Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

I am not a Ruby developer so I don't really know Coraline, but there were quite a few things in this blog post which I found disturbing:

> In the midst of my discussions with the editorial team, trying to reach a compromise, a (male) engineer from another team completely rewrote the blog post and published it without talking to me.

The entire paragraph about her writing a blog post has nothing to do with gender, why is it relevant to explicitly try to correlate it with gender in a situation where someone has done something which she wasn't happy about? It reads sexist to me as an outsider.

> In addition to my development work, I had started weekly mentoring sessions with one of my teammates... When I talked to my manager about how she was progressing, I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to "learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you."

Yes mentoring is an essential part, but mentorig is not becoming someone's teacher. That is very weird indeed. Here she says that she was additionally mentoring someone on a weekly basis, which implies that she was doing some sort of teaching lessons to another team member outside of regular development work. This is not mentoring AFAIK. Mentoring is something you do along the way as you work with someone together. You offer help when help is needed, you give advice when advice is requested, you keep your ears open and chip in with help or information when you see someone is struggling, you lead and teach by example and not by lessons.

I can totally understand if the manager was thinking that his person should not feel the pressure of a more senior developer in such a situation. She thinks the developer was benefitting, but how does she even know that? Perhaps the more junior developer was too shy to speak up or felt intimidated by a senior employee telling him/her what and how to do things.

> Discussions were directed to comments on issues and pull requests.

I can see how this was in some situations difficult, but I (as someone who thinks of himself as very open minded) can also totally see why it might be beneficial:

- A discussion on an open issue or pull request provides automatic documentation - It can be found and read by anyone - It fosters more of a culture where anyone feels invited to contribute if they think they have relevant information - It doesn't get lost among other conversations. In Slack or in real life you might talk about 3 issues at the same time and the history of one issue is totally swamped among the chat of all other issues. In GitHub each issue/PR has it's own discussion. - A discussion is often far more civilised when it is done in an issue or PR than in real life or in Slack, which is a huge benefit to establish a positive work culture IMHO.

Again, I can agree that there is also downsides to it, but as someone who prides themselves as an open minded person I would have hoped that she would have looked a bit further than just the downsides and also try to make an effort and understand why it was done like this at GitHub. Being open minded, look at positives and try to foster a positive attitute is one of the most important skills in an employee in my opinion.

> I asked my manager what had happened to upset her and was told that it was the feedback I provided on the gender question. I read back to her the body of the issue that I had opened and asked what I should have done differently. She responded that she didn't know, that my wording seemed direct but non-confrontational, but that I was forbidden to interact any further with the author of the survey.

I have really no foundation for this assumption, but it really reads that her tone in approaching other co-workers was rather direct and harsh, which from my personal experience is never a good way to get people on your side. Especially with people who you have never met or rarely seen I think it is crucial to put some thoughts into how certain things are phrased. At the end of the day you don't know the other person, don't know how they will read it and react to it. If you have a genuine interest to get the best out of this together, rather than just trying to show off that you are more knowledgable than someone else, then you would certainly phrase things more friendly.

Say what you want, but I have 10+ years of experience as well and I know that there was never a situation where I was not able to get my point across in a VERY obvious friendly tone.

> Starting in December, in my weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager, we would review all of my written communication (issues, pull requests, code reviews, and Slack messages) to talk about how I could improve. It felt ridiculous but I went along with it, and did my best to address my manager's feedback and concerns.

What attitute is that? A good manager will try to get the best of evey reportee and focus on personal strenghts/weaknesses. What is ridiculous about trying to improve communication skills? Honestly that is such a bad attitute, as if anyone would ever be such a communication god that there's nothing to improve anymore. That sentence alone is very negative IMHO.

--

Obviously it is very sad and unfortunate that she had to go through mental health issues and the loss of her grandmother, but it really feels like her manager was trying to work with her to go through all these situations and Coraline was doing her own thing. I think it was very responsible of her manager to ask her to take medical leave. Imagine what would have happenend if she didn't? If her manager would have been like "alright, just continue working then", then later she would sue GitHub for not taking her mental health problems seriously and firing her based on that. Her manager was extremely open about her weaknesses, was putting effort into working through them with her and taking the right and responsible steps to get her back on track, but honestly there's only so much you can do before you have to let someone go...

Quoting from an article by her on meritocracy[1]:

> In the Ruby world, we insist that “Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice,” ignoring the sexist statements he has made with regard to diversity outreach efforts. We write off Linus Torvalds’ dismissal of diversity as an “unimportant detail” and justify it based on the utility of his creations. But why is it that we can proudly refuse to use software created by corporations whose often aggressive business policies we disagree with, but continue to adopt software written by sexists, racists, homophobes, transphobes?

I feel that's pretty close to directly calling Matz a sexist. Later she proposes a Code of Conduct for Ruby so that there's a robust process for punishing sexism[2]. As far as I understand, Matz' tweet would have counted as an offence.

Also, while her Contributor Covenant seems like it strives to make GitHub interactions more civilised, Caroline has a public Twitter account on which she screenshots people who disagree with her for her followers to sneer at (current, harmless example: [3]). Inexplicably (to me), this behaviour is fine by the logic of the CC. I'd say it's the highway to emotional escalation.

Nothing of this invalidates her viewpoints, but her approach of working for change is more "take no prisoners" than "low friction".

[1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of... [2] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004 [3] https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/882735106070376451

My brief and only interaction with Coraline entailed me tweeting to her, thanking her for a talk she gave, to which she blocked me, and told me to my face "Straight white cis-hetero males are the enemy".

I think, looking back on that interaction with Coraline, there was, in fact, a real problem with empathy.

But that problem wasn't mine.

I work in the UK in a tech company and I thought the opposite. Here we would definitely have let her go as well for her aggressive communication style. No matter how good you write code, if your everyday attitude is creating a toxic environment around you then you're not welcome, because it drags down everyone else and as an employer it is a responsibility to create a nice environment to which your employees are happy to wake up 5 days a week.

Oh there's loads. First of all her single comment is very short which sets a certain tone itself. There is absolutely 0 effort in her comment to establish a friendly tone. That itself might not necessarily mean that it reads negatively, but it will certainly not ready positively either, which is the first problem.

Secondly she says that transgender is not a gender, but she doesn't provide any constructive feedback or improvement with it. She could have explained what transgender means, or linked to a website which explains the topic well, or at least offered something along the lines "hey I happen to know a lot about this topic and would love to help you phrasing this question. Feel free to reach out to me on Slack with any questions or if you need more advice.".

"If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question". That sentence alone comes across very much top-down as in "omg you're so stupid and don't even know what that is and you should do this or that if you want".

This is certainly not the message and tone that you want to say to someone the very first time you communicate with someone, unless you obviously don't care about how you come across, how other people feel and how it might affect them, which is fine, but then don't be surprised if people think you are unfriendly, not pleasant to work with and toxic.

For instance, if I know a lot about a programming topic and I would review someone's work for the first time I would not just say "Hey dude, what you've done here is wrong. If you want to do it right do it right man."

First I would avoid to say wrong at all and say that I think it can be improved, because my goal is to improve things and not tell people if they are right or wrong, I don't gain anything from that. Further I would offer constructive suggestions on how it can be improved and also provide extra material/links for them to educate more on that topic, because I would want them to get better and not just me look superior to them.