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GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

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Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#531

The current dominant themes in certain feminism & diversity cliques in our community are openly hostile towards me. I'm a male. I'm white. I'm middle class. I'm heterosexual. I'm also a leader. I'm a parent of two daughters. My mother had to fight sexism issues in her career. I am supportive of inclusion & diversity. I am trying to raise my girls to be empowered, confident & curious. But the dominant themes in curren…

It will swing back in thirty years. In thirty years I plan to be retired. Or have died of my unhealthy lifestyle. Or at the most optimistic become too old to code competitively.

My point is, far as I'm concerned I can't afford to just sit tight and wait for it to blow over. And neither can the rest of you.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT." We live in a world where this is not remotely possible. Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism.

Why? Let me apply the principle you claim to be the case in a different, ahistorical way: "'We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about denigrating and enslaving blacks, and NOT MENTION IT.' We live in a world where this is not remotely possible. Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism." --some Southern slave owner, 1859 The same could be applied to historical anti-semitic movements, anti-suffrage gro…

You are setting up an enormous straw man. When you say people like the GP say:

> We will always be just as hateful and prejudiced as the worst of us are now.

That is emphatically not what the GP is saying. The problem is not the ideal that race should not matter, it's that history does not go away, or more generally we can not build the ideal world from first principles.

Those with privilege often wish it was as simple as simply being "color-blind", then everything would be fair, right? Wrong. Because even if no white person harbored racist thoughts of any kind, we are still saddled with racist institutions and wealth distribution. Even if police magically became completely egalitarian, black people would still suffer the brunt of police brutality, because they still live in the poorest areas where there is the most crime.

The bottom line is that, if you are a white male (which I am), then you really and truly should be listening and not proclaiming any strong opinion or solution, because privilege is a blind, and so you really are not qualified to have an opinion about what should be done about sexism or racism. I feel like this is especially onerous for geeks (again, like me) who value their ability to reason, but understand that your (my) feelings being hurt is much less of an indignity than most black people face on a regular basis. Don't get defensive and try to prove how non-racist you are. Instead just take a deep breath and realize that this country forcibly imported 10 million African slaves. Despite how uncomfortable that makes a lot of people, there really is no way for that legacy to ever be erased.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#533
post #482
post #379

I would expect more from a tech company that is supposed to be by programmers for programmers. Programmers are abstract thinkers, and it's disgusting to see them lower themselves and adopt the semantics and memes of obvious cultural constructs like race. What does it even mean to be "white"? Who exactly are they talking about and what is it about this group of people that is so bad? There's no need to bring in this g…

> We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT. There is simply no excuse at all to mention it. So when Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about his experience constantly being treated as a shoplifter solely based on his race [1], there's "simply no excuse at all"? I'd counter there's simply no excuse at all to attempt silencing necessary discussion about ongoing mass injustice. [1] http://…

Well, there are those claims of unwarranted scrutiny and his assumptions that they were race-based... and then there are his bogus claims about what was said about him in the media and before Congress, which have been documented.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/09/15/did-neil-degrasse-tyson-...

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#534

Bring on the suits! While GH is busy distracting their world-class engineers with B.S. reverse-racism meetings, they will successfully free up their equity pool for more suit hires. That should suck the life out real quick... Goodbye revolutionary, forward-thinking work culture & hierarchy (meritocracy). You will be gravely missed. Good luck hiring sub-par engineers for the next 2 years and watching your data centers…

Well, what are the alternatives? Hosted: Bitbucket, GitLab Self-hosted: GitLab, Gogs None of these come close to GitHub in my experience.

Haven't seen anybody mention Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services[1]... private repos, reasonably priced for teams, and some pretty sweet extra tools and integration into other services. I've used it for a few projects and prefer some parts of it to github. You don't have to use Visual Studio itself or, really, ANY other Microsoft tools.

[1] https://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-team-ser...

