Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
where.coraline.codes
where.coraline.codes
Secondly, Coraline seems to think that human relationships are a one way street: that she is entitled to be direct and even confrontational or insensitive, especially if she believes she is "right" or in a "mentor" role, and yet her peers are expected to walk on eggshells around her, lest they be accused of attacking her.
One part that stood out as particularly odd was her insistence to stay at work while she was suffering with a mental health issue that was clearly affecting her job performance, in spite of her manager's request that she take mental health leave. It sounds like she just flat out ignored her manager under the assumption that her manager just needed to accept whatever her therapist advised her to do, which is kind of ridiculous on the face of it.
There's all of this talk about all of the code she pushed and all of the popular features she wrote, but there's no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured, e.g. what her management was expecting her to do. So when the negative review is mentioned, we're supposed to be shocked by it. Certainly she is shocked by it. That doesn't mean she should have been.
> no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured
But per the blog post:
> Based on the positive feedback from my one-on-ones and how well I was tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level, I was hopeful of getting a promotion and a raise.
I'm confused as to how one could be "tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level" but not be measured by those metrics.
> I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count.
So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period.
Here's another question: Why were weekly one-on-one meetings happening to discuss these issues? Are weekly one-on-ones typical at GitHub?
Shouldn't the review have happened closer to the end of the period, so that all of that progress could be part of improvement?
It would help if we had an inside perspective on how their reviews work from someone who isn't invested in this specific story.
I'm obviously taking a cynical take on this -- there are lots of organizations that try to use performance reviews to help an employee's career, and HR that is there to help the employees, not to bail the company out of litigation.
As someone who has poohpoohed the idea of a human resources department in a large company, I've almost done a 180 on it now that I have a small company of my own and I'd be very interested in reading some good books on the utility and function of the organisation in a large company.
This past week, our small team had brought in an executive coach that works with the material from Crucial Conversations. A wiki summary was circulated around. When I read it, I knew it applied to what was going on with our team as well as personal relationships.
Crucial conversations are moments when opinions vary, the stakes are high, and emotions run strong. Being able to have crucial conversations and handle them well allows someone to be effective, influential, and helps out the team and community tremendously. The follow-on book is called Crucial Accountability, which teaches how to deal with people who breaks promises and violates expectations.
So I stand by what I said about the cynical view of "Corporate Confidential". The thesis of "corporate confidential" is that corporaions want to fire someone using legal means because the real reasons is not legal. it might sound like a case of corporate greed and that is true to some extent. In addition, I think people are -not- having those crucial conversations. It is easier to plot a way to ease someone out than to have the crucial conversation about what is really going on.
Taking that frame with Coraline's story: if seems to me neither Corolaine, nor the github manager was able to have crucial conversations. In some ways, Coraline admitted to it in her blog post.
I also wonder if Github's earlier trouble -- what with the controversies, were also a series of crucial conversations that wete not held, or they were handled badly. They tried to fix it by hiring activists, but then, the crucial conversations and the shared meaning that includes social justice did not get discussed.
Finally: I think perhaps Coraline might benefit from skills in crucial conversations, as far as her activism goals.
I have sone friends for whom SJW rubs them the wrong way -- because it adds fuel to the fire and increases conflict. (Ironic, being that most of my friends who feel this way are committed martial artists and explore violence with each other). While crucial conversations is not a pancea, there are often some deep meaning held by both social activists and social conservatives.
I have always felt that Code of Conducts as imperfect substitutes for what we really want. I think people (generally speaking), deep down, want to speak their truths while getting along, even when disagreeing, when stakes are high, and emotions run strong.
Whilst the article is (as I've pointed out elsewhere) only one side of the story, GitHub isn't that big a company, so how crap do your management processes have to be that you only get around to reviewing somebody 3 months after the review period ended? It doesn't sound like the scheduling of the review was a surprise to Coraline: she saw it coming, it wasn't late, etc. So why didn't it cover the period up to the date of the review?
Bashing somebody with months old feedback when they've been working with you to improve against goals that you've both agreed specifically related to that feedback is an extremely poor way to operate, and obviously hugely demotivating to the reviewee.
Problem is, as I've already said, we've only read one side of the story.
In my experience, both as a manager and an individual contributor, the periods will be offset by 2-4 months. The delivery of the review, while it feels like the start of something to the recipient, is the end of what's often a long and stressful period of planning, writing, and distributing reviews that lead to raises, bonuses, and promotions.
So nothing seems odd about that timeline to me, unless her manager failed to explain "this is a review that applies to the period before you made marked improvement".
We used to do 6 monthly reviews but scrapped them in favour of more regular meetings every 4 - 8 weeks, largely for the reasons you've stated. That being said, in my experience reviews are one of those tasks that take up as much time as you give them. If you only give yourself a month to gather feedback and prepare them you'll find a way to get it done, and I always wanted to work off the most current information available when meeting with members of my teams, hence doing the prep as late as possible.
As I said, GitHub is not a large company at around 700 employees, so I'm not really sure what their excuse is. The largest company I've worked for, as a contractor this time, was around 400k employees, and they seem to have much better processes around this with regular one-to-ones in the place of annual reviews, at least for permanent tech staff.
1. (Less likely) She did a lot of work, but it was not high priority work. It was good engineering but on things that the company did not consider important. She was given this freedom and then, in the company's eyes (fairly or unfairly) considered to have wasted it.
2. (More likely) She had good technical skills and bad social skills. When she was able to go heads-down and crank out PRs and tickets, everyone was happy, but she was socially abrasive and alienated her coworkers. This could be because she is an unpleasant person, or because they are unpleasant people, or it could be an honest misunderstanding or personality conflict, but in every case it detracts from the productivity of everyone, generally.
I suspect (2) played a big part, mostly because I've seen this same dynamic play out at other places before. As a borderline autist, I'm highly sympathetic to people in that position, and generally believe that it's better for everyone involved if management can find a way to work to their strengths. However, drastic differences in interaction style are what they are, and at the end of the day, your employer's priority is their productivity, not your happiness. Sometimes these things happen. They suck. At least we're fortunate enough to work in an industry where we have half a dozen other options for work at any time
> This could be because she is an unpleasant person, or because they are
> unpleasant people, or it could be an honest misunderstanding or personality
> conflict, but in every case it detracts from the productivity of everyone,
> generally.
I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case here, but the behaviour of "well let's just fire this one person, no matter who was in the wrong" is only good from a "anything for the company's bottomline" perspective.
But
> I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case here, but the behaviour of "well let's just fire this one person, no matter who was in the wrong" is only good from a "anything for the company's bottomline" perspective.
Regardless of one's opinions on ethics, this is the attitude your employer _will_ take and it will _never_ change unless they are forced to do so. Tech companies are the shepherds of billions of dollars worth of assets, and they are going to protect those assets over you, when push comes to shove. Consequently, it is important to always keep this in mind, to expect it, and to proceed accordingly. Ignoring this doesn't make it untrue
In fact, some people coming consider it an inalienable part of their masculinity, personality, religion, etc, that they will put their principles above their checkbook.
In fact, some people start companies specifically because they want to put their principles above their paycheck.
> My overall review was a "Does Not Meet Expectations." I was shocked and upset. A bad review out of the blue was not something that I had experienced before. I thought I had good rapport with my manager, and that if there was a problem that we would have been addressing it at our weekly meetings. In my mind this was a serious management failure, but there was apparently nothing I could do about it.
Emphasis on "addressing it at our weekly meetings".
This seems to be far more of a management failure than Coraline's failure.
> I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count.
So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period.
Re-reading it again, I'm not convinced that this is a management failure either. The section titled Empathy starts with:
> Starting in December, in my weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager, we would review all of my written communication (issues, pull requests, code reviews, and Slack messages) to talk about how I could improve. It felt ridiculous but I went along with it, and did my best to address my manager's feedback and concerns.
One way to read that is that her manager was trying to address these problems, but Coraline didn't understand how serious they were, because she dismissed them as "ridiculous."
That's the vibe I got from her post (that the conversation just stopped at a certain point), but that's really my point; in adult, human interactions, if you behave in ways that people find unacceptable, people can and will at one point simply say, "I've had enough" and shut down further dialogue because they do not find communicating with you to be constructive or productive. They are within their rights as human beings to do so.
Some people seem to have a "I have a certain approach and you must accept it and deal with me" attitude and that's just not how the world works. You can try to push a bad, combative attitude on other people, but there's just nothing that says that they have to accept it.
Yes, there's a point at which you're completely justified in shutting down further dialogue because you do not find the communication constructive or productive. That point is after you have said that you do not find the communication constructive or productive.
(It sounds like your impression from the OP is that they didn't ghost too early; I didn't form an impression about that, but your take sounds reasonable.)
There's a flipside to your (correct) point about "that's not just how the world works"; basically, if you find yourself "having to accept my approach and just deal with it", are you sure you're not yourself requiring me to adopt to your communication modalities? Why are you sure you're not telling me to accept it and deal with you?
If I prefer directness and you prefer obliqueness, who is correct, and why?
(I find dealing with subtext and other "implies" to be the bad, evasive attitude - why would I have to accept it?).
I've always wondered the same, after all, doesn't it take two people to have an argument or misunderstanding? And why is simply stating outright what the issue is considered unspeakable, is it some sort of an ego/pride thing?
I just don't get how people behave, but I'm pretty sure I'm the odd one out.
They are. That's the whole point. If someone comes to try and convince you of their point, you can either listen and engage in a discussion, or if you believe that isn't going to work out, you can refuse. Both are valid options and necessary at times.
Likewise if you want to convince someone of your point and they refuse to listen to you, you can either change your approach so that they do, or declare them a lost cause and move on. Both are again valid options and necessary at times.
The problem is when you keep trying the approach that the other person doesn't want to listen to. That will just alienate them further, and can easily turn into harassment.
I got this vibe too. Empathy on the part of others (or rather its lack) is discussed quite a bit, but no consideration is given for the person who wrote the survey who was upset by her feedback. From the subtext it sounds like we are to believe this person was silly to be upset, because the feedback was so anodyne, but it really does seem like a part of the story there is missing. Based on the usage of the "her" pronoun, I'm guessing this other person is also a woman, who also faces issues of harassment and unfairness in tech. And so the lack of empathy for where that person was coming from was quite striking.
I'm going to hazard a guess that it was Frannie Zlotnick who led the survey [0]. As her research interests include gender and race stereotyping [1], I'm guessing that she objected to being lectured on the subject.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-wor...
[1] https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/frannie-zlotnic...
>This was the first instance of what came to be referred to as my "non-empathetic communication style".
I like how she was pissed when she was "out victim-ed" HA!
I think you are right, employees like this have an bigger agenda they are focused on rather than doing work of the company.
And the fact that she says she has bipolar depression (and she was on involuntarily mental commitment for 8-days!?! A 5150 in California is 72-hours!) and yet she can't imagine why somebody would say she is not doing well at work, is also ridiculous on the face of it.
You can of course be involuntarily confined in California for over 72 hours. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80...
I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight.
Where you see an instance of her co-workers being accused of attacking her, I see her lines of communication being shut down from above. A simple one-on-one conversation probably could have resolved that situation very easily, but GH management seems in this case to have insulated that person from learning from their mistake. Not the kind of effort I would expect from an organization that's truly trying to be "inclusive.
Apparently not?
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> As a senior engineer she was in a mentor role.
Being in a mentor role does not mean you have to right to mentor. Assuming you have a superior position, and deciding to use it to explain something obvious to someone else as "educating" them is not a good social interaction for the other person, and may make them feel trapped and uncomfortable. The author never said the junior developer expressed interest in mentorship, merely that "this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it." Not willing engaged, but "benefiting." Without context, it is imaginable that said mentoree didn't want these interactions or this relationship and the author never identified this social cue.
> I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight.
The article starts by complaining about "drive-by issue comments", then described opening what might be considered a drive-by issue. That could be construed as contradictory. Moreover, said issue may be construed as a (company-)public dressing-down. A developer came though and, in a public manner observable by all their peers, informed another that they were not being sensitive enough. It's reasonable, I think, to be upset in that context.
> A simple one-on-one conversation probably could have resolved that situation very easily, but GH management seems in this case to have insulated that person from learning from their mistake
The author could have initiated such a conversation herself in lieu of the issue.
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My point is that a lot of things are a matter of perception, and one person's is seldom the whole story. Caroline clearly had a bad go of it at GitHub, that isn't deniable. But individuals' perceptions are fickle things, and it is seldom the case that any one tells the whole story.
The article is reasonably clear that "drive-by issues" are ones where people leave comments uninvited, and it's also explicit that Caroline was specifically asked to review the survey in question. So it's hard to read that as contradictory.
Yes and no. From the article:
> One day a notification came to me that a repo for the open source developer survey had been created and that the survey questions were in progress. My director followed up with me to make sure that I was aware of the survey and asked me to review the questions. I worked my way through, and stopped short at one particular question...
She got a notification of the repository, was asked by someone (not the person working on it) to review the questions, and decided that these two interactions separately constituted an invitation to give public feedback.
Then, her primary feedback was in the form of creating an issue about a specific question, with a terse description. (If you look at the repository in question [0], it appears her feedback came in the form of opening two similarly-terse issues about back-to-back questions with no further comments on the survey for 10 days.)
It's easy to imagine viewing that as a negative interaction from the other side.
I'm not saying it was handled well, or that it wasn't possible to resolve it in another way, but, yeah, I can imagine getting a little upset about that sort of thing happening in the author's shoes.
Exactly. For what we know, the junior could have actively complained to the manager (wrongly or rightly) about her mentoring. OTOH the junior dev might have appreciated it. We can't say for sure.
Some people (myself included) prefer to get a general direction and then later to come back for further questions. Too much information in a short amount of time can be overwhelming, I need some time to absorb and read it up in the internet. A few keywords might be good enough to get someone going and figure it out themselves.
"learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you." This really sounds as if the manager had the junior dev's best interest in mind. I don't see how the manager said this to get back at Caroline, as was kind of implied in the article.
I'm in a senior role on my team, and this is exactly how I'd describe the support I try to give my teammates when they ask (and hopefully, they'd agree). Unless someone is going down the significantly wrong path, I'll generally leave them alone until they ask for assistance. Sometimes, they ask for a direction, sometimes they ask for the type of "pair programming" described in the post (screensharing via video calls), but how much or little they get is up to them, and they drive.
In this case, you're right that we don't know the context of the story from the more junior developer's perspective, and it's completely plausible that they weren't happy with the mentorship they were receiving, but also didn't feel comfortable giving that feedback themselves, all of which is a shame.
