Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy? And how do you square it with calling someone an asshole in the next paragraph? That passes as professionalism and empathy at Joyent?
They're not opposing the use of the word "he," they're opposing him saying "no, go away, I don't see any reason someone could take offense" when the issue was pointed out instead of "thanks for the patch."
1) Every employee is an ambassador of your company's brand, and Tech already has a sexism problem to begin with.
2) It's not about the pronoun so much as it's about Ben re-rejecting a patch that Isaac, the project lead, had already accepted, solely on the grounds of pronoun genders.
#2 really has no other explanation than sexism; and when his behaviour is conducted in public on the internet, where the "Joyent employs bigots" meme has potential to go viral, that'd be cause for concern for any employer.
Now, I like to think that had Ben been a Joyent employee the author of this pieces would have had a standard "we have concerns with your conduct" meeting with Ben before reaching for the banhammer but we don't really have any way of knowing.
Not everyone is familiar with the battle of gender inequality in tech and the fact that some people find gendered pronouns exclusionary.
This was a perfect time to help the cause and educate developers, but instead Alex chose to be hostile because they didn't understand.
This is the comment I believe hurt everything the PR was trying to do: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29537...
We need to remember that the Internet is a global community and not everyone we deal with has english as a first language, Ben being from The Netherlands most likely speaks dutch first which has its own gender language issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar
It's so easy to condemn others, isn't it? There are many possible motives for Ben's actions, sexism being only one of them. Moreover, convicting someone and giving them the "committer's death sentence" on such flimsy evidence ought to give anyone pause.
Demands for strict orthodoxy aren't the way to navigate the path of righteous inclusion. When a minor situation blows out of proportion you make sure to clearly state policy, set the people who did something wrong straight and make sure that everybody is on the same page. You use heavy handed tools like bans, firing, or removal of contributor privileges when it becomes clear that someone is set on wrong doing despite warnings and clarifications. Punishment at the hint of political incorrectness just leads to an environment of fear.
Rejects a pull request, project lead overrides his rejection, Ben goes out of his way to attempt to revert it.
Please list some reasons other than sexism why he would go to such trouble.
The singular "they" dates back to at least the twelfth century.
Assuredly. But assailing associates with company assets is embarrassing, too.
Name calling——especially vulgar name calling——is unprofessional.
I blame Dick Cheney. But at least he didn't know he was miked.
The whole event reads to me like Ben was having a bad day and rejected a minimal patch, and then it exploded and he was grumpy. I imagine that on a normal day, a good F/OSS leader would accept patches that improve or make the codebase more consistent, even if they are fairly minimal. That's how code grows.
I'm giving Ben the benefit of the doubt that he was in a mood, which is why he behaved as a bad project leader. If this became a regular occurrence, then there's a problem.
Ben's behavior isn't about the gendered pronouns. I think it's great that the project is committing to using appropriate language. But I don't think this is what made this incident occur.
EDIT: removed some poorly chosen words that didn't reflect the point of my comment.
If they missed any gendered pronouns in the now-landed PR, surely they would be discoverable in the current source:
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=him&type=Code
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=he&type=Code
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=his&type=Code
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=she&type=Code
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=her&type=Code
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=hers&type=Code
Anyway, definitely a lesson in where we choose to direct the benefit of the doubt. In this case, the author of the PR was the one who deserved it, but wasn't the one who received it.
(edit - link formatting)
"Benefit of the doubt" isn't such a finite resource. If anyone escalating this chain of tomfoolery had applied it, you would have likely found that there was more than enough to go around.
No True Scotsman there.
It may not be to you, but social justice has been diluted to an insane and incoherent pseudo-academic political correctness that goes to such extreme lengths it becomes equivalent to the very thing it opposes (as per the principle of the horseshoe theory).
That's great. But that's not what Ben said. He said he rejected it for being too trivial for a pull request.
Guy shoulda just let it blow over. Esp when project lead accepts the patch, he doesn't even have a canine level of sociability. Woof.
You're literally dehumanizing someone based on misleading information, and he's the one who's an asshole? Wow.
They consciously and deliberately use shaming and bullying tactics to intimidate others into silence. They acknowledge this constantly, especially on Twitter when their bullying victims ask why the "social justice warriors" are being so cruel.
Their answers are typically something like, "We need everyone to know that being a fucking asshole like you will mean everyone will mock and hate you."
These activists are quite literally bullies. It's extremely important that we continue to stand up to them.
Suppose the merger had merged the commit before the discussion, would it also have been reverted? I rather doubt it (not knowing any of the people involved, though).
I think with Joyent's conduct today libuv is 100% more likely to be forked than it was yesterday. Accusing a committer of lacking empathy in an official blog post is not cool.
No. I think it's fairly absurd as well, FWIW.