Obviously this article is a single personal viewpoint, but I have heard similar stories from two other github employees (one of whom still works for github).
Their interpretation was that github is upset they are viewed as sexist, so they want to figure out how to change their public reputation, without actually changing anything.
This feels like the mostly likely scenario, quickly change your image by hiring a bunch of 'diverse' people and soak up the PR, then quietly let them go over the next few years if they don't conform.
That'll work for a year or so. The problem is that they will write about it afterwards (like this), and then you're reputation (in this area) is even worse, because now people won't be believe you.
> Their interpretation was that github is upset they are viewed as sexist, so they want to figure out how to change their public reputation, without actually changing anything.
Github has really completed an unusual feat - Hostile to people of color, the entire gender spectrum as well as cisgendered people of no color. All seem to have grievances with this company. Wow.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. - Cardinal Richelieu (apoc.)
At-will employment, in the United States. You can be PIPped and then fired (the PIP is optional but it's generally used as a way to protect the company from risk) for just about anything not explicitly carved out as an unacceptable under federal or state law.
What's most interesting is that "empathetic communication" is generally not prioritized in software development environments, in favor of exactly the kind of polite-but-direct communication the author employs. (In fact, many feel that even politeness is unnecessary or harmful. For instance, Linus Torvalds' and other OSS developers are known and regularly praised for their bluntness.) I've spoken out often on HN about the need for more of this kind of communication, but I don't see a problem with the author's tone here, and I don't see Github as a workplace that's much of an advocate for it.
I think it is possible that there is some sexism here in that I'm not confident a male employee at Github would ever be challenged over failing this communication standard. That is, I think we implicitly expect women to be more empathetic and polite than men are, and get confused when they are not.
Edit: Also, I have never, ever heard of a PIP being used as anything other than a strategy for building a case for firing someone. Does anyone have any counter-examples?
Edit 2: Also also, the author says she had to turn down Github's severance package because it included an NDA, so she could write the article. Gross. [1]
It's completely possible for a woman to behave in a sexist way towards another woman. There's an argument about whether one can be sexist against men (or racist against white people, etc.) that has to do with how the terms are defined, but I don't think that applies here.
>I think it is possible that there is some sexism here in that I'm not confident a male employee at Github would ever be challenged over failing this communication standard.
What leads you to this conclusion?
Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence.
> Also, I have never, ever heard of a PIP being used as anything other than a strategy for building a case for firing someone.
Agreed on this point, as soon as she had a phone call with manager + HR they had already decided to fire her.
> Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence.
It comes back to that implicit expectation. Something I've been bringing up a lot in this thread as I read the comments throughout it is that whether we consider somebody rude or not seems to depend a lot on a) who they are, and b) whether we agree with them. We are more charitable to people who are more like us and whose ideas we find more correct. We're all human, so that's part of life. However, as an organization, Github can and should do better than that, and I think here that it did not. The sexism here, if it exists, is implicit in the way problems with this person were handled and in the expectations (mostly unwritten, at least at first) about how she'd behave.
>However, as an organization, Github can and should do better than that, and I think here that it did not.
Consider if the situations were reversed. What if some white male engineer was simply being terse in an email to her. Might she attribute it to rudeness, sexism, or transphobia? If the company fired the engineer would you be arguing that she should be a bit more charitable in her interpretations?
It can be very hard to capture the subtleties of spoken word in text form. The onus has pretty much always been on the individual to ensure they are being professional. I definitely think something is fishy here. It may very well be that Github has some serious issues, but the flip side of that coin (and Occam's razor) is that she sent out some rude emails and was fired.
> Consider if the situations were reversed. What if some white male engineer was simply being terse in an email to her. Might she attribute it to rudeness, sexism, or transphobia? If the company fired the engineer would you be arguing that she should be a bit more charitable in her interpretations?
These are good questions, and I don't know the answers. I'd like to tell you how I'd react, but I think given the current context it'd be hard for me to do so without my opinion of this whole thread coloring my answer.
> It can be very hard to capture the subtleties of spoken word in text form. The onus has pretty much always been on the individual to ensure they are being professional. I definitely think something is fishy here. It may very well be that Github has some serious issues, but the flip side of that coin (and Occam's razor) is that she sent out some rude emails and was fired.
What I'll say is this: I can see how her comments could be perceived as rude, or "unempathetic." I cannot see how - especially at Github, a place not known for cultural sensitivity - they were firable. I think there is a double/triple/quadruple standard going on here where people are, without even realizing it, passing their opinions of somebody through ideological blinders. I think this issue may be part of a core problem with Github's culture.
>I can see how her comments could be perceived as rude, or "unempathetic." I cannot see how - especially at Github, a place not known for cultural sensitivity - they were firable.
I agree, I think this is where the "fishy"-ness I spoke of earlier comes in. Giving the benefit of the doubt to Coraline, there is definitely more at play than being rude in a few emails. I just feel uncomfortable jumping from an individual account to broadly concluding an organization is sexist.
I respect that. Personally, I feel that Github has a long enough history of mismanagement and poor culture that sexism and the kinds of issues this post describes aren't difficult to imagine at all.
That was my confusion as well. I think that 99% of the working world would kill for the kind of conditions where mildly harsh words get you fired. Okay, maybe that wasn't the best metaphor there.
What I see in this is a sort of passive transphobia. It's not that anyone harbors any grudge, it's that they harbor no kind feelings. The idea that someone deserves whatever happens to them, for good or ill, is just an excuse to turn a blind eye to any harm that occurs to them. When the best response you get from people is indifference, you're probably not going to have a long and happy life.
I think Coraline has more passion than good judgment, but on the other hand. I'm glad someone is out there to raise these issues and take the resulting flak. I worry about what kind of similar discrimination I'm going to face. If this is what goes on in the enlightened liberal utopias we've all got a tough row to hoe.
> PIPs are used to try and demonstrate cause so that collecting benefits is harder.
I mean, I'd agree that someone at some point in time has used a PIP for this reason, but I'd strongly argue that this is wrong.
I'd argue a much more charitable and accurate description of why PIP's are used is to protect the company from a litigious former employee. They are designed to show that they company tried to help the fired employee before they took the final action of letting them go.
... and the reason that they want to do that is so that the person cannot collect benefits, or has a harder time doing so.
Maybe you've worked with better employers than I have, but it's pretty much been an open secret in a few different places I've worked, both inside and outside of tech.
Or, sometimes it's not a PIP, but something similar. Many fast food places have a policy where if you're underperforming, your hours get reduced. If they want to fire you, they don't fire you: they give you one, four-hour shift a week at the slowest possible time of the week. That way, they didn't fire you; you quit, and so you don't get unemployment, etc. If you don't show up for your shift, then you're fired with cause, and so you don't get unemployment, etc.
I've noticed in international teams that there can be a culture clash when it comes to communication. People from some countries favor communication that is much more flourished and gentle, while folks from other countries are much more blunt and to the point (not necessarily to be curt, but rather they just get to the point). I've seen this clash also on mailing lists for open source projects that have an active global community.
Also, in academia, there is a similar phenomenon for letters of recommendation that can actually really hurt your chances if you are not familiar with the intricacies. For example, if you are applying for an American position, letters are expected only shower praise upon the applicant. But for European positions, letters are intended to be a straightforward and honest assessment of the applicant--highlighting both the good and the bad (e.g. [0]).
I'm not trying to justify this action by any means. I can just see how it may come about.
Yes.
I had to have a manager fire a person because they repeatedly yelled at others on video conferences, etc.
I've seen others performance planned for being complete jerks to others on a repeated basis.
Please remember that no amount of genius should make up for being an asshole.
Some companies don't take this to heart, for sure, but those that actually want a good culture, do.
So yeah, regardless of this case (i don't have enough facts), but i've definitely seen people fired/etc for not being able to communicate empathetically.
I've seen two people fired for being difficult to work with before.
One was very critical of other peoples' work, and would not take criticism well herself. She would make everything very personal. Despite being a junior engineer with limited experience or seniority, she would criticize more senior peoples' work in highly personal ways. Think "how could you be so stupid as to write this garbage" instead of "this is bad code". One day she received constructive criticism from her team lead (one of the nicest guys I've ever met) and instead of accepting it, she dug in and insulted him. He stood his ground and refused to +1 the PR without her change. He escalated it to his manager. She was given a formal warning. A week later she made another personal attack-as-criticism and was fired later that day.
The other was an obsessive perfectionist. He would withhold +1s from PRs until they were perfect. Given that these were PRs on existing systems, this meant in practice that if you modified code in a poorly-written existing file, he would refuse to +1 it until the entire file was rewritten, ground-up, to be high quality. One day, his dragging his heels turned a four hour ticket into a week-long tar pit. This caused an important deadline to slip. The next day he was let go.
----
In both cases they were cool people who I really liked. The first person was one of my closest friends in the office at the time. She was really cool, and while she was kind of abrasive, for the most part it was just like RMS-lite style assholitry. Nothing that out of the ordinary. The second guy, he may have been an obsessive perfectionist but his code was _perfect_. The stuff he wrote was by far the best anybody on our teams did.
But teams are more than the sum of their parts. These people might have been good individually, but their being hard to work with caused the whole team to suffer. So they got fired.
Maybe it's not super fair to them. Maybe they have their baggage or there's a culture shock (She was recent immigrant from China, he from Austria). But at the end of the day we are paid lots and lots of money to do important work, and if people are causing significant obstacles to us getting our jobs done, they're going to lose theirs. That's life
I know it would be a thing for any company I worked for. You can't just be an ass to your coworkers for long and expect to stay around. Your team deserves cordiality, you're on the same team. And if not that, at the very least respect.
You can be fired for just about any reason in the United States.
Now, if you're asking whether or not "lack of empathetic communication" is a real thing worth firing somebody over, that depends. Certainly interpersonal abuse is something that can happen and can rise to the level where it becomes a good reason to fire somebody.
In this case, we largely do not see most of the communication that took place. We really only have her word to take that it wasn't that bad or not worth being fired over. We also don't see much in this story about how her behavior affected the people around her. So, I wouldn't draw a conclusion on whether or not the firing over "empathetic communication" is appropriate.
Not saying it's true in this case, but I think that's typically code for "people think you're a jerk". It can really bring down team productivity to have a toxic coworker, especially if management isn't willing to fire them.
I just use smileys. I know that some people see them as childish/immature/unprofessional, but especially in a multi-cultural environment I prefer to be safe.
The question of "is this person terse, or are they an asshole?" can be very difficult to answer. I think it's interesting how in this thread alone, we can see that people with different views on the core issue are answering it differently. I tend to fall on the author's side on social justice stuff, and I lean "no." Others, who don't (or seem not to), clearly lean "yes." I wonder, if the circumstances were reversed, what I and they would think.
Some people do a good job of making it known that they are one or the other. I used to have a coworker who was very brusque, bordering on rude, not because he was actually an asshole, but because he just didn't really pick up on a lot of social cues, was a little socially awkward, and it would not have surprised me at all to learn he had mild, un-diagnosed autism. But he never got in trouble for it, because even the people who didn't particularly like him personally, knew that that was just his personality, and he meant absolutely nothing bad by it. He enjoyed his job, enjoyed his coworkers, but just did not have the time (or ability?) to worry about social graces.
This is a good point but I think under-discussed. Ultimately what separates a well intentioned person with terse communication, (perhaps) poor empathy skills (i.e. lots of programmers), etc, from an asshole, is intentions. If we could read minds, it would be easier. But we can't, so we read words (and facial expressions, when available). If those signals line up with "asshole", whether or not its true, the person will often be taken as such. Moreover, its possible to be correct and / or on the moral high ground and still be an asshole. Nobody likes being around assholes. And to be clear, I don't know much about this person, so I have no idea if they are one. But I wanted to add on to this comment, I think firing someone for being an asshole is a fine thing to do, regardless of their status or contributions. Which presents an odd situation if a person is not actually an asshole but just seems like one.
It's usually a few specific interactions where the terseness is combined with some other set of factors.
Like there's a spectacular outage and the terse person is updating someone important that's already irritated. Then, sometime later, another interaction with the same person...but they now have some bias.
I've known people all up and down the spectrum of "curt" and you just have to reset your expectations. I have coworkers who talk like this all the time whether they are actually grumpy or not. I just try to act according to how I feel I should and try not to reflect whatever I'm getting from them.
except that, for a same communication style, people from some genders are given a pass and perceived as "assertive" and people from other genders are perceived as "aggressive"
There is this saying about implementing network protocols where different implementation may have non-standard extensions or divergent interpretations of the standard (assuming there is one): Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you emit.
(It has a name, but I keep forgetting it.)
In my experience, this is equally applicable to social interactions and works surprisingly well.
Isn't this the person who ran a code of conduct that has a website which includes things like "thoughtless use of pronouns" and mentions meritocracy as an evil, not a goal to strive for?
Can't really say I'm expecting someone like that to be low friction.
Didn't know about that, but abrasiveness like that is really unfortunate. It makes real progress harder because it means people dig in on views that maybe they shouldn't.
Looks like she wasn't even aware of the project, but instead saw it on a person's twitter profile and went to its github repo to get that person fired. In a way, she's doing the exact same thing, to others, that she is claiming github did to her.
I read about the first 50 replies or so and found myself agreeing with the 'meh' user, but after reading that blog post, it seems aredridel was on to something...
The blog post only further confirms what a self-righteous jerk ‘meh’ is... it’s clearly not a joke but some strange mini-achievement in “freedom” and upsetting the “cucks” (meanwhile getting an F in human decency).
I can confirm that blog post is a joke, going lengths to have a "safe" version of it (which is actually funnier than the original) should have been a good tell.
A dev contributes to open-source, also personally expresses (in an entirely different context) views about Trans that she dislikes. Demands the dev be forcibly removed from the project, invites others into thread to say how terrible it is one of the developers has the wrong political views. Suggests (prescribes) this will put people off contributing, but while borderline threatening to spread the news of said dev's views in order to make sure this happens.
She doesn't care about said project, but to promote the idea of political cleansing in open source.
Meh's comments, while to course, are correct in the sentiment that she isn't really contributing anything, but is instead attacking. HOWEVER, he should of said "because you won't" rather than "can't", since that's just an unjustified attack on her competence as a dev.
Hmm. That entire thread is full of people communicating in a fairly brusque manner -- OP's comments didn't seem like a 'tirade' to me! But I guess it's up to the receiver to decide what a tirade is.
Wait, so some person reads a twitter post of someone commenting on kids going through sexual reassignment surgery and how they consider it an issue.
They find a project they're associated with. They go on it's github repo and they start an issue with a title of "Transphobic maintainer should be removed from project". Not "Potentially transphobic maintainers and how their association with the project hurts it in the long run". Not even "My feelings were hurt after I interpreted some comment of one of the maintainers in some way, please let's discuss". No, they simply demanded removal of someone, based on an, at best, ambiguously "transphobic" twitter comment.
And you're here telling me that person isn't the one with the problem.
Meritocracy is actually a very damaging thing, the way we tend to implement it in tech. Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators. Particularly in tech, those biases tend to favor white, upper middle class, males.
This kind of bias is demonstrated over and over in studies, even (and in some cases, especially) among people who are highly educated and even forewarned about the study objectives.
Perhaps - but the goal is to remove that kind of thing, which is in my opinion at least a noble goal and should be respected even if it's hard to implement properly. My point was not that it's perfect, but that successful meritocracy is something to strive for.
So fix the implementation. Rather than say "well there's not a lot of brown people contributing to this JS package so we need to get some more" why not fix the way the mentioned biases (which I agree 100% exist) are affecting how merit is decided?
The idea that the best way to fix biases in favor of wealthy white men is to add new biases against wealthy white men is crazy.
What if the biases are deep-rooted and subtle and difficult to address without destroying productivity with endless ceremony? What if the biases exist beyond that single organization's control, but still affect them? If the waves are pushing you in one direction, pointing your bow slightly in the opposite direction might really be the right thing to do.
> The idea that the best way...
Few think it's the best way. The problem is, eliminating systemic bias will take a long time. During that time, new victims of that bias will continue to be created. If the introduction of a contrary bias helps more people than it harms, is that really so crazy?
If you're curious, consider doing research on the subject rather than asking people to re-litigate the whole thing from first principles every time the topic comes up. It gets exhausting because most people operate from a position of "a belief that there is no significant bias/significant effect from bias is the correct default assumption unless/until someone demonstrates otherwise through overwhelming evidence". And each individual person expects the whole thing to be proven for them from scratch each time.
Instead you could do some research on your own and find the information that's out there.
The thing is, at this point saying that there's discrimination and systemic bias should be about as controversial as saying that the earth orbits the sun. It's not something that should be responded to with a demand for sources, and the fact that it always is, and always devolves into people trying to shift the argument to whether there's even a problem at all (regardless of any one individual's reason for starting such a conversation, that's where the conversation inevitably ends up), is just ludicrous.
People who are unaware of the existence of the problem can use a search engine and read up on it.
This is a very presumptive attitude to take which is not going to convince people on the fence on this topic who don't already agree with you.
I suggest that if you want to change minds and improve the status quo, you should engage these people who you find tiresome anyway. Not to persuade them, but the third-parties who will read the discussion and could be persuaded. Or, if that's too much work, simply don't engage, if only so you don't sabotage someone else's effort to persuade.
I can tell you right now, though, the people who will keep demanding sources and want to re-litigate even the existence of discrimination/bias, in every single thread which mentions the topic, will not be convinced by providing them walls of links and sources. They've already made up their minds, and the only thing they'd do in response is exactly what I said: nitpicks and non sequiturs and "well, I don't find that convincing..." and so what's the point? If someone is genuinely and truly unaware, they can use Google. If someone just wants to try to discredit a basic established fact about the world, it's not my job to coddle them or make them feel good about it or "engage" with them or make them feel that they were properly listened to and had their concerns addressed, any more than it would be my job to do that for someone who denies evolution.
Right, it's not your job to do anything. It is perfectly valid for you to feel frustrated in exactly that way.
All I am saying, is that their are third parties who you are not interacting with, who could be persuadeable, who will read that frustration and are going to find it alienating rather than persuasive, and therefore you end up creating more people in the world who think there is no real problem.
It may be more constructive to simply disengage if you feel that exasperated by it. Both for persuading other people and for your own sanity. That's all I am saying.
Imagine that you live in a world where there is a large, extremely loud (larger and louder than the actual world) population of young-Earth creationists.
Now, imagine that every time you say something which even tangentially mentions evolution -- let alone something where the main topic is evolution -- some of those people immediately pop up with "got sources for that?" / "gonna need a source on that" / "citation needed for that claim" / etc.
And imagine that for a while you did go to the trouble of linking up primers on the topic, but every time you did that, they just responded with non sequiturs and attempts to nitpick little details of the primers and parlay that into discrediting the entire idea of evolution.
Now, imagine you've been living in that world, every day, for years. You might well finally decide "you know what, it's not my job to pause every single time I post a comment online and have to re-prove the theory of evolution to anyone and everyone who demands it; evolution is a basic fact we shouldn't have to debate at this point, and people who genuinely want an intro to it for some reason can find one on their own".
Now, imagine that if you do make that decision, you'll be branded an asshole for "complaining" instead of just posting a link. You'll be told that these folks are "just asking for sources". Or any of a large number of other explanations which don't jive with what you see day in and day out, but if you try to explain that you'll be told you're projecting, or making it up, or arguing with a strawman, and this is a sign that you are not trustworthy (which in turn just reflects back on the theory of evolution -- after all, if this is the kind of person who stands up as its representative...).
Imagine all of that, but change the topic from the theory of evolution... to the topic of this thread. And imagine how tired everyone is of the "got a source for that?" brigade. Regardless of whether the person asking has the noblest purest intentions in the history of noble purity, we're talking about basic stuff about the society we live in and the industry we work in, and if someone is genuinely unaware of it and genuinely curious, they can use Google on their own.
My intention with this question was to probe if there was anyone that has experience within this field that might have any milestone studies/papers on hand, or something that they can cite from memory. The reason for this is that when you venture into a new field of study it usually takes time sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Now off course I can do the research on my own, it was simply a question I asked to save time.
To assume that I have some sort of hidden agenda behind this question is rather paranoid from my perspective (and came as a surprise), as you didn't know anything about my intentions.
> Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators.
I wish we could have discussions like this in the wider community without people going knee-jerk against the idea of it, itself.
I'd be willing to accept that a lot of companies here are nepotistic. I'd even be willing to accept that they cloak their nepotism in the rhetoric of meritocracy. But I have to draw the line at people opposing the idea itself. I have a hard time understanding how anyone could even hold that position. Don't you want the best people, at least in principle?
If people were more nuanced in these things we could hold discussions like "yes, this is a great ideal, but it gets corrupted. The problem is the corruption, not the ideal"
Your comment reminds me of a story I heard on NPR a while back, about an effort to reclaim the word "jihad". Basically, jihad is a concept of struggling or striving for something worthwhile but most Americans only hear the word coming from the mouths of horrible people.
I think the word meritocracy is in a similar situation. It's an interesting and useful concept, but the word tends to get thrown around by people you probably don't want to get associated with or confused with, so if you want to be heard and understood maybe try a different word.
If the idea sounds great and is arguably great on all accounts, but in practice proves to not work, time and time again, perhaps the idea needs to be parked until the environment is fixed. Otherwise, arguing about it becomes a distraction while, in its corrupted form, the idea actively damages the things it should be improving.
So you just say "don't do <<idea>>" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on.
> So you just say "don't do <<idea>>" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on.
That's a terrible plan because it blanket dismisses a rational and widely accepted idea without explaining why or even forcing you to think about it.
How about you at least take the courtesy to explain why you're dismissing something that at face value provides a better solution than what you're suggesting. Even with its problems, you need to explain why your suggested solution is better than meritocracy.
I personally at least am yet to see a better alternative to meritocracy, despite its definite problems. In my opinion all proposed alternatives seem to introduce more unfairness and problems of their own.
+1. Parent comment's argument is not great because, among other things, the exact same argument could be made right back at them.
Amongst almost everybody I know, "meritocracy" still means it's dictionary definition. If the definition is contested, I don't understand why other peoples' definitions of it take priority over the official one
Ok so apparently my attempt to offer an alternative pov for people who I believed did not grasp the original, is getting me some downvotes. Let me just link to what she has said about meritocracy in the context of her Code of Conduct:
"Marginalized people also suffer some of the unintended consequences of dogmatic insistence on meritocratic principles of governance. Studies have shown that organizational cultures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality. People with "merit" are often excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions. Meritocracy also naively assumes a level playing field, in which everyone has access to the same resources, free time, and common life experiences to draw upon. These factors and more make contributing to open source a daunting prospect for many people, especially women and other underrepresented people. (For more critical analysis of meritocracy, refer to this entry on the Geek Feminism wiki.)