I think this level of support is a fairly widespread target for the first interaction on a topic. We're (generally speaking) working among fellow talented professionals within a small-enough window of related disciplines and skill levels. The reasonable assumption is that someone requesting help needs just enough new information to establish connective tissue in their own mental understanding of a problem to become self-sufficient again (even if that means doing more research, learning, digging, etc... on their own). Topics that require a "brain dump" from someone with the institutional knowledge is a sign of technical debt and that information belongs in internal documentation.
What makes me a bit skeptical here is that Coraline just writes 'this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it'. But doesn't mention that the junior dev appreciated it or thanked her for her help. Didn't the junior complain about the missing mentoring after the intervention of the manager?
But who knows, probably I am reading way too much into these few sentences...
This is the main issue right there.
If anyone is reading this and wants to have a lot of HR/PR related problems in his/her company - start doing this and problems will pile up.
If that's all it takes for your company to come crumbling down, then good riddance.
I'm sorry if this seems unempathetic - getting fired sucks, and is extremely painful. But there's no other way I can put it.
A long time ago, when my career first started, I also went through the "PIP deathspiral", and it took months... maybe years after my termination to realize I was just fired being a shithead.
I see the same "it's not my fault it's theirs" attitude I had at the time in this.
I agree; she's very passionate about what she's doing. I'm really on about her interactions with the team.
The things that really stand out to me:
- Regarding the data scientist's gender question: "I was forbidden to interact any further with the author of the survey"
- Regarding the mentee situation: "I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to 'learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you.'"
- Regarding asynchronous communication: "Asynchronous communication is definitely not my strongest area. When I see a text box on screen, I tend to be very terse and direct instead of typing out a wall of text."
It sounds like there's a lot unsaid in these lines she's getting. As if glaring social cues are being missed, and the managers and teammates are either unable or unwilling to just say "you come across like a jerk a lot. People are scared to say this to you. Please slow down before you type."
It could also be my massive amount of privilege talking. Who knows.
But it's not exactly the first time GitHub has had issues with this kind of thing.
The impression I get from this whole debacle is that GitHub has a shit attitude, and there's more of them than there is of her, so they did what any company does in a similar situation.
But hey! It's just a "culture issue" right. Except, the culture issue is that the whole effing Silicon Valley culture is pure poison.
I don't disagree. I probably should have taken the greater SV problem into consideration in my knee jerk OP :-|
Over all, it paints a picture of GH where the management (and many / some employee) are not fans of directly dealing with problems, which, IMHO, speaks to people who don't do it often enough. Most of the time, when I (or others who've related stories) "turn" to directly deal with a people problem, it turns out not to be much of a problem at all. It's only when you try to deal indirectly, or not all, that things go south and eventually explode.
Interestingly, all of the people at my last company that I had this issue with were in the Bay Area, and I didn't have this issue with folks in other remote offices.
The strategy I use is to qualify and de-personalize everything. This is less persuasive writing, verbose, and slightly annoying but is "safer" if you don't know your audience. "It may be better", "X seems like it could be asked better", "help me understand your thoughts for X over Y", "what if we tried asking X like this? It might have this effect".
This is categorically less efficient communication but is arguably more 'effective' if it means people don't get offended. As it's hard to be effective when people are complaining to their managers.
Can't really say I'm expecting someone like that to be low friction.
Never really wanted to use opal before, but if this is who is behind it...
http://meh.schizofreni.co/random/lulz/2016/01/08/tales-from-...
I read about the first 50 replies or so and found myself agreeing with the 'meh' user, but after reading that blog post, it seems aredridel was on to something...
> Protip: you won't because you can't.She doesn't care about said project, but to promote the idea of political cleansing in open source.
Meh's comments, while to course, are correct in the sentiment that she isn't really contributing anything, but is instead attacking. HOWEVER, he should of said "because you won't" rather than "can't", since that's just an unjustified attack on her competence as a dev.
They find a project they're associated with. They go on it's github repo and they start an issue with a title of "Transphobic maintainer should be removed from project". Not "Potentially transphobic maintainers and how their association with the project hurts it in the long run". Not even "My feelings were hurt after I interpreted some comment of one of the maintainers in some way, please let's discuss". No, they simply demanded removal of someone, based on an, at best, ambiguously "transphobic" twitter comment.
And you're here telling me that person isn't the one with the problem.
This kind of bias is demonstrated over and over in studies, even (and in some cases, especially) among people who are highly educated and even forewarned about the study objectives.
The idea that the best way to fix biases in favor of wealthy white men is to add new biases against wealthy white men is crazy.
> The people who generally push against that "meritocracy" are the ones who benefit from it not being implemented in the first place.
What if the biases are deep-rooted and subtle and difficult to address without destroying productivity with endless ceremony? What if the biases exist beyond that single organization's control, but still affect them? If the waves are pushing you in one direction, pointing your bow slightly in the opposite direction might really be the right thing to do.
> The idea that the best way...
Few think it's the best way. The problem is, eliminating systemic bias will take a long time. During that time, new victims of that bias will continue to be created. If the introduction of a contrary bias helps more people than it harms, is that really so crazy?
Instead you could do some research on your own and find the information that's out there.
People who are unaware of the existence of the problem can use a search engine and read up on it.
I suggest that if you want to change minds and improve the status quo, you should engage these people who you find tiresome anyway. Not to persuade them, but the third-parties who will read the discussion and could be persuaded. Or, if that's too much work, simply don't engage, if only so you don't sabotage someone else's effort to persuade.
I can tell you right now, though, the people who will keep demanding sources and want to re-litigate even the existence of discrimination/bias, in every single thread which mentions the topic, will not be convinced by providing them walls of links and sources. They've already made up their minds, and the only thing they'd do in response is exactly what I said: nitpicks and non sequiturs and "well, I don't find that convincing..." and so what's the point? If someone is genuinely and truly unaware, they can use Google. If someone just wants to try to discredit a basic established fact about the world, it's not my job to coddle them or make them feel good about it or "engage" with them or make them feel that they were properly listened to and had their concerns addressed, any more than it would be my job to do that for someone who denies evolution.
All I am saying, is that their are third parties who you are not interacting with, who could be persuadeable, who will read that frustration and are going to find it alienating rather than persuasive, and therefore you end up creating more people in the world who think there is no real problem.
It may be more constructive to simply disengage if you feel that exasperated by it. Both for persuading other people and for your own sanity. That's all I am saying.
Now, imagine that every time you say something which even tangentially mentions evolution -- let alone something where the main topic is evolution -- some of those people immediately pop up with "got sources for that?" / "gonna need a source on that" / "citation needed for that claim" / etc.
And imagine that for a while you did go to the trouble of linking up primers on the topic, but every time you did that, they just responded with non sequiturs and attempts to nitpick little details of the primers and parlay that into discrediting the entire idea of evolution.
Now, imagine you've been living in that world, every day, for years. You might well finally decide "you know what, it's not my job to pause every single time I post a comment online and have to re-prove the theory of evolution to anyone and everyone who demands it; evolution is a basic fact we shouldn't have to debate at this point, and people who genuinely want an intro to it for some reason can find one on their own".
Now, imagine that if you do make that decision, you'll be branded an asshole for "complaining" instead of just posting a link. You'll be told that these folks are "just asking for sources". Or any of a large number of other explanations which don't jive with what you see day in and day out, but if you try to explain that you'll be told you're projecting, or making it up, or arguing with a strawman, and this is a sign that you are not trustworthy (which in turn just reflects back on the theory of evolution -- after all, if this is the kind of person who stands up as its representative...).
Imagine all of that, but change the topic from the theory of evolution... to the topic of this thread. And imagine how tired everyone is of the "got a source for that?" brigade. Regardless of whether the person asking has the noblest purest intentions in the history of noble purity, we're talking about basic stuff about the society we live in and the industry we work in, and if someone is genuinely unaware of it and genuinely curious, they can use Google on their own.
I don't need to imagine, I do live in such a world, and here's what I do:
I either don't bother commenting on the first place, or I keep some links handy so that if someone genuinely asks I have something ready to share.
Surely passing a simple link is easier than what you're doing.
To assume that I have some sort of hidden agenda behind this question is rather paranoid from my perspective (and came as a surprise), as you didn't know anything about my intentions.
I wish we could have discussions like this in the wider community without people going knee-jerk against the idea of it, itself.
I'd be willing to accept that a lot of companies here are nepotistic. I'd even be willing to accept that they cloak their nepotism in the rhetoric of meritocracy. But I have to draw the line at people opposing the idea itself. I have a hard time understanding how anyone could even hold that position. Don't you want the best people, at least in principle?
If people were more nuanced in these things we could hold discussions like "yes, this is a great ideal, but it gets corrupted. The problem is the corruption, not the ideal"
http://www.wnyc.org/story/268598-struggle-reclaim-word-jihad...
I think the word meritocracy is in a similar situation. It's an interesting and useful concept, but the word tends to get thrown around by people you probably don't want to get associated with or confused with, so if you want to be heard and understood maybe try a different word.
So you just say "don't do <<idea>>" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on.
That's a terrible plan because it blanket dismisses a rational and widely accepted idea without explaining why or even forcing you to think about it.
How about you at least take the courtesy to explain why you're dismissing something that at face value provides a better solution than what you're suggesting. Even with its problems, you need to explain why your suggested solution is better than meritocracy.
I personally at least am yet to see a better alternative to meritocracy, despite its definite problems. In my opinion all proposed alternatives seem to introduce more unfairness and problems of their own.
Amongst almost everybody I know, "meritocracy" still means it's dictionary definition. If the definition is contested, I don't understand why other peoples' definitions of it take priority over the official one
http://contributor-covenant.org/
"Marginalized people also suffer some of the unintended consequences of dogmatic insistence on meritocratic principles of governance. Studies have shown that organizational cultures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality. People with "merit" are often excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions. Meritocracy also naively assumes a level playing field, in which everyone has access to the same resources, free time, and common life experiences to draw upon. These factors and more make contributing to open source a daunting prospect for many people, especially women and other underrepresented people. (For more critical analysis of meritocracy, refer to this entry on the Geek Feminism wiki.)
An easy way to begin addressing this problem is to be overt in our openness, welcoming all people to contribute, and pledging in return to value them as human beings and to foster an atmosphere of kindness, cooperation, and understanding."
AFAIK the word "merit" doesn't appear at all in the actual Code of Conduct.
Meritocracy is still the best we have. It may be flawed, yes, but there exists no superior alternative. It's likely possible to get away with a few minor tweaks - but there doesn't seem to be anyone looking into what exactly those could be, instead they shit on the concept without providing any viable alternative.
It seems like many of the things she and others mention are not necessarily bias in individuals in the workplace, but "resources, free time, life experiences" - which seem much easier to attack and if done fully I think could help make up for other biases too. I think the best bet honestly is stuff like Black Girls Code where they try to get people up to speed in order to compete successfully by merit.
Maybe not. In many situations you want the best team, and the best team is not necessarily the team that has the most top flight individual contributors.
The best teams I've been on seem stronger than the sum of their individual members, and I've definitely been on teams I rate less highly that had some very strong individual contributors.
Along these lines, I found this article interesting: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-mak...
I mean like honestly, if you don't care _in principle_ about the quality of your staff, how are you deciding who to hire?
* Able to clearly communicate technical concepts. Evidenced by seeing displaying in wiring logical ordering of thought, separation of complex pieces into smaller, less complicated, and clearly delineated pieces, effective and actuate command of technical vocabulary.
* Able to code. Evidenced by watching them code.
* Familiarity with the data structures and algorithmic approaches native to the problem domain. Evidenced by discussion around that domain, perhaps a psuedo-code exercise with a relevant problem paired with discussion of design tradeoffs of different approaches.
* Understanding of the cross-cutting concerns related to maintainable software: testing, documentation, modularity, etc. Evidenced by Socratic discussion of said topics. "Given this problem common to sustainable software development, what would you do/have you done?"
I still believe in the value of meritocracy. Actually pursuing meritocracy solves a lot of the inclusivity problems we think we have. The problem is that people are inherently biased and unless we are purposeful in accounting for these biases it is easy to weave then into any system you design, no matter what the name or started goals.
Doesn't change the value of an actual meritocracy. Just highlights one of the challenges of being human.
All of these can be objectively measured to a degree if you actually care to take the time:
* Logical ordering of thought: identify and diagram the main ideas in the text. Identify transitions in the text. Identify explicitly named connections between pieces. Multiple people can do this and expect to have a high degree of similarly in their results.
* Separation of components: similarly identify and diagram the components they list by name, the relationships the identify by name, the responsibilities they identify by name.
* Technical vocabulary: list all of the technical terms. Compare their usage against a dictionary.
* Ability to code: run their code. Does it complete and produce the expected output? This is absolutely objective. You can add further constraints and retain absolute objectivity: does it complete within a certain time, stay within a certain memory budget, stay within a certain cyclomatic complexity threshold, have a certain percentage of test coverage, etc.
* Familiarity with data structures and algorithms common to the problem domain: list the major constraints of the problem domain, list the data structures according to feature which addresses the constraints, similarly list algorithms. Compare to the candidate's answers. How many of the major concerns did they address? How many of the applicable data structures/algorithms did they know? Did they volunteer anything new and were they able to explain how it addressed the problem constraints?
* Understanding of the cross-cutting concerns. This could almost be a checklist. I would make it a little more involved. As a mentioned, Q&A, see what solutions they present, but to have a quantifiable metric we can identify major components and identify the major concerns each of those addresses, see how many the candidate reached, give bonus points for value concerns they addressed that we didn't.
I'm sure if I spent more time I could expand both of these lists.
I will concede that this is still subjective in many ways, especially in the interviewers choices of what is "correct" ( what are the problem constraints, etc.) and what parts of the answers after important.
In that regard I will concede to you that there is an ultimately subjective nature to most of this, because deciding what is valuable has an element of subjectivity, but that is going to be true of pretty much any pursuit outside of pure mathematics (and I'm not convinced we have entirely objective values there either). However, once we have decided what we value it's possible to eliminate a lot of the subjectivity from measuring it. In most interview processes it's not a lack of ability to be objective, it's a lack of concern about being objective.
And actually, I'm not too bothered by that. A healthy meritocracy does not require absolute objectivity. What it requires is an explicit statement of what the values are and a transparent means of evaluating people against those values, and but according to any other values. The values can be subjective. The evaluation can be subjective. As long as the values are known and the evaluation process is transparent it can function as intended. Even better, by clearly communicating the values of the system you send a strong signal to others so the can determine if your organization is something they want to be a part of.
Objectivity is a good tool to help maintain that transparency. But I'm not worried so much about the subjectivity of it as I am hidden values and opaque evaluations tied to things that should be irrelevant according to the stated values.
