20 ms·

Hubot, “the hardest working GitHubber”

74 points by jfernandez 11y ago

kefka 11y ago
That's an old picture, as in before January 24, 2014. Why do I know? Because the "United Meritocracy of Github" carpet shown was removed after feminists threw a fit and got them to remove it. Because "Meritocracy is masculine and evil." (Read; the women GH hired can't cut it. Mainly GitHub's Julie Ann Horvath) Source: http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug
- neffy 11y ago
  Speaking from the distaff side here, meritocracy would be a really nice thing to have. But what happens all too often is that a company wanting to distance itself from xxx-discrimination will quota hire the not-terribly meritocratic, because hey we just confirmed our own prejudices. What happens when genuinely meritocratic hiring is introduced is quite interesting: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903
- andreiw 11y ago
  OT: those are some skewed definitions of meritocracy... The real issue the feminist camp is missing is that in a real meritocracy no one looks at your gender or background. The real issue at stake in the corporate world today is that a meritocratic org is an unattainable ideal - they don't exist. Every org ends up being an ol' boys club. And being an ol' gals club is going to be just more of the same. Double hilarity for women from GitHub getting discriminated against based on their affiliation - this just proves that feminism is simply the other side of the same sexist coin.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > The real issue the feminist camp is missing is that in a real meritocracy no one looks at your gender or background. A real meritocracy serves exactly the values of whatever person or group defines the merit function; when sexists exist and are in positions of social power, "real meritocracies" will also be sexist.
    - Spivak 11y ago
      We can't let this issue devolve into something this stupid. Yes, if one of the factors determining merit is being able to lift 250lbs then you'll probably end up with a staff of mostly men simply because there are comparatively few women who do strength training. Assuming that this requirement is reasonable for the type of work there is nothing sexist about the hiring practice. The unequal distribution of specific types of merit between men and women is not the responsibility of the hiring manager. If you put the burden of social change and "making up for discrimination" on businesses then they're going to hire just enough "___"s to not look discriminatory, give them inconsequential projects, and hire the rest of the team on merit.
- Bluestrike2 11y ago
  Genuine meritocracy would ideally see women in positions roughly commensurate to their percentage of the population (~50.8%). There are a lot of reasons why we don't see that, and those reasons shape choices made by, available to, and expected of women well before they ever get to the point where they're applying for a position at Github or any other tech company. I think a lot of the criticism of Github's rug went for the low-hanging fruit there, and missed a lot of those earlier factors that push far too many women away from math, science, and technology while they're still just developing children. Removing a rug (and granting the assumption that the act heralds a shift in workplace culture), or any number of the policies that might improve the gender imbalance in the tech world, are the functional equivalent of bandaids: useful and maybe even necessary, but they're actions taken after the initial cause has already arisen. Part of that's because the damage is already done by that time (how many have given up on math because they didn't think they were a "math person," even before we start to look at the gender disparity there?), but also because defining--let alone building--a true meritocracy is damned