Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

When the original blog post showed up on HN, I couldn't understand why it was penned. As best I could tell, here's what happened:

* Party A submitted a pull request for a minor change to the libuv docs

* Party B (who can signoff on changes) declined it for being an extremely minor change

* Party C merged it after getting signoff from Party D (who can signoff on changes)

* Party B reversed the change under the impression than neither he nor Party D had signed off on it

* Joyent would fire Party B for this

It just so happens that the minor change was removing two masculine pronouns into favour of gender neutral ones.

I can't reconcile the blog post on Joyent with what actually happened.

Blog post [1]:

    Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

The pull request wasn't rejected on any pronoun principle [2]:

    Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.

And again:

    Especially when that poor behavior transcended into the gobsmackingly inappropriate as Ben tried to revert Isaac's commit

The actual commit message [3]:

    @isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will.  All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert.  Isaac, consider yourself chided.

Unless bnoordhuis was aware the patch had been signed off on (in which case reversing the commit is a dick move), all he's doing is following procedures.

[1] http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

[2] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...

[3] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

Minor detail: your summation makes it sound like Joyent would fire over reversing a change, when in fact Joyent appears to be saying they would fire over reversing the change because the change was removing two masculine pronouns.

It's a pretty extreme reaction by Joyent; I wonder how much further away "We would also fire whoever used the gendered pronouns in the first place" is.

Minor detail: It was misleading in the Joyent blog post, the fact that it also reads as misleading in the parent post isn't the poster's fault.

When I read the Joyent post, it doesn't seem like they acknowledge any other possible motivation for revert. When I later saw the revert message regarding sign-offs I was quite surprised that the blog neither mentioned it, nor was written in a way that indicated they had read it.

I'm confused as to what exactly you are saying, but I wasn't assigning fault to my parent.

I'm not saying you were. Just saying that not only is that a fire-able offense to Joylet, their post heavily implies that to be the motivation for the revert.

Perhaps it would be most clear to say they "insinuate" that was his motivation?

I'm replying to my own comment to attach an opinion to it (I want the original comment to remain neutral). But, maybe we can't have women in IT because people like Bryan Cantrill can't avoid attaching themselves and company to even the most trivial gender issues and posting inflammatory blog posts about it?

I'd wager that there are less women in IT because of behaviour like Bryan's and a company like Joyent that will host his views than there are because of declined pull requests.

From what I've seen, this is the result of polarised thinking. There are lots of issues upon which campaigners are unwilling to accept any compromise on any level.

Case in point feminism. Women have put up with a lot over the years and I can understand someone being angry and having the courage of their convictions as a result.

In a way, I respect that. It's their prerogative to try and bring about change. Refusing to enter into dialogue over certain issues will certainly not win anyone over who isn't already on their side, but admitting that things aren't black and white is admitting that they could be wrong.

But mixing take-no-prisoners thinking with the workplace and you can end up with a very poisonous atmosphere. You always need some flexibility of thought, however strong your views, because sooner or later a situation will come up which requires clarification and discussion. Not everything is black and white, and sometimes there are mistakes and misunderstandings. I think the error bars on that github activity are wide enough that we can't be certain.

This blog rant reflects very badly on Joyent. I think it shows that Bryan Cantrill has exceptionally poor judgment. Bryan says "we believe that empathy is a core engineering value". That seems a bit hypocritical given his behaviour.

That seems like a really silly notion...

The pull request was titled "Removed use of gendered pronoun". I think that's a key fact missing from your summary.

I mean, there isn't really a whole lot of information from Ben here except two actions, the rejection and then the reversion.

Did he look at the title and think "I should reject a PR titled 'Removed use of gendered pronoun' because the act of removing a gendered pronoun is trivial"? Did he just look at the diff and think "This is a couple of characters, not important." Did he see the change and think "I can't wait to marginalize the shit out of these women reading my documentation!"

There's just not a lot of info from Ben. And now because of all this bluster, there is likely not to be.

Seems like a bunch of drama, rather than a fruitful discussion.

That requires far too much, and far too nuanced thought. BURN THE WITCH.

No, no, no. This requires careful and measured thought before passing judgement. Bring me a duck and I shall fetch my largest scales.

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