That's an old picture, as in before January 24, 2014. Why do I know?
Because the "United Meritocracy of Github" carpet shown was removed after feminists threw a fit and got them to remove it. Because "Meritocracy is masculine and evil." (Read; the women GH hired can't cut it. Mainly GitHub's Julie Ann Horvath)
Speaking from the distaff side here, meritocracy would be a really nice thing to have. But what happens all too often is that a company wanting to distance itself from xxx-discrimination will quota hire the not-terribly meritocratic, because hey we just confirmed our own prejudices.
What happens when genuinely meritocratic hiring is introduced is quite interesting:
OT: those are some skewed definitions of meritocracy... The real issue the feminist camp is missing is that in a real meritocracy no one looks at your gender or background. The real issue at stake in the corporate world today is that a meritocratic org is an unattainable ideal - they don't exist. Every org ends up being an ol' boys club. And being an ol' gals club is going to be just more of the same. Double hilarity for women from GitHub getting discriminated against based on their affiliation - this just proves that feminism is simply the other side of the same sexist coin.
> The real issue the feminist camp is missing is that in a real meritocracy no one looks at your gender or background.
A real meritocracy serves exactly the values of whatever person or group defines the merit function; when sexists exist and are in positions of social power, "real meritocracies" will also be sexist.
We can't let this issue devolve into something this stupid. Yes, if one of the factors determining merit is being able to lift 250lbs then you'll probably end up with a staff of mostly men simply because there are comparatively few women who do strength training. Assuming that this requirement is reasonable for the type of work there is nothing sexist about the hiring practice.
The unequal distribution of specific types of merit between men and women is not the responsibility of the hiring manager. If you put the burden of social change and "making up for discrimination" on businesses then they're going to hire just enough "___"s to not look discriminatory, give them inconsequential projects, and hire the rest of the team on merit.
Genuine meritocracy would ideally see women in positions roughly commensurate to their percentage of the population (~50.8%). There are a lot of reasons why we don't see that, and those reasons shape choices made by, available to, and expected of women well before they ever get to the point where they're applying for a position at Github or any other tech company. I think a lot of the criticism of Github's rug went for the low-hanging fruit there, and missed a lot of those earlier factors that push far too many women away from math, science, and technology while they're still just developing children. Removing a rug (and granting the assumption that the act heralds a shift in workplace culture), or any number of the policies that might improve the gender imbalance in the tech world, are the functional equivalent of bandaids: useful and maybe even necessary, but they're actions taken after the initial cause has already arisen. Part of that's because the damage is already done by that time (how many have given up on math because they didn't think they were a "math person," even before we start to look at the gender disparity there?), but also because defining--let alone building--a true meritocracy is damned difficult.
Humans are fallible. We see things through our own perspectives, and don't even realize what we're missing unless we make a conscious effort to attempt it. There's a lot of cultural baggage that still surrounds questions of gender, and diving into that is an incredibly messy process that, if we're going to be honest, is going to take years if not decades. And that's a damned scary thing, precisely because of how unjust the consequences of that baggage are.
Speaking as a man, I don't think most feminists have an issue with meritocracies as ideals: there's no basis for assuming that a woman can't compete equally against a man, and that'd be obvious in a meritocracy. Their brains aren't "different," nor are they the "weaker sex," or any of a thousand tropes littered throughout history. I think that the issue boils done to a problem with what happens before you get to that meritocracy that affects the decision-making calculus. It's hard to say that you're looking at a genuine meritocracy when the sample being analyzed is already skewed. This is setting aside questions of pay, culture, and other gender issues in the workplace.
And I think the way I grew up and the things that's happened to me that goes against the flow of what others say and see.
One of my first jobs was a Subway. Had a female manager. Her boss was the district manager and also female. Cool. The store manager tries sexually assault me (shoves things in my underwear) in the store. DM promptly fires her.
And yet, I hear about this kind of stuff with guys doing it to women, along with butt slapping and the sort. I've not been around that crowd, but had it does the same.
I went to a bar with a my wife and a friend. He's a big burly gay guy (a Bear, self identifies). Technically I, along with my wife are both bisexual, it's not a big deal. The bar, however, was a Bear Bar. I'm 6'5", big beard. Pretty fat. In other words, I fit in. Except, the whole feeling that women talk about they are a piece of meat; I felt that. I was the piece, to be gawked over. It was pretty uncomfortable, but it ended soon enough.
