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Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

104 points by ahhrrr 10y ago

twunacceptable 10y ago
"There are no Black/African-American GitHubbers in management positions, which is unacceptable." Why is it unacceptable? Just by virtue of the number of different kinds of people -- race, gender, etc there's no way to have 'one of each' for every position for maximum diversity. This sort of thing is so creepy because it treats people like collectible figures ("Oh yeah? Well I added a black transgendered person to our team today! I have way more diversity points than you!") instead of actual people you judge on their merits. How is a white person supposed to feel about applying to Github management position after reading "Its unacceptable we don't have a black manager"? I'm not white and I don't want to be treated as some statistic you can show off on your diversity report card. Thats really demeaning and insulting.
- cjbprime 10y ago
  Because the percentage of black GitHubbers in management positions is far below e.g. the percentage of e.g. black people with CS degrees in the US, indicating a probable bias in their hiring, retention or promotion pipelines that they're announcing they find concerning. You're making it about individuals, not GitHub. They're comparing statistics.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - atom-morgan 10y ago
    We can determine bias simply by comparing one company's numbers to national trends?
    - cjbprime 10y ago
      I said probable bias, and yes.
      - atom-morgan 10y ago
        As you reduce geographical scope, national trends aren't as relevant or realistic.
  - Pyxl101 10y ago
    > Because the percentage of black GitHubbers in management positions is far below e.g. the percentage of e.g. black people with CS degrees in the US Where's the data for this? Often people talk about these things as assumptions, but I've never seen credible data. Can you share a source? Furthermore, even the comparison that you mentioned is not accurate. It should start from a funnel like: "the number of qualified black applicants to GitHub with CS degrees", or something along those lines. GitHub can't hire people that don't apply.
    - ascendingPig 10y ago
      Starting from only the people who apply gives a free pass to biased recruitment.
      - GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
        What, you want them to go kidnap black people and force them to apply?
        jacalata 10y ago
        So you don't think it's a problem if their ads say "whites only"? Or if they only advertise to white people? Or are you thinking "nobody would say whites only" and just totally unaware of the many ways that language and targeting can affect who applies to a job, sometimes skewing the pool of applicants in unintended ways? A nice, nobody-meant-it way to bias your candidate pool: only hire people who know an existing employee. White Americans mostly know white Americans.
    - cjbprime 10y ago
      You're asking for a citation for zero being less than non-zero? :)
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        He's asking for a citation that the probability of seeing zero is small (p<0.05 if you want to be frequentist about it), contingent on a proper funnel analysis and no bias.
  - prodigal_erik 10y ago
    Was that percentage equally high in 1990? Fresh grads are not qualified for management.
- pedrorijo91 10y ago
  I kinda have the same thinking. Saying that "we have no Black/African-American (...)" seems way more racist that don't saying anything at all. People should get hired according their skills, not race/gender/etc. If a company is focused in hiring non-white males, aren't white males in disadvantage on recruitment processes?
  - antimatter 10y ago
    Agreed. These types of reports make it seem like Github cares only about skin color which to me is racist.
    - geofft 10y ago
      This viewpoint genuinely baffles me. You can only manage what you measure, and the process of monitoring a metric isn't the same thing as caring about the metric. I monitor free disk space on all my servers, but it doesn't mean I care primarily about buying more disks. In fact I don't care because I've monitored it and have determined we're okay there. However, as a result of data, if my servers were regularly running out of disk space, then I should start caring. If these reports determined that there was no evidence of something to be fixed (either the statistics were consistent with the statistics of qualified potential employees, or there were a good reason for them not to be consistent), I would expect GitHub not to care. And yes, if they continued to care about shifting the numbers further past that point, then you could accuse them of caring only about skin color when it's unjustified. But why should a technical company not measure metrics and gather data?
      - 1_2__3 10y ago
        The argument is that making decisions based on race is racism. Github isn't "monitoring" things, they're actively trying to change them, and using race (and other such factors that some people believe we should try to be blind to, or at least agnostic about) as a factor.
        geofft 10y ago
- pron 10y ago
  I think that the reason you find this objectionable is because you misunderstand the goal and the premises, and therefore the statement. It is not, "universally, we need one of each", but (goal:) "we must ensure no group is marginalized" + (premise:) "blacks are marginalized" = (conclusion:) "we must reduce the marginalization of blacks" = (statement:) "it is unacceptable that there are no blacks" In general, most prescriptive feminist and anti-racist notions are not founded an a manufactured set of axioms for a hypothetical society, but with premises based on empirical observations of our real society, and so are based on the assumption that there exist marginalized groups, and we know which groups they are (or some of them, at least). You can think of it as statements not prescribing how a new society must be built, but how our existing society must be fixed. I.e., you are given a delta value, not an absolute one. You may argue with either the goal (a value statement) or the premise (a factual statement), but right now you're arguing with the wrong ones.
  - ajhurliman 10y ago
    This strikes me as centralized planning for jobs. It seems like the best way to go about this is focusing on the pool of applicants and making sure everyone gets a fair shake. Making assumptions about the outcome of those hiring decisions independent of the actual applicants seems neither fair nor good for business.
    - jason_dstillery 10y ago
      If your organization's demographics don't match the demographics of the broader population of qualified candidates, there's a good chance it's because you're biased (intentionally or not) in your recruiting or evaluation. In that sense, "focusing on the pool of applicants and making sure everyone gets a fair shake" are pretty much exactly what diversity efforts are about.
      - ajhurliman 10y ago
        By their wording, it seems like they're more focused on the outcome of the hiring process. No black managers is the outcome, and they said that's unacceptable. If you look at the process instead of the outcome, it might not be the same. If the scenario was that no qualified black people applied for management positions which resulted in not having any black managers they could still come back to the public and say "We have nothing to apologize for, we tried to hire black managers but none applied" instead of "We failed, we don't have any black managers and it's our fault". It's good to be unbiased in your hiring practices, but you can only shoulder so much blame. There are many factors that play into the process and you can only accept responsibility for your own actions.