difficult. Humans are fallible. We see things through our own perspectives, and don't even realize what we're missing unless we make a conscious effort to attempt it. There's a lot of cultural baggage that still surrounds questions of gender, and diving into that is an incredibly messy process that, if we're going to be honest, is going to take years if not decades. And that's a damned scary thing, precisely because of how unjust the consequences of that baggage are. Speaking as a man, I don't think most feminists have an issue with meritocracies as ideals: there's no basis for assuming that a woman can't compete equally against a man, and that'd be obvious in a meritocracy. Their brains aren't "different," nor are they the "weaker sex," or any of a thousand tropes littered throughout history. I think that the issue boils done to a problem with what happens before you get to that meritocracy that affects the decision-making calculus. It's hard to say that you're looking at a genuine meritocracy when the sample being analyzed is already skewed. This is setting aside questions of pay, culture, and other gender issues in the workplace.
  - kefka 11y ago
    And I think the way I grew up and the things that's happened to me that goes against the flow of what others say and see. One of my first jobs was a Subway. Had a female manager. Her boss was the district manager and also female. Cool. The store manager tries sexually assault me (shoves things in my underwear) in the store. DM promptly fires her. And yet, I hear about this kind of stuff with guys doing it to women, along with butt slapping and the sort. I've not been around that crowd, but had it does the same. I went to a bar with a my wife and a friend. He's a big burly gay guy (a Bear, self identifies). Technically I, along with my wife are both bisexual, it's not a big deal. The bar, however, was a Bear Bar. I'm 6'5", big beard. Pretty fat. In other words, I fit in. Except, the whole feeling that women talk about they are a piece of meat; I felt that. I was the piece, to be gawked over. It was pretty uncomfortable, but it ended soon enough. I had a manager, female, in a professional setting. She speaks highly of feminism. Cool. Except, she would wear skimpy short skirts, low cut blouses and more. She would play the stereotype; the same stereotype she would claim she was against. And when people would treat her like the hot sexy eyecandy, rather than smart computer scientist (which she is), she would get pissed off.
- Nadya 11y ago
  Don't ask what they do, because they won't answer [0]. Also, being racist and sexist is okay, as long as it is against the proper race and sex. [1] [2] Social Impact Project Manager Amanda Gelender & Rachel Myers, Github something-or-another. The Github part comes after the SJW part, of course. It's ranked by importance. [0] http://i.imgur.com/gqxQyFq.png http://i.imgur.com/gqxQyFq.png [1] https://archive.is/6r6bR https://archive.is/6r6bR [2] https://archive.is/Q6yxX https://archive.is/Q6yxX
  - anon4 11y ago
    In summary: https://imgur.com/gallery/nidsRR6 https://imgur.com/gallery/nidsRR6
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
KaiserPro 11y ago
Aha, chatbots! Brings back my days on IRC.
- jarek 11y ago
  Everything old on IRC is new again. I read an article about Slack that praised their speed of integrating feedback and iterating with the following example: "the Slack team quickly identified small changes that had a big impact: Within the list of channels, they added fields for a description and the number of people using that channel."
  - t4nkd 11y ago
