As a maintainer of a popular and actively developed open source project, I would totally use the app to respond to issues and pull requests if it were usable. Unfortunately, the app is a dumpster fire, so I just use github.com.
If you do use android for development, you wouldn't need a github app to push your code to github. You would need a git app, and several great ones exist.
> With plenty of competitors, including Atlassian, GitLab, and even Google, one thing is certain: If GitHub does stumble, there are plenty of companies that want to pick up its slack.
Atlassian? Oh god. Their software might be ideal for corporate beancounters and expensive consultants, but for everyone else it's a nightmare.
GitLab? A pile of memory leaks and other weirdness.
Google? Not so much, I highly doubt they'll ever re-open Google Code.
edit: and another thing, Github enjoys a massive, massive network effect, next to impossible to recreate by anyone else. Except Sourceforge, but they burned so many bridges that no one sane in his mind will ever trust them again.
Atlassian bitbucket is fine for me, and it gives free private repos. If you just want something for side projects without all of the bells and whistles, bitbucket is fine
My company has been using bitbucket for a couple of years and I personally haven't noticed much in the way of unscheduled downtime. Maybe once or twice during that time.
Dev attached to the Bitbucket team here. While we love and support open source where we can, the vast majority of repositories on Bitbucket are private or public but maintained by a single organization. Our core focus is professional teams, which typically means branching (rather than forking) workflows. This has lead us to prioritize features like branch level permissions over network graphs and other features focused on forking workflows, because they are of higher value to our users. We're not ideologically opposed to them (indeed, forks are useful for some professional workflows too - such as working with contractors or external contributors), but they just haven't bubbled up to the top of our roadmap just yet.
I'm administrating a small-ish Gitlab server and we have to reboot it every week or else it will fail in random and weird ways due to OOM - the machine has 8GB of RAM and 20 active users, so WTF? Isn't the entire point of git to have one pretty dumb server acting as a file server and letting the client do the work?!
GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket etc are not simply a GitServer, if that is all you want then there are better projects out there for that. hell basic ssh or http server can be used a gitserver with no front end at all or gitweb http://git-scm.com/docs/gitweb.html
GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket etc are project Management platforms that enable Bug Tracking, Documentation, Social networking all on top of and around basic git functions
just use git directly then without a gui server? or hell if you need a gui use upsource, that needs 8 gb ram however it is down you still could use everything else.
https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/ (just repository browsing and code review not hosting, for hosting you need to create your bare repos yourself which is not hard)
We run a Gitlab server at our company, with about 25 people using it to host their repos. I don't know the technical specs of the server, but it's only been down two times for the last year, so OOM seems unlikely.
If it was that horrid, I'm pretty sure the admin would have said something by now.
You probably have pretty good sysadmins. My experience with Gitlab is pretty similar but you kind of have to have a bit of knowledge of systems, network and the software itself to set it up properly with the right amount of memory, CPU, etc. to accommodate for the user base.
Gitlab is one project that absolutely needs to be rebuilt using Java. Both from a performance and a deployment perspective (deploying a jar is a one line step through jetty).
Something like Akka is probably well suited for Gitlab and it's git hooks.
This is definitely not normal. For 20 users, 8GB is more than enough and it should not require constant restarts. Please check out https://about.gitlab.com/getting-help. Message me on Freenode #GitLab @ dblessing or Twitter @drewblessing or @GitLabSupport. I'm happy to help.
You got downvoted by people promoting the companies they work for. Altasian stuff is hideous and Gitlab I heard is a horror show.
This will be downvoted too but honestly who cares. Despite all of Github's problems no one comes anywhere close in terms of adoption and developer mindshare and there is a reason for that.
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).
I dunno if it's impossible to recreate. You could just scrape GitHub's user data, mirror all public repositories, provide GitHub login, and do everything you can to ensure that your new competing thing lets people move away from GitHub with no friction.
"Google? Not so much, I highly doubt they'll ever re-open Google Code.
"
One thing to remember is that the main reason Google did code.google.com was to create competition for sourceforge (I was the third or fourth person to join the code.google.com team)
Now, it's pretty much 100% that Google won't do this again anytime soon, but that doesn't mean some other large company won't have the same thought.
Maybe Google Ventures will end up investing in Gitlab, or some similar startup down the line. It seems like it would be a decent hedge, and possibly cheaper than developing and/or running it themselves.
Haven't had a change to review it yet but seems to be they retired Google Code in preparation for this, not because they were acquiescing the market to Github.
They describe it as "fully-featured private Git repositories" so not a replacement for Google code. Also it's pretty inconceivable they'd retire Google Code early, forcing repos to move to a competitor, then introduce a new public service.
I've heard a lot of people complaining about JIRA and so on, but I've never really understood why they hate it. Sure, it's closed source, but so is GitHub, and people seem to like that (this discussion notwithstanding).
I think the clue was in "Truly Open", github isn't open source and is fairly expensive for small teams with private repo's (compared to bitbucket for example).
It's network effects are large but beyond that the product doesn't really do anything that others don't do just as well.
I am not the GP. To me, supporting GitHub is like supporting Jetbrains. I know they're good people. I know they're trying to do good things. However, I will always have a nagging feeling that wishes that the universe was somehow different and that their business model made it possible for them to freely and openly offer all their software.
I guess I can include things like Aerospike and even Gitlab in that group. I don't actively wish for them to succeed either. I am glad they exist and I actively use their products but I would not cheer for any of them.
Why do you put GitLab in that category? We're trying hard to freely and openly offer as much as we can. We do have an open core business model with a proprietary GitLab EE. But I wonder what you think we have to change.
Most larger companies will not use a third party cloud service to host their code like github.com. They want software to run locally on their own servers instead.
Github offers their software to enterprise customers to run on their own servers, but they traditionally have done a bad job doing it, at least relative to gitlab. Today, dozens of open projects and even closed ones are using personal gitlab instances, but since the ecosystem is more open on gitlab contributions come back in to make it a much more friendly tool to self-host.
Tons of larger companies favor gitlab for exactly that reason.
I used bitbucket for a long time because it did the job and it provided private repos. But after I had to start looking for another job, many employers wanted to see my github profile.
While I fully agree, there's somewhat of a chicken-n-egg problem here though, because part of the profile shows contributions to other projects/repos, and that's more of a github thing, partly because their profile is designed differently to focus on that, and partly because there are just many more popular repos on github to begin with, so to contribute to those, an Atlasssian bitbucket profile doesn't help much, IF the primary intent is to 'show off' activity. Personally, I couldn't care less, I very much like the fact that Bitbucket offers free private repos, and I also prefer the tooling and cleaner UI of Bitbucket over github's.
I know others have waxed on the irony of the centralized role GitHub plays in a supposedly decentralized world of the DVCS that is git.
It would be cool if there were a Behance or even a Dribbble for programmers: a way for us to present our creations well but also easily in a host agnostic and semi or fully automated way.
Many of us or don't invest the effort necessary to maintain a work portfolio, unlike say design oriented fields where it's the norm. I think there could be something to it.
Yes but many employers want to look at how many stars and forks your repo got on github. It's a nice metric to filter repos from candidates, it is not enough for sure but usually repos with tons of stars are considered a good signal and it allows employers to save time before they start looking at your code. Bitbucket doesn't have enough users to offer these kinds of interesting metrics unfortunately.
I'm not sure about your sampling of "many". I can count the number of interviews where my code was actually looked at on one hand; no doubt this is different for unicorn-type companies.
At any rate, enter the law of triviality. Making something simple that lots of people will understand is more likely to lead to more stars than something brilliant but complex, yet more indicative of development skill. This selects for gaming of the system and/or salesmanship; no doubt said employers will screech about a lack of "qualified" candidates before long.
Wow, I've never seen that. I mean, people often like to see some kind of evidence of something you've worked on, and looking at someone's Github profile is an easy way to do that. But I've never heard of stars and forks being used as a crude filtering mechanism.
There are so many factors that go into whether or not a repo becomes popular, which aren't necessarily related to anything that reflects on the creator's merits as an engineering hire. I think you'd skew your candidate pool in a weird way if you leaned on these metrics too heavily. Honestly, I'd be curious to hear more about how it's used in hiring.
I don't understand that as a criteria to be hired. I could see it as something to help show off, but shouldn't you as an employee be focusing on your company's codebase and not OSS products (unless there is some bug in the product you could fix that impacted your company)?
Maybe it's since I've always worked for companies with > 500 employees, but there is always a pile of work on the products I've worked on that there was little time to contribute externally.
Doesn't entirely solve the problem. But you could use multiple remotes. Still gives github power in terms of forks and stars, but your commits can be in many places. (and you can decide to do issues where you want)
We're certainly growing, and I'll do everything I can to keep and increase the openness. We just made our strategy public https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/
We're certainly growing, and I'll do everything I can to keep and increase the openness. We just made our strategy public https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/
That appears to be free repositories when you sign up for the $24/month personal plan, according to their Pricing page. That is a barrier to many people.
Edit: Hmm, there is also a page that talks about free repositories, but it requires an account. https://www.assembla.com/git/ In any event, they are confusing me.
uhm... So a company that is an enabler of developers working from anywhere and collaborating on code doesn't have at its core value working remotely? I find that a bit hard to believe, but I guess I've heard stranger things.
I guess I just expect as a matter of dogfooding that a company that strives to do great distributed source code control and all the activities surroundings that would live the remove lifestyle.
The people who would point it out are basically in fatigue mode from talking about it so much. How he was not escorted out of the building after that tweet is beyond me. Seeing the slide is just as bad.
No hatred ever got fixed by pouring more hatred into the cauldron. Sure, you can be the conquerer, but you just created more people gunning for you. If you are not about equality and love of all, then you are just another part of the problem. It is very much like the H1-B threads. Its important to see the system is broken and not the H1-B applicants doing the best they can in the system.
I sit here on a reservation and see the problems. A university adding requirements in a job search that weren't there before for one. I've lived through a bit of it, and people like him won't solve anything. All they will do is cost the company money in lawsuits.
Want to fix diversity? Fix the diversity and STEM education in pre-K and K-6. We learn to dream then. Let's think about everyone having a chance to dream of STEM.
It's becoming the norm in some communities. For example, Mozilla/Rust has a lot of people like that, and one of the core team members has contributed to #hnwatch Twitter tag linked below.
People from that circle were proposing the idea of creating 'black lists' to make people unemployable for political reasons; they managed to get Brendan Eich expelled from Mozilla; they're pushing for "Codes of conducts", which again aim at expelling people from open source communities for political reasons - eg things they said in completely unrelated places, like their own Twitter feeds (see "Opalgate").
Also see PronounGate, DongleGate, past scandals at Github (meritocracy rug, Julie-Ann Horvath departure), discussions/scandals around CoC/"Contributor Covenant", etc etc etc.
One thing they frequently claim, is that they are NOT censoring anything, people are free to do whatever they want.
Yet they keep pushing for this behaviour (black listing people that disagree with feminism, nagging companies until they decide to not launch products in some markets because fear of feminist backlash, and so on).
I honestly don't see how they don't notice how illogical their position are.
>> I honestly don't see how they don't notice how illogical their position are.
I have a friend on Twitter who's a raging feminist. I asked her if she was concerned about Carly Fiorina being excluded from the GOP debate since she was the only woman and actually had more votes in the Iowa caucus than two other male candidates who they kept in the debate.
Her response was that she never cared about any GOP candidate. It just makes no sense to me. If you're for women's rights, then it shouldn't matter what race, religion or political party someone is, in order to support them - they're women, and should be supported regardless.
> If you're for women's rights, then it shouldn't matter what race, religion or political party someone is, in order to support them - they're women, and should be supported regardless.
WTH are you talking about? If you're for women's rights you support people who are also for women's rights, regardless of race, religion or gender they are.
I don't know who Carly Fiorina is, but I know Margaret Thatcher, and she did nothing for women. By your logic though, just because she was a woman, feminists should have supported her over men in the opposing (socialist) party that supported women's rights?
Exactly it, but your friend is just a typical hypocrite. She says she is for women's rights, but is really just for any woman who has the same worldview as her and f the rest.
if we think some pattern should be called "censorship", then it is called that. if your interlocutor refuses to move beyond "argument about definition of words" and you still want to communicate, you then have to taboo the word, which slows your thinking+communication down a bit, but so be it.
It rather seems that the entire thread is now about this totally minor and uninteresting point, all the while ignoring the GitHub-the-company-is-broken argument. The inability to understand priorities is not surprising but talent isn't leaving GH because of reverse racism: it's the horrible leadership and the dismantling of one of the most innovative workplace cultures that suck.
Wasn't it pretty obvious github was broken when the hovarth episode happened?
They are in a special cognitive dissonance zone, they are wildly successful and that cures a lot of problems. They have time and money to worry about issues that aren't the products, and be vocal about it. Now the community seems to be mostly pacified, they like git and github has the mindshare, but they are coasting. Or so it seems, maybe the enterprise version I've never used has some badass features.
My first reaction is that the language of "us" vs "them", victims vs oppressors, reeks of hatred. Hatred undermines productive conversation, which undermines any attempt at building a good culture.
I would have to listen to the whole presentation before I render final judgement.
Don't see what the big deal is. The slide refers to spearheading a diversity program, not the company itself. Seems intuitive to me that such a program with only white, male managers might be problematic.
Your use of "only" is undeservedly generous of the attitude reflected on that slide. Furthermore, the slide actually doesn't even really address gender as a reason to disqualify someone, just race. They aren't talking about having a diverse group of people, including white males and females, leading diversity. Instead that slide near as I can tell communicates a policy of excluding white people.
Furthermore, I don't understand the racist attitude that somehow white or male people are somehow less qualified to lead a diversity program. Interpersonal skills, knowledge of the myriad diversity initiatives and approaches tried elsewhere and how effective they have been, knowledge of hiring practices, knowledge of recruiting practices, knowledge of retention practices, knowledge of the law surrounding hiring, recruiting and retention practices, professional network, etc. are all the type of things that should be relevant when choosing the most qualified candidates for such a position. Discounting all these and elevating someone's race and gender to utmost importance is blatantly racist policy/attitude.
What about experience? If nothing else (and there is else), it's reasonable to think that someone from a group which has been discriminated against may have more insight about battling systemic discrimination and racism (i.e. diversity hiring) than someone from a more privileged background (privileged in the sense of being from a majority group which was not the subject of systemic discrimination). Note that, like for any other hire, this type of personal experience is only one element involved in selecting the best fit for a role. I shouldn't have to say that last bit, but people like to think in black-and-white (pun intended) about race, sex, and class.
Experience is valid too. Being white or male doesn't mean you don't understand discrimination because you don't have experience with it.
An equally absurd corollary to "those that have experienced discrimination have unique insight into preventing discrimination" is "those that have experienced privilege have unique insight into privilege and how to dismantle it".
Just because you're on one side or the other doesn't make you more qualified by experience. We need people with understanding of both sides of the coin. In other words, we need diversity with respect to experiencing privilege and discrimination to understand what is happening and how to address it. When you don't have people on the other side of the coin, racist attitudes like the ones reflected in that slide proliferate.
Being white doesn't disqualify you from having experience being discriminated either. There are gay, lesbian and transgender white men, women and other gender identities. Head over to The Advocate and read some essays/blog posts from gay white males.
Furthermore, discriminating white people and men from this sphere of work (or any other) gives them some similar experiences and insight into discrimination.
What this thread shows is the sentiment that, if you claim diversity is important, leaving out a group specifically to increase diversity (as opposed to, say, merely reducing their proportion in the cohort) is in fact not being intellectually consistent or honest.
Don't fall into the flippant "Oh ho ho if white's aren't involved I guess it can't ever be legit" sarcastic dismissal. That's neither fair nor accurate.
I don't know if you even need to see the whole presentation. A few of the full sentences on that one slide are more than enough to project a strong us vs them attitude of hatred and victim versus oppressor, especially the following bullets:
- "This is not work for white folks to lead"
- "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"
Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
- "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
Second wave feminism, largely led by white women, often leaves out women of color. I mentioned this below, but the publishing industry is 79% white and 78% female. This has a huge impact on the types of stories that get to be published, which subsequently has real results on culture and society.
- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"
I mean yeah, sure, nothing super deep on that one. There should also be solidarity with white friends and colleagues, preferably ones that do a lot of listening and understand how not to take up all the space.
>>It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
How can anybody who advocates equality say no white person can lead a diversity movement? Just because somebody is white doesn't mean they aren't an oppressed minority (female, transgender, Jewish or some other oppressed group like a furry).
I think we collectively need to declare it's not okay to say "people with skin color ____" cannot possibly understand Y or have an opinion on Y. To do so is institutionalized racism.