- djtriptych 10y ago
  Creepier than a few centuries of slavery? Creepier than a few centuries of anti-black, anti-woman laws at every level of government? Creepier than nearly universal, measurable, provable anti-black, anti-woman implicit bias today? Sure guy.
  - twunacceptable 10y ago
    Discriminating by sex and race is what caused those issues in the first place.
    - djtriptych 10y ago
      lol.
- tetrep 10y ago
  It's awkward that all these statistics seem to focus on the output of system without any regard to the input. There's a passing comment about "improve recruiting" but there's no details presented as to who is actually applying. The hiring process/system is very complicated an difficult to reason about in an objective manner, mostly because it's humans dealing with humans, compounding our human-y traits, non-objectiveness being a hallmark. I don't see how I'm supposed to take seriously an initiative at attempting to uncover/rectify biases of a system with only the output taken into account. It just seems silly.
rubyfan 10y ago
Explains why they haven't delivered a notable imporovement in the last year and a half. They've been focusing on social justice instead of making a great product that we all want to use.
nolepointer 10y ago
Jesus Christ, I never want to work on the Left Coast.
davidcelis 10y ago
Looks like the link to the actual data[1] was posted and subsequently removed, making it unable to be submitted. Why? [1]: https://diversity.github.com https://diversity.github.com
brandoncordell 10y ago
Weird, it seems like some of their team has been decidedly anti-white. http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/githubs-diversity-is-just-as-bad-as-the-rest-of-silicon-valleys/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/githubs-diversity-is-just-a... Edit: Removed Breitbart link
- _toastie 10y ago
  really? breitbart.com?
  - brandoncordell 10y ago
    Sorry, I grabbed the first link. Are they a poor source (honestly don't know)? I also found http://www.techinsider.io/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2 http://www.techinsider.io/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-... and http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/githubs-diversity-is-just-as-bad-as-the-rest-of-silicon-valleys/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/githubs-diversity-is-just-a... The tweets and images came from Githubbers themselves.
    - zyxley 10y ago
      > Are they a poor source (honestly don't know)? Extremely. Breitbart regularly publicizes stories that are misleading at best or just flat out wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitbart_News_Network#Notable_stories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitbart_News_Network#Notable...
      - brandoncordell 10y ago
        Thanks. Wow, TIL! I feel like an idiot now, but I've edited the original post with the TechCrunch link.
    - patmcguire 10y ago
      They're conservative partisans and pretty open about it. Mostly they publish red meat for their base, same as Salon or Alternet.
jbob2000 10y ago
I wish so much that I could be picky about my hiring like GitHub. I wish I could have so many qualified candidates applying that I am able to create a diverse team. But I put out job ads and get like 2 qualified responses. How the hell are they able to find all these candidates such that they can start being picky about who they hire??? Maybe Toronto just sucks for tech talent... Argh...
- chickenfries 10y ago
  Hiring remotely seems to be one thing they have over you.
- MustardTiger 10y ago
  >But I put out job ads and get like 2 qualified responses. And 200 completely unqualified ones. It is crazy how many people apply for jobs they have absolutely no qualifications for.
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    Anyone can apply to a programming job—it's not like you need formal education like lawyers or doctors.
    - MustardTiger 10y ago
      Yes, but I would have hoped people would have the common sense to only apply if they know how to program. I don't even mean this in the sense of "you aren't good enough", I mean people who literally have no idea what programming is. People who rate their winzip using skills on their resume as part of their "computer experience".
- baudehlo 10y ago
  Tech talent is tight in Toronto. There are too many jobs and not enough talent. Job postings suck at attracting people here. You literally have to crawl through LinkedIn to find people. Stack overflow careers is actually pretty decent though. But a lot of small companies aren't willing to pay for it. Your best bet here? Frankly a recruiter if you're willing to pay them. They are still the gold standard for finding good tech talent in Toronto. I wish we could offer our product for developers, but we are very focussed on sales recruiting right now. Maybe in a year or so.
guessmyname 10y ago
This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All". Being non-american (I'm from a South American country) it is hard for me to understand the importance giving to these things associated to racism and sexism. The United States is the only place I have seen where people invest a considerable amount of time and resources just to put people from minor groups or specific genders in pedestals just to please other people. You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job. Why do they care if there are no "Black/African-American" in their company? Or that 10% are black women? Or that 35% of women are in a leadership role? Like who cares? Are their roles assigned based on their gender and/or skin color? Jesus, even my European co-workers make fun of Americans for these things. Let people build their career based on how they work and not their ethnicity nor gender, otherwise you will be incentivizing more racism and more sexism.
- jacalata 10y ago
  If you want to look for examples closer to home, try reading about the Mapucho.
  - superpatosainz 10y ago
    Mapuches you mean? Well, living in Chile, I've learnt that there's no racism here BUT: -There's classism, a lot. Both from the lower classes to the upper and vice versa. There's also a lot of anger left from the various dictatorships that ruled in the eighties. -In some countries, here included, there's also big prejudice against native cultures like the Mapuches. "They're all lazy drunkards". These problems mostly stem from colonial times, where the Spanish didn't respect native culture and since the Europeans were seen as the "civilized, more advanced people", the aristocrats here did everything to imitate their lifestyle. See also: mestizaje.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - rco8786 10y ago
brbsix 10y ago
Ever since Zach Holman "left", it appears as though GitHub has been eaten away from the inside by intersectional feminism. There appear to be subversive efforts to turn tech companies into platforms for social justice. I can only imagine it must be really uncomfortable to work in this sort of environment.
- djtriptych 10y ago
  Slightly less comfortable for the most-privileged people on earth; probably more comfortable for everyone else. cf. Every other American industry's initial foray into diversity.
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    Personally, I don't think I would be very comfortable knowing I was hired because company X has to meet diversity quotas and not solely because I was the best candidate for the job. I think it's an offense to hackers in general—I'm hired based on merit.
    - clevernickname 10y ago
      This is where affirmative action is a step backwards. The unconscious assumption goes from "they're an X in this field, they have to be good" to "they're an X in this field, they're probably just here to fill a quota" and makes matters worse for everybody.