An easy way to begin addressing this problem is to be overt in our openness, welcoming all people to contribute, and pledging in return to value them as human beings and to foster an atmosphere of kindness, cooperation, and understanding."
AFAIK the word "merit" doesn't appear at all in the actual Code of Conduct.
But what's her alternative proposal - that we say, accept pull requests from someone because of their race or sex without critiquing at all? Based on the way she responded to some stuff in this job... maybe that's actually what she wants, but it's not what I want and it sounds like a terrible idea in general.
Meritocracy is still the best we have. It may be flawed, yes, but there exists no superior alternative. It's likely possible to get away with a few minor tweaks - but there doesn't seem to be anyone looking into what exactly those could be, instead they shit on the concept without providing any viable alternative.
It seems like many of the things she and others mention are not necessarily bias in individuals in the workplace, but "resources, free time, life experiences" - which seem much easier to attack and if done fully I think could help make up for other biases too. I think the best bet honestly is stuff like Black Girls Code where they try to get people up to speed in order to compete successfully by merit.
Being a "meritocracy" doesn't mean that you have to reject pull reqests until the author gets it perfect. For someone who's new, you can instead have someone with more experience with the project fix it up as an example, and for the second give some advice but fix it up for the author if the author seems stuck, and for the next one, ...
> Don't you want the best people, at least in principle?
Maybe not. In many situations you want the best team, and the best team is not necessarily the team that has the most top flight individual contributors.
The best teams I've been on seem stronger than the sum of their individual members, and I've definitely been on teams I rate less highly that had some very strong individual contributors.
I can't create a comprehensive definition for it, but I can identify many components that are objective and purely technical in nature:
* Able to clearly communicate technical concepts. Evidenced by seeing displaying in wiring logical ordering of thought, separation of complex pieces into smaller, less complicated, and clearly delineated pieces, effective and actuate command of technical vocabulary.
* Able to code. Evidenced by watching them code.
* Familiarity with the data structures and algorithmic approaches native to the problem domain. Evidenced by discussion around that domain, perhaps a psuedo-code exercise with a relevant problem paired with discussion of design tradeoffs of different approaches.
* Understanding of the cross-cutting concerns related to maintainable software: testing, documentation, modularity, etc. Evidenced by Socratic discussion of said topics. "Given this problem common to sustainable software development, what would you do/have you done?"
I still believe in the value of meritocracy. Actually pursuing meritocracy solves a lot of the inclusivity problems we think we have. The problem is that people are inherently biased and unless we are purposeful in accounting for these biases it is easy to weave then into any system you design, no matter what the name or started goals.
Doesn't change the value of an actual meritocracy. Just highlights one of the challenges of being human.
Your definitely is not actually the definition of objectivity, though it is one way to be relatively confident that you are being objective, so I won't argue the semantics too much.
All of these can be objectively measured to a degree if you actually care to take the time:
* Logical ordering of thought: identify and diagram the main ideas in the text. Identify transitions in the text. Identify explicitly named connections between pieces. Multiple people can do this and expect to have a high degree of similarly in their results.
* Separation of components: similarly identify and diagram the components they list by name, the relationships the identify by name, the responsibilities they identify by name.
* Technical vocabulary: list all of the technical terms. Compare their usage against a dictionary.
* Ability to code: run their code. Does it complete and produce the expected output? This is absolutely objective. You can add further constraints and retain absolute objectivity: does it complete within a certain time, stay within a certain memory budget, stay within a certain cyclomatic complexity threshold, have a certain percentage of test coverage, etc.
* Familiarity with data structures and algorithms common to the problem domain: list the major constraints of the problem domain, list the data structures according to feature which addresses the constraints, similarly list algorithms. Compare to the candidate's answers. How many of the major concerns did they address? How many of the applicable data structures/algorithms did they know? Did they volunteer anything new and were they able to explain how it addressed the problem constraints?
* Understanding of the cross-cutting concerns. This could almost be a checklist. I would make it a little more involved. As a mentioned, Q&A, see what solutions they present, but to have a quantifiable metric we can identify major components and identify the major concerns each of those addresses, see how many the candidate reached, give bonus points for value concerns they addressed that we didn't.
I'm sure if I spent more time I could expand both of these lists.
I will concede that this is still subjective in many ways, especially in the interviewers choices of what is "correct" ( what are the problem constraints, etc.) and what parts of the answers after important.
In that regard I will concede to you that there is an ultimately subjective nature to most of this, because deciding what is valuable has an element of subjectivity, but that is going to be true of pretty much any pursuit outside of pure mathematics (and I'm not convinced we have entirely objective values there either). However, once we have decided what we value it's possible to eliminate a lot of the subjectivity from measuring it. In most interview processes it's not a lack of ability to be objective, it's a lack of concern about being objective.
And actually, I'm not too bothered by that. A healthy meritocracy does not require absolute objectivity. What it requires is an explicit statement of what the values are and a transparent means of evaluating people against those values, and but according to any other values. The values can be subjective. The evaluation can be subjective. As long as the values are known and the evaluation process is transparent it can function as intended. Even better, by clearly communicating the values of the system you send a strong signal to others so the can determine if your organization is something they want to be a part of.
Objectivity is a good tool to help maintain that transparency. But I'm not worried so much about the subjectivity of it as I am hidden values and opaque evaluations tied to things that should be irrelevant according to the stated values.
Defining "best" need not imply an objective definition in the same way that describing the "best" database architecture for a given set of requirements isn't entirely objective: "our programmers like to work with SQL more than MongoDB" is a subjective but sufficient argument to tip the scales.
Defining the "best people" is _obviously_ subjective. _People_ are subjective. There isn't just one "best"-- there is a set of "bests" that you can strive for. Just like the above example, it depends on your requirements, your priorities, etc.-- but most importantly, it doesn't need to be objective to work well, which brings us full circle to:
> "Best people" can mean the best team.
If you prioritize teamwork among individual contributors, this is what best people would imply.
The awesome part about a capitalist system is that companies have the freedom to experiment with these configurations of how they define "best". GitHub may define it differently from you, but that doesn't make their definition less valid.
Meritocracy is an idea, not a specification-- there is no one true meritocracy implementation. The discussion needs to start from there.
> Meritocracy is an idea, not a specification-- there is no one true meritocracy implementation. The discussion needs to start from there.
Im not convinced it does. If you want to say meritocracy says merely that we should try to hire the best people all things considered then no-one would disagree. The disagreement is precisely about which things it's appropriate to consider.
Typically meritocratic systems in practice make the assumption that it is possible to determine merit outside the context of a specific team. I think this assumption is highly suspect. Merit is not a fixed characteristic of the individual but rather an emergent property of them in their context and in relationship with those around them.
Not "an", as in singular measure, no. But what about several? Is there a single metric for "heathy"? Someone can be OK in almost all ways but have a broken leg. Are they "healthy" by a single metric? What about diabetes that is managed? Can you think of any field in life where there is a singular metric for performance? If not, why does the non-existence of a singular metric in tech invalidate the idea?
And what about in reverse? What if, rather than finding the "best", we merely have a metric/s that weed out the worst? If I remove the bottom 15% effectively, and replace them with average performers, then the net gain is massive, especially as each extra bug introduced is a massive time sink for any team, and poor developers are a massive cause of that.
Nowhere do I say that I don't care at all about the quality of my staff. In fact I'm often told my hiring process is pretty rigorous.
What I am claiming is that work is generally done by teams and optimising for high performing and highly capable teams is not the same as optimising for high performing and highly capable individuals (my understanding of what most people mean by 'meritocracy').
It's not merely word games. I've observed poorly performing teams built entirely of highly capable people. That kind of dynamic can hobble a company.
Don't just look to companies for examples -- look to sports.
There are professional sports franchises who go out and just throw money at "the best" players in their leagues. And the track record of doing that is pretty mixed; it turns out that just hiring a bunch of top individuals easily loses to putting together a group of players who are each objectively "worse" but whose play as a team is superior.
That's pretty rare! Almost all great teams have great players - and the teams that don't, usually have chronically underrated players, e.g. the Pistons with Ben Wallace - one of the greatest defenders ever.
HOWEVER, I will say that, rather than a great team, strategic / tactical innovation can cover for flaws. The Sydney Swans pioneered "flooding" and made a grand final with a sub-standard team. Next season though, the league caught up and the Swans did poorly. It wasn't the team or the players that got there, rather it was a tactical innovation, and that is usually short lived.
In similar ways, a coding change - new library, microservices etc can all be short term gains. Ultimately, though, when everyone starts using those tactics, what you want is the best people, fullstop.
That's pretty rare! Almost all great teams have great players
You're disagreeing with something I never said.
Imagine you're a baseball GM. You decide to build a winning roster by taking an unlimited amount of money, and then identifying the statistically best left fielder, the statistically best center fielder, the statistically best right fielder, and so on through all the field positions. You also identify the five statistically best starting pitchers, etc., and sign all of them.
There are franchises which try this "just sign a bunch of superstars, they have to win because they're so good" approach, and the track record of that approach is very, very mixed. But "just sign a bunch of superstars" is basically how tech companies claim they try to hire.
I dunno - there's a fair case to be made that Kante was the essential lynchpin which dragged the rest of them upwards. Especially since we can check this in the subsequent season when he joined a different team (who also won the league whilst Leicester languished mid-table.)
"Chelsea were so happy with N'Golo Kante that they sent Leicester flowers to say thank you for selling him to them."
The best person form the job is the person who will make the team perform at its best. Which in IT would probably mean a technically savvy, creative person with good social skills and some domain knowledge. Those would be the merits upon which to build our meritocracy.
So you can be a productive coder or a good presenter or whatever but by themselves, these are incomplete metrics. If you happen to also be an a*hole, you are probably an overall liability.
An even more useless metric, though, is your specific flavour of sexuality or your skin colour. None of these count as qualifications in any sense, and if management if measuring these things I'd be wary of their sense of judgement.
Fun fact: The original intent of the word `meritocracy` was satirical so it's connotations were intended to be closer to those of the OP than those which current defenders of the terms ascribe to it.
I got a new computer. Where news.ycombinator.com hasn't been set to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts yet. So I wanted to check what changed in the last year or so...
And your post reminded me why I stopped visiting here. Thanks.
Yet you took the time out of your day to even login and leave us with your wisdom. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for this invaluable contribution.
* "I implemented feature X, which increased CTR by Y% thus increasing revenue by Z"
* "New compression scheme reduces bandwidth usage by this much, allowing team B to implement their new feature without worrying about badnwidth usage too much"
* "Team C, who uses our library, needed urgent help investigating a performance issue. I dove in and found that the interface we were providing them didn't allow the most efficient usage; designed, tested and deployed an alternative, which resulted in team C being satisfied with performance"
I could keep going with these examples (I'm paraphrasing these from some actual work my colleagues did). My point is, it's pretty easy to measure merit in earned dollars, shipped features, fixed bugs, saved engineering hours, and resource usage. Those metrics are concrete and public.
A bug might be as simple as a single character fix on a printed string, or as complex as performance isn't as good as we expected, so profile and rewrite parts of the entire application to get acceptable performance. Both count as a single unit in your "bugs fixed" metric.
Or do we have meetings to play poker and assign points for bugs?
Unless you're fixing tens of thousands of bugs I don't think you're going to have a good sample size to judge the output of 2 people based on just how many bugs they've closed.
This can also be gamed ie. pick up easier bugs to appear more productive, open bugs for small issues you notice yourself and fix, and this has the byproduct that real work never gets done.
Rewrites, infrastructure, code reviewers, mentoring. No earned dollars, no "features" shipped, good luck measuring "saved engineering hours".
There are no objective measures of productivity in the majority of cases for tech workers.
Infrastructure is a feature in and of itself. Besides, doing things like improving a build system to reduce build times, or streamlining code review workflow has clear measurable impact.
Every rewrite must have an observable measurable impact, otherwise it is simply not worth doing.
Your mentees' performance is an excellent proxy to measure your quality as a mentor.
Again, all of these can be assessed without much hand-waving.
Code reviews shouldn't even count towards your performance. It's just something that you have to do. (though arguably, if you have to do a lot of code reviews, then it's a clear signal that you're a valuable person on the team who knows a lot of detail about the system).
> There are no objective measures of productivity in the majority of cases for tech workers.
I think there clearly are, and I just listed some of them. Sometimes they're hard to boil down to a single number, but in most cases you can easily tell who's doing meaningful work.
I'm not sure that's "easy to measure" since how do you know how many hours have been saved without doing it the "slow" way first?
> earned dollars
Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs or implementing flashy new features but is providing good mentoring to the team, writing onboarding documentation, helping them understand the large-scale ramifications of their changes, etc., is essentially invisible to "metrics" yet providing a vital role.
> I'm not sure that's "easy to measure" since how do you know how many hours have been saved without doing it the "slow" way first?
Like I said, not always easy to boil down to a concrete number, but you can always find good proxies. Fixed a problem that caused service to trigger alarms in the middle of the night? Saved engineering hours. Wrote a library that several teams use? Saved engineering hours. Even your example, writing documentation, saves engineering hours.
> Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs [...]
How would you be able to do any of that if you're not doing meaningful work on the system?
It's true that Meritocracy alone overlooks the differences in opportunity people have starting out. Still, I think the criticism is somewhat misguided.
I like to think about Neurosurgery to illustrate: if you need a tumor removed from your brain, would you rather have the surgeon be a privileged, elite surgeon from Harvard, or some random dude from the streets?
We should be happy that we are able to produce elite Neurosurgeons, and strive to give more people the opportunity (including random dudes from the street). Attacking elite Neurosurgeons is completely counterproductive.
In a world where i know nurses often perform doctors dutys and jobs, while new doctors stumble around clueless.
Knowledge on adjunct fields and skills can accumulate in a person over time, thus allowing them to perform similar feets.
Like, a bright pupil might learn from a master, if it is not intended. It has happend- since medieval times- apprenticeships, although a attack on caste-think can happen today. Yes, they did not jump through the money hoops, that are suppossed to keep them away- but some of them studied what happens around them. Those servant peoples.. they might not be automatons.
If it had a drop-out quota similar to comp sci or math, i might actually consider your elitism a valid opinion.
Post all the meritocracy nonsense you need to post, but deep down you know, if you had the money and a mediocre kid- you would help him through and put additional money hoops up behind him to jump through.
The irony, that all the others doing the same thing, have you lay on a metal table, beeing cut open by maybee not the best person for the job, it never reaches escape velocity.
Given that the only alternatives that I know of are seniority (age of employment before contributions) or favoritism (find the right people to move you forward), what alternative is there that won't enforce a bias? At the end of the day, businesses are driven by people, and people are emotional.
> mentions meritocracy as an evil, not a goal to strive for?
I think the main objection to "meritocracy" is that often there is no real meritocracy, and people use it as a way to ignore claims that the place isn't a meritocracy.
Organisation: We're a meritocracy!
Member: I'm getting unfairly treated based on race/gender/etc.
Org: That's impossible, we're a meritocracy!
That's "the false premise of meritocracy", not "meritocracy"; It's an important distinction that should be made. There is nothing wrong with democracy, even if some people don't like the word anymore due to it's widespread misuse.
> In the Ruby world, we insist that “Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice,” ignoring the sexist statements he has made with regard to diversity outreach efforts. We write off Linus Torvalds’ dismissal of diversity as an “unimportant detail” and justify it based on the utility of his creations. But why is it that we can proudly refuse to use software created by corporations whose often aggressive business policies we disagree with, but continue to adopt software written by sexists, racists, homophobes, transphobes?
I feel that's pretty close to directly calling Matz a sexist. Later she proposes a Code of Conduct for Ruby so that there's a robust process for punishing sexism[2]. As far as I understand, Matz' tweet would have counted as an offence.
Also, while her Contributor Covenant seems like it strives to make GitHub interactions more civilised, Caroline has a public Twitter account on which she screenshots people who disagree with her for her followers to sneer at (current, harmless example: [3]). Inexplicably (to me), this behaviour is fine by the logic of the CC. I'd say it's the highway to emotional escalation.
Nothing of this invalidates her viewpoints, but her approach of working for change is more "take no prisoners" than "low friction".
I don't think it's about labeling people as being good or bad, but more about not letting things stand.
If you encounter attitudes from people that are hostile towards you, you can either speak up and allow them to correct themselves (or double-down) or be silent and give your tacit approval.
I think sometimes opinions are best left to change slowly or through exposure, when you approach things in this way it often just comes off as hostile and that doubling down you're talking about becomes a much more common response.
While GitHub seemingly handled her employment poorly, this person sounds horrible to work with:
>Was politely calling out a data scientist on a problematic and transphobic survey answer a demonstration of lack of empathy?
How presumptuous. Ever thought that maybe the person putting it together didn't know any better? What does framing oneself as the victim accomplish here?
Do you think this person is unusual in her communication style? She posted the complete text of the "problem" comment. If you got that message from a colleague, would you consider it unacceptable? Why or why not? If yes, what could she have said that would have made it OK?
How would you answer her core question of whether or not the comment she made is appropriate?
I'm disgusted at her reflection that the question was transphobic, not that she commented on the difference. Whether the data scientist overreacted or not is irrelevant.
It's not irrelevant because it's the reason she was fired, and hence the reason the post exists. The fact that you disagree with her assertion about the question seems to be the irrelevant thing to me.
No, it is irrelevant. The fact that the incident got her fired is a failing with GitHub's management and dearth of communication. Playing the victim card and shitting on the data scientist is misguided.
Calling a comment transphobic in no way implies that the speaker of that comment is transhpobic. It is a description of what's been said. The same way if someone was to say something that could possibly be construed as racist. If someone points that out and says hey that statement is racist, that's not calling that person racist. They might be. They might not, but that statement in and of itself implies no assertion on that actual person.
In short, calling the statement in question transphobic is correct.
How silly it sounds to anthropomorphize the question that way should tell you that you are wrong in this case. A question doesn't have a brain to be ignorant with, nor does it have intentions of any sort: once someone has written it down, it just is.
In TDD, do we talk about a unit test succeeding because I intended for it to fail and it did? No, we say it failed because the actual result is red. I didn't fail, but the test sure did.
Intention doesn't change the impact of communication; if the intent doesn't match the actual outcome, what it means is that the author probably wanted to change it.
Re-structure the question and switch gender out for cake flavors.
"What flavor of cake do you prefer? Chocolate, vanilla, or sheetcake?"
the feedback coming back as...
"'Sheetcake' is not a flavor. Sheetcake may be vanilla, chocolate, red velvet, lemon-poppyseed... If you want to know if a survey respondent likes sheetcake, you need to explicitly ask that question."
... it does seem kinda grating but not overtly so. It could have been nicer but also could have been more rude.
I completely agree. I know and have worked with many people who communicate that way. I'd probably prefer it if they didn't, but I also don't generally have a problem when they do. I would feel that the explanation was unnecessarily pedantic and perhaps the slightest bit disrespectful in its assumption that I didn't know what I was talking about, but I would assume that was unintentional. It's interesting that the reaction from this data scientist individual came back so extremely negative.
Just think it's worth mentioning that she doesn't seem to present evidence that the data scientist was "transphobic". She seems to discount the possibility the data scientist was unaware of how to properly ask that question on surveys (as am I). Perhaps she had more personal experience with the data scientist in question to justify this claim, but that should of been included here.
You are correct, thank you for pointing that out. However, she is still assuming that the question was phrased in a "Transphobic" way. Perhaps she reads it like that, but I doubt that was the authors (or questions) intention. Perhaps i'm wrong
I think it's not an assumption so much as an observation based on her definition of transphobia. This is the point I'm trying to get at throughout this thread: Github says she was fired for the way she conveyed her beliefs, and not what they were. I disagree. Those who do agree seem to be mainly those who disagree with her beliefs. I'm trying to understand that disconnect.
I don’t think anyone, including the author, thought that the intention of the question was to be transphobic. That doesn’t mean it’s not a transphobic question, though. Especially when the point of the survey was to gauge engagement in Open Source by marginalized people, having such a mistake can be seen as pretty tone deaf, and imply that the company really doesn’t care.
Having grown up around a lot of gay and working closely with a number of trans people, I have come to the conclusion (possibly wrongly), that they will forgive a lot of "-phobic" speech, as long as you accept the criticism they provide.
One of the critiques I often got was to be more gender inclusive in my speaking. Which a lot of people do now (re: replacing he/she with they). From what I read, it seemed like this person would provide feedback that would either be ignored or the contributor/employee/whomever would actively retaliate against.
It really isn't how you mean something, it is how you make someone feel. If you are trying to run an inclusive community, that distinction is very important.
All of the "accidental racism" of years past have now become "accidental -phobic".
You can be transphobic by omission. For example, not taking any time to research the issue ("Is 'transgender' a gender?") before writing a study question, and then getting angry when someone tries patiently to educate you.
It's not what's in people's hearts that counts. Someone can truly believe that blackface is not racist, but that doesn't mean that it's not racist when they do it.
I don't agree. Any definition from a reputable source on the term "transphobic" implies or directly states that transphobia is, specifically, a fear or dislike towards trans people. Not researching what transgender means or what a survey should include for genders in the year 2017 may be stupid or ignorant but I just don't see how it meets the bar for being "transphobic", especially when the person who is making the error of omission has no problem with trans people!
As an LGBT person I really think that people need to stop inferring malice where there is none. Not only does it not accomplish anything, it simply aggravates people who would otherwise be friends and allies and creates further divisions. If I pointed out every single time a friend or family member accidentally misgendered someone or said something that I thought was not 100% PC, I would be spending a lot of time alone.
This was also the line that stuck out to me. I've had some personal experiences with coworkers in my recent career that has turned me on to issues of harassment in the workplace; I understood the issues before, but it wasn't until it affected someone close did I actually care. As I've been more involved I've seen how fast those active in making workplaces safer/more inclusive outpace those who merely empathize and understand. It's unfair and rude to assign a label to those who aren't completely up-to-date with these new practices, and is in fact counterproductive - you turn off to those whose support you want when you speak down to them as such. This is what makes people afraid of what to say, and makes you look like a "crazy liberal SJW". Calling a survey maker who didn't know "transgender" wasn't a gender is an objective lack of empathy, which makes Github here sound like they really have a point.
But... she didn’t. She pointed out that the question was a bad one, and that the question itself (not the writer of the question, just the question) was transphobic.
Further, she provided the straightforward, no none sense feedback that most people here advocate for, especially when the issues of someone like Linus’ gruffness and straight up meanness comes up. Here we have a story of someone doing just that, without the meanness, and everyone is dog piling on her.
