This was not in a public interface, this was in variable names.
Ignoring that every word in programming is in US English: color, gray, program.
We were deadlocked for weeks, with him refusing to ship working code that fulfilled the business goals over this single issue. Quitting resolved the deadlock, and I learned afterwards that he really did go through the work and change it all to "dialogue".
And yet architects usually originate from promoted engineers. And that means they are stubborn, and the result is all kinds pointless conflicts with all the other developers.
Technical Architecture should be about making the right set of trade offs given the business goals of the system being developed. That involves spending a lot of time talking to people both inside and outside of dev team about what the goals are and how the decisions that devs are making are impacting everyone else in the company. That stuff is time consuming, but if there's any time left you should really be keeping up with the latest frameworks and tools.
If you're spending your time reviewing commits and enforcing coding standards, you're doing it wrong.
Quitting because of that is just stupid. In my company CS rules are almost opposite to my preferences (and to common style for that language community of course). I use every opportunity to grumble about it, but it would be much worse if everybody (me included) shaped the code based on personal preferences, not style guide.
I don't understand how these guys were "deadlocked" for weeks.
So, the traditional CTRL+F, or :%s/dialog/dialogue/g would have resulted in at least some instances of 'dialoguegue' as a result. Yeah, the obvious remedy there is :%s/guegue/gue/g, but that too could lead to unintended results, etc.
Not that I don't agree with the intent of your statement, search and replace across 20k lines of code, over however many files, is likely a more involved process than it sounds like.
dialog\>
dialog\b
:%s/dialog_/dialogue_/g
:%s/\([dD]\)ialog\([A-Z][A-z]*\)/\1ialogue\2/g
I don't have experience with them, but I imagine an IDE with refactoring support should make these sort of changes trivial.
Or use variable renaming in an IDE that actually parses the code.
I spelled it in consistency with everything else in the source code at that time... US English. It was a British company, and I understood that the UI should be UK English, but did not comprehend/believe that variables should be too. Especially as one can't force CSS to stop calling it color.
What was _your_ reasoning for losing a job over a completely semantic argument?
Did the illogicality of it all really irk you so much that you couldn't stand to change it? What do you mean by saying that you couldn't 'comprehend' why variables should be written in UK English? It seems pretty clear that they should be in UK English because that's what you were told to write them in... at your job...
If this happened as described then I would have loved to be a coworker watching this hilariously petty feud unfold.
I wanted a reasonable work environment that was delivering product to the customers, for the business.
The work in question was 20k lines and involved the whole stack. As it bled into web page stuff that actually had calls to browser open "dialog" commands, no find and replace was going to safely work to now make it comply with the clarification on the coding standards (UK English var names). We would spend weeks changing it and re-testing, weeks in which we were not delivering it.
I felt we were no longer working for either the customer or business, when we were willing to hold back an improvement that would immediately create revenue, for a petty argument.
It wasn't the first time I'd seen this architect do that to others, but I never thought it would happen to me so long as the product was good, the code was good, deadlines were met.
I was no longer convinced it was possible to create work that wouldn't fall foul of some rule or other. And the architect had managed to position himself on the org structure outside of a chain of command, so there was no-one to appeal to.
There are too many good jobs, and good companies, that want to ship product to their customers and build a great business to even consider staying somewhere that doesn't.
It was a very easy decision.
I still would like to see someone that ridiculous operate... Sounds like the most incompetent architect/engineer I have ever heard of.
Sorry for the snark fellow human.
Particularly given that it's a UK company, the request may be arguably wrong, but it's at least semi-reasonable. Why make such a huge deal over it from either side?
I would have done the same thing. If someone is hanging your job over your head over spelling in source code, then the issue is no longer about spelling in source code. It's about dick wagging.
Software engineers are a stubborn bunch. It's kind of necessary given the nature of programming. However, if promoted to an architect, stubbornness is a real problem, with little to no upside.
