Does she need to be an engineer or a "good engineer" to have a non-hostile workplace?

Considering that GitHub appears to have hired her partially for the purpose of bettering the culture, your point about "feminist agendas" also falls short.

I'll wait for real facts before coming to any conclusions, but immediately rejecting her statements like you're doing is not constructive for anyone.

To be referred to as a prominent engineer, yes.

prominent - adjective 1. important; famous.

12.6K twitter followers disagree with you. For comparison, founder PJ Hyett has 14.9K.

And Linus Torvalds has 7.9k followers. Number of followers is a pretty terrible metric for prominence.

https://twitter.com/Linus__Torvalds

prominent employee, sure, engineer no.

you can be a really shitty engineer, or not one at all and have thousands of twitter followers.

That's not what prominent means.

'prominent engineer' makes it sound like the prominence is due to being well-respected for skill in engineering, when it's apparently not. This is what ehutch79 is saying.

As an example, my primary role in my company is administration of systems. I very rarely take out the trash, and sometimes refill the toilet rolls if they're low. It would be misleading to refer to me as a janitor, prominent or otherwise.

Edit: I say 'apparently not' because she may be an awesome engineer, but her code is in private repos.

Did you really just use number of followers to gauge something?

No, I used it as an indicator of fame.

Equally stupid.

Wow, good argument there. Tell me why it's not an indicator of fame in this case?

Going into a workplace with the idea that everyone should be treated fairly and equally is a distraction and a problem waiting to happen? "Feminism" isn't "women better, dudes worse."

(And the always popular implication that people who aren't engineers don't matter...)

"Feminism" isn't "women better, dudes worse."

Woah woah woah - all those she-beasts online had led me to believe otherwise. Hell just take a look at /r/tumblrinaction.

Tumblr isn't representative of feminism or humankind for that matter. And a collage of Tumblr posts cherry-picked for their awfulness isn't even representative of Tumblr itself.

The "I was born a woman but I really am a chinchilla inside" variety of Tumblr users in perpetual Poe's law mode aren't the average feminist, but the Twitter feminist circles I've seen (I don't know if Julie is really a part of them — I recall seeing her name often, but I don't know much about her) are, honestly, more articulate and powerful versions of some SJ Tumblr circles. They don't rise up for the same reasons the more unhinged[0] Tumblr posters do, but they have some pressure power that's used unwisely like in the dongle/fork situation last year.

[0] Both many prominent Twitter Feminists and Tumblr SJWs cling to the idea that if you're privileged, you can't criticize the oppressed (even if you're not directly oppressing the oppressed in question), so if you're misunderstood as doing something that opresses the oppressed they can start a campaign against you so you lose your job, etc, but you can't answer in the same tone. This is to say, I'm being a jerk for using the word "unhinged" when I don't have any apparent mental disorders.

How about university courses about feminism, taught by self-proclaimed feminists? I've been dropped from such a course against my will for no other reason than being male IMO, after two days of class, having said nothing (like everybody else). "Too many people in the class", the only two dropped were the two males of which I was one. I don't think it's a stretch either to say that a great deal of feminist writing reeks of misandry.

The last women's studies course I took in college had the professor actively thanking the men in the class for their contribution to the discussion.

Some people are Assholes. Feminists are people. Ergo, some Feminists are Assholes. It doesn't say anything more about feminism than it does people in the checkout line at the grocery store.

I think we can expect more from full professors than people in the checkout line. It's hard to imagine any professor in any other discipline not being fired for that.

Here's another feminist who also did the same (and was eventually made to resign for it, thankfully): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Daly

Tumblr feminism is actually an even extremer extension of postmodern feminism, which is the mainstream ideology nowadays, promoted by journals such as Jezebel and Feministing.

The vast majority of tech industry feminists are postmodernists.

If you choose to judge a group of people by the standards of a subreddit that claims to represent that group of people, we're all pretty much f*cked.

A loud minority does not define something.

When no one does anything to counter them, or to make it clear they don't speak for the social group, it does actually define said group.

