I would like to see a statement from the other side.
For example I heard around a few corners that people didn't feel unconfortable with JeanHeyd as a keynote speaker but with topic of the keynote speech. Mainly because it would frame certain possible future rust features as if they are decided one and it's just a question of time and how until they land. But that many people disagree and think this features should never land in rust due to the complexity they impose and due to how they did play out in other languages.
The problem is the "around a few corners" part, I have no idea if that's true or made up excuses.
EDIT: Maybe I should just go back on twitter and go through JeanHeyd's posts ...
EDIT EDIT: The missing official statement is very telling by itself.
The good guy who thought this would be the wrong decision all along but who got caught up in the middle of it has resigned. I bet people who thought (and perhaps still think) this was the right decision will not resign. Politics is a bitch.
From reading a few blog posts, there appears to be a complete lack of process and governance since the moderator team resigned and the "leadership chat" (which I understand was only supposed to be temporary) was implemented.
I didn't care for the official statement, it's great they apologized, but it's lacking a lot of details and an RCA. The explanations from other members personal blogs go in further detail and that makes the official statement seem kind of hand wavey.
In my interpretation at least, I don't think anyone would have a problem if JeanHeyd had never been offered a keynote spot.
The problem is offering, and then taking it away -- doing that should only be done for the most serious reasons (as it's a clear strong snub to take such a thing away once it's been announced, people start planning their talk, pay for things, etc).
This whole affair is embarrassing to behold, and it makes it extremely difficult for me to try to build traction using Rust in my team when there is this level of visible drama.
Your phrasing is interesting: "visible drama". Which suggests it would be "better" for Rust if it covered these things up :). Obviously that would be hard to do at the moment. It's actions are fairly open and there is a very keen interest in "drama" from everyone from HN to popular YouTubers who can boost the signal.
Personally I think some amount of immediate drama is necessary to force positive change. Better than many orgs that keep this kind of thing behind closed doors (and somebody maybe writes a blog post about it years later).
That wasn’t my intention, but I see how it could be read that way.
I have colleagues on WG21 and there’s a degree of drama there too, but it’s mostly behind closed doors so it doesn’t tend to impact people’s view of the language too much.
Open discourse can certainly be a virtue, but when on first glance it looks like there is constant bickering and poor leadership, it tends to put people off.
Really my intended message is that people (probably the Rust Project in this case, although I’m not really close enough to have a valid opinion) should consider their actions a lot more carefully on account of the fact that everything is visible.
Visible drama is what puts people off; avoiding the drama is the best approach rather than hiding it, but fundamentally what matters is whether people want to use the project or not.
The folks I know who write rust code haven't mentioned this drama at all. I only dabble in it a little, but I'm guessing 99%+ of rust coders don't care and don't attend conferences anyway. I like reading about the drama, and I was also quite interested in the introspection stuff the talk was going to be about. However, none of this is going to influence my use of Rust going forward. It's just not that important.
I think you’re mistaken. Rust as a language is still very niche, and it has a lot of work to do become mainstream. This work is going to be accomplished (or not) by people very involved in the project’s governance.
Didn't it crack the top 20 languages last year? Maybe even top 15? It's supported in the Linux kernel now, I think we're way past the point where we can consider it niche
i think its current popularity (still not top 10) and its learning curve makes it still very vulnerable to another language integrating something close to what the borrow checker guarantees without the hassle.
I don’t think this is true any more. From my perspective rust has hit critical mass adoption wise. The hyper scalers are all using it, it’s on the way into the m$ and Linux kernels, developer mindshare is just a matter of time at this point
I didn't realize jeanheyd was one of the editors of the C standard. If I were a language designer and even if I disagreed with some purely technical thing they were doing, I would lunge at the chance to have someone like that speak at my conference.
What the hell, dude. What a terrible, dumb decision made, and the backlash is so much worse.
This whole situation is making people who have started discussing Rust as a serious future look like imbeciles.
Rust needs to purge itself of whatever children are holding the project back.
I saw the writing on the wall and chose not to invest any time into adopting Rust after observing various happenings like this <https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/25585> PR. Their supposed dedication to being "nice" has ever been bound to degenerate into behind-the-sceenes ankle-biting.
Really? That's a perfectly reasonable change, that you object to. It's okay for a project to be more welcoming to women. Let's not forget women are underrepresented in programming.
Yes, it does help women to get into science or programming to have an inclusive terminology (i have no evidence to back this up). But consider this, how much good does this actually do versus the time and effort it takes to make it? If I am drinking Coke every day, does it matter if I spend time deciding if I should shake the Coke first to release the gas which presumably is more healthy? Isn't the more important issue here is that I am drinking Coke in the first place? Similarly, there are way, way more important issue in this area that this kind of useless activity is actively undermining the cause.
