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GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

• jpeg_hero 11y ago
  I am a white customer. Am I welcome at Github???
  • ghyu66 11y ago
    Your money surely is. Just keep your mouth shut and obey the code of conduct.
• jcromartie 11y ago
  How many more years before all of these orgs finally come to the realization that making hiring decisions based on skin color or genitals isn't a winning strategy?
• ihsw 11y ago
  Whatever happens, I hope they improve their Android app. It is one of the most pathetic things I've ever had the mispleasure of using. Is it really that difficult to get push notifications for pull requests, issues, and my homepage news feed? I don't know what it's built with but it's not native in the least, it looks like some awful PhoneGap monstrosity.
  • dflock 11y ago
    The gitskarios app is a good alternative.
  • tosseraccount 11y ago
    I'm truly curious: who uses Android for development? I'd think getting a github Android app just right would be a low priority.
    • giaour 11y ago
      As a maintainer of a popular and actively developed open source project, I would totally use the app to respond to issues and pull requests if it were usable. Unfortunately, the app is a dumpster fire, so I just use github.com. If you do use android for development, you wouldn't need a github app to push your code to github. You would need a git app, and several great ones exist.
    • ihsw 11y ago
      I meant to use it as a communications tool, not for pushing/pulling/etc. Responding to issues, accepting/declining PRs, and so forth.
  • AndyKelley 11y ago
    Octodroid is a winner.
• mschuster91 11y ago
  > With plenty of competitors, including Atlassian, GitLab, and even Google, one thing is certain: If GitHub does stumble, there are plenty of companies that want to pick up its slack. Atlassian? Oh god. Their software might be ideal for corporate beancounters and expensive consultants, but for everyone else it's a nightmare. GitLab? A pile of memory leaks and other weirdness. Google? Not so much, I highly doubt they'll ever re-open Google Code. edit: and another thing, Github enjoys a massive, massive network effect, next to impossible to recreate by anyone else. Except Sourceforge, but they burned so many bridges that no one sane in his mind will ever trust them again.
  • seibelj 11y ago
    Atlassian bitbucket is fine for me, and it gives free private repos. If you just want something for side projects without all of the bells and whistles, bitbucket is fine
    • tomschlick 11y ago
      The frequent bitbucket downtime is what got me to switch my company's stuff to github.
      • fredsted 11y ago
        For us, Github has been down more than Bitbucket due to all the recent DDoS attacks.
      • pearle 11y ago
        My company has been using bitbucket for a couple of years and I personally haven't noticed much in the way of unscheduled downtime. Maybe once or twice during that time.
    • techdragon 11y ago
      Shame they lack any way to discover active forks that is as useful as the GitHub network graph widget.
• the_ancient 11y ago
  I Hope to see GitLab, and other Truly Open Systems, replace GitHub as the go to place for source control
  • andyfleming 11y ago
    Why? I mean, I'm always happy to see competition keeping companies on their toes, but why do you actively want people to leave GitHub?
    • akerro 11y ago
      I don't like them because they put someones opinions/values above technical skills. https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/ https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/ http://dancerscode.com/blog/why-the-open-code-of-conduct-isnt-for-me/ http://dancerscode.com/blog/why-the-open-code-of-conduct-isn...
    • noir_lord 11y ago
      I think the clue was in "Truly Open", github isn't open source and is fairly expensive for small teams with private repo's (compared to bitbucket for example). It's network effects are large but beyond that the product doesn't really do anything that others don't do just as well.
    • the_ancient 11y ago
      I do not like the centralization of anything GitHub is becoming too large, and code is becoming too centralized, that is dangerous.
    • newjersey 11y ago
      I am not the GP. To me, supporting GitHub is like supporting Jetbrains. I know they're good people. I know they're trying to do good things. However, I will always have a nagging feeling that wishes that the universe was somehow different and that their business model made it possible for them to freely and openly offer all their software. I guess I can include things like Aerospike and even Gitlab in that group. I don't actively wish for them to succeed either. I am glad they exist and I actively use their products but I would not cheer for any of them.
• j4kp07 11y ago
  Assembla offers free private repos (no bells, no whistles). I've been using them for over 4 years now.
  • jws 11y ago
    That appears to be free repositories when you sign up for the $24/month personal plan, according to their Pricing page. That is a barrier to many people. Edit: Hmm, there is also a page that talks about free repositories, but it requires an account. https://www.assembla.com/git/ https://www.assembla.com/git/ In any event, they are confusing me.
• protomyth 11y ago
  uhm... So a company that is an enabler of developers working from anywhere and collaborating on code doesn't have at its core value working remotely? I find that a bit hard to believe, but I guess I've heard stranger things. I guess I just expect as a matter of dogfooding that a company that strives to do great distributed source code control and all the activities surroundings that would live the remove lifestyle.
  • grk 11y ago
    It's enabling developers to work from anywhere. That doesn't mean this approach works for management.
    • protomyth 11y ago
      If the person making the decisions isn't familiar with the basis of the decision then I trust their judgement not at all.
• raverbashing 11y ago
  Given the amount of news talking about SV companies losing stock market value it seems the bubble is popping
  • spitfire 11y ago
    It looks like a case of the things no one could talk about can now be talked about. It will now be fashionable to talk about the emperors new clothes. Even by those who previously strongly vocalized their love of the emperors clothes. I'll bet you sam a will start talking about being Ramen Profitable soon.
• iza 11y ago
  > "We’re trying to build a new kind of enterprise company where the playbooks of old won’t always work" By replacing flat meritocracy and remote work with traditional top-down management? > "don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion anytime soon, so let's limit their scope of damage" So the technical director and member of the social-impact team is a blatant racist.
  • at-fates-hands 11y ago
    > So the technical director and member of the social-impact team is a blatant racist. I had the same reaction. I'm surprised nobody else has noticed this and made a comment about it.
    • gaius 11y ago
      Search Twitter for #hnwatch.
      • onewaystreet 11y ago
        The people who use that hashtag are not the kind of people who think you can be racist against white people.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    • protomyth 11y ago
      The people who would point it out are basically in fatigue mode from talking about it so much. How he was not escorted out of the building after that tweet is beyond me. Seeing the slide is just as bad. No hatred ever got fixed by pouring more hatred into the cauldron. Sure, you can be the conquerer, but you just created more people gunning for you. If you are not about equality and love of all, then you are just another part of the problem. It is very much like the H1-B threads. Its important to see the system is broken and not the H1-B applicants doing the best they can in the system. I sit here on a reservation and see the problems. A university adding requirements in a job search that weren't there before for one. I've lived through a bit of it, and people like him won't solve anything. All they will do is cost the company money in lawsuits. Want to fix diversity? Fix the diversity and STEM education in pre-K and K-6. We learn to dream then. Let's think about everyone having a chance to dream of STEM.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• RamshackleJ 11y ago
  This article could have been written better. It has two themes going on. Github is restructuring and the lack of diversity in tech. Why did they unnecessarily mention diversity in the context of the reorganization of github? Because that is the corporate BS that is popular to spout when you are redefining power within your company. Make no mistake github is doing restructuring to position themselves for large corporate contracts, NOT to be a more diverse workplace. Using injustice to whitewash your redefined power structure is disingenuous. sad to see github losing its way = (
  • pbreit 11y ago
    It also seemed odd that it implied that whatever the new structure is does not include meritocracy. Does "meritocracy" really mean "no managers"?
    • hga 11y ago
      https://www.google.com/search?q=github+meritocracy+rug https://www.google.com/search?q=github+meritocracy+rug
• audessuscest 11y ago
  "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women." edit : also : "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'"
  • sanjeetsuhag 11y ago
    Yeah, what does that even mean ?
    • audessuscest 11y ago
      As a european i'm really shocked that this kind of tumblr bullshit invade top tech company like Github...
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    • matthewbauer 11y ago
      I think what she's saying is that usually when tech companies talk about diversity they mean they really are talking about increasing the number of women in tech. To her, at least, that's not as important as increasing the number of minorities in tech. So as "white women" are in one group but not the other, the are bad because they are minorities in disguise. Even with that, it's a terrible thing to put on a slide without any added context.
      • audessuscest 11y ago
        well, the only important thing that matter is skills / experiences, because choosing people (or not) for their race or gender is really... at least weird.
• sanjeetsuhag 11y ago
  > Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women. Can someone explain this ?
  • victor9000 11y ago
    yes, it's blatant sexism and racism.