She absolutely did. She said specifically that it should be a separate question.
At some point, I have to wonder whether or not the people who are complaining about these easily debunked things are discussing the topic in good faith.
> Whatever the perceived tone, what Caroline didn't do was suggest improvements, provide examples. It was a teachable moment.
Seems to me she directly suggested the improvement, after explaining both the reason the existing version was bad and the reason the improvement was better (the two reasons being the same):
Quoting directly from the issue she raised, which was not merely quoted but emphasized as a pull-quote in the article: “‘Transgender’ is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question.”
She said what was wrong, but did not say what was right. Explicitly. To me, it's an example of "Guess what I'm thinking!" Or more famously, that UI designer who said "Don't make me think!"
Granted, a "data scientist" should already know how to survey, be open to constructive criticism.
I personally would have no idea how to ask the question. Though I'm not a data scientist, I can use google.
> She said what was wrong, but did not say what was right. Explicitly.
She explicitly stated both that including “transgender” as a gender identity option was wrong, and that the right way was to ask about transgender status as a seperate question.
Belated personal story. I know multiple transgendered persons (friends, family, at work). So I'm at least partially familiar with the issues. Many of my friends work on LBGTQ policy issues, to which I've given money. I've even marched in our local Gay Pride parade.
My bestie recently told me she's now dating a transman. I looked askance. I had never heard that term before. I wondered if she meant transvestite, transgender, transexual... She got upset. She thought I was judging.
Nope. I just didn't know what transman meant. Oh. She explained and everything was cool again.
Though this is not my cause, I am here to help. I'm an ally for equal rights, justice, responsibility, and so forth.
She exactly said what was right. She said EXACTLY what to do. There was absolutely no guesswork involved. She said that you should ask if one is transgender as a separate question. How is that not explicit?
The only reason I now have any notion of an appropriate phrasing is because I was curious enough to seek examples. (Unlike the aggrieved data scientist?)
If nothing else, this mini-thread illustrates the challenges with communication, even when all parties have the best of intentions.
It's bit different if you work with them (or in the same company). Linus has a certain, style, to put it nicely, but in the broader open source community.
The key point is that this is likely the first time these two individuals had communicated - she effectively introduced herself to this person by saying "you are wrong", or "your work is incorrect". This isn't a professional way in a business to talk to someone. Even a simple greeting and explanation to say "I have some experience in this area, and here's some suggestions that would improve it" is infinitely better than the framing she gives:
> I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake
> sadly opened an issue referencing the question
The emotions portrayed there give a good indication to the tone that the writing likely gave - instead of being constructive it could easily be perceived as hostile.
Yes, I think the data scientist over reacted. But I don't think her tone or approach was at all appropriate either.
> I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake, and sadly opened an issue referencing the question. The body of my issue read:
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
She was disappointed. She explained her problem with the survey in a non-judgmental way- "This question is based on a false premise, the correct way to ask this question is X". I don't see how she could have handled this particular interaction any better.
As someone who has a naturally terse communication style and who does not react emotionally to people who send emails like e.g. "Send it" instead of "Send it to me, thanks.", I have had to train myself to realise that any form of text communication conveys tone with huge imprecision. If you didn't see someone smiling at you in the corridor and then you send an email to them saying "Yep" the entire tone of the email changes vs. if you saw the person, grinned, said hi and then sent the exact same email.
It's not fair, and bright people very often feel like morons adding exclamation points and smiley faces made out of punctuation to their written comms. but trust me when I say that it can TOTALLY obviate a whole bunch of grief and is, I think, incumbent on you the communicator to improve just as much as it's incumbent on the recipient to not react emotionally.
Thought I was alone on this. I think she read it poorly, and to call it a 101 mistake that she 'sadly' had to correct seems a bit unfair to the data scientist. But none of that comes across in her comment, which is extremely professional.
Sure, we just have to reword it - something like this may be less confrontational:
> "Hi! I have a suggestion on question #14. I think we can improve this to be more inclusive by replacing the options w ith "male", "female", "gender queer" "non-binary", (...) Since transgender people may or may not associate with a gender, we have be a little careful when asking for a gender. Hope this helps!"
When I write emails, I always pretend to "YELL" the email in the most dramatic way possible. If it sounds potentially confrontational yelling what I am saying, it could be intimidating for some people.
By defusing the way you talk to others, you make them feel more comfortable around you. The more comfortable people feel around you, the more they trust you and listen to what you say. It's a win-win :)
Some data scientist made a small survey faux pas, and now they're being called out in a lengthy blogpost about how bad and un-inclusive the company was to work for.
How can anyone work with this person without feeling like they're standing on eggshells? How must the woman who wrote the survey who was just doing her job feel today if she reads this?
The post would never have been written if the author of the question hadn't immediately escalated by complaining to her manager. The data scientist was not walking on eggshells- they felt perfectly justified in escalating the situation. Even the manager didn't have a problem with how she'd handled it!
I read it as an indictment of the company and its procedures. The data scientist was not even named. The bulk of the post is indicting management, HR, company culture, and insane bureaucratic nightmares designed to push someone out.
> they felt perfectly justified in escalating the situation
So they should have been, being accused of transphobia is a serious accusation. Anyone accused of anything like transphobia, homophobia, islamaphobia or any other of these discriminations is absolutely right to escalate the matter straight away to their manager or HR.
> The data scientist was not even named
She was gendered, how many data scientists work at GH? How many are female? She was narrowed down enough that she may as well have been named IMHO and transphobic is a serious mark on her character. Especially from someone who has tried to push people off projects before for being transphobic.
If the account is to be believed, she was not accused of transphobia. She was told about a question that was misphrased. Even the author's manager couldn't articulate anything she'd done wrong.
The "transphobia" judgement by the poster comes later in the post, and it is addressed to the question itself, not the author of the question.
It would be great if we could see the pull requests that were subject to disproportionate scrutiny. It would add a lot of context that is missing from that story.
"I was well aware of GitHub's very problematic past, from its promotion of meritocracy in place of a management system"
This person mentions multiple times that meritocracy is a bad idea, that promotion or reward based on merit should be done away with in order to promote diversity, e.g., racial/gender-based quotas.
This is a person who does not view competence as the primary trait to select for within a market, and is insisting here that competence be downplayed to make room for people with the correct melanin levels and/or chromosomes.
""What is your gender?" The multiple-choice options were "Male", "Female", and "Transgender". I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake, and sadly opened an issue referencing the question. The body of my issue read: "
Uh oh! The data scientist isn't up to date on the trends in gender studies and critical theory, better send her off to sensitivity training! Doesn't the data scientist who wrote the question know that gender is performative? Better get offended and make her apologize. Oh wait, that's exactly what the author does, like the bully she is.
I can't take a diary post like this, from someone interested in enforcing equity, littered with ideological axioms, promoting unscientific gender "theory", all the while playing the victim in the classic social justice style, with anything more than a giant boulder of salt.
> This person mentions multiple times that meritocracy is a bad idea, that promotion or reward based on merit should be done away with in order to promote diversity, e.g., racial/gender-based quotas.
She wasn't fired for that.
> This is a person who does not view competence as the primary trait to select for within a market, and is insisting here that competence be downplayed to make room for people with the correct melanin levels and/or chromosomes.
She wasn't fired for that either.
> Uh oh! The data scientist isn't up to date on the trends in gender studies and critical theory, better send her off to sensitivity training!
She was fired because GitHub alleged she was the insensitive one here. Do you agree?
I strongly disagree with your assessment that this person doesn't value competency, at least based off of her dislike of meritocracy.
Meritocracy is not a replacement for proper management, and without proper management the idea of "meritocracy" reverts back to just being a popularity contest. If you don't have a good management system in place then identifying who "merits" promotion is extremely difficult and is often based not on how someone performs but how much they are liked by the decision makers of the company.
> If you don't have a good management system in place then identifying who "merits" promotion is extremely difficult and is often based not on how someone performs but how much they are liked by the decision makers of the company.
Worth noting that a typical "management system" simply re-enforces these "likeability" biases with a bunch of phony paperwork.
(Not that I didn't like this article. I came here to the comments kind of puzzled why it was flagged.)
> Uh oh! The data scientist isn't up to date on the trends in gender studies and critical theory, better send her off to sensitivity training!
The problem here wasn't that the data scientist was asking the wrong questions, it's that they were upset by someone stepping and offering an improved set of questions, and felt the need to complain to a manager instead of responding.
The Github management's decision of asking the author _never to communicate with this person again_ is even more bewildering.
We don't see any of the correspondence other than the one small portion quoted, so it is entirely possible that something more confrontational was said.
It seems they were looking to hire someone specifically to reach out to people who care about these distinctions, though. They can't really be surprised at what they got.
It's very difficult for me to agree with your assessment. Virtually everything you've said, from her supposed discounting of meritocracy to sensitivity training for the data scientist, is either blatantly false or a very uncharitable interpretation of this post.
The person in question was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and considers herself as a social justice warrior.
Worse is the antipathy she directs to "white males", which destroys the goal of an inclusive environment.
Every story has two sides, would certainly wait for hearing what her team mates would have to say, but I suspect they will say nothing out of fear from the repercussion by SJW when expressing how it was to work with such person.
Unfortunately one of my little brothers is bipolar and will soon turn 27 years old. It is awful, I love him so much and yet we are unable to help him more.
If nobody in our family is there to talk with him immediately when he demands, then something drastic happens such as burning parts of his body (e.g. nipples) or anything that forces our attention to focus on him.
Every week is a struggle, he dreams on becoming a world-known DJ and music is all he cares, but he is always on the edge of becoming a homeless because he is simply unable to hold a job (focus) or simply be nice to others, more often than not he becomes arrogant without real reason, which isolates him further.
Now that brother of mine is saying that he dreams about committing suicide like Kurt Cobain, because he considers himself a musician of the same level/type and I had to dismiss that thought by telling him that he first needs to have a world-wide hit. It's not good.
So, when reading the blog post with that description of the world against her (persecution), the mood swings, the clinical diagnosis of being bipolar. These are things I've had to endure for many years, because this is my brother and I care deeply for him.
But I'd certainly not be able to work side-by-side with a bipolar person as it would be affecting me emotionally and then professionally. At least with my brother I just see him on the weekends and through Facebook chat, not every single day and having to ask her things while the mood is not helping one bit.
This is why I've mentioned that we should wait to hear what her team mates will say (if saying anything at all).
I was diagnosed with Bipolar 1 disorder 14 years ago. I take my meds everyday, go to therapy and stay sober. If you ask anyone I work/worked with they will tell you I have it together and my career thus far has exceeded my (and others) expectations.
I'm sorry your brother is going through hell right now, trust me I have been there. I know the burden it can put on friends and family, but you really shouldn't lump all people with mental illness like they are useless. If treated you wouldn't even know they are diagnosed.
You can contact me directly if you would like to chat about your brother. I know with treatment he can turn his life around. He just needs to do the work.
Many people have seen the Netflix document on company culture. My favorite part is where it points out that company values are not what the founders list in an email, or what gets painted on a wall or put on a plaque. It's what happens every single day, what gets done now and what gets deferred.
I'm surprised she lasted as long as she did and wasn't fired earlier. We even have a diagnosis that she has mental health issues. I'm glad Github fired her. Now the question is, why was this article posted? Why are we giving her her 2 minutes of fame?
" The next day I got an urgent request for a call with my manager. She told me that the data scientist who had written the survey questions was very upset and had gone to her manager to complain about me. I asked my manager what had happened to upset her and was told that it was the feedback I provided on the gender question. I read back to her the body of the issue that I had opened and asked what I should have done differently. She responded that she didn't know, that my wording seemed direct but non-confrontational, but that I was forbidden to interact any further with the author of the survey."
If your company ever communicates this badly to you, it's time to question whether this company can be fixed.
"'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
For contrast, this reminds me of Gene Wilder's feedback about his Willy Wonka costume:
Was there really something wrong with that phrasing? How would you improve it? Genuinely curious; I think I'd have phrased it the same way (though at every place I've worked we'd have done a review like this face to face), and I find it pretty non-confrontational.
Enjoyed the letter you shared. Gene is truly missed.
TLDR: They suggest splitting the gender question into two parts.
As you know, this is a super important issue for me. Progress! Exciting! If you're busy, I'll make a pull request. Please let me know if I can help in any way. Thank you, Specialist"
Why thank you for that clarification! I'm quite busy but can definitely submit a PR within the next few days. Feel free to do it first and I'll take a look, though. :)
Idk. Every time I've wanted something done, this sort of language usually resulted in better outcomes as opposed to being direct, especially when communicating with someone I don't know very well, or a superior.
Some people need the sugar, some do not. It's not always easy to work out which is which so you may need to err on the side of caution until you know your co-workers better.
Because empathy is important to communicating effectively. You're looking at the words, but you're not looking at phrasing and tone, which are just as important.
Try this exercise: read the sentence out loud to yourself. Taking a line out of Myers-Briggs, does it sound more perceptive or judging, to you, when read aloud?
To me it sounds judging, as if Coraline already has pre-conceived notions about the person she is communicating with. At the very least, it sounds unnecessarily defensive. The wording is definite, with no room for discussion. In fact, all I see in that wording is a mini "well, actually" lecture.
The reality is that she doesn't know if this was an intentional or unintentional oversight. People leave things out, forget to finish sentences, paint in broad strokes and fine-tune later. From the description, this likely wasn't in its final stages. Maybe it was going to get changed, or maybe it wasn't, but you need to start from the idea that the person on the other end of the sentence also wants the best results.
It's a nice idea to think that people should say whatever they want as long as it's the objective truth, but humans are humans, which means they are subjective and have feelings. I find that people are much more effective workers when they are attentive to the feelings of others.
Another phrasing which is probably just as effective, much less aggressive, and only slightly more wordy:
"Have you considered how people of different gender identities might engage with this question? Transgender people might be confused if they identify as both male (or female) and trans. Perhaps we can find a way to make this question a little less ambiguous for this class of people?"
Sure, the proposed solution is not directly in that sentence-- but that's kind of the point. You have to get on the same page before you start throwing out answers at people. Maybe the data scientist already knows this but just didn't communicate effectively-- otherwise you end up dangerously close to "well actually"ing someone who already knows the thing you're telling them.
In fact, to me, the weirdest part of the article is how ironic it is to see Coraline be so obtusely unaware of how unempathetic this kind of phrasing is, since she is so vocal about it on Twitter. It definitely strikes me as slightly hypocritical to see people arguing that we should be allowed to get straight to the point of a technical argument without any fluff or nicety. I believe this was the exact opposite argument being made from the same camp when Code of Conduct discussions were being had.
> empathy is important to communicating effectively.
Yes, but that applies just as well to the data scientist--who, when she saw this comment, didn't do what any reasonable person would do and call up/message/whatever the coworker who made the comment and straighten out any confusion/misunderstanding, but instead went right to her boss and complained. That should not be the first resort--it should be the last resort. A little empathy on the data scientist's part would have led to: "Hm, that seemed abrasive at first glance, but she does have a valid point..."
- I think issues of diplomacy get magnified online because intent is so easy to misjudge. Whatever I write seems to come off twice as rude as I intended.
- I was taught etiquette, to a large extent, in an online fiction workshop called Critters. There, critiques are all peer reviews, and diplomatic critiques are essential. I try to keep some of that friendly peer spirit in every review and issue I make.
> Because empathy is important to communicating effectively.
I learned the hard way that displaying empathy and applying sugarcoating are two very different things, back when I was conflating the former with the latter and ended up dismissing both in name of the latter (which made me sound like a pretentious prick), then trying to correct course and applying the latter in lieu of making use of the former (which made me sound political and manipulative).
> Try this exercise: read the sentence out loud to yourself.
To me it sounded like someone who is alarmed at a subject that matters to them and haphazardly made an assertive statement.
People generally can't stand assertive discourse as they perceive it as being judgemental, unless you take a chance at discovering them as well as give them a chance do discover you. Sugarcoating doesn't help with that, it's just trying to state the same thing in a roundabout, artificially lightened way, which most of the time ends up feeling heavy, gooey, pretenseful and manipulative, when what matters is the build-up, the foreplay if you will, leading to a common level of understanding. Ultimately this is all about people and openness, not facts and opinions. Being openly and genuinely kind, querying for people's thoughts and listening to them helps a lot in getting a point across, but it leaves you vulnerable to abusive personalities, also sometimes you really have to stand your ground. It's really tough to strike a balance.
I honestly don't know where truth lies in this exact matter but what I'm sure of is that when you have to second-guess your every words then the place is mentally exhausting and toxic in a terribly pernicious way as it makes you feel in constant danger and gradually destroys your self-esteem.
> Why so much sugarcoating? Feedback was straightforward. I didn't see any aggressive words.
I disagree; mostly because of this last part.
> you need to explicitly ask that question.
This last part feels like a demand and is too forceful. Suggestion is more persuasive then demands. I agree with you the comment you replied too is a little too sugarcoated for my taste, but the basic structure seems good, suggesting an authoritative source to back up your concern is a good idea. Especially when you are commenting on something (the data scientist may not have known about her LGBT work) outside your field to someone who is in the field (making a survey).
With that said, I get like this too when I am deep in coding. This may not be an issue for technical topics where it can be proved that x would cause a crash. But, I would handle this differently for non-tech issues that are subjective.
But... the data scientist should have been used to this at a company full of programmers. Maybe she was the first to actually comment on the content of the work.
Still, the data scientist overreacted and should have handled it better. Assuming this is more or less the details we need to know.
> I find is that in some companies people are just scared of each other that they fail to communicate.
Keep in mind OP said she got hundreds of comments on her earlier work from all over the company. Maybe instead the female data scientist was very defensive because she got similar treatment in the past.
It didn't seem like an overreaction from the data scientist. The subtext of the comment was that the scientist is considered an enemy of the trans political block. This is a serious problem that you will get burned by if you don't recruit allies to help you with it.
Like, the statement wasn't an opening for dialogue about or investigation into the best way to fulfill the work project. It went straight into making a power play. You can't discuss your way out of someone who's trying to control and gain power over you.
We're missing context as to the existing work relationship. If this was one of the first interactions, maybe it was a little too harsh.
Beyond that, even though I'm generally an asshole, I try to be nice in PR comments. Like it or not, most devs have some amount of ego tied up in their code. So removing the sting with some sugar coating makes for a better chance of them listening.
None of this applies once I have a longer work relationship with the author.
This tone is so bloody fake and would make me lose all respect for the person sending it.
There's treating someone respectfully and there's talking to them like they're a child. The fact that Silicon Valley is promoting this method of communication is just ridiculous.
How about we concentrate more on getting things done and less on so much sugar-coating that we all get diabetes.
In school, we once read a brief essay by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer on politeness.
Back then, I found Schopenhauer's tone incredibly pompous and condescending, but over the years I have come to appreciate it as one of the best explanations of what function politeness plays in social interaction:
"It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy."
What Schopenhauer says is that all politeness carries with it at least a kernel of insincerity, but that this is not a bad thing, quite the opposite - once we get past the idea that politeness is "phony", we can throw it around generously, and discover how much easier we get along with people we may not like very much. Consider politeness a kind of WD-40 for social interactions.
Its the terseness -- I think its ok to be terse with people you know, but in a context where you're interacting with someone who doesnt know you well, manners can be pretty important for relaying that you're on the same team. Directness can come across as aggressive when you cant see a persons expression or hear their tone. Especially if its a sensitive subject.
I just got reported to HR because I told somebody that a component they developed for us was badly designed. Turns out everybody agreed and it was changed but I still have to deal with HR.
Being ultra sensitive keeps people around you on their toes and makes them think twice about everything they say.
I think running to a manager and complaining about being offended is the new way of bullying people.
If you're ever put on a PIP, get out -- it's a sign someone in the company doesn't want you there.
I've never heard of a PIP working out and both the company and employee being happy -- maybe you only hear about the bad cases, but a PIP often seems to me like a cover your ass plan on the part of the company. They want to get rid of a person, but they're afraid of getting sued, so a PIP is a way to document why a person was fired in the case of litigation.
This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.
> This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.
Because the PIP exists to to support the argument that the firing was not for a prohibited reason in the event that the employee charges that it was. “At-will” doesn't mean there aren't prohibited reasons for firing, and if you don't have any evidence for what the firing reason was, it doesn't take much evidence of an improper purpose to meet the “preponderance of the evidence” standard for civil litigation.
This is super-cynical.
If you want to get rid of them, you don't have to have success criteria at all.
You could just document the behavior that makes them want to fire them ("you smell funny") and followups in an email, and call it a day after a week or so.
Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer :)
> You could just document the behavior that makes them want to fire them ("you smell funny") and followups in an email, and call it a day after a week or so.
Documenting something that has no objective criteria does very little to defeat even slight evidence of another motive for firing where the proferred reason is purely pretextual.
> Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer
That's true; that cost is weighed against losing wrongful-termination lawsuits.
Also, very often formal PIPs follow undocumented informal ones that have the same purpose in reality that a formal one does on paper (but which avoid any adverse record for an employee you end up keeping), and the success criteria in the formal PIP are things the manager knows (to a fair certainty) the employee will not meet based on the informal one.
I don't think you're correct here. As I've understood the concept for something like a decade, PIPs are almost universally understood to be a soft form of firing. The correct response to receiving a PIP, probably in most SV companies, is to start looking for another job.
It's easy to turn your own logic back around on you. Since it's a more-or-less open secret that most PIPs are part of managed termination, every competent company that issues one knows they're running a huge risk of sabotaging their relationship with an employee by issuing one. There are lots of ways to manage improved performance from an employee without invoking the dreaded PIP. If the company merely wants to improve performance, they can issue MBOs or schedule a special series of 1:1s.
It's also easy to see why companies would issue PIPs despite potentially backing themselves into a corner when the targeted employee exceeds the stated expectations of the PIP. PIPs are how HR wants employees to be fired; they simple are the whole firing process. But that doesn't mean the people who actually write the PIPs know how to write them effectively. In Coraline's story, you have what reads to me like a pretty standard Kafkaesque PIP story: Github wanted her out, HR demanded they follow the standard process, they PIP'd her, the PIP didn't anticipate that Coraline would keep diligent records, and they were forced to go through contortions to pretend that it was the PIP that had been failed, rather than the "will" part of Github's "at-will employment".
I'm not denying that you've worked in places where HR convinced line managers that PIPs were a "legitimate" management tool. But I am saying that in making that decision, HR at those places exhibited incompetence: they left a reasonable developer with significant professional experience in a position to wonder whether continuing to work on that team was rational.
More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :)
"But I am saying that in making that decision, HR at those places exhibited incompetence: they left a reasonable developer with significant professional experience in a position to wonder whether continuing to work on that team was rational."