There is an opportunity cost here; to everything. Human attention is not limitless, I can only care about as many topics/subjects that I am biologically capable of. If I am discussing or wasting my time writing this comment, I could be doing something else.
Personally I think what people do in their free time is up to them, so long as it isn't hurting anyone. I don't think it's right for you to police that.
I find stuff like that as annoying as you, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the current debacle. The current thing is purely caused by good old fashioned power politics between factions with different technical ideas. There is no "woke" angle at all.
I think there is. If they had normal process for openly discussing disagreements and making decisions, instead of shady rumour- and backstabbing-based one, none of this would have happened.
The “woke” angle was raised later on. JT brought up it up:
“It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation among Rust conference speakers. Rightly so, as both the Rust organization and the conferences had little to no Black representation.
When I saw an organization that not only could act so coldly to an expert in the field, but also to one who was a vocal critic of Rust's lack of diversity, it was hard not to see the additional context.
Systems have memory and biases. If the people that make up the system don't work to fight against these, they are perpetuated.
As my buddy Aman pointed out, the context that this would have also been the first keynote by a person of color at RustConf should not be lost here.”
There has been a lot of talk about toxicity in developer environments over the years.
I'm starting to feel we should take a step back in each such case and think:
Who is actually toxic in the current situation?
The person saying something to his friend next seat or the person on next row listening in, reporting it to PyCon and going public on Twitter about it?
The person who has a blueprint of a veteran hunting rifle on his screen or the person who photographs it and put it on Twitter?
A certain leader of an open source project who used to swear a lot, or the persons that were trying to frame him so hard that for a long time I have understood he went out of his way never to be alone with anyone?
And in this case: what are all these code of conducts for if people can destroy others work in this way and nothing happens?
I feel hot headed at the moment, so I might be missing something, feel free to correct me.
I think in each of the cases you've described I would probably fall on the same side as you. The PyCon example I thought was particularly egregious because it could so easily have been myself making silly jokes about dongles. There's no way anyone should have lost their job over that, so actually, while the person who went public was in the wrong, the main fault must lie with the companies who can't take a step back and give their employees any room or compassion at all.
This particular little drama is a bit more nuanced I think. First, the company behind the speaker involved is actually being supportive. Secondly the original post from the speaker wasn't terribly hand wavy or anything, but pretty measured "I didn't put forward a talk, they asked me, and then later pulled it without discussing the issue with me".
There's no question about it: joking about dongles and forking, *for the innuendo", is immature. It also is unprofessional, and they were having the conversation loudly enough to be heard by women and others nearby.
Yes, there are far worse cases of sexual harassment. Nonetheless, it helps create an environment where people, especially women, understandably feel uncomfortable.
The question then is what to do about it. IMO in the PyCon case, an apology and training would probably have been the best outcome, because losing your job is quite severe.
Of course, if after training a problem is repeated, or if there is just one case of much more overt harassment, then firing is probably the least bad action.
The difficulty with social media is sometimes it is impossible to call out toxic behaviour without there being an overreaction. That's unfortunate, but it doesn't mean toxic behaviour should be unaccountable (or overpunished).
I'm sorry, are woman totally unable to handle hearing immature jokes? I certainly hear them making enough of them, it's not just a male past time. Part of being a human is having a body and making stupid jokes about it. The pervasive blanket prudishness that elicits offence at anything body related is really out of hand.
It's quite simple: save the sexual jokes for the pub with your friends, not the workplace.
The massive gender imbalance in IT leads to skewed perceptions of what is acceptable in a professional environment. This in turn helps perpetuate gender imbalance. Simply, women do not want to work and get harassed.
I'd rather have more women in programming, than men who think sexual harassment is okay in a professional enviroment.
Sure I agree with everything you say, except that the jokes made were not sexual harassment. Overhearing something you don't like between strangers you are not involved with is not harassment. This is treading very old ground, but a simple "keep it to yourselves" from the listener or the conference organiser is the total remonstration and "training" anyone required in that circumstance. The people making jokes were contrite, and all of us sometimes slightly lose our heads when among friends at events, even professional ones.
"Overhearing something you don't like between strangers you are not involved with is not harassment"
1. It definitely can be (by legal, social, etc definitions), and it's very silly to claim otherwise in any form of generality. Like if I overhear you talking about what you want to do to my breasts or whatever, congrats, you've harassed me even if you didn't mean me to hear.
I don't remember the particular jokes here enough to give a more particularized view, but your statement is pretty general.
In any case,
2. To the degree it isn't harassment, it can also be considered creation of a hostile work environment (even at a conference), which is also actionable and has been for many decades (ie this is not some new recent thing). The most common form you will find is probably exactly this: people making inappropriate jokes loud enough for others to hear.