    • pweepon 11y ago
      doesn't this also cross a legal boundary? if you're an independent activist fine, but both race and sex are protected categories in the workplace
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    • Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
      > I can: it's socially acceptable sexism and racism. fixed
  • laurent123456 11y ago
    More info there: http://uk.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-white-women-2016-2?r=US&IR=T http://uk.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-white... > A person familiar with the matter told us this talk was not > done by Sanchez at GitHub, but was part of a seminar geared > specifically for people of color. > > We were told that it was based on research published in the > Racism Review as part of its "Trouble with White Women" > series in 2014. > > In particular, one article delves into data that suggests > that white women have "disproportionately" benefited from > affirmative-action policies. It then suggests that instead > of being advocates for affirmative action, white women > "have been at the forefront of lawsuits brought to > challenge affirmative action."
  • ktRolster 11y ago
    If you try writing a technical book as a woman, other women will discourage you, saying, "No one will buy a computer book written by a woman." No joke.
• psycr 11y ago
  The content in this article is disgusting and despicable. I will be moving my code from GitHub as soon as possible.
  • zongitsrinzler 11y ago
    Will you be moving to Google Code? /s
    • greenrd 11y ago
      It's not like Github and Google Code are the only two choices. (Of course, Google Code isn't a choice, as it's shutting down.)
  • mrrrgn 11y ago
    GitLab is pretty nice and auto-imports from GitHub!
    • WhyDoiPostHere 11y ago
      Meh, I think we need to fork github. Gitlab supports the same nonsense github does.
      • azth 11y ago
        Do you have any sources? I'm genuinely curious.
        • WhyDoiPostHere 11y ago
          https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#code-of-conduct https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/CONTRIBUTIN... https://about.gitlab.com/2016/02/02/gitlab-diversity-sponsorship/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/02/02/gitlab-diversity-sponsor...
      • sytse 11y ago
        What can we do better at GitLab?
• krisdol 11y ago
  I wonder which startup will chomp off this new sourcefor-- I mean, Github. I know, totally different companies at this point, but this shift marks me seeing GH as a completely different entity from what it used to be, and I don't look forward to what kind of company they'll become in the future. Kind of disappointing to read about the changes. None of them sound good.
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 11y ago
    Gitlab has already surpassed Github in terms of functionality. I've been hard selling it at my place of employ but I work at a large company so Github is already solidly entrenched and will be so for at least awhile.
    • sytse 11y ago
      Please let us know if we can help convince your company. Email sales@gitlab.com if you need help convincing the higher ups.
  • chc4 11y ago
    I already use GitLab for my personal projects, since I don't care about the networking effects and it's open-source. Since it's still just git, there's nothing stopping people from switching: it has inheritably less lock-in than Twitter or Facebook. GitLab even scrapes issues and other GitHub metainfo if you migrate.
    • hoorayimhelping 11y ago
      There is one-click repo import functionality that is great also.
      • sytse 11y ago
        Thanks! Since Jan 22 we now import repo's, issues, pull/merge requests and wiki's.
  • bigbadgoose 11y ago
• tosseraccount 11y ago
  "top lawyer, Julio Avalos, 'has amassed great power' in the company" It's often not a good sign when the top engineers or star salesmen aren't running a tech company.
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 11y ago
    Hence why the development of GH appears to have stagnated in the last few years. I deal with limitations related to permission handling on a daily basis with GH Enterprise.
  • DannyBee 11y ago
    Great power != running the company. It specifically mentions he's taken over corpdev and some other functions Also note that Julio is a very technical guy. Note that what you have seen here is nearly identical to what david drummond did at Google (start as legal, take over some other functions like corpdev) in the early years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drummond_(Google) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drummond_(Google) It's hard to say this didn't work out amazingly well. I'm also completely unsure why, without any evidence (in this article or elsewhere), you would assume that whatever power Julio has, he's using in a way that stagnates things, instead of using it in a way that enables folks to get shit done. (David is the reason Google was willing to take so many legal/etc risks for the past N years)
    • wanstrocity 11y ago
      Interesting perspective but a lawyer heading corporate development can make sense, having a lawyer with no accounting or finance training or experience is reckless at best but very scary to any potential shareholder. How on earth is Avalos making investment decisions? Avalos is not technical at all, he knows markdown, yoga and how to spin records. The company is falling apart under his watch, case closed. His purview is HR and Social Impact, he is calling the shots.
    • tosseraccount 11y ago
      Who's making the assumptions, counsellor(?) ? I didn't write the article which is fingering him as the root of the problem. You say he does "corpdev" and the article clearly points out "development of the corporation" has become a big problem. I'll take your word on Mr. Drummond, though.
• grandalf 11y ago
  This stuff just happens to companies. The kinds of people who enjoy a meritocratic, decentralized kind of system are less likely to really want to be someone's boss or to have a boss who acts like a boss. It's unlikely that the kind of multi-tiered management structure most larger companies use is ideal, but it's the best thing management science has found (it's a young field, rooted in the buildout of factories in the industrial age).
• xiaoma 11y ago
  >"(The social impact team) are trying to control culture, interviewing and firing. Scary times at the company without a seasoned leader. While their efforts are admirable it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging" No wonder they got rid of the meritocracy rug.
• fuck__dang 11y ago
  Well, I migrated to Bitbucket just now. I agree with a few of these points and maybe that's barbaric, but what is worse imo is the approach that GitHub has to this. I mean, when you know you are at the forefront of social software development, you need to hold yourselves at a higher standard than this. Millions (!) of people depend on you for some kind of baseline, and this divisiveness and shallowness in protocol really can't be accepted. Somehow, I have this feeling that even though we all know that this is wrong that they'll just get away with it like usual and nothing major will change except that GitHub's support will get even worse.
  • teen 11y ago
    unfortuntely, bitbucket sucks. the website is slow as hell, the design is terrible, the code review features and issue tracking are awful
    • fuck__dang 11y ago
      I mainly use(d) GitHub to have projects to show to potential employers. What could you recommend that would present well?
      • sehr 11y ago
        A personal gitlab instance is always an option, it's 40$ a year though.
        • MatthewMcDonald 11y ago
          You can host it for free on gitlab.com
          • sehr 11y ago
            Oh sweet thanks! I didn't even notice they had a community edition
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• victor9000 11y ago
  > While their efforts are admirable it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging How is this even legal? Change 'white' for any other race, and you'd have yourself a workplace discrimination lawsuit.
  • ericjang 11y ago
    It definitely doesn't sound right. I'm hoping/wishing that this quote was taken out of context. Can anybody with more insider context elaborate? I'm very interested in the "internal cultural battle" over diversity issues at Github, because my school's CS dept. is having a lot of dialogue lately with similar rhetorical arguments. Teaching Assistants recently had a mandatory student-run training session that I perceived to be frighteningly one-sided. Besides the photo, what else did the talk discuss?
    • greenrd 11y ago
      This is very odd. I know universities can be very liberal places, but where did this combination of "mandatory" and "student-run" come from? I'm actually in favour of flattening hierarchies - but not inverting them. Why should students barely out of high school get to dictate the behaviour of teaching assistants who may be up to 40 years their senior? Why should the power relationships be temporarily inverted like that?
  • yulaow 11y ago
    Well tumblerinas says you can't be racist against white because patriarchy. /s No really, just read reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction and realize wtf people are saying these days shielding behind (false)feminist propaganda and some very confused idea of oppression.
    • ceejayoz 11y ago
      > No really, just read reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction Before reading that subreddit, one should probably be aware of Poe's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
• amelius 11y ago
  We need a decentralized (federated) system to store our source repositories.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • audessuscest 11y ago
    Exactly
  • hermanbergwerf 11y ago
    Yeah, that sounds pretty cool.
• bitL 11y ago
  So where should I move all my repos now?
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • chinathrow 11y ago
    Is anyone else using it? Yes: Bitbucket No: Self hosted Gitlab instance
  • reactor 11y ago
    https://notabug.org https://notabug.org might be a good place, in fact it is.
• ryanackley 11y ago
  This is standard stuff for a growing company. Right down to the disillusionment of the rank and file. I'm curious if anyone in the HN community has worked for a > 500 person company with a flat structure. What a lot of commenters seemed to miss is that the remote work policy applies exclusively to senior managers. Senior managers are no longer allowed to live afar and must report to the office. These are the people that are usually on a separate bonus plan and receive an order of magnitude more stock options. It seems totally reasonable that they should have to come into the office.
  • officialchicken 11y ago
    How does a GPS fence lead to better management/leadership? Until you realize their whole reason for github existing (and why Linus wrote git in the first place) is to support product development for large remote/distributed/non-centralized teams or projects. It just happens to also work identically for very small teams/projects too.
