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Looks like they trade "structure based purely on meritocracy" by "promote diversity". I don't see how this can go well. Meritocracy is important among dev and

Looks like they trade "structure based purely on meritocracy" by "promote diversity". I don't see how this can go well. Meritocracy is important among dev and open source. And they don't care about political diversity. I can only imagine this new "culture of fear" where you can't hire white people (even woman). Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender. Anyway, looks like a good time to switch from github to open source solutions.

reitanqild 11y ago
> Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender. Exactly. The issue should not be how many percent are what "race", but if companies are dumb enough to leave good programmers, managers etc waiting tables, manning the help desk etc because they doesn't fit our stereotypes. Or: If if companies does spectacularly bad hires because of political correctness.
DanBC 11y ago
> Meritocracy Meritocracy is a lie. Look how broken interview processes are - definitely not meritocratic. Meritocracy is a rationalisation for "I hire people I like so long as they don't say anything idiotic during the interview". You'd get better results from having some kind of bar that candidates have to meet and then just selecting one at random and giving that person the job.
- mjolk 11y ago
  How do bad interview processes prove that meritocracy doesn't work?
  - KirinDave 11y ago
    You cannot prove meritocracy doesn't work. Fortunately you don't have to. The burden of proof is required for positive claims. We don't have a lot of evidence meritocracy works. We have several pieces of evidence suggesting that it, in fact, didn't serve github very well. The fact there was a sexual harassment lawsuit with a barely kept secret about a whole group of women bound by arbitration and non-disparage agreements is probably evidece it doesn't. The sad part, most people will never really understand how much Tom sacrificed to protect his friends during his final days there.
    - humanrebar 11y ago
      > The burden of proof is required for positive claims. Any positive claim is a negative claim and vice-versa. That also means positive claims are often contradictory. 1. Diversity should be considered along with merits when hiring. 2. Merit should be the overriding concern when hiring. 3. Extra precautions should be taken to promote a "blind" application and vetting process. There's not enough proof to close the discussion, but we still have to hire people.
    - mjolk 11y ago
      If you're referencing GH with that sexual harassment lawsuit comment, it fizzled, and from the outside, it seemed like it wasn't anything sketchy, just that the accuser's work wasn't very good and people didn't treat her with kid gloves. The only inappropriate thing was one of the founder's wives trying to manipulate her, but that doesn't sell as well. The philosophic burden of proof is on you as you're making a statement counter to user "audessuscest"'s claim that meritocracy is important and the ideal is to make solely skill-based hires.
      - KirinDave 11y ago
        > The philosophic burden of proof is on you as you're making a statement counter to user "audessuscest"'s claim that meritocracy is important and the ideal is to make solely skill-based hires. Let's just... ignore the larger societal angle of harassment, denigration, fear and uncertainty that plagues women and some minorities in STEM fields or finance, okay? Let's say, "It exists but let's not discuss it here." I really don't wanna do this conversation AGAIN but the contention is that right now "whiteness" and "maleness" are implicitly part of the meritocratic process as positive traits. That happens in 2 ways: 1. Young, single, white (and Asian!) men are targeted by recruiters because of a perception of a "work ethic". This ethic is "I expect people to prop up my life so I can work 80+ hours a week, which is not sustainable if you have ANY responsibilities at all outside of basic sustenance". Historically, they has been a safe bet. 2. Subsequent "pattern matching" be it implicit or explicit, kind or cruel, expects that kind of commitment and education and ethos. That this wasn't ever reasonable is lost because people are just trying to recognize someone who can likely work in the same way they're expecting or have worked. You can argue that people should work that hard and that it's fair, if you want. But what actually happens is that people find that there is a specific profile of people most likely to be willing and able to commit to that kind of lifestyle and then they optimize for selecting that. Therefore, Meritocracy is not a hedge against racism or sexism. Indeed, Meritocracy may be selecting "merit" based on attributes which explicitly reinforce sexism or racism. So when you say, "skill-based hires" I can't help but hear, "people like me" every time. Because if anyone actually gave a shit about skill based hires they'd be blinding their recruiting efforts, doing pre-filter tests and desperately trying to remove every drop of bias from the industry to identify them.
- captain_jamira 11y ago
  Did you adapt this from the similar suggestion for college admissions that made the rounds a while back? I liked the idea.
- audessuscest 11y ago
  You're wrong. People don't hire people like that. I hire developer where I work, I hired white, non-white and women, and every time I make my choice by testing their skills and asking about their past experiences because that's how you get the most competent employees. And every tech company want best employees...
  - argonaut 11y ago
    You are human. You are not a robot. That's the problem. Humans judge people, make snap judgments, fit people into sterotypes. I'm not saying you do that. I bet you don't. But if you start scaling the interviewing process, adding more and more people into it, you'll eventually get a few who do make racial/other unfair judgments.
    - Sevrene 11y ago
      Everyone has some level of bias. The best thing you can really do is try and counter your own bias when you notice it. In most jurisdictions not hiring someone based on racial or unfair judgements is illegal. Trying to change workplace culture away from meritocracy for the sake of diversity might sound noble and well intended, but just as 'meritocracy is a lie', so is diversity in that sense. Hiring people based on how much diversity they provide based purely on their gender, race, etc is prejudice in itself, even if well intended.
      - argonaut 11y ago
        I agree with you that everyone has some level of bias, but we disagree on to what degree people are biased. Race is a very complex issue in American society. It permeates everything: politics, economics, academia. And it's visually obvious. The evidence is pretty clear to me (all the statistics related to how racial judgments are made, how stunningly often resumes get rejected if they have names that sound like they belong to certain racial groups), that race plays a very large role in people's snap judgments of others.