You're most likely correct. I personally think the lines have been drawn in a way that catches out people who are not being malicious, making some people over sensitive to basic human dialogue, and still not properly going after those who are actually malicious. And it's actually making us mix less with colleagues. Maybe the ends justify it, feels rather cold to me.
When do you expect this process to show positive results?
Reductio ad absurdum, like, what if you don't overhear me talking about what I want to do to your breasts, is that harassment too?
Your being absurd by assuming your experience generalises to the whole population, and that the way you think things should change is the way things should change.
I'm willing to bet boob, dick, and bum jokes will be proven more durable than this bout of lunacy.
"When do you expect this process to show positive results?"
Given that "Mad Men" is no longer considered standard acceptable workplace behavior, uh, i think it did already?
These are not new laws, they started in ~1964 (in the US), and have shown positive results pretty quickly?
"Reductio ad absurdum, like, what if you don't overhear me talking about what I want to do to your breasts, is that harassment too?"
Yes, actually, but i'm sure you know this.
You act as if this is all some horrible form of oppression - sexual harassment law is ... not particularly hard to avoid violating.
There are certainly edge cases, but like, it's really not that hard to avoid sexually harassing your coworkers.
You'd have a stronger argument about PC and more general "acceptable workplace behavior" or something.
"Your being absurd by assuming your experience generalises to the whole population, and that the way you think things should change is the way things should change."
Uh, you think that sexual harassment law does not enjoy broad support?
Okay?
"I'm willing to bet boob, dick, and bum jokes will be proven more durable than this bout of lunacy."
In the workplace, so far you have turned out pretty wrong, and this "bout of lunacy" has been going on for well over half a century in the US, and longer elsewhere.
The point here is that what is considered sexual harassment is itself political.
I can hear all kinds of overtly racist and sexist statements from my female colleagues, but because they are women, and their comments are directed at white folks and male folks, they are totally safe from this sort of retribution. (Ex. "I didn't want to move here because it's eyeroll so white")
Meanwhile, an (admittedly juvenile) set of jokes gets some people fired.
Yes, I have received harassment from women when I was younger. And there was very little that could be done about it, people would not take it seriously. That includes being sexually assaulted in high school, it happened because I was so eccentric it attracted "bad" girls.
But as a guy, if I did one tiny thing wrong I would be labelled all sorts of nasty things. It could be as little as being slightly too friendly to a woman somewhere, because I am really happy, having a really good day, and I would be treated horribly.
This is a widespread rampant problem in society. It's being seen as "harassment" when it's coming from men. But not so when it's coming from women.
You've just described what most every woman I have talked to says their life is like including massive fear of retaliation, fairly common harassment (including from strangers in public), etc. The whole reason for the metoo movement is because the massive fear and retaliation for speaking up.
Is there fear of retaliation when the reaction is almost universally media fawning for the bravery of speaking up, and importantly, has been for 20 ish years?
Yes, the retaliation might be from other men seeing the complaint as frivolous. And in this hypersensitive society we live in now, that complaint may very well be frivolous.
I bring in data and you bring up random hypotheticals to dismiss it out of hand since you don't like what the data says. Which I think says everything someone needs to know about this debate and the participants.
I don't trust the data, even if it comes from academia, as it's very likely to have a pro-feminist bias. I need to know the methodology used, and also other sources of data to cross check it against. The bias in the coverage of these issues is absolutely shocking, and has been occurring for a long time indeed.
Yes, radical feminists are behind this, they have even taken over academia, and it's taboo to speak out against it, if you do, you will find yourself up against a mob.
I wonder if there is an evolutionary basis for such sexual conformity in humans. Because I'm trying to find an explanation for what's going on. How so many lives are being destroyed over trivial sexual transgressions, things that are really trifles and cause no real harm other than discomfort or unpleasantness. Of course serious transgressions such as rape are not trivial at all.
These are not random hypotheticals. Which is why we cannot reasonably call your listicle that doesn't give proper citations or even hyperlinks "data".
55% of all EEOC complaints were about "retaliation", that's not 55% of victims, as the headline shows. That's 55% of all reports. Which means there are definitionally more reports of retaliation than reports of incidents!
Yes, it's insane, it's the rise of sexual authoritarianism or even fascism. We scare the whole population into fearing that there's predators everywhere, and punish people for minor transgressions or trifles, ruining their lives. Meanwhile these minor transgressions increase the figures and are used to justify even more draconian measures. A vicious circle.
> I can hear all kinds of overtly racist and sexist statements from my female colleagues, but because they are women, and their comments are directed at white folks and male folks, they are totally safe from this sort of retribution. (Ex. "I didn't want to move here because it's eyeroll so white")
That's pervasive, but it's not appropriate either. This is why I said low key unprofessionalism should initially be dealt with by apologies and training.