    • ryanackley 11y ago
      I wasn't commenting on the effectiveness of remote work. My point was that it's reasonable to ask more from senior management. I'm sensing righteous indignation in your comment and a lot of the other comments. It's missplaced. Remote vs. in-office work is not a right vs. wrong battle. I work 100% remotely and sometimes I wish I was in the office. Every company, employee, situation, etc. is different. It should be up to Github and its employees to decide what is right for their particular situation.
  • mcguire 11y ago
    HN seems to have a white-male persecution complex. No one here is talking about the interesting parts of the story: "10 or more executives have departed in recent months." "In addition to previously reported executive departures, Business Insider has learned that Ryan Day, VP of business development; Adam Zimman, senior director of technology partnerships; and Scott Buxton, controller, have all left in the last six months." "Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers. This has ticked off many people in the old guard." "...key technical people from the old days like CTO Ted Nyman and third cofounder PJ Hyett are mostly absent from the office and not contributing much technically." Github is very likely going to be a different company by the end of the year. The question is, is that going to be good or bad for its current leadership position? I'm a pessimist: I'll go with bad.
• deleted 11y ago
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• Animats 11y ago
  First Sourceforge went over to the dark side. Next, Github? This is a huge setback for open source. We need federated open source hosting, where several companies all host the important projects, they all stay in sync, and any client can go to any service for any operation.
  • audessuscest 11y ago
    Maybe because Sourceforge and Github are not open source.
    • JohnTHaller 11y ago
      SourceForge is open source. The software underpinning the way the whole setup works is called Allura. Paid developers at SourceForge keep enhancing it. It's hosted by Apache: http://allura.apache.org/ http://allura.apache.org/ Github is closed source.
  • yuhong 11y ago
    What BIZX did with SourceForge is already promising I think.
• fideloper 11y ago
  Total conjecture, with a tad of sensationalist on a topic that is otherwise unremarkable: Company grows large, needs to adjust to survive. The ease in which y'all are swayed into this article's point of view is the true worry here.
  • fideloper 11y ago
    Even the decision to show the image of the scotch collection is subtly (actually, not so subtle) using our ideas of appropriative work culture to lead us down the path of believing how terrible GitHub is. Restructuring and growing pains are normal.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• morgante 11y ago
  Serious question: why can't someone make a good Github replacement that is anywhere near feature parity? I've tried both Bitbucket and GitLab, but their UIs continue to be leagues behind Github. It takes twice as long to do something in them (ex. find and blame a file) than it does with Github. If they could just get the UI right, I'd migrate in a second. Hosting providers should enforce political opinions (beyond defending free speech).
  • MatthewMcDonald 11y ago
    When's the last time you looked at GitLab? I've been using it since last February, and the UI improvements have been pretty dramatic.
    • audessuscest 11y ago
      I agree it's quite good now, and still improving
  • audessuscest 11y ago
    You could help gitlab getting better... It's open source.
    • err4nt 11y ago
      I have checked Gitlab out in the past, and fully intend to mirror my stuff from Github over to there soon. How do we know that Gitlab, as an open-source project, can't be infected with the same ideological virus? Should I just start by self-hosting Gitlab so I never have to migrate again?
  • protomyth 11y ago
    > Serious question: why can't someone make a good Github replacement that is anywhere near feature parity? Time and Github executed well at the start giving them experience. I get the feeling that a company starting out now and doing all of their development and management remotely through the site they are building might have a good chance at catching Github in capability. Getting buy-in from customers is the problem.
• politician 11y ago
  Over the past year, we've moved to limit our exposure to GitHub by shifting repos over to Bitbucket, but it looks like that'll have to accelerate that now. The cultural and leadership turmoil described in the article sounds worse then those DDoS attacks last year. How can they stay focused on building a great product?
• CryoLogic 11y ago
  This is just gross. I've spent the last 10 years of my life listening to various minority leaders discriminate against whites with no consequence. I hope someone stands up for themselves and sues GitHub for this type of behavior. First off, this is very irrational and not based in any facts. Second off, it's blatant racism and sexism. I will probably migrate my repos to GitLab or even BitBucket shiver. We need to vote with our dollars if that's the only way to get a point across.
  • mikegioia 11y ago
    If you can, avoid Bitbucket. We used them for a few years and it just wasn't good, through and through. I've been really impressed with Gitlab and we use that as a backup right now but I really think I'll be moving all of our repos over to them. Plus, you can even host your own Gitlab server.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • dvirsky 11y ago
      I've been using Gitlab for a couple of years, and it's really great. Used a self hosted repo for a team of ~40, and I can't recall any major incidents or any loss of code, ever.
      • smileysteve 11y ago
        > I can't recall any major incidents or any loss of code, ever. It's Git either way, how does code get lost? It's not centralized unless you don't trust your local copies.
        • dvirsky 11y ago
          Of course, but I meant remote repo code loss. I actually had this happen once when I was running a small filesystem based git server. Users could login with normal shell sessions with their public key, and repo permissions were handled with the unix permissions system. Some user with a funky git UI client for windows actually deleted a repo completely from the server. It wasn't much of an issue because of local copies, but we moved to git-shell right after that, and to gitlab not long after when then team grew beyond a handful of people.
• s986s 11y ago
  In defense of github, they can create whatever culture they desire. Same with npm and every other company out there. If they succeed, they will be seen as a company who took ethics and equality very seriously. If they don't theyll be seen as racists and confused leftists. They are making a big risk with no obvious gain (outside of hypothetical culture and numbers). But this is their risk to make. If it does well they will be considered heroes.
• bitL 11y ago
  Seems like another instance of "let the nerds build a company and then take over"...
  • cfcef 11y ago
    Should this be considered an example of entryism, or just opportunism?
    • bitL 11y ago
      It might be neither if it were the default (uncommunicated) strategy of investors...
    • WhyDoiPostHere 11y ago
      Definitely entryism, considering Github even has their own race gestapo (their 'social impact team') which made it "very hard to even interview people who are 'white'".
  • eecks 11y ago
    Just out of interest, what are other examples of this?
    • qb45 11y ago
      Not OP, but I think the "let the nerds build" quote may have referred to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10238132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10238132
• douche 11y ago
  Anybody use Microsoft's Team Services git hosting? Looks like they have unlimited free repos, although I don't know about public.
  • systemz 11y ago
    I don't trust Microsoft
• brightball 11y ago
  That's a pretty blistering take. Really wonder if Bitbucket will see an uptick in business from this. I can see something like this influencing their users as well as employees.
• melted 11y ago
  This would be a good lesson for other companies with SJWs on staff: do what _you_ believe is right, don't let them drive the discussion.
  • cookiecaper 11y ago
    Software guys seem really impressionable if the argument is coming from the right sectors. I'd be really interested in learning more about that.
• canistr 11y ago
  Hold on. Before we make judgment based solely on mentioning race in a slide. I highly recommend reading Nicole Sanchez's full take on the issue here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2015/02/12/women-of-color-diversity-tech-silicon-valley-nicole-sanchez/23298945/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2015/02/12/wome...
  • adamsea 11y ago
    Agreed.
  • guelo 11y ago
    Too late. The pitchforks are out, the angry nerd mob is on a crusade now.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • b6 11y ago
    Thanks, good idea. I read it. To me it seems saturated with the insidious mutant form of racism and sexism that I've been very worried about.
    • humanrebar 11y ago
      Yeah, in her coda, "be honest" and have "uncomfortable conversations" read more like, "let's end the conversation and agree with me". These comments are a conversation. I'll take it in good faith that people are being honest. But I doubt that Ms. Sanchez has this in mind: "We refuse to accept the current paradigms that reflect rather than challenge the status quo..." So you want to have an honest conversation about how you're refusing to accept the status quo?
  • greenrd 11y ago
    Again another diversity piece that claims that trans people are somehow "locked out" of tech. I've seen no evidence for this, and in fact some evidence for the opposite - that they're overrepresented. That makes sense, I would expect trans people to find it easier to work as a programmer than say, a construction worker or any kind of customer-facing job. But trans people are kind of invisible, both (usually) statistically and (sometimes) passing so well that they are not known to be trans. With other minorities the situation is more clear-cut and obvious. I hope at least no-one will pretend that Asians are not overrepresented in Silicon Valley relative to population.