  - dijit 10y ago
    Oh, it's fine that it's racist, because I as a white male have it so good? Seems odd to me mate, there are things that being white certainly doesn't buy, it's not a ticket to middle-class. Being cis doesn't make me any more worse at my job than being gay would, don't judge me on that merit it's bullshit. FWIW I grew up incredibly poor and my "advantage" in IT was that people don't care about your background. If I had wanted to be a lawyer or doctor I would bet my life that I would have failed. Tech is definitely inclusive as hell by default and making it less so is rather stupid. If there are people who are actively stopping women in tech or downplaying them then those people are at fault, I would argue as at fault as a company that wont interview me based on my skin colour or gender.
powertower 10y ago
To me every example of diversity basically has been the concept that "there are too many white people in the room." And to a smaller degree that "there are too many straight men...". I've never seen this applied to non-whites, at least not to this degree. In fact, 100% black-demographic teams (or businesses or organisations) are oftentimes praised for being "authentically black". IMO, the way I see it is once a productive homogeneous group (which by definition is composed of members that are able to agree with each other and engage in actual progress rather than in-fighting) puts in the effort and spends the time building the infrastructure/business/etc and makes it successful - then other groups see this as an opportunity to get something out of it... "Diversity for the sake of diversity" only comes in at the end, never at the beginning. It is also odd that when someone says diversity is our strength, they never really share the actual details of that strength. To me this is a turning point for a company that goes from being work oriented to becoming a race/gender oriented cesspool where everything is about your color, genitalia, and gender.
- djtriptych 10y ago
  So you would bet there is no bias in extant hiring practices? How do you know?
  - spriggan3 10y ago
    You're answering literally every comment on this thread, with this "passive aggressive" tone that will do nothing but derail the conservation. That's the definition of a troll. Why don't you make a point of your own instead?
wozer 10y ago
Previous discussion of GitHub's diversity culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067
petsormeat 10y ago
Anybody besides me impressed that they released data about employee age ranges?
- hokkos 10y ago
  I like how the graph is carefully crafted to make it like there is good age distribution when it does NOT. There is twice a subdivision in ages 20-40 than in ages 40+.
jpeg_hero 10y ago
> At a high level, GitHub is 64% male worldwide and 64% white in the U.S. That said, the company has improved since the end of 2014, when it was 79% male and 21% female worldwide. I wonder what their male/female split is in daily active users.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- WillAbides 10y ago
  93% male / 4% female / 3% undisclosed. source: https://medium.com/@tenaciouscb/github-com-demographics-a-story-of-researching-uncovering-blind-spots-21d7f1f90204 https://medium.com/@tenaciouscb/github-com-demographics-a-st...
t0mbstone 10y ago
Amidst the forest of diversity demographics, I found this little tidbit: "We have a flexible paid time-off policy and our maternity/paternity leave policies exceed the tech industry’s norm. In addition, our policies do not differentiate between maternity or paternity leave." Now THAT is cool. I really wish more companies did that. When my wife had a c-section with our son, she got 6 weeks off of work. I got nothing.
- dijit 10y ago
  Come to Sweden, Paternity leave and Maternity leave are basically tied up into a shared "Parental" leave, a couple of new parents get upwards of 400+ paid days between themselves to divvy up as they see fit. Source: my colleague just had a child and I have to do all his work as well as my own now :( (not salty, glad we have this!)
Keats 10y ago
How about adding other parts of the company like HR/Sales/Marketing/etc etc to their data?
johnnyg 10y ago
"There are no Black/African-American GitHubbers in management positions, which is unacceptable." It is only unacceptable if people with the skills to be in management positions didn't get a promotion because of a non-relevant personal attribute. Otherwise, it is acceptable and in the best long term interests of the company. I acknowledge that America has equality of opportunity problems. There are strong and just historical reasons why the government has carried the torch on this issue. However, I think its time to let the market work. Companies that place talent above non-relevant personal attributes are at a competitive advantage as they are drawing from a larger talent pool. Letting that market run on a long enough time line means that companies who discriminate will grow weaker, as well they should. Github has come out and said "we're going to make sure that we meet target quotas for people of X, Y and Z non-relevant personal attributes." I think that's bad business and not the equality we need to be going for. If you have the skill set, drive and integrity to be a strong contributor to a team, I want to work with you and make wealth with you. If you don't, I don't want to work with you - go get educated, build skills and try again or if I'm wrong about you, prove it by out competing me. This is equality of opportunity and of ideas. What Github is doing isn't, nor does it get us closer to what the idea of America promises us all. I think that providing the resources to build skills to those whose parents didn't or couldn't provide them is a great idea. I think shaking up our education system (because the numbers show that investing doesn't produce better results) is a great idea. I want to be fellow citizens with educated, driven people who are so in part because society ensured it'd happen. Lets not go too far or go in the wrong direction.
- drhayes9 10y ago
  I think GH is starting from the point of "the distribution of our employees doesn't line up with the larger population of the country we operate in". If you think each of those groups of people has the potential to be as talented as any other, then why is there a discrepancy? I think they're saying, "We don't think the market is working." There are hidden biases at work. For example, people with "non-white sounding" names don't get hired at the same rate as those with "white sounding" names when they have the same skillset. http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html I think these biases operate at a low level, below most of our understanding. I like that GH is having this conversation in the open and working to rid themselves of these biases as much as possible. To me, this is all relevant socioeconomic data. Why not look at the distribution of gender, race, sexuality, religion, etc, in your workplace? If there's a discrepancy, why not figure out what the root cause is? Given the starting point of "all these groups of people have the same capacity for talent and skill", why is the distribution skewed? What does it hurt to ask?
vemv 10y ago
It's like a law of nature... your organisation grows, its culture becomes braindead. There should be more Basecamps around. I don't know what their equality policy is, but they sure have very little tolerance to bullshit - and don't mind letting you know!
dijit 10y ago