I'm going to strongly disagree with this one, but it's clear you and i will not agree about this.
"More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :)
"
I still believe think it's incredibly cynical to assume and write that the only purpose of a PIP is to formally make up evidence so you can fire someone.
Precisely because i've worked at places where that is very specifically not the intent.
Fair enough! You've forgotten more about managing devs than I ever plan to know. Just don't be surprised that there's a pretty big chunk of the profession that will make this assumption about PIPs.
I imagine most seasoned professionals placed on a PIP will probably already have a reasonable guess if it's a BS posture or honest attempt to fix a problem. If not from the get go, definitely by the first 1:1.
I guess, it doesn't really matter what the company calls this process or how it's presented, only how it is conducted. If you even mildly agree with the reasons presented for it, and you get positive feedback soon, it may work out, otherwise it most surely won't, regardless of the honesty behind it.
I would imagine that most seasoned professionals who can tell this don't put themselves in a position where they are likely to get PIPed in the first place. If it's a culture fit problem, they remove themselves from consideration at organizations that don't share their values. If it's a skill problem, they work like hell to correct the problem before their manager notices.
> they remove themselves from consideration at organizations that don't share their values.
Not necessarily feasible in all situations. Sometimes a seasoned professional is only able to find out about culture fit after working there for a while.
Like Chris Lattner recently found out that he didn't belong at Tesla.
Sometimes there are honestly mismatched expectations or understanding of how performance is measured and evaluated. Other times, people assume new roles, and some aspects of the new role are not prioritized correctly or just not working out. I have witnessed some such cases, and personally managed one.
Working like hell does not help if the effort is expended in the wrong place. That's where the first 1:1 will be a clear indicator if the correction is working or not - if it's not working it may be a failure of a honest PIP, or PIP dressing up a decision that has already been made. But honest PIPs exist, and sometimes they do work to solve a problem that was not being solved by itself.
Any measure like a PIP is an attempt to reinforce a political/power structure. Where "mismatched expectations" indicate that it is not clear whether the behavior of the employee or the manager -- specifically, whichever manager has some part in that employee's success within the organization -- is the larger contributor to the failure to meet expectations. Most organizations are notorious for a systemic inability to distinguish one from the other, defaulting to laying the onus on the employee. So "working like hell" ends up as "effort expended in the wrong place." On the part of both parties. An "honest PIP" would be one where the intention is perceived as good, even though the need for a formal process is the result of some other weakness or failure where the net result is a less robust relationship, overall.
I still believe think it's incredibly cynical to assume and write that the only purpose of a PIP is to formally make up evidence so you can fire someone. Precisely because i've worked at places where that is very specifically not the intent.
Every single employee assumes that's the intent, and this is obvious to literally everyone.
It's the same kind of thing as "never accept a counteroffer from your current employer", but with a much higher epistemological certainty level. Both are self-fulfilling to some extent. That doesn't make is 100% true, but it does make it the kind of hand you bet strongly on.
As a manager and employee this has also been my experience. it was even raised that effectively no employee survives a PIP due to the deliberate treatment of compensation (such as bonuses, which are immediately zeroed out) in the mandatory manager training by people who had been managers for 12, 15 years, much to the chagrin of the presenter from HR.
In the company I work for now, we genuinely try and recover people and we don't call it a PIP. But that is the exception for my personal experience over 20 years.
How does it work at your company? IMO anything with deadlines and paperwork is a PIP in disguise (thus, hostile and relationship-poisoning). Much less than that can easily end up being little more than saying "do better," so I'm interested in how your company walks that narrow line.
We have a management structure that allows us to do both peer guidance and detailed project tracking which can help people avoid falling off the rails.
Our problem has never been a deliberately underperforming employee though - all of our issues to date have been people who start doing light slacking or who are too easily distracted/focus on the wrong things. Careful hiring and luck.
I have personally managed a serious problem employee who basically did not want to work and put a great deal of effort into actively avoiding work (writing long soliloquies in "documentation" instead of writing code or meaningful and appropriate docs); that was decidedly unpleasant and exacerbated by the (very large) company in question basically protecting certain classes of employees but refusing to add a resource. In the end it came down to me doing half of his job for him.
> I don't think you're correct here. As I've understood the concept for something like a decade, PIPs are almost universally understood to be a soft form of firing. The correct response to receiving a PIP, probably in most SV companies, is to start looking for another job.
I have a friend who was put on a two-month PIP and was fired at the end of it. Two weeks before the end of his PIP, his boss scheduled a meeting with him to "clear some things up" and tell him that his PIP isn't going well.
The first thing I told my friend after that was "Dude, he just gave you your two weeks notice. Start ramping up the job search.". And at the beginning of his PIP, I told him that he was effectively being given two months notice.
He took my advice, by the way, and landed a new job less than two weeks after being fired.
Guy on my team at my last company was - he was non-technical, but was in charge of looking at raw data and finding discrepancies and things we could write code to fix on an ongoing basis as he was a domain expert. He had a rough time with technical topics, and so part of his PIP, as I understand it, was to become basically proficient in using SQL to query, and understand the basics of RDBMS. He did so, and was removed from PIP and went on to be a key contributor on the team, and had some light technical duties assigned to him, which he performed competently.
This was a valuable employee that the company actually wanted to improve, which is unrelated to the PIP as excuse to fire people discussed here.
There's a world of difference between a review that says "he's weak at technical tasks: inferior and unfit" and a review that says "he's weak at technical tasks, it would be nice if he learned to do them"
That's actually a good point. Hence, the problem with such blanket statements I guess. But perhaps one can figure it out from the context in which it's happening.
> This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.
Because sometimes it's a genuine desire for someone who is a good cultural fit to improve.
> If you're ever put on a PIP, get out -- it's a sign someone in the company doesn't want you there.
I've put folks on PIPs before (we don't call them that and we're much more straightforward about it than some employers I hear about who do), and had positive outcomes. The correct way of thinking about a PIP is:
1. We rely on people to work adequately-to-well by themselves
2. If they can't, we tell them they aren't and expect them to improve,
3. If they can't, we get more specific in our feedback and meet more often to discuss course corrections
4. If that doesn't work, because the continued presence of performance problems means we can't work productively as an employer/employee, we try to meet on a MUCH more regular basis than 1, 2, 3 in order to track and improve performance.
The best and most effective feedback is given in the moment: you are doing [x], here's how it has an impact on [y], here's what we think would be a better way. A PIP basically means you get more refined and structured feedback way more often.
I'm not saying that a PIP is a hugely positive or stress-free thing for anyone, but we try to assume positive intent and treat it as a great opportunity to help someone constructively get over a block to being a better contributor to our company.
Well put -- I suppose these sorts of things are largely kept between manager and employee, so people don't end up hearing about them unless the employee decides to disclose.
You're right. It's also something employers can't dress up often for legal reasons. E.g. you can't be vague/fluffy/nice about the reason for putting someone onto a PIP. So if your company culture is kind/gentle, then it can seem like a HUGE abrasive shock to have one appear.
There are of course some people who are a) actively assholes and b) genuinely oblivious to the rules applying to them. But you gotta believe they're in the tiny minority in the world.
I actually _have_ seen PIPs work out. Pretty rare though. In this context though, I believe it was done because of stack ranking, so perhaps the person PIPed was not actually "undesirable" so much as the manager had to pick someone.
Even if you're an at will state, you can still be sued or investigated by the government (state or federal) for all kinds of employment discrimination. Making some of these discrimination claims can be fairly easy to do, so the PIP acts as a cheap ass-covering document if it happens.
PIPs work sometimes. It really depends on the (frequently opaque) intentions behind the plan.
Sometimes you might really like an employee, but _need_ them to improve on a few things for their employment to work. PIPs can definitely work in this circumstance.
Sometimes an employee is just incredibly toxic, and you may have reason to believe that they'll sue the company if you fire them without well-defined cause, (like the parent article here). In this case you are simply creating a paper trail to cover your ass legally. Of course the PIP is not going to "work" for the employee, they will be fired regardless as you want them gone. But the PIP may "work" for the company, by limiting liability.
"I've never heard of a PIP working out and both the company and employee being happy "
At least where i've worked, they work out about 50% of the time. That tracks with the PIP's i've been involved in.
I can also give you anecdotes if you like, but i'm not sure you care.
"This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.
"
I'd agree plenty of PIPs are written and delivered at various companies as a cover your ass.
But where I am, and what I do, they are used as a hopeful wakeup call with some formal tracking and feedback mechanism.
Really. As you say, there is no point if there is no hope of improvement.
(I know how cynical HN is, of course, so i don't expect this to be believed)
As a senior engineer, here's how the decision to PIP or not has been explained to me: Is there a clear and actionable plan where the employee would be welcome to stay on the team if they complete it?
It's a simply stated requirement but difficult, I think, to fulfill. Often there's not a clear path forward to fix the problem(s). Employers don't always make this judgment of what needs to be done correctly. And, of course, there's always the possibility that the employee doesn't follow through on their end.
If you are put on a PIP and hold out for severance, in exchange for not writing this kind of post you can at least get a pretty nice vacation out of it.
My success rate with giving Pips has been 40-50%. Sometimes people just don't understand they're not performing until it's forced on them. Sometimes they can react.
I don't necessarily agree with this. This can be true in a place where management is poor at coaching and development, or simply wants to cover their asses. But at its best, it can serve as a way to add explicitness where implicit assumptions of expectations aren't working out.
I've seen it work out once. I used it as a voice of hope to other people I knew on PIPs for a long while until the numbers kept adding up over the years. 1 out of 3 doesn't seem so bad. 1 out of 20 or so, them's not good odds.
It was a revenge and scape goat PIP.
An employee was leaving a team, so they decided to pin all the disasters of the preceding 6 months on him.
Of course they didn't raise the issue until after he had joined my team, but it was performance review time, and he'd been on their team for almost all of the review period, so they got to declare him "unsatisfactory" and force me to do the PIP process with him.
But he really was a good performer, and our team had worked with him before and knew the whole thing was bullshit, so he quite appropriately sailed through the PIP, and that allowed us to draw a line and say "it has been dealt with, the problem is resolved and whatever took place in that team has no relevance to his performance here".
Anecdotal evidence: I've run numerous PIPs as a manager. The most recent one was successful in that both employee and company are now happy. The credit for that outcome was 100 percent the employee's. All I contributed was honesty and an genuine effort too give them a shot.
It's the PIPs where the attitude is what you describe that are doomed to fail. And if everyone has that perception to begin with, I can't reach for PIPs as a tool anymore because the outcome is determined already. Vicious cycle.
This being said, I get where you're coming from. PIPs can be used to let people go. For good and not so good reasons.
One way we try to defend against that is that if things aren't working, we do our best to move the employee you a different manager with an as-clean-as-possible shot after giving clear feedback and before the PIP. After all, people leave managers, not jobs.
This.
I've been "in the loop" on several people getting PIPs. Two were 100% a pretext for firing. One of those two was fired less than a week after going on the PIP, despite it being a six week plan. I thought that was especially shitty as it didn't give the person sufficient time to line up other work.
The third instance was "we wanna fire this person but if we see improvement then they can stay". This person stayed for almost a year.
In all cases the PIP was to create a paper trail to support an argument of firing for legal cause in a potential lawsuit.
The main thing I've taken away from the whole github situation is that, as a tech company, you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. That doesn't mean exclusively hiring white men and sending out Kalanick-style emails; it means keeping your work environment as professional and politically neutral as possible unless absolutely necessary.
My employer does a good job of this. We have a lot of women and transgender (not so many POC) employees, but we don't have any special inclusivity initiatives or outreach programs, nor do we officially inject any related ideology into the businessplace. The expectation is that you conduct yourself professionally, and that you exercise your own discretion; the other side of the coin is that you correct what you might think is morally/terminologically wrong (such as confusing biological sex with gender) as diplomatically and non-confrontationally as possible; assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them.
As for Coraline herself, I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here. In particular, I'm sure there is more to the "non-empathetic communication style" than the data scientist and other related incidents. Not to be a presumptive asshole, but I do get the impression from this kind of expose that she might be difficult to work with.
I don't get it though. Didn't they want to bring her on specifically because her political profile gave them cachet with people they wanted to make overtures to?
Top-down hirings for the sake of culture change don't really work, though do they? It seems like the inevitable outcome is exactly this, a bright-eyed, and then soon-disenfranchised new hire, butting up against an resistant and entrenched culture.
I don't know the answer to that; it just seems odd to say she should have refrained from politicizing her work if that's exactly what they hired her for.
Think this is only one side of the story though, what about people who had worked there just doing their job and you're being told there is something wrong with your culture and this person is being brought in to fix it.
It's a big company the whole thing can't just be a frat house there must at least be some percentage of decent people trying to do a job that are now being told there is something wrong with them.
(Not to mention the whole idea of a remote worker involved in any sort of culture change is utterly absurd)
> you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere
I suspect you will find yourself publicly involved in another kind of justice sphere by accident.
That said, there is something to your hesitancy. I did a big part of my education in the social justice sphere, and while I believe in pretty much all of the core theories, in practice I don't think most activists have much of a plan of attack for tech companies. That's partly because they don't really get much practice, because companies are reluctant to give them power, and, as this story shows, quick to give up if results aren't progressing as expected.
Your solution—give up on that crew entirely—sort of solves the problem, I guess.
But my solution is to keep trying to study and talk and figure out what a good methodology would be for applying the core social justice theories (everyone has valuable compentencies, demographics are a useful signal, other realities exist than yours, consent matters, etc) in a tech corp setting productively.
I think the reason my employer is successful at recruiting women is actually precisely because they stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. You think that entails "giving up on that crew entirely", when in reality it does the exact opposite. I think a lot of women/transgender/POC employees don't want to be thought of as an X software developer, just to be thought of as a developer who happens to be X.
The thing about strict professionalism is that it avoids the problems of bro-culture while simultaneously preventing issues from blowing up.
As of now, Github has pretty much alienated everybody. They've pissed of activists by firing Coraline and some of the stuff they've done in the past. They've pissed off "broflakes" by some of their other more recent cultural changes. But now they're starting to piss off people who may or may not care about social justice, but who definitely don't want the defining topic in the OSS community to be social justice. I think this is a game you can only win by refusing to play.
Tbh,i don't really understand the "brogrammer" thing either. I got my CS degree, then was at Google, and then the first employee at a tiny startup and none of those experiences gave me any inkling of what the brogrammer stereotype might be. Isn't the programmer stereotype literally the opposite of a "bro"?
It's meant to be a portmanteau of "bro" and "snowflake" (implying more or less that someone sees themselves as a special snowflake, and gets upset when not treated that way).
Like both the words it comprises, I find it's more of a disparaging name for people the speaker dislikes, than a label for a discernible subgroup of people.
Naw. Starbucks has done a good job with their corporate responsiblity efforts, bumpy road and all. So it's possible to do well.
Any nail that sticks up will get pounded down, someone somewhere will be offended no matter what. So just do your thing and ignore the haters.
Edit: To the skeptics, Starbucks was among the first to extend health insurance to domestic partners, and I'm a big fan of their CARE programs. That said, it was still the worst job I've ever had.
Bit OT, but I've somewhat always had a desire to work in a software developer role at Starbucks because I drink a lot of their coffee and i like how they seem to treat their regular partners (in an externally facing role, not internal IT). I'm not searching for a new position now, but can I ask what you didn't like there?
Circa 1992, during the first hyper growth period. I was in Store Planning, a particularly stressful, dysfunctional group. I know many others who've had great jobs, careers there. I was just unlucky, immature, naive, etc.
Reading the full article, it strikes me how you can be "inclusive" if you are constantly highlighting the differences. The fact, for example, she dismisses PRs or code reviews because made by white males. Or the blog post on her first deliverable, rewritten by a white male. I don't see what could be the benefit to point that out in every sentence: that all of that is made in malice because of gender and race?
If I had a white male colleague who would constantly point out - in a work environment - that a PR should be dismissed because made by a woman or that a deliverable sucks because made by a black guy, I would not tolerate that behavior for a second. I don't get why the opposite should be considered "inclusion and safety".
> For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written. One PR actually had over 200 comments from 24 different individuals.
[...] For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written.
[...] Shortly after this happened to me, the code review feature was prioritized. This functionality was rolled out internally pretty quickly. From that point on I didn't get dogpiled anymore [...]
Re: who cares if they were all male? If I open a PR and I get dozens of feedback, either they are legit feedback or not. Or maybe they are all sexist comments, that you should absolutely report. But it sounds like the "all of who were male" wants to imply a specific subtext, but the accusation is neither explicit nor provides any justifications. Saying it in other words: if a colleague would say "I am getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of who were black women)", wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?
I took it to indicate that she believes that she is getting so much 'feedback' specifically because of what she is and what she's trying to do.
The fact that all of the people offering feedback were male is weak evidence in favour of this (consider that much of her immediate team is female). She offers as another piece of evidence that she compared notes with a colleague with a similar background who was male and who wasn't getting the same level of attention.
> Re: who cares if they were all male? If I open a PR and I get dozens of feedback, either they are legit feedback or not.
If you're working somewhere where you and people like you are getting 20 people peering over your shoulder uninvited and criticizing your every move and people of a different group only have 2 people reviewing their code then you can legitimately claim to be working in a hostile environment.
Code reviews are always a mixture of objective and subjective feedback, and having to consider detailed comments (objective, subjective, substantive, trivial) from a large number of people not directly involved and without appropriate context would be a stress on anyone (not to mention is a simple drain on productivity).
On a purely technical note, she says nowhere that the PRs should be dismissed because they were from men. I think that was something you read into it. At issue was the unusual quantity of the feedback.
> if a colleague would say "I am getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of who were black women)", wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?
If it were fact, then I would assume that there was some way in which this colleague had upset a group of black women. I think a similar conclusion is being offered here (although given the likely employment ratios the black women theory would have a whole lot more evidence).
For purposes of neutrality, she shouldn't mention the gender or race of the reviewers. In many places that I have worked, I do not even know the ethnicity of my coworkers. As an aside, I am not white and honestly believe there is more to ethnicity than skin color.
@kybernetikos definitely already said it, but to be clear:
That doesn't sound like she dismissed the PRs, or that she dismissed them for gender reasons, and there's no mention of race anywhere in there.
> if a colleague would say... wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?
Yes, yes it would. I'd look at the feedback, the thing receiving feedback, and then go ask the people who gave the feedback. Then I'd probably circle back around to the colleague for more information, because clearly, something is wrong, but from just that information? Cannot tell what.
> The fact, for example, she dismisses PRs or code reviews because made by
> white males. Or the blog post on her first deliverable, rewritten by a
> white male.
I really feel like you are injecting your own issues into this. For example,
here is an excerpt that you're referring to:
> However, it soon became apparent that this promising start would not last
> for long. For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from
> literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams,
> nitpicking the code I had written. One PR actually had over 200 comments
> from 24 different individuals.
First off, nowhere does she reference the race of the engineers that were
commenting on the PRs. The fact that you jump into this talking about white
males this and white males that, seems like you are bringing your own
baggage with you into this discussion.
Secondly, it seems more like her issue was that she felt like she was getting
dogpiled on via the PR. I've never worked anywhere that I felt the need to
start critiquing the code of people from other teams who were working on
systems that I might not even have experience with. It especially seems not
very inclusive to make a new hire feel like she is immediately on the
defensive. 200 comments seems excessive. (Granted we can't see the content so
it may not have been all unjustified, but still).
Here is the other excerpt that you reference:
> The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone
> of what I had written was too personal and didn't reflect the voice of the
> company. The reviewer insisted that any mention of the abuse vector that
> this feature was closing be removed. In the midst of my discussions with
> the editorial team, trying to reach a compromise, a (male) engineer from
> another team completely rewrote the blog post and published it without
> talking to me.
Again, there is a lack of reference to whether or not the male is white or
not. We can assume that he is probably white, but there isn't even a hint as
to his actual race.
Also, like the previous excerpt the gender of the person is referenced to drive
home the whole 'inclusiveness' angle. The real issue here isn't that the
offender is male, but that he apparently went around her while her content was
tied up in editorial review. That seems like a total dick move, IMHO.
To be fair, it's possible that to also blame the managerial systems in place
for allowing this too. How was this person able to publish the blog post while
a "competing" version of the post was held up in editorial review (though
presumably not fully rejected)? Was this a mistake due to poor communication?
> I've never worked anywhere that I felt the need to start critiquing the code of people from other teams who were working on systems that I might not even have experience with.
This is probably a side effect of how GitHub evolved. Watching some of their earlier talks and comparing that with how they function now, the introduction of managers was a recent addition. It probably didn't change how past engineers operate in the company, e.g., "chime in if your comments are relevant, even if you aren't necessarily requested to chime in."
It was common in early Google as well...I knew someone fairly high up that used to leave drive-by code reviews for people on other teams. It wasn't done much by the time I joined in 2009, and became explicitly taboo by 2010 or so.
I think it's actually because when you're in a young fast-growing company, the success of the company is literally everyone's responsibility. You have both the means (because the company hasn't yet ossified into management structures and the codebase is small enough that most people can be familiar with all of it) and the incentive (because a large portion of your compensation is in stock options that are only worth something if you succeed) to materially affect the company's prospects. And many people who join in that environment don't get the memo about when it becomes inappropriate for a new, larger structure.
Even at a larger size, though, it can still work – but the need for effective communication and diplomacy is even greater. You also want to be sensitive that you probably do not have all the context you might need when reviewing another project's code, so humility is important. When I do this, it's usually in the form of clarifying questions, suggestions, or requests.
> I've never worked anywhere that I felt the need to start critiquing the code of people from other teams who were working on systems that I might not even have experience with.
I've actually found myself in precisely this scenario. Last time it happened, it was because I was called upon to help try to talk some sense into a somewhat stubborn junior engineer who couldn't grasp that they were making sub-optimal and potentially dangerous decisions.
She wasn’t saying they should be dismissed because they were made by men. She was pointing out that they were extremely nit picky, and those who did so were men. And that her male colleagues had nowhere near that amount of nit pickiness on their requests.
Because it's obvious that white males have all the power and are part of the patriarchy which oppresses all non white males.
It's so obviously correct that you can't even argue about it, and if you do (and you're white and male) you are mansplaining, and if you're not, you have internalized self hatred (which is the patriarchy fault, no less).
It's OK to promote Democrats internally at a company but if you're a Trump supporter you are EVIL. This is also obvious and requires no explanation and cannot be argued.
/s
In all seriousness, this stuff needs to stay out of the professional sphere. It's a swing back in the other direction of toxicity.
It's not a swing _back_: it's just a different axis altogether. Being narcissistic enough to insist that your ideological opponents are evil and that every forum is an excuse to root out wrongthink is an ancient tendency. It's pretty ideology neutral.
