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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

#601

Post by cooper12 »

striking wrote: post #599
cooper12 wrote: post #590

They targeted programmers. Programmers. We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a successful build saying we did. We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun. We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the runtim…

The points you made about programmers aren't invalid, but are taken to an absurd level and also imply the existence of the "other side." I mean, you could have written a feelgood snippet about programming, but I guess a meme is okay too.

It wasn't meant to be serious but to point out how absurd it is how seriously everyone here is taking themselves and viewing everything as a personal affront or a call to war. They see this as a war with "SJWs" and "PC police". You're right that I could have written a more serious reply, but when HN goes to shit the best thing to do is shitpost :).

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

#602

Post by Jedd »

Mangalor wrote: post #586
Jedd wrote: post #558

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. 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…

The point is to not ignore racism by pretending it doesn't exist.

I don't think anyone is advocating that we ignore racism, let alone that the ideal state is one where it exists and we ignore it.

Rather, we aim to be in a place where racism simply doesn't exist.

I am painfully aware that for many people this is an unsettling proposition as it sounds like rampant fantasy and/or they don't comprehend how (or believe that) any society could reach that position.

But in turn I believe those people exhibit a poverty of imagination, and are exhibiting an ignorance of various historical examples of comparably profound cultural shifts.

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

#603

Post by striking »

rotw wrote: post #492
verylongaccount wrote: post #345

It seems that a large number of posters believe that discriminating against white men is okay because they enjoy "white privilege", whatever that is. Either you believe it is okay to discriminate against someone on the basis of their skin color or you don't. Attempts to redefine the word notwithstanding, those who subscribe to the former philosophy are known as racists. It is hard to distinguish the anti-white vitrio…

> believe that discriminating against white men is okay because they enjoy "white privilege", whatever that is > It is hard to distinguish the anti-white vitriol I see on this page from the antisemitism of yesteryear. It was often said that Jews were over-represented in various occupations not because their industriousness, intelligence or other virtues, but because of devious trickery (they plot together to deprive…

> Educate yourself before you throw Godwins around.

He's not invoking Hitler or Nazism, he's making a comparison between white privilege and anti-semitism. It's pertinent because of whites and Jews being races; it's not just a random invocation of whatever to win an argument. Not all anti-semites are Nazis. There are plenty of otherwise normal people who just randomly hate Jews for literally no reason.

There's a point there, and I think you missed it. (Please note I am not arguing for or against that point, just that you may have missed it.)

I also appreciate the "Educate yourself" thought-terminating cliche. It's an interesting one.

If you call an argument Godwinesque but turn out to be wrong, who has lost the argument?

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

#604

Post by dracht »

anotherc wrote: post #432
proc0 wrote: 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…

> 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. You have to be joking. This is sarcasm, right?

There is a lot of overlap between the HN user base and the delusional SJW ilk that is running Github into the ground. People here are defending the blatantly racist sentiments mentioned in the article. They are performing some serious mental gymnastics to both hold the belief that race is an irrelevant social construct and that too many people of one race (cough whiteys cough) in one place is bad.

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

#605

Post by b6 »

rtpg wrote: post #583
b6 wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your end goal might be laudable, but the path to reach it requires corrections If you think it's a good goal, how would you would try to achieve it?

Well... Things like affirmative action do help price in the advantages race have given people, at least for a while. A stronger safety net works too. Obviously in combination with "magically getting rid of all racist/sexist thoughts".

But doesn't affirmative action necessitate the exact behavior we want to eliminate, making decisions based on body attributes?

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

#606

Post by striking »

verylongaccount wrote: post #345

It seems that a large number of posters believe that discriminating against white men is okay because they enjoy "white privilege", whatever that is. Either you believe it is okay to discriminate against someone on the basis of their skin color or you don't. Attempts to redefine the word notwithstanding, those who subscribe to the former philosophy are known as racists. It is hard to distinguish the anti-white vitrio…

It wasn't uncommon to hear in Eastern Europe a short while ago that "Jews control the world" and that's why we should take their power from them. Clearly absurd, but that's how people felt. (And I'm not making points about the Nazis, I'm making points about Poland in 1989 during the fall of Communism.)

But now we hear "white men control the world," and are expected to take their power away.

Just because they're similar doesn't mean they're the same, I realize. But we should at least be self-aware about that similarity, because it means something.

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

#607

Post by ben0x539 »

b6 wrote: post #566
ben0x539 wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't it a bit more like saying that because I don't want to be an alcoholic anymore, I should try hard every day not to drink?

No, because it doesn't actually address the existing situation. Maybe "I don't want it to be a problem that I'm an alcoholic, so no one should ever talk about my alcohol problem".

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

#608

Post by dracht »

dasil003 wrote: post #549
yulaow wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well tumblerinas says you can't be racist against white because patriarchy. /s No really, just read reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction and realize wtf people are saying these days shielding behind (false)feminist propaganda and some very confused idea of oppression.

Well to be fair, a white man's opinion on racism or sexism is sort of like a Pacific Islander's idea of how cold it is in Siberia. But on the other hand being ignorant does not make you less-than-human which seems to have become a common opinion in the age of Twitter lynch mobs.

>Well to be fair, a white man's opinion on racism or sexism is sort of like a Pacific Islander's idea of how cold it is in Siberia.

I hope the irony is not lost on you. What a despicable (and sadly typical) comment.

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

#609

Post by rjzzleep »

ploxiln wrote: post #557
DanBC wrote: 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.

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…

I've come to the conclusion that most people cannot grasp how meritocracy works, because the majority of the "real" world simply doesn't work like that.

One side of the equation are people that grew up with an alternate reality, because they spend a lot of their time online, growing up, working on their own projects and only later joining "society". In that world you get indeed ridiculed by how good or bad your code is, but not generally based on your socioeconomic background.

The other side of the equation is people that grew up in society where things do indeed work like in an old boys club. I will never get access to the people, that people studied international affairs at columbia do. I will also never get access to the people that MBAs from Harvard do.

But I still very well remember when I graduated from "the annoying kid that doesn't know shit" to "the kid that wrote a LR parser in IRC almost 20 years ago. And most of those people never ever found out my real name, my gender, my socioeconomic background, nor my ethnicity.

In fact the reality that this shit does matter in real life was as inconceivable for me back then, as the concept of meritocracy must be for someone that spent his entire life in society now.

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

#610

Post by Jedd »

mikeash wrote: post #528
b6 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending you've already achieved it. If current problems are driven by subconscious biases then you need to eliminate those. It seems to me that the best way to eliminate them is to forcibly overcome them until people get used to seeing more minorities in these positions and replace their subconscious biases with new ones.

I don't believe the two approaches conflict.

We're all familiar with the possibly apocryphal experiment of five monkeys, a ladder, and an electric shock - with the end of the experiment being five monkeys that have never been shocked, but their behaviour is changed. I think we all like to think we've evolved above this kind of manipulation, though I also suspect we each have stories of having worked in professional environments, staffed by evidently smart people, where we observe this same phenomenon.

(Aside -- it's sobering to consider that the people we've worked with may have stories about such effects operating upon us.)

Anyway, point being that while you may be correct in the assertion:

  > It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending
  > you've already achieved it.
What if the goal is to have the next generation(s) achieve a way of thinking by pretending (I'm not ecstatic about that word, but it'll have to do) we think that way now.

Do you think that may have a positive effect?

I'm reminded of the Garbage Dump Troop - a fascinating story, told in many places, but here's a succinct explanation of the effect:

http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/the-baboon-tr...

Unsurprisingly, alpha males usually don't find the story charming. ; )

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