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

#891

Post by malandrew » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:12 PM UTC

threatofrain wrote: post #853

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…

I think it's a weakness to omit thought and speech of outward appearance. Race for some is more than outward appearance. It's a line of community strategy. It's a shared language. It's shared food. Shared customs. Shared values. There's something beautiful and treacherous there. Race as a social reality exists whether we talk about or it not. Omitting speech destroys a valuable technique for counterbalancing instinct…

But why? You can have a shared language, shared food, shared customs and shared values despite race. Brazil is exemplary in this regard, where most of the country is mixed race and everyone is having sex with everyone else despite race. A former co-worker of mine, Wesley poignantly lamented this when he was in the US, when people ask questions like "What are you, Japanese, Chinese, Korean or something else?" and he was like "Huh? None of those. I'm Brazilian."

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

#892

Post by greenrd » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:13 PM UTC

b6 wrote: post #811

halostatue wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not talking or thinking about race leads to erasure , which is another form of racism. (For race / racism , you can substitute gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, etc.) To try to make this clear by analogy, one of the reasons that #OscarsSoWhite is a meme is because if black children only ever see white people winning Oscars…they won’t believe that they themselves could win one (and there’s 95%…

> No, not talking or thinking about race leads to erasure, which is another form of racism. Erasure seems to be jargon with no widely accepted meaning outside of social justice. For now I will stick to what I perceive to be the average of the various dictionary definitions of racism. By that meaning, not talking about or thinking about ethnicity is definitely not racism. > if black children only ever see white people…

> I think you're saying it's important to have visible role models with the same ethnicity and/or sex, and/or whatever other bodily attribute we're focusing on at the moment. But why would anyone think that unless they already have racist and/or sexist beliefs?

That's a new low in victim-blaming. It's not Hollywood that's racist - it's black people!

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

#893

Post by nickbauman » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

droopybuns wrote: post #494

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 think you're making too blanket a statement about culture and bigotry from this one story. This is about something at Github. Specifically, the Github "diversity initiative" appears to have dispensed with the notion of diversity training for certain segments in favor of adopting a bias against members of traditionally privileged class. I can't imagine this will go well for them. It's a pretty clear conflict of mission.

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

#894

Post by mikeash » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

b6 wrote: post #815

mikeash wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I don't want to be unfair to you or your argument, but I can't understand what you're saying any other way than that we should build racism and sexism into our policies and processes as a step toward eliminating racism and sexism.

I don't see why you should understand it any other way, done that is in fact what I'm saying. It's like putting wheels on an airplane. You want to be in the air, but you have to deal with the fact that you're on the ground or else you won't get anywhere.

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

#895

Post by malandrew » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:22 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #646

anotherc wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does it matter for someone who deals with 0's and 1's what the color of the skin of your coworker is? It seems crazy to me that someone would have to explain this on a public forum.If you are a white male I'm sure it might be hard for you to understand why race, gender, and class matter and how they intersect with your life, your work, and that of your colleagues.

Lets not deliberately ignore the point that was trying to be made. Its possible in this industry, to not even know the race or ethnicity of a coworker. That's a positive thing.

Lol. So true. I had a co-worker that I talked with several times a week about technical issues via HipChat for almost a year before I met him in person and the entire time I knew nothing about him other than he was a guy or identified as a guy and he was really good at his job (we have a few trans co-workers, so I don't assume cis-male). When I finally met him, it turns out that he was on the same floor about 50 meters away despite the fact that we're at a company with 1500 engineers spread across multiple offices.

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

#896

Post by greenrd » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

proc0 wrote: post #848

raquo wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument, the way I see it: "People say lies about race[0]. So let's not talk about race anymore" . This is, appallingly, the current state of the art of racial discussions in the west. Try to apply that logic to any other subject however, and the insanity will reveal itself. "People say lies about used cars. So let's not talk about used cars anymore" "People say lies about the mistakes of The One Party. So let'…

That's not the argument, granted it's very subtle and hard to see. The argument is "race as used in the U.S. is a social construct that is incorrectly correlated with some physical traits. So lets avoid bringing up someone's race when trying to explain their behavior and/or intentions." Just because someone has dark skin doesn't automatically mean they are "black" because black is more of a cultural thing than a race…

> Just because someone has dark skin doesn't automatically mean they are "black" because black is more of a cultural thing than a race.