I don't agree that if they can't lead the program, that means they are being prevented from having a meaningful opinion about it. That's all they're talking about, right? Who leads the program?
Yes, presumably the leaders are to issue orders and everyone else is to follow them. That is not the kind of participation that allows opinions.
You may be saying that the non-white leadership is the kind of leadership that allows collaboration and influence from followers, which is what I would do, but the evidence in the Github case is to the contrary.
Considering that they are moving to a more enterprise-y management style where there are lots of middle managers, I would imagine that that is a very real possibility.
When the discussion is about "social impact", the conversation is about diversity. Diversity != equality. In the view of many, equality isn't enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged. The concept of "reverse racism" is there to deflect the inevitable awkward questions that arise, when clearly biased statements are made and practices get institutionalized.
IMO, all this stuff is problematic. I wish we could all embrace the golden rule and move on.
I'm sorry to move the discussion to politics, but such affairs trigger sentiments among White people which end up in favor of Trump, if I understand politics properly. So would it be clever for the Trump team to highlight and exaggerate such stories/Is this article the result of it?
I don't understand what you're arguing. Equal opportunity will lead to diversity. Equality is about removing processes that look at privilege (e.g. your rich father donated X dollars so welcome to our college).
If your idea of fairness requires we become systematically biased against certain majorities (white, heterosexual, male, cis-gender) for your cause then I don't want to be part of your cause, and moreover I find that cause discriminitory and dangerous.
> If your idea of fairness requires we become systematically biased against certain majorities (white, heterosexual, male, cis-gender) for your cause then I don't want to be part of your cause, and moreover I find that cause discriminitory and dangerous.
Exactly. As mentioned earlier, in the case of Github the cultural transition appears to be from prioritizing meritocracy to codified diversity for the sake of diversity.
"In the view of many, equality isn't enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged."
Then that's not equality - equality is, or should be enough, because if the issue of diversity and equality is 'minimizing / eliminating privilege' then by definition, equality is that privilege is the same for all (or zero).
For many though, this becomes a good cover for 'preferential treatment above and beyond equality, in the name of 'compensation'.'
Race is a goofy power structure which puts certain people ("whites") on top of others.
Whiteness changes with political needs. Hilariously, Irish-Americans, Jews, etc weren't always considered white. They had to become white. Nowadays, certain Asians are held up as model minorities and may get some honorary whiteness.
With children getting murdered by the state for being black, it's obvious race is about white supremacy. (Analogously, sexism is about male supremacy, also known as patriarchy.)
I think you mean 77.7% white? It should be noted that the census counts North African and Middle Eastern as white, which is inaccurate. That number also drops to 62.6% when you take out Hispanics that describe themselves as white. So it's probably more like a 20 point difference than 2.
Do you want to also take out the jewish % from the white group, and see how much of an 'imbalance' there is amongst top management / successful founders?
Again, are you arguing that it's ok for the publishing industry to be 79% white and 78% female? Do you oppose diminishing white supremacy and racism? Because it sounds like you do.
You: White people are 79% of the publishing industry. Do you oppose diminishing White Supremacy (I mean, they're way overrepresented!)? Are you saying it's okay?
White Supremacists: Jewish people are 2% of the american population, but they hold the majority of top positions in the publishing industry. Do you oppose diminishing Jewish Supremacy? Are you saying it's okay?
Both of these arguments are terrible, and are both based on the premise that over-representation of some group in some industry or position constitutes a serious problem and probable conspiracy.
"...based on the premise that over-representation of some group in some industry or position constitutes a serious problem and probable conspiracy."
Ah, ok, so you don't think representation is an issue. Most people of color that have dealt with white gatekeepers will disagree with you. If you care to examine the part of you that holds that belief I'd suggest reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, followed by some James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, and bell hooks to start. Hate read it if you must, but give some experiences orthogonal to yours a chance.
> Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
On the one hand, sure, it would be odd if it were entirely led by a group of people that the initiative is not meant to directly benefit.
But on the other,
1. The title implies it is white people that must be left out of leadership there. It does not mention Asian people, which is odd, as the tech industry is currently mostly white and Asian men. Asian people are highly overrepresented, much more than white people, relative to their percentage in the country. That means if you have objections to putting a white person in a leadership position for a diversity initiative, you should have a similar objection to an Asian person. Not having that mentioned can't help but seem racist against white people.
2. Diversity initiatives need to work with everyone, not just the newcomers, but also the existing tech industry, which is mostly white and Asian men. White and Asian men could be helpful in guiding the industry towards more diversity, in particular, by doing so in a way that gets as many other white and Asian men on board with such changes. They might know best what would work to convince them, for example.
3. And, in the end, it is just always wrong to say "this is not work for [race X]". That's racist and offensive. Instead, it would have been fine to say "this is work where we need a strong leadership presence of currently underrepresented groups".
Asian people are highly overrepresented, much more than
white people, relative to their percentage in the country.
But not relative to California. This is important to note because the base rates of the state in which a company is located or an industry is concentrated matter. Very very few people move farther than 500 miles from the place where they are born. This means that the overwhelming majority of the people in this country would never take a job in California.
That said, I believe Asian people are overrepresented, more than white people, relative to their percentage in California, but it's not nearly as disproportionate as the figures relative to the entire country.
No, even relative to California, their overrepresentation is far larger.
Your link shows 14.4% for Asian people in California, but in the tech industry, they are at least twice that. Whereas in California white people are 73.2%, which is about equal or even less than their ratio in tech.
And about most people not moving more than 500 miles - is that true for tech jobs in California? See for example
which indicates that your general rule might not apply, as over a third of Silicon Valley people are foreign-born. That means even from outside of the US, not just outside of California. And it's obvious the valley is full of people from the rest of the US, in fact tech workers that grew up in the area are a clear minority.
Thanks for this thought/argument about mobility. It's extremely valid and not one someone has yet made when I bring up base rates.
With this in mind, I'm very curious if we're asking the question of what these overrepresented groups are doing differently and if there are lessons to be learned by and applied by underrepresented groups.
As someone born in Brazil, when I meet a Brazilian in SF, we get to talking about where in Brazil we're both from at some point and one thing I've discovered is that Brazilians from the state of Goias are very much overrepresented in SF despite the fact that São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are typically more represented globally with Brazilian expats. Why are Brazilians from Goias over-represented in the Bay Area? Near as I can tell from the numerous conversations is that there is a strong network of weak ties, à la Granovetter, at play and that this is the same phenomena that can be see among Asian and Indian communities in SF.
In fact, the only Indian-Brazilian person I know in the Bay Area (and in the world, since there isn't much cultural exchange between Brazil and India) is a VC and he has commented that he wishes there was as much community and support on the Brazilian side of the Silicon Valley as there is on the Indian side, because he has seen that as one of the greatest external factors (i.e. outside what the individual himself is capable of) helping Indians move to the region in the first place and be successful once they arrive and establish themselves. Perhaps more efforts to establish professional and social networks of weak ties would be an effective strategy within identities group that are underrepresented. I'm curious how effective directing energy towards helping those within your identity in-group is versus fighting for your identity in-group as a whole relative to other identity in-groups?
"...you should have a similar objection to an Asian person. Not having that mentioned can't help but seem racist against white people."
It's not purely about representation, although that is important too. It's about centuries of white dominance. A couple decades of people of Asian descent having a strong presence in an industry isn't enough. How many of those overrepresented Asians are holding positions of senior leadership?
"And, in the end, it is just always wrong to say "this is not work for [race X]"."
You're missing the ending part of that statement, which is "to lead". That makes it very different. No one said white people can't be involved, as long as they are not taking up all the space.
The historical question has to address the current facts on the ground, though. Those centuries matter in some ways, for example, in currently poverty rates among black people, for example, which are a disgrace to the US. But how do those centuries justify focusing only on white people in that slide, if the goal of the slide is diversity?
I didn't miss "to lead", I referred to it. My point is that no matter the position - rank and file, or leadership; technical or non-technical; etc. etc. - it is never ok to say "this position is not for [race of gender X]". It's just wrong.
Again, it's fine to say "it would be helpful to have a presence of [group X] here". That focuses on the positive, doesn't exclude a specific group, and there are valid reasons to indeed want a presence of underrepresented minorities, because it's about them.
In other words, this entire initiative could be done in a non-racist way.
"But how do those centuries justify focusing only on white people in that slide, if the goal of the slide is diversity?"
Again, no one said white people can't be involved. It says it is not for white people to lead. No one is leaving white people out of this.
"...and there are valid reasons to indeed want a presence of underrepresented minorities, because it's about them."
Think about that for a second. Do you see the subtlety in what you're saying? You're acknowledging that some power should be yielded from those that hold it "because it's about them", but you're not giving people of color the power to run the thing that is in and of itself about them. Only giving up token pieces instead of yielding power is one of many ways that white supremacy gets passed on over the centuries.
No, I disagree with that point of view. You see things as groups holding power and that distribution of power shifting. I think that's a combative and counterproductive perspective.
Instead, I focus on fairness and equal treatment. Individuals - all of them - should be given respect and opportunity. That's what really matters, and if we do that, then we can wipe out discrimination and intolerance.
Our points of view lead to some identical things we want - we both want to end any and all existing discrimination against underrepresented minorities. However, from there, there is divergence.
This is a political difference of opinion. It can't easily go away. What I think is important is that people like you and people like me find ways to meet on common ground and work towards those shared goals. But to do so, we have to accept some political viewpoint differences.
Side note: I find comments like "think about that for a second" etc. from you as potentially condescending. As if you're trying to play the role of a teacher, guiding me to some truth that you already grasp. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't mean it that way.
Sorry if I came off as condescending, that wasn't my intention. I once held a similar position as yours, but it was because I wasn't well read about the subtleties of white supremacy and power structures. That changed as soon as I first read Malcolm X and had my mind blown as a teenager. I thought maybe you also didn't see it, but now I realize you do see it but don't think it's about power. My apologies.
But yes we disagree. Of course all individuals should be given respect and opportunity, no one is arguing otherwise. The fact of the matter is that that's not the current state of the world. We can talk about fairness and equal treatment all we want, but that doesn't address the systemic racism that is happening right this second. People of color don't have the time to wait around for white people to decide to be respectful and fair. I don't see any way to overcome it than from a yielding of power.
I'm down to find common ground, but it has to be on something concrete, not vague ideas of fairness (which are subjective anyways). I personally think it's silly to have diversity initiatives led by white men. What do you suggest?
> I once held a similar position as yours, but it was because I wasn't well read
Again, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but I think any reasonable person could interpret that as condescending.
> I personally think it's silly to have diversity initiatives led by white men.
I might see a 10-person board of a diversity nonprofit that is 100% white men as silly. But to have some Chief of Diversity officer in one company happen to be a white man sounds fine to me - if he's good at it. No more odd than a professor of Russian history being Indonesian.
To say otherwise, as you just did, strikes me as racist. Do you really not see it?
> What do you suggest?
For example:
1. Educate hiring committees on implicit bias.
2. Make sure hiring is done as blindly as possible, e.g., coding tests can be done via text and not in person. This has worked wonders in other industries.
3. Have companies' HR departments focus on diversity, e.g. talking to employees (anonymously, or as they prefer) to see if there are current issues, and if so, to try to address them.
All those steps are already being taken by most major software companies, including the one I work at. Progress is happening. And it can happen without
1. Posing the problem as "group A" vs "group B", as you are doing. That's the type of thinking that got us into this problem in the first place, that led to prejudice and racism.
2. Acting and talking in ways that appear racist to a large segment of the tech industry, as Github is doing.
Nope, I really don't think saying the chief of diversity should be non-white is racist. I can intellectually understand the impacts of racism, but I'm seen as a cis-gendered white male when I'm out in the world and don't experience the effects of racism personally. It's a different thing to live in the US as a person of color and experience the small daily abuses that that comes with. When I come home with my girlfriend, who is a woman of color, and she starts crying because a white person followed her in a store, or assumed she didn't have money, or she overheard a comment made about her, yet I was treated with respect and dignity all day, it's very difficult to deal with. I can intellectually understand the effects of racism, yet I don't experience it.
Forgive me if I think she is more qualified for that job running diversity initiatives than I am, even though I'm very well read on the topic.
That's all true, and definitely that perspective matters a lot.
But it's not the only qualification necessary for the job. The other is to effect change in the organization. By your logic, if a black person is better at understanding the problems black people face, perhaps a white person would be better at getting white people to change things in the company.
I actually think both of those are wrong. You can feel horror at the Rwandan genocide or the holocaust or other massive injustices without being African or Jewish. You don't just intellectually understand racism in the US - I hope - you also feel it has to change.
Again, I agree the perspectives of underrepresented minorities are crucial here. But that doesn't lead to "every single chief of diversity must be non-white."
"But it's not the only qualification necessary for the job."
Exactly, but it is one qualification of many. If you have a white man with a stellar application for that position, and a woman of color with a similarly stellar application for that position, doesn't the woman of color necessarily get the job because she has more qualifications than the white man?
The point is there is always going to be a person of color that is more qualified than the white man for that leadership position because their experience as a person of color makes them more qualified for the position, everything else being equal, and they should thus be given it. Is that not reasonable?
You're ignoring the parallel argument I made to yours (not that I believe it, but I'm saying it makes as much sense as yours), which would suggest the white man is more qualified.
Anyhow, in practice, I doubt it matters: most applicants to such positions are likely not white men anyhow. So the racism inherent in such statements as "white folks are not suitable for this role" is not only wrong, it is also unnecessary.
Again, no one ever said white people are not suitable for this role or can't be involved in any way. This is the third time I've pointed this out. No one is saying white people can't be empathetic, or thoughtful, or innovative when it comes to topics of race. It's just that people of color are even more qualified to lead these programs as they have first hand experience existing in an exceptionally racist system.
White people are already in charge of everything, they don't also need to be in charge of diversity. That's exactly why these positions are being created in the first place.
I don't actually believe the following statement, but just to play devil's advocate, what would you say if I made the argument which is a direct corollary to the argument you are making:
"The head of diversity should be a white male because they are the only ones qualified to understand white male privilege and therefore will be more effective at working and communicating with others that also have the same privilege and coming up with ways to get others with privilege to change their behavior. Seeing that those with privilege are a majority in the industry, a white male leading it would be more effective leading more people to changing attitudes."
> Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
1) Diversity isn't just about race and the fact you think it is is why I'm honestly horrified by you.
2) Sexual orientation, transgender issues are serious problems and not really protected classes in many respects and they have as much of a "fixed" bag from genetics as you do.
It's actually written into GitHub's Open Code of conduct. (The 'Open' Code has not accepted any changes for quite some time even though this particular issue was under discussion [1].) The Open Code expressly excuses discrimination against some races and genders, specifically by explicitly ignoring any critique which might fall under a 'reverse'-ism; 'reverse-racism' or 'reverse-sexism' [2]. This line in the Open Code was previously discussed here [3].
I wasn't aware of this history. One thing to note is the sentence that precedes 'reverse'-ism:
>Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding:
> ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
I'm okay with it, because I can get a job elsewhere. Some minorities can't. I don't need to be able to get a job at GitHub, because for some stupid reason, society has a general bias in favor of me. I can work anywhere, but the folks they're giving a shot are folks who don't have it as good as I do.
If this continues to proliferate, instead of achieving a World where minorities have equal opportunity with non-minorities, we will instead end up with a mix of institutions where those in the majority have an advantage and other institutions where those who are minorities have an advantage. This doesn't look like equality, but a reversion to something looking like "separate but equal".
> (6) Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women.
I'm just glad I dumped Github. I'm pretty sure they'd find my white female friends [some of whom needed to transition] being discriminated against as okay based on those slides.
So, as far as I'm aware, there is "racism-as-defined-in-some-academic-circles", where it's only racism when it's systematic and directed by a privileged ethnic group against an unprivileged ethnic group. Which is (IMHO) different from what non-academic people understand racism. Maybe that's what parent means?
> "when it's systematic and directed by a privileged ethnic group against an unprivileged ethnic group"
Honest question: does it have to be directed by "a privileged ethnic group" or is it valid if it is by any general group or even a single, privileged person?
Presumably, the "privileged group" should have a perceived ethnic composition different from that of the "unprivileged group", otherwise discrimination can't be based on ethnicity. But I guess it doesn't mean that all members of that ethnic group need to share this outlook.
That said, I'm no academic, but I remember reading something about this a few years ago, in the case of a woman in France accused of anti-white racism.
Do you mean that it does not exist or that it cannot exist? I've heard this exact phrase before, "reverse racism is a myth," and it seems like an example of a thought-terminating cliché.