Architects will usually stick mostly to design and not do a lot of debugging. So that stubbornness is not useful. But it sure can rear its ugly head when it comes to pointless conflicts like this one. And the problem is, all the junior developers are also stubborn.
Welcome to software development. What you want in in a software architect is primarily a diplomat. Not someone who is stubborn.
If there's a disagreement that can't be resolved between the two of them, the architect is the one whose stubbornness I value more. You have managers to be diplomats. You have technical leadership to say, "they pay me more than you because they trust my judgment more than yours. I've heard your argument; I found it not compelling enough to overrule my own experience and judgment, and the decision has been made."
Ideally you have more than one such person to help surface the cases where the architect was wrong, but if you're routinely treating them as though they're no more reliable than junior developers, why are you paying them so much?
Actually... It's (jokingly) possible :)
You can get pretty close :)
Edit: not to imply a reason for the noted situation, just an example to lend some credence/reasoning elsewhere
The parochialism of the wannabe "hacker" (entreprenerd) here used to be cute.
If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker. But just making the change and then threatening to quit... that is most definitely crazy.
> No, they are crazy.
That may be.
> Reverting someone else's changes without explaining why is crazy.
Not necessarily. There are times when you are so wrong you aren't even wrong.
> If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker.
Let's imagine a scenario where they had done this, and yet nothing had corrected the problem. At that point, it would be quite reasonable to revert someone's changes without explaining why, and threatening to quit if one wasn't allowed to.
Which is precisely why it would be eminently reasonable to quit, and therefore reasonable to threaten to quit.
> But in that scenario, whether or not you quit should not be contingent upon whether or not the change is kept, it should be whether or not you have to continue to work with that person.
Right, but anything less than reverting the change means you have to put up with the person, which again... is why one might threaten to quit.
Those are pretty big flags that you screwed up.
The person making the threat felt they were immune from backlash, but they were threatened by where I was working in the code base because they lacked the expertise to compete on a technical level. What I found even more interesting was that our mutual manager felt that his position was an even more tenuous political position so he wasn't going to do anything he wasn't told to do by someone above him in the chain of command.
If someone working for me threatens to quit, I first ask them if their issue can be resolved rationally, and if it can't I ask them when will their last day be. But that is because even if my boss then comes to me and says "You told this guy who is friends with <important person> to quit? Your fired!" I am totally ok with that. Not everyone is.
To look at the flip side though as to whether I screwed up or not, I'm reasonably self aware enough to know when I do. And prior to this incident going 'nuclear', as it did, I had come at it from several different directions to try to eliminate bias. Every third party consulted felt my reasoning was pretty sound. But we all know that being "right" doesn't mean you get what you want in a politicized environment. Just ask the Ukrainians living in Crimea, life is what it is. We move past it.
I had assumed as much. Sun seemed to be very political except for a very few areas; I avoided it for that exact reason.
It's always a hard lesson for a junior person to realize that politics exists. I had my introduction to that at a very big company in a very hard way.
And yet it happens everywhere. The question is what narratives can be told about it more than what actually happened.
Wait, they're a ruby shop, they don't even believe in letting the compiler help you avoid making basic mistakes. dons flame-retardant suit
Easy, just start calling managers "people hackers" and launch a people hacking tips blog next week.
If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach. If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do.
I see nothing wrong with the involvement of founders' wives in the business.
> The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly.
Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.
> In both cases the companies also boast a level of success that makes it hard for them to evaluate whether elements of their company culture is detrimental to their continued development at this stage of their existence.
I don't think any company can evaluate that. Culture arises from the grass roots and that means that the floor employees are the ones who ultimately decide company culture.
> I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management' once these no-management companies realize they have issues that cannot be resolved by hiring supposedly perfect people.
What do you think of WL Gore and Associates?
Edit: Figured out why.
I don't understand why saying, "people will call me sexist for this" immediately validates your statement as "not intended to be sexist".