There's a lot more to this phenomenon than you could get into on hacker news, but it goes something like "if you don't agree with everything i say exactly, you're clearly the enemy"

Correction: going into a workplace with the idea that women are treated unfairly is a problem to happen.

Uh. They generally fucking are, bruv.

In my opinion that is a belief, not a fact.

So a 20% average lower salary for women compared to men (and even lower for women of color) is...just a figment, right?

Sigh... No it's not, it is just comparing apples to oranges. If you cite the 20% number I know you have no interest in understanding the issue, because that number is a comparison across all jobs, and it ignores education, part time, everything. You don't have women and men working in the same company with 20% difference in wages (at least not significantly many - of course such things happen, but also with men vs men).

The 20% number definitely is not from the tech industry either.

So you have women picking different jobs. You have different incentives and preferences (motherhood is the big one here), different preferred industry (like media vs mining or whatever).

You also have women getting half of the income of their husbands, having the option to drop out of unpleasant jobs, not being under the same pressure to feed their family, and so on.

There are many many aspects to this. So far I haven't seen anything that convinces me women are being treated unfairly.

There are issues, but only if you consider staying at home with kids degrading. For example I suppose the incentive to get a good education is less if you know you will miss out several years where you could earn back the money invested. I don't think "unfair" is the right way to characterize that issue, though.

> the always popular implication that people who aren't engineers don't matter

There is also the popular implication when there is a girl on twitter starting trouble again, they're not coding and trying to claim some form of discrimination, instead of developing programming skill.

Implied by the deranged, yes. Are you deranged?

You can't--and obviously I mean in the "if you're a basically functioning, mostly vertebrate human being it's morally repugnant" sense of "can't", not the physical, over-literal sense that I feel like you're going to use--blame shitty workplace behaviors (and this isn't the first I've heard of GitHub having problems) on people not knowing how to code. I mean, what kind of world do you want to live in where you can excuse mistreating people because they don't "develop programming skill"?

Actually, don't answer that. I don't want to know what kind of world you want to live in.

But that's an unfair implication, not one you should be looking to imitate.

Edit: I see from your profile that you're an undergrad. Hopefully you'll grow out of the attitude that only super-coders are valuable to a project, like I did.

Only women have to prove that they are engineers enough to matter to HN. Men get that for free.

How is she starting trouble? I suppose not being harassed at work is not too much to ask for, is it? What does programming even have to do with it?

Julie has contributed to one of my projects, but due to my own fuckup, the code has not yet made it into master, and so doesn't appear on that graph: https://github.com/resque/resque.github.com/pull/3

It's an incredibly valuable contribution that I thanked her for and apologized for not yet merging in person.

The article calls her an engineer, she describes herself as a designer and front-end developer. And just because someone doesn't have many publicly available repositories doesn't mean they don't contribute to private repositories. This isn't even the controversy, what she does for a living is of little consequence, it's the alleged harassment that's up for discussion – we shouldn't be judging how good she is at programming.

I downvoted you for the "marketer/enthusiast" comment. I think that was out of line. Deciding whether she's an engineer or a marketer is not up to you, it's between her and Github.

That said, feminism describes lots of different things, and I think she was addressing a broad group with that first statement. The sooner you realize that not all feminists have the same agenda, the easier it will be for you to understand what's going on.

> Deciding whether she's an engineer or a marketer is not up to you

This is not a subjective distinction. It is very objective thing and such judgement can be done by outsider.

Forbes calls her a "developer". http://www.forbes.com/sites/northwesternmutual/2013/09/10/fi... Business Insider calls her a "designer". http://www.businessinsider.com/is-it-sexist-to-recruit-women... rds2000 is the only "source" I have seen claiming that she doesn't have skill.

It's also not a relevant distinction. What job she did there has no relevance to whether or not harassment is worth investigating.

How is it not relevant? The title is "Prominent GitHub Engineer Quits, Alleging Gender-Based Harassment".

Github ENGINEER. If she's not an engineer, she's not an engineer, it's pretty simple.