- pkaye 11y ago
  What do you mean by "having some kind of bar ... to meet"? Isn't that what most interviewers do? For example have a expectation of javascript knowledge and ask questions to determine how knowledgable they are?
- ploxiln 11y ago
  Oh yes. No one is any better than anyone else at anything. In fact, github isn't a better hosted SCM/code review/issue tracking platform than any other. Which makes sense, because none of their employees are better at doing anything than anyone else. It's all just a rationalization, and a lie. Old boys club all the way down. But why didn't the old boys club decide to have microsoft's hosted team foundation server win? Or sourceforge? The silicon valley conspiracy is hard to understand at times ...
  - generic_user 11y ago
    Some have speculated Silicon Vally hood men are the decedents of an ancient extraterrestrial race of reptiles with IQ >= 388. If true no wonder there logic is incomprehensible to the feeble non hood men mind. All the more reason to topple there sinister 'meritocracy'.
  - rjzzleep 11y ago
    I've come to the conclusion that most people cannot grasp how meritocracy works, because the majority of the "real" world simply doesn't work like that. One side of the equation are people that grew up with an alternate reality, because they spend a lot of their time online, growing up, working on their own projects and only later joining "society". In that world you get indeed ridiculed by how good or bad your code is, but not generally based on your socioeconomic background. The other side of the equation is people that grew up in society where things do indeed work like in an old boys club. I will never get access to the people, that people studied international affairs at columbia do. I will also never get access to the people that MBAs from Harvard do. But I still very well remember when I graduated from "the annoying kid that doesn't know shit" to "the kid that wrote a LR parser in IRC almost 20 years ago. And most of those people never ever found out my real name, my gender, my socioeconomic background, nor my ethnicity. In fact the reality that this shit does matter in real life was as inconceivable for me back then, as the concept of meritocracy must be for someone that spent his entire life in society now.
    - generic_user 11y ago
      Thats part of it. But there is a whole other group that is using victim hood and distorted diversity arguments to extract monetary gain and organisational power from usually large companies who reflexively instantiated paid positions with little or no research and vague PR-friendly mission statements. If the only real goal put down on paper is to hire x% black people and y% brown people and reduce z% of white people under some fuzzy equality rubric its no surprise these positions attract people who have ideologically compatible beliefs. There has been a small collection of black/brown power radical organisations in California for over 50 years. There views are openly racist and have anti white, anti European, anti Colonial America sentiments. These diversity jobs are a magnet for people with that mindset who live every day with there race on there sleeve. When they get in they can twist whatever mandate there is to promote there own agenda and beliefs. The sheltered Ivy league set who runs these companies have no street smarts or experience with race politics in California. So you end up with what we have now with genuinely nasty ideologues hired into these organisations and they eventually do lots of damage.
- mc32 11y ago
  It's a truth and a lie depending on how you want to interpret the meaning if meritocracy. For many people it means, atomically, when you're filling a position, you're not just going thru the motions to get your buddy, mate, someone you owe a favor, your cousin, etc. in and not doing due diligence in finding someone capable of executing the position. For many people merit does not equate to reversing historical injustices, but it does mean not being unjust during this process. That's to say you don't disqualify people out of hand, just because.
rotw 11y ago
The entire point of diversity initiatives is that the meritocracy in theory doest not translate into a meritocracy in practice, due to unconscious bias: https://library.gv.com/unconscious-bias-at-work-22e698e9b2d#.hzu4mn8hb https://library.gv.com/unconscious-bias-at-work-22e698e9b2d#... as well as other factors. You're totally right that skills and experiences should be the only way to choose, but right now, tech firms in this society are fundamentally incapable of actually implementing that without diversity initiatives. True meritocracy can only come through promoting diversity.
- pas 11y ago
  What if there are other ways to overcome those biases other than stuffing the office full of people from every kind of (oppressed) minority?
- rjzzleep 11y ago
  except that because of the original remote nature of Github the first thing you saw was their work and then the person. by changing the culture they are increasing a bias that may have been less prevalent or even non existent in such a work culture. Trying to apply normal social dynamics to a play where you have a completely async environment(meaning they don't even see each other), is a little bit of a stretch. A lot of interviews in tech don't even involve voice or face to face communication. If you take away looks, sound and name, what else is there besides quality of work? see my comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050965
  - sanctus 11y ago
    > except that because of the original remote nature of Github the first thing you saw was their work and then the person. Unless their name is in their username. Or they have a profile picture of themselves. Or they have their real name on their commits. Or their username or picture is something stereotypically masculine/feminine. I searched for 'things' on Github and looked at the most recent committer of the first 20 responses (easiest way I could think of to get a random sample of users). For 16 of them, I could easily see that they were male. 2 of them had their names, but I wasn't sure if the names were feminine or masculine. 2 had no hints whatsoever.
tootie 11y ago
My reading is that the reorg and push for diversity are two different things.
NotSammyHagar 11y ago
I didn't get this 'we are afraid and only want to hire non-whites' from the article. Hiring a diverse workforce is a good good thing, generally. Why do you think that should mean we don't hire white people? Every tech company that isn't going out of business in the world has open headcount, and they'd like to hire all capable people.

