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Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

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Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#501

Post by BFatts »

garethadams wrote: post #391
ninjaboy2 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate: ------------------------------ > As a senior engineer she was in a mentor role. Being in a mentor role does not mean you have to right to mentor. Assuming you have a superior position, and deciding to use it to explain something obvious to someone else as "educating" them is not a good social interaction for the other person, and may make them feel trapped and uncomfortable. The author never…

> The article starts by complaining about "drive-by issue comments", then described opening what might be considered a drive-by issue. That could be construed as contradictory. The article is reasonably clear that "drive-by issues" are ones where people leave comments uninvited, and it's also explicit that Caroline was specifically asked to review the survey in question. So it's hard to read that as contradictory.

Right on! Perfectly stated.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#502

Post by [deleted] »

ubernostrum wrote: post #288
the_watcher wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post asked for sources. Presumably to facilitate research. The post did not ask anyone to relitigate anything.

The thing is, at this point saying that there's discrimination and systemic bias should be about as controversial as saying that the earth orbits the sun. It's not something that should be responded to with a demand for sources, and the fact that it always is, and always devolves into people trying to shift the argument to whether there's even a problem at all (regardless of any one individual's reason for starting s…

[deleted]

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#503

Post by ninjaboy2 »

garethadams wrote: post #391
ninjaboy2 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate: ------------------------------ > As a senior engineer she was in a mentor role. Being in a mentor role does not mean you have to right to mentor. Assuming you have a superior position, and deciding to use it to explain something obvious to someone else as "educating" them is not a good social interaction for the other person, and may make them feel trapped and uncomfortable. The author never…

> The article starts by complaining about "drive-by issue comments", then described opening what might be considered a drive-by issue. That could be construed as contradictory. The article is reasonably clear that "drive-by issues" are ones where people leave comments uninvited, and it's also explicit that Caroline was specifically asked to review the survey in question. So it's hard to read that as contradictory.

> Caroline was specifically asked to review the survey in question.

Yes and no. From the article:

> One day a notification came to me that a repo for the open source developer survey had been created and that the survey questions were in progress. My director followed up with me to make sure that I was aware of the survey and asked me to review the questions. I worked my way through, and stopped short at one particular question...

She got a notification of the repository, was asked by someone (not the person working on it) to review the questions, and decided that these two interactions separately constituted an invitation to give public feedback.

Then, her primary feedback was in the form of creating an issue about a specific question, with a terse description. (If you look at the repository in question [0], it appears her feedback came in the form of opening two similarly-terse issues about back-to-back questions with no further comments on the survey for 10 days.)

It's easy to imagine viewing that as a negative interaction from the other side.

I'm not saying it was handled well, or that it wasn't possible to resolve it in another way, but, yeah, I can imagine getting a little upset about that sort of thing happening in the author's shoes.

0. https://github.com/github/open-source-survey/

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#504

Post by LordHumungous »

sqldba wrote: post #442
LordHumungous wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The saying seems to apply: "if everyone around you is an asshole, maybe you are the asshole"

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#505

Post by s73ver »

HelloWorldInWS wrote: post #313
s73ver wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then define "Best". The problem is, you can't come up with an objective metric for it.

Defining "best" need not imply an objective definition in the same way that describing the "best" database architecture for a given set of requirements isn't entirely objective: "our programmers like to work with SQL more than MongoDB" is a subjective but sufficient argument to tip the scales. Defining the "best people" is _obviously_ subjective. _People_ are subjective. There isn't just one "best"-- there is a set o…

If you want a Meritocracy, then Best does need an objective definition. Otherwise it's just a popularity contest.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#506

Post by forgottenpass »

eddieroger wrote: post #462
readittwice wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being in a mentor role does not mean you have to right to mentor. Exactly. For what we know, the junior could have actively complained to the manager (wrongly or rightly) about her mentoring. OTOH the junior dev might have appreciated it. We can't say for sure. Some people (myself included) prefer to get a general direction and then later to come back for further questions. Too much information in a short amount of…

