 5thaccount »

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.

Not "an", as in singular measure, no. But what about several? Is there a single metric for "heathy"? Someone can be OK in almost all ways but have a broken leg. Are they "healthy" by a single metric? What about diabetes that is managed? Can you think of any field in life where there is a singular metric for performance? If not, why does the non-existence of a singular metric in tech invalidate the idea?

And what about in reverse? What if, rather than finding the "best", we merely have a metric/s that weed out the worst? If I remove the bottom 15% effectively, and replace them with average performers, then the net gain is massive, especially as each extra bug introduced is a massive time sink for any team, and poor developers are a massive cause of that.

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