"Prominent GitHub Employee Quits, Alleging Gender-Based Harassment" ...there fixed, now is it relevant ? Let's just add the title to all the other shoddy inaccuracies in the article. So, now do you agree ?? >> What job she did there has no relevance to whether or not harassment is worth investigating.

You're right, but as a writer, if you mess up something so simple as somebodies job title, then your integrity takes a hit. I want a solid piece, that includes getting minutia like this right.

Relevant to the article title but not that actual issue. How she was treated is not made better or worse depending on whether or not she's an engineer.

Splitting hairs about her position distracts from the actual issue at hand.

Yes. But it also addresses the quality of the journalism, which in this case is disgustingly poor. The link to random open source repos hosted on github, the inability to nail down a title... just poor journalism.

It's also totally irrelevant.

If the author couldn't make this distinction, I wonder what else they missed? Integrity is required all across the board, and it reflects poorly on you as a writer if you mess up something so central and easy in the title of your article.

I think people often look at distinctions like that to find out of they're "one of his tribe", aka, another programmer.

It shouldn't matter, but it does to many people.

I think rds2000's comment about her not being an engineer was responding to the origin article referring to nrrdcore as variously, "prominent github engineer" and "influential engineer".

>Does anyone here have proof of gender discrimination or she was a good engineer?

Her skills and/or experience as a software developer have absolutely nothing to do with this. Someone's performance on a job is completely irrelevant when it comes to harassment or intimidation in the workplace.

You are part of the problem with sexism that exists in software development teams.

indeed it has nothing to do with gender: the article quotes hint that she was performing poorly and thus raged against people - used any kind of things available to her to circunvent the performance issue - including saying shes being harrassed or told she perform poorly because shes a women - even thus they seem to imply it has not been the case.

see the problem?

the only gender based issue is calling her queen.

i think people like you are the problem with toxic workplaces in general l you're blindly transforming arguments into whatever serves your cause - even when unjustified.

If she feels like people are treating her as if she's not good at her job because she's a woman when the reality is that she's just not good at her job, then yes, that is relevant. Not every time a woman gets passed over for a promotion is sexism, and all we've heard is one, obviously biased, detail-free version of the "story."

My Github profile is similarly sparse. Github is a private company with private repositories.

If you identify as a developer, you're probably a developer.

Ditto. I had private repos on github, even, but moved to bitbucket because their pricing model made more sense to me. My bitbucket account looks equally empty to anyone that isn't logged in as me. That's excluding the dummy github and bitbucket accounts I have, just like the dummy irc and email and twitter and more accounts I have because some people are assholes and my real name (Jane) is so very obviously feminine. Oh, I can't forget to include HN in there too - I picked a very gender ambiguous username all those years ago for a reason.

Not to mention I can't actually share the code to a lot if not all of the work that I do, and I'm too busy elsewhere (a restaurant...) or dealing with impostor syndrome to share anything else most days. Hell, sometimes I have a hard time just opening my mouth to talk to other people because of impostor syndrome. But I code for a living, and I thought that was enough to call myself a coder.

But according to some people, including people I used to consider friends and allies of my very laid back feminism, nothing is ever fucking good enough for them so I don't really know what I am in the end. Amateur hour involving a part time restaurant owner that is clearly a fake coder and couldn't possibly have majored in CS in college because she has big boobs and she has other hobbies that aren't staring at the computer for the entire day? Gasp. I really have no fucking clue, why don't you tell me what I am? :|

So a person has to have lots of open source code available to prove that they are good engineer? Maybe, just maybe, they were too busy earning money and the code they wrote, however brilliant, was commercial?

You realize this is a dictionary definition of an ad hominem logical fallacy?

The ultimate sign of a piece of shit with no social comprehension is a programmer who uses the not equal relational operator in conversation. Human lives are not as simple as the PHP you write at your day job, dude.

Then you turn it into some sort of fucked up meritocracy thing. She wrote No Code therefore her opinions are invalid! I've got more bitcoins than her too!!