• yaakov34 11y ago
  She certainly doesn't say "only white" and she explicitly excludes white women ("some of the biggest barriers to progress"). You can make convoluted excuses for her, but it's obvious that she sees white people (of whatever gender or socioeconomic status) as essentially enemies, and doesn't want them as allies (let alone is willing to accept some of them as people with different, but valid opinions). It's not acceptable to write "we're not looking for Indian folks to lead this", and it shouldn't be if it's "white". Also, it's definitely not just her, expressions like this have popped up in a number of mainstream places. I am definitely not imagining the various celebrations of white people "dying off", their share in the population dropping, and what have you.
  • specialk 11y ago
    There is a subtle irony in your comment. I think it is interesting to tease out because much of the arguments on diversity come from one's own perspective. So, if you'll indulge me, your argument is essentially 'us vs them' is a bad thing. About right? If so, I agree. We're not going to solve an exclusionary tech culture by excluding people or creating two sides to a debating war. But what strikes me is that your comment didn't even reference Nicole Sanchez by name once. Your comment was "she" and "her" time and time again. Did you even notice yourself do it? I somehow doubt it was intentional. But I'm an optimist.
    • moistgorilla 11y ago
      Explain to me your subtle irony. Because frankly, it's so subtle it doesn't seem to exist.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • ohnomrbill 11y ago
      Who cares if he didn't mention her by name? I refer to my own mother using pronouns sometimes - it's a feature of the English language. What about using pronouns in place of a proper name is problematic to you?
    • 11y ago
• _pmf_ 11y ago
  > One person familiar with Wanstrath's relationship with these VCs told us they are "thrilled" with him and with the changes he's been making at the company. I, too, like watching a nice horror story unfold. > It's led by Nicole Sanchez, vice president of social impact Does she have more or less to say than the vice president of sanitary hygiene? Maybe the chef of the cantina wants to have a word about the hiring process of technical personnel, too.
• dudul 11y ago
  Since github doesn't want to deal with white male developers, I'm migrating my repos to GitLab. So long octocat.
• eikenberry 11y ago
  I love how the guy quoted saying that they can't teach white, male middle managers empathy is a white male middle manager. I guess he's saying that he's proud of what he is.
  • facepalm 11y ago
    He could be a Latino, profile says he is from Puerto Rico.
    • eikenberry 11y ago
      Possibly. Though Latino's range from standard white European (usually Spanish or Danish decent) to near full blooded Indian. So it is hard to use it as a differentiating category.
      • malandrew 11y ago
        The same goes for caucasian. It's a remarkably broad category that includes a lot of different nationalities and ethnicities.
• ElComradio 11y ago
  Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers. This has ticked off many people in the old guard. This is almost certainly a mistake, from my experience. Our fairly small team's productivity dropped by I'd estimate 300% even with a much larger team once HQ decided we needed to bring in management layers. I wonder what GH hopes to gain from these changes.
• jsksma2 11y ago
  Bring on the suits! While GH is busy distracting their world-class engineers with B.S. reverse-racism meetings, they will successfully free up their equity pool for more suit hires. That should suck the life out real quick... Goodbye revolutionary, forward-thinking work culture & hierarchy (meritocracy). You will be gravely missed. Good luck hiring sub-par engineers for the next 2 years and watching your data centers go down on a daily basis. I guess the only question left is... who are you switching to?
  • obelisk_ 11y ago
    Well, what are the alternatives? Hosted: Bitbucket, GitLab Self-hosted: GitLab, Gogs None of these come close to GitHub in my experience.
    • coderjames 11y ago
      Now you can self-host BitBucket also with BitBucket Server[1]. We're starting a migration to it at my work right now. [1] https://www.atlassian.com/software/bitbucket/download https://www.atlassian.com/software/bitbucket/download
      • djKianoosh 11y ago
        bitbucket server (used to be called stash) has practically no search capability. it's the underappreciated killer feature of github IMO
        • james-skemp 11y ago
          We've recently started using it at work and the lack of profiles and graphs (without paying for oddly priced plugins) is quite unfortunate as well. It was quite disappointing, especially since Gitlabs was on the table as an option but we opted for Bitbucket since we added JIRA a couple years ago. If the smart people here have any suggestions on how to make Bitbucket look more line GitHub, I'd love to hear.
• gedy 11y ago
  The irony is remote workers are one of the best ways to remove much the physical power politics due to human biology. Size, body language, sexual attraction, etc.
  • timrpeterson 11y ago
    Valuable comment. Also, gender and ethnicity get neutralized when remote employees have text-based conversation, allowing your words to be the focus as they should.
    • greenrd 11y ago
      Possibly, but only if people actively choose usernames that remove hints of such things, avoid disclosing their ethnicity or gender, avoid using stereotypical male or female communication patterns... it's a rather unstable equilibrium.
  • uptownJimmy 11y ago
    Fantastic point. In a sea of not-fantastic points.
• jgalt212 11y ago
  When this bubble pops, no one is gonna care about diversity in tech. It's only because there's big money do people care about diversity.
• jgalt212 11y ago
  >Some of these folks may be hanging out until GitHub offers some kind of "liquidity event" — a way for longtime employees or investors to sell some of their shares — which one person believes could take place soon. (A GitHub spokesperson refused comment on that.) This event is not likely to come any time soon because Andreessen Horowitz bid the price up so high.
• elcapitan 11y ago
  Can we have a seal for services and software that are not run by the SJW crowd? That would be helpful. No racist "Code of Conduct"? Check.
  • greenrd 11y ago
    Codes of conduct generally act to protect people from racist and sexual harassment, by prohibiting and deterring it. Name one example of racist harassment against white people that a code of conduct hasn't prevented. tumbleweeds
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• OJFord 11y ago
  If they pursue this genuinely, they'll be perpetually flip-flopping between states - it won't take long under this leadership for the hard-done-by minority to change to white/male, and then 'reverse sex/racism' would be sex/racism towards non-white/female...
• marshray 11y ago
  Is it ever a good idea to mix shipping products with social activism? What are some examples where this has ever gone well?
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• StevePerkins 11y ago
  Some random thoughts and observations after reading this thread: [1] I'm interested in the differences between reactions to this, versus Brendan Eich's gay marriage scandal at Mozilla a couple of years ago. Don't get me wrong... I supported marriage equality then, and I do not support the worst of the statements called out in this story now. However, there are rational arguments that the HN community overreacted in BOTH cases. You have to assume that self-interest factors into the difference. [2] Why are people so reluctant to move from GitHub to Bitbucket or GitLab? I've done work with all three, and personally haven't found any of them to be significantly more or less reliable than the others (i.e. they ALL go down occasionally). GitLab's interface is virtually on-par with GitHub at this point, and frankly Bitbucket is far superior if you're using JIRA. Current architecture trends are moving toward smaller services, with a proliferating number of repositories. So GitHub's pricing model, in which you're charged by the number of repos, is becoming less competitive every day against Bitbucket and GitLab charging per user. I sometimes wonder how many HN people do actual work on teams of significant size, and how many are college students or micro-startup founders who don't really pay much for tooling anyway? GitHub's pricing model makes NO sense for established companies with lots of projects, and it seems weird that so few people here bring this up.
  • noobermin 11y ago
    At least for [2], I'd suggest the community around Github is the reason many are reluctant to leave.
    • StevePerkins 11y ago
      That's exactly my point in wondering about the ratio of students to established company professionals. For every company I've ever worked at, the "community" or "network effect" of a source control vendor is meaningless. Because the repos are all private. Sure, the company might have SOME open source stuff mirrored on GitHub for publicity purposes. But the real bread-and-butter daily WORK that pays the bills takes place in private repos. In most cases, private repos that are hosted on-prem rather than in the cloud. Sure, GitHub and its "network effect" matters for open source projects, and for resume-fodder side projects we tinker with as individuals. But all of that is free anyway. What about the scenarios where you'd have to pay GitHub a lot of money? How many vocal people on HN are actually IN that scenario?
• jhou2 11y ago
  This articl was a bit of a hit job. GitHub is changing as revenue and staff increase. That makes sense. There are always growing pains. A flat, so-called meritocratic structure only works in a few situations. GitHub makes the majority of its revenue from enterprise. It only makes sense to mirror the structure of your most valued customers. A VP of important corporate enterprise customer expects to talk to another VP at GitHub to get things done. I am not sure there are many success stories for increasing diversity in any industry. There are minor improvements to diversity but not much. At most companies I've worked for, the majority of the HR department were white female and the majority of engineering department were male. It was a very clean separation. I've always found that a bit odd in terms of diversity. I think it's unfair to class everyone with white skin as "white", or darker skin as black or south asian or middle eastern. There is so much diversity in culture and backgrounds that stretch far beyond skin color. Can we stop classifying people based on skin color and just build great software to make the world a better place?