> Meanwhile, an (admittedly juvenile) set of jokes gets some people fired.
I said that was an overreaction. But it's a different employer, who were acting due to publicity.
> I'm sorry, are woman totally unable to handle hearing immature jokes?
In this day and age? Yes. Absolutely. Comedians often lament the death of comedy, and I can see why. People are super easily offended and even minor comments make them lose their marbles.
Comedians are not pining to tell immature 'jokes' about forking dongles, women have been handling that crap for decades and they're not finding it offensive just lame.
What's changed is the feeling that it has to be endured without comment and left to slide in professional settings as happened in the past.
I myself find it odd that people are super offended and lose their marbles now that women are expressing an opinion.
It's more than just an opinion, it's costing people their careers and worse. The hypersensitivity of women can destroy mens lives over trifles in this day and age. With radical third wave feminists and their moral panics to blame for that.
Meanwhile women can harass and even "stalk" men and get away with it, the problem is ignored in society. In most cases these behaviors are completely harmless. What makes it so infuriating is that if an equally harmless man did the same, he could be in trouble with the law for it. He is presumed potentially predatory and dangerous for being male. This is a clear cut case of discrimination.
This is actually degeneration of feminism and equality. It harks back to conservatism "cover your lady's ears so she doesn't hear the wisecracks"
And it really doesn't square with the people I know. The men and women I've mixed with over the years are equal with the adult themed jokes. The rudest is the lady who lives next door.
So I don't actually believe that women don't want to hear that kind of joking about. I think they don't want to hear the kind of joking about that I, and probably most men, don't want to hear either: The I'd screw her, "locker room" (not any locker room I've been in, they're mostly be quiet and get on with dressing places) talk. But the collateral damage is a subset of people who now feel empowered to suck all the enjoyment out of everyones life.
> The pervasive blanket prudishness that elicits offence at anything body related is really out of hand.
It comes with the territory of living in a low-trust society (which the U.S. pretty much is nowadays). Joking around about topics that might raise offense is a luxury we can't necessarily afford in every circumstance.
> And in this case: what are all these code of conducts for if people can destroy others work in this way and nothing happens?
In a "the purpose of a system is what it does" sense it's clear that they exist to make it easier to kick out people you don't like - especially people who don't share the PMC cultural background that's dominant in tech - without taking responsibility for your choice in doing so.
It looks like unity of leadership and communication is needed between RustConf, the Rust Foundation, and the Rust Project.
It is normal for people to have different ideas and to argue a bit about the best way to do things.
However, it is not a good look for such internal politics to become public or for the communication channels between groups to be so informal that a rogue actor can effectively torpedo a contributor's work (Shepherd's Oasis) and bring bad PR on all three Rust groups.
From the outside, this looks like a terrible mess. Rust is technically amazing, but events like these make its politics and governance into a liability.
> It looks like unity of leadership and communication is needed between RustConf, the Rust Foundation, and the Rust Project.
This problem happened precisely because there was too much connection between the Rust project and RustConf leadership. Meanwhile, JeanHeyd has stressed that the Rust Foundation has been blameless, because they're aren't tightly connected to the project leadership!
To be honest CoC are mostly just that, virtue signaling. Especially if you aren't enforcing them. Then they are letters on dead wood.
That said, CoC wasn't the cause here. It seems it was just a non-functional governance. Why was Rust Project considering Keynote speaker a direction for the project? Some argued they weren't before. Why wasn't previously team that approved the talk consulted?
If someone (like me) is looking for a summary of the "story so far", this post from JT is probably the best one to start with: https://www.jntrnr.com/why-i-left-rust/
I stopped participating completely in any open source project that has a "code of conduct". To me, open source was all about freedom from such censorship and thought control.
And I completely oppose rude and unpleasant behavior in open source, we can handle that by supporting each other and calling it out instead of imposing punitive rules on contributors. Many times these rules attempt to control behavior outside of the project, which smacks of authoritarianism.
I found JT's version lacked some context (e.g. that the 5 people wasn't even half of the whole group) that I think is important for understanding what went on. I misunderstood from their post and I'm fairly familiar with the structure of the Rust organization.
disclaimer: I am on the same Rust team as Josh and have some interactions with JT and have respect for both.
Granted, I think there are several pieces of context missing for understanding the situation, like when ThePhD asked for reassurances, did that stop at their point of contact or go back to the whole group and had the dissenting voices spoken up before then? Who all knew how cautious ThePhD was being in communicating the experimental nature of their work?
Not like my opinion matters at all here, but everyone sucks here.
- The Rust project should get their act together to avoid miscommunication
- Bloggers like fasterthanlime should probably not say anything at all
- Core team members like JT resigning over miscommunication is a huge mistake
- JeanHyde should've opened a dialog with project leads like Josh to understand the situation
Everyone involved needs to get on a zoom call or sit in the same room and work this out. Of course we want JeanHyde to present at RustConf. Of course we want folks like JT on the team.
