This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic. There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.
Another example is that a hobby I loved is now dead to me for lack of gatekeeping; Magic the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast started putting out products that were not for their core playerbase, and when players complained, were told "these products are not for you; but you should accept that because there's no harm in making products for different groups of people". That seems fair enough on its face. Fast forward a couple of years, and Magic's core playerbase has been completely discarded. Now Magic simply whores itself out to third party IPs; this year we'll get or have gotten Final Fantasy, Spiderman, Spongebob Squarepants, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card sets. They've found it more lucrative in the short-term to tap into the millions of fans of other media franchises while ditching the fanbase that had played Magic for 30 years. "This product is not for you" very rapidly became "this game is not for you", which is pretty unpleasant for people who've been playing it for most or all of their lives.
Also, it became the best selling set of all time even before it was out. Which isn’t an indicator of quality, for sure, but it does show Wizards understands something about their market.
I'm not sure Wizards does understand their market. As you noted, a set doing numbers pre-release has absolutely nothing to do with its quality; it just means there are a lot of Final Fantasy fans interested in collecting cards. But this is not necessarily sustainable for another 30 years, because those Final Fantasy fans are not necessarily going to stick around for Spiderman, and Spiderman fans are not necessarily going to stick around for Spongebob. The Spiderman set was already such a massive flop that they were trying to identify and blame which content creators/streamers were responsible for negatively influencing public opinion, as though that couldn't have happened organically.
At this point, I'm done with WotC. The Pinkerton thing was by far the worst and what made me turn my back forever. Bad rulesets or design designs with which I disagree are one thing, but I refuse to do business with a company that thinks it's acceptable to use force to try to bully people into sticking to their release schedules. They can pound sand forever.
My take away is that diversity at a global level, and in some specific contexts, is a great thing. But diversity in some other specific contexts is entirely destructive and analogous to rot or decomposition.
When we rely on a core societal function (firefighting, accounting, waterworks maintenance, property rights, etc.) the people responsible for maintaining these functions need to maintain in themselves a set of core characteristics (values as patterns of action), and there is room to play outside of those cores, but those cores shouldn't be jeopardized as a tradeoff for diversity and inclusion.
For example, if constructive core values of a railroad system is consistency and reliability, then these shouldnt be diminished in the name of diversity and inclusion, but if diversity and inclusion can be achieved secondarily without a tradeoff (or even to somehow further amplify the core values) then it is constructive. One has to thoughtfully weigh the tradeoffs in each context, and ensure that the most important values in that context to maintain the relevant function are treated as most important. The universe seems to favor pragmatism over ideology, at least in the long run.
So in a company if the core values that make it successful are diluted in exchange for diversity, it's no longer what it was, and it might not be able to do keep doing what it did. That said, it also might have gained something else. One thing diversity tends to offer huge complex systems is stability, especially when its incorporated into other values and not held up singularily.
In other words, my take on diversity (and by extension, inclusion) is that we need a diversity of diversity. Sometimes a lot of diversity is best, and sometimes very little diversity is best.
If you take a hardline attitude on keeping the gates up, you're just going to end up with a monoculture that stagnates.
Sure, they lack wisdom, but that doesn't mean they aren't smart, it just means they're young.
Gatekeeping doesn't have to mean "Don't hire anyone under 35" it means "Don't hire people who are bozos" and "don't hire people who don't give a shit"
I’ve worked at places that have the opposite philosophy - hire quickly and fire quickly. That works in terms of hiring people who already happen to be what you want them to be. It just leaves no room for anyone who could be, but isn’t yet, what you want them to be. It also leaves no room for anyone who is different from what you are looking for but who could still bring a lot to the table if you just take the time to figure out what that is, which I think describes a lot of people. You might have hired a mediocre programmer who would be a rockstar at documentation, for example. That kind of thing happens all the time, yet workplace culture and practices tend not to accommodate that. By all means have standards, but put in some effort to help your people reach them in their own way.
If Apple was made up of only top-end engineers led by a quality-obsessed maniac, would they put out better or worse products?
Of course, not everyone can follow this philosophy, but they don't have to, and most don't want to anyway.
The great engineers don’t graduate from college knowing everything they need to know, nor are they born with that knowledge. It takes time and help from other people to get them there. Even if they were already a top performing engineer at Netflix, that doesn’t mean they can smoothly transition into a role at your company and perform well with zero assistance. The on-ramp matters and has a huge impact on how they will perform. Some people will require more investment than others, but that’s true regardless of whether you stubbornly try to maintain your existing monoculture. And I firmly believe that everyone brings something different to the table. It’s mostly a matter of figuring out what that is for each person.