"Racial" is not the same as "racist." I don't think it helps the conversation to conflate them, and it's anti-intellectual criticism that inhibits even speaking about race.
The really sad thing is that there actually is sexism and racism towards women and minorities in various subtle ways at lots of tech companies. I've seen it first-hand myself. But this antagonistic line of thinking isn't helping. It just makes things worse for everyone.
The majority of sexism and racism that I've seen is probably subconscious and doesn't really seem intentional per se. People often just don't realize the side-effects of what they're saying or doing, or how it can come across to people sometimes. You certainly won't build shared camaraderie and empathy by antagonizing entire classes of people.
Perhaps you should actually take some time and read the article? This was given at a presentation not aligned with Github (so this isn't an official policy as you and others are making it out as). Further, its context is obviously needed to limit all of this specious extrapolation on how this is a contribution to the current shifts at Github; I'm impressed so many have been so easily taken in by this blogspam.
If people can get thrown out of conferences for their tweets on unrelated things, if Eich can get in hot water over a political donation, then it is little surprise to see the knife cutting both ways.
You wouldn't forgive a developer for speaking at an MRA conference--why should these people be forgiven for unrelated presentations?
This is the future you chose.
EDIT:
Downvote all you want. This is the kind of goodthink/badthink politicking that happens once you move away from "Does the code work?"
The thing being complained about by my parent poster here is completely consistent with the social norms that have prevailed lately. I would say don't be surprised at the sudden double-standard, but logic apparently isn't the strong point of the mobs.
We've spent so much time lately attacking meritocracies that it is somewhat cathartic to watch the inevitable consequences.
EDIT2:
Just to make this painfully clear--we have decided as a community that it is okay to judge people based on their actions in unrelated contexts. That applies just as much to folks that have slides about "white women being obstacles" in some unrelated context to their work in HR as it does to people that tweet bigoted things while being maintainers of projects.
Perhaps you should actually take some time and read the article? This was given at a presentation not aligned with Github (so this isn't an official policy as you and others are making it out as). Further, its context is obviously needed to prevent all of this specious extrapolation on how this is a contribution to the current shifts at Github; I'm impressed so many have been so easily taken in by this blogspam.
I'm honestly shocked at the lack of empathy on display in this comment thread. The technology world has a diversity problem—why not assume that this is a good-faith effort to address it, just expressed in words you don't like? Why instead flip directly into Internet Outrage Status?
This kind of outpouring of rage, to be frank, is why Hacker News has such a bad reputation. Look around at the comments here: there are people complaining about the very notion that there might be something wrong with how hiring and promotion happens in technology. There are people, like @yoodenvranx, equating their own anecdotal problems with the victimization of white men. There are countless comments asserting that we are capable of "pure meritocracy," a notion that is invalidated by research on implicit bias.
The overwhelming consensus here is that (a) there is no problem, and (b) GitHub's attempts to address it are unjust. This is why Hacker News looks to the outside world like a self-affirming bubble with no grounding in reality.
Personally it irks me that tech has excellent representation of diversity in the forms of people of colour, specifically Asians from different a diverse set of backgrounds, yet they don't count in the tally of diversity.
But we also have to remember that, to someone not in those well-represented groups, it's not a huge consolation. Diversity isn't a floating-point number between 0.0 and 1.0.
True, but we need to ask valid questions like "Why do we have a bunch of diversity in this vector, but not this other vector? If tech was fundamentally intolerant of diversity in general like many claim, wouldn't we lack diversity in all vectors? Why causes might contribute to the disparity between these two diversity vectors with different representations?
Overall, I rarely if ever see anyone arguing for diversity asking hard questions like "Why are there many Asians and Indians even though there aren't many Women, Hispanics/Latinos and Black people?". What are these successful identity groups doing differently that is affording them much success in being well represented or even over represented? How might the under represented groups adopt the same approaches to achieve the same success?
I'm not saying that we shouldn't solve unconscious bias as well, but I'm less inclined to first consider solutions that address unconscious bias if those solutions are proposed by someone who hasn't also considered other explanations and solutions because they aren't applying the null hypothesis in their thought process.
Also, how about some multi-variate analysis to determine which factors most greatly contribute to the diversity gap for each underrepresented group? We can't adequately fix what we don't measure and I really don't see a lot of measurement going on. For example, all successful startups understand and apply concepts of a user acquisition funnel and pipeline, but then people complain loudly in simplistic terms that the "pipeline problem is a myth". I don't understand how you can the former technique with great success and hold the latter incongruous thought in your head at the same time.
Did you read that slide and the comments others have made addressing it? Even after going through some seriously generous contortions to assume good faith, it's racist and alarming.
I also don't think your comment extends good faith you are demanding to the comment and commenters which you're addressing.
there are people complaining about the very notion that
there might be something wrong with how hiring and
promotion happens in technology.
I haven't gotten past the topmost comment thread on this HN post, but I have yet to read one comment here that makes this argument. Many here are addressing a particularly troublesome form of racism using a slide and other primary evidence as exemplary of this type of creeping racism. I haven't yet read a comment that argues that "(a) there is no problem", so the "consensus" you're asserting isn't there. I do agree that there is generally consensus about your second point " (b) GitHub's attempts to address it are unjust.", but maybe it's because GitHub's attempts just might be unjust?
Comments like the one you replied to, threaten to derail our discourse with the distortions you've already pointed out.
Comments like yours, on the other hand, are the reason I come to HN. Measured rebuttals without being too biased one way or the other-- it really enhances the reading experience of those going through this thread.
It's hard to convey my appreciation through an upvote, since that can be confused for just popularity, so I had to say it here.
This one I actually don't think is so bad, in context. The title of the slide is "Diversity and Inclusion in Tech". It is difficult for someone that is not part of a minority to spearhead efforts to outreach to one, because they don't experience the same issues. Literally, they don't have the right experience for the job.
It's a stretch as a comparison, but no-one gets sued for refusing to hire ugly models. It's because a model's job is to be good looking. That's just the way it is. In a similar way, a head of diversity should probably be... diverse. Although that could include gay white men, for example - maybe that text is shorthand that was qualified in the actual presentation, none of us know.
The white women one mystifies me, though. Women are usually a minority in the workplace, surely their views are valid.
Yes, sorry, I just edited my comment to address that. I wonder whether the point was expanded upon in the actual presentation to address that or not - bullet points on slides are usually "launching off points".
I'm a white person. My family came from Cuba with the clothes on their backs 50 years ago. Everything they ever had was taken by the Communists. Like millions of other Cubans, they came here with nothing and had to rebuild their lives. I grew up in a very unique environment, the Cuban-American community in Miami. I'd say that's a pretty "diverse" background. But I guarantee that in Github's book, I'm one of the "white folks" that shouldn't be leading this.
I'm sick of this politics of division. It pits people against each other and treats them as members of some helpless group instead of as individual human beings, with their own unique story and their own untapped potential.
But I guarantee that in Github's book, I'm one of the "white folks" that shouldn't be leading this.
I don't see how you can guarantee that. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand what you're saying. But this is a one-line bullet point in a slideshow, I'd like to see some more context before I grab my pitchfork.
> It is difficult for someone that is not part of a minority to spearhead efforts to outreach to one, because they don't experience the same issues. Literally, they don't have the right experience for the job.
We've invented tools to deal with this: language and literature. Almost everyone has experienced some form of discrimination, even if for many it is only occasional and minor, and that's enough to give a good writer an opening to get inside the reader's head and use that to build upon and paint a vivid picture of the more frequent or major discrimination the writer has dealt with.
This is blatant racism yes. I have posted this with a mention of here name on LinkedIn and Twitter and asked her to clarify this slide. Maybe a bit of public pressure will do the trick for her to come forward.
Do you have an arrest record? If not: there's the magic power. Statistically speaking, a poor young black male is much more likely to have an arrest record than a poor young white male.
Edit: holy batman the downvotes. I never considered the possibility that maybe #hnwatch is right.
> Do you have an arrest record? If not: there's the magic power. Statistically speaking, a poor young black male is much more likely to have an arrest record than a poor young white male.
> Edit: holy batman the downvotes. I never considered the possibility that maybe #hnwatch is right.
Its unfortunate that you are being downvoted without comment. The downvotes may or may not be evidence that #hnwatch is correct, it would depend on the motivation. It would not be rational for us to assume that the downvotes are evidence that #hnwatch is correct, in the absence of any explanation for the downvotes.
The mistake of sociological studies labeling a concept called white privilege was when people started using it to villify others for the negative space of discrimination they didn't receive.
IDK why, but people tend to not like being blamed for things they didn't do.
If that's not the mesaage we're supposed to take out of the concept, them somebody has got a lot of work to do to figure out a better way of communicating it. Someone who is not me, because I'm a programmer, just trying to take care of my own family, not a sociologist.
I don't see how your comment relates to mine. My point was that the simple fact of the existence of downvotes alone are a wholly insufficient basis for reaching a conclusion about #hnwatch.
Its too common for people to be so certain of their own viewpoint that they will simply assume the worst (ie racism and sexism) of anyone who disagrees with them, rather than consider that their critics might have damn good (non-racist, non-sexist) reasons for disagreeing with them.
I understood that, what I'm trying to state with my rhetorical question was that all his statement served to say was "Germany created the Nazis, you should feel guilt for that". And even if you think that people deserve some sort of retribution or culpability for the supposed actions of the ancestors (which I personally don't), Germany paid for it already considering the post war fallout and the Russian occupation of Eastern Germany.
> I understood that, what I'm trying to state with my rhetorical question was that all his statement served to say was "Germany created the Nazis, you should feel guilt for that".
I think he simply couldn't back up his own argument with any logic, so resorted to a tired cheap shot about Nazis in frustration.
Actually, I have plenty of logic to back up my argument in a sister thread with ElComradio, and I just apologized to the German kid. FWIW, only ElComradio was engaging with me in an actual discussion there, and his replies are reasonable, but I am thoroughly downvoted anyway, so how's that for evidence of a hivemind?
It's a pity your apology makes it seem like you simply referred to the Nazis without knowing he was German, when you actually specifically blamed him and every other (white) German ("you guys") for what the Nazis did, because he said he was in Germany.
> FWIW, only ElComradio was engaging with me in an actual discussion there, and his replies are reasonable, but I am thoroughly downvoted anyway, so how's that for evidence of a hivemind?
Out of five posts in that discussion, you have one post that is white. I wouldn't call that "thoroughly downvoted".
You are comparing an individual to a group which is a mismatch.
It would be absurd to tell someone to recognize their privilege that the odds were in their favor but nonetheless they rolled poorly. It's like telling some white guy on death row to feel privileged he had a lower chance of being there.
Being a white male is being allowed at a table in a casino where the expected value of the game is positive, and much higher than any other table. You can still lose, but the players in general don't. You should be thankful for being allowed to play a game with the highest expected value.
If you lose all your chips at the "black table" and I lose mine at the "white table", as we cry over our beers it would be ridiculous for you to assert that I should feel privileged compared to you when our outcomes have turned out to be identical.
If we look around the bar, and see that the vast majority of people crying over the beers are black, would it be a reasonable thing for me to assert that the white folk that are here (you included) must've gotten extra unlucky?
I think that's a reasonable thing to assert. That's what privilege is: the number of times you can fuck up (self-inflicted bad things) or be unlucky (externally inflicted bad things) before you lose all your chips.
That's the nice things about probability and statistics. They allow us to compare an individual to a group.
As a fellow loser at the bar, how is the knowledge that I am extra unlucky supposed to make me feel towards you? Am I supposed to consider myself fortunate that I had a greater chance at winning even as we both sit there with no chips? Am I supposed to buy you a beer because you had less of a chance?
"How is this supposed to make you feel?" - I have no idea, and I certainly don't think that in your sorry state you owe a beer to anyone. However, I do think you should say to your fellow losers "I am sorry that you guys are forced play a harder game, and I promise to remember that if I ever manage to leave the losers' bar."
Now we get down to it- It's really a call to action. We are both losers, but you want the guys at the winners' tables to buy you a beer first, because you had a harder time, and disregard the fact that you and I are both equally losers.
Of course feelings are important- The feeling you wish to elicit is guilt, not simply acknowledgement.
The call to action is the acknowledgment, not the beer or the guilt.
Getting white males, whether successful or not, to even say "yes, the system discriminates for us, regardless of outcomes" is such a huge barrier that their acknowledgment of the issue is the first thing that must happen before any kind of "fixing of the system" could happen.
Acknowledgement is useless and not actionable. The end goal of people who bring up privilege is to engender a sense of guilt over undeserved advantages, which then leads to resources flowing out of the guilty group.
So at our losers' table, you would ask the white winners to help you out over me, and over the other white guys at the losers' table, because we, the white losers, must have fucked up more to get here. The underprivileged losers are entitled to disproportionate aid from the winners.
Let's assume that this whole discussion really is about resource redistribution. I don't actually think so, but we can take that as a hypothetical.
A winner comes over to the losers bar, and you want him to give every loser, white or black, the same number of chips.
The problem is that after you all get your re-up, you get to go play at the white table again, and they go back to play at the black table again, which means that you have a way greater chance to not come back to the losers' bar.
Ideally, you'd make both games have the same probability distributions, and that might happen eventually, but until then, the underprivileged losers should get more resources to have similar outcomes.
What is the conversation about if not resource redistribution? Simple acknowledgment gets you what, exactly? Nothing.. There's obviously some desired action. That action is what, if not some kind of favoritism or balancing of scales?
In this simplistic example, it comes down to one party using guilt tactics to convince the other party to provide an advantage or a leg up, which necessitates working against their own interests. Guilt tactics are required because it's a social engineering goal; the total number of people at the losers' bar remains the same.
If you thought that simple acknowledgement has no subsequent results, you wouldn't have any issues with it. What it seems you are afraid of is that acknowledging that the games are rigged puts you on a slippery slope that will eventually lead you to gladly and voluntarily showing up at the losers' bar offering parts of your unfairly-won gains.
It sounds like you are agreeing with me and not realizing it- We seem to agree that the ultimate goal of conversations about privilege is to guilt the privileged group members into supporting members of underprivileged groups, ignoring the actual personal circumstances of the individuals.
No, I realize exactly what I am saying, and I am not agreeing with you.
What I am saying is: "Regardless of personal outcomes, whites and blacks are playing a game with a different probability distribution. That's a statistical fact. I want you to either acknowledge that it's a fact, or provide evidence that it is not. If you do agree that it's a fact, I want you to say 'I'm sorry you guys are playing a statistically rigged game', however, I don't want you to feel guilty and give up your shit."
Saying 'I am sorry' is not the same as feeling guilty. If you really object to the words 'I'm sorry' and can't fathom saying them and not feeling guilty, try saying 'it sucks that you guys are playing a statistically rigged game'. If the words "I promise to remember that if I ever manage to leave the losers' bar" seem to imply to you that it's a promise to later feel guilty and give up some of your shit when you have some, it isn't. Certainly you can remember what it is like to be a loser while being a winner, and then do nothing to help current losers.
What you seem to be saying is: "Regardless of whether 'the black game is disadvantageous to the white game' is a fact or not, the reason anyone tells me that is because they want to elicit guilt and then proceed with resource redistribution, rebalancing and social engineering", and I think that's wrong.
Just like it is incorrect to say that there is a white/asian/indian-male-libertarian-programmer-hivemind on Hacker News, it is incorrect to state that everyone that makes the observation that I am making is there to elicit guilt and proceed with resource redistribution.
There is a philosophical maxim that states "you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'." Interpret your opponents with sufficient charitability to believe that they are obeying this maxim, especially when they say "I am obeying that maxim."
And what if he does have an arrest record? Got any other stats instead to conclusively demonstrate his undeniable white magic? Where does a black person with no arrest record fit on your magic powers scale?
Oh, never mind, I forgot for a second you're addressing something/someone specific with generalisations that are meaningless to him and have nothing to do with his life or status.
Your argument is piss poor; that's why you were downvoted (not by me). Congrats on your successful upvote fishing, by implying/imagining some kind of HN conspiracy/agenda/hive mind.
This comment breaks the HN guidelines, as do several other of the comments you've posted, including in this thread. We ban accounts that do this, and it's the last thing this angry thread needs more of. Kindly reread the HN guidelines and follow them when posting here:
The poster I replied to was whining about being downvoted in order to score upvotes ("Please resist commenting about being downvoted."), when in fact their argument was just a bad one. In another post he made a stupid and offensive reference to the Nazis because someone said they were from Germany. So either he was trolling or he's an idiot.
I'm not sure if pointing that out was what violated the guidelines or just the way I did it, but in future, assuming this has not been banned, I'll try to keep my opinion of someone's argument or intellect to myself. Thanks for the heads up.