>"If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach."
It's pretty clearly a sexist statement is it not? Am I confused about what makes a statement sexist?
Does that entire paragraph not just objectify the wife and establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience?
>"If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do."
And this one doesn't even really make sense(as in where are you pulling this random ass statement from), not to mention stating it as, "If you are a founder, chances are your spouse does more to build the business than you ever do." feels literally 10x better to me(even if it still sounds false). Even the punctuation in that sentence makes the word man stand out when it could have easily been written without said punctuation.(well without the comma at least :-p ).
I realize this is super overly sensitive by the way. I normally wouldn't comment, I had already posted "this post really bothers me somehow" though, and felt an explanation was warranted. Definitely curious if anyone else felt the same.
Lastly, I'm a 21 year old white male; the only adversity I've ever faced is being called a ginger, so don't think this is coming from a longstanding feminist, just a human.
The point is that when you look cross-culturally and cross-historically, where you don't have women certain things like rule of law don't happen (you see this develop in the American West for example as gender rates stopped being so lopsided).
I would suggest that recognizing that the genders do have differences in terms of social aptitudes and needs, and different positions relative to life choices is the first step in reducing the male-normative view on our economic model (i.e. "if you work like a man, and wait to have kids like a man, you will get paid like a man").
This always drove me insane - people seem to confuse value equality/congruence and strict identicality. The latter seems to either try to create a female default and punish men for not living up to it, or create some weird fuzzy default that nobody really fits comfortably.
What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.
The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.
It creates a female default and punishes men for not living up to it in some areas (like public school in the US), but it creates a male default and punishes women for not living up to it in other areas (academic careers in life sciences, the job market, etc).
> The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.
Agreed.
> What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.
Agreed here too. The question then is, how we address this.
Objectify is a really overused term that has lost all relevant meaning. How can saying that someone is better than you at something possibly objectify that person? Maybe I'm overly sensible as well, but it's really sad that this is where PC has led us.
That's the objectifying part imo.... Would you disagree?
Do you consider that statement equally objectifying? If not, why?
I think it's perfectly fine to objectify a role though... An accountant is an object after all.
This comment bothered me because OP is fetishizing and tokenizing women in a way that purports to be admiring and supportive of them. In fact, he simply has weak social skills; for example, this post.
It can't be both. Either men or women are (as groups, i.e. averages) innately differ on the social vs analytical axis, and diversity is a net plus, or gender is entirely socially constructed, and adding women to a group shouldn't do anything in aggregate.
Studies point to the former rather than the latter.
Stupid analogy: I hate it that only tall people seem to design store displays of pants. Remarkably, tall people don't seem to notice that putting the small sizes on the top shelves and the larger sizes lower does not make sense. It's because they have a different experience of reaching for things on shelves. Height diversity, though, makes for a better user experience.
It is true in my stupid analogy that tall people and short people do have genetic differences, as on average they innately differ in height. But it is not their innate genetic traits that makes these tall people ignorant both on the social and analytical axes when designing store displays.
Or is it? Hm....
It's okay to make generalizations based on imperfect correlates - like gender - as long as you understand they're generalizations, and are open to revising your judgment if new, more specific information appears. The comment that sparked this thread didn't evidence any of that understanding.
You can't see a third possibility in between those two?
Re objectification: couples get advice from their life partners. That doesn't mean this is their life partners only goal.
Re: 'establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience' is there anything ethically wrong with this? Would you prefer a citation be added, eg, 'newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants'?
Or do you find the mere existence of differences between the sexes to be 'offensive'? In which case, you're more than welcome to be offended.
Completely true, valid point.
>Re: 'establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience' is there anything ethically wrong with this?
I would argue that there is something ethically wrong with this. Take this statement:
>" women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach."
Yeah, on it's face it's a compliment(I guess?), but all it really serves to do, in this context,(for me, might read totally different to you) is illustrate the differences between the two sexes. Where's any evidence that his assertion is true?
