Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

This may be an unpopular opinion but I still don't understand why diversity even matters here - shouldn't it be the merit of the ideas and the presentation skills of the speakers?

View on HN

I don't actually know anyone who concerns themselves with identity politics to the extent they would mothball their tech conference. Who are these people who make these kinds of decisions?

Conference organizers and conference presenters/attendees are two different sets of people with wildly different objectives and values.

You made me think. Electron may have been unsatisfied with the promotional appeal of the lineup; it's like advertising Windows 10 - you show ethnic minorities, women, children using their tablet etc. But who knows whether electron are being business minded or simply upholding standards they claim to have.

It's GitHub HR and their ongoing war against meritocracy.

I'm becoming convinced they are saboteurs. See all the projects that descended into chaos over codes of conduct.

The same kind of people who banished the word "meritocracy" from the posters in their office because it might be offensive towards diversity hires who couldn't compete on merit.

GitHub, that's who.

The trouble is, this is a very difficult position for the organizers to defend as it is easy to attack them with "So you claim that the other sex is not capable for skilled presentations, how dare you!" -comments. And likely this is something that resonates with enough people to create a storm in social media where you as the organizer end up in the middle.

It is much easier to put up a more equal lineup of speakers and probably picking up few less insightful presentations. While somebody could also attack this approach, it would be much more difficult as you would need to argue that somebody who was left out due to their gender would have given much better presentation than somebody who was included. This would be so complicated that it is not likely to create the angry mob effect.

>"So you claim that the other sex is not capable for skilled presentations, how dare you!"

I don't think it's particularly hard to defend yourself against that. You simply claim that for some reason women don't want to come to your conference so there wasn't enough submissions, and then promise to aim to do better. Maybe it's just me who feels that intent to fix is better than trying to cover up our problems. If i had any interest in this conference now I'd consider not going.

It's sad this could be considered an unpopular opinion

on face value you can't argue with your logic but if you want to play the long game and help create and contribute to an industry that includes people from all demographics than this is a very smart move.

and more people included in your sample, more chance of finding amazing A++ engineers that can help the industry, your dev platform, etc...

> and more people included in your sample, more chance of finding amazing A++ engineers that can help the industry, your dev platform, etc...

Wasn't everyone included in the sample? Did they reject any paper based on how the sender looked like?

> on face value you can't argue with your logic but if you want to play the long game and help create and contribute to an industry that includes people from all demographics than this is a very smart move.

The way to play the long game in this is precisely accepting applications from anywhere, anything different is detrimental. So no, not a smart move.

> help create and contribute to an industry that includes people from all demographics than this is a very smart move

I doubt it. Now people are just going to think it's a waste of time trying to submit to this conference, and so lower quality material will be presented, and those in attendance aren't going to be as impressed and may not return. It's frankly a great way to to ensure you only ever hold one conference.

>and more people included in your sample, more chance of finding amazing A++ engineers that can help the industry, your dev platform, etc...

Well, whatever. Myself, I was just about to look into Electron having heard so much about it lately. But if this is how they run things, I think I'll just look elsewhere to satisfy my cross-platform development curiosities.

It's an effort to make the programming community more accessible to currently underrepresented groups. Expanding the base is one way to improve a meritocracy.

What you describe is an important goal, but I agree with protomyth[0] - they're doing it backwards. If you want to make the industry more accessible to minorities, focus on making information and training more accessible to them, and not on status rewards (being a speaker on a conference is first and foremost a status reward).

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481090

The argument here is representation. See also: Uhura from Star Trek.

Learning code should be the only way to make programming 'more accessible'. Black, white, yellow, red, gay, straight, whatever. None of that should matter. All that matters is that you can pull your weight.

The gender gap in the open source world is notoriously bad (worse than in the idustry as a whole), and this goes beyond women not being able to pull their weight.

There are fun statistics such as that women who are not immediately recognizable as such have a higher pull request acceptance rate on github than their male counterparts, whereas women who are easily identifiable have a lower one.

Source? I heard of one study like this but it was refuted for bad procedures

https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/

Open-source, an all-volunteer, enthusiast community, where the only requirement is you show up and write good code has a gender gap.

You can even be an open-source developer of one by starting your own project.

Maybe that tells you something about the general interest in programming by women. If people aren't volunteering, maybe they just aren't interested in that thing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com