> Some people (myself included) prefer to get a general direction and then later to come back for further questions. Too much information in a short amount of time can be overwhelming, I need some time to absorb and read it up in the internet. A few keywords might be good enough to get someone going and figure it out themselves. I'm in a senior role on my team, and this is exactly how I'd describe the support I try t…

I'm in a senior role on my team, and this is exactly how I'd describe the support I try to give my teammates when they ask

I think this level of support is a fairly widespread target for the first interaction on a topic. We're (generally speaking) working among fellow talented professionals within a small-enough window of related disciplines and skill levels. The reasonable assumption is that someone requesting help needs just enough new information to establish connective tissue in their own mental understanding of a problem to become self-sufficient again (even if that means doing more research, learning, digging, etc... on their own). Topics that require a "brain dump" from someone with the institutional knowledge is a sign of technical debt and that information belongs in internal documentation.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#507

Post by [deleted] »

ninjaboy2 wrote: post #503
garethadams wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article starts by complaining about "drive-by issue comments", then described opening what might be considered a drive-by issue. That could be construed as contradictory. The article is reasonably clear that "drive-by issues" are ones where people leave comments uninvited, and it's also explicit that Caroline was specifically asked to review the survey in question. So it's hard to read that as contradictory.

> Caroline was specifically asked to review the survey in question. Yes and no. From the article: > One day a notification came to me that a repo for the open source developer survey had been created and that the survey questions were in progress. My director followed up with me to make sure that I was aware of the survey and asked me to review the questions. I worked my way through, and stopped short at one particul…

[deleted]

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#508

Post by nunez »

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…

Given that the only alternatives that I know of are seniority (age of employment before contributions) or favoritism (find the right people to move you forward), what alternative is there that won't enforce a bias? At the end of the day, businesses are driven by people, and people are emotional.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#509

Post by erikpukinskis »

eqdw wrote: post #261
pyre wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This could be because she is an unpleasant person, or because they are > unpleasant people, or it could be an honest misunderstanding or personality > conflict, but in every case it detracts from the productivity of everyone, > generally. This could also become a "Tyranny of the Majority" type situation though. If all of the other people are unpleasant, and they are being unpleasant because the new hire is a minori…

This is a good point, and one I didn't consider. But > I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case here, but the behaviour of "well let's just fire this one person, no matter who was in the wrong" is only good from a "anything for the company's bottomline" perspective. Regardless of one's opinions on ethics, this is the attitude your employer _will_ take and it will _never_ change unless they are forced to do so. T…

No, not all companies put their bottom line above their principles.

In fact, some people coming consider it an inalienable part of their masculinity, personality, religion, etc, that they will put their principles above their checkbook.

In fact, some people start companies specifically because they want to put their principles above their paycheck.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#510

Post by smueller1234 »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #47

If you're ever put on a PIP, get out -- it's a sign someone in the company doesn't want you there. I've never heard of a PIP working out and both the company and employee being happy -- maybe you only hear about the bad cases, but a PIP often seems to me like a cover your ass plan on the part of the company. They want to get rid of a person, but they're afraid of getting sued, so a PIP is a way to document why a pers…

Anecdotal evidence: I've run numerous PIPs as a manager. The most recent one was successful in that both employee and company are now happy. The credit for that outcome was 100 percent the employee's. All I contributed was honesty and an genuine effort too give them a shot.

It's the PIPs where the attitude is what you describe that are doomed to fail. And if everyone has that perception to begin with, I can't reach for PIPs as a tool anymore because the outcome is determined already. Vicious cycle.

This being said, I get where you're coming from. PIPs can be used to let people go. For good and not so good reasons. One way we try to defend against that is that if things aren't working, we do our best to move the employee you a different manager with an as-clean-as-possible shot after giving clear feedback and before the PIP. After all, people leave managers, not jobs.

PS: Not github. Also Europe, not US.

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