reitanqild 11y ago

> Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender. Exactly. The issue should not be how many percent are what "race", but if companies are dumb enough to leave good programmers, managers etc waiting tables, manning the help desk etc because they doesn't fit our stereotypes. Or: If if companies does spectacularly bad hires because of political correctness.

DanBC 11y ago

> Meritocracy Meritocracy is a lie. Look how broken interview processes are - definitely not meritocratic. Meritocracy is a rationalisation for "I hire people I like so long as they don't say anything idiotic during the interview". You'd get better results from having some kind of bar that candidates have to meet and then just selecting one at random and giving that person the job.

mjolk 11y ago
How do bad interview processes prove that meritocracy doesn't work?
- KirinDave 11y ago
  You cannot prove meritocracy doesn't work. Fortunately you don't have to. The burden of proof is required for positive claims. We don't have a lot of evidence meritocracy works. We have several pieces of evidence suggesting that it, in fact, didn't serve github very well. The fact there was a sexual harassment lawsuit with a barely kept secret about a whole group of women bound by arbitration and non-disparage agreements is probably evidece it doesn't. The sad part, most people will never really understand how much Tom sacrificed to protect his friends during his final days there.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    > The burden of proof is required for positive claims. Any positive claim is a negative claim and vice-versa. That also means positive claims are often contradictory. 1. Diversity should be considered along with merits when hiring. 2. Merit should be the overriding concern when hiring. 3. Extra precautions should be taken to promote a "blind" application and vetting process. There's not enough proof to close the discussion, but we still have to hire people.
  - mjolk 11y ago
    If you're referencing GH with that sexual harassment lawsuit comment, it fizzled, and from the outside, it seemed like it wasn't anything sketchy, just that the accuser's work wasn't very good and people didn't treat her with kid gloves. The only inappropriate thing was one of the founder's wives trying to manipulate her, but that doesn't sell as well. The philosophic burden of proof is on you as you're making a statement counter to user "audessuscest"'s claim that meritocracy is important and the ideal is to make solely skill-based hires.
    - KirinDave 11y ago
      > The philosophic burden of proof is on you as you're making a statement counter to user "audessuscest"'s claim that meritocracy is important and the ideal is to make solely skill-based hires. Let's just... ignore the larger societal angle of harassment, denigration, fear and uncertainty that plagues women and some minorities in STEM fields or finance, okay? Let's say, "It exists but let's not discuss it here." I really don't wanna do this conversation AGAIN but the contention is that right now "whiteness" and "maleness" are implicitly part of the meritocratic process as positive traits. That happens in 2 ways: 1. Young, single, white (and Asian!) men are targeted by recruiters because of a perception of a "work ethic". This ethic is "I expect people to prop up my life so I can work 80+ hours a week, which is not sustainable if you have ANY responsibilities at all outside of basic sustenance". Historically, they has been a safe bet. 2. Subsequent "pattern matching" be it implicit or explicit, kind or cruel, expects that kind of commitment and education and ethos. That this wasn't ever reasonable is lost because people are just trying to recognize someone who can likely work in the same way they're expecting or have worked. You can argue that people should work that hard and that it's fair, if you want. But what actually happens is that people find that there is a specific profile of people most likely to be willing and able to commit to that kind of lifestyle and then they optimize for selecting that. Therefore, Meritocracy is not a hedge against racism or sexism. Indeed, Meritocracy may be selecting "merit" based on attributes which explicitly reinforce sexism or racism. So when you say, "skill-based hires" I can't help but hear, "people like me" every time. Because if anyone actually gave a shit about skill based hires they'd be blinding their recruiting efforts, doing pre-filter tests and desperately trying to remove every drop of bias from the industry to identify them.
captain_jamira 11y ago
Did you adapt this from the similar suggestion for college admissions that made the rounds a while back? I liked the idea.
audessuscest 11y ago
You're wrong. People don't hire people like that. I hire developer where I work, I hired white, non-white and women, and every time I make my choice by testing their skills and asking about their past experiences because that's how you get the most competent employees. And every tech company want best employees...
- argonaut 11y ago
  You are human. You are not a robot. That's the problem. Humans judge people, make snap judgments, fit people into sterotypes. I'm not saying you do that. I bet you don't. But if you start scaling the interviewing process, adding more and more people into it, you'll eventually get a few who do make racial/other unfair judgments.