But no - we live in an era where instead of talking to each other, we just tweet and make passive-aggressive blog posts.
The fallout of this whole dumb shitshow:
- JT left
- Josh is stepping back
- JeanHyde is leaving
- Introspection is not getting funded
NOBODY WANTS THIS. JT and Josh both had the authority and power to fix these issues. I get people are upset and offended, but airing all this dirty laundry in public has led to a disaster for the project. The whole thing could've been easily rectified if JeanHyde and JT worked together with Josh to come to a happy conclusion.
But nope, everyone leaves the project or steps down because that's somehow the right answer?
You seem pretty knowledgeable about Rust politics. Who are the toxic assholes that JeanHeyd Meneide should have contacted to "work this out" after being insulted, with the likely outcome of suffering further harm? It seems a very strange expectation.
Leaving this kind of dumpster fire is the obvious right answer for almost everyone involved, to limit current and potential damage of all sorts.
Do you just feel entitled to a "good" (or at least functioning) Rust community, or are you seriously blaming JeanHeyd Meneide and Shepherd's Oasis for deciding that they have been offended enough?
I’m working with the same set of blogposts, hackmds, and tweets as everyone else. It seems that JeanHyde went public with their experience instead of opening a dialogue with their advocate (JT) or core team member (Josh). JeanHyde says as much in their original post - assuming that the Rust Project had some sort of due process, JH didn’t want to legitimize that process.
As Josh’s post points out, there is no legitimate due process and the Rust project is actively a mess right now.
> suffering further harm
This type of language is actively muddying the conversation. Nobody suffered and nobody was harmed here. JH might’ve been upset and confused, but there was no “torture” to “suffer.” The only damage here is everyone leaving the project. In an alternative world, this would’ve been solved in one 30 minute meeting and nobody would’ve heard a thing.
> Do you feel entitled…
Yes, I do. I’ve payed my dues within the rust community, I’ve bet my career on Rust, I’m building a company that’s actively working to improve Rust. The project is a once-in-generation chance to replace C/C++ and I personally don’t think leadership is taking that seriously.
It doesn’t help when speakers like JH choose to go public instead of trying to smooth things over in a sensible manner. I get it, JH expected some sort of legitimate leadership, but now with all the context, I don’t see how you could believe anyone leaving the project or canceling efforts is 1) good or 2) going to solve any problems in the long term.
Maybe it can't be solved behind closed doors because that's where the problems are? Rust's governance has always been a secret backroom and reliance on soft power to make the real decisions.
If this could be fixed quietly, I expect it would have been. But it looks like they had just finished using the back channels to make sure nobody gets the impression rust core thought ThePHD's research was worth perusing.
> As the Rust Foundation has granted us leave from this project as of 20:19, Tuesday, 30 May 2023, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), we will not publish a “Final Report” on or after Wednesday, 5 July 2023 (the end of the term of the grant). All work has been terminated as of the release of this statement.
There was a midterm report published on April 30, 2023. I haven't been able to find any source code for their work. There's a crate, but it's a placeholder for the name [1].
So this sounds a bit like they've taken the grant money, written one blog post, and dipped. I appreciate that JeanHeyd has been treated shabbily by the project leadership. Assuming I haven't got the wrong end of the stick, this doesn't strike me as a great way to wind up the grant.
That the Foundation has gone along with this would certainly make me hesitant to donate to them, if I were considering it.
Still, I think this was a rather small grant, so perhaps it's just not worth bothering about.
74 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadFor example I heard around a few corners that people didn't feel unconfortable with JeanHeyd as a keynote speaker but with topic of the keynote speech. Mainly because it would frame certain possible future rust features as if they are decided one and it's just a question of time and how until they land. But that many people disagree and think this features should never land in rust due to the complexity they impose and due to how they did play out in other languages.
The problem is the "around a few corners" part, I have no idea if that's true or made up excuses.
EDIT: Maybe I should just go back on twitter and go through JeanHeyd's posts ...
EDIT EDIT: The missing official statement is very telling by itself.
EDIT: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/05/29/RustConf.html me blind
It doesn't mean what they did wasn't very wrong.
Just some of the speculations in previous HN comments seem to be very far off
From reading a few blog posts, there appears to be a complete lack of process and governance since the moderator team resigned and the "leadership chat" (which I understand was only supposed to be temporary) was implemented.
I didn't care for the official statement, it's great they apologized, but it's lacking a lot of details and an RCA. The explanations from other members personal blogs go in further detail and that makes the official statement seem kind of hand wavey.
The problem is offering, and then taking it away -- doing that should only be done for the most serious reasons (as it's a clear strong snub to take such a thing away once it's been announced, people start planning their talk, pay for things, etc).