It's good to not exclude people for arbitrary reasons (though even this requires the caveat that one man's "arbitrary" is another man's "important part of our identity"). But we also need to recognize that it's ok for something to not be everyone's cup of tea. There isn't some kind of moral mandate that everything must be maximally welcoming to all. Unfortunately, we don't recognize that in our current culture, and in fact we stigmatize it as "gatekeeping" which is deemed to be toxic. But the culture is wrong about this.
This is a huge misunderstanding at best and a malicious re-framing of serious issues within portions of the tech industry at worst.
In what context is virtually everyone pushing to hire demonstrably unqualified people?
Any time anyone is celebrated for being an X in this role rather than being good at the role, this is being pushed for.
I do not for the life of me understand your point. Gatekeeping, as its most commonly used, means controlling access to something (be it a resource, information etc) to deliberately and negatively affect others that are not part of a "blessed" group. Its not objective, and certainly is not a practice reliant on merit. Its an artificial constraint applied selectively at the whim of the gatekeeper(s).
>There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.
The first assertion and the second one are not related. Being welcoming to everyone is not the same thing as holding people to different standards. Company culture sets company inertia and how employees are incentivized to behave and what they care about. You can have the most brilliant engineers in the world, like Google most certainly does have its fair share, and as we have seen, with the wrong incentives it doesn't matter. Look at Google's chat offerings, the Google Graveyard, many of their policies becoming hostile to users as time goes on etc.
Yet you can have a company with what you may deem "average quality" but exceeds in its business goals because its oriented its culture to do so. I don't think Mailchimp was ever lauded for its engineering talent like Google has been, for example, but they dominated their marketplace and built a really successful company culture, at least before the Intuit acquisition.
I was in a (tech) meetup last week. We meet regularly, we are somewhere between acquaintances and friends. One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".
I believe that does more good than harm, even to the person it is being directed to. It is a nice covenant to have, "we'll call you on your bs whenever you bring it in", that's what a good friend would do. Embracing high standards in a community makes everyone in it better.
The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.
I wish he'd bless a certain Linux distro for PCs so we can have some default. Current default is kinda Ubuntu, but they've made some weird decisions in the past. Seems like he'd make reasonable choices and not freak out over pointless differences like systemd.
But that's a special case, not a usual one. Unfortunately, quite a lot of people say things are stupid when they don't understand them (often because of an inflated sense of their own expertise). If they can politely explain why they think an idea is bad, they are more likely to be listened to, and they can save face if the other person successfully counters their argument.
Bottom line is, if you go around calling ideas stupid you better make damn sure you're never wrong, otherwise, well... that's just stupid :)
You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.
I've had plenty of tough conversations with colleagues where it was paramount to filter through ideas, and determining viable ones was really important. Not once did anyone have to punch at someone's intelligence to make the point. Even the simple "Thats a bad idea" is better than that.
>whenever the situation warrants it
Which will of course be up to interpretation by just about everyone. Thats the problem with so called "honest"[0] conversation. By using better language you can avoid this problem entirely without demeaning someone. Communication is a skill that be learned.
>The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.
Linus took a sabbatical in 2018 to work on his communication and lack of emotional empathy. He's had to make changes or he absolutely risked losing the respect of his peers and others he respected. He has worked on improving his communication.
To follow Linus as an example, would be to work on communication and emotional empathy. Not disregard your peers.
[0]: Most often, I find people who are adamant about this line of thinking tend to want an excuse to be rude without accountability.
In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap, not much usually gets done. This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop.
And even if you don't agree with what I'm saying here, "avoid criticising people" quickly turns into "avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket and the product would be greatly improved.
Those two things are not coupled. You can maintain a sense of politeness in face of conflict. This is the entire basis of Nonviolent Communication, a great book about handling and resolving conflict in such a manner.
It’s extremely effective in my experience and results in overall better clarity and less conversational churn.
>Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable
You can be, that is in part a definition of accountability and you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.
So like anything, you hold them accountable. You can do that without being rude.
>In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap
I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.
Abusive and abrasion language does not do that.
>This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop
No, in my experience and many reports from others you get this for a myriad of reasons, but consistent theme is lack of ownership or organizational politics, not because people level up their communication skills
>avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket
I don’t disagree with you because I don’t believe in proper criticism, I do. I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following
- you sometimes have to be a jerk
- therefore it’s okay to be a jerk sometimes
- somehow having an expectation of treating others with respect somehow equates to poor accountability
I’ve spent a good chunk of my years learning a lot about effective communication and none of it is about avoiding accountability, of yourself or others. It’s about respecting each other and creating an environment where you can talk about tough things and people are willing to do it again because they were treated respectfully
Yes, I'm conflating that. Maybe the two aren't intrinstically coupled, but from what I have seen, that seems to happen. When you forbid surface-level aggression, people don't stop being aggressive or frustrated. They just turn to more underhanded ways of aggression, like bullying or gaslighting.