  - Sevrene 11y ago
    Everyone has some level of bias. The best thing you can really do is try and counter your own bias when you notice it. In most jurisdictions not hiring someone based on racial or unfair judgements is illegal. Trying to change workplace culture away from meritocracy for the sake of diversity might sound noble and well intended, but just as 'meritocracy is a lie', so is diversity in that sense. Hiring people based on how much diversity they provide based purely on their gender, race, etc is prejudice in itself, even if well intended.
    - argonaut 11y ago
      I agree with you that everyone has some level of bias, but we disagree on to what degree people are biased. Race is a very complex issue in American society. It permeates everything: politics, economics, academia. And it's visually obvious. The evidence is pretty clear to me (all the statistics related to how racial judgments are made, how stunningly often resumes get rejected if they have names that sound like they belong to certain racial groups), that race plays a very large role in people's snap judgments of others.
pkaye 11y ago
What do you mean by "having some kind of bar ... to meet"? Isn't that what most interviewers do? For example have a expectation of javascript knowledge and ask questions to determine how knowledgable they are?
ploxiln 11y ago
Oh yes. No one is any better than anyone else at anything. In fact, github isn't a better hosted SCM/code review/issue tracking platform than any other. Which makes sense, because none of their employees are better at doing anything than anyone else. It's all just a rationalization, and a lie. Old boys club all the way down. But why didn't the old boys club decide to have microsoft's hosted team foundation server win? Or sourceforge? The silicon valley conspiracy is hard to understand at times ...
- generic_user 11y ago
  Some have speculated Silicon Vally hood men are the decedents of an ancient extraterrestrial race of reptiles with IQ >= 388. If true no wonder there logic is incomprehensible to the feeble non hood men mind. All the more reason to topple there sinister 'meritocracy'.
- rjzzleep 11y ago
  I've come to the conclusion that most people cannot grasp how meritocracy works, because the majority of the "real" world simply doesn't work like that. One side of the equation are people that grew up with an alternate reality, because they spend a lot of their time online, growing up, working on their own projects and only later joining "society". In that world you get indeed ridiculed by how good or bad your code is, but not generally based on your socioeconomic background. The other side of the equation is people that grew up in society where things do indeed work like in an old boys club. I will never get access to the people, that people studied international affairs at columbia do. I will also never get access to the people that MBAs from Harvard do. But I still very well remember when I graduated from "the annoying kid that doesn't know shit" to "the kid that wrote a LR parser in IRC almost 20 years ago. And most of those people never ever found out my real name, my gender, my socioeconomic background, nor my ethnicity. In fact the reality that this shit does matter in real life was as inconceivable for me back then, as the concept of meritocracy must be for someone that spent his entire life in society now.
  - generic_user 11y ago
    Thats part of it. But there is a whole other group that is using victim hood and distorted diversity arguments to extract monetary gain and organisational power from usually large companies who reflexively instantiated paid positions with little or no research and vague PR-friendly mission statements. If the only real goal put down on paper is to hire x% black people and y% brown people and reduce z% of white people under some fuzzy equality rubric its no surprise these positions attract people who have ideologically compatible beliefs. There has been a small collection of black/brown power radical organisations in California for over 50 years. There views are openly racist and have anti white, anti European, anti Colonial America sentiments. These diversity jobs are a magnet for people with that mindset who live every day with there race on there sleeve. When they get in they can twist whatever mandate there is to promote there own agenda and beliefs. The sheltered Ivy league set who runs these companies have no street smarts or experience with race politics in California. So you end up with what we have now with genuinely nasty ideologues hired into these organisations and they eventually do lots of damage.
mc32 11y ago
It's a truth and a lie depending on how you want to interpret the meaning if meritocracy. For many people it means, atomically, when you're filling a position, you're not just going thru the motions to get your buddy, mate, someone you owe a favor, your cousin, etc. in and not doing due diligence in finding someone capable of executing the position. For many people merit does not equate to reversing historical injustices, but it does mean not being unjust during this process. That's to say you don't disqualify people out of hand, just because.