Fifty years ago people were doing it for not being a good enough Christian. Now it's for not buying into every detail of an incredibly specific (and quite flawed, imo) political philosophy, or even just claiming that perhaps it's counter productive to fight every battle simultaneously in every forum.
> assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them.
I think many social activists, esp. those I see on social media, could use a heavy dose of this kind of thinking. People are human, humans make mistakes, and most people I run into in life are too busy with their own affairs to always be perfectly conscious about their words and actions.
Well, the other issue is that if they are constantly barraged by trolls trying to offend them on social media (just because they find offending people to be funny), then it could be more of a "if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail" situation.
I thought her positive reaction on being placed into such an obviously intentionally isolated team was odd. A team of people just so, without the undesirables, their own org structure with dedicated PMs, QCs, and backlog.
The way things fell apart when that cocoon was breached -- both from within and without -- was entirely predictable.
How was this supposed to work in the first place? What did they hope to accomplish with this design?
There must be better designs for these sorts of initiatives, right? What are Microsoft, Apple, or Google doing?
This happened to me at my last job - there were a bunch of us in a celebrated cocoon, and then everything fell apart when it was breached. It wasn't about undesirable people, it was about undesirable management influences; whiplash from constantly changing projects and reorgs, moving goal posts, etc etc. It definitely came with it's fair share of problems.
We were trying to isolate ourselves from the craziness in the rest of the company, and we got a lot of cool shit done while it lasted.
Definitely a net-positive. We should have done more outreach and attempts to bring people into our way-less-drama bubble; but if the theories that the other groups were jealous of our successes was true, it might have accelerated our demise.
Ditto for being clearer with upper management why were liking the isolation.
I think there's an catch-22 problem tho: Anything we could have done would have just been political in some way, which would have been contributing to the drama.
Possibly the appropriate middle ground is to clearly and consistently seek feedback and share successes with the top of our management chain; avoid the politics of multi-person, but keep the awareness that we're doing well and will continue to do so with those that make the decisions about whether we'd get to keep going that way.
--
Original response:
It was definitely a net-positive; I got out (I was encouraged to get out by people I trust and respect) before it had a chance to properly explode, and there's a lot I'd have done differently.
Probably the most valuable skill is recognizing that you're in a tailspin; a good way to notice this is failing to achieve your own core values. In my case, people were feeling unheard; I pride myself on listening skills, so that should have been a pretty serious red flag. If you're sucking at stuff you really care about, something's pretty wrong.
I would have liked to have the presence of mind and skill to directly address the meta-problem; but that might have just backfired more, since I gathered that my directness was part of the issue.
So in that case, just bailing earlier. Make sure you don't stick around past the point where the bridges are burned; I'm a little past that, since I don't feel good when I think about going back, but I know I can.
The other option (which was one I was encouraged to take, that then turned into a full departure) was to take a sabbatical. I probably set down 70% of the baggage in the first month, which might have been enough to make a successful comeback - at least in attitude. (There's other complicating factors).
The main takeaway should be a company has one obligation to you: a job to do and money to be paid. You as an adult bring your services to fix the problem in exchange for said compensation. Personal tesponbility is everything and Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired and removed from any workplace where they act as a menace to their coworkers.
I don't agree that she was acting as a menace to her coworkers. At least, I don't think you can come to that conclusion from her blog post alone. I would be pissed too if I wrote an official blog post for a feature that I cared about, and someone else went behind my back and rewrote it and published it without even telling me.
A better way to put what I wrote is this: these problems can all be avoided by approaching problems from a professionalism point of view, rather than a social justice one. Both Coraline and her coworkers did unprofessional things that could have been avoided with better communication, and perhaps more attentive management.
Edit: since you've done this repeatedly and we warned you before, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
The main takeaway should be a company has one obligation to you: a job to do and money to be paid. You as an adult bring your services to fix the problem in exchange for said compensation. Personal tesponbility is everything and Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired and removed from any workplace where they act as a menace to their coworkers.
The main takeaway should be a company has one obligation to you: a job to do and money to be paid. You as an adult bring your services to fix the problem in exchange for said compensation. Personal tesponbility is everything and Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired and removed from any workplace where they act as a menace to their coworkers.
> The main thing I've taken away from the whole github situation is that, as a tech company, you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. That doesn't mean exclusively hiring white men and sending out Kalanick-style emails; it means keeping your work environment as professional and politically neutral as possible unless absolutely necessary.
At my previous employer, we achieved a 50-50 gender balance on our engineering team. Not through identity politics, outreach initiatives, and politicking, but through professionalism and politeness.
We were able to attract many incredibly talented women and minority engineers, by just not being assholes and treating them like any other engineers.
In fact, for somewhat of a natural experiment: there was a bifurcation in our engineering organization, a split between the web dev side (our teams) and the functional programming side. The FP side was full of politicking. The FP side's morale was terrible.
It was kind of ridiculous. By the time I chose to move on from this company, four out of the six women in our engineering organization were backchanneling with me about how uncomfortable the women-in-tech political rhetoric made them feel. They didn't want to be singled out as special snowflakes. They didn't want everyone else wondering if they were just diversity hires. They just wanted to participate on an equal footing, with everyone else. The fact that they felt more comfortable talking to me, a senior engineer, than HR or the company's Womens' Group is fairly absurd.
You don't need all this campaigning and activism to achieve these goals. You just need to be good, competent, professional, and kind people. You need management that has no tolerance for asshole behaviour, regardless of whether it's an ism, or just an asshole. You need a company that notices and rewards good work, even (and especially!) from those people who would otherwise fade into the background.
Thing is, a lot of the complaints made by "SJWs" are legit! Racism sucks. Assholes making shitty comments suck. Favouritism and nepotism sucks. But all of these concerns are already dealt with by healthy norms of professionalism, and those norms do a lot better job of advocating fair treatment for everyone, than the activists seem to do.
The women on our team didn't want special treatment or top-down interventions. They just wanted to be treated like the equals that they were! They really appreciated the fact that, on our team, they got that, and it wasn't a big deal.
When you're facing a team, company, or culture that appears problematic, consider that instead of being sexist, management may just be shitty, incompetent assholes _in general_. Healthy, mature, capable, professional teams are not like this.
For women and people of color, supporting diversity was found to have a negative impact on how effective they were perceived to be, lowering performance ratings and reducing the chance of promotion. The same wasn't true for white men, so even though white dudes weren't rewarded for it, we can support marginalized people without sacrificing our careers.
And of course, many of the products we code are inherently political. It is no more possible for a social network like Github to be "politically neutral" than it would be possible for a bank to be "security neutral".
Hence the qualifier "absolutely necessary." For example, harassment is bad, period. Github did the right thing in taking steps to address it by forming a team of developers to address harassment vectors.
That said, it might not have been the best idea to frame harassment in the context of the wider social justice movement. It may or may not fall into that group (depending on what you believe) and I'm not trying to argue whether it does or doesn't; what I am saying is that regardless, it might not actually be a good idea to inject politics into this situation. Nobody would say that preventing harassment is bad, but you will piss people off by injecting larger narratives into the issue.
If I could summarize, I guess I'm saying "go easy on the intersectionality."
You are so sadly mistaken to think that you can "stay away from social justice sphere". Taking the example of a survey question in the blog post,
> What is your gender?" The multiple-choice options were "Male", "Female", and "Transgender"
What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case? I would think, at the very least, an "Other" field would be a 1000x improvement from a "Transgender" option.
> I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here
People like you (and the kind of reaction you are describing here) are the reason why more people don't report discrimination and harassment issues.
One could imagine just putting a text entry field for gender, so as to not other any gender identity that doesn't align with the male-female binary. One could also imagine putting other fields in for respondents to self-identify as trans, should they want.
That said, it seems a very neutral approach to gender self-reporting is self-defeating (consider that, at least for bathroom laws in some US states), the very notion of something that's not on the assigned-at-birth male-female binary is itself controversial. I guess if your gender choices included "deconstruct the male-female binary" or something, that'd be overtly political, but at least in this political climate just acknowledging the existence of some people seems to be a political act. (one I'm in favor of, fwiw, but I'm one of those people that argue that being "apolitical" is just cover for being politically in favor of the status quo).
Right, the problem of the gender binary is that it never existed. What we have is trans-erasure. More generally it seems to me to prove that, with respect to Mr Burke, all that is necessary for evil to be done to a person is for good people to do nothing.
This isn't _entirely_ accurate. Gender binary may be an oversimplification or diminutive concept, but the idea that it "never existed" is a little extreme. It would almost be like saying religion never really existed because it's a figment of human imagination. In that sense, sure, binary genders are a bandaid over a complex subject, but it does exist. In fact, it is quite literally birthed from the genesis of more than a few religious ideologies. It exists just as much as the religions that buy into them exist.
Anyway back on topic:
Open field text boxes come with a practical cost of being much more difficult to aggregate, and let's be honest, the gender data is probably not important enough for GitHub to expend too much energy on. The more costly you make the data to mine, the less likely that the data will be used effectively.
Keep in mind an employer is usually trying to follow compliance and reporting standards set by OPM, OSHA, IRS, etc. when selecting the allowable answers to this question.
> I do get the impression from this kind of expose that she might be difficult to work with.
I get that impression as well, but I also get the impression that GitHub is a difficult place to work (from things like the data scientist going straight to her boss to complain, instead of trying to resolve any issue at the coworker level first, which is what would happen in a professional workplace).
> it means keeping your work environment as professional and politically neutral as possible unless absolutely necessary.
This sounds good, but I think to some people in tech "professional" and "political neutral" are contradictory goals. And your company has to choose which to take.
For example a professional workplace might say "You can't display photos of scantily clad women in the office" or "We're not hiring (female) strippers for our office party" (or "We have reprimanded $MANAGER for taking their team to a strip club") or "You can't use that word in the office to refer to a co-worker because it's mildly/very insulting and has political baggage". And all of those decision are derided by some as "political correctness" or taking political stances.
Those things aren't really non "politically neutral", they bring risks of lawsuits.
being politically neutral means not being active on an issue when there are no laws to follow, and otherwise taking no stated stance on topics, other than to cite legislative rules.
This is not a comment on the experiences described in the article, but it makes me extremely sad that the word "meritocratic/meritocracy" is used pejoratively, almost as if it were damning in itself. To me, meritocracy is something to be cherished, being far preferable to the systems that came before it, and being inherently anti-discriminatory.
(Yes, people's hardships which prevent them achieving their full potential should be taken into account, when determining "merit"; anything causing these hardships, including (especially?) past discrimination, should be countered; and people who had been subjected to the hardship should be treated with care and compassion, but that's orthogonal to meritocracy itself.
Also, obviously, your skills and abilities (in the context of work and meritocracy) have no bearing on your intrinsic value as a human being (so we need something like guaranteed basic income or progressive taxes to reduce issues like pay inequality).)
"Meritocracy" is regarded with derision in no small part because what is actually meant by it, rather than what you describe, is "this person is similar to me and I like them, so I think they do a better job."
It's the ingroup club made manifest. What you describe would be great, but it's not what "meritocracy" actually means in practice.
Then we need to call out fake meritocracy as such. I'm actually looking at this situation with some sort of confusion, because I've never seen proclaimed meritocracy to actually mean "boy's club".
But then again, I'm a white caucasian heterosexual male, so maybe I just don't notice. (Previous sentence is meant literally, not ironically.)
You're right, we do need to call out fake meritocracy that way. And people do call out fake meritocracy as such. Here's a bunch: http://istechameritocracy.com/
What often happens, though, is that responses to these claims become these backhanded dismissals. "Oh, you're just overreacting." "Well, I don't see it." I'm a straight, white, cis dude, too, so for a long time it was hard for me to notice it. I promise you, there is a point--and maybe it's not one you will ever personally see, but it exists--where it becomes too big, too obvious to ignore.
I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an
eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a
guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with
Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.
The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief
of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving
recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at
Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an
undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat
Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got
William an internship at the White House; how he talked to
friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and
secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and
how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach
at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.
With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving
what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving
replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.'
I'm sorry, but this is just stupid. You can take literally anyone who hypocritically asserts a belief in an ideal and use it to huffily dismiss the concept overall. And you can find such a person for literally any ideal.
For example, I could say: whenever I think of anti-racism, I think of [insert quote about someone who claims to be anti-racist and then says/does something racist]. Does that say anything about the concept of anti-racism itself? Or is it just irrelevant commentary about the fact that there are dishonest people claiming the mantle of every ideal while not living up to it?
Just because Irving Kristol is too dumb to understand the concept of meritocracy doesn't mean the concept is without merit.
I assume you would agree with me, though, that it makes little sense in the present discussion to talk about "meritocracy" without taking into account how Github implemented the concept.
I'm not sure whether this is sufficient to convince me to stop using the term "meritocracy" — the term is already ingrained in popular usage, irrespective of its provenance, and quite nice in that the word conveys the idea behind it relatively well, so I'm not sure whether the baggage associated with it is sufficiently toxic to justify dropping it.
As for the idea of meritocracy, at least in the narrow sense of selecting people based on their (potential) skills and abilities, I don't really see any better alternatives. The issues of social stratification, lack of inter-generational mobility, unequal access to education, income inequality and self-satisfaction are very severe, but with the partial exception of the last one, I don't agree that they're exacerbated by meritocracy (and regarding the last one, people will always find a reason to be self-satisfied/self-congratulatory).
The problem of political representatives not actually being representative of the population as a whole is indeed worrying. Perhaps sortition [0] might work (???). (If sortition were shown to be functional and implemented, but "meritocracy" continued to be used everywhere else, then meritocracy would become a terrible misnomer...)
As an aside, assuming that the word "meritocracy" was coined in a book satirising the concept, as stated in the article (as well as wikipedia), why did it start being used in a positive sense?
To me Meritocracy is extremely important, it's one of the very few things we have left that allow poorer people to get out of their situations. We see it all the time in the Development world and it's one of the things I love the most about it. We have people who have come from poorer backgrounds around the world putting themselves into a better life through hard work and discipline. Sometimes people don't even need a degree which can be hard to obtain without a good amount of money - it's just determination and hard work. Remove the ideas of Merit from this then you lose that and once you lose it, it's unlikely you'll ever get it back
"The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication."
I'm all for being compassionate and helping people through tough times, but does this sound like a stable person?
She does literally say "I have bipolar depression". Assuming that the company knew this when hiring her, it would be very surprising that they would not be compassionate at this point. I don't know if that assumption holds, though.
Congratulations, I think you managed to set a new record for ableism on Hacker News. I'm actually struggling to formulate a response because disqualifying people from discussing their issues because of mental illness is so extraordinarily low.
You literally just said, "I'm all for being compassionate and helping people through tough times," then proceeded to shit on her for undergoing exactly that.
For one, I hope you aren't in a management position in a company, because discriminating by mental illness is illegal. Second, I hope you never get mentally ill -- which can happen to anyone -- because you would have to confront people with attitudes like yours and you would realize what garbage this is.
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
I Imagine this read to the survey writer like:
"Hello, I'd like to complain about your use of the term Linux on the corporate intranet. A page provides instructions for running the data parsing scripts "on Linux". Since we do not do any kernel work, it is improper to refer to them as Linux instructions. Instead, people should be familiar with either POSIX, bash(with extensions), or GNU coreutils."
I mean, I see the point you're trying to make. But that error could be pretty damning in the context of a detailed survey about, like, operating systems and their utilities. In that case, wouldn't you expect to survey writer to know those details, or at least not completely lose their shit when told about them from someone who knows more about the topic?
We don't know the purpose of the survey, but it's described as an "open source developer survey". I imagine gender was thrown in because, hey maybe the women use vim and the men use emacs for some reason, and that's kind of interesting to know.
So on a survey meant to gather data on the participation rates of marginalized people in Open Source communities, you feel it would be appropriate to publish a question which would be deemed as troublesome or even offensive to members of those groups?
Perhaps you should reflect on that we are talking about people, not computer programs, and that the contextual impact of misrepresenting people has a much more marked impact than the contextual impact of misrepresenting computer programs.
This survey question was more along the lines of "What text editor do you use: a) vi b) emacs c) Linux"
In such a question, it would be perfectly reasonable to point out that "Linux is not a text editor. Linux users may use vi, emacs, pico, sam... If you want to know if a survey respondent is a Linux user, you need to explicitly ask that question".
I am really torn on this one. I want to discuss the article because I think it brings up interesting topics, and for the most part HN folks are good at discussing polarizing things like this without devolving into Reddit-style nonsense. On the other hand, I want to flag it, because the article itself is absolute garbage.
EDIT: I see now it is flagged. To be clear, I didn't, because I still think it's worth discussing some of the points made.
Programmers aren't really well known for their inherent skill in writing. It seems like the content, rather than the delivery, is the more important thing here.
I don't think the complaint was stylistic in nature (though I may be mistaken...?). Other than GitHub's puzzlingly callous reaction to her medical emergency, the entire thing reads like a narcissist blaming everyone else for every imagined slight and excusing herself for far worse. It's the Fundamental Attribution Error in article form.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadTheir interpretation was that github is upset they are viewed as sexist, so they want to figure out how to change their public reputation, without actually changing anything.
Good ol' Diversity Theatre :/
Old Polish [0] saying, back from the days when Poland was a communist country.
[0] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dajcie_mi_cz%C5%82owieka,_a_pa...
Dzienkuje
I think it is possible that there is some sexism here in that I'm not confident a male employee at Github would ever be challenged over failing this communication standard. That is, I think we implicitly expect women to be more empathetic and polite than men are, and get confused when they are not.
Edit: Also, I have never, ever heard of a PIP being used as anything other than a strategy for building a case for firing someone. Does anyone have any counter-examples?
Edit 2: Also also, the author says she had to turn down Github's severance package because it included an NDA, so she could write the article. Gross. [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/882636914981036032
What leads you to this conclusion?
Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence.
> Also, I have never, ever heard of a PIP being used as anything other than a strategy for building a case for firing someone.
Agreed on this point, as soon as she had a phone call with manager + HR they had already decided to fire her.
It comes back to that implicit expectation. Something I've been bringing up a lot in this thread as I read the comments throughout it is that whether we consider somebody rude or not seems to depend a lot on a) who they are, and b) whether we agree with them. We are more charitable to people who are more like us and whose ideas we find more correct. We're all human, so that's part of life. However, as an organization, Github can and should do better than that, and I think here that it did not. The sexism here, if it exists, is implicit in the way problems with this person were handled and in the expectations (mostly unwritten, at least at first) about how she'd behave.
Consider if the situations were reversed. What if some white male engineer was simply being terse in an email to her. Might she attribute it to rudeness, sexism, or transphobia? If the company fired the engineer would you be arguing that she should be a bit more charitable in her interpretations?
It can be very hard to capture the subtleties of spoken word in text form. The onus has pretty much always been on the individual to ensure they are being professional. I definitely think something is fishy here. It may very well be that Github has some serious issues, but the flip side of that coin (and Occam's razor) is that she sent out some rude emails and was fired.
These are good questions, and I don't know the answers. I'd like to tell you how I'd react, but I think given the current context it'd be hard for me to do so without my opinion of this whole thread coloring my answer.
> It can be very hard to capture the subtleties of spoken word in text form. The onus has pretty much always been on the individual to ensure they are being professional. I definitely think something is fishy here. It may very well be that Github has some serious issues, but the flip side of that coin (and Occam's razor) is that she sent out some rude emails and was fired.
What I'll say is this: I can see how her comments could be perceived as rude, or "unempathetic." I cannot see how - especially at Github, a place not known for cultural sensitivity - they were firable. I think there is a double/triple/quadruple standard going on here where people are, without even realizing it, passing their opinions of somebody through ideological blinders. I think this issue may be part of a core problem with Github's culture.
I agree, I think this is where the "fishy"-ness I spoke of earlier comes in. Giving the benefit of the doubt to Coraline, there is definitely more at play than being rude in a few emails. I just feel uncomfortable jumping from an individual account to broadly concluding an organization is sexist.
What I see in this is a sort of passive transphobia. It's not that anyone harbors any grudge, it's that they harbor no kind feelings. The idea that someone deserves whatever happens to them, for good or ill, is just an excuse to turn a blind eye to any harm that occurs to them. When the best response you get from people is indifference, you're probably not going to have a long and happy life.
I think Coraline has more passion than good judgment, but on the other hand. I'm glad someone is out there to raise these issues and take the resulting flak. I worry about what kind of similar discrimination I'm going to face. If this is what goes on in the enlightened liberal utopias we've all got a tough row to hoe.
At-will means "for basically any reason." PIPs are used to try and demonstrate cause so that collecting benefits is harder.
It's not always in these words, sometimes it's presented as "culture fit", which is a bit broader but "communication style" fits under it.
I mean, I'd agree that someone at some point in time has used a PIP for this reason, but I'd strongly argue that this is wrong.
I'd argue a much more charitable and accurate description of why PIP's are used is to protect the company from a litigious former employee. They are designed to show that they company tried to help the fired employee before they took the final action of letting them go.
Maybe you've worked with better employers than I have, but it's pretty much been an open secret in a few different places I've worked, both inside and outside of tech.
Or, sometimes it's not a PIP, but something similar. Many fast food places have a policy where if you're underperforming, your hours get reduced. If they want to fire you, they don't fire you: they give you one, four-hour shift a week at the slowest possible time of the week. That way, they didn't fire you; you quit, and so you don't get unemployment, etc. If you don't show up for your shift, then you're fired with cause, and so you don't get unemployment, etc.
Also, in academia, there is a similar phenomenon for letters of recommendation that can actually really hurt your chances if you are not familiar with the intricacies. For example, if you are applying for an American position, letters are expected only shower praise upon the applicant. But for European positions, letters are intended to be a straightforward and honest assessment of the applicant--highlighting both the good and the bad (e.g. [0]).
I'm not trying to justify this action by any means. I can just see how it may come about.
[0]: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/53876/postdoc-r...
I've seen others performance planned for being complete jerks to others on a repeated basis.
Please remember that no amount of genius should make up for being an asshole. Some companies don't take this to heart, for sure, but those that actually want a good culture, do.
So yeah, regardless of this case (i don't have enough facts), but i've definitely seen people fired/etc for not being able to communicate empathetically.
One was very critical of other peoples' work, and would not take criticism well herself. She would make everything very personal. Despite being a junior engineer with limited experience or seniority, she would criticize more senior peoples' work in highly personal ways. Think "how could you be so stupid as to write this garbage" instead of "this is bad code". One day she received constructive criticism from her team lead (one of the nicest guys I've ever met) and instead of accepting it, she dug in and insulted him. He stood his ground and refused to +1 the PR without her change. He escalated it to his manager. She was given a formal warning. A week later she made another personal attack-as-criticism and was fired later that day.
