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Comment by drhayes9 | Hacker News Reader

This line was really interesting to me:

> From the perspective of the employer, Github, Bitbucket and other code sharing sites simply do not have these biases - when employers look at these sites, there is no demographic information on users to look at other than what the user voluntarily puts up.

But there is demographic information there. Ashe Dryden's original article (http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-th...) called it out in this paper on gender in FLOSS: http://flosspols.org/deliverables/D16HTML/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gend...

Essentially, I can guess that any particular GitHub user is a white, upper-middle class man and be right most of the time.

I understand that this article isn't saying "We Use Only GitHub Profiles" when hiring but acting as though the code present there exists with zero social context seems willfully wrongheaded.

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There is demographic information, but you aren't using it. Fundamentally the equation holds:

    hiring_procedureX(Candidate(github, male)) == hiring_procedureX(candidate(github, female))

There is nothing whatsoever preventing a person of any sort from creating a code portfolio, and it's pretty easy to browse a github profile without learning anything about the demographics of the coder.

In contrast, basically every other screening procedure out there is potentially influenced by the demographics of an applicant. Prior employers/educators might have been racist/sexist, interviews are potentially subject to similar biases, etc.

> There is nothing whatsoever preventing a person of any sort from creating a code portfolio

You're wrong. Here are some likely hypotheticals:

* I'm lower middle class with four kids and don't own a computer that isn't owned by work. They own all the code I write on that machine and I'd be fired if they found out I was using it recreationally.

* My security clearance prevents me from publicly contributing for fear of getting swept in a security audit and losing my job.

* I've been harassed in the past by dogged pursuers who have doxed me and SWATed me. Publishing anything under my name is a no-go. If I don't use my real name, how do I participate on mailing lists and collaborate with other users?

So, yeah, I choose not to contribute and I own those choices. But pretending like there's "nothing whatsoever preventing a person" from open source contribution is, like I said, willfully wrongheaded.

That's the point of this article and Ashe Dryden's and the others linked before: there is demographic information associated with open source work in that a particular demographic overwhelmingly is able to contribute vs. others. They're not making idle suppositions; they're backing this stuff up.

Ashe Dryden and others conflate able to contribute with do contribute. They aren't the same thing.

From the perspective of someone who can make hiring decisions, how do you differentiate the two?

Besides, I see it the other way around: they're identifying "can't contribute" instead of "don't contribute" and asking people who make hiring decisions not to assume "don't".

Near as I can tell, all Ashe Dryden does is digs up some statistics about the overall population (women choose to be caregivers and earn less than men on average) and declares victory.

Among other things, if these statistics implied women can't create content and push it to free internet services, wouldn't that imply women couldn't contribute to facebook/instagram/etc?

As for distinguishing the two, I don't. My goal is to find good coders, simple as that. In the absence of information suggesting someone is good, I need to assume they aren't.

In the quest of finding "information suggesting someone is good", ignoring the known, recognized biases inherent in your sampling method seems like not such a good idea. You're throwing away data and then saying you have an absence of information.

Additionally, her statistics are not solely about women. They are about the multiple, separate groups that encounter obstacles when trying to contribute to open source projects. They include not just gender but race and health.

You're brushing away a lot of the subtlety of her argument and then misrepresenting her stance as "victory". On the contrary, she's exhorting us to work together to make our field more equitable and to recognize the deeper social realities underneath the shallow veneer of meritocracy.

Two things about your comparison:

1. There's a huge difference between contributing to Instagram/Facebook and contributing to GitHub that I'm sure I don't have to explain to you.

2. Dryden's blog post is not about "creating content and pushing it to free services". It is specifically about contributions to OSS not being inherently meritocratic.

I'm not sure why you'd conflate the two.

>There is nothing whatsoever preventing a person of any sort from creating a code portfolio.

When I was hired by a former employer as a term of my employment I had to sign a contract saying all the code I wrote why employed for them, they owned. Even if I wrote it on my own time.

So you chose not to contribute to open source or build a portfolio. Own your own choices.

No. I chose to be employed.

This has nothing to do with me anyway. I gave an example of a factor preventing someone from publishing code since you claimed "absolutely none exists."

> There is nothing whatsoever preventing a person of any sort from creating a code portfolio, and it's pretty easy to browse a github profile without learning anything about the demographics of the coder.

Not if they use their name on the profile or use a picture of themselves for their avatar.

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