Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

My intention with this question was to probe if there was anyone that has experience within this field that might have any milestone studies/papers on hand, or something that they can cite from memory. The reason for this is that when you venture into a new field of study it usually takes time sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Now off course I can do the research on my own, it was simply a question I asked to save time.

To assume that I have some sort of hidden agenda behind this question is rather paranoid from my perspective (and came as a surprise), as you didn't know anything about my intentions.

> I don't think you're correct here. As I've understood the concept for something like a decade, PIPs are almost universally understood to be a soft form of firing. The correct response to receiving a PIP, probably in most SV companies, is to start looking for another job.

I have a friend who was put on a two-month PIP and was fired at the end of it. Two weeks before the end of his PIP, his boss scheduled a meeting with him to "clear some things up" and tell him that his PIP isn't going well.

The first thing I told my friend after that was "Dude, he just gave you your two weeks notice. Start ramping up the job search.". And at the beginning of his PIP, I told him that he was effectively being given two months notice.

He took my advice, by the way, and landed a new job less than two weeks after being fired.

It's not doomed to end in confusion at all. Discussing Coraline might end in confusion, but that's the whole reason for creating an abstract hypothetical to talk about in the first place.

The point of creating such a hypothetical is to imagine what sort of discussion we would be having if the subject is not Coraline. So, it doesn't matter if Coraline is a man or is a woman or a transgender woman or a transgender man or a unisexual space alien from the other side of the galaxy. We can reason about how "a man" would be treated without getting stuck on ambiguities about Coraline.

Now, what could be confusing about the hypothetical is if we're not in agreement about what "a man" means. So let me be more explicit: I'm using the default understanding of what that means, which in the tedious language of modernity means a cisgender male. For simplicity, let's assume it's a white, heteronormative male, even though I don't think the reaction would be different for non-white not-hetero cisgender males.

Its a wise thing to do. I use it to simulate, how I would do in a face to face communication. So a smiley, where you would actually smile, to soften the blow, or to add humility when pointing somebody's wrong could be useful. Of course its use has to be limited, else it will look like a typical WhatsApp message emoticon train. :)

There are lots of small things, which if more people do, would lead to friendlier communications. E.g. replying with a greeting, to a mail which has greeting.

Some things that stood out to me after reading the whole thing:

- Other engineers dog-piling on her first few PRs showed that there was a complete lack of trust in her, and perhaps an active distrust in her abilities. I have no comments regarding whether this was deserved or not, but the known facts point to such a reality.

- Writing a feature blog post based on a personal perspective and personal past experience is not something a matured corporation can allow. This should not have been a surprise.

- Being the most productive engineer is not the goal of a Principal level engineer. I don't believe any software management would expect their Principal engineers to be sitting at the desk cranking out code all day. Influencing large scale initiatives across the org is more of the job expectation. This means building relationships with lots of people, which means less coding and more guidance of other engineers to do the coding.

- By that point, the expectation must have been high for what she can contribute on the diversity front. The terse messaging regarding the survey probably didn't help, but I also don't see it as a big deal. It's probably just piling on past issues.

- The rest is standard PIP procedure of managing out someone who isn't working out. I would love to say that I know how better to handle a PIP, but I don't.

It seems to me that Github expected a much stronger engineer, but feel like they didn't get one and that she was underperforming. Was that the actual reality? I don't know, and I don't feel qualified to pass judgment.

Which leads me to my final thought: it does seem like Github might have an empathy problem. My guess is that Coraline had her own set of insecurities about being at Github going into the job, and the first few encounters with the rest of the org put them into overdrive. It's unfortunate that her manager did not deem it productive to learn what her insecurities were and validate her on those fronts, which I believe might have put her back on the right track towards success. Instead, Coraline hunkered down and started cranking out code, and possibly withdrawing from the org around her? Rather than doing her intended job.

But, it is a lot to ask for a manager to do all of that, and she was a Principal engineer after all.

Getting a job is like getting married, even if things look all good at the ceremony, there's still years of sustained work/relationship-building to come. This one looks like a case of bad matching. In no way as to diminish Coraline's story, I've seen this happen to a lot of different kinds of people from all walks of life.

My 2 pennies.