The other was an obsessive perfectionist. He would withhold +1s from PRs until they were perfect. Given that these were PRs on existing systems, this meant in practice that if you modified code in a poorly-written existing file, he would refuse to +1 it until the entire file was rewritten, ground-up, to be high quality. One day, his dragging his heels turned a four hour ticket into a week-long tar pit. This caused an important deadline to slip. The next day he was let go.
----
In both cases they were cool people who I really liked. The first person was one of my closest friends in the office at the time. She was really cool, and while she was kind of abrasive, for the most part it was just like RMS-lite style assholitry. Nothing that out of the ordinary. The second guy, he may have been an obsessive perfectionist but his code was _perfect_. The stuff he wrote was by far the best anybody on our teams did.
But teams are more than the sum of their parts. These people might have been good individually, but their being hard to work with caused the whole team to suffer. So they got fired.
Maybe it's not super fair to them. Maybe they have their baggage or there's a culture shock (She was recent immigrant from China, he from Austria). But at the end of the day we are paid lots and lots of money to do important work, and if people are causing significant obstacles to us getting our jobs done, they're going to lose theirs. That's life
Now, if you're asking whether or not "lack of empathetic communication" is a real thing worth firing somebody over, that depends. Certainly interpersonal abuse is something that can happen and can rise to the level where it becomes a good reason to fire somebody.
In this case, we largely do not see most of the communication that took place. We really only have her word to take that it wasn't that bad or not worth being fired over. We also don't see much in this story about how her behavior affected the people around her. So, I wouldn't draw a conclusion on whether or not the firing over "empathetic communication" is appropriate.
Not generally true, it varies on a state by state basis.
It _is_ generally true of California tho, so carry on
It feels dumb to me but I know for a fact that some people who are quick to take offense ease when they see it.
How I look when I reply: :|
Irony, sarcasm and humor don't scale well.
(But then.. I have a terse style myself. But I'm glad we're discussing this.)
Like there's a spectacular outage and the terse person is updating someone important that's already irritated. Then, sometime later, another interaction with the same person...but they now have some bias.
(It has a name, but I keep forgetting it.)
In my experience, this is equally applicable to social interactions and works surprisingly well.
Can't really say I'm expecting someone like that to be low friction.
Never really wanted to use opal before, but if this is who is behind it...
http://meh.schizofreni.co/random/lulz/2016/01/08/tales-from-...
I read about the first 50 replies or so and found myself agreeing with the 'meh' user, but after reading that blog post, it seems aredridel was on to something...
She doesn't care about said project, but to promote the idea of political cleansing in open source.
Meh's comments, while to course, are correct in the sentiment that she isn't really contributing anything, but is instead attacking. HOWEVER, he should of said "because you won't" rather than "can't", since that's just an unjustified attack on her competence as a dev.
They find a project they're associated with. They go on it's github repo and they start an issue with a title of "Transphobic maintainer should be removed from project". Not "Potentially transphobic maintainers and how their association with the project hurts it in the long run". Not even "My feelings were hurt after I interpreted some comment of one of the maintainers in some way, please let's discuss". No, they simply demanded removal of someone, based on an, at best, ambiguously "transphobic" twitter comment.
And you're here telling me that person isn't the one with the problem.
This kind of bias is demonstrated over and over in studies, even (and in some cases, especially) among people who are highly educated and even forewarned about the study objectives.
The idea that the best way to fix biases in favor of wealthy white men is to add new biases against wealthy white men is crazy.
> The people who generally push against that "meritocracy" are the ones who benefit from it not being implemented in the first place.
What if the biases are deep-rooted and subtle and difficult to address without destroying productivity with endless ceremony? What if the biases exist beyond that single organization's control, but still affect them? If the waves are pushing you in one direction, pointing your bow slightly in the opposite direction might really be the right thing to do.
> The idea that the best way...
Few think it's the best way. The problem is, eliminating systemic bias will take a long time. During that time, new victims of that bias will continue to be created. If the introduction of a contrary bias helps more people than it harms, is that really so crazy?
Instead you could do some research on your own and find the information that's out there.
People who are unaware of the existence of the problem can use a search engine and read up on it.
I suggest that if you want to change minds and improve the status quo, you should engage these people who you find tiresome anyway. Not to persuade them, but the third-parties who will read the discussion and could be persuaded. Or, if that's too much work, simply don't engage, if only so you don't sabotage someone else's effort to persuade.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712546
I can tell you right now, though, the people who will keep demanding sources and want to re-litigate even the existence of discrimination/bias, in every single thread which mentions the topic, will not be convinced by providing them walls of links and sources. They've already made up their minds, and the only thing they'd do in response is exactly what I said: nitpicks and non sequiturs and "well, I don't find that convincing..." and so what's the point? If someone is genuinely and truly unaware, they can use Google. If someone just wants to try to discredit a basic established fact about the world, it's not my job to coddle them or make them feel good about it or "engage" with them or make them feel that they were properly listened to and had their concerns addressed, any more than it would be my job to do that for someone who denies evolution.
All I am saying, is that their are third parties who you are not interacting with, who could be persuadeable, who will read that frustration and are going to find it alienating rather than persuasive, and therefore you end up creating more people in the world who think there is no real problem.
It may be more constructive to simply disengage if you feel that exasperated by it. Both for persuading other people and for your own sanity. That's all I am saying.
Now, imagine that every time you say something which even tangentially mentions evolution -- let alone something where the main topic is evolution -- some of those people immediately pop up with "got sources for that?" / "gonna need a source on that" / "citation needed for that claim" / etc.
And imagine that for a while you did go to the trouble of linking up primers on the topic, but every time you did that, they just responded with non sequiturs and attempts to nitpick little details of the primers and parlay that into discrediting the entire idea of evolution.
Now, imagine you've been living in that world, every day, for years. You might well finally decide "you know what, it's not my job to pause every single time I post a comment online and have to re-prove the theory of evolution to anyone and everyone who demands it; evolution is a basic fact we shouldn't have to debate at this point, and people who genuinely want an intro to it for some reason can find one on their own".
Now, imagine that if you do make that decision, you'll be branded an asshole for "complaining" instead of just posting a link. You'll be told that these folks are "just asking for sources". Or any of a large number of other explanations which don't jive with what you see day in and day out, but if you try to explain that you'll be told you're projecting, or making it up, or arguing with a strawman, and this is a sign that you are not trustworthy (which in turn just reflects back on the theory of evolution -- after all, if this is the kind of person who stands up as its representative...).
Imagine all of that, but change the topic from the theory of evolution... to the topic of this thread. And imagine how tired everyone is of the "got a source for that?" brigade. Regardless of whether the person asking has the noblest purest intentions in the history of noble purity, we're talking about basic stuff about the society we live in and the industry we work in, and if someone is genuinely unaware of it and genuinely curious, they can use Google on their own.
I don't need to imagine, I do live in such a world, and here's what I do:
I either don't bother commenting on the first place, or I keep some links handy so that if someone genuinely asks I have something ready to share.
Surely passing a simple link is easier than what you're doing.
To assume that I have some sort of hidden agenda behind this question is rather paranoid from my perspective (and came as a surprise), as you didn't know anything about my intentions.
I wish we could have discussions like this in the wider community without people going knee-jerk against the idea of it, itself.
I'd be willing to accept that a lot of companies here are nepotistic. I'd even be willing to accept that they cloak their nepotism in the rhetoric of meritocracy. But I have to draw the line at people opposing the idea itself. I have a hard time understanding how anyone could even hold that position. Don't you want the best people, at least in principle?
If people were more nuanced in these things we could hold discussions like "yes, this is a great ideal, but it gets corrupted. The problem is the corruption, not the ideal"
http://www.wnyc.org/story/268598-struggle-reclaim-word-jihad...
I think the word meritocracy is in a similar situation. It's an interesting and useful concept, but the word tends to get thrown around by people you probably don't want to get associated with or confused with, so if you want to be heard and understood maybe try a different word.
So you just say "don't do <<idea>>" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on.
That's a terrible plan because it blanket dismisses a rational and widely accepted idea without explaining why or even forcing you to think about it.
How about you at least take the courtesy to explain why you're dismissing something that at face value provides a better solution than what you're suggesting. Even with its problems, you need to explain why your suggested solution is better than meritocracy.
I personally at least am yet to see a better alternative to meritocracy, despite its definite problems. In my opinion all proposed alternatives seem to introduce more unfairness and problems of their own.
Amongst almost everybody I know, "meritocracy" still means it's dictionary definition. If the definition is contested, I don't understand why other peoples' definitions of it take priority over the official one
http://contributor-covenant.org/
"Marginalized people also suffer some of the unintended consequences of dogmatic insistence on meritocratic principles of governance. Studies have shown that organizational cultures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality. People with "merit" are often excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions. Meritocracy also naively assumes a level playing field, in which everyone has access to the same resources, free time, and common life experiences to draw upon. These factors and more make contributing to open source a daunting prospect for many people, especially women and other underrepresented people. (For more critical analysis of meritocracy, refer to this entry on the Geek Feminism wiki.)
An easy way to begin addressing this problem is to be overt in our openness, welcoming all people to contribute, and pledging in return to value them as human beings and to foster an atmosphere of kindness, cooperation, and understanding."
AFAIK the word "merit" doesn't appear at all in the actual Code of Conduct.
Meritocracy is still the best we have. It may be flawed, yes, but there exists no superior alternative. It's likely possible to get away with a few minor tweaks - but there doesn't seem to be anyone looking into what exactly those could be, instead they shit on the concept without providing any viable alternative.
It seems like many of the things she and others mention are not necessarily bias in individuals in the workplace, but "resources, free time, life experiences" - which seem much easier to attack and if done fully I think could help make up for other biases too. I think the best bet honestly is stuff like Black Girls Code where they try to get people up to speed in order to compete successfully by merit.
Maybe not. In many situations you want the best team, and the best team is not necessarily the team that has the most top flight individual contributors.
The best teams I've been on seem stronger than the sum of their individual members, and I've definitely been on teams I rate less highly that had some very strong individual contributors.
Along these lines, I found this article interesting: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-mak...
I mean like honestly, if you don't care _in principle_ about the quality of your staff, how are you deciding who to hire?
* Able to clearly communicate technical concepts. Evidenced by seeing displaying in wiring logical ordering of thought, separation of complex pieces into smaller, less complicated, and clearly delineated pieces, effective and actuate command of technical vocabulary.
* Able to code. Evidenced by watching them code.
* Familiarity with the data structures and algorithmic approaches native to the problem domain. Evidenced by discussion around that domain, perhaps a psuedo-code exercise with a relevant problem paired with discussion of design tradeoffs of different approaches.
* Understanding of the cross-cutting concerns related to maintainable software: testing, documentation, modularity, etc. Evidenced by Socratic discussion of said topics. "Given this problem common to sustainable software development, what would you do/have you done?"
I still believe in the value of meritocracy. Actually pursuing meritocracy solves a lot of the inclusivity problems we think we have. The problem is that people are inherently biased and unless we are purposeful in accounting for these biases it is easy to weave then into any system you design, no matter what the name or started goals.
Doesn't change the value of an actual meritocracy. Just highlights one of the challenges of being human.
All of these can be objectively measured to a degree if you actually care to take the time:
* Logical ordering of thought: identify and diagram the main ideas in the text. Identify transitions in the text. Identify explicitly named connections between pieces. Multiple people can do this and expect to have a high degree of similarly in their results.
* Separation of components: similarly identify and diagram the components they list by name, the relationships the identify by name, the responsibilities they identify by name.
* Technical vocabulary: list all of the technical terms. Compare their usage against a dictionary.
* Ability to code: run their code. Does it complete and produce the expected output? This is absolutely objective. You can add further constraints and retain absolute objectivity: does it complete within a certain time, stay within a certain memory budget, stay within a certain cyclomatic complexity threshold, have a certain percentage of test coverage, etc.
* Familiarity with data structures and algorithms common to the problem domain: list the major constraints of the problem domain, list the data structures according to feature which addresses the constraints, similarly list algorithms. Compare to the candidate's answers. How many of the major concerns did they address? How many of the applicable data structures/algorithms did they know? Did they volunteer anything new and were they able to explain how it addressed the problem constraints?
* Understanding of the cross-cutting concerns. This could almost be a checklist. I would make it a little more involved. As a mentioned, Q&A, see what solutions they present, but to have a quantifiable metric we can identify major components and identify the major concerns each of those addresses, see how many the candidate reached, give bonus points for value concerns they addressed that we didn't.
I'm sure if I spent more time I could expand both of these lists.
I will concede that this is still subjective in many ways, especially in the interviewers choices of what is "correct" ( what are the problem constraints, etc.) and what parts of the answers after important.
In that regard I will concede to you that there is an ultimately subjective nature to most of this, because deciding what is valuable has an element of subjectivity, but that is going to be true of pretty much any pursuit outside of pure mathematics (and I'm not convinced we have entirely objective values there either). However, once we have decided what we value it's possible to eliminate a lot of the subjectivity from measuring it. In most interview processes it's not a lack of ability to be objective, it's a lack of concern about being objective.
And actually, I'm not too bothered by that. A healthy meritocracy does not require absolute objectivity. What it requires is an explicit statement of what the values are and a transparent means of evaluating people against those values, and but according to any other values. The values can be subjective. The evaluation can be subjective. As long as the values are known and the evaluation process is transparent it can function as intended. Even better, by clearly communicating the values of the system you send a strong signal to others so the can determine if your organization is something they want to be a part of.
Objectivity is a good tool to help maintain that transparency. But I'm not worried so much about the subjectivity of it as I am hidden values and opaque evaluations tied to things that should be irrelevant according to the stated values.
Defining the "best people" is _obviously_ subjective. _People_ are subjective. There isn't just one "best"-- there is a set of "bests" that you can strive for. Just like the above example, it depends on your requirements, your priorities, etc.-- but most importantly, it doesn't need to be objective to work well, which brings us full circle to:
> "Best people" can mean the best team.
If you prioritize teamwork among individual contributors, this is what best people would imply.
The awesome part about a capitalist system is that companies have the freedom to experiment with these configurations of how they define "best". GitHub may define it differently from you, but that doesn't make their definition less valid.
Meritocracy is an idea, not a specification-- there is no one true meritocracy implementation. The discussion needs to start from there.
Im not convinced it does. If you want to say meritocracy says merely that we should try to hire the best people all things considered then no-one would disagree. The disagreement is precisely about which things it's appropriate to consider.
Typically meritocratic systems in practice make the assumption that it is possible to determine merit outside the context of a specific team. I think this assumption is highly suspect. Merit is not a fixed characteristic of the individual but rather an emergent property of them in their context and in relationship with those around them.
And what about in reverse? What if, rather than finding the "best", we merely have a metric/s that weed out the worst? If I remove the bottom 15% effectively, and replace them with average performers, then the net gain is massive, especially as each extra bug introduced is a massive time sink for any team, and poor developers are a massive cause of that.
What I am claiming is that work is generally done by teams and optimising for high performing and highly capable teams is not the same as optimising for high performing and highly capable individuals (my understanding of what most people mean by 'meritocracy').
It's not merely word games. I've observed poorly performing teams built entirely of highly capable people. That kind of dynamic can hobble a company.
There are professional sports franchises who go out and just throw money at "the best" players in their leagues. And the track record of doing that is pretty mixed; it turns out that just hiring a bunch of top individuals easily loses to putting together a group of players who are each objectively "worse" but whose play as a team is superior.
HOWEVER, I will say that, rather than a great team, strategic / tactical innovation can cover for flaws. The Sydney Swans pioneered "flooding" and made a grand final with a sub-standard team. Next season though, the league caught up and the Swans did poorly. It wasn't the team or the players that got there, rather it was a tactical innovation, and that is usually short lived.
In similar ways, a coding change - new library, microservices etc can all be short term gains. Ultimately, though, when everyone starts using those tactics, what you want is the best people, fullstop.
You're disagreeing with something I never said.
Imagine you're a baseball GM. You decide to build a winning roster by taking an unlimited amount of money, and then identifying the statistically best left fielder, the statistically best center fielder, the statistically best right fielder, and so on through all the field positions. You also identify the five statistically best starting pitchers, etc., and sign all of them.
There are franchises which try this "just sign a bunch of superstars, they have to win because they're so good" approach, and the track record of that approach is very, very mixed. But "just sign a bunch of superstars" is basically how tech companies claim they try to hire.
"Chelsea were so happy with N'Golo Kante that they sent Leicester flowers to say thank you for selling him to them."
So you can be a productive coder or a good presenter or whatever but by themselves, these are incomplete metrics. If you happen to also be an a*hole, you are probably an overall liability.
An even more useless metric, though, is your specific flavour of sexuality or your skin colour. None of these count as qualifications in any sense, and if management if measuring these things I'd be wary of their sense of judgement.
Jew professor: let's take 9 Jews and 1 Russians
Conservative professor: let's take 9 Russians and 1 Jew
Liberal professor: let'ts take 5 Jews and 5 Russians
Eldest professor: you are all bloody nationalists! Let's take 10 best musucians!
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122417714422...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
I got a new computer. Where news.ycombinator.com hasn't been set to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts yet. So I wanted to check what changed in the last year or so...
And your post reminded me why I stopped visiting here. Thanks.
Merits are important in engineering. If our merit measurements are low resolution, enhance them.
I don't care what team members look or sound like as long as they are good.
But there are such metrics. For example:
* "I implemented feature X, which increased CTR by Y% thus increasing revenue by Z"
* "New compression scheme reduces bandwidth usage by this much, allowing team B to implement their new feature without worrying about badnwidth usage too much"
* "Team C, who uses our library, needed urgent help investigating a performance issue. I dove in and found that the interface we were providing them didn't allow the most efficient usage; designed, tested and deployed an alternative, which resulted in team C being satisfied with performance"
I could keep going with these examples (I'm paraphrasing these from some actual work my colleagues did). My point is, it's pretty easy to measure merit in earned dollars, shipped features, fixed bugs, saved engineering hours, and resource usage. Those metrics are concrete and public.
Unless you're fixing tens of thousands of bugs I don't think you're going to have a good sample size to judge the output of 2 people based on just how many bugs they've closed.
This can also be gamed ie. pick up easier bugs to appear more productive, open bugs for small issues you notice yourself and fix, and this has the byproduct that real work never gets done.
Rewrites, infrastructure, code reviewers, mentoring. No earned dollars, no "features" shipped, good luck measuring "saved engineering hours".
There are no objective measures of productivity in the majority of cases for tech workers.
which could be really important if that single character was a decimal point that was screwing up sscanf in a european locale :-)
obviously, impact of the fixed bugs should be taken into account. It's pretty easy to measure too, by things like:
* is this bug affecting many customers? * is it affecting just one, but a really important one? * is this bug release-blocking?
etc.
If you try to game it, it will become very obvious.
> Rewrites, infrastructure, code reviewers, mentoring
Infrastructure is a feature in and of itself. Besides, doing things like improving a build system to reduce build times, or streamlining code review workflow has clear measurable impact. Every rewrite must have an observable measurable impact, otherwise it is simply not worth doing. Your mentees' performance is an excellent proxy to measure your quality as a mentor. Again, all of these can be assessed without much hand-waving.
Code reviews shouldn't even count towards your performance. It's just something that you have to do. (though arguably, if you have to do a lot of code reviews, then it's a clear signal that you're a valuable person on the team who knows a lot of detail about the system).
> There are no objective measures of productivity in the majority of cases for tech workers.
I think there clearly are, and I just listed some of them. Sometimes they're hard to boil down to a single number, but in most cases you can easily tell who's doing meaningful work.
I'm not sure that's "easy to measure" since how do you know how many hours have been saved without doing it the "slow" way first?
> earned dollars
Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs or implementing flashy new features but is providing good mentoring to the team, writing onboarding documentation, helping them understand the large-scale ramifications of their changes, etc., is essentially invisible to "metrics" yet providing a vital role.
Like I said, not always easy to boil down to a concrete number, but you can always find good proxies. Fixed a problem that caused service to trigger alarms in the middle of the night? Saved engineering hours. Wrote a library that several teams use? Saved engineering hours. Even your example, writing documentation, saves engineering hours.
> Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs [...]
How would you be able to do any of that if you're not doing meaningful work on the system?
I like to think about Neurosurgery to illustrate: if you need a tumor removed from your brain, would you rather have the surgeon be a privileged, elite surgeon from Harvard, or some random dude from the streets?
We should be happy that we are able to produce elite Neurosurgeons, and strive to give more people the opportunity (including random dudes from the street). Attacking elite Neurosurgeons is completely counterproductive.
Academia usually garants a minimum of performance - i will give you that, it is no indicator for a maximum.
Well I guess if he performed zero surgeries then he automatically gets 100% success rate.
Knowledge on adjunct fields and skills can accumulate in a person over time, thus allowing them to perform similar feets.
Like, a bright pupil might learn from a master, if it is not intended. It has happend- since medieval times- apprenticeships, although a attack on caste-think can happen today. Yes, they did not jump through the money hoops, that are suppossed to keep them away- but some of them studied what happens around them. Those servant peoples.. they might not be automatons.
If it had a drop-out quota similar to comp sci or math, i might actually consider your elitism a valid opinion. Post all the meritocracy nonsense you need to post, but deep down you know, if you had the money and a mediocre kid- you would help him through and put additional money hoops up behind him to jump through.
The irony, that all the others doing the same thing, have you lay on a metal table, beeing cut open by maybee not the best person for the job, it never reaches escape velocity.
Good code speaks for itself, and competent programmers will quickly recognize you.
I think the main objection to "meritocracy" is that often there is no real meritocracy, and people use it as a way to ignore claims that the place isn't a meritocracy.
Organisation: We're a meritocracy! Member: I'm getting unfairly treated based on race/gender/etc. Org: That's impossible, we're a meritocracy!
> In the Ruby world, we insist that “Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice,” ignoring the sexist statements he has made with regard to diversity outreach efforts. We write off Linus Torvalds’ dismissal of diversity as an “unimportant detail” and justify it based on the utility of his creations. But why is it that we can proudly refuse to use software created by corporations whose often aggressive business policies we disagree with, but continue to adopt software written by sexists, racists, homophobes, transphobes?
I feel that's pretty close to directly calling Matz a sexist. Later she proposes a Code of Conduct for Ruby so that there's a robust process for punishing sexism[2]. As far as I understand, Matz' tweet would have counted as an offence.
