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?
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.
First paragraph under the section "Collaboration"
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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'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)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case?
* "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 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.
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.
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."
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 [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
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.