What are you trying to say? That sounds incredibly racist. Are you trying to say that someone who has dark skin but "acts white" is not black??

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

#897

Post by malandrew » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

proc0 wrote: post #828

raquo wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks. I'll talk about race the same way I talk about eye color. I'll talk about culture the same way I talk about TV preferences. Without hysteria. Fuck racists. Fuck spineless "don't you dare mention race" bullshit. Both are equally cowardly.

The moment you mention race, you are fighting the racist's battle. Instead if you avoid it, you are side-stepping and leaving the racists on their own ground, where they are just insane and/or ignorant people. History gave us inaccurate representations of people, and racists use these to spew their hatred. Why promote the tool and framework for racists to continue using?

This is why I tend to trend in many comments to talking about "identity in-groups". I do occasionally use examples based on race or gender, but abstractly, I prefer "identity in-group" because it explicitly highlights that whatever it is we are talking about is an abstract concept that is not reality but something that exists as discrete quanta merely because we believe it does.

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

#898

Post by CWuestefeld » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

csteinbe wrote: post #855

dba7dba wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you not read the article? It says they can't even interview white candidates for jobs.

Just because they wrote it doesn't mean it's true.

...and they showed photos of Powerpoint slides that were pretty damning as well. Sure, those slides could also be faked, but I think that's well past the believable threshold for giving the benefit of a doubt.

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

#899

Post by greenrd » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

timrpeterson wrote: post #287

gedy wrote: post #241

The irony is remote workers are one of the best ways to remove much the physical power politics due to human biology. Size, body language, sexual attraction, etc.

Valuable comment. Also, gender and ethnicity get neutralized when remote employees have text-based conversation, allowing your words to be the focus as they should.

Possibly, but only if people actively choose usernames that remove hints of such things, avoid disclosing their ethnicity or gender, avoid using stereotypical male or female communication patterns... it's a rather unstable equilibrium.

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

#900

Post by bmh_ca » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 5:32 PM UTC

striking wrote: post #801

bmh_ca wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either you believe it is okay to discriminate against someone on the basis of their skin color or you don't. In most anti-discrimination policy discussions, the question being asked is not what colour ones skin is. It is whether the person belongs to an identifiable group that has suffered systemic prejudice. The ordinary intention of anti-discrimination is to rectify past and prevent future wrongs, and in particul…

> The argument that white people are being discriminated against based on a formula that rectifies past wrongs and undoes future ones belies a misunderstanding of the purpose, benefit, and impact. That's perfectly absurd. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. How do we measure wrongs? How do we "undo future wrongs"? I can't. Totally cannot. 100% can't deal with your argument.

> I can't. Totally cannot. 100% can't deal with your argument.

I find it telling that you think it is my argument. What I wrote is neither mine nor an argument. It is a description of a theory.

> Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination.

Not all discriminations are equal.

To argue that all discrimination is discrimination is to give equivalence to police murdering for traffic violations and being denied the pole position on a job application. Both are wrong, but there are quantitative differences – they can be measured.

> How do we measure wrongs? How do we "undo future wrongs"?

We can measure the effect of discrimination by the number of people affected, and the impact a discrimination has on an individual. It's not an unknown problem; statisticians measure it on jobs, income, applications, promotions, employment types. The data exists or can be gathered, and it can ascribed monetary value ("damages" in law). No formula will be ideal in all cases, but that is not an excusable barrier.

Societies with affirmative action have in essence determined, whether founded or not, that the aggregate of prejudice against classes of victims outweighs the aggregate prejudice of attempting to correct it.

If you want to discredit the theory you must first understand that it is a widely published and peer reviewed theory of many facets of society and not just an argument from some guy on the internet. The theory is founded in the philosophy of law, and touches on many other aspects ranging from the relationship between culture and economics through criminology.