Personally I think some amount of immediate drama is necessary to force positive change. Better than many orgs that keep this kind of thing behind closed doors (and somebody maybe writes a blog post about it years later).
I have colleagues on WG21 and there’s a degree of drama there too, but it’s mostly behind closed doors so it doesn’t tend to impact people’s view of the language too much.
Open discourse can certainly be a virtue, but when on first glance it looks like there is constant bickering and poor leadership, it tends to put people off.
Really my intended message is that people (probably the Rust Project in this case, although I’m not really close enough to have a valid opinion) should consider their actions a lot more carefully on account of the fact that everything is visible.
Visible drama is what puts people off; avoiding the drama is the best approach rather than hiding it, but fundamentally what matters is whether people want to use the project or not.
What the hell, dude. What a terrible, dumb decision made, and the backlash is so much worse.
This whole situation is making people who have started discussing Rust as a serious future look like imbeciles.
Rust needs to purge itself of whatever children are holding the project back.
There is an opportunity cost here; to everything. Human attention is not limitless, I can only care about as many topics/subjects that I am biologically capable of. If I am discussing or wasting my time writing this comment, I could be doing something else.
Noone does.
It was a few lines of text. GP has spent more time complaining about the change, than the effort to make the change.
“It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation among Rust conference speakers. Rightly so, as both the Rust organization and the conferences had little to no Black representation.
When I saw an organization that not only could act so coldly to an expert in the field, but also to one who was a vocal critic of Rust's lack of diversity, it was hard not to see the additional context.
Systems have memory and biases. If the people that make up the system don't work to fight against these, they are perpetuated.
As my buddy Aman pointed out, the context that this would have also been the first keynote by a person of color at RustConf should not be lost here.”
https://www.jntrnr.com/why-i-left-rust/
I would have bet that if JeanHeyd was white, the issue would die out by now.
I'm starting to feel we should take a step back in each such case and think:
Who is actually toxic in the current situation?
The person saying something to his friend next seat or the person on next row listening in, reporting it to PyCon and going public on Twitter about it?
The person who has a blueprint of a veteran hunting rifle on his screen or the person who photographs it and put it on Twitter?
A certain leader of an open source project who used to swear a lot, or the persons that were trying to frame him so hard that for a long time I have understood he went out of his way never to be alone with anyone?
And in this case: what are all these code of conducts for if people can destroy others work in this way and nothing happens?
I feel hot headed at the moment, so I might be missing something, feel free to correct me.
This particular little drama is a bit more nuanced I think. First, the company behind the speaker involved is actually being supportive. Secondly the original post from the speaker wasn't terribly hand wavy or anything, but pretty measured "I didn't put forward a talk, they asked me, and then later pulled it without discussing the issue with me".
Yes, there are far worse cases of sexual harassment. Nonetheless, it helps create an environment where people, especially women, understandably feel uncomfortable.
The question then is what to do about it. IMO in the PyCon case, an apology and training would probably have been the best outcome, because losing your job is quite severe.
Of course, if after training a problem is repeated, or if there is just one case of much more overt harassment, then firing is probably the least bad action.
The difficulty with social media is sometimes it is impossible to call out toxic behaviour without there being an overreaction. That's unfortunate, but it doesn't mean toxic behaviour should be unaccountable (or overpunished).
The massive gender imbalance in IT leads to skewed perceptions of what is acceptable in a professional environment. This in turn helps perpetuate gender imbalance. Simply, women do not want to work and get harassed.
I'd rather have more women in programming, than men who think sexual harassment is okay in a professional enviroment.
1. It definitely can be (by legal, social, etc definitions), and it's very silly to claim otherwise in any form of generality. Like if I overhear you talking about what you want to do to my breasts or whatever, congrats, you've harassed me even if you didn't mean me to hear.
I don't remember the particular jokes here enough to give a more particularized view, but your statement is pretty general. In any case,
2. To the degree it isn't harassment, it can also be considered creation of a hostile work environment (even at a conference), which is also actionable and has been for many decades (ie this is not some new recent thing). The most common form you will find is probably exactly this: people making inappropriate jokes loud enough for others to hear.
Reductio ad absurdum, like, what if you don't overhear me talking about what I want to do to your breasts, is that harassment too?
Your being absurd by assuming your experience generalises to the whole population, and that the way you think things should change is the way things should change.
I'm willing to bet boob, dick, and bum jokes will be proven more durable than this bout of lunacy.
Given that "Mad Men" is no longer considered standard acceptable workplace behavior, uh, i think it did already?
These are not new laws, they started in ~1964 (in the US), and have shown positive results pretty quickly?
"Reductio ad absurdum, like, what if you don't overhear me talking about what I want to do to your breasts, is that harassment too?"
