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Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

where.coraline.codes

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Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#441

Post by zimpenfish »

Shinchy wrote: post #407
kybernetikos wrote: post #240

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…

Leicester City FC.

I dunno - there's a fair case to be made that Kante was the essential lynchpin which dragged the rest of them upwards. Especially since we can check this in the subsequent season when he joined a different team (who also won the league whilst Leicester languished mid-table.)

"Chelsea were so happy with N'Golo Kante that they sent Leicester flowers to say thank you for selling him to them."

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#442

Post by sqldba »

LordHumungous wrote: post #396
verinus wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I wonder where the hate in this comment comes from- I can not draw the same conclusions from the blog post and imho your comment tells a lot more about yourself that the case at hand.

No hate. I see a self-absorbed person who is unable to see their own flaws and who blames everyone but themselves for their own failings. It's sad actually.

I think you're onto something. This is a valid way of interpreting what happened.

I can't help but feel though that the OP is... not very good, and they haven't had very good interactions on some other posts, but also I get the feeling that GH handled everything incredibly badly all along as well.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#443

Post by zimpenfish »

nice_byte wrote: post #358
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> saved engineering hours

I'm not sure that's "easy to measure" since how do you know how many hours have been saved without doing it the "slow" way first?

> earned dollars

Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs or implementing flashy new features but is providing good mentoring to the team, writing onboarding documentation, helping them understand the large-scale ramifications of their changes, etc., is essentially invisible to "metrics" yet providing a vital role.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#444

Post by lucozade »

draw_down wrote: post #178
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…

> Secondly, Coraline seems to think that human relationships are a one way street: that she is entitled to be direct and even confrontational or insensitive, especially if she believes she is "right" or in a "mentor" role, and yet her peers are expected to walk on eggshells around her, lest they be accused of attacking her. I got this vibe too. Empathy on the part of others (or rather its lack) is discussed quite a b…

> I'm guessing this other person is also a woman

I'm going to hazard a guess that it was Frannie Zlotnick who led the survey [0]. As her research interests include gender and race stereotyping [1], I'm guessing that she objected to being lectured on the subject.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-wor...

[1] https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/frannie-zlotnic...

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#445

Post by sqldba »

Torakfirenze wrote: post #425

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.

Wow.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#446

Post by thehardsphere »

joatmon-snoo wrote: post #324
thehardsphere wrote: post #142

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…

As I pointed out earlier, her boss addressed the weekly meeting thing directly, and Coraline mentions it:

> 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.

Re-reading it again, I'm not convinced that this is a management failure either. The section titled Empathy starts with:

> 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.

One way to read that is that her manager was trying to address these problems, but Coraline didn't understand how serious they were, because she dismissed them as "ridiculous."

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#447

Post by Torakfirenze »

sqldba wrote: post #445
Torakfirenze wrote: post #425

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.

Wow.

Yeah and I'm not joking either - I have all of TWO tweets on twitter (https://twitter.com/Stuart_codes) and am most certainly blocked:

http://i.imgur.com/EHa3MfQ.png

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#448

Post by tomgp »

eqdw wrote: post #214
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators. I wish we could have discussions like this in the wider community without people going knee-jerk against the idea of it, itself. I'd be willing to accept that a lot of companies here are nepotistic. I'd even be willing to accept that they cloak their nepotism in the rhetoric of meri…

Fun fact: The original intent of the word `meritocracy` was satirical so it's connotations were intended to be closer to those of the OP than those which current defenders of the terms ascribe to it.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#449

Post by jacobr »

artumi-richard wrote: post #384

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 th…

I have started to use emojis almost excessively in situations where there is risk of misinterpretation due to my terseness. It comes across a bit unprofessional, but I prefer that over being considered rude or lacking empathy. I believe the latter impression is harder to recover from.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#450

Post by hiyou102 »

hasenj wrote: post #417
gerbal wrote: post #403

How would HN be reacting if this were written by and about a man? There are a lot of gender expectations that punish assertive and matter of fact women as 'bitchy' and 'insensitive'. If a white guy behaves the same way no one thinks twice about it. To me it sounds like management at Github is uncomfortable with her perspectives. We often see women and minorities censured for not trying to conform to the model of a de…

> How would HN be reacting if this were written by and about a man? There are a lot of gender expectations that punish assertive and matter of fact women as 'bitchy' and 'insensitive'. Did you just assume my reaction? (partly sarcastic). If you know anything about tech and blogging and HN, you should know that most posts get flamed and dissected very quickly. People have very strong opinions and have very low toleran…

This is easily disprovable. See for example this post about being fired from the exact same company: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158913

Despite the post having less details,there is less negativity and uncertainty. For reference as to why that might be, refer to the post you are responding to.

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