I had a manager, female, in a professional setting. She speaks highly of feminism. Cool. Except, she would wear skimpy short skirts, low cut blouses and more. She would play the stereotype; the same stereotype she would claim she was against. And when people would treat her like the hot sexy eyecandy, rather than smart computer scientist (which she is), she would get pissed off.
> Genuine meritocracy would ideally see women in positions roughly commensurate to their percentage of the population
i.e. meritocracy means having people in positions based on their incidence in the general population... not on their merits.
Are you sure you understand the meaning of the word "meritocracy" ?
> a lot of those earlier factors that push far too many women away from math, science, and technology while they're still just developing children
Because women have different interests from men? I can easily name 10 male friends who obsessed about science and technology starting from 12 years old. 30 years later, they're all in computers making good money. I can think of maybe 2 female friends who came close. And even they didn't have the same level of obsession as the guys.
> I don't think most feminists have an issue with meritocracies as ideals:
If a meritocracy means hiring people on their incidence in the general population (not on their merits), then yes, that statement is true.
> i.e. meritocracy means having people in positions based on their incidence in the general population... not on their merits.
If we take a random, representative sample of people, we're going to see women make up approximately 50.8% of that sample. Positions aren't assigned on the basis of that percentage; rather, it just works out that they'd match it overall across an industry. Or it would, and that was my point. Differences in individual workplace makeup are deviations away from that, for whatever reasons you have (say, the gender split amongst CS graduates and other factors that contribute to it and the numbers we see today).
> Yes, they are.
That was a rather poor word choice on my part. That sentence consisted of a series of historical examples of rationals used when describing women as lesser beings for various reasons. When I wrote "different," I was thinking specifically of arguments used against women's suffrage movements on the basis of irrationality. Even more obvious arguments can be found in how common diagnoses of "female hysteria" by the European medical community for centuries. Even the word hysteria comes from the Greek hystera, meaning womb. The precursor of those arguments--the so-called wandering womb--dates back to at least Hippocrates. Plato later describes the theory in the Timaeus, and Aretaeus after him. The medical community never really managed to escape the theory until relatively recently. It's actually a really fascinating history; if you're interested, Hysteria: The disturbing history by Andrew Scull is an excellent introduction to how the disease of hysteria changed over time, eventually fading altogether as we learned more about the human mind.
I guess my point is that there's a huge difference between historical views of the female mind (and its differences) compared to how neuroscientists approach the question today. You're absolutely right in that sense; chemical and structural differences might affect how information and sense input is processed, but the current body of research doesn't recognize that as indicating a difference in ability or even capability. Chalk this up to a poorly written sentence on my part with my apologies.
> If you believe the American Association of University women, they "wage gap" is about 6%. Not 77% like it's widely (and falsely) reported.
One of the reasons why I said to set questions of wage aside is precisely for this reason. The 77% number comes from BLS statistics, but those numbers are in aggregate and making comparisons from that is intellectually dishonest at best. But it's a very easy mistake to make, precisely because the caveats behind that number are so complex.
There are a lot of very significant factors that have to be accounted for, and the top-line numbers can't do that by their very nature. Career choice is one of the largest: what cultural factors push women towards one career and men towards another--and how early do those factors start influencing people's own choices and self-images? Just look at the nursing field and how it's shifting from its historical, almost all-female makeup. While I don't really think it's relevant to the discussion, Blau and Kahn expand on the points raised by the AAUW article if you're interested:
Moreover meritocracy doesn't mean having equal number of people at the top, it means equal chances for people to climb up the ladder. After one workplace generation, proportions will be equal. And them not being equal today doesn't equate women are discriminated (In fact, career is much quicker for a woman today than for a man).
> If we take a random, representative sample of people, we're going to see women make up approximately 50.8% of that sample.
Sure. If we take a random, representative sample of people. But you weren't talking about people in general. You were talking about a meritocracy. Which is very, very, different.
You also ignored my point about men obsessing about science and tech, and women not. Which says to me you don't have an argument against it.
People complain that men obsess about their work. That they're work-aholics. And who is more likely to be CEO? Someone who works 16 hours a day, or someone who goes home to spend time with the kids?
Your statement insinuates that the distribution of people in the general population should be the same as the distribution of people in any sub-set of that population. That is naive at best.
The top weightlifters? All men. Child-bearers? All women.
These differences aren't trivial. It is a fundamental denial of reality to wave them away.
Don't ask what they do, because they won't answer [0].