  • ryan-allen 11y ago
    The irony is corporate sales is even less diverse than tech. Bring back the whiskey, the strippers, the boozy sales lunches, the white guys in suits. I hope this whole SJW-led assault implodes because I just want to get back to writing software. Make no mistake, this is a political war.
    • popmystack 11y ago
      Can you people please not pollute this board with your over the top non-sense?
  • imfine-ok 11y ago
    This has nothing to do with growth or even sexism/racism. This is a political takeover and shakedown of a valueable company. Moving out of a meritocracy to a hierarchy like this is to move away from performance based influence to political based influence. The SJWs behind this just want money and they are importing their people into the company to increase their control. The use of discrimination is part of the mechanism to increase their numbers. Once they get a lot of people below them, they'll demand larger and larger paychecks and stock options. That's it, it's a fairly simple plan. Find a valuable company and raid it. All this inclusion/sexism talk is just dressing. Even githubs ceo's motivation is pretty clear. If he grows the org, he'll argue that he deserves more money because he's managing more people. Then when he exits he can position himself as the manager of a much larger org of thousands instead of this insanely profitable 70 person org.
• fapjacks 11y ago
  I guess I will say the thing that is hard to talk about, but I must: What does Nicole Sanchez know? Everybody knows Hispanics are too lazy to achieve anything great.
  • fapjacks 11y ago
    For once, I do appreciate the downvotes. It means racist bullshit is unacceptable.
  • dang 11y ago
    > Everybody knows Hispanics are too lazy to achieve anything great. We've banned this account for obvious reasons. There are strong feelings all around, so we try to assume good faith, but no one gets to use HN as a dumping ground for the ugly bits of their id. All: if there are more comments like this and we've missed them, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We can't come close to reading all the comments.
    • fapjacks 11y ago
      Did you read my own response to this? The feelings should be strong about this! This is exactly what is happening right now inside Github. It is inexcusable.
      • dang 11y ago
        Assuming that everything you said is true doesn't change the outcome here. You can't post outright slurs to HN, whether others are doing inexcusable things or not. There's no substantive view that demands being expressed that way. If you don't want your account to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to unban accounts when people give us reason to believe that they'll follow the rules in the future. (Edit: they did, so we unbanned the account.)
• verylongaccount 11y ago
  It seems that a large number of posters believe that discriminating against white men is okay because they enjoy "white privilege", whatever that is. Either you believe it is okay to discriminate against someone on the basis of their skin color or you don't. Attempts to redefine the word notwithstanding, those who subscribe to the former philosophy are known as racists. It is hard to distinguish the anti-white vitriol I see on this page from the antisemitism of yesteryear. It was often said that Jews were over-represented in various occupations not because their industriousness, intelligence or other virtues, but because of devious trickery (they plot together to deprive others of opportunities). I fail to see how the arguments regarding white men are any different.
  • striking 11y ago
    It wasn't uncommon to hear in Eastern Europe a short while ago that "Jews control the world" and that's why we should take their power from them. Clearly absurd, but that's how people felt. (And I'm not making points about the Nazis, I'm making points about Poland in 1989 during the fall of Communism.) But now we hear "white men control the world," and are expected to take their power away. Just because they're similar doesn't mean they're the same, I realize. But we should at least be self-aware about that similarity, because it means something.
  • exolymph 11y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding the argument people make about the concept of privilege. Nothing about it is intentional in the standard sense. It's more that people behave to benefit themselves -- which is natural and fine -- and power has slowly accrued over time to white men more than to other types of people. The argument is not that white men are malicious, but that their traits are implicitly favored and promoted because we tend to gravitate toward and feel more comfortable around people who are similar to ourselves. Ergo, white men in power enable other white men to gain more power.
    • verylongaccount 11y ago
      I understand perfectly. This is precisely what was (and is still to an extent) said of Jews.
• verylongaccount 11y ago
  It seems that many posters here believe that it is okay to discriminate against white men because they enjoy "white privilege," whatever that is. There are those who believe that it is okay to discriminate on the basis of skin color and those who do not. The former are called racists, attempts to redefine the term notwithstanding. What I find most interesting is that the comments about white men are roughly equivalent to commonly heard antisemitic statements. It is often said that Jews are over represented in various occupations not because of any virtue on their part, but rather because of devious trickery. I don't see much distinction between such sentiments and those being expressed here.
  • greenrd 11y ago
    The claim is not that white people are overrepresented because of devious trickery, but because white people are usually doing the hiring and they are often biased, consciously or unconsciously, against non-white people, and women. It's not something that's exclusive to white people, by the way. Racial and religious nepotism should be resisted wherever and whenever it occurs, in favour of meritocracy.
• gyardley 11y ago
  What an utter mess of a thread. Look, social experiments of the sort taking place at GitHub are good things - they can teach us something. If their policies make the organization stronger, that's awesome - we get a stronger GitHub. If their policies end up damaging the organization, that's also awesome - because it'll become evident they're bad policies, and companies will stop implementing them. Everyone just sit back, let the market do its job, and be sure to take note of the results when it's time for you to do your own company-building.
  • defen 11y ago
    > If their policies end up damaging the organization, that's also awesome - because it'll become evident they're bad policies, and companies will stop implementing them. I'm a bit more cynical - if it fails, I suspect the failure will be blamed on "wreckers".
    • gyardley 11y ago
      Well, sure, and if it succeeds, some people will claim the success was in spite of the policies. Ideologues gotta ideologue, and all that. But that doesn't mean we can't learn something useful - since those 'wrecker'-style arguments give off the political equivalent of code smell.
  • chippy 11y ago
    I'm inclined to agree. I wonder, however, about the huge amount of VC money and the pressures of money and capitalism. I wouldn't be surprised if these experiments are more lip service than actual concrete restructuring given that people in positions of power tend to want to protect their power bases, and investors tend to want to protect their investments. Edits - I am not losing anything by them changing things. I have not invested any money in them, I use their service though, and pay for a pro account. I am curious to see what happens and am optimistic about humans but pessimistic about VC money!
• ianwalter 11y ago
  Seriously? You guys are complaining that they are saying that white people shouldn't lead their diversity initiative? Just take a minute and think about why they've decided there should be a diversity initiative in the first place.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• scoot 11y ago
  Meanwhile, github has quietly dropped the "owner" / "collaborator" tag for contributors to open source projects. Either you're part of an org, or you're not. Not too many OS projects have their own org, and commercial entities will be reluctant to add non-employees to their org, in order to distinguish contributors from employees. Users of OS projects now have now easy way to tell if they're interacting with a collaborator. Total shambles.
• seivan 11y ago
  You might be upset by some quotes here. It's important to not to let that take over you. You end up becoming exactly like the things that bother you. Don't get bothered over the people in the article expressing their opinions. It's the only way to live. Trust me, it takes over. ".. that is life. I cannot change them overnight. I think society, their own experiences, their own reading, their own observations, will bring about the change despite their innate biases."
• proc0 11y ago
  I would expect more from a tech company that is supposed to be by programmers for programmers. Programmers are abstract thinkers, and it's disgusting to see them lower themselves and adopt the semantics and memes of obvious cultural constructs like race. What does it even mean to be "white"? Who exactly are they talking about and what is it about this group of people that is so bad? There's no need to bring in this gross oversimplification of culture and biology into professional talks. If they're seeing some kind of pattern within their company that correlates with some ethnicity or culture, it's just a coincidence! Start hiring less asshole managers! Who cares what color they are? American culture is such a bummer when it comes to how it shoves people into categories. We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT. There is simply no excuse at all to mention it. People CANNOT be categorized based on skin color at all, AT ALL. People cannot be categorized based on culture either. Virtually everyone is multi-ethnic and multi-racial at some level. To identify even yourself as belonging to a distinct "color" is just a fabrication of American culture that is an unfortunate outcome of the history in this country. The only way forward is to forget about categorizing people, and just speak to their qualities -> not "white managers are assholes", instead "asshole managers are assholes".
  • anotherc 11y ago
    > Programmers are abstract thinkers, and it's disgusting to see them lower themselves and adopt the semantics and memes of obvious cultural constructs like race. You have to be joking. This is sarcasm, right?