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#535
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feminism wasn't always as intersectional as it is now. For a long time it was dominated by white women who wanted more equality ignoring and sometimes even opposing equality for people and women of color. Suffragettes are a very good example of this problem. There are a few people now that feel a similar thing is happening in the tech industry right now as well. In that diversity is promoted only in so far as it help…

To further extend from the suffrage movement, it is important to note that minorities (men & women) didn't legally have the right to vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act. So Sanchez has a point in claiming that historical precedence has shown that "discrimination" was thought to have ended after the suffrage movement when it wasn't until many years later that minorities were legally secured the right to vote. Hence…

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Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#536
post #379

I would expect more from a tech company that is supposed to be by programmers for programmers. Programmers are abstract thinkers, and it's disgusting to see them lower themselves and adopt the semantics and memes of obvious cultural constructs like race. What does it even mean to be "white"? Who exactly are they talking about and what is it about this group of people that is so bad? There's no need to bring in this g…

Not talking or thinking about race, or any other marginalization category, does absolutely nothing to help. "Privilege is invisible to those who have it". I humbly suggest you watch this TED presentation, https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_kimmel_why_gender_equality... Granted it's primarily about gender equality, but it does an excellent job also addressing race, ethnicity, etc.

> Not talking or thinking about race ... does absolutely nothing to help.

But in the better future world we're trying to create where there is much less discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or sex or other body attributes, isn't that exactly what we'd be doing, not talking or thinking about race because it just isn't important to us? Isn't not talking or thinking about race exactly what we should be doing, as much as possible?

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#537
post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT." We live in a world where this is not remotely possible. Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism.

But do you agree that the goal should be, more or less, to create a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes matter as little as, say, eye color does today? If so, what is the plan to achieve that goal? Don't we achieve it by actually acting that way as much as possible ? That's what makes sense to me. Suppose we, in the name of equality or diversity or fairness, actually elevate the importance of bodily…

Let's say we all started ignoring everything you're talking about today.

Currently a black family making $100k will live in roughly the same area as a white family making $30k.

This family is also much more likely to have family that has gone to prison due to previous racist institutions, and less likely to have had 3 generations of parents having gone to Stanford.

So sure, race gets ignored, but do you think people will start ignoring all the other social signals? Even if you ignore everything else, being born to a white family in itself means you inherit centuries of advantages

This is the justification behind affirmative action. Even if it might not be "fair" when looking at an individual case, its also pretty unfair when a kid just happens to be born to a family that has had opportunity robbed from them until extremely recently.

Your end goal might be laudable, but the path to reach it requires corrections

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#538
post #500
post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meritocracy Meritocracy is a lie. Look how broken interview processes are - definitely not meritocratic. Meritocracy is a rationalisation for "I hire people I like so long as they don't say anything idiotic during the interview". You'd get better results from having some kind of bar that candidates have to meet and then just selecting one at random and giving that person the job.

How do bad interview processes prove that meritocracy doesn't work?

You cannot prove meritocracy doesn't work. Fortunately you don't have to. The burden of proof is required for positive claims.

We don't have a lot of evidence meritocracy works. We have several pieces of evidence suggesting that it, in fact, didn't serve github very well. The fact there was a sexual harassment lawsuit with a barely kept secret about a whole group of women bound by arbitration and non-disparage agreements is probably evidece it doesn't.

The sad part, most people will never really understand how much Tom sacrificed to protect his friends during his final days there.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#539
post #340

This articl was a bit of a hit job. GitHub is changing as revenue and staff increase. That makes sense. There are always growing pains. A flat, so-called meritocratic structure only works in a few situations. GitHub makes the majority of its revenue from enterprise. It only makes sense to mirror the structure of your most valued customers. A VP of important corporate enterprise customer expects to talk to another VP…

The irony is corporate sales is even less diverse than tech. Bring back the whiskey, the strippers, the boozy sales lunches, the white guys in suits. I hope this whole SJW-led assault implodes because I just want to get back to writing software. Make no mistake, this is a political war.

Can you people please not pollute this board with your over the top non-sense?
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