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Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

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Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#71

Post by Thorazul »

CJefferson wrote: post #4

Obviously this article is a single personal viewpoint, but I have heard similar stories from two other github employees (one of whom still works for github). Their interpretation was that github is upset they are viewed as sexist, so they want to figure out how to change their public reputation, without actually changing anything.

This feels like the mostly likely scenario, quickly change your image by hiring a bunch of 'diverse' people and soak up the PR, then quietly let them go over the next few years if they don't conform.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#72

Post by twerkmonsta »

"The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication."

I'm all for being compassionate and helping people through tough times, but does this sound like a stable person?

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#73

Post by MichaelBurge »

> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."

I Imagine this read to the survey writer like:

"Hello, I'd like to complain about your use of the term Linux on the corporate intranet. A page provides instructions for running the data parsing scripts "on Linux". Since we do not do any kernel work, it is improper to refer to them as Linux instructions. Instead, people should be familiar with either POSIX, bash(with extensions), or GNU coreutils."

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#74

Post by thehardsphere »

Herald_MJ wrote: post #39
giggles_giggles wrote: post #18

"I was well aware of GitHub's very problematic past, from its promotion of meritocracy in place of a management system" This person mentions multiple times that meritocracy is a bad idea, that promotion or reward based on merit should be done away with in order to promote diversity, e.g., racial/gender-based quotas. This is a person who does not view competence as the primary trait to select for within a market, and…

> Uh oh! The data scientist isn't up to date on the trends in gender studies and critical theory, better send her off to sensitivity training! The problem here wasn't that the data scientist was asking the wrong questions, it's that they were upset by someone stepping and offering an improved set of questions, and felt the need to complain to a manager instead of responding. The Github management's decision of asking…

We don't see any of the correspondence other than the one small portion quoted, so it is entirely possible that something more confrontational was said.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#75

Post by ohthehugemanate »

problems wrote: post #12

Isn't this the person who ran a code of conduct that has a website which includes things like "thoughtless use of pronouns" and mentions meritocracy as an evil, not a goal to strive for? Can't really say I'm expecting someone like that to be low friction.

Meritocracy is actually a very damaging thing, the way we tend to implement it in tech. Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators. Particularly in tech, those biases tend to favor white, upper middle class, males.

This kind of bias is demonstrated over and over in studies, even (and in some cases, especially) among people who are highly educated and even forewarned about the study objectives.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#76

Post by dang »

rexicus wrote: post #29

This guy is a walking stereotype and must be a nightmare to be around.

We ban accounts that comment like this. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704219 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#77

Post by Thorazul »

microcolonel wrote: post #65
opportune wrote: post #49

The main thing I've taken away from the whole github situation is that, as a tech company, you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. That doesn't mean exclusively hiring white men and sending out Kalanick-style emails; it means keeping your work environment as professional and politically neutral as possible unless absolutely necessary. My employer does a good job of thi…

I agree wholeheartedly. As soon as political and emotional appeals overrule standards of professional conduct, everyone is walking on eggshells. > assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them. Especially big on this. Nobody can read minds, so when people make mistakes, there is no winning tactic other than to assume good intent.

Especially in a company that seems to communicate through comments/emails etc. and not so much face to face interaction.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#78

Post by ivraatiems »

rndmwlk wrote: post #67
ivraatiems wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's most interesting is that "empathetic communication" is generally not prioritized in software development environments, in favor of exactly the kind of polite-but-direct communication the author employs. (In fact, many feel that even politeness is unnecessary or harmful. For instance, Linus Torvalds' and other OSS developers are known and regularly praised for their bluntness.) I've spoken out often on HN about…

>I think it is possible that there is some sexism here in that I'm not confident a male employee at Github would ever be challenged over failing this communication standard. What leads you to this conclusion? Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence. > Al…

> Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence.

It comes back to that implicit expectation. Something I've been bringing up a lot in this thread as I read the comments throughout it is that whether we consider somebody rude or not seems to depend a lot on a) who they are, and b) whether we agree with them. We are more charitable to people who are more like us and whose ideas we find more correct. We're all human, so that's part of life. However, as an organization, Github can and should do better than that, and I think here that it did not. The sexism here, if it exists, is implicit in the way problems with this person were handled and in the expectations (mostly unwritten, at least at first) about how she'd behave.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#79

Post by myko »

azinman2 wrote: post #26
Dirlewanger wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She went on a tirade against an Opal contributor a couple years back: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

The maintainers instant reply was super flippant and worthy of retort. Never really wanted to use opal before, but if this is who is behind it...

Wow. That particular maintainer is really off the deep end - here is their writeup on the incident (which is pretty fucked up reading IMO):

http://meh.schizofreni.co/random/lulz/2016/01/08/tales-from-...

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#80

Post by pc86 »

I am really torn on this one. I want to discuss the article because I think it brings up interesting topics, and for the most part HN folks are good at discussing polarizing things like this without devolving into Reddit-style nonsense. On the other hand, I want to flag it, because the article itself is absolute garbage.

EDIT: I see now it is flagged. To be clear, I didn't, because I still think it's worth discussing some of the points made.

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