Defining the "best people" is _obviously_ subjective. _People_ are subjective. There isn't just one "best"-- there is a set of "bests" that you can strive for. Just like the above example, it depends on your requirements, your priorities, etc.-- but most importantly, it doesn't need to be objective to work well, which brings us full circle to:
> "Best people" can mean the best team.
If you prioritize teamwork among individual contributors, this is what best people would imply.
The awesome part about a capitalist system is that companies have the freedom to experiment with these configurations of how they define "best". GitHub may define it differently from you, but that doesn't make their definition less valid.
Meritocracy is an idea, not a specification-- there is no one true meritocracy implementation. The discussion needs to start from there.
Im not convinced it does. If you want to say meritocracy says merely that we should try to hire the best people all things considered then no-one would disagree. The disagreement is precisely about which things it's appropriate to consider.
Typically meritocratic systems in practice make the assumption that it is possible to determine merit outside the context of a specific team. I think this assumption is highly suspect. Merit is not a fixed characteristic of the individual but rather an emergent property of them in their context and in relationship with those around them.
And what about in reverse? What if, rather than finding the "best", we merely have a metric/s that weed out the worst? If I remove the bottom 15% effectively, and replace them with average performers, then the net gain is massive, especially as each extra bug introduced is a massive time sink for any team, and poor developers are a massive cause of that.
What I am claiming is that work is generally done by teams and optimising for high performing and highly capable teams is not the same as optimising for high performing and highly capable individuals (my understanding of what most people mean by 'meritocracy').
It's not merely word games. I've observed poorly performing teams built entirely of highly capable people. That kind of dynamic can hobble a company.
There are professional sports franchises who go out and just throw money at "the best" players in their leagues. And the track record of doing that is pretty mixed; it turns out that just hiring a bunch of top individuals easily loses to putting together a group of players who are each objectively "worse" but whose play as a team is superior.
HOWEVER, I will say that, rather than a great team, strategic / tactical innovation can cover for flaws. The Sydney Swans pioneered "flooding" and made a grand final with a sub-standard team. Next season though, the league caught up and the Swans did poorly. It wasn't the team or the players that got there, rather it was a tactical innovation, and that is usually short lived.
In similar ways, a coding change - new library, microservices etc can all be short term gains. Ultimately, though, when everyone starts using those tactics, what you want is the best people, fullstop.
You're disagreeing with something I never said.
Imagine you're a baseball GM. You decide to build a winning roster by taking an unlimited amount of money, and then identifying the statistically best left fielder, the statistically best center fielder, the statistically best right fielder, and so on through all the field positions. You also identify the five statistically best starting pitchers, etc., and sign all of them.
There are franchises which try this "just sign a bunch of superstars, they have to win because they're so good" approach, and the track record of that approach is very, very mixed. But "just sign a bunch of superstars" is basically how tech companies claim they try to hire.
"Chelsea were so happy with N'Golo Kante that they sent Leicester flowers to say thank you for selling him to them."
So you can be a productive coder or a good presenter or whatever but by themselves, these are incomplete metrics. If you happen to also be an a*hole, you are probably an overall liability.
An even more useless metric, though, is your specific flavour of sexuality or your skin colour. None of these count as qualifications in any sense, and if management if measuring these things I'd be wary of their sense of judgement.
Jew professor: let's take 9 Jews and 1 Russians
Conservative professor: let's take 9 Russians and 1 Jew
Liberal professor: let'ts take 5 Jews and 5 Russians
Eldest professor: you are all bloody nationalists! Let's take 10 best musucians!
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122417714422...
I got a new computer. Where news.ycombinator.com hasn't been set to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts yet. So I wanted to check what changed in the last year or so...
And your post reminded me why I stopped visiting here. Thanks.
Merits are important in engineering. If our merit measurements are low resolution, enhance them.
I don't care what team members look or sound like as long as they are good.
But there are such metrics. For example:
* "I implemented feature X, which increased CTR by Y% thus increasing revenue by Z"
* "New compression scheme reduces bandwidth usage by this much, allowing team B to implement their new feature without worrying about badnwidth usage too much"
* "Team C, who uses our library, needed urgent help investigating a performance issue. I dove in and found that the interface we were providing them didn't allow the most efficient usage; designed, tested and deployed an alternative, which resulted in team C being satisfied with performance"
I could keep going with these examples (I'm paraphrasing these from some actual work my colleagues did). My point is, it's pretty easy to measure merit in earned dollars, shipped features, fixed bugs, saved engineering hours, and resource usage. Those metrics are concrete and public.
Unless you're fixing tens of thousands of bugs I don't think you're going to have a good sample size to judge the output of 2 people based on just how many bugs they've closed.
This can also be gamed ie. pick up easier bugs to appear more productive, open bugs for small issues you notice yourself and fix, and this has the byproduct that real work never gets done.
Rewrites, infrastructure, code reviewers, mentoring. No earned dollars, no "features" shipped, good luck measuring "saved engineering hours".
There are no objective measures of productivity in the majority of cases for tech workers.
which could be really important if that single character was a decimal point that was screwing up sscanf in a european locale :-)
obviously, impact of the fixed bugs should be taken into account. It's pretty easy to measure too, by things like:
* is this bug affecting many customers? * is it affecting just one, but a really important one? * is this bug release-blocking?
etc.
If you try to game it, it will become very obvious.
> Rewrites, infrastructure, code reviewers, mentoring
Infrastructure is a feature in and of itself. Besides, doing things like improving a build system to reduce build times, or streamlining code review workflow has clear measurable impact. Every rewrite must have an observable measurable impact, otherwise it is simply not worth doing. Your mentees' performance is an excellent proxy to measure your quality as a mentor. Again, all of these can be assessed without much hand-waving.
Code reviews shouldn't even count towards your performance. It's just something that you have to do. (though arguably, if you have to do a lot of code reviews, then it's a clear signal that you're a valuable person on the team who knows a lot of detail about the system).
> There are no objective measures of productivity in the majority of cases for tech workers.
I think there clearly are, and I just listed some of them. Sometimes they're hard to boil down to a single number, but in most cases you can easily tell who's doing meaningful work.
I'm not sure that's "easy to measure" since how do you know how many hours have been saved without doing it the "slow" way first?
> earned dollars
Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs or implementing flashy new features but is providing good mentoring to the team, writing onboarding documentation, helping them understand the large-scale ramifications of their changes, etc., is essentially invisible to "metrics" yet providing a vital role.
Like I said, not always easy to boil down to a concrete number, but you can always find good proxies. Fixed a problem that caused service to trigger alarms in the middle of the night? Saved engineering hours. Wrote a library that several teams use? Saved engineering hours. Even your example, writing documentation, saves engineering hours.
> Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs [...]
How would you be able to do any of that if you're not doing meaningful work on the system?
I like to think about Neurosurgery to illustrate: if you need a tumor removed from your brain, would you rather have the surgeon be a privileged, elite surgeon from Harvard, or some random dude from the streets?
We should be happy that we are able to produce elite Neurosurgeons, and strive to give more people the opportunity (including random dudes from the street). Attacking elite Neurosurgeons is completely counterproductive.
Academia usually garants a minimum of performance - i will give you that, it is no indicator for a maximum.
Well I guess if he performed zero surgeries then he automatically gets 100% success rate.
Knowledge on adjunct fields and skills can accumulate in a person over time, thus allowing them to perform similar feets.
Like, a bright pupil might learn from a master, if it is not intended. It has happend- since medieval times- apprenticeships, although a attack on caste-think can happen today. Yes, they did not jump through the money hoops, that are suppossed to keep them away- but some of them studied what happens around them. Those servant peoples.. they might not be automatons.
If it had a drop-out quota similar to comp sci or math, i might actually consider your elitism a valid opinion. Post all the meritocracy nonsense you need to post, but deep down you know, if you had the money and a mediocre kid- you would help him through and put additional money hoops up behind him to jump through.
The irony, that all the others doing the same thing, have you lay on a metal table, beeing cut open by maybee not the best person for the job, it never reaches escape velocity.
Good code speaks for itself, and competent programmers will quickly recognize you.
I think the main objection to "meritocracy" is that often there is no real meritocracy, and people use it as a way to ignore claims that the place isn't a meritocracy.
Organisation: We're a meritocracy! Member: I'm getting unfairly treated based on race/gender/etc. Org: That's impossible, we're a meritocracy!
> In the Ruby world, we insist that “Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice,” ignoring the sexist statements he has made with regard to diversity outreach efforts. We write off Linus Torvalds’ dismissal of diversity as an “unimportant detail” and justify it based on the utility of his creations. But why is it that we can proudly refuse to use software created by corporations whose often aggressive business policies we disagree with, but continue to adopt software written by sexists, racists, homophobes, transphobes?
I feel that's pretty close to directly calling Matz a sexist. Later she proposes a Code of Conduct for Ruby so that there's a robust process for punishing sexism[2]. As far as I understand, Matz' tweet would have counted as an offence.
Also, while her Contributor Covenant seems like it strives to make GitHub interactions more civilised, Caroline has a public Twitter account on which she screenshots people who disagree with her for her followers to sneer at (current, harmless example: [3]). Inexplicably (to me), this behaviour is fine by the logic of the CC. I'd say it's the highway to emotional escalation.
Nothing of this invalidates her viewpoints, but her approach of working for change is more "take no prisoners" than "low friction".
[1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of... [2] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004 [3] https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/882735106070376451
If you encounter attitudes from people that are hostile towards you, you can either speak up and allow them to correct themselves (or double-down) or be silent and give your tacit approval.
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
> The next day I got an urgent request for a call with my manager. She told me that the data scientist who had written the survey questions was very upset and had gone to her manager to complain about me.
I can't help but shake my head reading thru the whole piece. It's like a soap opera. Everyone's so caught up in the social issues it's fucking impossible to not offed anyone.
The fact that Github asked "Transgender" in addition to this shouldn't be seen as offensive, as I am sure they were doing this simply to make sure transgendered people felt included too. Sadly a good deed is not always appreciated.
UK government guidelines [1] for general forms to do with benefits/services &c are fairly thin
Organisations that have to maintain equality metrics in some form [2] have a more complex approach. This second approach seems like the nearest to the Github situation. The example I have cited (third or fourth in goog search results) maps directly to 'protected characteristics' in diversity legislation in UK.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/design/gender-or-sex
[2] http://www.ecu.ac.uk/guidance-resources/using-data-and-evide...
Meta comment: Survey questions are tricky to formulate. Kicking ideas round in a group on a whiteboard with reference to external advice/exemplars seems to help get wording sorted and clarify the taxonomy. Genuine question (I don't work in the software world) is it normal for a lone web developer person to be left just making up the questions as they are coding them?
I've never heard of a PIP working out and both the company and employee being happy -- maybe you only hear about the bad cases, but a PIP often seems to me like a cover your ass plan on the part of the company. They want to get rid of a person, but they're afraid of getting sued, so a PIP is a way to document why a person was fired in the case of litigation.
This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.
Because the PIP exists to to support the argument that the firing was not for a prohibited reason in the event that the employee charges that it was. “At-will” doesn't mean there aren't prohibited reasons for firing, and if you don't have any evidence for what the firing reason was, it doesn't take much evidence of an improper purpose to meet the “preponderance of the evidence” standard for civil litigation.
You could just document the behavior that makes them want to fire them ("you smell funny") and followups in an email, and call it a day after a week or so.
Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer :)
Documenting something that has no objective criteria does very little to defeat even slight evidence of another motive for firing where the proferred reason is purely pretextual.
> Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer
That's true; that cost is weighed against losing wrongful-termination lawsuits.
Also, very often formal PIPs follow undocumented informal ones that have the same purpose in reality that a formal one does on paper (but which avoid any adverse record for an employee you end up keeping), and the success criteria in the formal PIP are things the manager knows (to a fair certainty) the employee will not meet based on the informal one.
It's easy to turn your own logic back around on you. Since it's a more-or-less open secret that most PIPs are part of managed termination, every competent company that issues one knows they're running a huge risk of sabotaging their relationship with an employee by issuing one. There are lots of ways to manage improved performance from an employee without invoking the dreaded PIP. If the company merely wants to improve performance, they can issue MBOs or schedule a special series of 1:1s.
It's also easy to see why companies would issue PIPs despite potentially backing themselves into a corner when the targeted employee exceeds the stated expectations of the PIP. PIPs are how HR wants employees to be fired; they simple are the whole firing process. But that doesn't mean the people who actually write the PIPs know how to write them effectively. In Coraline's story, you have what reads to me like a pretty standard Kafkaesque PIP story: Github wanted her out, HR demanded they follow the standard process, they PIP'd her, the PIP didn't anticipate that Coraline would keep diligent records, and they were forced to go through contortions to pretend that it was the PIP that had been failed, rather than the "will" part of Github's "at-will employment".
FWIW, they've never been at any company i've managed at, or org i've belonged to :)
I certainly believe such companies exist, i'm not stupid. I just am not sure I believe they are as prevalent as you do.
The only question in the room (from either HR or the manager) has always been "how do we help this person get better".
In fact, there were cases a PIP was decided against because it wasn't going to be effective in helping.
We simply offered fork in the road instead.
As for "sabotaging relationships", in every successful PIP i've seen, the person is still working at the company years later. So ....
Apparently i'm just very lucky ;)
(which is, of course, within the realm of possibility)
More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :)
I'm going to strongly disagree with this one, but it's clear you and i will not agree about this.
"More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :) " I still believe think it's incredibly cynical to assume and write that the only purpose of a PIP is to formally make up evidence so you can fire someone. Precisely because i've worked at places where that is very specifically not the intent.
I guess, it doesn't really matter what the company calls this process or how it's presented, only how it is conducted. If you even mildly agree with the reasons presented for it, and you get positive feedback soon, it may work out, otherwise it most surely won't, regardless of the honesty behind it.
Not necessarily feasible in all situations. Sometimes a seasoned professional is only able to find out about culture fit after working there for a while.
Like Chris Lattner recently found out that he didn't belong at Tesla.
https://mobile.twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812...
Working like hell does not help if the effort is expended in the wrong place. That's where the first 1:1 will be a clear indicator if the correction is working or not - if it's not working it may be a failure of a honest PIP, or PIP dressing up a decision that has already been made. But honest PIPs exist, and sometimes they do work to solve a problem that was not being solved by itself.
Every single employee assumes that's the intent, and this is obvious to literally everyone.
While you are almost certainly correct about this, particularly from a pure risk mitigation standpoint, it's also somewhat self-fulfilling.
In the company I work for now, we genuinely try and recover people and we don't call it a PIP. But that is the exception for my personal experience over 20 years.
Our problem has never been a deliberately underperforming employee though - all of our issues to date have been people who start doing light slacking or who are too easily distracted/focus on the wrong things. Careful hiring and luck.
