Serious question HN:
If Katie was a man do you think people would be going through git histories and their published papers trying to determine if she is being over-credited for her achievements?
If Katie was a man do you think people would be going through git histories and their published papers trying to determine if she is being over-credited for her achievements?
Edit: I just checked Twitter, apparently there are thousands of idiots who believe this "850,000/900,000 lines written by Andrew, therefore he wrote the algorithm" narrative. It's amazing how willing people are to eat up a low-hanging narrative as long as it confirms their world-view. All it takes is a very crude understanding of how software development works to see through this narrative.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/bbykvf/ka...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bbuvff/this_is_andrew...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bbql1i/this_is_dr_kat...
> Andrew Chael wrote 850k out of the 900k lines of code. He was also the leader of the project. Michael D. Johnson wrote 12k lines of code. Chanchikwan wrote 5k lines of code. The woman? Only wrote 2.4k lines of code.
It's a little bit unbelievable that the author of this comment (/u/dragonballcell) nailed all of these fine-grained details (red herrings, perhaps?) and yet glossed over an incredibly important and superficial/trivial detail: that Andrew Chael did not "write 850k LOC", he generated hundreds of thousands of lines of data and committed them to the repo. Needless to say, I think this whole drama is incredibly pointless.
You might as well credit the Linux operating system to only a single man, whose effort is certainly largely responsible, but for who also does not in any way represent the whole of effort.
It's the ship of Theseus all over again.
That said, if Katie was a man, her story would not be as groundbreaking in a social context, and thus she would not be as celebrated.
Can you link the HN article with the "Mohawk NASA dude". Searching on "Mohawk NASA" gave me a 1 point article that didn't get a single upvote.
Searching on "Bobak Ferdowsi" gives zero articles on HN, and I could not find any article where even comments were celebrating the achievements of Bobak Ferdowsi, and obviously no 832 point upvoted ones.
No, I must conclude that there is no articled named "Bobak Ferdowsi, the scientist behind the Curiosity rover", and definitively not one that got just as much celebration as this one.
I have no idea why people are doing this to Dr. Bouman, if it's gender related or not. Just stating my experiences.
Just so I'm fair, my GitHub does suck.
Some companies addressed it directly and some let it happen. It also was not every co-worker at every job. Just a select few personality types mainly.
It's not that they don't deserve their fair share of credit, to be clear. It's that they do not deserve the level of overwhelming credit the media intentionally tries to bestow upon them, to create an idol that sells / generates clicks.
You pretty well see it in every thread regarding those two people. The hype train tries to give them credit, whether the media or fans, and other people get annoyed by it and call it out because it's obviously ridiculous to so overly credit such vast accomplishments requiring thousands of contributors to a given individual.
On the other hand, looking at git histories is basically how the social parts of engineering (e.g., money and power) at a place like Google works, at its fundamental level.
This has persisted for a very, very long time. I still remember when people would comment things like, "I worked with so-and-so unorthodox former Google employee, and he didn't commit code."
There are a lot of Googlers on HN. There are a lot of people who work at places that culturally align themselves with how that company runs.
It probably has something to do with why some women feel underpaid or unwelcome at these places.
It definitely has something to do with people commenting things like, "So is this the case of the product manager taking credit..." The tension between the product manager who "didn't do anything" and the engineer who "did all the work" and how the "org" sees that and measures "performance" are all swimming in the back of HN people's heads when they snipe some random academic.
Settling the score in a way so reductive is extremely appealing. But at least in duels, the other person gets to fire back.
In my experience, people don't start looking into these things without some other suspicion. In a work setting, that would be things like impressions of poor productivity, claimed output not matching perceptions of competency, etc. But those involve a ton of data points, based on direct interactions with the person. In this case, the article gives us the following demographic data points:
- 29 years old
- Woman
- Computer Science doctorate from MIT
- Assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology
Which of those data points suggests that her work output should be questioned?
I think people let their own personal biases destroy their impartiality. Replace her name with Musk, algorithm with science/engineering, and 'image of a black-hole' with reusable rocket. The article would (and does) read like something posted by a sycophantic fanboy. It wouldn't be doing him any favors, and certainly isn't doing her any favors. However, I also do not think this article is representative of her in any way, shape, or form.
For instance it tries to frame things in the most narcissistic way possible. They found one image posted where the developer stated, "Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed." So she made that image. Not a team, not the project of a coordinate global effort, no - she made that image. Even the image framing itself is indicative. It's a tiny out of focus image of a laptop and a giant in focus image of her with an artificial pose. The article itself continues with a similar narrative in all the eye-catching spots such as the headline and image captions: "Katie Bouman designed an algorithm that made the image possible" "Katie Bouman: The woman behind the first black hole image", and so on.
But as mentioned, I doubt this is indicative of the developer herself. She's probably just being used by the media. She's attractive, young, and has the right genitalia = stories that'll get a million clicks and shares = $$$. When you actually read the very small number of quotes from her, they seem much more realistic and in stark contrast to the media sensationalism:
- "No one of us could've done it alone. It came together because of lots of different people from many different backgrounds."
- "We're a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, and that's what it took to achieve something once thought impossible".
Also if she was a man her story and contribution wouldn't be as sensationalized as has been done.
Well, I take part of that back. He did have some personal pieces about "he's the guy that's a bully of the project" (when he took a personal hiatus from the project)
>to the exclusion of the algorithm designer and the primary software author?
How can you possibly infer that from a git history?
So yes, that happens a lot.