GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart • Hacker News Board

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

#881

Post by Karunamon » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

13thLetter wrote: post #824

Karunamon wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said it back then and I'll say it here: There's a difference between "having a political view" (thinking that non-heterosexual marriages are icky) and taking positive action to prevent others from having equal rights (donating money to a lobbying/social engineering group) One is a thought, the other is an action. Punishing people for unknowable bad thoughts is an Orwellian nightmare. Punishing people for visible ba…

So people are allowed to have unpopular opinions as long as they don't, you know, tell anyone else about them or anything? Sorry, but that's unacceptable.

So personally involved people aren't allowed to voice displeasure at those who have taken positive steps to harm them?

Did you completely ignore the differentiation between thought and action that I just laid out?

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

#882

Post by malandrew » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 4:35 PM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #537

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…

Let's say we all started ignoring everything you're talking about today. Currently a black family making $100k will live in roughly the same area as a white family making $30k. This family is also much more likely to have family that has gone to prison due to previous racist institutions, and less likely to have had 3 generations of parents having gone to Stanford. So sure, race gets ignored, but do you think people…

    Currently a black family making $100k will live in roughly 
    the same area as a white family making $30k.

I've heard this figure several times and no one using it has yet cited a source for this. Could you please provide a citation for this figure and any secondary sources that study primary sources attempting to explain this disparity.

I don't doubt this figure could exist at some time pre-1990, but I don't understand how this could possibly be the case since the start of the housing bubble that burst in 2008 in which many many firms pretty much threw out all prejudices in the pursuit of money as people tried to source any and all loans to sell Wall Street. They not only threw out prejudices, they actively overlooked issues that might correlate with and work against some identity groups like credit rating and earning power.

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

#883

Post by greenrd » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 4:36 PM UTC

13thLetter wrote: post #824

Karunamon wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said it back then and I'll say it here: There's a difference between "having a political view" (thinking that non-heterosexual marriages are icky) and taking positive action to prevent others from having equal rights (donating money to a lobbying/social engineering group) One is a thought, the other is an action. Punishing people for unknowable bad thoughts is an Orwellian nightmare. Punishing people for visible ba…

So people are allowed to have unpopular opinions as long as they don't, you know, tell anyone else about them or anything? Sorry, but that's unacceptable.

What would you propose we do - jail people who call for boycotts? Jail people who criticise corporations?

I'll spell this out very simply: the same laws and social standards that make it OK for you to criticise them, make it OK for them to criticise Mozilla.

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

#884

Post by malandrew » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 4:36 PM UTC

exolymph wrote: post #456

api_or_ipa wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When is the disease distinct from the cure? At a certain point, we need to move forward and strive towards a harmonious ideal. Otherwise we delay true equality.

I agree that we need to move forward, but I think it's better to focus on tactics that can succeed.

What about tactics that are antagonistic and counter-productive? Isn't it about time someone asked "What could possibly go wrong?" when discussing each tactic?

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

#885

Post by malandrew » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 4:41 PM UTC

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.

The parent's point was that not all places are racist in the same way and when you see the diversity in how racism plays out across countries and cultures, you realize that is exists because people believes it exists.

Racism is not reality.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick

from "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978) http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm

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

#886

Post by greenrd » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 4:44 PM UTC

ericjang wrote: post #107

victor9000 wrote: post #72

> While their efforts are admirable it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging How is this even legal? Change 'white' for any other race, and you'd have yourself a workplace discrimination lawsuit.

It definitely doesn't sound right. I'm hoping/wishing that this quote was taken out of context. Can anybody with more insider context elaborate? I'm very interested in the "internal cultural battle" over diversity issues at Github, because my school's CS dept. is having a lot of dialogue lately with similar rhetorical arguments. Teaching Assistants recently had a mandatory student-run training session that I perceive…

This is very odd. I know universities can be very liberal places, but where did this combination of "mandatory" and "student-run" come from? I'm actually in favour of flattening hierarchies - but not inverting them. Why should students barely out of high school get to dictate the behaviour of teaching assistants who may be up to 40 years their senior? Why should the power relationships be temporarily inverted like that?

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

#887

Post by collyw » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 4:53 PM UTC

dpweb wrote: post #725

morgante wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Github has a great UI, probably my favorite web app of all time. Not even sure why, I just like it. Their culture is definitely screwed up - or they wouldn't be in the news like this. Culture starts at the top, a few people, even just one person at the very top. You have to take responsibility for that. The "we can break all the rules" thinking is naive - you'll find some of those rules are there for a reason. If you…

I don't find it that great. Finding your own repositories is a bit cryptic compared to bitbucket.

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

#888

Post by malandrew » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 4:54 PM UTC

tatterdemalion wrote: post #507

alphapapa wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Let me apply the principle you claim to be the case in a different, ahistorical way: "'We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about denigrating and enslaving blacks, and NOT MENTION IT.' We live in a world where this is not remotely possible. Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism." --some Southern slave owner, 1859 The same could be applied to historical anti-semitic movements, anti-suffrage gro…

The actual analogy would be: "We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about slavery , and NOT MENTION IT." Do you see why this would not be an effective way to eliminate slavery?

This is a very strange mental exercise you're asking, but I'd like to explore it as a thought experiment for a moment if I may.

Can you implement and maintain a market without mentioning/discussing that market?

I don't see how any activity, economic or otherwise, can exist much less persist if you can't discuss it.

How would one buy something if they don't understand what it is or its utility?

Why would someone engage in selling something if they don't know a market exists for that product and don't talk about it (market it)?

Could racist groups like the KKK persist without resorting to racial language to communicate their ideas?

This thought experiment is rooted in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

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

#889

Post by malandrew » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

Lazare wrote: post #687

proc0 wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm saying it's a wrong categorization, and inaccurate. People inaccurately categorize themselves as well. It would be more accurate to not refer to those categories as race, but as sub-cultures, because then it becomes something that isn't inherent to someone's identity. People of mixed race, for example, half "black", half "white", will often choose to be "black", and identify as such, when in fact, their race…

Everything you said is factually correct. Race is a social construct with just as much meaning as society chooses to give it, which ideally should be none, because it's inherently nonsensical. The problem is, society chooses to give it a significant amount of meaning. > People of mixed race, for example, half "black", half "white", will often choose to be "black", and identify as such, when in fact, their race is a m…

    The problem is, society chooses to give it a significant 
    amount of meaning.

But why do we have the society we currently have? Can't we foster a society where race is less important by making it less important to the point it's not a concept we consider at all?

Personally, I felt as though we were progressing towards a society where we were giving it less and less meaning but in recent years we're regressing towards elevating its importance again and that is resulting in animosity.

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

#890

Post by greenrd » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:04 PM UTC

generic_user wrote: post #674

rjzzleep wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thats part of it. But there is a whole other group that is using victim hood and distorted diversity arguments to extract monetary gain and organisational power from usually large companies who reflexively instantiated paid positions with little or no research and vague PR-friendly mission statements. If the only real goal put down on paper is to hire x% black people and y% brown people and reduce z% of white people…

> If the only real goal put down on paper is to hire x% black people and y% brown people and reduce z% of white people under some fuzzy equality rubric

I suspect that in GitHub's case, the diversity officer was tasked with defining those goals, on the basis that the straight white male executives would have no clue what the "right" goals should be.