Yes, the comment about downvoting broke the rules, and yes the comment about Germany would have merited chiding if the author hadn't deleted it. But the HN guidelines apply to you, as to all of us, whether the other person breaks the rules or not.
Your entire comment upthread was uncivil. If you're sincere about abiding by the guidelines (as I hope you are), it would be an instructive exercise to rewrite it in a neutral, respectful way, editing out the nose-tweaking and every trace of snark. Do that on three or four occasions and you'll see how much better your contributions get, regardless of what you're arguing for. I know that sounds patronizing, but I don't mean it that way—it's a process that many of us, including me, have gone through, and it helps.
Thanks. I don't know if you mean edit posts I've made (which AFAICS is not possible) or future posts, before posting, but I agree, polite, respectful posts mean better signal to noise, and I'll try not to slip into bad habits.
I hope it's still possible to disagree, argue or take a negative position towards someone's post or argument without it necessarily being taken as personal or uncivil though.
By "posts I've made (which AFAICS is not possible)" I meant the messages further up the thread, where the edit link had long since expired, but I wasn't 100% sure if there was another way to do it.
the same fucking idiots with their heads up their asses will never understand "privilege" no matter how many times people patiently spell it out for you.
"white" people's power is not that they are given money, a job, or great health. their power is that they are the ones given those opportunities. Being white doesn't remove you from being poor, jobless, or in poor health, you just have a lot more options to get out of it.
Being poor and white is a lot better than being poor and black or poor and <not white> because you're not fighting additional problems that come with being a minority.
> If you're white, male and poor enough to qualify for a free meal at school then you face the toughest challenge when starting out in life.
> That's what the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said in "the most comprehensive review ever carried out on progress towards greater equality in Britain".
Frankly the debate should really be "How do we give everyone the best start in life" rather than "how do we cripple some groups so everyone gets an equal start in life".
What you're citing is how well academically poor kids did in school. That is not because of discrimination or racism, that is merely what occurred. I think a further study about how well each group does in terms of say, getting a job or getting to university would be more valuable.
Poor students have an immensely huge problem already (being poor), the problem is how do they climb out of poverty? There is no easy path but being "white" is easier in that (for ex.) looking for a job, there won't be people who discriminate against you because you're black, asian or latino. The same minority applying to the same job now also has to deal with any preconceived discriminatory outlooks of the hiring manager. that is the _out_ that white people get.
I agree that we should, "we give everyone the best start in life", but you act as though whites don't already get that or are being penalized now by your, "how do we cripple some groups so everyone gets an equal start in life" statement. White people have always been unequal from other minorities in that they've always had an advantage. Your view of "crippling" is everyone else's view of a level playing field.
No one talking about white privilege says it means white people can't ever have a tough life. Just as being black doesn't mean you can't ever be successful.
It's simply argued that if all other things were equal, chances are you'd have it harder as a minority.
> No one talking about white privilege says it means white people can't ever have a tough life.
False. Many people who speak frequently about white privilege actually do sometimes make the argument that white people's lives are so intrinsically easier than POCs, that we need not ever worry about harming any white people.
This mentality is most visible when a gang of righteous ideologues are waging a vicious doxxing or "harass their employer until they fire them" campaign against an accused white person.
And don't forget that killer quote from their internal presentation:
"Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
When diversity initiatives become an "us vs them" discourse, everyone loses. Except for the fat cats with full wallets at the top, who have no issue with the plebe infighting as long as it's between themselves (see the not so subtly placed "this is not about socio economic class").
That's not an internal presentation, it explicitly says it's "a diversity training talk held at a different company". She works for GitHub, but we don't have any evidence GitHub explicitly endorses those views.
They are views directly related to that persons job responsibilities. So Github endorses the views by hiring the person and putting the person in a leadership role. It would be different if the views were not directly related to the persons job responsibilities and policies of the company.
I've been seeing this discussion a lot lately, particularly in the publishing world. 79% of editors are white and 78% are women [1], so the statement has validity at least when talking about the gatekeepers of what stories get to be told. Marlon James recently posted about his experiences with it [2] and many writers of color have since shared similar experiences.
My take is that it's not "us vs them", but a need to illuminate where the barriers lie.
OK, but like 63% of the U.S consists of whites. If it were an even distribution it would be disproportionate. Whites are somewhat over represented based on your numbers, but not as much as you seem to imply.
It sounds small when you put it that way, but try looking at the same stats from the other side: 37% of Americans aren't white, but only 21% of editors aren't. Or to put it another way, white people are twice as likely to become editors as non-white people. That's not a small difference.
> 37% of Americans aren't white, but only 21% of editors aren't.
how many chinese restaurants are run by non-chinese?
these stats don't make any sense, if you just look at them that way.
maybe whites like being editors more…
if you don't find the reason, you won't find the solution.
And men are how much more likely to become firemen? And women are how much more likely to be flight attendants? And men or how less likely to be in marketing?
For the life of me I can't understand why people insist on having equal representation in every industry. It'd be on thing if there were numbers proving a massive backlog of people of a certain race/gender wanting positions in a field but unable to get them. It's another entirely when there's no demand, and we insist on artificially generating it to make people feel warm and fuzzy that every job on the planet has equal representation across race/age/gender.
Sure, but we're talking about white women, which make up about 33% of the population of the US. Are you arguing that it's ok that 79% of the publishing industry is white and 78% is female?
I'm not really trying to make a judgement on the moral aspects, I'm just a fan of accurately representing the situation. What if a disproportionate amount of the applications are from women? That'd be a societal thing and not necessarily the direct fault of hiring managers. There are a lot of important factors that need sussed out to make good decisions here.
There are plenty of women of color applying for editor positions. Yet you go to the National Book Awards and the audience is predominantly white women and Daniel Handler makes jokes about watermelon on stage [1].
Ya, but we don't even know if the racial disparity and gender disparity are affected by the same factors. I'm not arguing they don't exist I'm arguing for comprehensive evaluation instead of assumptions based on incomplete information. We can do better than a survey.
It's not necessarily okay or not okay. You first need to determine what you believe the correct percentage to be and justify why you believe that that percentage is "correct" or "okay".
I'm inclined to believe that there is no correct percentage and that even trying to simplify as you have is disingenuous and leads to simple but wrong explanations that ignore all sorts of contributory factors.
I'm a cis-male that identifies as agender, but I haven't seen any evidence that I'm under-represented in the publishing industry because my gender is discriminated against. That's an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.
Furthermore, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on base rates and how they contribute to measurements of diversity?
Furthermore, the distribution of race is not equal across the US and very very few people move further than 500 miles away from where their parents lived. The racial makeup you should expect in a company (or geographically focused industry) should be approximate that of the state and neighboring states in which that company is located (or that industry is concentrated).
This is what really confused me. "33% is barely enough to change culture" To me that strikes the perfect balance. You don't get diversity by only pushing on one side.
I don't really understand this. I've published books. It isn't particularly difficult or expensive, any printer can do it. If any group feels their books are being overlooked, they can start a publishing company with little difficulty. If they are correct, their company will make a nice profit for them.
Another quote is "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'". This is absurd and disgusting.
I haven't lived in the US for a while, but lately, I keep hearing all these expressions of straight up racial hatred of white people, all the way up to taking pleasure in white people "dying off" and so on. This kind of thing can't end well and needs to be stopped.
Just to confirm this, I read a lot of time about black/asian people attacking those of the same ethnicity who don't agree on "white patriarchy" as being "just white inside!".
I even read of people claiming they are trans-black because they inside them feel black (and I am quoting literally) and so other people must see them that way.
You find this on tumblr, on pseudo-feminism propaganda sites, etc... a lot of this is collected in the subreddit reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction
> I even read of people claiming they are trans-black because they inside them feel black (and I am quoting literally) and so other people must see them that way.
Ideological intolerance is part of it, but it's clearly not the only part, given that the very first point in her slide is "this is not work for white folks to lead", i.e. she doesn't want white allies. I don't see how much more explicit this lady can make the fact that she hates white people as such.
As for German or Russian philosophers - that seems far fetched. This is an American phenomenon, and in its explicit and mainstream form, it is a fairly recent one.
It's a department at a company. You're not allowed to say that 'people of ethnicity X will never be given a leadership position'. That's blatant racism.
Do white-passing gay people not get to have a say in diversity issues?
I really don't like this trend of painting everyone with white-ish skin as a homogenous oppressor class. It's pretty clear to me that a diversity department that explicitly bans white people from leadership positions will not represent my interests if I am discriminated against.
As a white middle-aged male, Tumblr is the only place I've experienced what it is like to be on the receiving end of racism. It's quite fascinating to see just how vile some of it gets. Of course it is only fascinating to me because I can trivially withdraw from it and not be particularly affected.
My point about Tumblr is that it's a huge site containing a lot of blogs. Seems like half (or over half) is porn. Most of the other half seems dedicated to rabid fanbases of various bits of pop culture. There's some politics like everywhere else on the net, but I have no idea why so many people here, including my downvoters, think it's this despicable bastion of frothy far leftism when that's only a small part of it. Hell, there's a dedicated base of white power blogging on Tumblr but no one ever mentions that.
It's like saying Reddit is nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types, or HN is nothing more than clueless Valley types. Or that Twitter is nothing but people sending each other 140 character descriptions of lunch. I really hate lazy stereotypes of complex interactions, especially on a place like HN where people should be "native" enough to digital culture to know better.
> I have no idea why so many people here, including my downvoters, think it's this despicable bastion of frothy far leftism when that's only a small part of it.
I have no idea how you know what your downvoters think about Tumblr.
> It's like saying Reddit is nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types [...] I really hate lazy stereotypes
Who is the "they" in your post then, below, if not a generalised "Reddit" of nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types?
"Reddit is leaking. Tumblr: the scapegoat for everything they don't like."
>I have no idea how you know what your downvoters think about Tumblr.
Because Tumblr is brought up here and on Reddit frequently as this hellhole of idiotic far leftist thought. All I can think is: "have you actually looked at Tumblr beyond following some link at /r/tumblrinaction?" because there's so, so much more than that.
>Reddit is leaking...
Well, one thing you can count on from Reddit (or at least the vocal people in the defaults and conservative subs) is a fear and loathing of Tumblr, as well as considering SRS to be the root of all evil. Any time someone wants to panic about the threat of "SJWs", Tumblr is not far behind in the fear factor.
Hence, "reddit is leaking.." which was a joking way of referring to "tumblr is leaking".
But I still defend Reddit to my friends who are dismissive of it. Reddit contains a lot more than the awful stuff it's well known for. The defaults might be a hive of scum and villainy but there's a ton of great stuff in the smaller subs.
It's the social "flows" of the sites that differentiate them. On Reddit, you subscribe to a number of communities, and then you only see content that a bunch of people agree fits those communities' standards. On Tumblr, you subscribe to a bunch of individuals' blogs, where those bloggers all have 1. a very simple/encouraged inbuilt mechanism for sharing things they see from their own subscriptions onto their own blog, and 2. a culture of "signal-boosting"—a term loosely meaning "passing along chain letters", or more generally, sharing something they wouldn't have posted for its own sake, with an audience that didn't sign up for such content, because "it's important that this spread until it reaches the people who are affected by it." As if it were a local weather emergency or an amber alert or something.
The combined result is that, on Tumblr, you'll subscribe to people for one thing, and then inevitably they'll "signal-boost" other things into your feed that you didn't sign up for. The most often "signal-boosted" thing is Social Justice discourse. This is why people get the impression Tumblr is a Social Justice website: if you subscribe to blogs about porn, cats, and tech, you'll end up with a dashboard containing porn, cats, tech, and "signal-boosted" Social Justice.
Personally, my problem isn't with Social Justice, but with "signal-boosting" itself. I (very carefully) use Tumblr, and enjoy doing so, but only by strictly following a policy of unsubscribing from any blog that "signal-boosts" anything. I think this means that I end up following only blogs that are completely disconnected from Tumblr's social graph, though, so I don't know how precisely I can be said to be "using Tumblr" at this point, rather than just being subscribed to some blogs that happen to be hosted there.
It's not always fun and games: I'm Assyrian (a middle eastern, ethnically Christian ethnicity). When the first news reports of ISIS ethnically cleansing Assyrians in areas under their control came out, prominent members of social justice tumblr started joking about it being 'karma' because white-passing Christian-ish people were on the receiving end of genocide.
It's both or neither depending on how you want to look at it. The problem isn't any website or subculture, the problem is the entire overarching culture being created by digital natives that are coming into their own.
Internet induced sociopathy has infected an entire generation. No conversation is ever a conservation, everything is a performance for the benefit of third parties. Even face to face every conversion is haunted by what will this sound like when it is posted online. No one deserves the benefit of the doubt because they aren't real people, just words on a screen.
It's the so-called SJWs and the alt-right. It's GG and anti-GG. It's facebook and tumblr and twitter and reddit and lord knows 4chan.
It's sick, it's no ones fault, it's probably unfixable and that's heartbreaking.
> an endless argument over who can and can't be racist
It blows my mind that some people really believe that only white people can be racist. It's like they completely redefined the meaning of the word "racist".
> It blows my mind that some people really believe that only white people can be racist. It's like they completely redefined the meaning of the word "racist".
That's the point. Redefine words so that it's impossible for someone who doesn't share their point of view to have any moral high ground.
Yes, they did completely redefine the term. And they hold that their definition is the only 'correct' definition; all other definitions were a mistake and it is racist to use them.
Redefining common words makes your ideology impossible to discuss with outsiders.
That makes your followers who have adopted the new definitions fairly immune to persuasion. Some cults work like this. I've never seen it done by anyone with a defendable agenda.
GitHub has, since the Horvath incident, made it pretty clear what kind of person they want to hire. And, frankly, that's fine.
There are plenty of places where I, as a competent white male, can get hired and promoted without difficulty. The fact that Github isn't one of those is not a systematic problem. More power to them.
No it is not. Either we are all allowed to discriminate or none at all. If only some must have power to discriminate - I prefer the status quo. Since I like the white male privilege. I am fine with society without privilege. I will fight tooth and nail against one in which my privilege is transferred to someone else.
I wouldn't mind transferring my "privilege" whatever that is supposed to mean. Actually I would laugh at them. This "privilege" thing doesn't make me happy. Even if a lack of "privilege" would make me unhappy I don't care. I already am. The real world is a shitty place. Nothing here is worth living for.
Hey, very scary to hear you say that. My email is in my profile. Write me anytime if you want. Lots of people on HN love to help other people. Don't be shy about reaching out.
Obviously this is a controversial sentiment but it's refreshing to see somebody state it so plainly. The idea that I get special privileges I didn't earn is uncomfortable, but if we're going to try and change that I am scared of a simple reversal in which we punish me for being part of a privileged class.
That said, I don't think I "prefer" anything about the way the world works now.
That's not really what I'm asking, though. Yes, let's say it's not actually hard yet. Is it reasonable to ignore signs that things might get to that point and wait for if and when it does?
I think it's reasonable to worry well before that.
(I don't know what if anything we can or should do aside from worry.)
I don't know what your definition of major is, but Github is not it in my book. Don't get me wrong, they make a semi-decent product, better than anyone else at this point, but they are by no means the only solution in their market.
If Github wants to pass on solid talent just because of that person's race or sex, that's their (foolish) decision. It's a seller's market, and that talent will go elsewhere.
The problem will self-correct at some point once the lawsuits are filed and the cost of such efforts is visible to executive leadership and investors. Even if they settle the suits early on, it'll still be a very expensive lesson. Workplaces with problems like Github is apparently developing rarely get better on their own without first experiencing the consequences.
If GitHub is rejecting otherwise qualified white males for employment they are opening themselves up to legal liability. I cannot imagine some of their statements wouldn't serve to hurt them in a trial.
I freely agree that there is a lack of diversity in tech, and that we have to bear some of tbe blame ourselves, but this sort of approach is not helping.
>and that we have to bear some of tbe blame ourselves
I assume you're speaking for yourself. I will bear none of that with you. Never have I participated in any way to hold down anyone because of their race, gender, or otherwise.
When the blameless volunteer to take blame we have serious social problems. Better find the actual cause and fix it.
I've always been profoundly confused by people/groups who choose to fight racism with racism. I'm not quite sure that's the best corrective path for this problem. But everyone lets it slide, at least here in the US. Are we just scared?
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster."
It's an inherent problem that as you fight something, you tend to mirror it. You almost have to do so in order to be effective. The problem is that at some point, it just feeds the cycle.
God damn, that is painfully true to the point of nausea.
I am at fault for that, and have been trying to stop recently.
