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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

#691
post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, I can readily believe lots of our problems stem from subconscious biases. But what do you think about the questions I posed? Are we trying to create a world where we don't care about body attributes? If so, do you advocate doing the exact opposite behavior (deliberately paying attention to body attributes and factoring them into decisions) for some temporary period and then stopping?

Yes to both.

We're already factoring these things into decisions whether we want to or not. I don't see anything weird about saying that we should change how we do so, as a step towards getting rid of it altogether.

I think that as long as we have large discrepancies in how many people with or without a particular attribute are in a particular profession, we'll have subconscious biases in evaluating who's good at that profession. If you spend your whole life in an environment where almost all the best programmers are purple people, you'll have a hard time overcoming the notion that purple people are generally better programmers. Pretending not to notice color will simply persist the status quo. If we deliberately include more orange people for a time, then we may be able to overcome that.

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

#692
post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not about the software. Github has become the number one place to show of your portfolio. Half of job postings these days encourage you to include a link to your GitHub profile.

> It is not about the software. For me, it emphatically is about the software. Even for totally private repos, where popularity is not a factor, I continue to turn to Github because the UIs for both Bitbucket and GitLab continue to stand in the way of me easily getting shit done.

Anything we can improve in GitLab to make getting shit done easier?

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

#693
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab is pretty nice and auto-imports from GitHub!

Meh, I think we need to fork github. Gitlab supports the same nonsense github does.

Do you have any sources? I'm genuinely curious.

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

#694
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but like 63% of the U.S consists of whites. If it were an even distribution it would be disproportionate. Whites are somewhat over represented based on your numbers, but not as much as you seem to imply.

Sure, but we're talking about white women, which make up about 33% of the population of the US. Are you arguing that it's ok that 79% of the publishing industry is white and 78% is female?

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

#695
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…

> 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

Acting like your goal has already been achieved doesn't necessarily get you any closer to your goal. If my closet has a bunch of stuff I don't use, it's not going to get any cleaner if I just pretend it's already clean.

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

#696

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…

I don't understand how people can seriously claim that these are "current dominant themes". I studied at UC Berkeley, one of the liberal capitals of California. Most of my friends are Berkeley students. Most of my friends are feminists . There's practically no hostility (as you put it) towards white, heterosexual males in these circles. I have never been personally attacked or felt uncomfortable. Most of the discussi…

Your Berkeley friends may simply be more educated. In any case, before you pass judgment, try expressing a differing opinion.

Most of the feminists that are my friends aren't 'militant'. I can disagree with them and point out where their little bits of dogma differ with reality. We can usually have a discussion and learn from each other.

But trying to do that with any self-proclaimed feminist who doesn't already know me and it's I don't get it because of male privilege, or I'm ignorant on the subject (even if I cite sources and they don't), or I'm a rapist or rape sympathizer. They give me appeals to (their own) authority, fabricated statistics* , specious arguments about female fear, and I get shouted down if I want to discuss where males have similar struggles to females.

I once pointed out that the term feminism does not espouse the equality the feminist movement is trying to achieve. I said that is a disservice to the movement because it excludes some would-be allies while at the same time encouraging the "bad" type of feminist. I also pointed out that if someone self-identifies as a feminist, I don't really know what that person means. For some, like your friends apparently, it means what I think it means. But for others it means "white males are the devil."

I was immediately attacked. My attacker stated that she had read all the literature and (a million non sequiturs). My feminist friends just bowed out of the conversation, which irked me. The only person who stood up and was like "Uh, this is crazy. You're not even talking about what he said," was another male.

*Did you know murder by males is the number one cause of death among females?

Edit: Formatting

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

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed about Bitbucket. I've used it for a long time and haven't found it to be substantively different from GitHub in either functionality or reliability. The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular.

> The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular. Has anyone really thought of this? Do people just happen on to a github project because "it is on github" or because someone linked their work and people liked it and wanted to contribute? Would React, D3, Rails, Bootstrap etc not get what they do now simply because "oh I don't have a bitbucket account, I'm not going to bother" To me at least this k…

> Has anyone really thought of this? Do people just happen on to a github project because "it is on github" or because someone linked their work and people liked it and wanted to contribute?

I happen to have a BitBucket account, so I can't speak directly to your point, but I'm less likely to file issues on a project if I have to register a new account with their bug tracker to do so. I imagine the same would apply to a project hosted on BitBucket if I had a GitHub account but not one on BitBucket.

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

#698
post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I think the next generation will tend to do what we do. If a certain profession has a racial makeup that greatly differs from that of the general population, that will tend to cause the next generation to think of that profession as being typically whatever race is predominant. In short, if you grow up in an environment where almost all programmers are young black women (being deliberately opposite here) then you'll tend to see young black women as being more qualified, all else being equal, and this will perpetuate the disparity.

It seems to me that if you want to get to a state where diversity just happens by not consciously thinking about race, you need to first get to a state where diversity happens, let it sit for a while, then relax it. I don't see how it's supposed to work if you just stop deliberately discriminating against people and otherwise let things take their course. It seems like trying to achieve flight by making airplane noises and thinking real hard about being up in the air.

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

#699
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you even need to see the whole presentation. A few of the full sentences on that one slide are more than enough to project a strong us vs them attitude of hatred and victim versus oppressor, especially the following bullets: - "This is not work for white folks to lead" - "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women" - "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues" This is blat…

It's actually written into GitHub's Open Code of conduct. (The 'Open' Code has not accepted any changes for quite some time even though this particular issue was under discussion [1].) The Open Code expressly excuses discrimination against some races and genders, specifically by explicitly ignoring any critique which might fall under a 'reverse'-ism; 'reverse-racism' or 'reverse-sexism' [2]. This line in the Open Cod…

Oh well thankfully hating white makes is just plain old racism and sexism not some reverse-whatever nonsense. So I guess we're good ;-)

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

#700
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…

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…

My reading is that the reorg and push for diversity are two different things.
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