    • dracht 11y ago
      There is a lot of overlap between the HN user base and the delusional SJW ilk that is running Github into the ground. People here are defending the blatantly racist sentiments mentioned in the article. They are performing some serious mental gymnastics to both hold the belief that race is an irrelevant social construct and that too many people of one race (cough whiteys cough) in one place is bad.
      • dang 11y ago
• jondubois 11y ago
  I understand why GitHub feels it needs to add structure to their organization. It's impossible for 500 people to coordinate themselves - Combine that with the remote work environment and it gives some people a free ticket to do nothing at all. That said, I think the remote working aspect won't be a problem if you add a middle management layer. So I agree with adding management but disagree about cancelling remote work.
  • captain_jamira 11y ago
    the only mention of remote work limitations I saw in the article was specific to senior managers.
    • jondubois 11y ago
      Ok. I guess I fully agree with it then ;p
• emehrkay 11y ago
  There is a lot of anger in this thread. I understand. Honest question though: how much of it isn't coming from white men? I ask because the tone of what is causing this anger has been publicly said, and masked as "culture" and other phrases, about women and people of color for a very long time.
• atmosx 11y ago
  Wasnt github already involved in a scandal with a female employee who quit and came out a few years back?
  • b6 11y ago
    Yes. Here's some information: http://www.businessinsider.com/github-harassment-story-2014-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/github-harassment-story-2014-... More, supposedly from insiders: https://medium.com/@geeekcore1/facts-conveniently-withheld-d96f431f4e8e https://medium.com/@geeekcore1/facts-conveniently-withheld-d...
• captain_jamira 11y ago
  Holy bejeebus, people are defensive as all getup about this. WTF, people?!? Do people think that the quote, "...it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'..." is about the difficulty this person finds in sitting in a room across from a white person, chatting with him? I understood it to be a perception on this person's part that the efforts to increase diversity have created a condition where such a significant portion of their new hires need to be non-white or non-white-male that it's difficult to get on the interview schedule if you are. And my speculation is that this was an expression due to personal experience - perhaps this person tried to refer a friend and felt he was getting nowhere. THEY ARE BULLET POINTS PEOPLE... Going out on a limb, I'd say just about everyone here has seen a PowerPoint presentation with a slide full of what the presenter intends to be attention catching points that beg the question 'what's that about? do tell." I'm going to play devil's advocate here with some plausible explanations. I don't know the author and wasn't there so this is purely speculative, but I love speculation, it's why my favorite sport is spelunking. I tried to do this with an imagined 'voice' of the presenter but it ended up being mixed with my own - whatever. - "This is not work for white folks to lead" --- We're all familiar with congressional committees composed of a group of old white men discussing the legal policy issues related to healthcare access for women. It's a sorry sight. Let's put it up there front and center, that has not and will not constitute and acceptable effort, so it can't happen in this case. Does this mean that white people can't be a party to diversity efforts? no. but really, what's a bigger risk/likelihood, no white people/men on a committee or all white people/men on a committee? yeah. - "This is not about socio-economic class, mostly." --- I'm guessing this has something to do with the culture of distorted libertarian ideals held by many in the tech space, and how easy it is to discount racial bias and claim racial indifference while laying the blame for lack of diversity on childhood access to tech and the statistical differences in access based on purely socio-economic demographics. So this is a point to avoid the argument that diversity isn't a tech problem, and that if society fixed schools and whatnot, tech would naturally become more diverse. - "Why we refer our friends and family (or don't) are where a lot of the answers can be found." --- If you're a white employee and all your friends are white and you work for a company that is highly dependent on employee network referrals for hiring, you're going to just get more white people. --- "Even my conditioning has been conditioned" ... https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm1glnnHKg1qbce9oo1.mp3 https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm1glnnHKg1qbce9oo1.mp3 American (global) society is centuries deep in conditioning to value white people more highly than others, irrespective of the opinion-holder's racial identity. - "33% is barely enough to change the culture." --- I don't exactly know, but I would suspect that 33% is some arbitrary base target for a diverse workforce created by a group of advisers who were indicative of the reason for the 1st bullet point. - "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues" --- Asians are a minority. Asians have a singularly unique experience in tech-employment (although that's probably specific to Asian males). Let's not get bogged down in intra-minority finger-pointing. I suspect there are plenty of tech companies that point to their Asian-identifying employees when confronted (at least internally) with diversity questions, which probably doesn't satisfy non-Asian minorities. - "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women" --- There is a perception that historically, some successful women who have had to fight hard for their positions and put up with a great deal of crap from men along the way, have a tendency to reinforce the traditional barriers for subsequent aspiring female colleagues rather than aid in the dismantling of those barriers, due to a sense of personal fairness - sort of "I had it hard, why should you get to cruise in my wake?" or in defense of a space they perceive as arbitrarily limited by men - the thought potentially being "These men were cajoled into making room for one token female law partner at the firm so a rising female colleague is direct competition for my job." Highlight PERCEPTION and SOME please! If this is an actual, documented thing (I don't know?), I'd speculate that it's universal, and not specific to females or white females, but rather to the culture of numbers - meaning white men would do it too if put in the same position. So let's call it out in this presentation - We don't want that, we want understanding, supportive trailblazers, and those trailblazers in tech at this time are white women. As for the business side, wow what a more rational conversation RE: growth, size, and manageable company cultures.
• deleted 11y ago
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• jmorphy88 11y ago
  All "diversity" programs, along with other legalisms like "minority" status, "historically disprivileged groups", etc. are entirely about anti-white racism and dispossession. They have no moral standing and no logical consistency, and they don't pretend to, nor do they even need to. It's utilitarian and provides benefits to a specific group at the expense of another. I'm happy GitHub is getting to experience the runaway consequences of this toxic and repugnant ideology. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving group of "progressive" folks.
  • alistproducer2 11y ago
    You don't believe any actions should be taken to try and unwind the lingering effects of chattel slavery and jim crow?
    • b6 11y ago
      Do you think actions should be taken? If so, what actions?
      • alistproducer2 11y ago
        Yes. Free college would be a good start. Stopping over policing of black/brown neighborhoods would be another. Basically anything that actively seeks to break the cycle started with slavery and continued through Jim Crow. Occupying black/brown neighborhoods and using jay walking as a pretext to throw as many in jail as possible needs to stop - immediately.
    • jmorphy88 11y ago
      Nope. Plenty already has been done, and why do other non-white groups get special status too? Like I said, it's all about shaking down whitey.
      • headhuntermdk 11y ago
        Right. Fucking. There. Let me guess, you are a white male tired of people bringing up diversity? Or maybe you have forgotten about the special status given to minorities that brings us to todays topic? If enough was done, we wouldn't be having this conversation. As if "whitey" hasn't been shaking down different groups over the years.
• rdl 11y ago
  I wonder if remote-work culture helps with diversity. It obviously does with geographic culture diversity, and with nationality (due to visas), but does it particularly help with racial or gender or age or anything else? I'd assume it does with gender diversity (since women more often end up taking care of kids/elders/etc. even with a full time job of their own); race/ethnicity seems more indirect.
• gitthrowaway 11y ago
  There's real fear about a user driven backlash against policies coming down the pipe. One recent slide deck was titled "Kill Your Idols?" and examined ways to prevent a LinkedIn esque reputation from forming during proposed policy changes to accelerate growth. I make no claims as to the accuracy of this information or any relationship with GitHub. All assertions should be considered parody.
• anon42424242 11y ago
  "Technical director Danilo Campos" was part of a major shitshow a year and a half ago on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389163). He called HN a cesspit and then tried to work up a Twitter mob against someone who made the mistake of challenging his points. If a vindictive, narrow-minded individual like that is a technical director and a member of Github's social-impact team, no wonder people are leaving in droves.
• brianzelip 11y ago
  Christ, the wonderful platform for learning, sharing, and doing that is GitHub is potentially under threat and the majority of discussion here is consumed with questions and accusations of racism?! Of course white privilege exists. Next. Onto real shit like how do we not lose yet another bastion of web awesomeness.
  • thatswrong0 11y ago
    It's embarrassing that you don't think this is something worth having a discussion about. You're basically suggesting we abandon critical thought. There's clearly more to this than white privilege.
    • ghyu66 11y ago
      >You're basically suggesting we abandon critical thought socjus political correctness in a nutshell.
