Hacker News Reader

Comment by antimatter | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. These types of reports make it seem like Github cares only about skin color which to me is racist.

This viewpoint genuinely baffles me. You can only manage what you measure, and the process of monitoring a metric isn't the same thing as caring about the metric. I monitor free disk space on all my servers, but it doesn't mean I care primarily about buying more disks. In fact I don't care because I've monitored it and have determined we're okay there. However, as a result of data, if my servers were regularly running out of disk space, then I should start caring.

If these reports determined that there was no evidence of something to be fixed (either the statistics were consistent with the statistics of qualified potential employees, or there were a good reason for them not to be consistent), I would expect GitHub not to care. And yes, if they continued to care about shifting the numbers further past that point, then you could accuse them of caring only about skin color when it's unjustified. But why should a technical company not measure metrics and gather data?

The argument is that making decisions based on race is racism. Github isn't "monitoring" things, they're actively trying to change them, and using race (and other such factors that some people believe we should try to be blind to, or at least agnostic about) as a factor.

Yes. I understand "racism" (at least in this context) to mean "bias in favor of or against candidates based on their race", not "paying attention to race". The latter is something we can hopefully stop doing once we're confident the former isn't happening. I don't understand the reasoning that involves refusing to think about whether the former is happening. (And besides, if GitHub as policy does not pay attention to race, but individual interviews and reviews -- which are notoriously subject to human whim on all sorts of axes -- might be biased on race, you definitely haven't achieved the goal of your system not paying attention to race.)

Again, this seems pretty straightforward for a technical shop... if your goal is, say, "We should not have features on GitHub for Desktop that preference one platform over another," then the way to get to that goal is you add testing processes that explicitly try out things on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Even if you develop your software with some platform-agnostic library (which is a perfectly reasonable way to achieve the goal), you test the software in a non-platform-agnostic way, precisely because you want to know if you got it wrong. You don't say "We're platform-agnostic" and remove the OS field from bug reports, unless you are 200% sure that your code is platform-agnostic even when things go wrong. If you see lots of cross-platform bugs, fine! You still leave it in there so that, one day, if somehow things are disproportionately broken on Windows, you're able to actively respond to that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com