I have personally managed a serious problem employee who basically did not want to work and put a great deal of effort into actively avoiding work (writing long soliloquies in "documentation" instead of writing code or meaningful and appropriate docs); that was decidedly unpleasant and exacerbated by the (very large) company in question basically protecting certain classes of employees but refusing to add a resource. In the end it came down to me doing half of his job for him.
I have a friend who was put on a two-month PIP and was fired at the end of it. Two weeks before the end of his PIP, his boss scheduled a meeting with him to "clear some things up" and tell him that his PIP isn't going well.
The first thing I told my friend after that was "Dude, he just gave you your two weeks notice. Start ramping up the job search.". And at the beginning of his PIP, I told him that he was effectively being given two months notice.
He took my advice, by the way, and landed a new job less than two weeks after being fired.
Because sometimes it's a genuine desire for someone who is a good cultural fit to improve.
> If you're ever put on a PIP, get out -- it's a sign someone in the company doesn't want you there.
I've put folks on PIPs before (we don't call them that and we're much more straightforward about it than some employers I hear about who do), and had positive outcomes. The correct way of thinking about a PIP is:
1. We rely on people to work adequately-to-well by themselves 2. If they can't, we tell them they aren't and expect them to improve, 3. If they can't, we get more specific in our feedback and meet more often to discuss course corrections 4. If that doesn't work, because the continued presence of performance problems means we can't work productively as an employer/employee, we try to meet on a MUCH more regular basis than 1, 2, 3 in order to track and improve performance.
The best and most effective feedback is given in the moment: you are doing [x], here's how it has an impact on [y], here's what we think would be a better way. A PIP basically means you get more refined and structured feedback way more often.
I'm not saying that a PIP is a hugely positive or stress-free thing for anyone, but we try to assume positive intent and treat it as a great opportunity to help someone constructively get over a block to being a better contributor to our company.
There are of course some people who are a) actively assholes and b) genuinely oblivious to the rules applying to them. But you gotta believe they're in the tiny minority in the world.
Sometimes you might really like an employee, but _need_ them to improve on a few things for their employment to work. PIPs can definitely work in this circumstance.
Sometimes an employee is just incredibly toxic, and you may have reason to believe that they'll sue the company if you fire them without well-defined cause, (like the parent article here). In this case you are simply creating a paper trail to cover your ass legally. Of course the PIP is not going to "work" for the employee, they will be fired regardless as you want them gone. But the PIP may "work" for the company, by limiting liability.
At least where i've worked, they work out about 50% of the time. That tracks with the PIP's i've been involved in.
I can also give you anecdotes if you like, but i'm not sure you care.
"This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why. " I'd agree plenty of PIPs are written and delivered at various companies as a cover your ass.
But where I am, and what I do, they are used as a hopeful wakeup call with some formal tracking and feedback mechanism. Really. As you say, there is no point if there is no hope of improvement.
(I know how cynical HN is, of course, so i don't expect this to be believed)
Not the GP, but I care, and would like to hear them.
It's a simply stated requirement but difficult, I think, to fulfill. Often there's not a clear path forward to fix the problem(s). Employers don't always make this judgment of what needs to be done correctly. And, of course, there's always the possibility that the employee doesn't follow through on their end.
It was a revenge and scape goat PIP. An employee was leaving a team, so they decided to pin all the disasters of the preceding 6 months on him.
Of course they didn't raise the issue until after he had joined my team, but it was performance review time, and he'd been on their team for almost all of the review period, so they got to declare him "unsatisfactory" and force me to do the PIP process with him.
But he really was a good performer, and our team had worked with him before and knew the whole thing was bullshit, so he quite appropriately sailed through the PIP, and that allowed us to draw a line and say "it has been dealt with, the problem is resolved and whatever took place in that team has no relevance to his performance here".
It's the PIPs where the attitude is what you describe that are doomed to fail. And if everyone has that perception to begin with, I can't reach for PIPs as a tool anymore because the outcome is determined already. Vicious cycle.
This being said, I get where you're coming from. PIPs can be used to let people go. For good and not so good reasons. One way we try to defend against that is that if things aren't working, we do our best to move the employee you a different manager with an as-clean-as-possible shot after giving clear feedback and before the PIP. After all, people leave managers, not jobs.
PS: Not github. Also Europe, not US.
The third instance was "we wanna fire this person but if we see improvement then they can stay". This person stayed for almost a year.
In all cases the PIP was to create a paper trail to support an argument of firing for legal cause in a potential lawsuit.
The key quote:
"According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time."
I think this means we overlay what we think the intended tone was meant to be on top of the email, and usually it's more to do with us than the content of the email, and I suspect in Coraline's case it was uniformly negative due to unrecognised prejudice. I would suggest that in the corporate setting, if you've not got a relationship with the author of code you shouldn't be able to feedback initially as text, but instead either in person or on the phone. In that way you get the relationship between reporter and coder off to a good start, and follow up text communications will have a better chance of working.
I would actually go so far as to say no-one in a corporate setting should be communicating with each other as text without a phone call or a meeting to introduce each other.
Here's the article that's stuck with me so long:
https://www.wired.com/2006/02/the-secret-cause-of-flame-wars...
Also re-reading e-mails whilst mentally putting myself in the shoes of the recipient to see if I think it could be mis-intepreted helps avoid potential issues, I find.
There are lots of small things, which if more people do, would lead to friendlier communications. E.g. replying with a greeting, to a mail which has greeting.
I know I'm probably rehashing an argument many here have had before, but consider: With text, the whole of your message is visible at once, for rereading. You can include links or files, and the recipient doesn't have to take any notes or do anything special to make this communication archived and searchable. With voice, you need to set aside a specific time to make the call, and the other person needs to drop whatever they're doing to accept it. And, unless you can find some special nook to do it, everyone around you is both subtly bothered by having to listen to you, and able to eavesdrop on your conversation.
The stated reason doesn't seem to hold up either--having one initial voice conversation won't help with any tone conveyance problems down the line. Unless it is used to convince you that the other person is indeed a person, and you shift your default assumption of what their tone might be (which is itself a worrying tribalistic bias, but separate). This, however, could backfire. What if your voice or in-person conversation with the person reveals some personal detail of theirs that makes you dislike them (such as an annoying voice, or personal style, or hygiene, or, more seriously, race or gender)? You'd then be less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt in future text conversations.
Finally, I know I'm in the minority in this, but I don't get any extra benefit out of voice communications myself anyway. I'm oversimplifying somewhat, but I could say that all non-yelling "tone" is basically indistinguishable to me. Instead, voice communications often end up being a way for the more extroverted speaker to dominate a conversation through sheer force of will. My current boss does this all the time--his writing style is pretty scattered, but, whenever we Skype with someone, he'll rhapsodize at length about his abstract ideas about the current project before some of the other speakers are able to get anything in. I don't mean to be too harsh on him, because, one-on-one, his ideas and direction are often useful, but in these Skype conversations, it often turns out that it's the others' more focused additions that end up being the real product of the meeting, and his only contribution is some high-minded, well, tone-setting.
1) I prefer text too and ongoing communication requires lots of this. 2) You should be able to call people over simple things. 3) You should have a work environment where calls are OK. I've solved to many problems with a phone in 10 minutes that others have spent a week playing email ping-pong with. 4) An initial conversation does have lasting effects, "First impressions count" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_impression_(psychology) 5) It's not about making people like you, it's about reducing misunderstandings. If you've got open prejudice then this could help to address even that. 6) While you may not learn about someone from a call, especially if you struggle to understand the emotional content of a call, but that doesn't mean they don't understand something about you which eases future communications with that person. 7) Tone setting is really valuable for some people who struggle with focus.
(Yes, people's hardships which prevent them achieving their full potential should be taken into account, when determining "merit"; anything causing these hardships, including (especially?) past discrimination, should be countered; and people who had been subjected to the hardship should be treated with care and compassion, but that's orthogonal to meritocracy itself.
Also, obviously, your skills and abilities (in the context of work and meritocracy) have no bearing on your intrinsic value as a human being (so we need something like guaranteed basic income or progressive taxes to reduce issues like pay inequality).)
It's the ingroup club made manifest. What you describe would be great, but it's not what "meritocracy" actually means in practice.
But then again, I'm a white caucasian heterosexual male, so maybe I just don't notice. (Previous sentence is meant literally, not ironically.)
What often happens, though, is that responses to these claims become these backhanded dismissals. "Oh, you're just overreacting." "Well, I don't see it." I'm a straight, white, cis dude, too, so for a long time it was hard for me to notice it. I promise you, there is a point--and maybe it's not one you will ever personally see, but it exists--where it becomes too big, too obvious to ignore.
I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an
eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a
guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with
Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.
The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief
of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving
recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at
Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an
undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat
Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got
William an internship at the White House; how he talked to
friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and
secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and
how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach
at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.
With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving
what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving
replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.'For example, I could say: whenever I think of anti-racism, I think of [insert quote about someone who claims to be anti-racist and then says/does something racist]. Does that say anything about the concept of anti-racism itself? Or is it just irrelevant commentary about the fact that there are dishonest people claiming the mantle of every ideal while not living up to it?
Just because Irving Kristol is too dumb to understand the concept of meritocracy doesn't mean the concept is without merit.
I'm not sure whether this is sufficient to convince me to stop using the term "meritocracy" — the term is already ingrained in popular usage, irrespective of its provenance, and quite nice in that the word conveys the idea behind it relatively well, so I'm not sure whether the baggage associated with it is sufficiently toxic to justify dropping it.
As for the idea of meritocracy, at least in the narrow sense of selecting people based on their (potential) skills and abilities, I don't really see any better alternatives. The issues of social stratification, lack of inter-generational mobility, unequal access to education, income inequality and self-satisfaction are very severe, but with the partial exception of the last one, I don't agree that they're exacerbated by meritocracy (and regarding the last one, people will always find a reason to be self-satisfied/self-congratulatory).
The problem of political representatives not actually being representative of the population as a whole is indeed worrying. Perhaps sortition [0] might work (???). (If sortition were shown to be functional and implemented, but "meritocracy" continued to be used everywhere else, then meritocracy would become a terrible misnomer...)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
As an aside, assuming that the word "meritocracy" was coined in a book satirising the concept, as stated in the article (as well as wikipedia), why did it start being used in a positive sense?
What makes you so sure of that..
If your company ever communicates this badly to you, it's time to question whether this company can be fixed.
"'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
For contrast, this reminds me of Gene Wilder's feedback about his Willy Wonka costume:
https://www.bustle.com/articles/181340-this-letter-gene-wild...
I now try to emulate this style, in every situation.
As for the triggered data scientist... Well. Whaddya gonna do? I guess my skin's thicker than most.
Enjoyed the letter you shared. Gene is truly missed.
Hey, have you seen the HRC's recommendations for surveying gender? I've used their guidelines in the past. Very helpful! http://www.hrc.org/resources/collecting-transgender-inclusiv...
TLDR: They suggest splitting the gender question into two parts.
As you know, this is a super important issue for me. Progress! Exciting! If you're busy, I'll make a pull request. Please let me know if I can help in any way. Thank you, Specialist"
I can't wait until we all start wearing thick, black, woollen coats in the summertime...
Sometimes the big problem I find is that in some companies people are just scared of each other that they fail to communicate.
Best places where I worked: people were to the point, they had healthy debates even with strong opinions.
Because empathy is important to communicating effectively. You're looking at the words, but you're not looking at phrasing and tone, which are just as important.
Try this exercise: read the sentence out loud to yourself. Taking a line out of Myers-Briggs, does it sound more perceptive or judging, to you, when read aloud?
To me it sounds judging, as if Coraline already has pre-conceived notions about the person she is communicating with. At the very least, it sounds unnecessarily defensive. The wording is definite, with no room for discussion. In fact, all I see in that wording is a mini "well, actually" lecture.
The reality is that she doesn't know if this was an intentional or unintentional oversight. People leave things out, forget to finish sentences, paint in broad strokes and fine-tune later. From the description, this likely wasn't in its final stages. Maybe it was going to get changed, or maybe it wasn't, but you need to start from the idea that the person on the other end of the sentence also wants the best results.
It's a nice idea to think that people should say whatever they want as long as it's the objective truth, but humans are humans, which means they are subjective and have feelings. I find that people are much more effective workers when they are attentive to the feelings of others.
Another phrasing which is probably just as effective, much less aggressive, and only slightly more wordy:
"Have you considered how people of different gender identities might engage with this question? Transgender people might be confused if they identify as both male (or female) and trans. Perhaps we can find a way to make this question a little less ambiguous for this class of people?"
Sure, the proposed solution is not directly in that sentence-- but that's kind of the point. You have to get on the same page before you start throwing out answers at people. Maybe the data scientist already knows this but just didn't communicate effectively-- otherwise you end up dangerously close to "well actually"ing someone who already knows the thing you're telling them.
In fact, to me, the weirdest part of the article is how ironic it is to see Coraline be so obtusely unaware of how unempathetic this kind of phrasing is, since she is so vocal about it on Twitter. It definitely strikes me as slightly hypocritical to see people arguing that we should be allowed to get straight to the point of a technical argument without any fluff or nicety. I believe this was the exact opposite argument being made from the same camp when Code of Conduct discussions were being had.
Yes, but that applies just as well to the data scientist--who, when she saw this comment, didn't do what any reasonable person would do and call up/message/whatever the coworker who made the comment and straighten out any confusion/misunderstanding, but instead went right to her boss and complained. That should not be the first resort--it should be the last resort. A little empathy on the data scientist's part would have led to: "Hm, that seemed abrasive at first glance, but she does have a valid point..."
I really don't see that much wrong with it as a comment.
its to the point and precise.
There are perhaps two failing:
o No offer to help o No opening for conversations
Is that a reason to block someone? I doubt it. However I'm not the data scientist, so who knows
- I was taught etiquette, to a large extent, in an online fiction workshop called Critters. There, critiques are all peer reviews, and diplomatic critiques are essential. I try to keep some of that friendly peer spirit in every review and issue I make.
> Because empathy is important to communicating effectively.
I learned the hard way that displaying empathy and applying sugarcoating are two very different things, back when I was conflating the former with the latter and ended up dismissing both in name of the latter (which made me sound like a pretentious prick), then trying to correct course and applying the latter in lieu of making use of the former (which made me sound political and manipulative).
> Try this exercise: read the sentence out loud to yourself.
To me it sounded like someone who is alarmed at a subject that matters to them and haphazardly made an assertive statement.