Also, being racist and sexist is okay, as long as it is against the proper race and sex. [1] [2]
Social Impact Project Manager Amanda Gelender & Rachel Myers, Github something-or-another. The Github part comes after the SJW part, of course. It's ranked by importance.
I read an article about Slack that praised their speed of integrating feedback and iterating with the following example: "the Slack team quickly identified small changes that had a big impact: Within the list of channels, they added fields for a description and the number of people using that channel."
One time I asked why, since cgroups and the pattern of container based deployment had been popular for a decade before Docker started, that containers are so popular right now. We ultimately decided that someone constructing a really easy to use suite of tools around the concept was the reason it has all this love and growth.
Not that I totally disagree, but, signing up for Slack is easier than using NickServ for the average person. There's a bunch of features that make HipChat, Slack, Hall et al easier to use than IRC, especially for someone who doesn't want to learn anything new.
Replacing RSS with walled-gardens solutions from Internet Bigcos is another example.
In general I agree that ease-of-use is a big factor. Having said that, I was witness to decidedly non-technical teens in a mid-size town quite happily using mIRC in 2004, so maybe we're not giving people quite enough credit. If you tell people something is hard to use they'll believe you.
The real lesson is to look into what has been done and worked before and see how it can be improved if you're looking for "new" ideas and businesses.
My friend's mom used irc in the 90's / early 2000's for dating chatrooms. IRC can be plugged into the browser and embedded into applications seamlessly.
In contrast, I've never even heard of all the things mentioned above.
On Slack the channel owner will form a hierarchy too, if it's less problematic it's because Slack is usually used in a professional setting where flaming is generally frowned upon. You see these kind of issues pop up on the easy-to-use Twitter as well.
It's a social question. The most the tech did wrong was not making flooding impossible in the first place.
Having a botnet with all your servers really isn't a bad idea. I mean, easy admin access, live monitoring, the ability to query everything and have all interested ops people examine the output... pretty handy. Seems like it'd beat a lot of these monitoring services and tools people pay for these days.
No, I'm referring to a botnet. In the OP case we've got just a single bot which controls things, I'm more thinking 1 bot per server sort of thing so you can administer individual servers simply by directing messages at them.
Server goes down? You see it quit on IRC or send an alert message nickalerting relevant admins when a service halts. Need live information on just about anything, just direct a message to a given server. Could even direct logs to a separate IRC channel for each type of service, relevant admins can join and set alerts up just based on message content and keep track of small logs via IRC logging too.
You can make a lot of low visibility processes very visible using such a setup. Of course, it wouldn't be appropriate for a giant company, but for a small to medium sized one I think it could work quite well. For devops types who are already comfortable with IRC at least.
check out https://github.com/andyleap/srvbot. Still needs to do real time handling, but you can run commands on multiple servers and optionally receive output
There are a couple articles/repos out there with detailed steps on running Hubot on AWS. While the ease and simplicity of deploying Hubot outside of Heroku is not a tenth as easy, there are a couple of options out there.
Now we've got dependencies on node, npm, ruby, rails, heroku, some datastore, a queue for hubot, whatever your actual builder is (capistrano/chef/whatever) etc etc.
Right now I do all this with Jenkins+bash scripts. Inelegant and not as robust as I'd prefer, but so simple. I could just use a Jenkins adaptor for hubot, but then what's the point? I want locking environments, advanced permissions, and so forth.
I'm mostly complaining because I'm dying to implement chatops (mostly for slack-based deployments) but the information is really light, or the tools are too environment-specific, and I don't have people to bounce ideas/questions off of.
39 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 84.8 ms ] threadBecause the "United Meritocracy of Github" carpet shown was removed after feminists threw a fit and got them to remove it. Because "Meritocracy is masculine and evil." (Read; the women GH hired can't cut it. Mainly GitHub's Julie Ann Horvath)
Source: http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug
What happens when genuinely meritocratic hiring is introduced is quite interesting:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903
A real meritocracy serves exactly the values of whatever person or group defines the merit function; when sexists exist and are in positions of social power, "real meritocracies" will also be sexist.
The unequal distribution of specific types of merit between men and women is not the responsibility of the hiring manager. If you put the burden of social change and "making up for discrimination" on businesses then they're going to hire just enough "___"s to not look discriminatory, give them inconsequential projects, and hire the rest of the team on merit.
