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

#961

Post by cookiecaper » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 7:51 AM UTC

rjzzleep wrote: post #609

ploxiln wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I think this is the heart of these issues. Most people are fundamentally incapable of ascertaining objective merit, and thus the concept of a meritocracy is meaningless to them. This is instructive in business too; never trust your customers to be able to tell that your offering is superior, you have to TELL them.

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

#962

Post by cookiecaper » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 8:40 AM UTC

yakult wrote: post #565

The real question is: is a repo purge going to follow from their internal purge? Will they start deleting projects with diverging political views? It's not exactly paranoia: there has been precedents; see Gamergate.

>The real question is: is a repo purge going to follow from their internal purge? Will they start deleting projects with diverging political views?

They've already done that. https://github.com/FeministSoftwareFoundation/C-plus-Equalit...

However, they continue to host a mirror of it: https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality

Not sure why they didn't allow the "official" one but allow the mirror. Guess they just wanted the ability to say they took it down for PR purposes.

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

#963

Post by cookiecaper » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 8:43 AM UTC

melted wrote: post #167

This would be a good lesson for other companies with SJWs on staff: do what _you_ believe is right, don't let them drive the discussion.

Software guys seem really impressionable if the argument is coming from the right sectors. I'd be really interested in learning more about that.

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

#964

Post by wyclif » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 9:38 AM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #817

13thLetter wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall hearing that much in the context of Eich, but it certainly is a common go-to argument more recently among those who want to see people punished for having incorrect political views. It came up a lot when Strangeloop kicked out Curtis Yarvin, for example.

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…

"Having a political view" contra SSM might not only take the form of "non-heterosexual marriages are icky." Engaging in caricature doesn't help advance the discussion of PC in the workplace. People might believe that homosexual marriage isn't morally or ethically legit. That a company or large numbers of people disagree doesn't mean the people that have these views should be punished for thoughtcrime or for expressing their opinions, or donating to a non-PC cause.

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

#965

Post by greenrd » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 11:24 AM UTC

13thLetter wrote: post #938

greenrd wrote: post #883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And they also make it OK for me to criticize the people who are criticizing Mozilla, and for those people to criticize me for criticizing the people who are criticizing Mozilla, and etc. So now that we've gotten that out of our system, we can realize that there's a difference between being criticized and losing one's job because of one's political opinions, and a society where the second thing happens is a society th…

So again I ask, what would you propose we do about it? Criticism leads to boycotts lead to resignations. At what point does it become unacceptable, and unacceptable to whom?

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

#966

Post by jcromartie » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 2:08 PM UTC

spopejoy wrote: post #947

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…

Adapt or die. Integrated workforces are more successful. And with that I take my leave of this whiny white bastion called HN. Enjoy your caves, suckas

You say "adapt" but you mean "capitulate."

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

#967

Post by ake1 » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 2:10 PM UTC

sytse wrote: post #732

ake1 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

been using gitlab for the past two years at work and the only time it's inaccessible is when upgrading it. it does have a lot of other issues like response time and a difficult to navigate ui but crashing is not one of them.

What version are you on? Since GitLab 8.0 great improvements have been made to the UI and if there is something still wrong on the latest version we would love to know.

it is generally hard to navigate, every time i'm adding a user and giving him access to groups/projects i have to spend a minute to figure out where. the new CI gui is worse than the old one (pre-8).

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

#968

Post by anonicode » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 3:17 PM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #959

anonicode wrote: post #928

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true of GitHub as a whole, and I'm not sure it is true of any part of GitHub. Their team page shows everybody on staff in the order they were hired. Scroll to the bottom and you will see that there is no shortage of white people being hired. https://github.com/about/team

Is that up to date? They used to introduce each employee on their blog but they hadn't done one for months last time I checked.

It's up to date. It has people who started last week.

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

#969

Post by jcromartie » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 3:46 PM UTC

sauere wrote: post #491

StevePerkins wrote: post #338

Some random thoughts and observations after reading this thread: [1] I'm interested in the differences between reactions to this, versus Brendan Eich's gay marriage scandal at Mozilla a couple of years ago. Don't get me wrong... I supported marriage equality then, and I do not support the worst of the statements called out in this story now. However, there are rational arguments that the HN community overreacted in B…

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.

If I want to see someone's work, and they provide a URL, I'm interested in the content, not the identity of the service it's hosted on. Gee, this sounds familiar...

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

#970

Post by jcromartie » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

rotw wrote: post #865

green7ea wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentence seems like an oxymoron to me: >> True meritocracy can only come through promoting diversity. If you are taking diversity into account, you are taking things other than merit into account and so it isn't a 'true' meritocracy. Not only that but it also suffers from the no true Scotsman fallacy. The best way to promote meritocracy is to base your decisions on merit and nothing else. To avoid unconscious bi…

> If you are taking diversity into account, you are taking things other than merit into account and so it isn't a 'true' meritocracy. Well, no. The point is that due to inherent unconscious biases (see my link for scientific papers documenting this), it's impossible to only take merit into account without social norms biased towards white men skewing the process. Diversity initiatives seek to eradicate this bias, in…

How about a "blind" hiring process? For software engineers, it's easy to imagine tools that could help evaluate skills without revealing that person's race or gender.