People generally can't stand assertive discourse as they perceive it as being judgemental, unless you take a chance at discovering them as well as give them a chance do discover you. Sugarcoating doesn't help with that, it's just trying to state the same thing in a roundabout, artificially lightened way, which most of the time ends up feeling heavy, gooey, pretenseful and manipulative, when what matters is the build-up, the foreplay if you will, leading to a common level of understanding. Ultimately this is all about people and openness, not facts and opinions. Being openly and genuinely kind, querying for people's thoughts and listening to them helps a lot in getting a point across, but it leaves you vulnerable to abusive personalities, also sometimes you really have to stand your ground. It's really tough to strike a balance.
I honestly don't know where truth lies in this exact matter but what I'm sure of is that when you have to second-guess your every words then the place is mentally exhausting and toxic in a terribly pernicious way as it makes you feel in constant danger and gradually destroys your self-esteem.
I disagree; mostly because of this last part.
> you need to explicitly ask that question.
This last part feels like a demand and is too forceful. Suggestion is more persuasive then demands. I agree with you the comment you replied too is a little too sugarcoated for my taste, but the basic structure seems good, suggesting an authoritative source to back up your concern is a good idea. Especially when you are commenting on something (the data scientist may not have known about her LGBT work) outside your field to someone who is in the field (making a survey).
With that said, I get like this too when I am deep in coding. This may not be an issue for technical topics where it can be proved that x would cause a crash. But, I would handle this differently for non-tech issues that are subjective.
But... the data scientist should have been used to this at a company full of programmers. Maybe she was the first to actually comment on the content of the work.
Still, the data scientist overreacted and should have handled it better. Assuming this is more or less the details we need to know.
> I find is that in some companies people are just scared of each other that they fail to communicate.
Keep in mind OP said she got hundreds of comments on her earlier work from all over the company. Maybe instead the female data scientist was very defensive because she got similar treatment in the past.
Like, the statement wasn't an opening for dialogue about or investigation into the best way to fulfill the work project. It went straight into making a power play. You can't discuss your way out of someone who's trying to control and gain power over you.
Beyond that, even though I'm generally an asshole, I try to be nice in PR comments. Like it or not, most devs have some amount of ego tied up in their code. So removing the sting with some sugar coating makes for a better chance of them listening.
None of this applies once I have a longer work relationship with the author.
There's treating someone respectfully and there's talking to them like they're a child. The fact that Silicon Valley is promoting this method of communication is just ridiculous.
How about we concentrate more on getting things done and less on so much sugar-coating that we all get diabetes.
Back then, I found Schopenhauer's tone incredibly pompous and condescending, but over the years I have come to appreciate it as one of the best explanations of what function politeness plays in social interaction:
"It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy."
What Schopenhauer says is that all politeness carries with it at least a kernel of insincerity, but that this is not a bad thing, quite the opposite - once we get past the idea that politeness is "phony", we can throw it around generously, and discover how much easier we get along with people we may not like very much. Consider politeness a kind of WD-40 for social interactions.
> so much sugar-coating that we all get diabetes.
I love the way you phrased that!
Being ultra sensitive keeps people around you on their toes and makes them think twice about everything they say.
I think running to a manager and complaining about being offended is the new way of bullying people.
Their interpretation was that github is upset they are viewed as sexist, so they want to figure out how to change their public reputation, without actually changing anything.
Good ol' Diversity Theatre :/
My employer does a good job of this. We have a lot of women and transgender (not so many POC) employees, but we don't have any special inclusivity initiatives or outreach programs, nor do we officially inject any related ideology into the businessplace. The expectation is that you conduct yourself professionally, and that you exercise your own discretion; the other side of the coin is that you correct what you might think is morally/terminologically wrong (such as confusing biological sex with gender) as diplomatically and non-confrontationally as possible; assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them.
As for Coraline herself, I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here. In particular, I'm sure there is more to the "non-empathetic communication style" than the data scientist and other related incidents. Not to be a presumptive asshole, but I do get the impression from this kind of expose that she might be difficult to work with.
> assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them.
Especially big on this. Nobody can read minds, so when people make mistakes, there is no winning tactic other than to assume good intent.
It's a big company the whole thing can't just be a frat house there must at least be some percentage of decent people trying to do a job that are now being told there is something wrong with them.
(Not to mention the whole idea of a remote worker involved in any sort of culture change is utterly absurd)
I suspect you will find yourself publicly involved in another kind of justice sphere by accident.
That said, there is something to your hesitancy. I did a big part of my education in the social justice sphere, and while I believe in pretty much all of the core theories, in practice I don't think most activists have much of a plan of attack for tech companies. That's partly because they don't really get much practice, because companies are reluctant to give them power, and, as this story shows, quick to give up if results aren't progressing as expected.
Your solution—give up on that crew entirely—sort of solves the problem, I guess.
But my solution is to keep trying to study and talk and figure out what a good methodology would be for applying the core social justice theories (everyone has valuable compentencies, demographics are a useful signal, other realities exist than yours, consent matters, etc) in a tech corp setting productively.
The thing about strict professionalism is that it avoids the problems of bro-culture while simultaneously preventing issues from blowing up.
As of now, Github has pretty much alienated everybody. They've pissed of activists by firing Coraline and some of the stuff they've done in the past. They've pissed off "broflakes" by some of their other more recent cultural changes. But now they're starting to piss off people who may or may not care about social justice, but who definitely don't want the defining topic in the OSS community to be social justice. I think this is a game you can only win by refusing to play.
What does this mean? I've never heard the term.
Tbh,i don't really understand the "brogrammer" thing either. I got my CS degree, then was at Google, and then the first employee at a tiny startup and none of those experiences gave me any inkling of what the brogrammer stereotype might be. Isn't the programmer stereotype literally the opposite of a "bro"?
It's meant to be a portmanteau of "bro" and "snowflake" (implying more or less that someone sees themselves as a special snowflake, and gets upset when not treated that way).
Like both the words it comprises, I find it's more of a disparaging name for people the speaker dislikes, than a label for a discernible subgroup of people.
Any nail that sticks up will get pounded down, someone somewhere will be offended no matter what. So just do your thing and ignore the haters.
Edit: To the skeptics, Starbucks was among the first to extend health insurance to domestic partners, and I'm a big fan of their CARE programs. That said, it was still the worst job I've ever had.
If I had a white male colleague who would constantly point out - in a work environment - that a PR should be dismissed because made by a woman or that a deliverable sucks because made by a black guy, I would not tolerate that behavior for a second. I don't get why the opposite should be considered "inclusion and safety".
I didn't see this and can't find it. Can you point me at where this happens?
First paragraph under the section "Collaboration"
Re: who cares if they were all male? If I open a PR and I get dozens of feedback, either they are legit feedback or not. Or maybe they are all sexist comments, that you should absolutely report. But it sounds like the "all of who were male" wants to imply a specific subtext, but the accusation is neither explicit nor provides any justifications. Saying it in other words: if a colleague would say "I am getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of who were black women)", wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?
The fact that all of the people offering feedback were male is weak evidence in favour of this (consider that much of her immediate team is female). She offers as another piece of evidence that she compared notes with a colleague with a similar background who was male and who wasn't getting the same level of attention.
> Re: who cares if they were all male? If I open a PR and I get dozens of feedback, either they are legit feedback or not.
If you're working somewhere where you and people like you are getting 20 people peering over your shoulder uninvited and criticizing your every move and people of a different group only have 2 people reviewing their code then you can legitimately claim to be working in a hostile environment.
Code reviews are always a mixture of objective and subjective feedback, and having to consider detailed comments (objective, subjective, substantive, trivial) from a large number of people not directly involved and without appropriate context would be a stress on anyone (not to mention is a simple drain on productivity).
On a purely technical note, she says nowhere that the PRs should be dismissed because they were from men. I think that was something you read into it. At issue was the unusual quantity of the feedback.
> if a colleague would say "I am getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of who were black women)", wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?
If it were fact, then I would assume that there was some way in which this colleague had upset a group of black women. I think a similar conclusion is being offered here (although given the likely employment ratios the black women theory would have a whole lot more evidence).
That doesn't sound like she dismissed the PRs, or that she dismissed them for gender reasons, and there's no mention of race anywhere in there.
> if a colleague would say... wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?
Yes, yes it would. I'd look at the feedback, the thing receiving feedback, and then go ask the people who gave the feedback. Then I'd probably circle back around to the colleague for more information, because clearly, something is wrong, but from just that information? Cannot tell what.
> The fact, for example, she dismisses PRs or code reviews because made by
> white males. Or the blog post on her first deliverable, rewritten by a
> white male.
> However, it soon became apparent that this promising start would not last
> for long. For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from
> literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams,
> nitpicking the code I had written. One PR actually had over 200 comments
> from 24 different individuals.
Secondly, it seems more like her issue was that she felt like she was getting dogpiled on via the PR. I've never worked anywhere that I felt the need to start critiquing the code of people from other teams who were working on systems that I might not even have experience with. It especially seems not very inclusive to make a new hire feel like she is immediately on the defensive. 200 comments seems excessive. (Granted we can't see the content so it may not have been all unjustified, but still).
Here is the other excerpt that you reference:
> The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone
> of what I had written was too personal and didn't reflect the voice of the
> company. The reviewer insisted that any mention of the abuse vector that
> this feature was closing be removed. In the midst of my discussions with
> the editorial team, trying to reach a compromise, a (male) engineer from
> another team completely rewrote the blog post and published it without
> talking to me.
Also, like the previous excerpt the gender of the person is referenced to drive home the whole 'inclusiveness' angle. The real issue here isn't that the offender is male, but that he apparently went around her while her content was tied up in editorial review. That seems like a total dick move, IMHO.
To be fair, it's possible that to also blame the managerial systems in place for allowing this too. How was this person able to publish the blog post while a "competing" version of the post was held up in editorial review (though presumably not fully rejected)? Was this a mistake due to poor communication?
This is probably a side effect of how GitHub evolved. Watching some of their earlier talks and comparing that with how they function now, the introduction of managers was a recent addition. It probably didn't change how past engineers operate in the company, e.g., "chime in if your comments are relevant, even if you aren't necessarily requested to chime in."
I think it's actually because when you're in a young fast-growing company, the success of the company is literally everyone's responsibility. You have both the means (because the company hasn't yet ossified into management structures and the codebase is small enough that most people can be familiar with all of it) and the incentive (because a large portion of your compensation is in stock options that are only worth something if you succeed) to materially affect the company's prospects. And many people who join in that environment don't get the memo about when it becomes inappropriate for a new, larger structure.
I've actually found myself in precisely this scenario. Last time it happened, it was because I was called upon to help try to talk some sense into a somewhat stubborn junior engineer who couldn't grasp that they were making sub-optimal and potentially dangerous decisions.
It's so obviously correct that you can't even argue about it, and if you do (and you're white and male) you are mansplaining, and if you're not, you have internalized self hatred (which is the patriarchy fault, no less).
It's OK to promote Democrats internally at a company but if you're a Trump supporter you are EVIL. This is also obvious and requires no explanation and cannot be argued.
/s
In all seriousness, this stuff needs to stay out of the professional sphere. It's a swing back in the other direction of toxicity.
Fifty years ago people were doing it for not being a good enough Christian. Now it's for not buying into every detail of an incredibly specific (and quite flawed, imo) political philosophy, or even just claiming that perhaps it's counter productive to fight every battle simultaneously in every forum.
Really, I couldn't have said it better. This is the crux of the issue.
I think many social activists, esp. those I see on social media, could use a heavy dose of this kind of thinking. People are human, humans make mistakes, and most people I run into in life are too busy with their own affairs to always be perfectly conscious about their words and actions.
The way things fell apart when that cocoon was breached -- both from within and without -- was entirely predictable.
How was this supposed to work in the first place? What did they hope to accomplish with this design?
There must be better designs for these sorts of initiatives, right? What are Microsoft, Apple, or Google doing?
We were trying to isolate ourselves from the craziness in the rest of the company, and we got a lot of cool shit done while it lasted.
Definitely a net-positive. We should have done more outreach and attempts to bring people into our way-less-drama bubble; but if the theories that the other groups were jealous of our successes was true, it might have accelerated our demise.
Ditto for being clearer with upper management why were liking the isolation.
I think there's an catch-22 problem tho: Anything we could have done would have just been political in some way, which would have been contributing to the drama.
Possibly the appropriate middle ground is to clearly and consistently seek feedback and share successes with the top of our management chain; avoid the politics of multi-person, but keep the awareness that we're doing well and will continue to do so with those that make the decisions about whether we'd get to keep going that way.
--
Original response:
It was definitely a net-positive; I got out (I was encouraged to get out by people I trust and respect) before it had a chance to properly explode, and there's a lot I'd have done differently.
Probably the most valuable skill is recognizing that you're in a tailspin; a good way to notice this is failing to achieve your own core values. In my case, people were feeling unheard; I pride myself on listening skills, so that should have been a pretty serious red flag. If you're sucking at stuff you really care about, something's pretty wrong.
I would have liked to have the presence of mind and skill to directly address the meta-problem; but that might have just backfired more, since I gathered that my directness was part of the issue.
So in that case, just bailing earlier. Make sure you don't stick around past the point where the bridges are burned; I'm a little past that, since I don't feel good when I think about going back, but I know I can.
The other option (which was one I was encouraged to take, that then turned into a full departure) was to take a sabbatical. I probably set down 70% of the baggage in the first month, which might have been enough to make a successful comeback - at least in attitude. (There's other complicating factors).
A better way to put what I wrote is this: these problems can all be avoided by approaching problems from a professionalism point of view, rather than a social justice one. Both Coraline and her coworkers did unprofessional things that could have been avoided with better communication, and perhaps more attentive management.
You can't comment like this here regardless of how strongly you feel or how wrong you think someone else is. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704439.
Edit: since you've done this repeatedly and we warned you before, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
At my previous employer, we achieved a 50-50 gender balance on our engineering team. Not through identity politics, outreach initiatives, and politicking, but through professionalism and politeness.
We were able to attract many incredibly talented women and minority engineers, by just not being assholes and treating them like any other engineers.
In fact, for somewhat of a natural experiment: there was a bifurcation in our engineering organization, a split between the web dev side (our teams) and the functional programming side. The FP side was full of politicking. The FP side's morale was terrible.
It was kind of ridiculous. By the time I chose to move on from this company, four out of the six women in our engineering organization were backchanneling with me about how uncomfortable the women-in-tech political rhetoric made them feel. They didn't want to be singled out as special snowflakes. They didn't want everyone else wondering if they were just diversity hires. They just wanted to participate on an equal footing, with everyone else. The fact that they felt more comfortable talking to me, a senior engineer, than HR or the company's Womens' Group is fairly absurd.
You don't need all this campaigning and activism to achieve these goals. You just need to be good, competent, professional, and kind people. You need management that has no tolerance for asshole behaviour, regardless of whether it's an ism, or just an asshole. You need a company that notices and rewards good work, even (and especially!) from those people who would otherwise fade into the background.
