Usually companies try to hire more minorities out of guilt, or because "it's the right thing to do", but I think it's a wrong motivator. If the industry is not hiring part of society for some reason, then it's missing huge amount of unused talent.
We should be doing diversity and inclusion out of greed rather than guilt
GitHub, fuck your name change
551–560 of 1001 posts
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#552I want to share my own reactions to the name change since this is a really interesting topic. For context, I'm an African American, so many of my ancestors were slaves. - The first time it occurred to me that "master" in this context could offend anyone was when GitHub changed the name (and broke my workflow). - My immediate reaction was, "this change is by white people for white people," where "white" means anyone w…
This.
These changes to remove subconscious bias from our language are necessary. They are microaggressions which the average user doesn't even realize exist- but which do harms to some individuals in our society. This may be a minority group within our society- even a very small fraction of a percent- but removing biases which are perceived as harmful is one way that we as an organization demonstrate that we are being actively inclusive to all, instead of falling back on habits developed to favor, or carrying the embedded biases of, one social or cultural group.
I look at it like ADA requirements for language. If you have a curb a wheelchair user can't climb, that's a harm to that individual- and so we require actions, by law, to ensure that wheelchair users are accommodated in our society. 30 years ago the similar complaints were made against ADA ramps, handicap-accessible restrooms, etc.- that they weren't really necessary because the minority who were being hurt by their absence were such a minority, and weren't really the target served population of the organization, etc. That was anti-inclusivity- and so we passed the ADA and support accessibility for all in our organizations- and nobody these days chafes at it at all, for the most part.
Removing harms from how organizations execute their business operations is part of inclusivity. It's not cargo culting, it's not engaging in a self-pleasuring but pointless behavior, it's not a meaningless act that carries no value- it's ensuring that our organization does as little harm to folks as possible as we move forward doing business in the world.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#553As I've said when this was discussed a while ago, the problem is not with the word "master", it would be with the word "slave". "Master" has many uses that have nothing to do with slavery, as evidenced in words like "master's degree", "master" vs. "apprentice", "mastery", etc. Once "master" is used in combination with "slave", it refers back to slavery and leans on it, there is no doubt about it. That's the case for…
> Once "master" is used in combination with "slave", it refers back to slavery and leans on it, there is no doubt about it.
This is not how language works. E.g. if you recall the debate about this, some people dug up an email from, I guess, Linus that mentioned master and slave repositories and some reasoning around that repositories are identical to branches yadda-yadda. (Or maybe the email was actually referring to the terminology used in another DVCS they were taking idea from.)
So they have proven that say some 15 years ago the thing was originally named so because of the master/slave concept (the technical concept). However, nothing proves better than the need to dig this up that meanings indeed do change. Especially when you use a name that has multiple meanings, like master. They named it master because of master/slave but the majority probably never knew this (I've never heard anyone talking about a slave branch) so just assumed master is master as in master copy, source of truth, etc.
This is how language works. After all, this is how the word master acquired the meaning of "owner of slaves" which it did not have originally. So yes, it was named master because it was related to the concept that we (used to?) describe with the expression that does refer to slavery but we definitely changed the context over time.
Regarding the name change, you can see several ways how it does harm. One of them was described in the post: by diverting the discourse and using up the effort that could have been spent on handling the real issues. Whether we are talking about people who did want to do something positive and now they feel they did (this is what the post is about) as well as the people who could have been recruited for taking meaningful actions but got pissed off/tired of this stupidity.
I honestly think that both this master branch thing and black/whitelist was 100% stupid because, as said in the blog post context . I'm not sure about the master/slave, but I'm 100% willing to accept that it can be offensive (and I'm treating it as such), though it would be interesting to hear the opinion of those affected, like the post author. (I just miss the nuisances here as I'm not from the US. Before hearing all the debate around this, I would have simply said that slavery was a wide-spread phenomenon during human history and it refers to that concept. That doesn't mean we don't think it's a terrible thing to do to a human being or that we don't empathise will all of those who had to endure it during their life.)