every time I hear about "inclusive" practices at github it makes me grimace, not because it's not a good idea. Diversity is good. But because it's rather racist, partially sexist and it's increasingly the norm to be this way. Equal opportunity, not outcome, if 4% of your applicants are British, but do not pass because of technical reasons. (I'm using British because I am one, replace with $minority), then why should I hire them? Ideally we'd interview blind and whoever is the best tech, is the best. I'm not sure why this isn't possible in our technology culture, do you really need to be face to face with a person to assess their technical merits and ensure they are the right fit for a company. But, anyway, to me this stuff is exclusionary, I am apparently cursed to be a white male in tech, and as a majority I now have to work much harder for SV to acknowledge me for my merits, I am of the firm belief that if I were a black lady I would have enough support to prop me up above my current experienced position in no time. I'd love to test this theory honestly. And anyway, who cares who delivers github/facebook/$website at the end of the day, hire who you think will do the job, nobody is going to feel excluded from the services you provide because you didn't meet your quota of transgender people.. and if they were, you could very easily mislead them. edit: I know it's against etiquette to mention downvotes, but if you must downvote me please reply stating why. That is also against etiquette.
throwaway934825 10y ago
The last time this topic came up was around the same time that that open letter of from maintainers of GitHub repositories was making its rounds. If I recall correctly, GitHub responded to that open letter by implementing the lowest hanging fruit - bug templates and +1s - and then went radio silent. Have there been meaningful product updates since? Now we know what happened: they minimally addressed the PR needs of their business, and then went back to doing nothing interesting to advance their products. I was on the fence before, but now I'm certain: GitLab is the superior experience.
igorgue 10y ago
What's going on is that this company is under a magnifying glass over everything even their fucking rug: http://15809-presscdn-0-93.pagely.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/MTIyMjkzMDg3MTE1NDM5Mzg1.jpg http://15809-presscdn-0-93.pagely.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/... Crackers in Silicon Valley are so PC police...
yuhong 10y ago
I have been thinking of the problems anti-discrimination laws. Not all kinds of discrimination leave evidence. I have a feeling that they should be restricted to certain job categories. Similarly, sexual harassment leave evidence more often, but this don't mean they are worth the costs. I have been thinking of this Ask HN for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11666857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11666857
exstudent2 10y ago
As a Hispanic, I would never work at Github because I find this quest for "diversity" to be extremely patronizing and objectifying. As a male, I'd never work at Github because their policies are sexist.
BurningFrog 10y ago
How many republicans work at GitHub? How many evangelical christians? How do these numbers compare to the distribution in the larger population of the country?
- jshevek 10y ago
  I'm outraged that github has not reported these numbers. What are they hiding?
kkirsche 10y ago
Diversity for the sake of diversity. So dumb. Promote for qualifications not junk like this
pwim 10y ago
Previously I thought hiring diversity for diversity's sake didn't make sense, and hiring should be based solely on "merit". After all, as a company, you want to hire the best people. However, since then, I have found there is research that indicates diverse groups can be more advantageous than homogenous groups of highly talented people [1], [2]. So from this perspective, striving for diversity makes economic sense. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full [2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-make...
- ASpring 10y ago
  I'm glad someone is making this point. Here is a concise summary pdf from NCWIT. https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/impactgenderdiversitytechbusinessperformance_print.pdf https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/impactge...
Futurebot 10y ago
The goal of hiring diversity is to reach Proportional Representation; you want your workforce to resemble the demographics of the nation as a whole. If you accept that anyone, regardless of their genetic heritage, gender identity, sexual identity, skin color, etc. can do the job just as well as anyone else can, then you should be supportive of, or at least not oppose, efforts like these. If you don't think so (with regards to genetic heritage especially), there's really no discussion to be had, as that's a likely irreconcilable conflicting understanding of the science, especially at the individual level (intra-haplogroup potential ability swamps any supposed inter-haplogroup potential ability) or just plain, old-fashioned prejudice. What are the benefits to PR? Two major ones: - Countering structural biases in society. There has not historically been anything like a level playing field with regards to inherent attributes in this country. Many of those attributes cause people to get discriminated against, and this gets perpetuated across time. It's a "market" solution to a societal problem, which means that it can't magically counter much larger structural forces all by itself, but it can help. - Producing better results. Many studies claim that diverse teams operate better, and potentially produce superior products and services. A major part of the reason is the introduction of diversity in perspectives, which can allow a company to understand different potential markets better and can make a company potentially more welcoming, which can improve hiring (i.e., a great candidate who might feel out of place in an environment with non-diverse demographics might decide to join if the demographics were more diverse. This can become a virtuous cycle.) Whether this is true or not, or how much it's true, is not that relevant. It certainly can't hurt. There are valid criticisms of hiring diversity methods, but I'm not seeing many of them in the comments here: - Can PR be achieved? Getting PR at a place with 10 employees is going to be very tough, so coming down on companies this small who can't do so should not be done, IMO. 100? Easier. 1000. Much easier. The larger the organization is, the more possible it becomes. So no, it's not always possible, and some perhaps well-intentioned activists beat up on companies they shouldn't, but that does not mean it should not be a goal that is pursued as a general principle for hiring. - Do the people who get hired necessarily represent who those hiring them think they represent? Not always, no. If you're hiring a perfect rainbow coalition of identities, but all of them come from wealthy backgrounds or elite schools, for example, you may be getting less diversity than you think. It's not tokenism, but it's definitely not PR. Many Left criticisms of our current version elite liberal meritocratic culture center around this. The antidote is to include things like educational background, economic class/upbringing circumstances, etc. when considering a candidate vis a vis diverse hiring; that's what intersectionality is all about. You do not consider advantaging/disadvantaging attributes in isolation. Many companies have do a very poor job of the latter, but in this case, GH has explicitly said they are more open to non-traditionally educated candidates. PR and hiring diversity is not going to fix all society's problems; for that, we need major reforms like free higher ed, federal, rather than local, funding of K-12 education, GBI, UHC, ending the drug war and a dozen other things. Can it help, especially by helping push American culture towards greater acceptance of diversity and pluralism? Yes, so companies should strive for it.