It's funny how we (I) is okay with using old wisdom when it comes to engineering, but dismiss quotes like that even though it comes with significant experience across generation and culture. Chalk it up to young and (incredibly) stupid
I'm sure he did in some ways, but certainly not in the ways that matter to me. I have tremendous respect for MLK and his work is a stunning example of what's possible. The warning would be somewhat pointless if becoming a monster were inevitable.
Personally, it's because it's not worth my time. Why should I have any sort of dialogue with such people when it's not going to be productive and will provoke a massive amount of vitriol? At best, it's unproductive, and at worst it's career-ruining.
I think that most people think the same way, and as a result there are absolutely no consequences when the activists go from "challenging" to "outright hateful."
This is one reason I am inspired by reading about Nelson Mandela. He fought for both equality and forgiveness of his former oppressors. Once apartheid ended in South Africa he fought against the desire from many of the former oppressed to extract revenge. An early example:
"During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." ~ Nelson Mandela [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Prepared_to_Die]
IMHO, this position is more philosophically consistent than what many circles in American academia espouse. As I recall, Mr Mandela had to fight a lot of over-zealous activists in his own party who wanted to implement punishment or retribution to the white apartheid supporters. Though it cost him greatly in terms of discontent and difficulty but stands to me as an example. But it's been widely acclaimed after the fact.
The problem with hard pushes in the aftermath of really bad PR is that it's very easy to over-correct and wind up creating a new problem for yourself. It seems like Github is well on their way to just that with how they've implemented their diversity efforts. A lot of those quotes are truly scary, and are priming the pump for some very nasty lawsuits over hostile work environments that will only wind up creating new PR problems. And if those quotes are any indication, it's unlikely that someone is going to be able to slam on the brakes and stop things from getting further out of hand.
This kind of anti-white, anti-male racism is poisoning Silicon Valley. Honest, meritocratic people can't idly stand by while self-serving idiot racists take over. I'm now cancelling my GitHub account and moving to BitBucket.
I searched for that tweet [1] and I think the context makes it different. He doesn't talk about management directly, but about healthcare as a remedy to avoid people getting fired and then losing health, housing or similar things.
The article put that tweet in a context where it could be interpreted as "white males in Github are bad, let's fire them" and I think he says something completely different.
It's... quite heartening, to see HN call out the blatantly anti-equality messaging highlighted in this article, and to not have it buried at the bottom of the page.
Lots of unsourced speculation as to what's going on behind the scenes, but I wonder if a few years from now, we'll all look back at the day they decided to throw out meritocracy (symbolically, as the rug, and realistically, as the reorganization) as the beginning of the end...
Aside: I'm getting rather tired of being downvoted and nobody bothering to at least explain why.
That's the core truth people don't seem to want to directly address. Most criticism of meritocracy approaches it from the angle that it is meant to give everyone an equal shot and has failed, when the real goal is to sift away those who can't contribute, at which it works marvelously (which isn't to say everyone who deserves a given shot gets one).
What some people seem to want instead is some sort of egalitocracy, but I have no idea how to make such a beast productive or useful, particularly for tech work, which has a fairly high intellectual bar.
> Its once famous remote-employee culture has been rolled back. Senior managers are no longer allowed to live afar and must report to the office. This was one reason why some senior execs departed or were asked to leave, one person close to the company told us.
> There was a remote culture and very little hierarchical structure which worked wonderfully when they were 30 and 50 people, but at 500, it doesn't work.
"Racism" is a system where a racial group with a monopoly on power in society arranges the rules of that society to continue priveleging their own racial group. "Bigotry" is when you dislike someone because of their race. And the comments that everyone on HN are getting all in their feelings about are neither bigoted nor racist; they are basic, uncontroversial observations from people who have been doing anti-racist and anti-sexist work since before most members of HN's audience had heard either of those terms.
That's not the standard definition of racism. You're repeating a variation of "racism = prejudice + power", a component of the social justice meme I've been seeing everywhere.
To me it seems like rhetorical sleight of hand, redefining "racism" to depend on a mysterious "power" component which is never adequately demonstrated or explained, or only explained in terms which are themselves actually racist, e.g., "whites have power because most politicians are white".
So I should place "critical race theory" squarely in the camp of theories that do not have the elements of a scientific theories. Redefining words with a commonly accepted usage to further an agenda is academically dishonest, IMHO.
In other words, "Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." - Philip K Dick.
Yep. This has solidified my opinion. I'm moving all my code off Github.
Sorry, as a white male, I don't have to take this kind of blatant racism, abuse, and shaming when it comes to hosting my code. BitBucket does a good job without the uppity diversity attitude.
This article could have been written better. It has two themes going on. Github is restructuring and the lack of diversity in tech.
Why did they unnecessarily mention diversity in the context of the reorganization of github? Because that is the corporate BS that is popular to spout when you are redefining power within your company. Make no mistake github is doing restructuring to position themselves for large corporate contracts, NOT to be a more diverse workplace.
Using injustice to whitewash your redefined power structure is disingenuous.
I think what she's saying is that usually when tech companies talk about diversity they mean they really are talking about increasing the number of women in tech. To her, at least, that's not as important as increasing the number of minorities in tech. So as "white women" are in one group but not the other, the are bad because they are minorities in disguise. Even with that, it's a terrible thing to put on a slide without any added context.
well, the only important thing that matter is skills / experiences, because choosing people (or not) for their race or gender is really... at least weird.
> A person familiar with the matter told us this talk was not
> done by Sanchez at GitHub, but was part of a seminar geared
> specifically for people of color.
>
> We were told that it was based on research published in the
> Racism Review as part of its "Trouble with White Women"
> series in 2014.
>
> In particular, one article delves into data that suggests
> that white women have "disproportionately" benefited from
> affirmative-action policies. It then suggests that instead
> of being advocates for affirmative action, white women
> "have been at the forefront of lawsuits brought to
> challenge affirmative action."
Practical object oriented design in Ruby by Sandi Metz is hugely popular, and not just inside the Ruby community, and rightly so, it's one of if not the greatest texts on programming I've read.
Feminism wasn't always as intersectional as it is now. For a long time it was dominated by white women who wanted more equality ignoring and sometimes even opposing equality for people and women of color. Suffragettes are a very good example of this problem.
There are a few people now that feel a similar thing is happening in the tech industry right now as well. In that diversity is promoted only in so far as it helps white women but not any other underrepresented groups.
She might've been racist as fuck, but I seriously do not get how she could be declared as "one of the biggest barriers to progress". She wasn't even allowed to vote, god damnit.
It's completely incoherent. If the power is overwhelmingly in the hands of straight white man, than straight white women very unlikely to become not some of the biggest "barriers to progress."
White women make progress towards equality faster than any other group that's being discriminated.
The argument is that instead of focusing on the core issue that discrimination is inherently bad and needs to be fought against, white women put the focus specifically on them. This means other groups are ignored until white women have achieved their goals until a new conversation can be started.
I'm not sure whether other groups would have made progress sooner without this problem but it's a possiblity and that would make white women significant barrier.
I admit it's hard to go from that further to biggest barrier but I don't think one should discard that notion too easily. "Moderates" pushing for some bad compromise is the worse is better of politics. MLK famously considered white moderates to be a bigger issue than racist groups at one point.
That seems to be humanity in a nutshell - fuck you, got mine.
Most of us are not altruistic enough to put other people ahead of us and ours. Self > family > clan > tribe > race > everybody else. However you choose to segment your identity up and what characteristics you base it upon, that's generally the hierarchy of fucks you give about other people.
It's a hard problem we've been working on for at least a couple thousand years. When we find the universal solution, the philosophers can pack it in.
Meanwhile, I've got to live as best I can in the world as it exists, rather than as I might ideally like it. There's a lot of smaller, more manageable windmills out there.
Yeah, whereas now it's dominated by white women who get book deals off the back of their supposed anti-racist credentials, whereas the black activists who they got their arguments from (and watered them down, naturally) languish unmentioned in obscurity. There's a a lot of complicated history and anger behind the distrust of white feminist activists, most of which I don't think ever reached the mainstream media in any meaningful form, going right up to probably the present day even.
To further extend from the suffrage movement, it is important to note that minorities (men & women) didn't legally have the right to vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
So Sanchez has a point in claiming that historical precedence has shown that "discrimination" was thought to have ended after the suffrage movement when it wasn't until many years later that minorities were legally secured the right to vote. Hence the hierarchy is that white women are the "next-in-line" when it comes to diversity before any other type of minority group.
I'm having a guess that companies decide they want to be 'diverse' and not all white guys and the easiest way to hit the number target is to hire some women. The quota approach seems a bit flawed - they should be mostly colour and sex blind, perhaps dropping the bar a little bit for disadvantaged groups.
Another funny thing is after going on about hiring more dark skinned people a lot of companies are hiring Indians just because they are good at the job (eg Nadella) so they're having to say no not that sort of coloured person, the other lot.
What nonsense are you blathering? Github isn't open source so you can't fork it. Meanwhile there are lots of other GitHub-a-likes out there - Gitlab is only one of them. So if you don't like Gitlab either, there are other choices.
Isn't it though? Nicole Sanchez and Danilo Campos are openly advocating racial hatred while creating a toxic environment. If I worked there I would leave too. Never again, Github. There are too many good alternatives out there for me to support this fallen star.
I wonder which startup will chomp off this new sourcefor-- I mean, Github.
I know, totally different companies at this point, but this shift marks me seeing GH as a completely different entity from what it used to be, and I don't look forward to what kind of company they'll become in the future. Kind of disappointing to read about the changes. None of them sound good.
Gitlab has already surpassed Github in terms of functionality. I've been hard selling it at my place of employ but I work at a large company so Github is already solidly entrenched and will be so for at least awhile.
I already use GitLab for my personal projects, since I don't care about the networking effects and it's open-source. Since it's still just git, there's nothing stopping people from switching: it has inheritably less lock-in than Twitter or Facebook. GitLab even scrapes issues and other GitHub metainfo if you migrate.
i think that is fine by GH. i mean, it's clear that the $$ is in enterprise, not in selling $9/month plans to hobbyists. someone else will step up to fill the void.
Hence why the development of GH appears to have stagnated in the last few years. I deal with limitations related to permission handling on a daily basis with GH Enterprise.
Great power != running the company. It specifically mentions he's taken over corpdev and some other functions
Also note that Julio is a very technical guy.
Note that what you have seen here is nearly identical to what david drummond did at Google (start as legal, take over some other functions like corpdev) in the early years.
It's hard to say this didn't work out amazingly well.
I'm also completely unsure why, without any evidence (in this article or elsewhere), you would assume that whatever power Julio has, he's using in a way that stagnates things, instead of using it in a way that enables folks to get shit done.
(David is the reason Google was willing to take so many legal/etc risks for the past N years)
Interesting perspective but a lawyer heading corporate development can make sense, having a lawyer with no accounting or finance training or experience is reckless at best but very scary to any potential shareholder. How on earth is Avalos making investment decisions? Avalos is not technical at all, he knows markdown, yoga and how to spin records. The company is falling apart under his watch, case closed. His purview is HR and Social Impact, he is calling the shots.
You are.
Let's take what you said
"... aren't running a tech company."
Nothing in the article said he's running the company, you are making an assumption here.
Nothing you have provided at all backups up your claim that "It's often not a good sign when the top engineers or star salesmen aren't running a tech company.
". So there's an unproven statement combined again with the assumption that engineers aren't running the place (the article says it's being run by one of the co-founders, who was an engineer - "Prior to founding GitHub he worked as an engineer at CNET Networks on Gamespot and the launch of Chow.")
"You say he does "corpdev" and the article clearly points out "development of the corporation" has become a big problem.
"
This badly misunderstands what corpdev does.
It's pretty much not worth continuing this discussion, i'm just pointing out that you are making wildly silly generalizations to how to run companies and what the article actually says.
And yeah, you are making a ton of assumptions to do it.
This stuff just happens to companies. The kinds of people who enjoy a meritocratic, decentralized kind of system are less likely to really want to be someone's boss or to have a boss who acts like a boss.
It's unlikely that the kind of multi-tiered management structure most larger companies use is ideal, but it's the best thing management science has found (it's a young field, rooted in the buildout of factories in the industrial age).
>"(The social impact team) are trying to control culture, interviewing and firing. Scary times at the company without a seasoned leader. While their efforts are admirable it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging"
I agree with a few of these points and maybe that's barbaric, but what is worse imo is the approach that GitHub has to this.
I mean, when you know you are at the forefront of social software development, you need to hold yourselves at a higher standard than this. Millions (!) of people depend on you for some kind of baseline, and this divisiveness and shallowness in protocol really can't be accepted.
Somehow, I have this feeling that even though we all know that this is wrong that they'll just get away with it like usual and nothing major will change except that GitHub's support will get even worse.
I'm sure folks will disagree, but I really enjoy Visual Studio Online. Free private repositories and tools (agile board, etc).
Unfortunately, GitHub is where people expect open source projects to be, so it's almost an inconvenience for contributors to be on anything other than GitHub
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 perceived to be frighteningly one-sided.
Besides the photo, what else did the talk discuss?
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?
Well tumblerinas says you can't be racist against white because patriarchy. /s
No really, just read reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction and realize wtf people are saying these days shielding behind (false)feminist propaganda and some very confused idea of oppression.
It's a deep, and scary, rabbit hole. If you're at all curious, it seems Sargon of Akkad and Thunderf00t on YouTube are not just slinging shit. I've watched some, and sources have always been included.
Don't get me wrong, they clearly kick things up a notch in the drama department, but they do the ground work in sourcing articles for you.
My fiancée enjoys watching TLDR (teal deer) on youtube because he's the only youtuber speaking on these topics who literally only ever speaks facts. Theres not a thing he says that he doesn't back up for you.
Well to be fair, a white man's opinion on racism or sexism is sort of like a Pacific Islander's idea of how cold it is in Siberia. But on the other hand being ignorant does not make you less-than-human which seems to have become a common opinion in the age of Twitter lynch mobs.
But in that case you aren't blaming the Pacific Islanders for the lack of warmth in Siberia. If you were, I would like to hear their opinion on the matter.
Well, you have to remember that this statement is the opinion of one anonymous employee. Some of the other more blatant racial statements are much more worrying.
A lawsuit would be nice to confirm that 1. This is not legal, then 2. Confirm that it's the role of GitHub to get rid of such employees, 3. Have it happen regularly at GitHub for both racist and revert-racist attitudes, until clean, 4. and in the IT sector in general.
I dislike anti-discrimination laws in general of course. I think a good compromise would be to limit to manual labor jobs and the like which the laws was originally designed for.
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
This is standard stuff for a growing company. Right down to the disillusionment of the rank and file. I'm curious if anyone in the HN community has worked for a > 500 person company with a flat structure.
What a lot of commenters seemed to miss is that the remote work policy applies exclusively to senior managers.
Senior managers are no longer allowed to live afar and must report to the office.
These are the people that are usually on a separate bonus plan and receive an order of magnitude more stock options. It seems totally reasonable that they should have to come into the office.
How does a GPS fence lead to better management/leadership?
Until you realize their whole reason for github existing (and why Linus wrote git in the first place) is to support product development for large remote/distributed/non-centralized teams or projects. It just happens to also work identically for very small teams/projects too.
I wasn't commenting on the effectiveness of remote work. My point was that it's reasonable to ask more from senior management.
I'm sensing righteous indignation in your comment and a lot of the other comments. It's missplaced. Remote vs. in-office work is not a right vs. wrong battle. I work 100% remotely and sometimes I wish I was in the office.
Every company, employee, situation, etc. is different. It should be up to Github and its employees to decide what is right for their particular situation.
HN seems to have a white-male persecution complex. No one here is talking about the interesting parts of the story:
"10 or more executives have departed in recent months."
"In addition to previously reported executive departures, Business Insider has learned that Ryan Day, VP of business development; Adam Zimman, senior director of technology partnerships; and Scott Buxton, controller, have all left in the last six months."
"Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers. This has ticked off many people in the old guard."
"...key technical people from the old days like CTO Ted Nyman and third cofounder PJ Hyett are mostly absent from the office and not contributing much technically."
Github is very likely going to be a different company by the end of the year. The question is, is that going to be good or bad for its current leadership position? I'm a pessimist: I'll go with bad.
First Sourceforge went over to the dark side. Next, Github? This is a huge setback for open source.
We need federated open source hosting, where several companies all host the important projects, they all stay in sync, and any client can go to any service for any operation.
SourceForge is open source. The software underpinning the way the whole setup works is called Allura. Paid developers at SourceForge keep enhancing it. It's hosted by Apache: http://allura.apache.org/
Even the decision to show the image of the scotch collection is subtly (actually, not so subtle) using our ideas of appropriative work culture to lead us down the path of believing how terrible GitHub is.
