gitlabuser

I'm confused. Are you saying that a company should not hire a Republicans because some Republicans are anti-gay?

The OP called Republicans "backward ass belie[vers]" for not supporting gay marriage. I responded by saying that was a bigoted statement and doesn't make sense because 40% of Republicans do support gay marriage. The OP's larger point was basically that we should shun Republicans because of their "backward ass beliefs". I never mentioned that we should include anti gay workers, I didn't even mention gays. I just said we should be inclusive of Republicans. Are you agreeing with the OP's original assertion that we should shun Republicans?

Let me give another example. I am a male and I am not attracted to overweight / obese females. So I actively discriminate against overweight people in my dating life. It does not affect how I treat overweight people in any other aspect of my life, including my workplace. If I had a public dating profile which says I preferred petite females would that be grounds to not hire me? Or to give another equivalent scenario, if I was a female who discriminated against short males in dating would that be grounds to not hire me? Or to go further, would you think its fine for the tech community to blacklist people who voted for Trump?

There's something deeply troubling to me about going down that rabbit hole. That people can make such blanket statements about an entire political party, esp the party of Abraham Lincoln.

To me as a Bengali, it's no different from my parents stating "Well Pakistanis want us dead. They conducted a genocide of us 50 years ago and they feel no different. Don't cultivate relationships with them"

NO. You don't do that. You judge individuals by the individual. Not by the their political affiliation, not by their race, not by their sexuality, gender, etc.

You don't say "let's not hire this person because they are Republican and Republicans hate gays". You evaluate the individual and if you think the individual would not create a good environment for your gay workers you don't hire them. But you do that regardless of their party. I know plenty of Democrats who are bigoted, racist, or homophobic.

Seriously, this feels like a liberal version of McCarthyism.

Professional sports are much more meritocratic than the tech industry.

lol yes, it's comments like this which are a perfect example of why tech is not an inclusive community.

Well I think you've just proved my point. Not all Republicans are against gay marriage. In fact around 40% support gay marriage: http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay...

And I think using "backward ass beliefs" to describe Republicans seems pretty bigoted to me. It certainly doesn't win over the 40% who do support gay marriage from working with you and it excludes half of the country.

Well shucks I'm not sure, I clicked on this article hoping to get some insight on that exact question.

But my hypothesis would be social services and hospitality because both those industries have a high percentage of women advancing from entry level to management roles and I think a track record of career progression is probably a decent proxy for it being a good industry for a demographic.

But I'm definitely not going to write a blog post saying "Social services it the best industry for women" until I did a lot more research into it.

I agree that tech has been a haven for some who would be outcasts in other areas. Specifically the LGBT community.

To address your other points:

* I don't buy the pipeline argument. I've seen huge bias is how the tech community treats blacks. For example, I've seen a few black colleagues try to transfer into software engineering and get huge amounts of push back. Ironically I did the same thing (transfer from product management to dev) and I was supported. Why was I treated differently? Probably because I'm Indian so I am supposed to be a developer. In all the interviews I do, people assume I have a CS degree and lots of experience even though my resume says the complete opposite. I benefit a lot from the assumptions around my skin color while a black person gets the opposite experience.

* I get why people don't like offshore centers but that doesn't mean they should assume there aren't some very talented H1B developers. I have seen many. India has some of the best computer science programs in the world.

* I don't understand your comment on the homeless but the point I was trying to make was that verbally insulting poor people, the homeless, or old people is not inclusive or meritocratic. I've seen many examples of that in the tech community. I'm not asking people in tech to give free jobs to the homeless I'm asking people not to verbally insult them.

I guess I'm contrasting it to Susan Fowler's piece "A very, very strange year at Uber" which if she wanted to could have been titled "Why Uber is the worst place to work at in the entire tech industry".

I really respect her for letting the facts and content of her article speak for itself. I wish more would do the same.

Exactly. I'm liberal but I'm still astounded by the vitrol, hate, and language my colleagues use to describe conservatives and Republicans.

Inclusion means accepting people as people, not accepting just the people who look, talk, and share the same beliefs as you.

I don't think that any of these examples show that Bay Area tech is a meritocracy or inclusive. The truth is the tech community has a culture and almost all the things you mentioned are almost stereotypical parts of it. These all fit within the tech culture:

* Going to burning man

* Going to SXSW

* Working with the LGBT community

* Tattoos / Dyed hair

* Pole dancing

* Wearing Stan Smiths

* Being obsessed with high end coffee

You shouldn't be patting yourself on the back that tech accepts these things. I've seen terrible examples of the community not accepting:

* Those who believe in gun rights

* Those who are strongly religious

* Those who are homeless

* Those who are lower class

* Those who are H-1Bs (Indian outsourcing bias)

* Those who are Republican

* Those who are black

* Those who are old / have grey hair

Being inclusive and meritocratic doesn't mean accepting things that are within your culture. It means accepting those that are outside. I remember a colleague talking about a Dropbox all hands meeting where every one was patting themselves on the backs because the recruiting team had hired many from the LGBT community. He looked at me and said "Why the f* is everyone so happy? We literally have 1 black person in a company of almost 1,000"

Seriously, if you think that having colleagues having dyed hair or going to Burning man is proof that you are meritocratic or inclusive you are in a huge bubble.

Personally, I think this article title is clickbait. Nowhere does the author show that it's the best industry for women, only that in her experience, it was a better industry than medicine and a biology lab. And then some fluff about meritocracy. No exhaustive comparison across all the industry areas, no dive into data beyond one singular experience.

I'm tired of titles that don't explain what the article is about. Something like "Why the tech industry is a good industry for women" would be a more accurate reflection of the content.

We've been conditioned by clickbait farms to sensationalize our personal blog posts.

You don't eat vegetables?

Here's a real life example. It's like Credit Karma who prepares your tax return for free, but then uses the info to help target you for ads on credit cards, loans, etc.

[this is exactly happening]

I'm also getting frustrated from Gitlab. My company has been on gitlab EE for over a year, and while they have pushed out features quite quickly, their UX is still way behind github. I think they don't have a laser focus on the user and spread themselves thin. There are basic user flows that lack the polish; for example merge requests actually are a pain to edit. If you click the edit button, it does a full page load (instead of doing it using ajax) and the page takes a few seconds to load. So trivial things like fixing the title because of a typo or changing the assignee are actually quite painful. They've hacked a solution by allowing you to some changes through back slash commands but it's still a hack that doesn't address the core problem. Even things like finding all the merge requests where you are listed as an approver is a pain. We have an internal Q&A site and the running joke is that every new hire during onboarding asks the same question "How do I find all open merge requests where I'm the approver" and the answer is always "we don't know". If took them a while to even notify you when your merge request was approved (so you could merge it). Just basic, basic UX is completely unaddressed while they roll out big features like burn down charts, todos, boards. Keep is simple stupid.

It's sad because I want gitlab to win (I believe in both their remote and open source approach) but Github's UX is so much better. We just acquired a company that uses Github so now we have a few engineers using both tools side by side and they all prefer Github's UX at this point so we might switch.