Also, while her Contributor Covenant seems like it strives to make GitHub interactions more civilised, Caroline has a public Twitter account on which she screenshots people who disagree with her for her followers to sneer at (current, harmless example: [3]). Inexplicably (to me), this behaviour is fine by the logic of the CC. I'd say it's the highway to emotional escalation.
Nothing of this invalidates her viewpoints, but her approach of working for change is more "take no prisoners" than "low friction".
[1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of... [2] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004 [3] https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/882735106070376451
If you encounter attitudes from people that are hostile towards you, you can either speak up and allow them to correct themselves (or double-down) or be silent and give your tacit approval.
>Was politely calling out a data scientist on a problematic and transphobic survey answer a demonstration of lack of empathy?
How presumptuous. Ever thought that maybe the person putting it together didn't know any better? What does framing oneself as the victim accomplish here?
In addition, this is hilariously ironic given that GitHub employed (still employs?) people who actively promote racism against white men (and women): http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...
How would you answer her core question of whether or not the comment she made is appropriate?
In short, calling the statement in question transphobic is correct.
In TDD, do we talk about a unit test succeeding because I intended for it to fail and it did? No, we say it failed because the actual result is red. I didn't fail, but the test sure did.
Intention doesn't change the impact of communication; if the intent doesn't match the actual outcome, what it means is that the author probably wanted to change it.
Then what does it imply, that the comment has a phobia of or holds hate for trans people?
If I call your post autistic, does that not imply I think less of you for making it?
"What flavor of cake do you prefer? Chocolate, vanilla, or sheetcake?"
the feedback coming back as...
"'Sheetcake' is not a flavor. Sheetcake may be vanilla, chocolate, red velvet, lemon-poppyseed... If you want to know if a survey respondent likes sheetcake, you need to explicitly ask that question."
... it does seem kinda grating but not overtly so. It could have been nicer but also could have been more rude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portlandia_(TV_series)
She doesn't say they were. She says the question as phrased was. That's a big difference.
One of the critiques I often got was to be more gender inclusive in my speaking. Which a lot of people do now (re: replacing he/she with they). From what I read, it seemed like this person would provide feedback that would either be ignored or the contributor/employee/whomever would actively retaliate against.
It really isn't how you mean something, it is how you make someone feel. If you are trying to run an inclusive community, that distinction is very important.
All of the "accidental racism" of years past have now become "accidental -phobic".
It's not what's in people's hearts that counts. Someone can truly believe that blackface is not racist, but that doesn't mean that it's not racist when they do it.
I don't agree. Any definition from a reputable source on the term "transphobic" implies or directly states that transphobia is, specifically, a fear or dislike towards trans people. Not researching what transgender means or what a survey should include for genders in the year 2017 may be stupid or ignorant but I just don't see how it meets the bar for being "transphobic", especially when the person who is making the error of omission has no problem with trans people!
As an LGBT person I really think that people need to stop inferring malice where there is none. Not only does it not accomplish anything, it simply aggravates people who would otherwise be friends and allies and creates further divisions. If I pointed out every single time a friend or family member accidentally misgendered someone or said something that I thought was not 100% PC, I would be spending a lot of time alone.
Further, she provided the straightforward, no none sense feedback that most people here advocate for, especially when the issues of someone like Linus’ gruffness and straight up meanness comes up. Here we have a story of someone doing just that, without the meanness, and everyone is dog piling on her.
At some point, I have to wonder whether or not the people who are complaining about these easily debunked things are discussing the topic in good faith.
Seems to me she directly suggested the improvement, after explaining both the reason the existing version was bad and the reason the improvement was better (the two reasons being the same):
Quoting directly from the issue she raised, which was not merely quoted but emphasized as a pull-quote in the article: “‘Transgender’ is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question.”
She said what was wrong, but did not say what was right. Explicitly. To me, it's an example of "Guess what I'm thinking!" Or more famously, that UI designer who said "Don't make me think!"
Granted, a "data scientist" should already know how to survey, be open to constructive criticism.
I personally would have no idea how to ask the question. Though I'm not a data scientist, I can use google.
http://www.hrc.org/resources/collecting-transgender-inclusiv...
https://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/how-to-write-survey-...
I don't have a horse in this race. I only chimed in because I'm regularly unintentionally offending people, and have been trying to adapt.
> If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question.
How is this not saying what is right?
She explicitly stated both that including “transgender” as a gender identity option was wrong, and that the right way was to ask about transgender status as a seperate question.
Belated personal story. I know multiple transgendered persons (friends, family, at work). So I'm at least partially familiar with the issues. Many of my friends work on LBGTQ policy issues, to which I've given money. I've even marched in our local Gay Pride parade.
My bestie recently told me she's now dating a transman. I looked askance. I had never heard that term before. I wondered if she meant transvestite, transgender, transexual... She got upset. She thought I was judging.
Nope. I just didn't know what transman meant. Oh. She explained and everything was cool again.
Though this is not my cause, I am here to help. I'm an ally for equal rights, justice, responsibility, and so forth.
Just tell me what words you want me to use.
With examples, like this: http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/census-lgbt-d...
Wrapped with pleasantries, like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704542
The only reason I now have any notion of an appropriate phrasing is because I was curious enough to seek examples. (Unlike the aggrieved data scientist?)
If nothing else, this mini-thread illustrates the challenges with communication, even when all parties have the best of intentions.
She said EXACTLY what to change. She was not rude about it. To try and nitpick that away leads me to believe you have an agenda to push.
The key point is that this is likely the first time these two individuals had communicated - she effectively introduced herself to this person by saying "you are wrong", or "your work is incorrect". This isn't a professional way in a business to talk to someone. Even a simple greeting and explanation to say "I have some experience in this area, and here's some suggestions that would improve it" is infinitely better than the framing she gives: > I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake > sadly opened an issue referencing the question The emotions portrayed there give a good indication to the tone that the writing likely gave - instead of being constructive it could easily be perceived as hostile.
Yes, I think the data scientist over reacted. But I don't think her tone or approach was at all appropriate either.
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
She was disappointed. She explained her problem with the survey in a non-judgmental way- "This question is based on a false premise, the correct way to ask this question is X". I don't see how she could have handled this particular interaction any better.
It's not fair, and bright people very often feel like morons adding exclamation points and smiley faces made out of punctuation to their written comms. but trust me when I say that it can TOTALLY obviate a whole bunch of grief and is, I think, incumbent on you the communicator to improve just as much as it's incumbent on the recipient to not react emotionally.
EDIT: Just saw your comment below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704575). Makes perfect sense, and I see her point now.
> "Hi! I have a suggestion on question #14. I think we can improve this to be more inclusive by replacing the options w ith "male", "female", "gender queer" "non-binary", (...) Since transgender people may or may not associate with a gender, we have be a little careful when asking for a gender. Hope this helps!"
When I write emails, I always pretend to "YELL" the email in the most dramatic way possible. If it sounds potentially confrontational yelling what I am saying, it could be intimidating for some people.
By defusing the way you talk to others, you make them feel more comfortable around you. The more comfortable people feel around you, the more they trust you and listen to what you say. It's a win-win :)
Some data scientist made a small survey faux pas, and now they're being called out in a lengthy blogpost about how bad and un-inclusive the company was to work for.
How can anyone work with this person without feeling like they're standing on eggshells? How must the woman who wrote the survey who was just doing her job feel today if she reads this?
I read it as an indictment of the company and its procedures. The data scientist was not even named. The bulk of the post is indicting management, HR, company culture, and insane bureaucratic nightmares designed to push someone out.
So they should have been, being accused of transphobia is a serious accusation. Anyone accused of anything like transphobia, homophobia, islamaphobia or any other of these discriminations is absolutely right to escalate the matter straight away to their manager or HR.
> The data scientist was not even named
She was gendered, how many data scientists work at GH? How many are female? She was narrowed down enough that she may as well have been named IMHO and transphobic is a serious mark on her character. Especially from someone who has tried to push people off projects before for being transphobic.
The "transphobia" judgement by the poster comes later in the post, and it is addressed to the question itself, not the author of the question.
This person mentions multiple times that meritocracy is a bad idea, that promotion or reward based on merit should be done away with in order to promote diversity, e.g., racial/gender-based quotas.
This is a person who does not view competence as the primary trait to select for within a market, and is insisting here that competence be downplayed to make room for people with the correct melanin levels and/or chromosomes.
""What is your gender?" The multiple-choice options were "Male", "Female", and "Transgender". I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake, and sadly opened an issue referencing the question. The body of my issue read: "
Uh oh! The data scientist isn't up to date on the trends in gender studies and critical theory, better send her off to sensitivity training! Doesn't the data scientist who wrote the question know that gender is performative? Better get offended and make her apologize. Oh wait, that's exactly what the author does, like the bully she is.
I can't take a diary post like this, from someone interested in enforcing equity, littered with ideological axioms, promoting unscientific gender "theory", all the while playing the victim in the classic social justice style, with anything more than a giant boulder of salt.
She wasn't fired for that.
> This is a person who does not view competence as the primary trait to select for within a market, and is insisting here that competence be downplayed to make room for people with the correct melanin levels and/or chromosomes.
She wasn't fired for that either.
> Uh oh! The data scientist isn't up to date on the trends in gender studies and critical theory, better send her off to sensitivity training!
She was fired because GitHub alleged she was the insensitive one here. Do you agree?
I suspect the GP agrees, yes.
Meritocracy is not a replacement for proper management, and without proper management the idea of "meritocracy" reverts back to just being a popularity contest. If you don't have a good management system in place then identifying who "merits" promotion is extremely difficult and is often based not on how someone performs but how much they are liked by the decision makers of the company.
Worth noting that a typical "management system" simply re-enforces these "likeability" biases with a bunch of phony paperwork.
(Not that I didn't like this article. I came here to the comments kind of puzzled why it was flagged.)
The problem here wasn't that the data scientist was asking the wrong questions, it's that they were upset by someone stepping and offering an improved set of questions, and felt the need to complain to a manager instead of responding.
The Github management's decision of asking the author _never to communicate with this person again_ is even more bewildering.
Worse is the antipathy she directs to "white males", which destroys the goal of an inclusive environment.
Every story has two sides, would certainly wait for hearing what her team mates would have to say, but I suspect they will say nothing out of fear from the repercussion by SJW when expressing how it was to work with such person.
Nice bit of stigma there.
If nobody in our family is there to talk with him immediately when he demands, then something drastic happens such as burning parts of his body (e.g. nipples) or anything that forces our attention to focus on him.
Every week is a struggle, he dreams on becoming a world-known DJ and music is all he cares, but he is always on the edge of becoming a homeless because he is simply unable to hold a job (focus) or simply be nice to others, more often than not he becomes arrogant without real reason, which isolates him further.
Now that brother of mine is saying that he dreams about committing suicide like Kurt Cobain, because he considers himself a musician of the same level/type and I had to dismiss that thought by telling him that he first needs to have a world-wide hit. It's not good.
So, when reading the blog post with that description of the world against her (persecution), the mood swings, the clinical diagnosis of being bipolar. These are things I've had to endure for many years, because this is my brother and I care deeply for him.
But I'd certainly not be able to work side-by-side with a bipolar person as it would be affecting me emotionally and then professionally. At least with my brother I just see him on the weekends and through Facebook chat, not every single day and having to ask her things while the mood is not helping one bit.
This is why I've mentioned that we should wait to hear what her team mates will say (if saying anything at all).
I'm sorry your brother is going through hell right now, trust me I have been there. I know the burden it can put on friends and family, but you really shouldn't lump all people with mental illness like they are useless. If treated you wouldn't even know they are diagnosed.
You can contact me directly if you would like to chat about your brother. I know with treatment he can turn his life around. He just needs to do the work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704219 and marked it off-topic.
She sounds like a really toxic person to work with. I would say she sounds "problematic" to work with.
We all know how vengeful the culture of online shaming has become, so let's all keep that viciousness away from here.
If your company ever communicates this badly to you, it's time to question whether this company can be fixed.
"'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
For contrast, this reminds me of Gene Wilder's feedback about his Willy Wonka costume:
https://www.bustle.com/articles/181340-this-letter-gene-wild...
I now try to emulate this style, in every situation.
As for the triggered data scientist... Well. Whaddya gonna do? I guess my skin's thicker than most.
Enjoyed the letter you shared. Gene is truly missed.
Hey, have you seen the HRC's recommendations for surveying gender? I've used their guidelines in the past. Very helpful! http://www.hrc.org/resources/collecting-transgender-inclusiv...
TLDR: They suggest splitting the gender question into two parts.
As you know, this is a super important issue for me. Progress! Exciting! If you're busy, I'll make a pull request. Please let me know if I can help in any way. Thank you, Specialist"
I can't wait until we all start wearing thick, black, woollen coats in the summertime...
Sometimes the big problem I find is that in some companies people are just scared of each other that they fail to communicate.
Best places where I worked: people were to the point, they had healthy debates even with strong opinions.
Because empathy is important to communicating effectively. You're looking at the words, but you're not looking at phrasing and tone, which are just as important.
Try this exercise: read the sentence out loud to yourself. Taking a line out of Myers-Briggs, does it sound more perceptive or judging, to you, when read aloud?
To me it sounds judging, as if Coraline already has pre-conceived notions about the person she is communicating with. At the very least, it sounds unnecessarily defensive. The wording is definite, with no room for discussion. In fact, all I see in that wording is a mini "well, actually" lecture.
The reality is that she doesn't know if this was an intentional or unintentional oversight. People leave things out, forget to finish sentences, paint in broad strokes and fine-tune later. From the description, this likely wasn't in its final stages. Maybe it was going to get changed, or maybe it wasn't, but you need to start from the idea that the person on the other end of the sentence also wants the best results.
It's a nice idea to think that people should say whatever they want as long as it's the objective truth, but humans are humans, which means they are subjective and have feelings. I find that people are much more effective workers when they are attentive to the feelings of others.
Another phrasing which is probably just as effective, much less aggressive, and only slightly more wordy:
"Have you considered how people of different gender identities might engage with this question? Transgender people might be confused if they identify as both male (or female) and trans. Perhaps we can find a way to make this question a little less ambiguous for this class of people?"
Sure, the proposed solution is not directly in that sentence-- but that's kind of the point. You have to get on the same page before you start throwing out answers at people. Maybe the data scientist already knows this but just didn't communicate effectively-- otherwise you end up dangerously close to "well actually"ing someone who already knows the thing you're telling them.
In fact, to me, the weirdest part of the article is how ironic it is to see Coraline be so obtusely unaware of how unempathetic this kind of phrasing is, since she is so vocal about it on Twitter. It definitely strikes me as slightly hypocritical to see people arguing that we should be allowed to get straight to the point of a technical argument without any fluff or nicety. I believe this was the exact opposite argument being made from the same camp when Code of Conduct discussions were being had.
Yes, but that applies just as well to the data scientist--who, when she saw this comment, didn't do what any reasonable person would do and call up/message/whatever the coworker who made the comment and straighten out any confusion/misunderstanding, but instead went right to her boss and complained. That should not be the first resort--it should be the last resort. A little empathy on the data scientist's part would have led to: "Hm, that seemed abrasive at first glance, but she does have a valid point..."
I really don't see that much wrong with it as a comment.
its to the point and precise.
There are perhaps two failing:
o No offer to help o No opening for conversations
Is that a reason to block someone? I doubt it. However I'm not the data scientist, so who knows
- I was taught etiquette, to a large extent, in an online fiction workshop called Critters. There, critiques are all peer reviews, and diplomatic critiques are essential. I try to keep some of that friendly peer spirit in every review and issue I make.
> Because empathy is important to communicating effectively.
I learned the hard way that displaying empathy and applying sugarcoating are two very different things, back when I was conflating the former with the latter and ended up dismissing both in name of the latter (which made me sound like a pretentious prick), then trying to correct course and applying the latter in lieu of making use of the former (which made me sound political and manipulative).
> Try this exercise: read the sentence out loud to yourself.
To me it sounded like someone who is alarmed at a subject that matters to them and haphazardly made an assertive statement.
People generally can't stand assertive discourse as they perceive it as being judgemental, unless you take a chance at discovering them as well as give them a chance do discover you. Sugarcoating doesn't help with that, it's just trying to state the same thing in a roundabout, artificially lightened way, which most of the time ends up feeling heavy, gooey, pretenseful and manipulative, when what matters is the build-up, the foreplay if you will, leading to a common level of understanding. Ultimately this is all about people and openness, not facts and opinions. Being openly and genuinely kind, querying for people's thoughts and listening to them helps a lot in getting a point across, but it leaves you vulnerable to abusive personalities, also sometimes you really have to stand your ground. It's really tough to strike a balance.
I honestly don't know where truth lies in this exact matter but what I'm sure of is that when you have to second-guess your every words then the place is mentally exhausting and toxic in a terribly pernicious way as it makes you feel in constant danger and gradually destroys your self-esteem.
I disagree; mostly because of this last part.
> you need to explicitly ask that question.
This last part feels like a demand and is too forceful. Suggestion is more persuasive then demands. I agree with you the comment you replied too is a little too sugarcoated for my taste, but the basic structure seems good, suggesting an authoritative source to back up your concern is a good idea. Especially when you are commenting on something (the data scientist may not have known about her LGBT work) outside your field to someone who is in the field (making a survey).
With that said, I get like this too when I am deep in coding. This may not be an issue for technical topics where it can be proved that x would cause a crash. But, I would handle this differently for non-tech issues that are subjective.
But... the data scientist should have been used to this at a company full of programmers. Maybe she was the first to actually comment on the content of the work.
Still, the data scientist overreacted and should have handled it better. Assuming this is more or less the details we need to know.
> I find is that in some companies people are just scared of each other that they fail to communicate.
Keep in mind OP said she got hundreds of comments on her earlier work from all over the company. Maybe instead the female data scientist was very defensive because she got similar treatment in the past.
Like, the statement wasn't an opening for dialogue about or investigation into the best way to fulfill the work project. It went straight into making a power play. You can't discuss your way out of someone who's trying to control and gain power over you.
Beyond that, even though I'm generally an asshole, I try to be nice in PR comments. Like it or not, most devs have some amount of ego tied up in their code. So removing the sting with some sugar coating makes for a better chance of them listening.
None of this applies once I have a longer work relationship with the author.
There's treating someone respectfully and there's talking to them like they're a child. The fact that Silicon Valley is promoting this method of communication is just ridiculous.
How about we concentrate more on getting things done and less on so much sugar-coating that we all get diabetes.
Back then, I found Schopenhauer's tone incredibly pompous and condescending, but over the years I have come to appreciate it as one of the best explanations of what function politeness plays in social interaction:
"It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy."
What Schopenhauer says is that all politeness carries with it at least a kernel of insincerity, but that this is not a bad thing, quite the opposite - once we get past the idea that politeness is "phony", we can throw it around generously, and discover how much easier we get along with people we may not like very much. Consider politeness a kind of WD-40 for social interactions.
> so much sugar-coating that we all get diabetes.
I love the way you phrased that!
Being ultra sensitive keeps people around you on their toes and makes them think twice about everything they say.
I think running to a manager and complaining about being offended is the new way of bullying people.
I've never heard of a PIP working out and both the company and employee being happy -- maybe you only hear about the bad cases, but a PIP often seems to me like a cover your ass plan on the part of the company. They want to get rid of a person, but they're afraid of getting sued, so a PIP is a way to document why a person was fired in the case of litigation.
This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.
Because the PIP exists to to support the argument that the firing was not for a prohibited reason in the event that the employee charges that it was. “At-will” doesn't mean there aren't prohibited reasons for firing, and if you don't have any evidence for what the firing reason was, it doesn't take much evidence of an improper purpose to meet the “preponderance of the evidence” standard for civil litigation.
You could just document the behavior that makes them want to fire them ("you smell funny") and followups in an email, and call it a day after a week or so.
Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer :)
Documenting something that has no objective criteria does very little to defeat even slight evidence of another motive for firing where the proferred reason is purely pretextual.
> Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer
That's true; that cost is weighed against losing wrongful-termination lawsuits.
Also, very often formal PIPs follow undocumented informal ones that have the same purpose in reality that a formal one does on paper (but which avoid any adverse record for an employee you end up keeping), and the success criteria in the formal PIP are things the manager knows (to a fair certainty) the employee will not meet based on the informal one.
It's easy to turn your own logic back around on you. Since it's a more-or-less open secret that most PIPs are part of managed termination, every competent company that issues one knows they're running a huge risk of sabotaging their relationship with an employee by issuing one. There are lots of ways to manage improved performance from an employee without invoking the dreaded PIP. If the company merely wants to improve performance, they can issue MBOs or schedule a special series of 1:1s.
It's also easy to see why companies would issue PIPs despite potentially backing themselves into a corner when the targeted employee exceeds the stated expectations of the PIP. PIPs are how HR wants employees to be fired; they simple are the whole firing process. But that doesn't mean the people who actually write the PIPs know how to write them effectively. In Coraline's story, you have what reads to me like a pretty standard Kafkaesque PIP story: Github wanted her out, HR demanded they follow the standard process, they PIP'd her, the PIP didn't anticipate that Coraline would keep diligent records, and they were forced to go through contortions to pretend that it was the PIP that had been failed, rather than the "will" part of Github's "at-will employment".
FWIW, they've never been at any company i've managed at, or org i've belonged to :)
I certainly believe such companies exist, i'm not stupid. I just am not sure I believe they are as prevalent as you do.
The only question in the room (from either HR or the manager) has always been "how do we help this person get better".
In fact, there were cases a PIP was decided against because it wasn't going to be effective in helping.
We simply offered fork in the road instead.
As for "sabotaging relationships", in every successful PIP i've seen, the person is still working at the company years later. So ....
Apparently i'm just very lucky ;)
(which is, of course, within the realm of possibility)
More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :)
I'm going to strongly disagree with this one, but it's clear you and i will not agree about this.
"More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :) " I still believe think it's incredibly cynical to assume and write that the only purpose of a PIP is to formally make up evidence so you can fire someone. Precisely because i've worked at places where that is very specifically not the intent.
I guess, it doesn't really matter what the company calls this process or how it's presented, only how it is conducted. If you even mildly agree with the reasons presented for it, and you get positive feedback soon, it may work out, otherwise it most surely won't, regardless of the honesty behind it.
Not necessarily feasible in all situations. Sometimes a seasoned professional is only able to find out about culture fit after working there for a while.
Like Chris Lattner recently found out that he didn't belong at Tesla.
https://mobile.twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812...
Working like hell does not help if the effort is expended in the wrong place. That's where the first 1:1 will be a clear indicator if the correction is working or not - if it's not working it may be a failure of a honest PIP, or PIP dressing up a decision that has already been made. But honest PIPs exist, and sometimes they do work to solve a problem that was not being solved by itself.