1,036 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 378 ms ] threadIs it really that difficult to get push notifications for pull requests, issues, and my homepage news feed?
I don't know what it's built with but it's not native in the least, it looks like some awful PhoneGap monstrosity.
I'd think getting a github Android app just right would be a low priority.
If you do use android for development, you wouldn't need a github app to push your code to github. You would need a git app, and several great ones exist.
Atlassian? Oh god. Their software might be ideal for corporate beancounters and expensive consultants, but for everyone else it's a nightmare.
GitLab? A pile of memory leaks and other weirdness.
Google? Not so much, I highly doubt they'll ever re-open Google Code.
edit: and another thing, Github enjoys a massive, massive network effect, next to impossible to recreate by anyone else. Except Sourceforge, but they burned so many bridges that no one sane in his mind will ever trust them again.
GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket etc are project Management platforms that enable Bug Tracking, Documentation, Social networking all on top of and around basic git functions
Especially these days where everything is done on the client and the server only has to run a simple API!
Please ensure you've installed the Omnibus package that helps manage memory.
It doesn't have Gitlab's extra features, but it makes a great, lightweight dumb server.
Something like Akka is probably well suited for Gitlab and it's git hooks.
This will be downvoted too but honestly who cares. Despite all of Github's problems no one comes anywhere close in terms of adoption and developer mindshare and there is a reason for that.
We use our own instance since 2 years (60+ users, 200+ repo) and the only down time is for update
[1] https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/
One thing to remember is that the main reason Google did code.google.com was to create competition for sourceforge (I was the third or fourth person to join the code.google.com team)
Now, it's pretty much 100% that Google won't do this again anytime soon, but that doesn't mean some other large company won't have the same thought.
https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/
Haven't had a change to review it yet but seems to be they retired Google Code in preparation for this, not because they were acquiescing the market to Github.
What do you mean with other weirdness?
I mean, I'm always happy to see competition keeping companies on their toes, but why do you actively want people to leave GitHub?
https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/ http://dancerscode.com/blog/why-the-open-code-of-conduct-isn...
It's network effects are large but beyond that the product doesn't really do anything that others don't do just as well.
GitHub is becoming too large, and code is becoming too centralized, that is dangerous.
I guess I can include things like Aerospike and even Gitlab in that group. I don't actively wish for them to succeed either. I am glad they exist and I actively use their products but I would not cheer for any of them.
Most larger companies will not use a third party cloud service to host their code like github.com. They want software to run locally on their own servers instead.
Github offers their software to enterprise customers to run on their own servers, but they traditionally have done a bad job doing it, at least relative to gitlab. Today, dozens of open projects and even closed ones are using personal gitlab instances, but since the ecosystem is more open on gitlab contributions come back in to make it a much more friendly tool to self-host.
Tons of larger companies favor gitlab for exactly that reason.
I know others have waxed on the irony of the centralized role GitHub plays in a supposedly decentralized world of the DVCS that is git.
It would be cool if there were a Behance or even a Dribbble for programmers: a way for us to present our creations well but also easily in a host agnostic and semi or fully automated way.
Many of us or don't invest the effort necessary to maintain a work portfolio, unlike say design oriented fields where it's the norm. I think there could be something to it.
At any rate, enter the law of triviality. Making something simple that lots of people will understand is more likely to lead to more stars than something brilliant but complex, yet more indicative of development skill. This selects for gaming of the system and/or salesmanship; no doubt said employers will screech about a lack of "qualified" candidates before long.
There are so many factors that go into whether or not a repo becomes popular, which aren't necessarily related to anything that reflects on the creator's merits as an engineering hire. I think you'd skew your candidate pool in a weird way if you leaned on these metrics too heavily. Honestly, I'd be curious to hear more about how it's used in hiring.
Maybe it's since I've always worked for companies with > 500 employees, but there is always a pile of work on the products I've worked on that there was little time to contribute externally.
Edit: Hmm, there is also a page that talks about free repositories, but it requires an account. https://www.assembla.com/git/ In any event, they are confusing me.
I guess I just expect as a matter of dogfooding that a company that strives to do great distributed source code control and all the activities surroundings that would live the remove lifestyle.
It will now be fashionable to talk about the emperors new clothes. Even by those who previously strongly vocalized their love of the emperors clothes.
I'll bet you sam a will start talking about being Ramen Profitable soon.
By replacing flat meritocracy and remote work with traditional top-down management?
> "don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion anytime soon, so let's limit their scope of damage"
So the technical director and member of the social-impact team is a blatant racist.
I had the same reaction. I'm surprised nobody else has noticed this and made a comment about it.
No hatred ever got fixed by pouring more hatred into the cauldron. Sure, you can be the conquerer, but you just created more people gunning for you. If you are not about equality and love of all, then you are just another part of the problem. It is very much like the H1-B threads. Its important to see the system is broken and not the H1-B applicants doing the best they can in the system.
I sit here on a reservation and see the problems. A university adding requirements in a job search that weren't there before for one. I've lived through a bit of it, and people like him won't solve anything. All they will do is cost the company money in lawsuits.
Want to fix diversity? Fix the diversity and STEM education in pre-K and K-6. We learn to dream then. Let's think about everyone having a chance to dream of STEM.
People from that circle were proposing the idea of creating 'black lists' to make people unemployable for political reasons; they managed to get Brendan Eich expelled from Mozilla; they're pushing for "Codes of conducts", which again aim at expelling people from open source communities for political reasons - eg things they said in completely unrelated places, like their own Twitter feeds (see "Opalgate").
Also see PronounGate, DongleGate, past scandals at Github (meritocracy rug, Julie-Ann Horvath departure), discussions/scandals around CoC/"Contributor Covenant", etc etc etc.
One thing they frequently claim, is that they are NOT censoring anything, people are free to do whatever they want.
Yet they keep pushing for this behaviour (black listing people that disagree with feminism, nagging companies until they decide to not launch products in some markets because fear of feminist backlash, and so on).
I honestly don't see how they don't notice how illogical their position are.
I have a friend on Twitter who's a raging feminist. I asked her if she was concerned about Carly Fiorina being excluded from the GOP debate since she was the only woman and actually had more votes in the Iowa caucus than two other male candidates who they kept in the debate.
Her response was that she never cared about any GOP candidate. It just makes no sense to me. If you're for women's rights, then it shouldn't matter what race, religion or political party someone is, in order to support them - they're women, and should be supported regardless.
WTH are you talking about? If you're for women's rights you support people who are also for women's rights, regardless of race, religion or gender they are.
I don't know who Carly Fiorina is, but I know Margaret Thatcher, and she did nothing for women. By your logic though, just because she was a woman, feminists should have supported her over men in the opposing (socialist) party that supported women's rights?
They are in a special cognitive dissonance zone, they are wildly successful and that cures a lot of problems. They have time and money to worry about issues that aren't the products, and be vocal about it. Now the community seems to be mostly pacified, they like git and github has the mindshare, but they are coasting. Or so it seems, maybe the enterprise version I've never used has some badass features.
I thought you were being over the top about the racism but then I saw the slides in the article: http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56b3d2462e526543008...
My first reaction is that the language of "us" vs "them", victims vs oppressors, reeks of hatred. Hatred undermines productive conversation, which undermines any attempt at building a good culture.
I would have to listen to the whole presentation before I render final judgement.
They have enterprise services, or can be self-hosted.
Furthermore, I don't understand the racist attitude that somehow white or male people are somehow less qualified to lead a diversity program. Interpersonal skills, knowledge of the myriad diversity initiatives and approaches tried elsewhere and how effective they have been, knowledge of hiring practices, knowledge of recruiting practices, knowledge of retention practices, knowledge of the law surrounding hiring, recruiting and retention practices, professional network, etc. are all the type of things that should be relevant when choosing the most qualified candidates for such a position. Discounting all these and elevating someone's race and gender to utmost importance is blatantly racist policy/attitude.
An equally absurd corollary to "those that have experienced discrimination have unique insight into preventing discrimination" is "those that have experienced privilege have unique insight into privilege and how to dismantle it".
Just because you're on one side or the other doesn't make you more qualified by experience. We need people with understanding of both sides of the coin. In other words, we need diversity with respect to experiencing privilege and discrimination to understand what is happening and how to address it. When you don't have people on the other side of the coin, racist attitudes like the ones reflected in that slide proliferate.
Being white doesn't disqualify you from having experience being discriminated either. There are gay, lesbian and transgender white men, women and other gender identities. Head over to The Advocate and read some essays/blog posts from gay white males.
Furthermore, discriminating white people and men from this sphere of work (or any other) gives them some similar experiences and insight into discrimination.
What this thread shows is the sentiment that, if you claim diversity is important, leaving out a group specifically to increase diversity (as opposed to, say, merely reducing their proportion in the cohort) is in fact not being intellectually consistent or honest.
Don't fall into the flippant "Oh ho ho if white's aren't involved I guess it can't ever be legit" sarcastic dismissal. That's neither fair nor accurate.
Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
- "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
Second wave feminism, largely led by white women, often leaves out women of color. I mentioned this below, but the publishing industry is 79% white and 78% female. This has a huge impact on the types of stories that get to be published, which subsequently has real results on culture and society.
- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"
I mean yeah, sure, nothing super deep on that one. There should also be solidarity with white friends and colleagues, preferably ones that do a lot of listening and understand how not to take up all the space.
How can anybody who advocates equality say no white person can lead a diversity movement? Just because somebody is white doesn't mean they aren't an oppressed minority (female, transgender, Jewish or some other oppressed group like a furry).
I think we collectively need to declare it's not okay to say "people with skin color ____" cannot possibly understand Y or have an opinion on Y. To do so is institutionalized racism.
edit: typo
You may be saying that the non-white leadership is the kind of leadership that allows collaboration and influence from followers, which is what I would do, but the evidence in the Github case is to the contrary.
This sounds excessively harsh, do you really think that's how GitHub will run the program?
When the discussion is about "social impact", the conversation is about diversity. Diversity != equality. In the view of many, equality isn't enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged. The concept of "reverse racism" is there to deflect the inevitable awkward questions that arise, when clearly biased statements are made and practices get institutionalized.
IMO, all this stuff is problematic. I wish we could all embrace the golden rule and move on.
If your idea of fairness requires we become systematically biased against certain majorities (white, heterosexual, male, cis-gender) for your cause then I don't want to be part of your cause, and moreover I find that cause discriminitory and dangerous.
Exactly. As mentioned earlier, in the case of Github the cultural transition appears to be from prioritizing meritocracy to codified diversity for the sake of diversity.
Then that's not equality - equality is, or should be enough, because if the issue of diversity and equality is 'minimizing / eliminating privilege' then by definition, equality is that privilege is the same for all (or zero).
For many though, this becomes a good cover for 'preferential treatment above and beyond equality, in the name of 'compensation'.'
Whiteness changes with political needs. Hilariously, Irish-Americans, Jews, etc weren't always considered white. They had to become white. Nowadays, certain Asians are held up as model minorities and may get some honorary whiteness.
With children getting murdered by the state for being black, it's obvious race is about white supremacy. (Analogously, sexism is about male supremacy, also known as patriarchy.)
The US is 77.7% of the US population. I hardly think that a 2% imbalance is an issue to create divisiveness over. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...
I think you mean 77.7% white? It should be noted that the census counts North African and Middle Eastern as white, which is inaccurate. That number also drops to 62.6% when you take out Hispanics that describe themselves as white. So it's probably more like a 20 point difference than 2.
This sort of thinking is stupid.
White Supremacists: Jewish people are 2% of the american population, but they hold the majority of top positions in the publishing industry. Do you oppose diminishing Jewish Supremacy? Are you saying it's okay?
Both of these arguments are terrible, and are both based on the premise that over-representation of some group in some industry or position constitutes a serious problem and probable conspiracy.
Ah, ok, so you don't think representation is an issue. Most people of color that have dealt with white gatekeepers will disagree with you. If you care to examine the part of you that holds that belief I'd suggest reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, followed by some James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, and bell hooks to start. Hate read it if you must, but give some experiences orthogonal to yours a chance.
> Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
On the one hand, sure, it would be odd if it were entirely led by a group of people that the initiative is not meant to directly benefit.
But on the other,
1. The title implies it is white people that must be left out of leadership there. It does not mention Asian people, which is odd, as the tech industry is currently mostly white and Asian men. Asian people are highly overrepresented, much more than white people, relative to their percentage in the country. That means if you have objections to putting a white person in a leadership position for a diversity initiative, you should have a similar objection to an Asian person. Not having that mentioned can't help but seem racist against white people.
2. Diversity initiatives need to work with everyone, not just the newcomers, but also the existing tech industry, which is mostly white and Asian men. White and Asian men could be helpful in guiding the industry towards more diversity, in particular, by doing so in a way that gets as many other white and Asian men on board with such changes. They might know best what would work to convince them, for example.
3. And, in the end, it is just always wrong to say "this is not work for [race X]". That's racist and offensive. Instead, it would have been fine to say "this is work where we need a strong leadership presence of currently underrepresented groups".
That said, I believe Asian people are overrepresented, more than white people, relative to their percentage in California, but it's not nearly as disproportionate as the figures relative to the entire country.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html
Your link shows 14.4% for Asian people in California, but in the tech industry, they are at least twice that. Whereas in California white people are 73.2%, which is about equal or even less than their ratio in tech.
And about most people not moving more than 500 miles - is that true for tech jobs in California? See for example
http://www.siliconvalleyindex.org/index.php/people/talent-fl...
which indicates that your general rule might not apply, as over a third of Silicon Valley people are foreign-born. That means even from outside of the US, not just outside of California. And it's obvious the valley is full of people from the rest of the US, in fact tech workers that grew up in the area are a clear minority.
With this in mind, I'm very curious if we're asking the question of what these overrepresented groups are doing differently and if there are lessons to be learned by and applied by underrepresented groups.
As someone born in Brazil, when I meet a Brazilian in SF, we get to talking about where in Brazil we're both from at some point and one thing I've discovered is that Brazilians from the state of Goias are very much overrepresented in SF despite the fact that São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are typically more represented globally with Brazilian expats. Why are Brazilians from Goias over-represented in the Bay Area? Near as I can tell from the numerous conversations is that there is a strong network of weak ties, à la Granovetter, at play and that this is the same phenomena that can be see among Asian and Indian communities in SF.
In fact, the only Indian-Brazilian person I know in the Bay Area (and in the world, since there isn't much cultural exchange between Brazil and India) is a VC and he has commented that he wishes there was as much community and support on the Brazilian side of the Silicon Valley as there is on the Indian side, because he has seen that as one of the greatest external factors (i.e. outside what the individual himself is capable of) helping Indians move to the region in the first place and be successful once they arrive and establish themselves. Perhaps more efforts to establish professional and social networks of weak ties would be an effective strategy within identities group that are underrepresented. I'm curious how effective directing energy towards helping those within your identity in-group is versus fighting for your identity in-group as a whole relative to other identity in-groups?
It's not purely about representation, although that is important too. It's about centuries of white dominance. A couple decades of people of Asian descent having a strong presence in an industry isn't enough. How many of those overrepresented Asians are holding positions of senior leadership?
"And, in the end, it is just always wrong to say "this is not work for [race X]"."
You're missing the ending part of that statement, which is "to lead". That makes it very different. No one said white people can't be involved, as long as they are not taking up all the space.
White fragility is real.
I didn't miss "to lead", I referred to it. My point is that no matter the position - rank and file, or leadership; technical or non-technical; etc. etc. - it is never ok to say "this position is not for [race of gender X]". It's just wrong.
Again, it's fine to say "it would be helpful to have a presence of [group X] here". That focuses on the positive, doesn't exclude a specific group, and there are valid reasons to indeed want a presence of underrepresented minorities, because it's about them.
In other words, this entire initiative could be done in a non-racist way.
Again, no one said white people can't be involved. It says it is not for white people to lead. No one is leaving white people out of this.
"...and there are valid reasons to indeed want a presence of underrepresented minorities, because it's about them."
Think about that for a second. Do you see the subtlety in what you're saying? You're acknowledging that some power should be yielded from those that hold it "because it's about them", but you're not giving people of color the power to run the thing that is in and of itself about them. Only giving up token pieces instead of yielding power is one of many ways that white supremacy gets passed on over the centuries.
Instead, I focus on fairness and equal treatment. Individuals - all of them - should be given respect and opportunity. That's what really matters, and if we do that, then we can wipe out discrimination and intolerance.
Our points of view lead to some identical things we want - we both want to end any and all existing discrimination against underrepresented minorities. However, from there, there is divergence.