Thing is, a lot of the complaints made by "SJWs" are legit! Racism sucks. Assholes making shitty comments suck. Favouritism and nepotism sucks. But all of these concerns are already dealt with by healthy norms of professionalism, and those norms do a lot better job of advocating fair treatment for everyone, than the activists seem to do.
The women on our team didn't want special treatment or top-down interventions. They just wanted to be treated like the equals that they were! They really appreciated the fact that, on our team, they got that, and it wasn't a big deal.
When you're facing a team, company, or culture that appears problematic, consider that instead of being sexist, management may just be shitty, incompetent assholes _in general_. Healthy, mature, capable, professional teams are not like this.
That said, it might not have been the best idea to frame harassment in the context of the wider social justice movement. It may or may not fall into that group (depending on what you believe) and I'm not trying to argue whether it does or doesn't; what I am saying is that regardless, it might not actually be a good idea to inject politics into this situation. Nobody would say that preventing harassment is bad, but you will piss people off by injecting larger narratives into the issue.
If I could summarize, I guess I'm saying "go easy on the intersectionality."
> What is your gender?" The multiple-choice options were "Male", "Female", and "Transgender"
What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case? I would think, at the very least, an "Other" field would be a 1000x improvement from a "Transgender" option.
> I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here
People like you (and the kind of reaction you are describing here) are the reason why more people don't report discrimination and harassment issues.
> What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case?
* "Female"
* "Other (feel free to specify in the text field below)"
Or something along those lines, it's not that hard.
That said, it seems a very neutral approach to gender self-reporting is self-defeating (consider that, at least for bathroom laws in some US states), the very notion of something that's not on the assigned-at-birth male-female binary is itself controversial. I guess if your gender choices included "deconstruct the male-female binary" or something, that'd be overtly political, but at least in this political climate just acknowledging the existence of some people seems to be a political act. (one I'm in favor of, fwiw, but I'm one of those people that argue that being "apolitical" is just cover for being politically in favor of the status quo).
Anyway back on topic:
Open field text boxes come with a practical cost of being much more difficult to aggregate, and let's be honest, the gender data is probably not important enough for GitHub to expend too much energy on. The more costly you make the data to mine, the less likely that the data will be used effectively.
For the interested, this seems like a pretty good overview of gender identity (primarily from a developmental perspective, of course):
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/appsych/opus/issues/2011/spring/ge...
If the gender data is somehow critical to the data then it's worth being accurate. If not, why even ask?
I get that impression as well, but I also get the impression that GitHub is a difficult place to work (from things like the data scientist going straight to her boss to complain, instead of trying to resolve any issue at the coworker level first, which is what would happen in a professional workplace).
This sounds good, but I think to some people in tech "professional" and "political neutral" are contradictory goals. And your company has to choose which to take.
For example a professional workplace might say "You can't display photos of scantily clad women in the office" or "We're not hiring (female) strippers for our office party" (or "We have reprimanded $MANAGER for taking their team to a strip club") or "You can't use that word in the office to refer to a co-worker because it's mildly/very insulting and has political baggage". And all of those decision are derided by some as "political correctness" or taking political stances.
being politically neutral means not being active on an issue when there are no laws to follow, and otherwise taking no stated stance on topics, other than to cite legislative rules.
Keep in mind that her team helps writes her performance reviews.
> For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written.
Oh no people were reviewing a new engineer's code. (male employees. you know what that means)
> The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone of what I had written was too personal and didn't reflect the voice of the company.
Translation: I wrote a ranty screed and my employer, which unlike me understands the importance of polite communication and cares about its public image, declined to publish it verbatim.
> But pair programming simply didn't happen at GitHub. I would occasionally get another engineer to share a screen to walk me through a particularly hairy subsystem, but actual pairing was extremely rare and I missed it.
Gee I wonder why nobody wanted to pair program with you.
> When I talked to my manager about how she was progressing, I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to "learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you."
Translation: Your mentee is complaining about you being a huge asshole.
> She told me that the data scientist who had written the survey questions was very upset and had gone to her manager to complain about me.
Guessing this wasn't the first incident.
> This was the first instance of what came to be referred to as my "non-empathetic communication style".
Lol.
> My manager accused me of shutting down the conversation by making it personal.
You would never do such a thing.
> My overall review was a "Does Not Meet Expectations."
Surprise! Your coworkers hate you.
> The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally
Aaand here come the excuses.
> she said she felt like I was trying to manipulate her by sharing my feelings in the hopes of influencing the PIP.
You weren't though, right? Right?
> GitHub has made some very public commitments to turning its culture around, but I feel now that these statements are just PR.
Yes this has everything to do with Github's culture and nothing to do with your performance as an employee.
I can't help but feel though that the OP is... not very good, and they haven't had very good interactions on some other posts, but also I get the feeling that GH handled everything incredibly badly all along as well.
Very self absorbed and childish. Just reading it makes me feel like working with that person would be really annoying.
Unsubstantiated, folk-lorish Ad-homs like "tells a lot more about yourself" shouldn't be made.
That seems too harsh a conclusion given the scant evidence provided.
That said, this part stood out to me as potentially troubling:
> mentoring is an essential part of being a senior engineer, and this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it
Learning by way of a mentorship is an essential part of being a junior engineer. That doesn't imply that all senior engineers must mentor junior engineers. And it definitely does not require or even suggest that senior engineers should seek out junior engineers for potential mentorship (nor even make casual offers for informal mentorship for that matter).
Further, the language the author uses in the description is vague as to who requested the mentorship in the first place. It's also vague as to whether the company actually approved or encouraged such a formal mentorship.
It feels dumb to me but I know for a fact that some people who are quick to take offense ease when they see it.
How I look when I reply: :|
Irony, sarcasm and humor don't scale well.
(But then.. I have a terse style myself. But I'm glad we're discussing this.)
Like there's a spectacular outage and the terse person is updating someone important that's already irritated. Then, sometime later, another interaction with the same person...but they now have some bias.
(It has a name, but I keep forgetting it.)
In my experience, this is equally applicable to social interactions and works surprisingly well.
I think, looking back on that interaction with Coraline, there was, in fact, a real problem with empathy.
But that problem wasn't mine.
There are a lot of gender expectations that punish assertive and matter of fact women as 'bitchy' and 'insensitive'. If a white guy behaves the same way no one thinks twice about it. To me it sounds like management at Github is uncomfortable with her perspectives. We often see women and minorities censured for not trying to conform to the model of a demure, inoffensive, and compliant minority.
Much like the comments here, Github management appears to prefer to focus on the perceived personality flaws of someone who makes others uncomfortable by her presence rather than underlying issues causing their discomfort.
The "insensitivity" mentioned in the piece appears to be largely based on the fact that the author behaves much like a white guy would in these situations.
Did you just assume my reaction? (partly sarcastic).
If you know anything about tech and blogging and HN, you should know that most posts get flamed and dissected very quickly. People have very strong opinions and have very low tolerance for BS.
The only difference is, people from the "social justice" community always make it personal.
"What? You criticize me? It must be because of my race/skin/gender/religion/orientation, you bigoted monster!".
Despite the post having less details,there is less negativity and uncertainty. For reference as to why that might be, refer to the post you are responding to.
No. How about, the tone of the post is completely different?
So many devils advocates in this thread you'd think Github hired his law firm
It's fine if you think they have biases and you want to cite The Atlantic as some sort of proof of that, but that doesn't mean that those conclusions you don't like are automatically wrong.
As it stands right now, the discussion here is basically a debate over whether or not Coraline was discriminated against in some way, or if she was fired for some legitimate reason. Even if you dispute the facts of this case, there's a potential larger issue about inclusivity and discrimination in tech there that is worth talking about at least somewhat, regardless of what you think of it.
If Coraline were a man, then all that entire larger issue goes away and this post would be nothing more than a man whining about being fired. There's nothing much worth discussing about a man being fired. If anything, I'd expect that they would be censured for acting in an unseemly way for a man.
Is the point you're not actually making that Coraline previously was known as Corey and appeared to be a man?
1. Some people will think Coraline is a man.
1a. Those people might well discriminate against Coraline for failing to live up to gender stereotypes expected of a man ("deal with it!")
2. Some people will think Coraline is a woman.
2a. Those people might well discriminate against Coraline for failing to live up to gender stereotypes expected of a woman ("more empathetic communication!")
The point of creating such a hypothetical is to imagine what sort of discussion we would be having if the subject is not Coraline. So, it doesn't matter if Coraline is a man or is a woman or a transgender woman or a transgender man or a unisexual space alien from the other side of the galaxy. We can reason about how "a man" would be treated without getting stuck on ambiguities about Coraline.
Now, what could be confusing about the hypothetical is if we're not in agreement about what "a man" means. So let me be more explicit: I'm using the default understanding of what that means, which in the tedious language of modernity means a cisgender male. For simplicity, let's assume it's a white, heteronormative male, even though I don't think the reaction would be different for non-white not-hetero cisgender males.
One example is that the post needed several attempts here at Hacker News to be not flagged.
As a Deaf programmer I also experience this marginalisation. Of course the causes are different. One thing is exactly the same: I need to fight for my own power. And this fighting is sadly already enough to tick people off.
Edit: Clarified language.
I have low expectations for tech companies understanding these kind of issues, but to separate _transgender_ as an option completely misses the point of what "transgender" actually means.
transgender: adjective denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender.
Though I agree that it clearly isn't a gender, it does seem like a sensible option to be included in a survey when asking about gender. Maybe they should have kept the options but rephrased the question?
Edit: On second thought, I get it; you can be transgender and identify as male or female.
Old Polish [0] saying, back from the days when Poland was a communist country.
[0] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dajcie_mi_cz%C5%82owieka,_a_pa...
Dzienkuje
I think it is possible that there is some sexism here in that I'm not confident a male employee at Github would ever be challenged over failing this communication standard. That is, I think we implicitly expect women to be more empathetic and polite than men are, and get confused when they are not.
Edit: Also, I have never, ever heard of a PIP being used as anything other than a strategy for building a case for firing someone. Does anyone have any counter-examples?
Edit 2: Also also, the author says she had to turn down Github's severance package because it included an NDA, so she could write the article. Gross. [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/882636914981036032
What leads you to this conclusion?
Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence.
> Also, I have never, ever heard of a PIP being used as anything other than a strategy for building a case for firing someone.
Agreed on this point, as soon as she had a phone call with manager + HR they had already decided to fire her.
It comes back to that implicit expectation. Something I've been bringing up a lot in this thread as I read the comments throughout it is that whether we consider somebody rude or not seems to depend a lot on a) who they are, and b) whether we agree with them. We are more charitable to people who are more like us and whose ideas we find more correct. We're all human, so that's part of life. However, as an organization, Github can and should do better than that, and I think here that it did not. The sexism here, if it exists, is implicit in the way problems with this person were handled and in the expectations (mostly unwritten, at least at first) about how she'd behave.
Consider if the situations were reversed. What if some white male engineer was simply being terse in an email to her. Might she attribute it to rudeness, sexism, or transphobia? If the company fired the engineer would you be arguing that she should be a bit more charitable in her interpretations?
It can be very hard to capture the subtleties of spoken word in text form. The onus has pretty much always been on the individual to ensure they are being professional. I definitely think something is fishy here. It may very well be that Github has some serious issues, but the flip side of that coin (and Occam's razor) is that she sent out some rude emails and was fired.
These are good questions, and I don't know the answers. I'd like to tell you how I'd react, but I think given the current context it'd be hard for me to do so without my opinion of this whole thread coloring my answer.
> It can be very hard to capture the subtleties of spoken word in text form. The onus has pretty much always been on the individual to ensure they are being professional. I definitely think something is fishy here. It may very well be that Github has some serious issues, but the flip side of that coin (and Occam's razor) is that she sent out some rude emails and was fired.
What I'll say is this: I can see how her comments could be perceived as rude, or "unempathetic." I cannot see how - especially at Github, a place not known for cultural sensitivity - they were firable. I think there is a double/triple/quadruple standard going on here where people are, without even realizing it, passing their opinions of somebody through ideological blinders. I think this issue may be part of a core problem with Github's culture.
I agree, I think this is where the "fishy"-ness I spoke of earlier comes in. Giving the benefit of the doubt to Coraline, there is definitely more at play than being rude in a few emails. I just feel uncomfortable jumping from an individual account to broadly concluding an organization is sexist.
What I see in this is a sort of passive transphobia. It's not that anyone harbors any grudge, it's that they harbor no kind feelings. The idea that someone deserves whatever happens to them, for good or ill, is just an excuse to turn a blind eye to any harm that occurs to them. When the best response you get from people is indifference, you're probably not going to have a long and happy life.
I think Coraline has more passion than good judgment, but on the other hand. I'm glad someone is out there to raise these issues and take the resulting flak. I worry about what kind of similar discrimination I'm going to face. If this is what goes on in the enlightened liberal utopias we've all got a tough row to hoe.
At-will means "for basically any reason." PIPs are used to try and demonstrate cause so that collecting benefits is harder.
It's not always in these words, sometimes it's presented as "culture fit", which is a bit broader but "communication style" fits under it.
I mean, I'd agree that someone at some point in time has used a PIP for this reason, but I'd strongly argue that this is wrong.
I'd argue a much more charitable and accurate description of why PIP's are used is to protect the company from a litigious former employee. They are designed to show that they company tried to help the fired employee before they took the final action of letting them go.
Maybe you've worked with better employers than I have, but it's pretty much been an open secret in a few different places I've worked, both inside and outside of tech.
Or, sometimes it's not a PIP, but something similar. Many fast food places have a policy where if you're underperforming, your hours get reduced. If they want to fire you, they don't fire you: they give you one, four-hour shift a week at the slowest possible time of the week. That way, they didn't fire you; you quit, and so you don't get unemployment, etc. If you don't show up for your shift, then you're fired with cause, and so you don't get unemployment, etc.
Also, in academia, there is a similar phenomenon for letters of recommendation that can actually really hurt your chances if you are not familiar with the intricacies. For example, if you are applying for an American position, letters are expected only shower praise upon the applicant. But for European positions, letters are intended to be a straightforward and honest assessment of the applicant--highlighting both the good and the bad (e.g. [0]).
I'm not trying to justify this action by any means. I can just see how it may come about.
[0]: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/53876/postdoc-r...
I've seen others performance planned for being complete jerks to others on a repeated basis.
Please remember that no amount of genius should make up for being an asshole. Some companies don't take this to heart, for sure, but those that actually want a good culture, do.
So yeah, regardless of this case (i don't have enough facts), but i've definitely seen people fired/etc for not being able to communicate empathetically.