Every single employee assumes that's the intent, and this is obvious to literally everyone.
While you are almost certainly correct about this, particularly from a pure risk mitigation standpoint, it's also somewhat self-fulfilling.
In the company I work for now, we genuinely try and recover people and we don't call it a PIP. But that is the exception for my personal experience over 20 years.
Our problem has never been a deliberately underperforming employee though - all of our issues to date have been people who start doing light slacking or who are too easily distracted/focus on the wrong things. Careful hiring and luck.
I have personally managed a serious problem employee who basically did not want to work and put a great deal of effort into actively avoiding work (writing long soliloquies in "documentation" instead of writing code or meaningful and appropriate docs); that was decidedly unpleasant and exacerbated by the (very large) company in question basically protecting certain classes of employees but refusing to add a resource. In the end it came down to me doing half of his job for him.
I have a friend who was put on a two-month PIP and was fired at the end of it. Two weeks before the end of his PIP, his boss scheduled a meeting with him to "clear some things up" and tell him that his PIP isn't going well.
The first thing I told my friend after that was "Dude, he just gave you your two weeks notice. Start ramping up the job search.". And at the beginning of his PIP, I told him that he was effectively being given two months notice.
He took my advice, by the way, and landed a new job less than two weeks after being fired.
Because sometimes it's a genuine desire for someone who is a good cultural fit to improve.
> If you're ever put on a PIP, get out -- it's a sign someone in the company doesn't want you there.
I've put folks on PIPs before (we don't call them that and we're much more straightforward about it than some employers I hear about who do), and had positive outcomes. The correct way of thinking about a PIP is:
1. We rely on people to work adequately-to-well by themselves 2. If they can't, we tell them they aren't and expect them to improve, 3. If they can't, we get more specific in our feedback and meet more often to discuss course corrections 4. If that doesn't work, because the continued presence of performance problems means we can't work productively as an employer/employee, we try to meet on a MUCH more regular basis than 1, 2, 3 in order to track and improve performance.
The best and most effective feedback is given in the moment: you are doing [x], here's how it has an impact on [y], here's what we think would be a better way. A PIP basically means you get more refined and structured feedback way more often.
I'm not saying that a PIP is a hugely positive or stress-free thing for anyone, but we try to assume positive intent and treat it as a great opportunity to help someone constructively get over a block to being a better contributor to our company.
There are of course some people who are a) actively assholes and b) genuinely oblivious to the rules applying to them. But you gotta believe they're in the tiny minority in the world.
Sometimes you might really like an employee, but _need_ them to improve on a few things for their employment to work. PIPs can definitely work in this circumstance.
Sometimes an employee is just incredibly toxic, and you may have reason to believe that they'll sue the company if you fire them without well-defined cause, (like the parent article here). In this case you are simply creating a paper trail to cover your ass legally. Of course the PIP is not going to "work" for the employee, they will be fired regardless as you want them gone. But the PIP may "work" for the company, by limiting liability.
At least where i've worked, they work out about 50% of the time. That tracks with the PIP's i've been involved in.
I can also give you anecdotes if you like, but i'm not sure you care.
"This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why. " I'd agree plenty of PIPs are written and delivered at various companies as a cover your ass.
But where I am, and what I do, they are used as a hopeful wakeup call with some formal tracking and feedback mechanism. Really. As you say, there is no point if there is no hope of improvement.
(I know how cynical HN is, of course, so i don't expect this to be believed)
Not the GP, but I care, and would like to hear them.
It's a simply stated requirement but difficult, I think, to fulfill. Often there's not a clear path forward to fix the problem(s). Employers don't always make this judgment of what needs to be done correctly. And, of course, there's always the possibility that the employee doesn't follow through on their end.
It was a revenge and scape goat PIP. An employee was leaving a team, so they decided to pin all the disasters of the preceding 6 months on him.
Of course they didn't raise the issue until after he had joined my team, but it was performance review time, and he'd been on their team for almost all of the review period, so they got to declare him "unsatisfactory" and force me to do the PIP process with him.
But he really was a good performer, and our team had worked with him before and knew the whole thing was bullshit, so he quite appropriately sailed through the PIP, and that allowed us to draw a line and say "it has been dealt with, the problem is resolved and whatever took place in that team has no relevance to his performance here".
It's the PIPs where the attitude is what you describe that are doomed to fail. And if everyone has that perception to begin with, I can't reach for PIPs as a tool anymore because the outcome is determined already. Vicious cycle.
This being said, I get where you're coming from. PIPs can be used to let people go. For good and not so good reasons. One way we try to defend against that is that if things aren't working, we do our best to move the employee you a different manager with an as-clean-as-possible shot after giving clear feedback and before the PIP. After all, people leave managers, not jobs.
PS: Not github. Also Europe, not US.
The third instance was "we wanna fire this person but if we see improvement then they can stay". This person stayed for almost a year.
In all cases the PIP was to create a paper trail to support an argument of firing for legal cause in a potential lawsuit.
My employer does a good job of this. We have a lot of women and transgender (not so many POC) employees, but we don't have any special inclusivity initiatives or outreach programs, nor do we officially inject any related ideology into the businessplace. The expectation is that you conduct yourself professionally, and that you exercise your own discretion; the other side of the coin is that you correct what you might think is morally/terminologically wrong (such as confusing biological sex with gender) as diplomatically and non-confrontationally as possible; assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them.
As for Coraline herself, I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here. In particular, I'm sure there is more to the "non-empathetic communication style" than the data scientist and other related incidents. Not to be a presumptive asshole, but I do get the impression from this kind of expose that she might be difficult to work with.
> assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them.
Especially big on this. Nobody can read minds, so when people make mistakes, there is no winning tactic other than to assume good intent.
It's a big company the whole thing can't just be a frat house there must at least be some percentage of decent people trying to do a job that are now being told there is something wrong with them.
(Not to mention the whole idea of a remote worker involved in any sort of culture change is utterly absurd)
I suspect you will find yourself publicly involved in another kind of justice sphere by accident.
That said, there is something to your hesitancy. I did a big part of my education in the social justice sphere, and while I believe in pretty much all of the core theories, in practice I don't think most activists have much of a plan of attack for tech companies. That's partly because they don't really get much practice, because companies are reluctant to give them power, and, as this story shows, quick to give up if results aren't progressing as expected.
Your solution—give up on that crew entirely—sort of solves the problem, I guess.
But my solution is to keep trying to study and talk and figure out what a good methodology would be for applying the core social justice theories (everyone has valuable compentencies, demographics are a useful signal, other realities exist than yours, consent matters, etc) in a tech corp setting productively.
The thing about strict professionalism is that it avoids the problems of bro-culture while simultaneously preventing issues from blowing up.
As of now, Github has pretty much alienated everybody. They've pissed of activists by firing Coraline and some of the stuff they've done in the past. They've pissed off "broflakes" by some of their other more recent cultural changes. But now they're starting to piss off people who may or may not care about social justice, but who definitely don't want the defining topic in the OSS community to be social justice. I think this is a game you can only win by refusing to play.
What does this mean? I've never heard the term.
Tbh,i don't really understand the "brogrammer" thing either. I got my CS degree, then was at Google, and then the first employee at a tiny startup and none of those experiences gave me any inkling of what the brogrammer stereotype might be. Isn't the programmer stereotype literally the opposite of a "bro"?
It's meant to be a portmanteau of "bro" and "snowflake" (implying more or less that someone sees themselves as a special snowflake, and gets upset when not treated that way).
Like both the words it comprises, I find it's more of a disparaging name for people the speaker dislikes, than a label for a discernible subgroup of people.
Any nail that sticks up will get pounded down, someone somewhere will be offended no matter what. So just do your thing and ignore the haters.
Edit: To the skeptics, Starbucks was among the first to extend health insurance to domestic partners, and I'm a big fan of their CARE programs. That said, it was still the worst job I've ever had.
If I had a white male colleague who would constantly point out - in a work environment - that a PR should be dismissed because made by a woman or that a deliverable sucks because made by a black guy, I would not tolerate that behavior for a second. I don't get why the opposite should be considered "inclusion and safety".
I didn't see this and can't find it. Can you point me at where this happens?
First paragraph under the section "Collaboration"
Re: who cares if they were all male? If I open a PR and I get dozens of feedback, either they are legit feedback or not. Or maybe they are all sexist comments, that you should absolutely report. But it sounds like the "all of who were male" wants to imply a specific subtext, but the accusation is neither explicit nor provides any justifications. Saying it in other words: if a colleague would say "I am getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of who were black women)", wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?
The fact that all of the people offering feedback were male is weak evidence in favour of this (consider that much of her immediate team is female). She offers as another piece of evidence that she compared notes with a colleague with a similar background who was male and who wasn't getting the same level of attention.
> Re: who cares if they were all male? If I open a PR and I get dozens of feedback, either they are legit feedback or not.
If you're working somewhere where you and people like you are getting 20 people peering over your shoulder uninvited and criticizing your every move and people of a different group only have 2 people reviewing their code then you can legitimately claim to be working in a hostile environment.
Code reviews are always a mixture of objective and subjective feedback, and having to consider detailed comments (objective, subjective, substantive, trivial) from a large number of people not directly involved and without appropriate context would be a stress on anyone (not to mention is a simple drain on productivity).
On a purely technical note, she says nowhere that the PRs should be dismissed because they were from men. I think that was something you read into it. At issue was the unusual quantity of the feedback.
> if a colleague would say "I am getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of who were black women)", wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?
If it were fact, then I would assume that there was some way in which this colleague had upset a group of black women. I think a similar conclusion is being offered here (although given the likely employment ratios the black women theory would have a whole lot more evidence).
That doesn't sound like she dismissed the PRs, or that she dismissed them for gender reasons, and there's no mention of race anywhere in there.
> if a colleague would say... wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?
Yes, yes it would. I'd look at the feedback, the thing receiving feedback, and then go ask the people who gave the feedback. Then I'd probably circle back around to the colleague for more information, because clearly, something is wrong, but from just that information? Cannot tell what.
Secondly, it seems more like her issue was that she felt like she was getting dogpiled on via the PR. I've never worked anywhere that I felt the need to start critiquing the code of people from other teams who were working on systems that I might not even have experience with. It especially seems not very inclusive to make a new hire feel like she is immediately on the defensive. 200 comments seems excessive. (Granted we can't see the content so it may not have been all unjustified, but still).
Here is the other excerpt that you reference:
Again, there is a lack of reference to whether or not the male is white or not. We can assume that he is probably white, but there isn't even a hint as to his actual race.Also, like the previous excerpt the gender of the person is referenced to drive home the whole 'inclusiveness' angle. The real issue here isn't that the offender is male, but that he apparently went around her while her content was tied up in editorial review. That seems like a total dick move, IMHO.
To be fair, it's possible that to also blame the managerial systems in place for allowing this too. How was this person able to publish the blog post while a "competing" version of the post was held up in editorial review (though presumably not fully rejected)? Was this a mistake due to poor communication?
This is probably a side effect of how GitHub evolved. Watching some of their earlier talks and comparing that with how they function now, the introduction of managers was a recent addition. It probably didn't change how past engineers operate in the company, e.g., "chime in if your comments are relevant, even if you aren't necessarily requested to chime in."
I think it's actually because when you're in a young fast-growing company, the success of the company is literally everyone's responsibility. You have both the means (because the company hasn't yet ossified into management structures and the codebase is small enough that most people can be familiar with all of it) and the incentive (because a large portion of your compensation is in stock options that are only worth something if you succeed) to materially affect the company's prospects. And many people who join in that environment don't get the memo about when it becomes inappropriate for a new, larger structure.
I've actually found myself in precisely this scenario. Last time it happened, it was because I was called upon to help try to talk some sense into a somewhat stubborn junior engineer who couldn't grasp that they were making sub-optimal and potentially dangerous decisions.
It's so obviously correct that you can't even argue about it, and if you do (and you're white and male) you are mansplaining, and if you're not, you have internalized self hatred (which is the patriarchy fault, no less).
It's OK to promote Democrats internally at a company but if you're a Trump supporter you are EVIL. This is also obvious and requires no explanation and cannot be argued.
/s
In all seriousness, this stuff needs to stay out of the professional sphere. It's a swing back in the other direction of toxicity.
Fifty years ago people were doing it for not being a good enough Christian. Now it's for not buying into every detail of an incredibly specific (and quite flawed, imo) political philosophy, or even just claiming that perhaps it's counter productive to fight every battle simultaneously in every forum.
Really, I couldn't have said it better. This is the crux of the issue.
I think many social activists, esp. those I see on social media, could use a heavy dose of this kind of thinking. People are human, humans make mistakes, and most people I run into in life are too busy with their own affairs to always be perfectly conscious about their words and actions.
The way things fell apart when that cocoon was breached -- both from within and without -- was entirely predictable.
How was this supposed to work in the first place? What did they hope to accomplish with this design?
There must be better designs for these sorts of initiatives, right? What are Microsoft, Apple, or Google doing?
We were trying to isolate ourselves from the craziness in the rest of the company, and we got a lot of cool shit done while it lasted.
Definitely a net-positive. We should have done more outreach and attempts to bring people into our way-less-drama bubble; but if the theories that the other groups were jealous of our successes was true, it might have accelerated our demise.
Ditto for being clearer with upper management why were liking the isolation.
I think there's an catch-22 problem tho: Anything we could have done would have just been political in some way, which would have been contributing to the drama.
Possibly the appropriate middle ground is to clearly and consistently seek feedback and share successes with the top of our management chain; avoid the politics of multi-person, but keep the awareness that we're doing well and will continue to do so with those that make the decisions about whether we'd get to keep going that way.
--
Original response:
It was definitely a net-positive; I got out (I was encouraged to get out by people I trust and respect) before it had a chance to properly explode, and there's a lot I'd have done differently.
Probably the most valuable skill is recognizing that you're in a tailspin; a good way to notice this is failing to achieve your own core values. In my case, people were feeling unheard; I pride myself on listening skills, so that should have been a pretty serious red flag. If you're sucking at stuff you really care about, something's pretty wrong.
I would have liked to have the presence of mind and skill to directly address the meta-problem; but that might have just backfired more, since I gathered that my directness was part of the issue.
So in that case, just bailing earlier. Make sure you don't stick around past the point where the bridges are burned; I'm a little past that, since I don't feel good when I think about going back, but I know I can.
The other option (which was one I was encouraged to take, that then turned into a full departure) was to take a sabbatical. I probably set down 70% of the baggage in the first month, which might have been enough to make a successful comeback - at least in attitude. (There's other complicating factors).
A better way to put what I wrote is this: these problems can all be avoided by approaching problems from a professionalism point of view, rather than a social justice one. Both Coraline and her coworkers did unprofessional things that could have been avoided with better communication, and perhaps more attentive management.
You can't comment like this here regardless of how strongly you feel or how wrong you think someone else is. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704439.
Edit: since you've done this repeatedly and we warned you before, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
At my previous employer, we achieved a 50-50 gender balance on our engineering team. Not through identity politics, outreach initiatives, and politicking, but through professionalism and politeness.
We were able to attract many incredibly talented women and minority engineers, by just not being assholes and treating them like any other engineers.
In fact, for somewhat of a natural experiment: there was a bifurcation in our engineering organization, a split between the web dev side (our teams) and the functional programming side. The FP side was full of politicking. The FP side's morale was terrible.
It was kind of ridiculous. By the time I chose to move on from this company, four out of the six women in our engineering organization were backchanneling with me about how uncomfortable the women-in-tech political rhetoric made them feel. They didn't want to be singled out as special snowflakes. They didn't want everyone else wondering if they were just diversity hires. They just wanted to participate on an equal footing, with everyone else. The fact that they felt more comfortable talking to me, a senior engineer, than HR or the company's Womens' Group is fairly absurd.
You don't need all this campaigning and activism to achieve these goals. You just need to be good, competent, professional, and kind people. You need management that has no tolerance for asshole behaviour, regardless of whether it's an ism, or just an asshole. You need a company that notices and rewards good work, even (and especially!) from those people who would otherwise fade into the background.
Thing is, a lot of the complaints made by "SJWs" are legit! Racism sucks. Assholes making shitty comments suck. Favouritism and nepotism sucks. But all of these concerns are already dealt with by healthy norms of professionalism, and those norms do a lot better job of advocating fair treatment for everyone, than the activists seem to do.
The women on our team didn't want special treatment or top-down interventions. They just wanted to be treated like the equals that they were! They really appreciated the fact that, on our team, they got that, and it wasn't a big deal.
When you're facing a team, company, or culture that appears problematic, consider that instead of being sexist, management may just be shitty, incompetent assholes _in general_. Healthy, mature, capable, professional teams are not like this.
That said, it might not have been the best idea to frame harassment in the context of the wider social justice movement. It may or may not fall into that group (depending on what you believe) and I'm not trying to argue whether it does or doesn't; what I am saying is that regardless, it might not actually be a good idea to inject politics into this situation. Nobody would say that preventing harassment is bad, but you will piss people off by injecting larger narratives into the issue.
If I could summarize, I guess I'm saying "go easy on the intersectionality."
> What is your gender?" The multiple-choice options were "Male", "Female", and "Transgender"
What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case? I would think, at the very least, an "Other" field would be a 1000x improvement from a "Transgender" option.
> I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here
People like you (and the kind of reaction you are describing here) are the reason why more people don't report discrimination and harassment issues.
* "Female"
* "Other (feel free to specify in the text field below)"
Or something along those lines, it's not that hard.
That said, it seems a very neutral approach to gender self-reporting is self-defeating (consider that, at least for bathroom laws in some US states), the very notion of something that's not on the assigned-at-birth male-female binary is itself controversial. I guess if your gender choices included "deconstruct the male-female binary" or something, that'd be overtly political, but at least in this political climate just acknowledging the existence of some people seems to be a political act. (one I'm in favor of, fwiw, but I'm one of those people that argue that being "apolitical" is just cover for being politically in favor of the status quo).
Anyway back on topic:
Open field text boxes come with a practical cost of being much more difficult to aggregate, and let's be honest, the gender data is probably not important enough for GitHub to expend too much energy on. The more costly you make the data to mine, the less likely that the data will be used effectively.
For the interested, this seems like a pretty good overview of gender identity (primarily from a developmental perspective, of course):
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/appsych/opus/issues/2011/spring/ge...
If the gender data is somehow critical to the data then it's worth being accurate. If not, why even ask?
I get that impression as well, but I also get the impression that GitHub is a difficult place to work (from things like the data scientist going straight to her boss to complain, instead of trying to resolve any issue at the coworker level first, which is what would happen in a professional workplace).
This sounds good, but I think to some people in tech "professional" and "political neutral" are contradictory goals. And your company has to choose which to take.
For example a professional workplace might say "You can't display photos of scantily clad women in the office" or "We're not hiring (female) strippers for our office party" (or "We have reprimanded $MANAGER for taking their team to a strip club") or "You can't use that word in the office to refer to a co-worker because it's mildly/very insulting and has political baggage". And all of those decision are derided by some as "political correctness" or taking political stances.
being politically neutral means not being active on an issue when there are no laws to follow, and otherwise taking no stated stance on topics, other than to cite legislative rules.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14702902
(Yes, people's hardships which prevent them achieving their full potential should be taken into account, when determining "merit"; anything causing these hardships, including (especially?) past discrimination, should be countered; and people who had been subjected to the hardship should be treated with care and compassion, but that's orthogonal to meritocracy itself.
Also, obviously, your skills and abilities (in the context of work and meritocracy) have no bearing on your intrinsic value as a human being (so we need something like guaranteed basic income or progressive taxes to reduce issues like pay inequality).)
It's the ingroup club made manifest. What you describe would be great, but it's not what "meritocracy" actually means in practice.
But then again, I'm a white caucasian heterosexual male, so maybe I just don't notice. (Previous sentence is meant literally, not ironically.)
What often happens, though, is that responses to these claims become these backhanded dismissals. "Oh, you're just overreacting." "Well, I don't see it." I'm a straight, white, cis dude, too, so for a long time it was hard for me to notice it. I promise you, there is a point--and maybe it's not one you will ever personally see, but it exists--where it becomes too big, too obvious to ignore.
For example, I could say: whenever I think of anti-racism, I think of [insert quote about someone who claims to be anti-racist and then says/does something racist]. Does that say anything about the concept of anti-racism itself? Or is it just irrelevant commentary about the fact that there are dishonest people claiming the mantle of every ideal while not living up to it?
Just because Irving Kristol is too dumb to understand the concept of meritocracy doesn't mean the concept is without merit.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
I'm not sure whether this is sufficient to convince me to stop using the term "meritocracy" — the term is already ingrained in popular usage, irrespective of its provenance, and quite nice in that the word conveys the idea behind it relatively well, so I'm not sure whether the baggage associated with it is sufficiently toxic to justify dropping it.
As for the idea of meritocracy, at least in the narrow sense of selecting people based on their (potential) skills and abilities, I don't really see any better alternatives. The issues of social stratification, lack of inter-generational mobility, unequal access to education, income inequality and self-satisfaction are very severe, but with the partial exception of the last one, I don't agree that they're exacerbated by meritocracy (and regarding the last one, people will always find a reason to be self-satisfied/self-congratulatory).
The problem of political representatives not actually being representative of the population as a whole is indeed worrying. Perhaps sortition [0] might work (???). (If sortition were shown to be functional and implemented, but "meritocracy" continued to be used everywhere else, then meritocracy would become a terrible misnomer...)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
As an aside, assuming that the word "meritocracy" was coined in a book satirising the concept, as stated in the article (as well as wikipedia), why did it start being used in a positive sense?
What makes you so sure of that..
I'm all for being compassionate and helping people through tough times, but does this sound like a stable person?
You literally just said, "I'm all for being compassionate and helping people through tough times," then proceeded to shit on her for undergoing exactly that.
For one, I hope you aren't in a management position in a company, because discriminating by mental illness is illegal. Second, I hope you never get mentally ill -- which can happen to anyone -- because you would have to confront people with attitudes like yours and you would realize what garbage this is.
I Imagine this read to the survey writer like:
"Hello, I'd like to complain about your use of the term Linux on the corporate intranet. A page provides instructions for running the data parsing scripts "on Linux". Since we do not do any kernel work, it is improper to refer to them as Linux instructions. Instead, people should be familiar with either POSIX, bash(with extensions), or GNU coreutils."
I briefly checked the Stack Overflow survey as a comparison: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017
In such a question, it would be perfectly reasonable to point out that "Linux is not a text editor. Linux users may use vi, emacs, pico, sam... If you want to know if a survey respondent is a Linux user, you need to explicitly ask that question".
EDIT: I see now it is flagged. To be clear, I didn't, because I still think it's worth discussing some of the points made.