  • striking 11y ago
    It seems that people disagree with how obvious the existence of white privilege is. I don't think 600 comments would get posted over something obvious.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• droopybuns 11y ago
  The current dominant themes in certain feminism & diversity cliques in our community are openly hostile towards me. I'm a male. I'm white. I'm middle class. I'm heterosexual. I'm also a leader. I'm a parent of two daughters. My mother had to fight sexism issues in her career. I am supportive of inclusion & diversity. I am trying to raise my girls to be empowered, confident & curious. But the dominant themes in current diversity & feminist circles are so racist & sexist towards me that my first impulse is outrage. For those of you who share this impulse- I want to provide the piece of perspective that helps me manage my frustration: Our culture operates under a pendulum. Right now, it's bad, but it will swing back. There are “equality” people who are openly hostile to certain categories of humans based on gender, sexuality & race. This has happened before and it will happen again. The pendulum will swing back and we'll look back at these people in the same way as certain stale feminists & race marketeers of the 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s etc. The leaders of these ideas in the tech community who focus on gender & race over building products that people want will not last. They get louder & shriller, but wielding bigotry to fight bigotry always fertilizes suspicion. You can't fight exclusion with exclusion. So don’t worry about these themes. If people aren’t bitching about their bigotry, their relevance wanes. Just keep trying to do big things. If someone calls you privileged, it doesn't mean it wasn't hard & that you didn't earn it. You don’t have to argue with every person who writes something stupid on the Internet. To hell with those bigots. Their misery does not earn them the right to rob you of your own self worth and success. Diversity means that all perspectives deserve to be heard. It is ok that someone uses the word diversity to ward off white folks from leading. The community eventually rejects this kind of bigotry. You can find these people worthy of your contempt and still be supportive of diversity & equality. Now ignore these fools and go build your shit.
  • yakult 11y ago
    It will swing back in thirty years. In thirty years I plan to be retired. Or have died of my unhealthy lifestyle. Or at the most optimistic become too old to code competitively. My point is, far as I'm concerned I can't afford to just sit tight and wait for it to blow over. And neither can the rest of you.
  • Mangalor 11y ago
• hitekker 11y ago
  Hey, mods, did the top level comments get resequenced in this thread? Up until an hour ago, iza's comment was the first comment; now it's the fifth. I understand that the post itself may be inflammatory but the resulting discussion actually avoided a lot of the diversity v.s. meritocracy ("it's my side or the highway!") that some of the other comment threads are focusing on.
  • reitanqild 11y ago
    Votes affect ordering even of top level comments. As far as I understand it you mostly don't see it because once a thread gets to the top it is receiving a net positive stream of incoming vote and since it is already at the top it will receive more votes that threads further down the page. Sometimes threads are detached by admins and end up at the bottom of the page. In those cases they are usually (possibly always) clearly marked as such.
    • hitekker 11y ago
      Perhaps that's the case, but isa's comment was the first comment for 4 hours after it was posted. Round about two hours ago, it suddenly dropped down to the fifth slot, not the second or third. I don't know what HN's policy is on resequencing; I thought I would ask to see if I'm not understanding something correctly.
      • reitanqild 11y ago
        Possibly brigading downvoters then, I don't know.
• spc476 11y ago
  How about George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, who shot Trayvon Martin, a Black. CNN called him "white": <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/cnn-white-hispanic_n_3588744.html> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/cnn-white-hispanic_.... So did the New York Times: <http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-demotes-george-zimmerman-from-white-hispanic-to-white/> http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-demotes-george-zimmerman-from-....
  • untog 11y ago
    ...I'm not seeing how this relates to GitHub. Did GitHub hire the authors of those articles..?
  • lazyant 11y ago
    "Hispanics or Latinos can be of any race, any ancestry, any ethnicity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic
  • dang 11y ago
    We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050351 and marked it off-topic.
• masterleep 11y ago
  Discrimination is fairness. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
  • rotw 11y ago
    Being considerate of other people is Stalinism, is that what you're saying?
    • qb45 11y ago
      That's what Stalin said. But since parent was being sarcastic, yes, Stalinism is about being considerate.
    • nailer 11y ago
      The peasants were actually, legitimately being oppressed. Someone rose up to fight a good fight and ended up saying (as a well known someone in these circles frequently says) the non oppressed group should be killed. Yep: it's pretty Stalinist.
  • argonaut 11y ago
    What a total non sequitur. You haven't showed that rotw is saying "meritocracy is discrimination." You've merely insinuated that by saying this total cliche.
  • dang 11y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, especially on inflammatory topics. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050454 and marked it off-topic.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• tdkl 11y ago
  Just wow. I'm thinking about pulling my personal Jekyll site hosted off GitHub pages and host somewhere else. Not sure about the alternatives though, with custom domain support. Ah well, a nice weekend task.
  • bioinformatics 11y ago
    I have an Octopuses on Heroku, it seems a good solution for a static site.
  • jgowans 11y ago
    One option is to host the repo on Bitbucket and use the Aerobatic (https://www.aerobatic.com https://www.aerobatic.com) static hosting add-on. Free custom domain and more, included. disclaimer - I'm one of the founders of Aerobatic.
    • tdkl 11y ago
      Thanks, I already stumbled upon Aerobatic and it's in Todo list for trying it out :] One thing though, is it possible to use a naked domain ? Although I could use CloudFlare which supports ALIAS records.
      • jgowans 11y ago
        Yep, naked domains are supported, as is SSL.
• madebysquares 11y ago
  Diversity is a touchy subject. As a black engineer myself I've worked at three companies where I've been the only black technical worker and it's hard some times. I've gone to conferences where I've been maybe 1 of 5 or 6 engineers out of hundreds. i don't do any hiring but I often wonder if there is a lack of qualified black male or female engineers or what but sometimes I do feel isolated.
  • atdt 11y ago
    You may like "The darker side of tech", a talk Bryan Liles gave at Velocity 2015 in New York: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ5wYZqHQGo> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ5wYZqHQGo>.
  • hablahaha 11y ago
    Also, this is a great perspective from Twitter's only black engineer in a leadership position: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the-bar https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the-bar
  • humanrebar 11y ago
    > ...I often wonder if there is a lack of qualified black male or female engineers or what but sometimes I do feel isolated. FWIW, my anecdata shows that less than 1 out of 20 technical interviews I do are with black applicants. I do wonder why that is.
  • noelsusman 11y ago
    You'll see pretty much the same numbers at top American engineering universities. Most of the race/gender disparities we see in tech companies are a direct result of the same disparities seen in tech universities. The problem starts before freshman year of college.
    • xtracto 11y ago
      In the case of black, latinos (I am one of them myself) and other minorities I think it is partly a matter of numbers. Black people account for around 13% of the population in the USA. So in theory, a "natural" number would be to have around 13 black students for every 100 at every university. If it is less, then it may be due to either a) Lack of opportunities or b) Lack of desire enroll in specific subjects. Here in Mexico face a similar issue with the lack of Women in technical careers (programming in my experience). The fact is that for some reason less women enroll in Soft. Eng. or Comp. Sci. courses... And from the few that enroll, several get out after the first or second "filter subjects" (Data Structures, Programming I, algorithms). Given that there are more females (61 million) than males (58 million), in theory there should be roughly the same number of both in schools.
• sauere 11y ago
  If we could all grow up and act like professionals, that would be great. I have a hard time understanding why the tech industry always tends to create this much drama. At the end of the day, this is about software, not about your genitals. I don't care if you're liberal or conservative, black or white, straight or gay, or anything in between! In fact, i won't bring it up, or ask. I simply do not care, the only thing i care about is your pull request. How any company can include a slide like the one in the article (backup link here: http://i.imgur.com/p5zwScc.png http://i.imgur.com/p5zwScc.png) is absolutely beyond me. I am paying you to make a great product, not to make daily diversity meetings.
• yakult 11y ago
  The real question is: is a repo purge going to follow from their internal purge? Will they start deleting projects with diverging political views? It's not exactly paranoia: there has been precedents; see Gamergate.
  • cookiecaper 11y ago
    >The real question is: is a repo purge going to follow from their internal purge? Will they start deleting projects with diverging political views? They've already done that. https://github.com/FeministSoftwareFoundation/C-plus-Equality https://github.com/FeministSoftwareFoundation/C-plus-Equalit... However, they continue to host a mirror of it: https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality Not sure why they didn't allow the "official" one but allow the mirror. Guess they just wanted the ability to say they took it down for PR purposes.
• bootload 11y ago
  "We’re trying to build a new kind of enterprise company where the playbooks of old won’t always work," Code for, "lots more money to be made here, move over hackers, let the ^professionals^ do their work". I'm not surprised, the hippy dream of work as you please is no more. Take and want the big money? don't be surprised when big money dictates how the company will be run. Big question, will github be run to the benefit of users or share holders?