    One time I asked why, since cgroups and the pattern of container based deployment had been popular for a decade before Docker started, that containers are so popular right now. We ultimately decided that someone constructing a really easy to use suite of tools around the concept was the reason it has all this love and growth. Not that I totally disagree, but, signing up for Slack is easier than using NickServ for the average person. There's a bunch of features that make HipChat, Slack, Hall et al easier to use than IRC, especially for someone who doesn't want to learn anything new. Just worth thinking about...
    - jarek 11y ago
      Replacing RSS with walled-gardens solutions from Internet Bigcos is another example. In general I agree that ease-of-use is a big factor. Having said that, I was witness to decidedly non-technical teens in a mid-size town quite happily using mIRC in 2004, so maybe we're not giving people quite enough credit. If you tell people something is hard to use they'll believe you. The real lesson is to look into what has been done and worked before and see how it can be improved if you're looking for "new" ideas and businesses.
      - Joof 11y ago
        My friend's mom used irc in the 90's / early 2000's for dating chatrooms. IRC can be plugged into the browser and embedded into applications seamlessly. In contrast, I've never even heard of all the things mentioned above.
forgottenpass 11y ago
If pieces of software count as workers, I guess there are at least a dozen of harder-working more-vital workers at github. So as long as I personify a piece of software, it too can become the subject of worthless press articles?
- anon4 11y ago
  Where I work at, Sir Jenkins receives more praise, scorn, veneration and sacrilegious remarks than any traditional religious figure.
  - alexives 11y ago
    Same here. We love to hate jenkins.
Domenic_S 11y ago
I love the tech, but hate how heroku-centric it all is. If you want to spin up your own hubot+heaven instance somewhere not-heroku, glhf.
- listenrightmeow 11y ago
  https://github.com/listenrightmeow/dbot https://github.com/listenrightmeow/dbot http://pgarbe.github.io/blog/2015/03/24/how-to-run-hubot-in-docker-on-aws-ec2-container-services-part-1/ http://pgarbe.github.io/blog/2015/03/24/how-to-run-hubot-in-... There are a couple articles/repos out there with detailed steps on running Hubot on AWS. While the ease and simplicity of deploying Hubot outside of Heroku is not a tenth as easy, there are a couple of options out there.
  - Domenic_S 11y ago
    I guess I'm lazy and want an apt-get/yum/brew recipe. What if I have to install it on iron behind a corporate firewall?
    - jarek 11y ago
      There's always Supybot which runs basically anywhere :)
    - davewongillies 11y ago
      Then you just follow the installation instructions on your iron behind your corporate firewall: https://hubot.github.com/docs/ https://hubot.github.com/docs/ My team controls our hubots on iron behind a firewall with hubot-control, which can also create hubots for you too: https://github.com/spajus/hubot-control https://github.com/spajus/hubot-control
      - Domenic_S 11y ago
        Right, but then you need some kind of deployment adaptor to do something useful (like deploying apps) -- Heaven's the recommended one, but > Heaven is a rails app that was designed to be hosted on heroku. https://github.com/atmos/heaven/blob/master/doc/installation.md https://github.com/atmos/heaven/blob/master/doc/installation... Now we've got dependencies on node, npm, ruby, rails, heroku, some datastore, a queue for hubot, whatever your actual builder is (capistrano/chef/whatever) etc etc. Right now I do all this with Jenkins+bash scripts. Inelegant and not as robust as I'd prefer, but so simple. I could just use a Jenkins adaptor for hubot, but then what's the point? I want locking environments, advanced permissions, and so forth. I'm mostly complaining because I'm dying to implement chatops (mostly for slack-based deployments) but the information is really light, or the tools are too environment-specific, and I don't have people to bounce ideas/questions off of.
javajosh 11y ago
/askforraise 10%