ps4fanboy 10y ago
I dont want to live or work in a society where employees at every company reflect the demographics of that society, where everyone gets equal pay, feels less and less like diversity and more and more about conformity. Its the road to socialism, if all of this diversity was valuable the market will reward companies accordingly.
- ASpring 10y ago
  And it does. More diverse companies perform better financially. https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/impactgenderdiversitytechbusinessperformance_print.pdf https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/impactge...
  - ps4fanboy 10y ago
    After reading the sources I would say there is evidence that employees in the survey they conducted self reported better financial performance from the following options: "how would you compare your organization’s performance over the past two years in terms of market share? .|.|. Would you say that it was (1) much worse, (2) somewhat worse, (3) about the same, (4) somewhat better, or (5) much better?” Surely we can be more factual than this?
    - ASpring 10y ago
      You are truly grasping at straws. There are 15 citations there, many of which show direct data of market cap and share price performance for these companies and you hunt down a single survey you have an issue with. Please.
      - ps4fanboy 10y ago
        I dont have time to review all 15 citations, it was the first one I picked based on the claim made in your document. It was also the most closely related claim that you linked to the document in question: >"An investigation of 500 U.S. businesses found that companies with more race and gender diverse teams had higher sales revenue, more customers, greater market share, and greater profits than did less diverse companies.4" You are being very uncharitable to suggest I am "grasping at straws" by reviewing the very document you are using as evidence. Lets review page 3, each paragraph is a claim. 1. executive boards 2. executive boards 3. top management level 4. top management teams 5. greater profit and market share 6. student study make believe Now you can see why I Chose 5 to investigate as 1-4,6 are pretty much unrelated to what we are talking about which is diversity of the work force, not high level management.
balls187 10y ago
It chaffes me when I see companies talk about diversity and inclusion (ignore that the blog post is written by a young white guy). You want to use data to make Github more diverse--great. Just shut up about it and make it happen. Posting your diversity data like this, like it's some badge of honor, is ridiculous. Someone wants to know how diverse you are? Great, show them the data, and tell them you're working on it. Just please stop it with the public discourse. You know what I don't see--companies like MSFT, and Google, and Facebook, and Github who talk about their inclusion showing up to the poorer parts of my neighborhood trying to address diversity issues there.
deleted 10y ago
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ghrifter 10y ago
I am now a #GitLabMissile
- nolepointer 10y ago
  I moved all my code over to BitBucket when this nonsense started.
jchiu1106 10y ago
In NBA, 74% players are Blacks while Asians are at 0.2%. Maybe some SJWs should lobby to get NBA "reflect more the demographics of the society"??? If you haven't figured out already, I was being sarcastic. This just shows how ridiculous and superficial this whole trend is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA
- Gigablah 10y ago
  You jest, but discrimination in the NBA is a real issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvaM0pMj-8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvaM0pMj-8o
alva 10y ago
I expect this is a well intentioned mission. But to what extent do you take this? Does not making sure other (less in the zeitgeist) groups are involved mean they are failing at this? Hasidic Jews, Inuits, Wheelchair users, Men named Reginald, A person with a southern drawl, a person with one hand, a person with no hands, a 45 year old. Quick googling suggests Jews make up 1.4% of the US population. You can't really pull out the privilege card on them before anyone tries it. This is far higher than the estimates of transexual people. Are GitHub anti-semitic? Why do they hate Jews so much that they refuse to include them in diversity reports? Do they not care for their struggle? Why is it important to stress the number of transexual people they hire over the number of Jews they hire? It is a race to the bottom.
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  You're making a false equivocation between arbitrary demographic "groups" and demographic groups that have faced well documented systemic discrimination in America, both historically and continuing in the present. And to preempt a counterargument via your chosen example, yes, you could argue Jews have and do face discrimination in America - but garden variety American anti-semitism is not of the systemic, historical nature that makes a random Jewish American more likely to be passed over for a job because of their name, or treated drastically differently by the average police officer, or less likely to have become engaged in tech earlier in life, etc.
  - alva 10y ago
    > but garden variety American anti-semitism is not of the systemic, historical nature that makes a random Jewish American more likely to be passed over for a job because of their name, or treated drastically differently by the average police officer, or less likely to have become engaged in tech earlier in life. Many people would find that highly offensive and ignorant. Why are you trying to diminish the struggles faced by the Jewish people in America? Why are you trying to defend a now well known anti-semitic organisation Github?? Your hateful statements are dangerous and violent. (Oh, away from my posturing as an online hate-mob, you are completely incorrect in that statement) This game is very, very easy to play, but unfortunately, everyone loses. Lets go on. You are saying wheelchair users, disabled people have not faced a large amount of societal discrimination that can affect their job chances? Don't you know how many public buildings and spaces aren't accessible? I cannot believe how ableist you are. Does your employer know of your hateful, bigoted views? Do your colleagues? The problem with presenting the argument that the workplace and other groups need to be representative of wider culture, is that it will always run into this issue. If you say, discriminated groups need to be represented, and present it as a tautology, then you cannot decide which trendy group of the moment is more important.
ballsohardy 10y ago
when you horizontally scale a rails app this well, you can do whatever doofy shit you want lol
garfieldnate 10y ago
My questions: * Do you run the same diversity program in every country you have an office, so that, say, in Japan you try to hire Chinese and Brazilians? * Do you actually give points to someone over other candidates for filling a minority slot, or do you just focus your recruiting towards the target groups? * If you hire remote workers from anywhere in the world, do you even bother with diversity for them, since the definition of diversity would have to depend on their country? * Do you look for diversity in communication styles, personalities, philosophies, etc. (read Quiet), or do you only look for diversity in the trends you mentioned (sex, "race", etc.)? * What about fighting ageism? * Will you please write a post giving basic information on the advantages/goals you hope to achieve through American-style diversity? As it is I think everyone will just argue about what your agenda is.