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#554> So while the tech community was rushing around, trying to do their best impression of a black square post on Insta I remember thinking, “oh for fucks sake, they’ve completely missed the point”. Why? They forgot to talk to people who are actually members of the black community. In practice, big techs don't care about POC, they care about mobs. "Inclusive" words is just what make mobs happy and it's cheaper to do tha…
Is “person of color” an okay thing to say in US? It really rubs me the wrong way (as a non-native English speaker). To me it’s kinda like calling people with long noses “people of nose size”.
> Is “person of color” an okay thing to say in US?
I'm not English native so that could be the wrong term, not trying to offend anyone. In this context, I mean "discriminated persons/peoples".
IIRC, I saw this on the rules of r/publicfreakout (stating that videos representing "POC" would be moderated). For me "POC" means "Proof Of Concept", so I asked and discover it was about "Person Of Color" and so I use this on English spoken Internet.
But I agree, it's a weird term and I never use this in my native language. Each country have different way to talk about racism and discrimination because each country have it's own racism and discrimination problems.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#555> “Meritocracy!”, I hear you cry. “They pick from the most talented students. The ones that worked the hardest to get into the most elite schools. The black students should have just worked harder”. I guess mummy and daddy paying $20 mil for a new library to get me a seat at an ‘elite’ school is still meritocracy eh?
That's quite a straw man. If you're genuinely in favor of meritocracy, you should inherently be against the rich buying their way into positions. Just because bad thing A happens, that doesn't mean we should just allow bad thing B to happen too. We should stop bad thing A!
I do agree with the basic sentiment of this article. The tech industry would benefit from more diversity - particularly diversity of thought, which does not necessarily mean increasing diversity of skin color but would probably make the industry a more inviting place for minorities in the future. Nonsense like renaming benign technical terms does absolutely nothing to help with that.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#556I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote. It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate. For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, wat…
What do you think about the claim that LBJ’s great society effectively incentivized breaking up black families, with tragic consequences?
Seems another good reason to “walk away from the left” if even their apparently sincere projects keep backfiring like that.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#557I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote. It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate. For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, wat…
Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates? This specific instance seems like an overreaction of some in both corporate and social media culture. One poster already pointed out that this is likely more about corporate fear o…
Marxism isn't a political ideology?
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#558Saying that the left spends too much effort on rhetoric might be valid criticism, but focusing on it as reasons to "walk away from the left" (which not too many black Americans are doing, BTW) is disingenuous. Sure, the left talks about rhetoric, but it also fights for higher wages, civil liberties, healthcare, affirmative action, investment in education, workers' rights, and voting rights. It's fine not to like ever…
I find this post defensive in tone. At some point America's popular culture will internalize that the wage gap was a myth and etc and appreciate that the left has been peddling pseudoscience for ages in the name of intellectual vanity. Too many generations lost being the lefts rosemary kennedy.
In what way is the wage gap a myth? You can argue that the wage gap isn't primarily due to absolute discrimination, but that the wage gap exists is an objective fact.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#559As I've said when this was discussed a while ago, the problem is not with the word "master", it would be with the word "slave". "Master" has many uses that have nothing to do with slavery, as evidenced in words like "master's degree", "master" vs. "apprentice", "mastery", etc. Once "master" is used in combination with "slave", it refers back to slavery and leans on it, there is no doubt about it. That's the case for…
Personally I don’t even think master/slave is bad. Do black people look at the word “slave” and think “Oh, that’s about me”? Does a white person see it and think “This must be about black people”? I just cannot see the value. It just feels like brainless censorship.
And more importantly, like the post saliently points out, it gives the illusion of affecting change while in reality doing nothing for the people it’s supposed to be done for.
Hire more POC. Mentor and tutor POC in engineering. Don’t police innocuous words.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#560I want to share my own reactions to the name change since this is a really interesting topic. For context, I'm an African American, so many of my ancestors were slaves. - The first time it occurred to me that "master" in this context could offend anyone was when GitHub changed the name (and broke my workflow). - My immediate reaction was, "this change is by white people for white people," where "white" means anyone w…
Or I'll reflect about an American company imposing change to the rest of the world about domestic issues.