• cooper12 11y ago
  They targeted programmers. Programmers. We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a successful build saying we did. We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun. We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the runtime of an algorithm to draw out a single extra millisecond of runtime per element. Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same design patterns over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such programmer nirvana that they can literally write these programs blindfolded. Do these people have any idea how many keyboards have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and VMs destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights? These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our repository? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? programmers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the service our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a prewritten script. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex. Programmers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another bug report. (If you actually read through all of this and found yourself agreeing, it's a modified copypasta from a toxic subreddit and I hope you feel silly: https://redd.it/3o82sn https://redd.it/3o82sn)
  • striking 11y ago
    The points you made about programmers aren't invalid, but are taken to an absurd level and also imply the existence of the "other side." I mean, you could have written a feelgood snippet about programming, but I guess a meme is okay too.
• susan_hall 11y ago
  Way back in 2005, Shelley Powers made the argument that a diverse workforce helped a company deal with crisis. The inverse was also implied, that a rejection of diversity was an indicator of some kind of resistance, which would make it difficult to deal with crisis. Powers wrote: "When jobs are plentiful, diversification within the job pool is not seen as a threat. In fact, diversification can be seen as a way of extending one’s power over a larger base of people. Book companies see more people buying books, conference organizers hope for more butts in seats, industries have less stressed and healthier, happier workers. However, when jobs are threatened, any change in the status quo will be seen as a risk–even those in an industry populated by people who consider themselves free of bias. It is a natural inclination to want to pull in, like the turtle into its shell, when threatened. Except in the tech industry, this ‘pulling in’ materializes as a resistance to difference." http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2005/07/19/when-we-are-needed/ http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2005/07/19/when-we-ar... My interpretation of this is that the problems that Github has had with diversity in its teams was a leading indicator of the wider management problems that we now see.
• antjanus 11y ago
  I think this article pretty much shakes all the confidence in Github and for several (good) reasons: Whenever a new CEO steps in and starts making big changes like that to the company, it usually results in big changes in the product. Whereas before, the product was controlled by programmers, now it will be controlled by CEO, his inner circle, and VCs that have the most influence. That means a product that's more "money-friendly" toward investors rather than users. The fact that a lot of high-ranking people left and possibly, many remote developers will stop working there is yet another sign that Github as we know it will change. Maybe for the better, maybe not. One thing that really disappoints me is killing off the remote option. I've always looked up to Github and would use it as the perfect example of how "remote can work, even at scale". Facebook recently (a year or two) implemented the same thing which is a shame. I won't address the leadership thing but that last quote in the paragraph summed it up perfectly. Anyways, from the looks of it, Github will become an enterprise-friendly place with less of a focus on ordinary developers and smaller businesses. This makes me think that there is growing space for a new company to take up that "developer-friendly" social network/code repository.
• mianos 11y ago
  You know the corporate rot has set in when you see titles like "vice president of social impact".
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• avivo 11y ago
  It's interesting to see how people react to this, in the context of the reactions to their first VC raise of 100 million dollars -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220353 e.g. "They want to do bigger and better things with Github. They're not quite done trying to change the world. Now they are not only profitable, but they have substantial capital to invest in further innovations." and "I bet nobody here as anything bad to say about the exceptional skills of the github team. However such a huge investment may force them to "overscale" in order to be able to reach the expected return (by the VC)."
• imfine-ok 11y ago
  Great, just what we needed - our online code repository telling us to not be so racist. Thanks github! Commit Rejected -- Error 1337 Not inclusive enough
• susan_hall 11y ago
  Regarding diversity issues, it is interesting to go back and look at this interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, from 1972. What I find worrisome is that the conversation is still being discussed in 2016. For all the progress in technology, there are some social issues that change only very slowly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lMxWWK218 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lMxWWK218 What has changed is that some corporations now have formal programs in place to try to make progress on diversity issues. But the resistance to progress on this issue is remarkable.
• ershad_ 11y ago
  its opinion at mine
• ershad_ 11y ago
  it's opinion of master
• ershad_ 11y ago
  it's opinion of master
• ershad_ 11y ago
  it's opinion of master
• hysan 11y ago
  It's interesting how most of the comments here are focusing on the diversity part of the article. Reading it, the thing that screamed at me the most was the influence of VC culture. It seems as though the owners of GitHub are making the decision to appease their investors by going the traditional route - fast growth with a traditional top heavy hierarchy. This always consolidates money and power at the higher levels of the hierarchy. This is great for VCs and those at the top because they can allocate more revenue and profits to them, but bad for employees and to low revenue (high volume) customers because the immediate ROI is not as good there. This trend is fine for most companies because ultimately, the only people that matter are the ones with ownership control in the company. However, GitHub is different because of it's position in the Open Source community and with the type of people they serve - developers. If they burn the community too much, their customer base can and are fully capable of leaving the platform. The interesting thing to wonder is, have they built up a Facebook level of momentum yet? If not, the changes they are making now could ultimately turn them into an enterprise-only company and cap their potential.
• Khaine 11y ago
  Can someone explain to me why GitHub needs a "Social Impact Team". What benefits do they bring to the organisation? It looks to me like a massive money pit.
  • humanrebar 11y ago
    > What benefits do they bring to the organisation? Marketing to uber-rich investors?
• Khaine 11y ago
  The biggest 'privilege' someone can have is not white skin, its money. All the people who bang on about diversity are usually upper class, and never talk about the socioeconomic component of it.
• alistproducer2 11y ago
  It is interesting to see how race is discussed on a site like HN vs. a political website. Even people posting opinions I disagree with state their point(s) with respect. I understand how a white person could feel "under fire" in a discussion about "diversity" and "white privilege." For all the talk about the importance of empathy, it sure seems like some on the left don't have very much for our white brothers and sisters. We have to understand that no one is born with historical context and we should't be so harsh on white people who either don't have it (context) or who do and feel singled out for being white. We can't speak of the ingenious, invisible hand of institutional racism and then be mystified when a 23 year old white guy is skeptical of its existence.
• 574747775 11y ago
  People who want to build large companies are just plain scum. They are the upper class version of the aspirational middle class. The aspirational middle class can't wait to leave their peers behind and start managing them like slaves. The aspirational upper class can't wait to build a giant slave farm. Since the agricultural era, humans have been taken over by slave drivers. We should be going back to small, decentralised groups of people. Big business and big government have done nothing but destroy this planet. I used to work for a large company and that experience solidified my disgust for these places. I can fully understand why people would want to resign now that the company wants to grow. I decided that I would rather go down fighting then ever work for a large company again. Has anyone asked why GitHub needs to grow? If there are other products that could benefit from GitHub integration, provide an api and let some other small group of hackers build it. All GitHub is doing is laying the foundations for their slave farm.
  • douche 11y ago
    You'll get hammered, I'm sure for the rest of it, but this is a good question: > Has anyone asked why GitHub needs to grow? They are a making a pretty decent profit now. They could keep the lights on and keep doing what they are doing for the foreseeable future, make incremental improvements and scale out servers to pick up additional load without shaking things up drastically and taking in loads of VC money. That's not the sexy, billion dollar unicorn move, but it is a safe, sustainable bet.
    • 574747775 11y ago
      None of these big companies ever do anything useful after their initial product. They just start buying small companies and sucking them into the big shitty company.
• Joof 11y ago
  It's hard to have a meritocracy when a limited set of people make decisions for (or otherwise own) the company and are beholden to VC money. The flat structure is better for creating new products than squeezing money out of what exists. If people want this type of company, they have to build the company and product around those principles.
• etherael 11y ago
  Cancelled my subscription as soon as I read the tweet from @_danilo. If the races and genders were switched and the context instead was some horrendous civil war in Africa, it would be outrage fodder in the mainstream media for weeks, but because it's white males, it's totally alright to claim they're not just devoid of empathy and compassion, but constitutionally incapable of ever acquiring it. My disgust is boundless. To hell with anyone that thinks and behaves like this.
  • theorique 11y ago
    For contrast, look how Pax Dickinson was fired from the CTO role at Business Insider for his joking tweets that were perceived as anti-black racist. Such tweets were on a personal account, unrelated to work matters, and obviously ironic jokes about news items. (The context was ignored in order to paint a picture of Dickinson as a bigot.) Here, @_danilo is also on a personal account, and tweeting specifically about work matters. The difference? His tweets were anti-white rather than anti-black. Given the prevailing SJW agenda infesting Silicon Valley his job should be safe for now. But activists should keep our eyes on him.