104 points by ahhrrr 10y ago

"There are no Black/African-American GitHubbers in management positions, which is unacceptable." Why is it unacceptable? Just by virtue of the number of different kinds of people -- race, gender, etc there's no way to have 'one of each' for every position for maximum diversity. This sort of thing is so creepy because it treats people like collectible figures ("Oh yeah? Well I added a black transgendered person to our team today! I have way more diversity points than you!") instead of actual people you judge on their merits. How is a white person supposed to feel about applying to Github management position after reading "Its unacceptable we don't have a black manager"? I'm not white and I don't want to be treated as some statistic you can show off on your diversity report card. Thats really demeaning and insulting.

cjbprime 10y ago
Because the percentage of black GitHubbers in management positions is far below e.g. the percentage of e.g. black people with CS degrees in the US, indicating a probable bias in their hiring, retention or promotion pipelines that they're announcing they find concerning. You're making it about individuals, not GitHub. They're comparing statistics.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- atom-morgan 10y ago
  We can determine bias simply by comparing one company's numbers to national trends?
  - cjbprime 10y ago
    I said probable bias, and yes.
    - atom-morgan 10y ago
      As you reduce geographical scope, national trends aren't as relevant or realistic.
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  > Because the percentage of black GitHubbers in management positions is far below e.g. the percentage of e.g. black people with CS degrees in the US Where's the data for this? Often people talk about these things as assumptions, but I've never seen credible data. Can you share a source? Furthermore, even the comparison that you mentioned is not accurate. It should start from a funnel like: "the number of qualified black applicants to GitHub with CS degrees", or something along those lines. GitHub can't hire people that don't apply.
  - ascendingPig 10y ago
    Starting from only the people who apply gives a free pass to biased recruitment.
    - GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
      What, you want them to go kidnap black people and force them to apply?
      - jacalata 10y ago
        So you don't think it's a problem if their ads say "whites only"? Or if they only advertise to white people? Or are you thinking "nobody would say whites only" and just totally unaware of the many ways that language and targeting can affect who applies to a job, sometimes skewing the pool of applicants in unintended ways? A nice, nobody-meant-it way to bias your candidate pool: only hire people who know an existing employee. White Americans mostly know white Americans.
  - cjbprime 10y ago
    You're asking for a citation for zero being less than non-zero? :)
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      He's asking for a citation that the probability of seeing zero is small (p<0.05 if you want to be frequentist about it), contingent on a proper funnel analysis and no bias.
- prodigal_erik 10y ago
  Was that percentage equally high in 1990? Fresh grads are not qualified for management.
pedrorijo91 10y ago
I kinda have the same thinking. Saying that "we have no Black/African-American (...)" seems way more racist that don't saying anything at all. People should get hired according their skills, not race/gender/etc. If a company is focused in hiring non-white males, aren't white males in disadvantage on recruitment processes?
- antimatter 10y ago
  Agreed. These types of reports make it seem like Github cares only about skin color which to me is racist.
  - geofft 10y ago
    This viewpoint genuinely baffles me. You can only manage what you measure, and the process of monitoring a metric isn't the same thing as caring about the metric. I monitor free disk space on all my servers, but it doesn't mean I care primarily about buying more disks. In fact I don't care because I've monitored it and have determined we're okay there. However, as a result of data, if my servers were regularly running out of disk space, then I should start caring. If these reports determined that there was no evidence of something to be fixed (either the statistics were consistent with the statistics of qualified potential employees, or there were a good reason for them not to be consistent), I would expect GitHub not to care. And yes, if they continued to care about shifting the numbers further past that point, then you could accuse them of caring only about skin color when it's unjustified. But why should a technical company not measure metrics and gather data?
    - 1_2__3 10y ago
      The argument is that making decisions based on race is racism. Github isn't "monitoring" things, they're actively trying to change them, and using race (and other such factors that some people believe we should try to be blind to, or at least agnostic about) as a factor.
      - geofft 10y ago
pron 10y ago
I think that the reason you find this objectionable is because you misunderstand the goal and the premises, and therefore the statement. It is not, "universally, we need one of each", but (goal:) "we must ensure no group is marginalized" + (premise:) "blacks are marginalized" = (conclusion:) "we must reduce the marginalization of blacks" = (statement:) "it is unacceptable that there are no blacks" In general, most prescriptive feminist and anti-racist notions are not founded an a manufactured set of axioms for a hypothetical society, but with premises based on empirical observations of our real society, and so are based on the assumption that there exist marginalized groups, and we know which groups they are (or some of them, at least). You can think of it as statements not prescribing how a new society must be built, but how our existing society must be fixed. I.e., you are given a delta value, not an absolute one. You may argue with either the goal (a value statement) or the premise (a factual statement), but right now you're arguing with the wrong ones.
- ajhurliman 10y ago
  This strikes me as centralized planning for jobs. It seems like the best way to go about this is focusing on the pool of applicants and making sure everyone gets a fair shake. Making assumptions about the outcome of those hiring decisions independent of the actual applicants seems neither fair nor good for business.
  - jason_dstillery 10y ago
    If your organization's demographics don't match the demographics of the broader population of qualified candidates, there's a good chance it's because you're biased (intentionally or not) in your recruiting or evaluation. In that sense, "focusing on the pool of applicants and making sure everyone gets a fair shake" are pretty much exactly what diversity efforts are about.
    - ajhurliman 10y ago
      By their wording, it seems like they're more focused on the outcome of the hiring process. No black managers is the outcome, and they said that's unacceptable. If you look at the process instead of the outcome, it might not be the same. If the scenario was that no qualified black people applied for management positions which resulted in not having any black managers they could still come back to the public and say "We have nothing to apologize for, we tried to hire black managers but none applied" instead of "We failed, we don't have any black managers and it's our fault". It's good to be unbiased in your hiring practices, but you can only shoulder so much blame. There are many factors that play into the process and you can only accept responsibility for your own actions.
djtriptych 10y ago
Creepier than a few centuries of slavery? Creepier than a few centuries of anti-black, anti-woman laws at every level of government? Creepier than nearly universal, measurable, provable anti-black, anti-woman implicit bias today? Sure guy.
- twunacceptable 10y ago
  Discriminating by sex and race is what caused those issues in the first place.
  - djtriptych 10y ago
    lol.
tetrep 10y ago
It's awkward that all these statistics seem to focus on the output of system without any regard to the input. There's a passing comment about "improve recruiting" but there's no details presented as to who is actually applying. The hiring process/system is very complicated an difficult to reason about in an objective manner, mostly because it's humans dealing with humans, compounding our human-y traits, non-objectiveness being a hallmark. I don't see how I'm supposed to take seriously an initiative at attempting to uncover/rectify biases of a system with only the output taken into account. It just seems silly.