Anecdotal evidence is by definition flawed. I don't really understand where you're failing to see the potential for harm in this.
> Would you prefer a citation be added, eg, 'newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants'?
Do you have a source stating that females raised in the same environment as males exhibited a higher level of social complexity? Because, yes, I would like to see that before changing my worldview based upon this persons statement.
>Or do you find the mere existence of differences between the sexes to be 'offensive'? In which case, you're more than welcome to be offended.
Not at all; what I find offensive is when people try to extrapolate meaning and form social constructs based upon differences that often aren't conclusively proven or even relevant. When I'm talking about these differences I don't mean boy-penis girl-vagina, I mean boy-brave/courageous/smart girl-cute/supportive/geeky.
In my opinion these social constructs are already so ingrained in our society that this will be just as long and drawn out a problem as racism. I mean just define Masculine and Feminine in your head.
I'm not trying to make a point here, or to white-knight, my original response was just how that post genuinely made me feel, I didn't like it.
> Do you have a source stating that females raised in the same environment as males exhibited a higher level of social complexity? '?
Yes, I have a source stating precisely that newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants (Baron Cohen at Cambridge):
http://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x1xv47_BrainwashingInNor...
The experimenter who was interacting with the babies and measuring the time they spent staring at faces knew the gender of each baby - in other words, it wasn't double blind. This is a well known recipe for allowing the experimenter's bias to influence their recording of the results. This is just one of several basic flaws in the study; see the analysis starting on page 113 of Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender."
"Delusions of Gender" has lots of similar analyses of the research "proving" innate gender differences. The takedown of Louann Brizendine's references starting on page 158 and the one about the frozen salmon MRIs on page 150 are particularly hilarious. One example:
"Casually, Brizendine notes, 'All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women.' For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study."
Not does it invalidate male/female roles being consistent across over 200 cultures.
If you accept that men build muscle different from women, and have different hormones, could you not also accept that the differences in gray/white matter proportions, size etc are not 'cultural'?
Women objectification is about treating a woman like an object, a belonging, a resource.
As it turns out, the person writing the parent comment defined a founder's wife as "one of your most valuable business resources". That person should have said, "some of your most valuable business insights will come from your wife". It wouldn't be objectification, but it would still establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience.
Assuming unproven differences between the sexes to be true has always been ethically borderline from a scientific perspective. From a social perspective, it artificially deters persons of each sex from doing something which is then implicitly considered "unnatural" for them.
To be fair, in a world (the world of business) where employees are referred to as "human resources", everyone involved has already been objectified.
> The person writing the parent comment defined a founder's husband as "one of your most valuable business resources".
Nope, not offended. The husband is valuable, in no way does it state this is the only value of the husband.
Um, I'd say that your spouse (of whichever gender) is one of your most valuable business resources, period - if they're someone who can hear your side of the story who aren't actually involved in the situation and someone who knows you better than you know yourself.
But that person should never proceed to involve themselves in your business situation, unless your colleagues approve of their involvement. That appears to be the issue here.
Or, as this story demonstrates, accountability.
This is nuts.
If person A works at a company then obviously their significant other (male or female) will likely talk with them about work situations and that may be more or less helpful to A and the company. But the idea that as a general rule a female significant other's contribution will be so significant just by virtue of the "level of complexity" of the "social thinking" is just absurd.
If you are a male founder, you might not be married and you might not be straight. Also, one way to kill romance is to tell your significant other that they are your most valuable business resource.
> Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.
What, their point is to encourage death-match power struggles? And that's their strength?
In nature, the fittest survive, but that's because nature is cruel (indifferent, actually). But a business must nurture its employees and make them feel safe – not send them into a battlefield.
I've definitely seen this in the past. At startups where I've worked or friends have worked, the founder's wives have played important support roles in ways that are easy to observe but hard to quantify.