74 points by jfernandez 11y ago

kefka 11y ago

That's an old picture, as in before January 24, 2014. Why do I know? Because the "United Meritocracy of Github" carpet shown was removed after feminists threw a fit and got them to remove it. Because "Meritocracy is masculine and evil." (Read; the women GH hired can't cut it. Mainly GitHub's Julie Ann Horvath) Source: http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug

neffy 11y ago
Speaking from the distaff side here, meritocracy would be a really nice thing to have. But what happens all too often is that a company wanting to distance itself from xxx-discrimination will quota hire the not-terribly meritocratic, because hey we just confirmed our own prejudices. What happens when genuinely meritocratic hiring is introduced is quite interesting: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903
andreiw 11y ago
OT: those are some skewed definitions of meritocracy... The real issue the feminist camp is missing is that in a real meritocracy no one looks at your gender or background. The real issue at stake in the corporate world today is that a meritocratic org is an unattainable ideal - they don't exist. Every org ends up being an ol' boys club. And being an ol' gals club is going to be just more of the same. Double hilarity for women from GitHub getting discriminated against based on their affiliation - this just proves that feminism is simply the other side of the same sexist coin.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > The real issue the feminist camp is missing is that in a real meritocracy no one looks at your gender or background. A real meritocracy serves exactly the values of whatever person or group defines the merit function; when sexists exist and are in positions of social power, "real meritocracies" will also be sexist.
  - Spivak 11y ago
    We can't let this issue devolve into something this stupid. Yes, if one of the factors determining merit is being able to lift 250lbs then you'll probably end up with a staff of mostly men simply because there are comparatively few women who do strength training. Assuming that this requirement is reasonable for the type of work there is nothing sexist about the hiring practice. The unequal distribution of specific types of merit between men and women is not the responsibility of the hiring manager. If you put the burden of social change and "making up for discrimination" on businesses then they're going to hire just enough "___"s to not look discriminatory, give them inconsequential projects, and hire the rest of the team on merit.
Bluestrike2 11y ago
Genuine meritocracy would ideally see women in positions roughly commensurate to their percentage of the population (~50.8%). There are a lot of reasons why we don't see that, and those reasons shape choices made by, available to, and expected of women well before they ever get to the point where they're applying for a position at Github or any other tech company. I think a lot of the criticism of Github's rug went for the low-hanging fruit there, and missed a lot of those earlier factors that push far too many women away from math, science, and technology while they're still just developing children. Removing a rug (and granting the assumption that the act heralds a shift in workplace culture), or any number of the policies that might improve the gender imbalance in the tech world, are the functional equivalent of bandaids: useful and maybe even necessary, but they're actions taken after the initial cause has already arisen. Part of that's because the damage is already done by that time (how many have given up on math because they didn't think they were a "math person," even before we start to look at the gender disparity there?), but also because defining--let alone building--a true meritocracy is damned difficult. Humans are fallible. We see things through our own perspectives, and don't even realize what we're missing unless we make a conscious effort to attempt it. There's a lot of cultural baggage that still surrounds questions of gender, and diving into that is an incredibly messy process that, if we're going to be honest, is going to take years if not decades. And that's a damned scary thing, precisely because of how unjust the consequences of that baggage are. Speaking as a man, I don't think most feminists have an issue with meritocracies as ideals: there's no basis for assuming that a woman can't compete equally against a man, and that'd be obvious in a meritocracy. Their brains aren't "different," nor are they the "weaker sex," or any of a thousand tropes littered throughout history. I think that the issue boils done to a problem with what happens before you get to that meritocracy that affects the decision-making calculus. It's hard to say that you're looking at a genuine meritocracy when the sample being analyzed is already skewed. This is setting aside questions of pay, culture, and other gender issues in the workplace.
- kefka 11y ago
  And I think the way I grew up and the things that's happened to me that goes against the flow of what others say and see. One of my first jobs was a Subway. Had a female manager. Her boss was the district manager and also female. Cool. The store manager tries sexually assault me (shoves things in my underwear) in the store. DM promptly fires her. And yet, I hear about this kind of stuff with guys doing it to women, along with butt slapping and the sort. I've not been around that crowd, but had it does the same. I went to a bar with a my wife and a friend. He's a big burly gay guy (a Bear, self identifies). Technically I, along with my wife are both bisexual, it's not a big deal. The bar, however, was a Bear Bar. I'm 6'5", big beard. Pretty fat. In other words, I fit in. Except, the whole feeling that women talk about they are a piece of meat; I felt that. I was the piece, to be gawked over. It was pretty uncomfortable, but it ended soon enough. I had a manager, female, in a professional setting. She speaks highly of feminism. Cool. Except, she would wear skimpy short skirts, low cut blouses and more. She would play the stereotype; the same stereotype she would claim she was against. And when people would treat her like the hot sexy eyecandy, rather than smart computer scientist (which she is), she would get pissed off.
Nadya 11y ago
Don't ask what they do, because they won't answer [0]. Also, being racist and sexist is okay, as long as it is against the proper race and sex. [1] [2] Social Impact Project Manager Amanda Gelender & Rachel Myers, Github something-or-another. The Github part comes after the SJW part, of course. It's ranked by importance. [0] http://i.imgur.com/gqxQyFq.png http://i.imgur.com/gqxQyFq.png [1] https://archive.is/6r6bR https://archive.is/6r6bR [2] https://archive.is/Q6yxX https://archive.is/Q6yxX
- anon4 11y ago
  In summary: https://imgur.com/gallery/nidsRR6 https://imgur.com/gallery/nidsRR6

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

KaiserPro 11y ago

Aha, chatbots! Brings back my days on IRC.