Humans are fallible. We see things through our own perspectives, and don't even realize what we're missing unless we make a conscious effort to attempt it. There's a lot of cultural baggage that still surrounds questions of gender, and diving into that is an incredibly messy process that, if we're going to be honest, is going to take years if not decades. And that's a damned scary thing, precisely because of how unjust the consequences of that baggage are.
Speaking as a man, I don't think most feminists have an issue with meritocracies as ideals: there's no basis for assuming that a woman can't compete equally against a man, and that'd be obvious in a meritocracy. Their brains aren't "different," nor are they the "weaker sex," or any of a thousand tropes littered throughout history. I think that the issue boils done to a problem with what happens before you get to that meritocracy that affects the decision-making calculus. It's hard to say that you're looking at a genuine meritocracy when the sample being analyzed is already skewed. This is setting aside questions of pay, culture, and other gender issues in the workplace.
One of my first jobs was a Subway. Had a female manager. Her boss was the district manager and also female. Cool. The store manager tries sexually assault me (shoves things in my underwear) in the store. DM promptly fires her.
And yet, I hear about this kind of stuff with guys doing it to women, along with butt slapping and the sort. I've not been around that crowd, but had it does the same.
I went to a bar with a my wife and a friend. He's a big burly gay guy (a Bear, self identifies). Technically I, along with my wife are both bisexual, it's not a big deal. The bar, however, was a Bear Bar. I'm 6'5", big beard. Pretty fat. In other words, I fit in. Except, the whole feeling that women talk about they are a piece of meat; I felt that. I was the piece, to be gawked over. It was pretty uncomfortable, but it ended soon enough.
I had a manager, female, in a professional setting. She speaks highly of feminism. Cool. Except, she would wear skimpy short skirts, low cut blouses and more. She would play the stereotype; the same stereotype she would claim she was against. And when people would treat her like the hot sexy eyecandy, rather than smart computer scientist (which she is), she would get pissed off.
i.e. meritocracy means having people in positions based on their incidence in the general population... not on their merits.
Are you sure you understand the meaning of the word "meritocracy" ?
> a lot of those earlier factors that push far too many women away from math, science, and technology while they're still just developing children
Because women have different interests from men? I can easily name 10 male friends who obsessed about science and technology starting from 12 years old. 30 years later, they're all in computers making good money. I can think of maybe 2 female friends who came close. And even they didn't have the same level of obsession as the guys.
> I don't think most feminists have an issue with meritocracies as ideals:
If a meritocracy means hiring people on their incidence in the general population (not on their merits), then yes, that statement is true.
> Their brains aren't "different,"
Yes, they are.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/2014...
> This is setting aside questions of pay, culture, and other gender issues in the workplace.
If you believe the American Association of University women, they "wage gap" is about 6%. Not 77% like it's widely (and falsely) reported.
http://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gend...
If we take a random, representative sample of people, we're going to see women make up approximately 50.8% of that sample. Positions aren't assigned on the basis of that percentage; rather, it just works out that they'd match it overall across an industry. Or it would, and that was my point. Differences in individual workplace makeup are deviations away from that, for whatever reasons you have (say, the gender split amongst CS graduates and other factors that contribute to it and the numbers we see today).
> Yes, they are.
That was a rather poor word choice on my part. That sentence consisted of a series of historical examples of rationals used when describing women as lesser beings for various reasons. When I wrote "different," I was thinking specifically of arguments used against women's suffrage movements on the basis of irrationality. Even more obvious arguments can be found in how common diagnoses of "female hysteria" by the European medical community for centuries. Even the word hysteria comes from the Greek hystera, meaning womb. The precursor of those arguments--the so-called wandering womb--dates back to at least Hippocrates. Plato later describes the theory in the Timaeus, and Aretaeus after him. The medical community never really managed to escape the theory until relatively recently. It's actually a really fascinating history; if you're interested, Hysteria: The disturbing history by Andrew Scull is an excellent introduction to how the disease of hysteria changed over time, eventually fading altogether as we learned more about the human mind.
I guess my point is that there's a huge difference between historical views of the female mind (and its differences) compared to how neuroscientists approach the question today. You're absolutely right in that sense; chemical and structural differences might affect how information and sense input is processed, but the current body of research doesn't recognize that as indicating a difference in ability or even capability. Chalk this up to a poorly written sentence on my part with my apologies.
> If you believe the American Association of University women, they "wage gap" is about 6%. Not 77% like it's widely (and falsely) reported.
