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Comment by allochthon | Hacker News Reader

I'm sympathetic to Github's aims of addressing women's issues and increasing diversity. But as a general rule, in direct proportion to the extent that HR are permitted to step in and formalize something at a place, I am less likely to want to work at that place. I understand the need for processes for handling certain situations or deeply-ingrained challenges. But the more structured things are allowed to become, the more constraining a company feels.

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I think in their position they have the choice between making it crystal clear to current employees that they need different moral standards, or doing cycles of firings->hirings to get new employees aligned with their new policies.

If I were a Github employee happy with my job and current colleagues, I'd prefer the former solution.

I agree with you. When Github was starting out, they very much believed in overthrowing the traditional hierarchies that limited a company. But now, it seems like they are becoming more and more like what they feared.

Also, on another point, Github believes itself as a very much hacker culture. And if it's a hacker culture, shouldn't they believe in the Hacker manifesto, where they don't discriminate on religion, race, gender, but on their ability to code?

Any company that tries to throw out traditional processes needs to have a very clear understanding of why those processes/rules existed in the first place, and why they're irrelevant.

Certainly there are differences between highly motivated technical staff and many other professions, but it's not like most companies go around making rules and processes to make their lives harder.

I agree. In particular, the following line really turned me off GitHub's upcoming culture:

>We’re in the planning stages of designing a diversity and communication training curriculum for GitHub employees with input from Hubbers and external experts. Topics will include diversity training, effective communication, giving and receiving peer feedback, and conflict resolution.

I'm not sure if you're objecting to the topics they're planning to train for, or the perceived formality of the training, but I don't think either needs to hurt the culture if done well.

Communication is incredibly important at any company, but startups often fail to treat it as such, saying "we don't need meetings to get shit done" or "we hire great people so things will just work out".

Some people, through work or life experience, will have no problem giving constructive feedback at appropriate times, and working through differences of opinion. Others will suck at these things. The latter may otherwise be strong contributors - especially if you were hiring for ninja rockstar coding ability and not explicitly for communication skills - so it's worth helping them acquire those skills, both for their own career and for the company.

In particular, some people with conflict-avoiding personalities may have never experienced productive conflict resolution, unless you consider always backing down and feeling increasingly disempowered to be productive.

Now sure, if GitHub HR (or employees) treat this training as a box-ticking exercise, or use it to encourage bland, conflict-free discussion, the culture will nosedive. But I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Well said. Let's not forget why GitHub is putting such things in place. Had they existed before, they might have avoided all the unpleasantness they (and their former employee) went through (which also led to the CEO's resignation).

Communication, giving and receiving peer feedback, and conflict resolution are all extremely difficult to do well, and almost anyone would benefit from regular training.

It seems like a lot of programmers, engineers, hackers, etc. have a strong case of Dunning-Kruger in these areas.

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