Yes, actually, but i'm sure you know this.
You act as if this is all some horrible form of oppression - sexual harassment law is ... not particularly hard to avoid violating.
There are certainly edge cases, but like, it's really not that hard to avoid sexually harassing your coworkers.
You'd have a stronger argument about PC and more general "acceptable workplace behavior" or something.
"Your being absurd by assuming your experience generalises to the whole population, and that the way you think things should change is the way things should change."
Uh, you think that sexual harassment law does not enjoy broad support? Okay?
"I'm willing to bet boob, dick, and bum jokes will be proven more durable than this bout of lunacy."
In the workplace, so far you have turned out pretty wrong, and this "bout of lunacy" has been going on for well over half a century in the US, and longer elsewhere.
So maybe you should reconsider.
I can hear all kinds of overtly racist and sexist statements from my female colleagues, but because they are women, and their comments are directed at white folks and male folks, they are totally safe from this sort of retribution. (Ex. "I didn't want to move here because it's eyeroll so white")
Meanwhile, an (admittedly juvenile) set of jokes gets some people fired.
But as a guy, if I did one tiny thing wrong I would be labelled all sorts of nasty things. It could be as little as being slightly too friendly to a woman somewhere, because I am really happy, having a really good day, and I would be treated horribly.
This is a widespread rampant problem in society. It's being seen as "harassment" when it's coming from men. But not so when it's coming from women.
https://inspiredelearning.com/blog/sexual-harassment-in-the-...
Yes, radical feminists are behind this, they have even taken over academia, and it's taboo to speak out against it, if you do, you will find yourself up against a mob.
I wonder if there is an evolutionary basis for such sexual conformity in humans. Because I'm trying to find an explanation for what's going on. How so many lives are being destroyed over trivial sexual transgressions, things that are really trifles and cause no real harm other than discomfort or unpleasantness. Of course serious transgressions such as rape are not trivial at all.
Or is it really down to our society instead?
55% of all EEOC complaints were about "retaliation", that's not 55% of victims, as the headline shows. That's 55% of all reports. Which means there are definitionally more reports of retaliation than reports of incidents!
Additionally, you have stuff like this: https://www.the74million.org/article/ed-department-sex-discr...
That's pervasive, but it's not appropriate either. This is why I said low key unprofessionalism should initially be dealt with by apologies and training.
> Meanwhile, an (admittedly juvenile) set of jokes gets some people fired.
I said that was an overreaction. But it's a different employer, who were acting due to publicity.
In this day and age? Yes. Absolutely. Comedians often lament the death of comedy, and I can see why. People are super easily offended and even minor comments make them lose their marbles.
What's changed is the feeling that it has to be endured without comment and left to slide in professional settings as happened in the past.
I myself find it odd that people are super offended and lose their marbles now that women are expressing an opinion.
Meanwhile women can harass and even "stalk" men and get away with it, the problem is ignored in society. In most cases these behaviors are completely harmless. What makes it so infuriating is that if an equally harmless man did the same, he could be in trouble with the law for it. He is presumed potentially predatory and dangerous for being male. This is a clear cut case of discrimination.
> loudly enough to be heard by women
This is actually degeneration of feminism and equality. It harks back to conservatism "cover your lady's ears so she doesn't hear the wisecracks"
And it really doesn't square with the people I know. The men and women I've mixed with over the years are equal with the adult themed jokes. The rudest is the lady who lives next door.
So I don't actually believe that women don't want to hear that kind of joking about. I think they don't want to hear the kind of joking about that I, and probably most men, don't want to hear either: The I'd screw her, "locker room" (not any locker room I've been in, they're mostly be quiet and get on with dressing places) talk. But the collateral damage is a subset of people who now feel empowered to suck all the enjoyment out of everyones life.
It comes with the territory of living in a low-trust society (which the U.S. pretty much is nowadays). Joking around about topics that might raise offense is a luxury we can't necessarily afford in every circumstance.
In a "the purpose of a system is what it does" sense it's clear that they exist to make it easier to kick out people you don't like - especially people who don't share the PMC cultural background that's dominant in tech - without taking responsibility for your choice in doing so.
It is normal for people to have different ideas and to argue a bit about the best way to do things.
However, it is not a good look for such internal politics to become public or for the communication channels between groups to be so informal that a rogue actor can effectively torpedo a contributor's work (Shepherd's Oasis) and bring bad PR on all three Rust groups.
From the outside, this looks like a terrible mess. Rust is technically amazing, but events like these make its politics and governance into a liability.
How could future messes like this be prevented?
What changes are needed?
This problem happened precisely because there was too much connection between the Rust project and RustConf leadership. Meanwhile, JeanHeyd has stressed that the Rust Foundation has been blameless, because they're aren't tightly connected to the project leadership!