One of the reasons why I said to set questions of wage aside is precisely for this reason. The 77% number comes from BLS statistics, but those numbers are in aggregate and making comparisons from that is intellectually dishonest at best. But it's a very easy mistake to make, precisely because the caveats behind that number are so complex.
There are a lot of very significant factors that have to be accounted for, and the top-line numbers can't do that by their very nature. Career choice is one of the largest: what cultural factors push women towards one career and men towards another--and how early do those factors start influencing people's own choices and self-images? Just look at the nursing field and how it's shifting from its historical, almost all-female makeup. While I don't really think it's relevant to the discussion, Blau and Kahn expand on the points raised by the AAUW article if you're interested:
http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/pdf/key_issues/ge...
Sure. If we take a random, representative sample of people. But you weren't talking about people in general. You were talking about a meritocracy. Which is very, very, different.
You also ignored my point about men obsessing about science and tech, and women not. Which says to me you don't have an argument against it.
People complain that men obsess about their work. That they're work-aholics. And who is more likely to be CEO? Someone who works 16 hours a day, or someone who goes home to spend time with the kids?
Your statement insinuates that the distribution of people in the general population should be the same as the distribution of people in any sub-set of that population. That is naive at best.
The top weightlifters? All men. Child-bearers? All women.
These differences aren't trivial. It is a fundamental denial of reality to wave them away.
Also, being racist and sexist is okay, as long as it is against the proper race and sex. [1] [2]
Social Impact Project Manager Amanda Gelender & Rachel Myers, Github something-or-another. The Github part comes after the SJW part, of course. It's ranked by importance.
[0] http://i.imgur.com/gqxQyFq.png
[1] https://archive.is/6r6bR
[2] https://archive.is/Q6yxX
Brings back my days on IRC.
I read an article about Slack that praised their speed of integrating feedback and iterating with the following example: "the Slack team quickly identified small changes that had a big impact: Within the list of channels, they added fields for a description and the number of people using that channel."
Not that I totally disagree, but, signing up for Slack is easier than using NickServ for the average person. There's a bunch of features that make HipChat, Slack, Hall et al easier to use than IRC, especially for someone who doesn't want to learn anything new.
Just worth thinking about...
In general I agree that ease-of-use is a big factor. Having said that, I was witness to decidedly non-technical teens in a mid-size town quite happily using mIRC in 2004, so maybe we're not giving people quite enough credit. If you tell people something is hard to use they'll believe you.
The real lesson is to look into what has been done and worked before and see how it can be improved if you're looking for "new" ideas and businesses.
In contrast, I've never even heard of all the things mentioned above.
The easy of use of bots and flooding scripts was a downside, not an advantage.
Any web page that embedded IRC had to deal with that nonsense.
It's a social question. The most the tech did wrong was not making flooding impossible in the first place.
Server goes down? You see it quit on IRC or send an alert message nickalerting relevant admins when a service halts. Need live information on just about anything, just direct a message to a given server. Could even direct logs to a separate IRC channel for each type of service, relevant admins can join and set alerts up just based on message content and keep track of small logs via IRC logging too.
You can make a lot of low visibility processes very visible using such a setup. Of course, it wouldn't be appropriate for a giant company, but for a small to medium sized one I think it could work quite well. For devops types who are already comfortable with IRC at least.
So as long as I personify a piece of software, it too can become the subject of worthless press articles?
http://pgarbe.github.io/blog/2015/03/24/how-to-run-hubot-in-...
There are a couple articles/repos out there with detailed steps on running Hubot on AWS. While the ease and simplicity of deploying Hubot outside of Heroku is not a tenth as easy, there are a couple of options out there.
My team controls our hubots on iron behind a firewall with hubot-control, which can also create hubots for you too: https://github.com/spajus/hubot-control
> Heaven is a rails app that was designed to be hosted on heroku. https://github.com/atmos/heaven/blob/master/doc/installation...
Now we've got dependencies on node, npm, ruby, rails, heroku, some datastore, a queue for hubot, whatever your actual builder is (capistrano/chef/whatever) etc etc.
Right now I do all this with Jenkins+bash scripts. Inelegant and not as robust as I'd prefer, but so simple. I could just use a Jenkins adaptor for hubot, but then what's the point? I want locking environments, advanced permissions, and so forth.
I'm mostly complaining because I'm dying to implement chatops (mostly for slack-based deployments) but the information is really light, or the tools are too environment-specific, and I don't have people to bounce ideas/questions off of.