rubyfan 10y ago

Explains why they haven't delivered a notable imporovement in the last year and a half. They've been focusing on social justice instead of making a great product that we all want to use.

nolepointer 10y ago

Jesus Christ, I never want to work on the Left Coast.

davidcelis 10y ago

Looks like the link to the actual data[1] was posted and subsequently removed, making it unable to be submitted. Why? [1]: https://diversity.github.com https://diversity.github.com

brandoncordell 10y ago

Weird, it seems like some of their team has been decidedly anti-white. http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/githubs-diversity-is-just-as-bad-as-the-rest-of-silicon-valleys/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/githubs-diversity-is-just-a... Edit: Removed Breitbart link

_toastie 10y ago
really? breitbart.com?
- brandoncordell 10y ago
  Sorry, I grabbed the first link. Are they a poor source (honestly don't know)? I also found http://www.techinsider.io/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2 http://www.techinsider.io/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-... and http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/githubs-diversity-is-just-as-bad-as-the-rest-of-silicon-valleys/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/githubs-diversity-is-just-a... The tweets and images came from Githubbers themselves.
  - zyxley 10y ago
    > Are they a poor source (honestly don't know)? Extremely. Breitbart regularly publicizes stories that are misleading at best or just flat out wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitbart_News_Network#Notable_stories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitbart_News_Network#Notable...
    - brandoncordell 10y ago
      Thanks. Wow, TIL! I feel like an idiot now, but I've edited the original post with the TechCrunch link.
  - patmcguire 10y ago
    They're conservative partisans and pretty open about it. Mostly they publish red meat for their base, same as Salon or Alternet.

jbob2000 10y ago

I wish so much that I could be picky about my hiring like GitHub. I wish I could have so many qualified candidates applying that I am able to create a diverse team. But I put out job ads and get like 2 qualified responses. How the hell are they able to find all these candidates such that they can start being picky about who they hire??? Maybe Toronto just sucks for tech talent... Argh...

chickenfries 10y ago
Hiring remotely seems to be one thing they have over you.
MustardTiger 10y ago
>But I put out job ads and get like 2 qualified responses. And 200 completely unqualified ones. It is crazy how many people apply for jobs they have absolutely no qualifications for.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Anyone can apply to a programming job—it's not like you need formal education like lawyers or doctors.
  - MustardTiger 10y ago
    Yes, but I would have hoped people would have the common sense to only apply if they know how to program. I don't even mean this in the sense of "you aren't good enough", I mean people who literally have no idea what programming is. People who rate their winzip using skills on their resume as part of their "computer experience".
baudehlo 10y ago
Tech talent is tight in Toronto. There are too many jobs and not enough talent. Job postings suck at attracting people here. You literally have to crawl through LinkedIn to find people. Stack overflow careers is actually pretty decent though. But a lot of small companies aren't willing to pay for it. Your best bet here? Frankly a recruiter if you're willing to pay them. They are still the gold standard for finding good tech talent in Toronto. I wish we could offer our product for developers, but we are very focussed on sales recruiting right now. Maybe in a year or so.

guessmyname 10y ago

This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All". Being non-american (I'm from a South American country) it is hard for me to understand the importance giving to these things associated to racism and sexism. The United States is the only place I have seen where people invest a considerable amount of time and resources just to put people from minor groups or specific genders in pedestals just to please other people. You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job. Why do they care if there are no "Black/African-American" in their company? Or that 10% are black women? Or that 35% of women are in a leadership role? Like who cares? Are their roles assigned based on their gender and/or skin color? Jesus, even my European co-workers make fun of Americans for these things. Let people build their career based on how they work and not their ethnicity nor gender, otherwise you will be incentivizing more racism and more sexism.