jarek 11y ago
Everything old on IRC is new again. I read an article about Slack that praised their speed of integrating feedback and iterating with the following example: "the Slack team quickly identified small changes that had a big impact: Within the list of channels, they added fields for a description and the number of people using that channel."
- t4nkd 11y ago
  One time I asked why, since cgroups and the pattern of container based deployment had been popular for a decade before Docker started, that containers are so popular right now. We ultimately decided that someone constructing a really easy to use suite of tools around the concept was the reason it has all this love and growth. Not that I totally disagree, but, signing up for Slack is easier than using NickServ for the average person. There's a bunch of features that make HipChat, Slack, Hall et al easier to use than IRC, especially for someone who doesn't want to learn anything new. Just worth thinking about...
  - jarek 11y ago
    Replacing RSS with walled-gardens solutions from Internet Bigcos is another example. In general I agree that ease-of-use is a big factor. Having said that, I was witness to decidedly non-technical teens in a mid-size town quite happily using mIRC in 2004, so maybe we're not giving people quite enough credit. If you tell people something is hard to use they'll believe you. The real lesson is to look into what has been done and worked before and see how it can be improved if you're looking for "new" ideas and businesses.
    - Joof 11y ago
      My friend's mom used irc in the 90's / early 2000's for dating chatrooms. IRC can be plugged into the browser and embedded into applications seamlessly. In contrast, I've never even heard of all the things mentioned above.

forgottenpass 11y ago

If pieces of software count as workers, I guess there are at least a dozen of harder-working more-vital workers at github. So as long as I personify a piece of software, it too can become the subject of worthless press articles?

anon4 11y ago
Where I work at, Sir Jenkins receives more praise, scorn, veneration and sacrilegious remarks than any traditional religious figure.
- alexives 11y ago
  Same here. We love to hate jenkins.

Domenic_S 11y ago

I love the tech, but hate how heroku-centric it all is. If you want to spin up your own hubot+heaven instance somewhere not-heroku, glhf.

listenrightmeow 11y ago
https://github.com/listenrightmeow/dbot https://github.com/listenrightmeow/dbot http://pgarbe.github.io/blog/2015/03/24/how-to-run-hubot-in-docker-on-aws-ec2-container-services-part-1/ http://pgarbe.github.io/blog/2015/03/24/how-to-run-hubot-in-... There are a couple articles/repos out there with detailed steps on running Hubot on AWS. While the ease and simplicity of deploying Hubot outside of Heroku is not a tenth as easy, there are a couple of options out there.
- Domenic_S 11y ago
  I guess I'm lazy and want an apt-get/yum/brew recipe. What if I have to install it on iron behind a corporate firewall?
  - jarek 11y ago
    There's always Supybot which runs basically anywhere :)
  - davewongillies 11y ago
    Then you just follow the installation instructions on your iron behind your corporate firewall: https://hubot.github.com/docs/ https://hubot.github.com/docs/ My team controls our hubots on iron behind a firewall with hubot-control, which can also create hubots for you too: https://github.com/spajus/hubot-control https://github.com/spajus/hubot-control
    - Domenic_S 11y ago
      Right, but then you need some kind of deployment adaptor to do something useful (like deploying apps) -- Heaven's the recommended one, but > Heaven is a rails app that was designed to be hosted on heroku. https://github.com/atmos/heaven/blob/master/doc/installation.md https://github.com/atmos/heaven/blob/master/doc/installation... Now we've got dependencies on node, npm, ruby, rails, heroku, some datastore, a queue for hubot, whatever your actual builder is (capistrano/chef/whatever) etc etc. Right now I do all this with Jenkins+bash scripts. Inelegant and not as robust as I'd prefer, but so simple. I could just use a Jenkins adaptor for hubot, but then what's the point? I want locking environments, advanced permissions, and so forth. I'm mostly complaining because I'm dying to implement chatops (mostly for slack-based deployments) but the information is really light, or the tools are too environment-specific, and I don't have people to bounce ideas/questions off of.

javajosh 11y ago

/askforraise 10%