rotw 11y ago

The entire point of diversity initiatives is that the meritocracy in theory doest not translate into a meritocracy in practice, due to unconscious bias: https://library.gv.com/unconscious-bias-at-work-22e698e9b2d#.hzu4mn8hb https://library.gv.com/unconscious-bias-at-work-22e698e9b2d#... as well as other factors. You're totally right that skills and experiences should be the only way to choose, but right now, tech firms in this society are fundamentally incapable of actually implementing that without diversity initiatives. True meritocracy can only come through promoting diversity.

pas 11y ago
What if there are other ways to overcome those biases other than stuffing the office full of people from every kind of (oppressed) minority?
rjzzleep 11y ago
except that because of the original remote nature of Github the first thing you saw was their work and then the person. by changing the culture they are increasing a bias that may have been less prevalent or even non existent in such a work culture. Trying to apply normal social dynamics to a play where you have a completely async environment(meaning they don't even see each other), is a little bit of a stretch. A lot of interviews in tech don't even involve voice or face to face communication. If you take away looks, sound and name, what else is there besides quality of work? see my comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050965
- sanctus 11y ago
  > except that because of the original remote nature of Github the first thing you saw was their work and then the person. Unless their name is in their username. Or they have a profile picture of themselves. Or they have their real name on their commits. Or their username or picture is something stereotypically masculine/feminine. I searched for 'things' on Github and looked at the most recent committer of the first 20 responses (easiest way I could think of to get a random sample of users). For 16 of them, I could easily see that they were male. 2 of them had their names, but I wasn't sure if the names were feminine or masculine. 2 had no hints whatsoever.

tootie 11y ago

My reading is that the reorg and push for diversity are two different things.

NotSammyHagar 11y ago

I didn't get this 'we are afraid and only want to hire non-whites' from the article. Hiring a diverse workforce is a good good thing, generally. Why do you think that should mean we don't hire white people? Every tech company that isn't going out of business in the world has open headcount, and they'd like to hire all capable people.