When one spouse is a startup founder, then it's a true "family effort" whether the other spouse likes it or not. And if it's "or not" ... well, then, that substantially hinders the chances of success.
I will also say that in many instances, if you have this opinion about women (or any group of persons), it's probably somewhat evident in your interactions with them, and you may not be treated quite as well as you would be otherwise. This can be self-reinforcing, but unfortunately the responsibility lies with you to pull yourself out of it and get some perspective.
If you don't, well, get a strong pre-nup, I guess, or stay single forever.
For the supporter, the advantage of legal marriage—where the supporter owns half the assets plus some rights to future earnings—is obvious. Smart, capable supporters know this, and won't make that investment without legal protections. Anything else would be reckless.
The advantage to the breadwinner is that this is a way to get a smart, capable supporter. If you're not willing to provide the legal protections, you're just going to get someone who doesn't really understand the situation and doesn't understand the risks. There's some chance you could find someone who was generally capable, but who was naïve on this point, but that's a smaller dating pool. And I'd argue it's ethically wrong, and the unfairness will eventually degrade the quality of the relationship.
People think alimony is just someone sucking someone dry while doing no work, but it's really just a dividend being paid out from a shared venture that you were both equal partners in.
Not to mention the sizable portion of men who don't care about the intelligence/capability of their partner, or those who don't believe that wanting a legal upper hand correlates positively with the type of intelligence/capability that they desire.
You can find more here:
http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/wedding/f/MarriageBenefit.ht...
In your 20s its fine, put off getting married, but the 40 something guy who introduces you to his girlfriend sends a totally different signal than someone who introduces you to his wife (and vice versa if the genders are swapped). It says you're noncommittal, bad at relationships, maybe previously divorced, constantly shopping around, maybe breached partners trust repeatedly, whatever, take your pick. What it never says when someone is judging your book by its cover though is "this is just some guy who's been hedging against marital risk for a couple decades", any other snap judgement requires the person know you better.
For tens of thousands of years, it was possible to marry someone without recognition from the US government. I suspect it still is.
See the recent arguments about same-sex marriage for a fulsome discussion...
I chose marriage, because I was really f'ing excited about calling my partner my wife. Now, I am really proud to call her that. Note that financially, she is far more well-off than me, but we have similar lifetime earnings potential. YMMV.
Edited: grammar.
Hell, my wife has offered to let me quit my job, where I make nearly twice as much as her (her electrical engineering salary would be enough to get us by), just so I can work on art full time, because she knows it will make me happier. I haven't, yet, because I also want her to be happy and I'm not so unhappy with my work yet that I can't earn us some more savings and hopefully make an exit for both of us.
Wow. Just wow. This pisses me off especially, because to make it as a freelancer I've had to work damn hard to develop self-discipline, maturity, and reverse a path of self-destructive behaviour.
To see people in senior positions act like complete fucking children irritates me to no end, and I will do everything in my power to stop this when I run a company.
Does anyone know, with regards to employment law, whether it's ok to include provisions that allow us to fire or at least demote, for people acting like nasty, immature human beings?
I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It sounded very familiar.
I have several friends and many acquaintances who work at Valve. One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disagreements by silently reverting some of my friend's check-ins.
The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly. If you are unhappy, you have little recourse but to express your own power by indirect passive-aggressive means. That's bad enough when it happens in any corporate structure, but here it is almost the only possible course of action.
Valve might have been a lot like GitHub if it had hired inexperienced, smart, cocky web programmers in their early twenties. In both cases the companies also boast a level of success that makes it hard for them to evaluate whether elements of their company culture is detrimental to their continued development at this stage of their existence. It's probably hardest for Valve because of the inexhaustible money faucet that is Steam. There is so much squandered potential at that company, which is a weird thing to say considering how much they've done and are still doing.
I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management' once these no-management companies realize they have issues that cannot be resolved by hiring supposedly perfect people.