This is a political difference of opinion. It can't easily go away. What I think is important is that people like you and people like me find ways to meet on common ground and work towards those shared goals. But to do so, we have to accept some political viewpoint differences.
Side note: I find comments like "think about that for a second" etc. from you as potentially condescending. As if you're trying to play the role of a teacher, guiding me to some truth that you already grasp. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't mean it that way.
But yes we disagree. Of course all individuals should be given respect and opportunity, no one is arguing otherwise. The fact of the matter is that that's not the current state of the world. We can talk about fairness and equal treatment all we want, but that doesn't address the systemic racism that is happening right this second. People of color don't have the time to wait around for white people to decide to be respectful and fair. I don't see any way to overcome it than from a yielding of power.
I'm down to find common ground, but it has to be on something concrete, not vague ideas of fairness (which are subjective anyways). I personally think it's silly to have diversity initiatives led by white men. What do you suggest?
Again, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but I think any reasonable person could interpret that as condescending.
> I personally think it's silly to have diversity initiatives led by white men.
I might see a 10-person board of a diversity nonprofit that is 100% white men as silly. But to have some Chief of Diversity officer in one company happen to be a white man sounds fine to me - if he's good at it. No more odd than a professor of Russian history being Indonesian.
To say otherwise, as you just did, strikes me as racist. Do you really not see it?
> What do you suggest?
For example:
1. Educate hiring committees on implicit bias.
2. Make sure hiring is done as blindly as possible, e.g., coding tests can be done via text and not in person. This has worked wonders in other industries.
3. Have companies' HR departments focus on diversity, e.g. talking to employees (anonymously, or as they prefer) to see if there are current issues, and if so, to try to address them.
All those steps are already being taken by most major software companies, including the one I work at. Progress is happening. And it can happen without
1. Posing the problem as "group A" vs "group B", as you are doing. That's the type of thinking that got us into this problem in the first place, that led to prejudice and racism.
2. Acting and talking in ways that appear racist to a large segment of the tech industry, as Github is doing.
Forgive me if I think she is more qualified for that job running diversity initiatives than I am, even though I'm very well read on the topic.
But it's not the only qualification necessary for the job. The other is to effect change in the organization. By your logic, if a black person is better at understanding the problems black people face, perhaps a white person would be better at getting white people to change things in the company.
I actually think both of those are wrong. You can feel horror at the Rwandan genocide or the holocaust or other massive injustices without being African or Jewish. You don't just intellectually understand racism in the US - I hope - you also feel it has to change.
Again, I agree the perspectives of underrepresented minorities are crucial here. But that doesn't lead to "every single chief of diversity must be non-white."
Exactly, but it is one qualification of many. If you have a white man with a stellar application for that position, and a woman of color with a similarly stellar application for that position, doesn't the woman of color necessarily get the job because she has more qualifications than the white man?
The point is there is always going to be a person of color that is more qualified than the white man for that leadership position because their experience as a person of color makes them more qualified for the position, everything else being equal, and they should thus be given it. Is that not reasonable?
Anyhow, in practice, I doubt it matters: most applicants to such positions are likely not white men anyhow. So the racism inherent in such statements as "white folks are not suitable for this role" is not only wrong, it is also unnecessary.
White people are already in charge of everything, they don't also need to be in charge of diversity. That's exactly why these positions are being created in the first place.
> It's just that people of color are even more qualified
which you're ignoring again. Is it because the argument wasn't clear? Should I try again?
"The head of diversity should be a white male because they are the only ones qualified to understand white male privilege and therefore will be more effective at working and communicating with others that also have the same privilege and coming up with ways to get others with privilege to change their behavior. Seeing that those with privilege are a majority in the industry, a white male leading it would be more effective leading more people to changing attitudes."
1) Diversity isn't just about race and the fact you think it is is why I'm honestly horrified by you.
2) Sexual orientation, transgender issues are serious problems and not really protected classes in many respects and they have as much of a "fixed" bag from genetics as you do.
[1] https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/issues/82
[2] https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/blob/gh-pages...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043668
>Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding: > ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
Coded language for sanctioned discrimination.
For other reasons? Yeah. They get help too, though.
The law disagrees with you. I can very easily see Github on the losing side of workplace racial discrimination claim here.
I hope we can move past this some day, but that's not happening today.
Related reading:
Tact Filter: http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html
Ozark English: http://ozarque.livejournal.com/176349.html
When Nerds Collide: https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c
I'm just glad I dumped Github. I'm pretty sure they'd find my white female friends [some of whom needed to transition] being discriminated against as okay based on those slides.
You shouldn't be generalizing on race if you want me to believe that.
Honest question: does it have to be directed by "a privileged ethnic group" or is it valid if it is by any general group or even a single, privileged person?
That said, I'm no academic, but I remember reading something about this a few years ago, in the case of a woman in France accused of anti-white racism.
- what you mean by racial?
- how what I read on that slide is racial, not racist
The majority of sexism and racism that I've seen is probably subconscious and doesn't really seem intentional per se. People often just don't realize the side-effects of what they're saying or doing, or how it can come across to people sometimes. You certainly won't build shared camaraderie and empathy by antagonizing entire classes of people.
If people can get thrown out of conferences for their tweets on unrelated things, if Eich can get in hot water over a political donation, then it is little surprise to see the knife cutting both ways.
You wouldn't forgive a developer for speaking at an MRA conference--why should these people be forgiven for unrelated presentations?
This is the future you chose.
EDIT:
Downvote all you want. This is the kind of goodthink/badthink politicking that happens once you move away from "Does the code work?"
The thing being complained about by my parent poster here is completely consistent with the social norms that have prevailed lately. I would say don't be surprised at the sudden double-standard, but logic apparently isn't the strong point of the mobs.
We've spent so much time lately attacking meritocracies that it is somewhat cathartic to watch the inevitable consequences.
EDIT2:
Just to make this painfully clear--we have decided as a community that it is okay to judge people based on their actions in unrelated contexts. That applies just as much to folks that have slides about "white women being obstacles" in some unrelated context to their work in HR as it does to people that tweet bigoted things while being maintainers of projects.
The logic and principle is exactly the same.
This kind of outpouring of rage, to be frank, is why Hacker News has such a bad reputation. Look around at the comments here: there are people complaining about the very notion that there might be something wrong with how hiring and promotion happens in technology. There are people, like @yoodenvranx, equating their own anecdotal problems with the victimization of white men. There are countless comments asserting that we are capable of "pure meritocracy," a notion that is invalidated by research on implicit bias.
The overwhelming consensus here is that (a) there is no problem, and (b) GitHub's attempts to address it are unjust. This is why Hacker News looks to the outside world like a self-affirming bubble with no grounding in reality.
But we also have to remember that, to someone not in those well-represented groups, it's not a huge consolation. Diversity isn't a floating-point number between 0.0 and 1.0.
Overall, I rarely if ever see anyone arguing for diversity asking hard questions like "Why are there many Asians and Indians even though there aren't many Women, Hispanics/Latinos and Black people?". What are these successful identity groups doing differently that is affording them much success in being well represented or even over represented? How might the under represented groups adopt the same approaches to achieve the same success?
I'm not saying that we shouldn't solve unconscious bias as well, but I'm less inclined to first consider solutions that address unconscious bias if those solutions are proposed by someone who hasn't also considered other explanations and solutions because they aren't applying the null hypothesis in their thought process.
Also, how about some multi-variate analysis to determine which factors most greatly contribute to the diversity gap for each underrepresented group? We can't adequately fix what we don't measure and I really don't see a lot of measurement going on. For example, all successful startups understand and apply concepts of a user acquisition funnel and pipeline, but then people complain loudly in simplistic terms that the "pipeline problem is a myth". I don't understand how you can the former technique with great success and hold the latter incongruous thought in your head at the same time.
https://medium.com/life-tips/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-a...
I also don't think your comment extends good faith you are demanding to the comment and commenters which you're addressing.
I haven't gotten past the topmost comment thread on this HN post, but I have yet to read one comment here that makes this argument. Many here are addressing a particularly troublesome form of racism using a slide and other primary evidence as exemplary of this type of creeping racism. I haven't yet read a comment that argues that "(a) there is no problem", so the "consensus" you're asserting isn't there. I do agree that there is generally consensus about your second point " (b) GitHub's attempts to address it are unjust.", but maybe it's because GitHub's attempts just might be unjust?Comments like yours, on the other hand, are the reason I come to HN. Measured rebuttals without being too biased one way or the other-- it really enhances the reading experience of those going through this thread.
It's hard to convey my appreciation through an upvote, since that can be confused for just popularity, so I had to say it here.
Why is it OK to make these kinds of generalizations?
I don't understand it completely, but here is a related wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_feminism
It's a stretch as a comparison, but no-one gets sued for refusing to hire ugly models. It's because a model's job is to be good looking. That's just the way it is. In a similar way, a head of diversity should probably be... diverse. Although that could include gay white men, for example - maybe that text is shorthand that was qualified in the actual presentation, none of us know.
The white women one mystifies me, though. Women are usually a minority in the workplace, surely their views are valid.
I'm sick of this politics of division. It pits people against each other and treats them as members of some helpless group instead of as individual human beings, with their own unique story and their own untapped potential.
I don't see how you can guarantee that. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand what you're saying. But this is a one-line bullet point in a slideshow, I'd like to see some more context before I grab my pitchfork.
We've invented tools to deal with this: language and literature. Almost everyone has experienced some form of discrimination, even if for many it is only occasional and minor, and that's enough to give a good writer an opening to get inside the reader's head and use that to build upon and paint a vivid picture of the more frequent or major discrimination the writer has dealt with.
I know the slide needs more context, but even so, it is a very disturbing statement to make.
Something is amiss and lots of explanations are needed.
PS: now I am more than happy with my choice of keeping my repos on Bitbucket.
Edit: holy batman the downvotes. I never considered the possibility that maybe #hnwatch is right.
> Edit: holy batman the downvotes. I never considered the possibility that maybe #hnwatch is right.
Its unfortunate that you are being downvoted without comment. The downvotes may or may not be evidence that #hnwatch is correct, it would depend on the motivation. It would not be rational for us to assume that the downvotes are evidence that #hnwatch is correct, in the absence of any explanation for the downvotes.
IDK why, but people tend to not like being blamed for things they didn't do.
If that's not the mesaage we're supposed to take out of the concept, them somebody has got a lot of work to do to figure out a better way of communicating it. Someone who is not me, because I'm a programmer, just trying to take care of my own family, not a sociologist.
Its too common for people to be so certain of their own viewpoint that they will simply assume the worst (ie racism and sexism) of anyone who disagrees with them, rather than consider that their critics might have damn good (non-racist, non-sexist) reasons for disagreeing with them.
I think he simply couldn't back up his own argument with any logic, so resorted to a tired cheap shot about Nazis in frustration.
It's a pity your apology makes it seem like you simply referred to the Nazis without knowing he was German, when you actually specifically blamed him and every other (white) German ("you guys") for what the Nazis did, because he said he was in Germany.
> FWIW, only ElComradio was engaging with me in an actual discussion there, and his replies are reasonable, but I am thoroughly downvoted anyway, so how's that for evidence of a hivemind?
Out of five posts in that discussion, you have one post that is white. I wouldn't call that "thoroughly downvoted".
It would be absurd to tell someone to recognize their privilege that the odds were in their favor but nonetheless they rolled poorly. It's like telling some white guy on death row to feel privileged he had a lower chance of being there.
Being a white male is being allowed at a table in a casino where the expected value of the game is positive, and much higher than any other table. You can still lose, but the players in general don't. You should be thankful for being allowed to play a game with the highest expected value.
I think that's a reasonable thing to assert. That's what privilege is: the number of times you can fuck up (self-inflicted bad things) or be unlucky (externally inflicted bad things) before you lose all your chips.
That's the nice things about probability and statistics. They allow us to compare an individual to a group.
Of course feelings are important- The feeling you wish to elicit is guilt, not simply acknowledgement.
Getting white males, whether successful or not, to even say "yes, the system discriminates for us, regardless of outcomes" is such a huge barrier that their acknowledgment of the issue is the first thing that must happen before any kind of "fixing of the system" could happen.
So at our losers' table, you would ask the white winners to help you out over me, and over the other white guys at the losers' table, because we, the white losers, must have fucked up more to get here. The underprivileged losers are entitled to disproportionate aid from the winners.
A winner comes over to the losers bar, and you want him to give every loser, white or black, the same number of chips.
The problem is that after you all get your re-up, you get to go play at the white table again, and they go back to play at the black table again, which means that you have a way greater chance to not come back to the losers' bar.
Ideally, you'd make both games have the same probability distributions, and that might happen eventually, but until then, the underprivileged losers should get more resources to have similar outcomes.
Expected value is everything.
In this simplistic example, it comes down to one party using guilt tactics to convince the other party to provide an advantage or a leg up, which necessitates working against their own interests. Guilt tactics are required because it's a social engineering goal; the total number of people at the losers' bar remains the same.
You don't have to show up at the bar.
What I am saying is: "Regardless of personal outcomes, whites and blacks are playing a game with a different probability distribution. That's a statistical fact. I want you to either acknowledge that it's a fact, or provide evidence that it is not. If you do agree that it's a fact, I want you to say 'I'm sorry you guys are playing a statistically rigged game', however, I don't want you to feel guilty and give up your shit."
Saying 'I am sorry' is not the same as feeling guilty. If you really object to the words 'I'm sorry' and can't fathom saying them and not feeling guilty, try saying 'it sucks that you guys are playing a statistically rigged game'. If the words "I promise to remember that if I ever manage to leave the losers' bar" seem to imply to you that it's a promise to later feel guilty and give up some of your shit when you have some, it isn't. Certainly you can remember what it is like to be a loser while being a winner, and then do nothing to help current losers.
What you seem to be saying is: "Regardless of whether 'the black game is disadvantageous to the white game' is a fact or not, the reason anyone tells me that is because they want to elicit guilt and then proceed with resource redistribution, rebalancing and social engineering", and I think that's wrong.
Just like it is incorrect to say that there is a white/asian/indian-male-libertarian-programmer-hivemind on Hacker News, it is incorrect to state that everyone that makes the observation that I am making is there to elicit guilt and proceed with resource redistribution.
There is a philosophical maxim that states "you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'." Interpret your opponents with sufficient charitability to believe that they are obeying this maxim, especially when they say "I am obeying that maxim."
Oh, never mind, I forgot for a second you're addressing something/someone specific with generalisations that are meaningless to him and have nothing to do with his life or status.
Your argument is piss poor; that's why you were downvoted (not by me). Congrats on your successful upvote fishing, by implying/imagining some kind of HN conspiracy/agenda/hive mind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I'm not sure if pointing that out was what violated the guidelines or just the way I did it, but in future, assuming this has not been banned, I'll try to keep my opinion of someone's argument or intellect to myself. Thanks for the heads up.
Your entire comment upthread was uncivil. If you're sincere about abiding by the guidelines (as I hope you are), it would be an instructive exercise to rewrite it in a neutral, respectful way, editing out the nose-tweaking and every trace of snark. Do that on three or four occasions and you'll see how much better your contributions get, regardless of what you're arguing for. I know that sounds patronizing, but I don't mean it that way—it's a process that many of us, including me, have gone through, and it helps.
I hope it's still possible to disagree, argue or take a negative position towards someone's post or argument without it necessarily being taken as personal or uncivil though.
It's definitely still possible to disagree, of course. It's entirely a matter of how.
it makes you look stupid.
Being poor and white is a lot better than being poor and black or poor and <not white> because you're not fighting additional problems that come with being a minority.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/34667100/poor-white-bo...
> If you're white, male and poor enough to qualify for a free meal at school then you face the toughest challenge when starting out in life.
> That's what the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said in "the most comprehensive review ever carried out on progress towards greater equality in Britain".
Frankly the debate should really be "How do we give everyone the best start in life" rather than "how do we cripple some groups so everyone gets an equal start in life".
Poor students have an immensely huge problem already (being poor), the problem is how do they climb out of poverty? There is no easy path but being "white" is easier in that (for ex.) looking for a job, there won't be people who discriminate against you because you're black, asian or latino. The same minority applying to the same job now also has to deal with any preconceived discriminatory outlooks of the hiring manager. that is the _out_ that white people get.
I agree that we should, "we give everyone the best start in life", but you act as though whites don't already get that or are being penalized now by your, "how do we cripple some groups so everyone gets an equal start in life" statement. White people have always been unequal from other minorities in that they've always had an advantage. Your view of "crippling" is everyone else's view of a level playing field.
No one talking about white privilege says it means white people can't ever have a tough life. Just as being black doesn't mean you can't ever be successful.
It's simply argued that if all other things were equal, chances are you'd have it harder as a minority.