Then how was RustConf confused about what was wanted?
If they were communicating well, would this whole mess have even happened?
Who is making the decisions? Why is it not clear who is leading and what they decided? Who will be held accountable for what happened?
If everyone is pointing fingers at someone else, then there is neither leadership nor accountability.
Rust needs a BDFL or a PumpKing/Queen (https://perldoc.perl.org/perlhist) or something similar.
That said, CoC wasn't the cause here. It seems it was just a non-functional governance. Why was Rust Project considering Keynote speaker a direction for the project? Some argued they weren't before. Why wasn't previously team that approved the talk consulted?
All in all very disappointing outcome either way.
And I completely oppose rude and unpleasant behavior in open source, we can handle that by supporting each other and calling it out instead of imposing punitive rules on contributors. Many times these rules attempt to control behavior outside of the project, which smacks of authoritarianism.
I'm working on proprietary hardware now.
https://hackmd.io/p3VG_bK9TXOvtgh1oA2yZQ?view
I found JT's version lacked some context (e.g. that the 5 people wasn't even half of the whole group) that I think is important for understanding what went on. I misunderstood from their post and I'm fairly familiar with the structure of the Rust organization.
disclaimer: I am on the same Rust team as Josh and have some interactions with JT and have respect for both.
Granted, I think there are several pieces of context missing for understanding the situation, like when ThePhD asked for reassurances, did that stop at their point of contact or go back to the whole group and had the dissenting voices spoken up before then? Who all knew how cautious ThePhD was being in communicating the experimental nature of their work?
- The Rust project should get their act together to avoid miscommunication
- Bloggers like fasterthanlime should probably not say anything at all
- Core team members like JT resigning over miscommunication is a huge mistake
- JeanHyde should've opened a dialog with project leads like Josh to understand the situation
Everyone involved needs to get on a zoom call or sit in the same room and work this out. Of course we want JeanHyde to present at RustConf. Of course we want folks like JT on the team.
But no - we live in an era where instead of talking to each other, we just tweet and make passive-aggressive blog posts.
The fallout of this whole dumb shitshow:
- JT left
- Josh is stepping back
- JeanHyde is leaving
- Introspection is not getting funded
NOBODY WANTS THIS. JT and Josh both had the authority and power to fix these issues. I get people are upset and offended, but airing all this dirty laundry in public has led to a disaster for the project. The whole thing could've been easily rectified if JeanHyde and JT worked together with Josh to come to a happy conclusion.
But nope, everyone leaves the project or steps down because that's somehow the right answer?
Leaving this kind of dumpster fire is the obvious right answer for almost everyone involved, to limit current and potential damage of all sorts.
Do you just feel entitled to a "good" (or at least functioning) Rust community, or are you seriously blaming JeanHeyd Meneide and Shepherd's Oasis for deciding that they have been offended enough?
As Josh’s post points out, there is no legitimate due process and the Rust project is actively a mess right now.
> suffering further harm
This type of language is actively muddying the conversation. Nobody suffered and nobody was harmed here. JH might’ve been upset and confused, but there was no “torture” to “suffer.” The only damage here is everyone leaving the project. In an alternative world, this would’ve been solved in one 30 minute meeting and nobody would’ve heard a thing.
> Do you feel entitled…
Yes, I do. I’ve payed my dues within the rust community, I’ve bet my career on Rust, I’m building a company that’s actively working to improve Rust. The project is a once-in-generation chance to replace C/C++ and I personally don’t think leadership is taking that seriously.
It doesn’t help when speakers like JH choose to go public instead of trying to smooth things over in a sensible manner. I get it, JH expected some sort of legitimate leadership, but now with all the context, I don’t see how you could believe anyone leaving the project or canceling efforts is 1) good or 2) going to solve any problems in the long term.
I don't know how well documented it is, but there are at least two posts acknowledging it https://without.boats/blog/if-you-can-keep-it/ https://fasterthanli.me/articles/rust-the-wrong-people-are-r...
If this could be fixed quietly, I expect it would have been. But it looks like they had just finished using the back channels to make sure nobody gets the impression rust core thought ThePHD's research was worth perusing.
There was a midterm report published on April 30, 2023. I haven't been able to find any source code for their work. There's a crate, but it's a placeholder for the name [1].
So this sounds a bit like they've taken the grant money, written one blog post, and dipped. I appreciate that JeanHeyd has been treated shabbily by the project leadership. Assuming I haven't got the wrong end of the stick, this doesn't strike me as a great way to wind up the grant.
That the Foundation has gone along with this would certainly make me hesitant to donate to them, if I were considering it.
Still, I think this was a rather small grant, so perhaps it's just not worth bothering about.
[1] https://docs.rs/introwospection/0.1.0/src/introwospection/li...