One was very critical of other peoples' work, and would not take criticism well herself. She would make everything very personal. Despite being a junior engineer with limited experience or seniority, she would criticize more senior peoples' work in highly personal ways. Think "how could you be so stupid as to write this garbage" instead of "this is bad code". One day she received constructive criticism from her team lead (one of the nicest guys I've ever met) and instead of accepting it, she dug in and insulted him. He stood his ground and refused to +1 the PR without her change. He escalated it to his manager. She was given a formal warning. A week later she made another personal attack-as-criticism and was fired later that day.
The other was an obsessive perfectionist. He would withhold +1s from PRs until they were perfect. Given that these were PRs on existing systems, this meant in practice that if you modified code in a poorly-written existing file, he would refuse to +1 it until the entire file was rewritten, ground-up, to be high quality. One day, his dragging his heels turned a four hour ticket into a week-long tar pit. This caused an important deadline to slip. The next day he was let go.
----
In both cases they were cool people who I really liked. The first person was one of my closest friends in the office at the time. She was really cool, and while she was kind of abrasive, for the most part it was just like RMS-lite style assholitry. Nothing that out of the ordinary. The second guy, he may have been an obsessive perfectionist but his code was _perfect_. The stuff he wrote was by far the best anybody on our teams did.
But teams are more than the sum of their parts. These people might have been good individually, but their being hard to work with caused the whole team to suffer. So they got fired.
Maybe it's not super fair to them. Maybe they have their baggage or there's a culture shock (She was recent immigrant from China, he from Austria). But at the end of the day we are paid lots and lots of money to do important work, and if people are causing significant obstacles to us getting our jobs done, they're going to lose theirs. That's life
Now, if you're asking whether or not "lack of empathetic communication" is a real thing worth firing somebody over, that depends. Certainly interpersonal abuse is something that can happen and can rise to the level where it becomes a good reason to fire somebody.
In this case, we largely do not see most of the communication that took place. We really only have her word to take that it wasn't that bad or not worth being fired over. We also don't see much in this story about how her behavior affected the people around her. So, I wouldn't draw a conclusion on whether or not the firing over "empathetic communication" is appropriate.
Not generally true, it varies on a state by state basis.
It _is_ generally true of California tho, so carry on
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
I only found out about this post because the alternative (unofficial) interface https://hckrnews.com/ manages to surface this given the number of votes it has received.
I appreciate HN's moderation, on average. It's a shame the process of moderation isn't more transparent. I have no idea why this was flagged.
Since a lot of people are disagreeing about that and we always try to take guidance from the community, I've turned the flags off on this submission and reduced the software penalty formerly known as the flamewar detector. But FWIW this goes against my better judgment—this thread isn't as civil or substantive as several of the recent ones on related issues have been (I mean in relative terms—they still weren't that great overall) and I super don't like the negative focus on one individual. That's not what substantive discussions are made of.
Reading some of the comments here confirmed for me that this woman is on to something. People are claiming that there's more to the story, or that she must be a bitch/bad at social interactions (with no evidence worth mentioning and despite a respectful and genuinely empathetic writing style).
In fairness to GitHub, there may indeed be more to the story. However, I think if the tech community didn't have the issues she's talking about, the comment section here would be very different. Nothing she said sounds remotely unbelievable, nor is she selling us something, but people here read that she was forced into a mental health institution and felt free to jump to wild conclusions and publicly speculate on her job performance.
I'd have liked to see more discussion of BI, merit strategies, ideas on humanising large organisations, commiseration, maybe job offers and suggestions. And in fairness to this thread, there is a bit of that too. But experience has shown me that when people react this defensively to polite and well though out criticism, there is a measure of projection / delusion going on.
Now, I'm not saying that all non-substantive discussions should always be deemed kosher, but I feel like it's worth pointing out the irony here - the poor quality discussion has verified the quality of the OP.
It's not that your observations are wrong, it's that there are many other observations you'd also need to account for before drawing a conclusion about "the comment section here". Few people have the patience to do this, especially not when the data start to go outside a narrative that seems to make sense. (Where by few I mean statistically no one, including me.) Actually it's the other way around: nearly all of us start with a narrative and then see the community through it. This feels obviously right and there's plenty of data you can point to to support (a.k.a. 'prove') it; the trouble is that there's also plenty of data you can point to to 'prove' the opposite—and people do. What's really going on is that the community is large and complex enough to 'prove' any view you bring to it, and so everyone is simply reading back out what they just encoded in, by weighting some things differently than others. (Given enough things to weight you can encode anything.) This is why people so adamantly say such contradictory things about HN, and I'm sure that happens even more with still larger systems.
IMO this is also why there's a large measure of what you call 'projection/delusion' going on on every side of the internet wars. I'm not sure how to fix that but I'm pretty sure it can't be fixed by the triumph of the good side over the bad side, however you draw that line. The most interesting thing that has happened on HN recently has been the appearance of new forms of dialogue across those lines. Those threads still aren't great but at least it's a sign of something new that isn't just predestined conflagration. Another welcome sign is that in some of these contexts, more women have been commenting than usually do. Those are the kind of developments we're looking to support on HN, in the hope that more interesting and substantive forms of discourse can emerge here. Flamewars are certainly not that.
When we make moderation calls that don't seem to make sense, that's probably why. We're trying to optimize for one thing long-term: intellectual curiosity and substantive online discussion, a problem that turns out to have many counterintuitive aspects. But we're not trying to impose a regime that the community doesn't want and are happy to reverse decisions we get wrong along the way.
On the content of this story in particular: it's not a win/win. But there's an inherent risk in becoming too insular by letting a majority of users decide the outcome on posts the are about minorities. The flag button looks a lot more like a "censor this" button or a "down vote" button than it does a "this doesn't fit the guidelines" button. Maybe that's the goal, but if it is, it should be made clear that's what it is.
The reason they gave for firing her is just bizarre, making me wonder if there was a different reason that they didn't want to admit.
I can see it either way, honestly. I think the issues raised are worth discussing here. I don't know that the post itself is.
I would go so far as to say that explicitly discarding the context of the post as many are doing is rude and ironically lacking in empathy. How can we say that the issues raised by something are worth discussing while simultaneously putting down the post?
Secondly she says that transgender is not a gender, but she doesn't provide any constructive feedback or improvement with it. She could have explained what transgender means, or linked to a website which explains the topic well, or at least offered something along the lines "hey I happen to know a lot about this topic and would love to help you phrasing this question. Feel free to reach out to me on Slack with any questions or if you need more advice.".
"If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question". That sentence alone comes across very much top-down as in "omg you're so stupid and don't even know what that is and you should do this or that if you want".
This is certainly not the message and tone that you want to say to someone the very first time you communicate with someone, unless you obviously don't care about how you come across, how other people feel and how it might affect them, which is fine, but then don't be surprised if people think you are unfriendly, not pleasant to work with and toxic.
For instance, if I know a lot about a programming topic and I would review someone's work for the first time I would not just say "Hey dude, what you've done here is wrong. If you want to do it right do it right man."
First I would avoid to say wrong at all and say that I think it can be improved, because my goal is to improve things and not tell people if they are right or wrong, I don't gain anything from that. Further I would offer constructive suggestions on how it can be improved and also provide extra material/links for them to educate more on that topic, because I would want them to get better and not just me look superior to them.
Not everyone is going to like everyone else, and it has nothing to do with gender.
Some people are just not very likeable, others are very likeable.
Coraline based on my impression, is just not terribly likeable.
Github wants people they like, to be part of Github. How can you blame them?
People who don't get that, and go around writing long winded blogs of how they've been mistreated, and claim it has to do with some social justice issue, are unfortunately oblivious to what the real issue is.
I found this interesting:
> I wrote an impassioned piece talking about how this feature closed a security gap that had directly affected and provided an abuse vector against me
I see this "impassioned piece" as a public shaming of the company who employs her. Since her team's product manager encouraged her to write this, it makes the product manager look like a fool.
She probably caused a lot of friction among several of her co-workers and her manager just couldn't help her anymore.
EDIT: I see now it is flagged. To be clear, I didn't, because I still think it's worth discussing some of the points made.
When you get off on the wrong foot, there is very little you can do to correct it, beside changing teams. Once a manager thinks they know something about your performance, or perceived lack, it's hard to counter that. No matter what --colleagues, clients, other managers, etc. I've seen this play out a couple of times.
There is no stopping the snowball.
For me, it was these random things that would come up very suddenly seemingly from out of nowhere. Some one would have 'complained' about something. The thing would be completely ridiculous, and my manager could never tell me exactly what I should have done to fix it, but it would be a problem. One time I was told I was "unavailable to my team", even though we had slack and nobody had tried to contact me and failed or had even gotten a delayed response.
In another situation I had been having problems with 2 specific team members (couldn't handle any kind of feedback that wasn't completely onboard with their amazing ideas), and in the same exact week, my boss said (and this is a quote) ... "the problem may be that you are TOO good at your job", I got a merit based raise (after just 6 months there), and at the end of the week I was put on a PIP and told I had "no future" at the company. Hows that for consistency and your manager working to help you. lol.
The part that is absolutely maddening though?
That same communication style that everyone acts like is a huge problem. Some people get to talk like that to anyone at anytime in pretty much the same way in the same company you're at ... direct, pointed and directly opposed to some idea, sometimes even rudely. But when you do it as a minority (sans the rudeness), its a problem. I remember one Engineer, losing his shit because our company had decided to pay for only part of our parking in our new downtown location. He raised his voice, and he cussed in addressing a SENIOR FEMALE HR executive that was seated in the meeting, full of people. Nothing happened to him. If I'd tried something like that, I'd have been out of there in 1 week flat. That's the kind of double standard you have to just accept as a minority in tech, and I think its absolute trash.
Long story short, this stuff is real, it happens and its absolutely bullshit. It makes you feel like you are going batshit CRAZY (I'm an athlete, and at one point during one of these being-managed-out episodes, my blood pressure hit 140. thats hypertensive) ... and like I've alluded to before, I wouldn't be shocked if something like this played a role in that Uber engineer's suicide a few months back, because it can really wreak havoc with your mental state and sense of self if you don't have a good support system and/or therapist.
The key is to remember, you're not perfect, be humble and fix what you can, but also remember that lots of people and companies are full of shit, and quite often (especially if you're from a minority group in tech), its not you, its them that are fucked up, despite people on HN doubting your every move and intention.
Also always find a manager that will take a bullet for you, and if you're put on a PIP and you know its bullshit, just leave, don't suffer the indignity and mental anguish of getting shit on for weeks, all the way to a crappy severance if you can help it.
Cheers and Good Luck Coraline!
She got what she deserved.
This is common practice for new devs, at least where I work.
I don't see what's wrong with meritocracy as opposed to an unspecified "management system".
--
> Feature releases such as these are frequently promoted on the GitHub blog, and the product manager on my team encouraged me to write a post announcing what I had shipped. Since it was so important to me personally, I wrote an impassioned piece talking about how this feature closed a security gap that had directly affected and provided an abuse vector against me. The post also served as an announcement to the world of the new team and the kinds of problems that we were charged with solving.
>
> The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone of what I had written was too personal and didn't reflect the voice of the company. The reviewer insisted that any mention of the abuse vector that this feature was closing be removed. In the midst of my discussions with the editorial team, trying to reach a compromise, a (male) engineer from another team completely rewrote the blog post and published it without talking to me.
GitHub was correct here. Feature announcements on the company blog should remain neutral in tone. In addition, the published feature announcement seems to mention the motivations behind the feature quite well:
> Previously, anyone could automatically add other developers to their repositories without explicit permission. This model openly provided some users with opportunities to harass members of our community by inviting them to offensive or attention-seeking repositories.
So, it was rewritten to a neutral explanation of why this feature is a benefit to those who have had experiences like that of the author.
--
> In addition to my development work, I had started weekly mentoring sessions with one of my teammates (a recent boot camp graduate) on Ruby and Rails fundamentals that she had not been exposed to in her program. When I talked to my manager about how she was progressing, I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to "learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you." I was mystified: mentoring is an essential part of being a senior engineer, and this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it.
No quote was given from the manager telling the author to stop mentoring entirely, just that they wanted the _formal_ mentoring to stop (by formal, I assume it to mean it was initiated by the author, not the student). It's possible the manager's intention was as quoted: to see how this "recent boot camp graduate" was able to grow on her own.
--
> I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake, and sadly opened an issue referencing the question.
This has a presumptuous tone to it.
--
> The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication. When I reached out to my therapist for help, she recommended that I go to the emergency room. This was the start of an eight day ordeal involving involuntary commitment to a mental health facility. I shared this experience on Twitter and won't rehash it here, but suffice it to say that I was severely traumatized by what happened to me in the hospital.
I read the "experience on Twitter". It sounds to me that the author's judgement was impaired (re: the author's self-described overdose of anti-anxiety medication) and the hospital/psychiatrist believed they were enough of a risk to themselves to warrant admitting them as a patient.
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> Thursday and Friday were not good days. I had a lot of trouble focusing. I was making simple mistakes and in some cases doing the wrong work. Friday afternoon I reached out to my boss to tell her that I was having trouble and that I didn't know what to do. She suggested that I take medical leave, but I told her what my therapist had said about the importance of getting back to normal life. My manager was adamant that if I couldn't work at full capacity that I had no choice but to take medical leave.
> ...
> The following week I had scheduled conferences to attend, so my focus on work was put on hold.
> ...
> After the meeting I messaged her and shared the more personal aspects of what I was going through, the trauma that I had experienced in the hospital and its lingering effects on my mental health. I was told that I should have accepted the offer of medical leave, and she said she felt like I was trying to manipulate her by sharing my feelings in the hopes of influencing the PIP. I was dismayed.
The author "had a lot of trouble focusing". It was recommended multiple times that she take medical leave. Instead, the author's "focus on work was put on hold" in order to attend conferences. I'm as suspicious of PIPs as much as the next person, but this seems pretty cut-and-dry to me as unsatisfactory work performance.
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Regarding the firing on grounds of lack of empathetic communication, perhaps it was related to why this person was hired in the first place?
> They wanted to offer me a job. They had just created a team called Community & Safety, charged with making GitHub more safe for marginalized people and creating features for project owners to better manage their communities.
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> I think back on the lack of options I was given in response to my mental health situation and I see a complete lack of empathy.
As stated above, they provided the option of medical leave. The author chose not to take it.
> In the past several months GitHub has fired at least three transgender engineers and many more cisgender women.
Why were they fired? How many others were fired in the past several months? What's the ratio there?
> In a return to its meritocratic roots, the company has decided to move forward with a merit-based stock option program despite criticism from employees who tried to point out its inherent unfairness.