As an example: http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
> a white name yields as many more [job] callbacks as an additional eight years of experience
False. Many people who speak frequently about white privilege actually do sometimes make the argument that white people's lives are so intrinsically easier than POCs, that we need not ever worry about harming any white people.
This mentality is most visible when a gang of righteous ideologues are waging a vicious doxxing or "harass their employer until they fire them" campaign against an accused white person.
"Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
When diversity initiatives become an "us vs them" discourse, everyone loses. Except for the fat cats with full wallets at the top, who have no issue with the plebe infighting as long as it's between themselves (see the not so subtly placed "this is not about socio economic class").
My take is that it's not "us vs them", but a need to illuminate where the barriers lie.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/27/us-study-finds-...
[2] https://www.facebook.com/marlon.james1/posts/101537967097308...
how many chinese restaurants are run by non-chinese?
these stats don't make any sense, if you just look at them that way. maybe whites like being editors more… if you don't find the reason, you won't find the solution.
For the life of me I can't understand why people insist on having equal representation in every industry. It'd be on thing if there were numbers proving a massive backlog of people of a certain race/gender wanting positions in a field but unable to get them. It's another entirely when there's no demand, and we insist on artificially generating it to make people feel warm and fuzzy that every job on the planet has equal representation across race/age/gender.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/11/21/365707391/...
I'm inclined to believe that there is no correct percentage and that even trying to simplify as you have is disingenuous and leads to simple but wrong explanations that ignore all sorts of contributory factors.
I'm a cis-male that identifies as agender, but I haven't seen any evidence that I'm under-represented in the publishing industry because my gender is discriminated against. That's an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.
Furthermore, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on base rates and how they contribute to measurements of diversity?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
US Census Quick Facts Data Sheet by State: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905356
I've been watching github closely as they are one of our main competitors in the enterprise offerings.
I haven't lived in the US for a while, but lately, I keep hearing all these expressions of straight up racial hatred of white people, all the way up to taking pleasure in white people "dying off" and so on. This kind of thing can't end well and needs to be stopped.
I even read of people claiming they are trans-black because they inside them feel black (and I am quoting literally) and so other people must see them that way.
You find this on tumblr, on pseudo-feminism propaganda sites, etc... a lot of this is collected in the subreddit reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction
Wouldn't that constitute cultural appropriation?
As for German or Russian philosophers - that seems far fetched. This is an American phenomenon, and in its explicit and mainstream form, it is a fairly recent one.
BTW, do you want to get started on explaining away "we can't teach white male managers empathy or compassion"?
Not wanting to be an ally unless you're allowed to be in charge is a pretty perfect illustration of why the slide exists.
"the white folk"? That's pretty close to "you people"/"those people".
How stupid can you be to post a "no white leadership", in writing?
I really don't like this trend of painting everyone with white-ish skin as a homogenous oppressor class. It's pretty clear to me that a diversity department that explicitly bans white people from leadership positions will not represent my interests if I am discriminated against.
It's like saying Reddit is nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types, or HN is nothing more than clueless Valley types. Or that Twitter is nothing but people sending each other 140 character descriptions of lunch. I really hate lazy stereotypes of complex interactions, especially on a place like HN where people should be "native" enough to digital culture to know better.
I have no idea how you know what your downvoters think about Tumblr.
> It's like saying Reddit is nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types [...] I really hate lazy stereotypes
Who is the "they" in your post then, below, if not a generalised "Reddit" of nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types?
Because Tumblr is brought up here and on Reddit frequently as this hellhole of idiotic far leftist thought. All I can think is: "have you actually looked at Tumblr beyond following some link at /r/tumblrinaction?" because there's so, so much more than that.
>Reddit is leaking...
Well, one thing you can count on from Reddit (or at least the vocal people in the defaults and conservative subs) is a fear and loathing of Tumblr, as well as considering SRS to be the root of all evil. Any time someone wants to panic about the threat of "SJWs", Tumblr is not far behind in the fear factor.
Hence, "reddit is leaking.." which was a joking way of referring to "tumblr is leaking".
But I still defend Reddit to my friends who are dismissive of it. Reddit contains a lot more than the awful stuff it's well known for. The defaults might be a hive of scum and villainy but there's a ton of great stuff in the smaller subs.
The combined result is that, on Tumblr, you'll subscribe to people for one thing, and then inevitably they'll "signal-boost" other things into your feed that you didn't sign up for. The most often "signal-boosted" thing is Social Justice discourse. This is why people get the impression Tumblr is a Social Justice website: if you subscribe to blogs about porn, cats, and tech, you'll end up with a dashboard containing porn, cats, tech, and "signal-boosted" Social Justice.
Personally, my problem isn't with Social Justice, but with "signal-boosting" itself. I (very carefully) use Tumblr, and enjoy doing so, but only by strictly following a policy of unsubscribing from any blog that "signal-boosts" anything. I think this means that I end up following only blogs that are completely disconnected from Tumblr's social graph, though, so I don't know how precisely I can be said to be "using Tumblr" at this point, rather than just being subscribed to some blogs that happen to be hosted there.
Internet induced sociopathy has infected an entire generation. No conversation is ever a conservation, everything is a performance for the benefit of third parties. Even face to face every conversion is haunted by what will this sound like when it is posted online. No one deserves the benefit of the doubt because they aren't real people, just words on a screen.
It's the so-called SJWs and the alt-right. It's GG and anti-GG. It's facebook and tumblr and twitter and reddit and lord knows 4chan.
It's sick, it's no ones fault, it's probably unfixable and that's heartbreaking.
More accurately, that statement is both anti-white and misandrist, almost by definition, by equating white plus male with damage.
It blows my mind that some people really believe that only white people can be racist. It's like they completely redefined the meaning of the word "racist".
That's the point. Redefine words so that it's impossible for someone who doesn't share their point of view to have any moral high ground.
That makes your followers who have adopted the new definitions fairly immune to persuasion. Some cults work like this. I've never seen it done by anyone with a defendable agenda.
There are plenty of places where I, as a competent white male, can get hired and promoted without difficulty. The fact that Github isn't one of those is not a systematic problem. More power to them.
Hey, very scary to hear you say that. My email is in my profile. Write me anytime if you want. Lots of people on HN love to help other people. Don't be shy about reaching out.
That said, I don't think I "prefer" anything about the way the world works now.
Github is a major software company, and there are similar signs at other major companies, most of whom are starting down a similar path.
When it's actually hard to get a job as a white male developer. We're very far from that point.
I think it's reasonable to worry well before that.
(I don't know what if anything we can or should do aside from worry.)
I don't know what your definition of major is, but Github is not it in my book. Don't get me wrong, they make a semi-decent product, better than anyone else at this point, but they are by no means the only solution in their market.
I assume you're speaking for yourself. I will bear none of that with you. Never have I participated in any way to hold down anyone because of their race, gender, or otherwise.
When the blameless volunteer to take blame we have serious social problems. Better find the actual cause and fix it.
It's an inherent problem that as you fight something, you tend to mirror it. You almost have to do so in order to be effective. The problem is that at some point, it just feeds the cycle.
I am at fault for that, and have been trying to stop recently.
It's funny how we (I) is okay with using old wisdom when it comes to engineering, but dismiss quotes like that even though it comes with significant experience across generation and culture. Chalk it up to young and (incredibly) stupid
I think that most people think the same way, and as a result there are absolutely no consequences when the activists go from "challenging" to "outright hateful."
"During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." ~ Nelson Mandela [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Prepared_to_Die]
IMHO, this position is more philosophically consistent than what many circles in American academia espouse. As I recall, Mr Mandela had to fight a lot of over-zealous activists in his own party who wanted to implement punishment or retribution to the white apartheid supporters. Though it cost him greatly in terms of discontent and difficulty but stands to me as an example. But it's been widely acclaimed after the fact.
I tweeted a response stating this was racism and was blocked within 20 seconds.
The article put that tweet in a context where it could be interpreted as "white males in Github are bad, let's fire them" and I think he says something completely different.
1: https://twitter.com/_danilo/status/690601512813367297
Lots of unsourced speculation as to what's going on behind the scenes, but I wonder if a few years from now, we'll all look back at the day they decided to throw out meritocracy (symbolically, as the rug, and realistically, as the reorganization) as the beginning of the end...
Aside: I'm getting rather tired of being downvoted and nobody bothering to at least explain why.
What some people seem to want instead is some sort of egalitocracy, but I have no idea how to make such a beast productive or useful, particularly for tech work, which has a fairly high intellectual bar.
> Its once famous remote-employee culture has been rolled back. Senior managers are no longer allowed to live afar and must report to the office. This was one reason why some senior execs departed or were asked to leave, one person close to the company told us. > There was a remote culture and very little hierarchical structure which worked wonderfully when they were 30 and 50 people, but at 500, it doesn't work.
Hierarchy != Non-meritocracy
You can have hierarchy and still be based on productivity and merit.
To me it seems like rhetorical sleight of hand, redefining "racism" to depend on a mysterious "power" component which is never adequately demonstrated or explained, or only explained in terms which are themselves actually racist, e.g., "whites have power because most politicians are white".
In other words, "Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
It is far, far away from science or empiricism, and yet it is used to inform law and policy. Insanity
Sorry, as a white male, I don't have to take this kind of blatant racism, abuse, and shaming when it comes to hosting my code. BitBucket does a good job without the uppity diversity attitude.
Why did they unnecessarily mention diversity in the context of the reorganization of github? Because that is the corporate BS that is popular to spout when you are redefining power within your company. Make no mistake github is doing restructuring to position themselves for large corporate contracts, NOT to be a more diverse workplace.
Using injustice to whitewash your redefined power structure is disingenuous.
sad to see github losing its way = (
edit : also : "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'"
Can someone explain this ?
fixed
http://uk.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-white...
No joke.
[1] http://www.amazon.fr/CSS-Secrets-Lea-Verou/dp/1449372635
(it's really good btw)
Despite that, it's a belief that's out there, and it prevents some women from even trying (which is bad).
There are a few people now that feel a similar thing is happening in the tech industry right now as well. In that diversity is promoted only in so far as it helps white women but not any other underrepresented groups.
Some of the early suffragettes - including the first female senator in the US[0] - were not just racist, but outright white supremacists.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Latimer_Felton#Racial_...
It's completely incoherent. If the power is overwhelmingly in the hands of straight white man, than straight white women very unlikely to become not some of the biggest "barriers to progress."
The argument is that instead of focusing on the core issue that discrimination is inherently bad and needs to be fought against, white women put the focus specifically on them. This means other groups are ignored until white women have achieved their goals until a new conversation can be started.
I'm not sure whether other groups would have made progress sooner without this problem but it's a possiblity and that would make white women significant barrier.
I admit it's hard to go from that further to biggest barrier but I don't think one should discard that notion too easily. "Moderates" pushing for some bad compromise is the worse is better of politics. MLK famously considered white moderates to be a bigger issue than racist groups at one point.
Most of us are not altruistic enough to put other people ahead of us and ours. Self > family > clan > tribe > race > everybody else. However you choose to segment your identity up and what characteristics you base it upon, that's generally the hierarchy of fucks you give about other people.
Meanwhile, I've got to live as best I can in the world as it exists, rather than as I might ideally like it. There's a lot of smaller, more manageable windmills out there.
So Sanchez has a point in claiming that historical precedence has shown that "discrimination" was thought to have ended after the suffrage movement when it wasn't until many years later that minorities were legally secured the right to vote. Hence the hierarchy is that white women are the "next-in-line" when it comes to diversity before any other type of minority group.
Another funny thing is after going on about hiring more dark skinned people a lot of companies are hiring Indians just because they are good at the job (eg Nadella) so they're having to say no not that sort of coloured person, the other lot.
https://about.gitlab.com/2016/02/02/gitlab-diversity-sponsor...
I know, totally different companies at this point, but this shift marks me seeing GH as a completely different entity from what it used to be, and I don't look forward to what kind of company they'll become in the future. Kind of disappointing to read about the changes. None of them sound good.
It's often not a good sign when the top engineers or star salesmen aren't running a tech company.
Also note that Julio is a very technical guy.
Note that what you have seen here is nearly identical to what david drummond did at Google (start as legal, take over some other functions like corpdev) in the early years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drummond_(Google)
It's hard to say this didn't work out amazingly well.
I'm also completely unsure why, without any evidence (in this article or elsewhere), you would assume that whatever power Julio has, he's using in a way that stagnates things, instead of using it in a way that enables folks to get shit done.
(David is the reason Google was willing to take so many legal/etc risks for the past N years)
I didn't write the article which is fingering him as the root of the problem.
You say he does "corpdev" and the article clearly points out "development of the corporation" has become a big problem.
I'll take your word on Mr. Drummond, though.
You are. Let's take what you said "... aren't running a tech company."
Nothing in the article said he's running the company, you are making an assumption here.
Nothing you have provided at all backups up your claim that "It's often not a good sign when the top engineers or star salesmen aren't running a tech company. ". So there's an unproven statement combined again with the assumption that engineers aren't running the place (the article says it's being run by one of the co-founders, who was an engineer - "Prior to founding GitHub he worked as an engineer at CNET Networks on Gamespot and the launch of Chow.")
"You say he does "corpdev" and the article clearly points out "development of the corporation" has become a big problem. "
This badly misunderstands what corpdev does.
It's pretty much not worth continuing this discussion, i'm just pointing out that you are making wildly silly generalizations to how to run companies and what the article actually says. And yeah, you are making a ton of assumptions to do it.
It's unlikely that the kind of multi-tiered management structure most larger companies use is ideal, but it's the best thing management science has found (it's a young field, rooted in the buildout of factories in the industrial age).
No wonder they got rid of the meritocracy rug.
I agree with a few of these points and maybe that's barbaric, but what is worse imo is the approach that GitHub has to this.
I mean, when you know you are at the forefront of social software development, you need to hold yourselves at a higher standard than this. Millions (!) of people depend on you for some kind of baseline, and this divisiveness and shallowness in protocol really can't be accepted.
Somehow, I have this feeling that even though we all know that this is wrong that they'll just get away with it like usual and nothing major will change except that GitHub's support will get even worse.
* Self-hosted CE (free) * Self-hosted EE (paid) * GitLab-hosted EE on GitLab.com (free) * GitLab-hosted CE or EE on GitHost.io (paid)
We use the self-hosted CE, and it's a breeze to set up and maintain
Unfortunately, GitHub is where people expect open source projects to be, so it's almost an inconvenience for contributors to be on anything other than GitHub
How is this even legal? Change 'white' for any other race, and you'd have yourself a workplace discrimination lawsuit.
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 perceived to be frighteningly one-sided.
Besides the photo, what else did the talk discuss?
No really, just read reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction and realize wtf people are saying these days shielding behind (false)feminist propaganda and some very confused idea of oppression.
Before reading that subreddit, one should probably be aware of Poe's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Don't get me wrong, they clearly kick things up a notch in the drama department, but they do the ground work in sourcing articles for you.
This sentiment is racist and sexist.
I hope the irony is not lost on you. What a despicable (and sadly typical) comment.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/yahoo-sued-over-e...
Yes:
Bitbucket
No:
Self hosted Gitlab instance
What a lot of commenters seemed to miss is that the remote work policy applies exclusively to senior managers.
Senior managers are no longer allowed to live afar and must report to the office.
These are the people that are usually on a separate bonus plan and receive an order of magnitude more stock options. It seems totally reasonable that they should have to come into the office.
Until you realize their whole reason for github existing (and why Linus wrote git in the first place) is to support product development for large remote/distributed/non-centralized teams or projects. It just happens to also work identically for very small teams/projects too.
I'm sensing righteous indignation in your comment and a lot of the other comments. It's missplaced. Remote vs. in-office work is not a right vs. wrong battle. I work 100% remotely and sometimes I wish I was in the office.
Every company, employee, situation, etc. is different. It should be up to Github and its employees to decide what is right for their particular situation.
"10 or more executives have departed in recent months."
"In addition to previously reported executive departures, Business Insider has learned that Ryan Day, VP of business development; Adam Zimman, senior director of technology partnerships; and Scott Buxton, controller, have all left in the last six months."
"Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers. This has ticked off many people in the old guard."
"...key technical people from the old days like CTO Ted Nyman and third cofounder PJ Hyett are mostly absent from the office and not contributing much technically."
Github is very likely going to be a different company by the end of the year. The question is, is that going to be good or bad for its current leadership position? I'm a pessimist: I'll go with bad.
We need federated open source hosting, where several companies all host the important projects, they all stay in sync, and any client can go to any service for any operation.
Github is closed source.
The ease in which y'all are swayed into this article's point of view is the true worry here.
Restructuring and growing pains are normal.