Crybaby and crappy coder.
Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
491–500 of 572 posts
Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Hi cholantesh! Just saw your new survey. Looks great! Hey, have you seen the HRC's recommendations for surveying gender? I've used their guidelines in the past. Very helpful! http://www.hrc.org/resources/collecting-transgender-inclusiv... TLDR: They suggest splitting the gender question into two parts. As you know, this is a super important issue for me. Progress! Exciting! If you're busy, I'll make a pull request.…
This tone is so bloody fake and would make me lose all respect for the person sending it. There's treating someone respectfully and there's talking to them like they're a child. The fact that Silicon Valley is promoting this method of communication is just ridiculous. How about we concentrate more on getting things done and less on so much sugar-coating that we all get diabetes.
In school, we once read a brief essay by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer on politeness.
Back then, I found Schopenhauer's tone incredibly pompous and condescending, but over the years I have come to appreciate it as one of the best explanations of what function politeness plays in social interaction:
"It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy."
What Schopenhauer says is that all politeness carries with it at least a kernel of insincerity, but that this is not a bad thing, quite the opposite - once we get past the idea that politeness is "phony", we can throw it around generously, and discover how much easier we get along with people we may not like very much. Consider politeness a kind of WD-40 for social interactions.
> so much sugar-coating that we all get diabetes.
I love the way you phrased that!
Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So you just say "don't do >" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on. That's a terrible plan because it blanket dismisses a rational and widely accepted idea without explaining why or even forcing you to think about it. How about you at least take the courtesy to explain why you're dismissing something that at face…
Ok so apparently my attempt to offer an alternative pov for people who I believed did not grasp the original, is getting me some downvotes. Let me just link to what she has said about meritocracy in the context of her Code of Conduct: http://contributor-covenant.org/ "Marginalized people also suffer some of the unintended consequences of dogmatic insistence on meritocratic principles of governance. Studies have shown…
But what's her alternative proposal - that we say, accept pull requests from someone because of their race or sex without critiquing at all? Based on the way she responded to some stuff in this job... maybe that's actually what she wants, but it's not what I want and it sounds like a terrible idea in general.
Meritocracy is still the best we have. It may be flawed, yes, but there exists no superior alternative. It's likely possible to get away with a few minor tweaks - but there doesn't seem to be anyone looking into what exactly those could be, instead they shit on the concept without providing any viable alternative.
It seems like many of the things she and others mention are not necessarily bias in individuals in the workplace, but "resources, free time, life experiences" - which seem much easier to attack and if done fully I think could help make up for other biases too. I think the best bet honestly is stuff like Black Girls Code where they try to get people up to speed in order to compete successfully by merit.
Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
#494Something that I don't get about this article is why she keeps implying that a merit based system is so bad. It behoves a company to hire and fire based on merit, while also rewarding and encouraging those who are skilled at their job. That is how you create a top notch product.
Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
#495A lot of folks are kicking the author whenshe's down. Read this as 1st person field notes from an engineer with mental illness and the story makes sense. No need to say "but she is irrational" - of course she is. We shouldn't hold the ill to the same standards.
Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
#496I've seen this a few times. People with a naturally terse way of communicating eventually end up offending someone with the power to retaliate.
There is this saying about implementing network protocols where different implementation may have non-standard extensions or divergent interpretations of the standard (assuming there is one): Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you emit.
(It has a name, but I keep forgetting it.)
In my experience, this is equally applicable to social interactions and works surprisingly well.
Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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?
Like I said, not always easy to boil down to a concrete number, but you can always find good proxies. Fixed a problem that caused service to trigger alarms in the middle of the night? Saved engineering hours. Wrote a library that several teams use? Saved engineering hours. Even your example, writing documentation, saves engineering hours.
> Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs [...]
How would you be able to do any of that if you're not doing meaningful work on the system?
Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
#498There'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…
"It sounds like she just flat out ignored her manager under the assumption that her manager just needed to accept whatever her therapist advised her to do, which is kind of ridiculous on the face of it."
How, exactly, is this ridiculous? Is her manager qualified to give her mental health advice? Is her therapist less qualified? Is there some business "thing" that must be considered when suffering with a mental health issue?
You make it sound like she basically told her boss to "fuck off" while expounding what her therapist said. In reality, if was her boss who wasn't very empathetic. Probably because the cunt couldn't be.
Sympathy is showing concern for others where you don't have direct experience yourself. Empathy is where you share the experience or something very similar. So, for a company to claim that she had lack of empathy is what is ridiculous.
Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guy on my team at my last company was - he was non-technical, but was in charge of looking at raw data and finding discrepancies and things we could write code to fix on an ongoing basis as he was a domain expert. He had a rough time with technical topics, and so part of his PIP, as I understand it, was to become basically proficient in using SQL to query, and understand the basics of RDBMS. He did so, and was remove…
This was a valuable employee that the company actually wanted to improve, which is unrelated to the PIP as excuse to fire people discussed here. There's a world of difference between a review that says "he's weak at technical tasks: inferior and unfit" and a review that says "he's weak at technical tasks, it would be nice if he learned to do them"
That's actually a good point. Hence, the problem with such blanket statements I guess. But perhaps one can figure it out from the context in which it's happening.
Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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!
That's "the false premise of meritocracy", not "meritocracy"; It's an important distinction that should be made. There is nothing wrong with democracy, even if some people don't like the word anymore due to it's widespread misuse.
*s/democracy/meritocracy/