Again, what's unfair about rewarding based on merit? Should people who contribute relatively little compared to others get just as much reward? Why would the higher-performers bother to burden themselves in that case?
> So yes, in looking back over my year at GitHub I see that there was, in fact, a real problem with empathy.
>
> But that problem wasn't mine.
So in the end, the author seems to absolve themselves of responsibility. This shows a lack of growth; in my opinion you should _always_ try to fault yourself if you're going to fault others.
- Other engineers dog-piling on her first few PRs showed that there was a complete lack of trust in her, and perhaps an active distrust in her abilities. I have no comments regarding whether this was deserved or not, but the known facts point to such a reality.
- Writing a feature blog post based on a personal perspective and personal past experience is not something a matured corporation can allow. This should not have been a surprise.
- Being the most productive engineer is not the goal of a Principal level engineer. I don't believe any software management would expect their Principal engineers to be sitting at the desk cranking out code all day. Influencing large scale initiatives across the org is more of the job expectation. This means building relationships with lots of people, which means less coding and more guidance of other engineers to do the coding.
- By that point, the expectation must have been high for what she can contribute on the diversity front. The terse messaging regarding the survey probably didn't help, but I also don't see it as a big deal. It's probably just piling on past issues.
- The rest is standard PIP procedure of managing out someone who isn't working out. I would love to say that I know how better to handle a PIP, but I don't.
It seems to me that Github expected a much stronger engineer, but feel like they didn't get one and that she was underperforming. Was that the actual reality? I don't know, and I don't feel qualified to pass judgment.
Which leads me to my final thought: it does seem like Github might have an empathy problem. My guess is that Coraline had her own set of insecurities about being at Github going into the job, and the first few encounters with the rest of the org put them into overdrive. It's unfortunate that her manager did not deem it productive to learn what her insecurities were and validate her on those fronts, which I believe might have put her back on the right track towards success. Instead, Coraline hunkered down and started cranking out code, and possibly withdrawing from the org around her? Rather than doing her intended job.
But, it is a lot to ask for a manager to do all of that, and she was a Principal engineer after all.
Getting a job is like getting married, even if things look all good at the ceremony, there's still years of sustained work/relationship-building to come. This one looks like a case of bad matching. In no way as to diminish Coraline's story, I've seen this happen to a lot of different kinds of people from all walks of life.
My 2 pennies.
> In the midst of my discussions with the editorial team, trying to reach a compromise, a (male) engineer from another team completely rewrote the blog post and published it without talking to me.
The entire paragraph about her writing a blog post has nothing to do with gender, why is it relevant to explicitly try to correlate it with gender in a situation where someone has done something which she wasn't happy about? It reads sexist to me as an outsider.
> In addition to my development work, I had started weekly mentoring sessions with one of my teammates... When I talked to my manager about how she was progressing, I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to "learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you."
Yes mentoring is an essential part, but mentorig is not becoming someone's teacher. That is very weird indeed. Here she says that she was additionally mentoring someone on a weekly basis, which implies that she was doing some sort of teaching lessons to another team member outside of regular development work. This is not mentoring AFAIK. Mentoring is something you do along the way as you work with someone together. You offer help when help is needed, you give advice when advice is requested, you keep your ears open and chip in with help or information when you see someone is struggling, you lead and teach by example and not by lessons.
I can totally understand if the manager was thinking that his person should not feel the pressure of a more senior developer in such a situation. She thinks the developer was benefitting, but how does she even know that? Perhaps the more junior developer was too shy to speak up or felt intimidated by a senior employee telling him/her what and how to do things.
> Discussions were directed to comments on issues and pull requests.
I can see how this was in some situations difficult, but I (as someone who thinks of himself as very open minded) can also totally see why it might be beneficial:
- A discussion on an open issue or pull request provides automatic documentation - It can be found and read by anyone - It fosters more of a culture where anyone feels invited to contribute if they think they have relevant information - It doesn't get lost among other conversations. In Slack or in real life you might talk about 3 issues at the same time and the history of one issue is totally swamped among the chat of all other issues. In GitHub each issue/PR has it's own discussion. - A discussion is often far more civilised when it is done in an issue or PR than in real life or in Slack, which is a huge benefit to establish a positive work culture IMHO.
Again, I can agree that there is also downsides to it, but as someone who prides themselves as an open minded person I would have hoped that she would have looked a bit further than just the downsides and also try to make an effort and understand why it was done like this at GitHub. Being open minded, look at positives and try to foster a positive attitute is one of the most important skills in an employee in my opinion.
> I asked my manager what had happened to upset her and was told that it was the feedback I provided on the gender question. I read back to her the body of the issue that I had opened and asked what I should have done differently. She responded that she didn't know, that my wording seemed direct but non-confrontational, but that I was forbidden to interact any further with the author of the survey.
I have really no foundation for this assumption, but it really reads that her tone in approaching other co-workers was rather direct and harsh, which from my personal experience is never a good way to get people on your side. Especially with people who you have never met or rarely seen I think it is crucial to put some thoughts into how certain things are phrased. At the end of the day you don't know the other person, don't know how they will read it and react to it. If you have a genuine interest to get the best out of this together, rather than just trying to show off that you are more knowledgable than someone else, then you would certainly phrase things more friendly.
Say what you want, but I have 10+ years of experience as well and I know that there was never a situation where I was not able to get my point across in a VERY obvious friendly tone.
> Starting in December, in my weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager, we would review all of my written communication (issues, pull requests, code reviews, and Slack messages) to talk about how I could improve. It felt ridiculous but I went along with it, and did my best to address my manager's feedback and concerns.
What attitute is that? A good manager will try to get the best of evey reportee and focus on personal strenghts/weaknesses. What is ridiculous about trying to improve communication skills? Honestly that is such a bad attitute, as if anyone would ever be such a communication god that there's nothing to improve anymore. That sentence alone is very negative IMHO.
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Obviously it is very sad and unfortunate that she had to go through mental health issues and the loss of her grandmother, but it really feels like her manager was trying to work with her to go through all these situations and Coraline was doing her own thing. I think it was very responsible of her manager to ask her to take medical leave. Imagine what would have happenend if she didn't? If her manager would have been like "alright, just continue working then", then later she would sue GitHub for not taking her mental health problems seriously and firing her based on that. Her manager was extremely open about her weaknesses, was putting effort into working through them with her and taking the right and responsible steps to get her back on track, but honestly there's only so much you can do before you have to let someone go...
>Was politely calling out a data scientist on a problematic and transphobic survey answer a demonstration of lack of empathy?
How presumptuous. Ever thought that maybe the person putting it together didn't know any better? What does framing oneself as the victim accomplish here?
In addition, this is hilariously ironic given that GitHub employed (still employs?) people who actively promote racism against white men (and women): http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...
How would you answer her core question of whether or not the comment she made is appropriate?
In short, calling the statement in question transphobic is correct.
In TDD, do we talk about a unit test succeeding because I intended for it to fail and it did? No, we say it failed because the actual result is red. I didn't fail, but the test sure did.
Intention doesn't change the impact of communication; if the intent doesn't match the actual outcome, what it means is that the author probably wanted to change it.
Then what does it imply, that the comment has a phobia of or holds hate for trans people?
If I call your post autistic, does that not imply I think less of you for making it?
"What flavor of cake do you prefer? Chocolate, vanilla, or sheetcake?"
the feedback coming back as...
"'Sheetcake' is not a flavor. Sheetcake may be vanilla, chocolate, red velvet, lemon-poppyseed... If you want to know if a survey respondent likes sheetcake, you need to explicitly ask that question."
... it does seem kinda grating but not overtly so. It could have been nicer but also could have been more rude.
She doesn't say they were. She says the question as phrased was. That's a big difference.
One of the critiques I often got was to be more gender inclusive in my speaking. Which a lot of people do now (re: replacing he/she with they). From what I read, it seemed like this person would provide feedback that would either be ignored or the contributor/employee/whomever would actively retaliate against.
It really isn't how you mean something, it is how you make someone feel. If you are trying to run an inclusive community, that distinction is very important.
All of the "accidental racism" of years past have now become "accidental -phobic".
It's not what's in people's hearts that counts. Someone can truly believe that blackface is not racist, but that doesn't mean that it's not racist when they do it.
I don't agree. Any definition from a reputable source on the term "transphobic" implies or directly states that transphobia is, specifically, a fear or dislike towards trans people. Not researching what transgender means or what a survey should include for genders in the year 2017 may be stupid or ignorant but I just don't see how it meets the bar for being "transphobic", especially when the person who is making the error of omission has no problem with trans people!
As an LGBT person I really think that people need to stop inferring malice where there is none. Not only does it not accomplish anything, it simply aggravates people who would otherwise be friends and allies and creates further divisions. If I pointed out every single time a friend or family member accidentally misgendered someone or said something that I thought was not 100% PC, I would be spending a lot of time alone.
Further, she provided the straightforward, no none sense feedback that most people here advocate for, especially when the issues of someone like Linus’ gruffness and straight up meanness comes up. Here we have a story of someone doing just that, without the meanness, and everyone is dog piling on her.
At some point, I have to wonder whether or not the people who are complaining about these easily debunked things are discussing the topic in good faith.
Seems to me she directly suggested the improvement, after explaining both the reason the existing version was bad and the reason the improvement was better (the two reasons being the same):
Quoting directly from the issue she raised, which was not merely quoted but emphasized as a pull-quote in the article: “‘Transgender’ is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question.”
She said what was wrong, but did not say what was right. Explicitly. To me, it's an example of "Guess what I'm thinking!" Or more famously, that UI designer who said "Don't make me think!"
Granted, a "data scientist" should already know how to survey, be open to constructive criticism.
I personally would have no idea how to ask the question. Though I'm not a data scientist, I can use google.
http://www.hrc.org/resources/collecting-transgender-inclusiv...
https://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/how-to-write-survey-...
I don't have a horse in this race. I only chimed in because I'm regularly unintentionally offending people, and have been trying to adapt.
> If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question.
How is this not saying what is right?
She explicitly stated both that including “transgender” as a gender identity option was wrong, and that the right way was to ask about transgender status as a seperate question.
Belated personal story. I know multiple transgendered persons (friends, family, at work). So I'm at least partially familiar with the issues. Many of my friends work on LBGTQ policy issues, to which I've given money. I've even marched in our local Gay Pride parade.
My bestie recently told me she's now dating a transman. I looked askance. I had never heard that term before. I wondered if she meant transvestite, transgender, transexual... She got upset. She thought I was judging.
Nope. I just didn't know what transman meant. Oh. She explained and everything was cool again.
Though this is not my cause, I am here to help. I'm an ally for equal rights, justice, responsibility, and so forth.
Just tell me what words you want me to use.
With examples, like this: http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/census-lgbt-d...
Wrapped with pleasantries, like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704542
The only reason I now have any notion of an appropriate phrasing is because I was curious enough to seek examples. (Unlike the aggrieved data scientist?)
If nothing else, this mini-thread illustrates the challenges with communication, even when all parties have the best of intentions.
She said EXACTLY what to change. She was not rude about it. To try and nitpick that away leads me to believe you have an agenda to push.
The key point is that this is likely the first time these two individuals had communicated - she effectively introduced herself to this person by saying "you are wrong", or "your work is incorrect". This isn't a professional way in a business to talk to someone. Even a simple greeting and explanation to say "I have some experience in this area, and here's some suggestions that would improve it" is infinitely better than the framing she gives: > I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake > sadly opened an issue referencing the question The emotions portrayed there give a good indication to the tone that the writing likely gave - instead of being constructive it could easily be perceived as hostile.
Yes, I think the data scientist over reacted. But I don't think her tone or approach was at all appropriate either.
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
She was disappointed. She explained her problem with the survey in a non-judgmental way- "This question is based on a false premise, the correct way to ask this question is X". I don't see how she could have handled this particular interaction any better.
It's not fair, and bright people very often feel like morons adding exclamation points and smiley faces made out of punctuation to their written comms. but trust me when I say that it can TOTALLY obviate a whole bunch of grief and is, I think, incumbent on you the communicator to improve just as much as it's incumbent on the recipient to not react emotionally.
EDIT: Just saw your comment below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704575). Makes perfect sense, and I see her point now.
> "Hi! I have a suggestion on question #14. I think we can improve this to be more inclusive by replacing the options w ith "male", "female", "gender queer" "non-binary", (...) Since transgender people may or may not associate with a gender, we have be a little careful when asking for a gender. Hope this helps!"
When I write emails, I always pretend to "YELL" the email in the most dramatic way possible. If it sounds potentially confrontational yelling what I am saying, it could be intimidating for some people.
By defusing the way you talk to others, you make them feel more comfortable around you. The more comfortable people feel around you, the more they trust you and listen to what you say. It's a win-win :)
Some data scientist made a small survey faux pas, and now they're being called out in a lengthy blogpost about how bad and un-inclusive the company was to work for.
How can anyone work with this person without feeling like they're standing on eggshells? How must the woman who wrote the survey who was just doing her job feel today if she reads this?
I read it as an indictment of the company and its procedures. The data scientist was not even named. The bulk of the post is indicting management, HR, company culture, and insane bureaucratic nightmares designed to push someone out.
So they should have been, being accused of transphobia is a serious accusation. Anyone accused of anything like transphobia, homophobia, islamaphobia or any other of these discriminations is absolutely right to escalate the matter straight away to their manager or HR.
> The data scientist was not even named
She was gendered, how many data scientists work at GH? How many are female? She was narrowed down enough that she may as well have been named IMHO and transphobic is a serious mark on her character. Especially from someone who has tried to push people off projects before for being transphobic.
The "transphobia" judgement by the poster comes later in the post, and it is addressed to the question itself, not the author of the question.
There's no context given here about what the PR is, how big is it, and what's the nature of the comments. It could be a gigantic PR and it could be that most comments are innocuous repetitions such as "add empty line here".
or, it could it be that this person's notoriety followed them to their new workplace and many people were genuinely frustrated that they have to work with an unpleasant person.
EDIT:
> In a return to its meritocratic roots, the company has decided to move forward with a merit-based stock option program
Maybe they realized that trying to appease political agitators doesn't work and that having competent people is the only rational business decision?
I Imagine this read to the survey writer like:
"Hello, I'd like to complain about your use of the term Linux on the corporate intranet. A page provides instructions for running the data parsing scripts "on Linux". Since we do not do any kernel work, it is improper to refer to them as Linux instructions. Instead, people should be familiar with either POSIX, bash(with extensions), or GNU coreutils."
I briefly checked the Stack Overflow survey as a comparison: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017
In such a question, it would be perfectly reasonable to point out that "Linux is not a text editor. Linux users may use vi, emacs, pico, sam... If you want to know if a survey respondent is a Linux user, you need to explicitly ask that question".