>I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.
I see what you're saying, but I do not think this plays out in practice like that. It's not results-oriented thinking when you prioritise how the other person feels above all. Not to say you should never prioritise it (that's called sociopathy), but if you prioritise it too much, you can say less things, not more, because disagreeing with someone always carries the risk of offence, especially if you are going to say that their idea isn't the best. If you nurture a culture of honesty - and that does not include being abusive - then people will feel free to push back on bad ideas, and that is results-oriented thinking.
>I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following
The first two points absolutely, but I would like to push back on the third point. Not every idea deserves respect and hell, not everyone deserves respect either! It is the hollowing out of what the word originally meant. Ideally, you only respect people who deserve respect, who return it to you in turn. To be respected is a honour, not a right, because it carries implicit trust in your words. If you consistently have a negative impact on the environment, I do not think it is a reasonable expectation to continue to treat you with respect, because that wastes everyone's time.
And if someone "consistently has a negative impact on the environment" you can still confront them without being abrasive. They can still be fired without calling them stupid. Adding that kind of tone adds no information except that you lost your cool. You're making it sound like every instance that warrants confrontation is about an intentional and repeated offence.
I prefer the former by a lot, but of course you're free to spend your time in the latter.
What's wrong with calling an idea stupid? A smart person can have stupid ideas. (Or, more trivially, the person delivering a stupid idea might just be a messenger, rather than the person who originally thought of the idea.)
Though, to be clear, saying that an idea is stupid does carry the implication that someone who often thinks of such ideas is, themselves, likely to be stupid. An idea is not itself a mind that can have (a lack of) intelligence; so "that's stupid" does stand for a longer thought — something like "that is the sort of idea that only a stupid person would think of."
But saying that an idea is stupid does not carry the implication that someone is stupid just for providing that one idea. Any more than calling something you do "rude" when you fail to observe some kind of common etiquette of the society you grew up in, implies that you are yourself a "rude person". One is a one-time judgement of an action; the other is a judgement of a persistent trait. The action-judgements can add up as inductive evidence of the persistent trait; but a single action-judgement does not a trait-judgement make.
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A philosophical tangent:
But what both of those things do — calling an idea stupid, or an action rude — is to attach a certain amount of social approbation or shame to the action/idea, beyond just the amount you'd feel when you hear all the objective reasons the action/idea is bad. Where the intended response to that "communication of shame" is for the shame to be internalized, and to backpropagate and downweight whatever thinking process produced the action/idea within the person. It's intended as a lever for social operant conditioning.
Now, that being said, some people externalize blame — i.e. they experience "shaming messaging" not by feeling shame, but by feeling enraged that someone would attempt to shame them. The social-operant-conditioning lever of shame does not work on these people. Insofar as such people exist in a group, this destabilizes the usefulness of shame as a tool in such a group.
(A personal hypothesis I have is that internalization of blame is something that largely correlates with a belief in an objective morality — and especially, an objective morality that can potentially be better-known/understood by others than oneself. And therefore, as Western society has become decreasingly religious, shame as a social tool has "burned out" in how reliably it can be employed in Western society in arbitrary social contexts. Yet Western society has not adapted fully to this shift yet; which is why so many institutions that expect shame to "work" as a tool — e.g. the democratic system, re: motivating people to vote; or e.g. the school system, re: bullying — are crashing and burning.)
The likeliest outcome from that is the other person gets defensive and everything stays the same or gets worse. It’s not difficult to learn to be tactful in communication in a way which allows you to get your point across in the same number of words and makes the other person thankful for the correction.
Plus, it saves face. It’s not that rare for someone who blatantly say something is stupid to then be proven wrong. If you’re polite and reasonable about it, when you are wrong it won’t be a big deal.
One thing I noticed about people who pride themselves in being “brutally honest” is that more often than not they get more satisfaction from being brutal than from being honest, and are incredibly thin-skinned when the “honest brutality” is directed at them.
> The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus.
I don’t understand why people keep using Torvalds as an example/excuse to be rude. Linus realised he had been a jerk all those years and that that was the wrong attitude. He apologised and vowed to do better, and the sky hasn’t fallen nor has Linux turned to garbage.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...
Im sceptical. I've never seen what you describe outside of toxic "culture war clickbait videos", what i have seen is nepotism, class privileges and sprint culture pushed by investors - you know the exact opposite of what you describe.
When I interviewed at a smaller company, someone high up interviewed me last. I passed everything on paper afaik, but he didn't think I was the right person for some reason. Which is fine for a small company.