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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

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a department at a company. You're not allowed to say that 'people of ethnicity X will never be given a leadership position'. That's blatant racism.

It's not just any department, but a department that specifically deals with diversity and race issues.

Do white-passing gay people not get to have a say in diversity issues?

I really don't like this trend of painting everyone with white-ish skin as a homogenous oppressor class. It's pretty clear to me that a diversity department that explicitly bans white people from leadership positions will not represent my interests if I am discriminated against.

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

#552
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 muc…

Everyone is biased[1], even toward groups they themselves belong to. It's impossible not to think about it. Biases are hard-wired into humans.

To come anywhere near social equality, you have to recognize your own biases and actively ignore them.

1. http://www.boston.com/news/science/blogs/science-in-mind/201...

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

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Strongly considering moving my private repos and dumping my paid GitHub subscription.

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

#554
If we could all grow up and act like professionals, that would be great. I have a hard time understanding why the tech industry always tends to create this much drama.

At the end of the day, this is about software, not about your genitals. I don't care if you're liberal or conservative, black or white, straight or gay, or anything in between! In fact, i won't bring it up, or ask. I simply do not care, the only thing i care about is your pull request.

How any company can include a slide like the one in the article (backup link here: http://i.imgur.com/p5zwScc.png) is absolutely beyond me. I am paying you to make a great product, not to make daily diversity meetings.

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

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have an arrest record? If not: there's the magic power. Statistically speaking, a poor young black male is much more likely to have an arrest record than a poor young white male. > Edit: holy batman the downvotes. I never considered the possibility that maybe #hnwatch is right. Its unfortunate that you are being downvoted without comment. The downvotes may or may not be evidence that #hnwatch is correct, it…

The mistake of sociological studies labeling a concept called white privilege was when people started using it to villify others for the negative space of discrimination they didn't receive. IDK why, but people tend to not like being blamed for things they didn't do. If that's not the mesaage we're supposed to take out of the concept, them somebody has got a lot of work to do to figure out a better way of communicati…

I don't see how your comment relates to mine. My point was that the simple fact of the existence of downvotes alone are a wholly insufficient basis for reaching a conclusion about #hnwatch.

Its too common for people to be so certain of their own viewpoint that they will simply assume the worst (ie racism and sexism) of anyone who disagrees with them, rather than consider that their critics might have damn good (non-racist, non-sexist) reasons for disagreeing with them.

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

#556
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 muc…

This is like saying I shouldn't be worrying about my budget, because in the future that I am trying to create where I have plenty of money, I won't need to.

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

#557
post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like they trade "structure based purely on meritocracy" by "promote diversity". I don't see how this can go well. Meritocracy is important among dev and open source. And they don't care about political diversity. I can only imagine this new "culture of fear" where you can't hire white people (even woman). Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender. Anyway, looks lik…

> 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.

Oh yes. No one is any better than anyone else at anything. In fact, github isn't a better hosted SCM/code review/issue tracking platform than any other. Which makes sense, because none of their employees are better at doing anything than anyone else. It's all just a rationalization, and a lie. Old boys club all the way down.

But why didn't the old boys club decide to have microsoft's hosted team foundation server win? Or sourceforge? The silicon valley conspiracy is hard to understand at times ...

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

#558
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." We live in a world where this is not remotely possible. Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism.

  > "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.
This saddens me.

I'm somewhat curious on knowing some other data points on your spectrum of (bad) idealism..

But the 'not remotely possible' claim sounds like you've decided for all of us that we're incapable of ever thinking of skin colour in the future the same way we think of, say, hair colour today.

I suspect your position is based upon your current cultural surroundings, in which case I'd prescribe travel. Lots of it.

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

#559

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.

Just to point out... the US is the western only country on the planet which cares, or even mentions, people's skin colour/race AT ALL. Literally every other western country calls people... people. A man is "a man" not "a green/blue/pink/red/etc man". A women is "a women" not "a green/blue/pink/red/etc woman". Continuously giving skin colour qualifiers in descriptions of people... is (to non-US people) bizarre, and se…

You haven't been paying much attention then. Especially with all of the refugees coming into Europe, there is absolutely racism and discrimination based on race.

There is also a long history of racism in Australia towards the indigenous population, and more recently towards immigrants.

Pretty much everywhere you have two different cultures meeting you have racism. The modern western cultures are no exception.

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

#560
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.

Well, first, this talk is mostly about gender, which is completely different than race.

If you think about what race really is, it's not what it seems (unlike sex and gender, which have not only a more consistent historical difference, and a stronger biological one as well). Race is more cultural than anything else.

Sure it starts with physical traits, but whether or not you're black, white, or asian, does not depend on your biology. You're actually not born that way (even if the labels make it seem like you belong to a certain geographical location, they're just labels), and the proof is people who are of mixed race.

People who are half black, half white, from my experience, they choose which culture to belong to, and we all confuse it with their race. Obama is a great example. People saying he's our "black" president. What? What does that really mean? He's clearly half white, half black, so why is he a "black president"? That statement is inaccurate, and people should always say, he's our first "half black, half white, president". So what's going on there? People just categorize themselves, and it's just a matter of the stories and memes they adopt from a set of some kind of cultural background. In other words, it's all made up. Half-white, half-black people often choose to be black because they think black is cool. They adopt that culture and roll with it.

So in short, if people keep categorizing themselves, there's no way out of this. Categorization will lead to division among people. "Black" people are just Americans with a different sub-culture, that's it. "Black" people are just as racially diverse among themselves as they are in comparison to "white" people. There are "blacks" from east Africa, west Africa, and Saudi Arabia. Every "black" group is culturally and ethnically different. Why group them?

I'll recognize there is a history to be dealt with here. And that is that we've inherited inequality that is for the most part based on skin color (because that's how our ignorant ancestors decided to categorize people), so that division of inequality still lingers. But there is a case for both repairing the damage, while at the same time getting everyone to forget there is any kind of racial categorization. There is only sub-cultures within American culture.

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