jacalata 10y ago
If you want to look for examples closer to home, try reading about the Mapucho.
- superpatosainz 10y ago
  Mapuches you mean? Well, living in Chile, I've learnt that there's no racism here BUT: -There's classism, a lot. Both from the lower classes to the upper and vice versa. There's also a lot of anger left from the various dictatorships that ruled in the eighties. -In some countries, here included, there's also big prejudice against native cultures like the Mapuches. "They're all lazy drunkards". These problems mostly stem from colonial times, where the Spanish didn't respect native culture and since the Europeans were seen as the "civilized, more advanced people", the aristocrats here did everything to imitate their lifestyle. See also: mestizaje.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - rco8786 10y ago

brbsix 10y ago

Ever since Zach Holman "left", it appears as though GitHub has been eaten away from the inside by intersectional feminism. There appear to be subversive efforts to turn tech companies into platforms for social justice. I can only imagine it must be really uncomfortable to work in this sort of environment.

djtriptych 10y ago
Slightly less comfortable for the most-privileged people on earth; probably more comfortable for everyone else. cf. Every other American industry's initial foray into diversity.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Personally, I don't think I would be very comfortable knowing I was hired because company X has to meet diversity quotas and not solely because I was the best candidate for the job. I think it's an offense to hackers in general—I'm hired based on merit.
  - clevernickname 10y ago
    This is where affirmative action is a step backwards. The unconscious assumption goes from "they're an X in this field, they have to be good" to "they're an X in this field, they're probably just here to fill a quota" and makes matters worse for everybody.
- dijit 10y ago
  Oh, it's fine that it's racist, because I as a white male have it so good? Seems odd to me mate, there are things that being white certainly doesn't buy, it's not a ticket to middle-class. Being cis doesn't make me any more worse at my job than being gay would, don't judge me on that merit it's bullshit. FWIW I grew up incredibly poor and my "advantage" in IT was that people don't care about your background. If I had wanted to be a lawyer or doctor I would bet my life that I would have failed. Tech is definitely inclusive as hell by default and making it less so is rather stupid. If there are people who are actively stopping women in tech or downplaying them then those people are at fault, I would argue as at fault as a company that wont interview me based on my skin colour or gender.

powertower 10y ago

To me every example of diversity basically has been the concept that "there are too many white people in the room." And to a smaller degree that "there are too many straight men...". I've never seen this applied to non-whites, at least not to this degree. In fact, 100% black-demographic teams (or businesses or organisations) are oftentimes praised for being "authentically black". IMO, the way I see it is once a productive homogeneous group (which by definition is composed of members that are able to agree with each other and engage in actual progress rather than in-fighting) puts in the effort and spends the time building the infrastructure/business/etc and makes it successful - then other groups see this as an opportunity to get something out of it... "Diversity for the sake of diversity" only comes in at the end, never at the beginning. It is also odd that when someone says diversity is our strength, they never really share the actual details of that strength. To me this is a turning point for a company that goes from being work oriented to becoming a race/gender oriented cesspool where everything is about your color, genitalia, and gender.

djtriptych 10y ago
So you would bet there is no bias in extant hiring practices? How do you know?
- spriggan3 10y ago
  You're answering literally every comment on this thread, with this "passive aggressive" tone that will do nothing but derail the conservation. That's the definition of a troll. Why don't you make a point of your own instead?

wozer 10y ago

Previous discussion of GitHub's diversity culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067

petsormeat 10y ago

Anybody besides me impressed that they released data about employee age ranges?

hokkos 10y ago
I like how the graph is carefully crafted to make it like there is good age distribution when it does NOT. There is twice a subdivision in ages 20-40 than in ages 40+.

jpeg_hero 10y ago

> At a high level, GitHub is 64% male worldwide and 64% white in the U.S. That said, the company has improved since the end of 2014, when it was 79% male and 21% female worldwide. I wonder what their male/female split is in daily active users.

deleted 10y ago
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WillAbides 10y ago
93% male / 4% female / 3% undisclosed. source: https://medium.com/@tenaciouscb/github-com-demographics-a-story-of-researching-uncovering-blind-spots-21d7f1f90204 https://medium.com/@tenaciouscb/github-com-demographics-a-st...

t0mbstone 10y ago

Amidst the forest of diversity demographics, I found this little tidbit: "We have a flexible paid time-off policy and our maternity/paternity leave policies exceed the tech industry’s norm. In addition, our policies do not differentiate between maternity or paternity leave." Now THAT is cool. I really wish more companies did that. When my wife had a c-section with our son, she got 6 weeks off of work. I got nothing.

dijit 10y ago
Come to Sweden, Paternity leave and Maternity leave are basically tied up into a shared "Parental" leave, a couple of new parents get upwards of 400+ paid days between themselves to divvy up as they see fit. Source: my colleague just had a child and I have to do all his work as well as my own now :( (not salty, glad we have this!)

Keats 10y ago

How about adding other parts of the company like HR/Sales/Marketing/etc etc to their data?

johnnyg 10y ago

"There are no Black/African-American GitHubbers in management positions, which is unacceptable." It is only unacceptable if people with the skills to be in management positions didn't get a promotion because of a non-relevant personal attribute. Otherwise, it is acceptable and in the best long term interests of the company. I acknowledge that America has equality of opportunity problems. There are strong and just historical reasons why the government has carried the torch on this issue. However, I think its time to let the market work. Companies that place talent above non-relevant personal attributes are at a competitive advantage as they are drawing from a larger talent pool. Letting that market run on a long enough time line means that companies who discriminate will grow weaker, as well they should. Github has come out and said "we're going to make sure that we meet target quotas for people of X, Y and Z non-relevant personal attributes." I think that's bad business and not the equality we need to be going for. If you have the skill set, drive and integrity to be a strong contributor to a team, I want to work with you and make wealth with you. If you don't, I don't want to work with you - go get educated, build skills and try again or if I'm wrong about you, prove it by out competing me. This is equality of opportunity and of ideas. What Github is doing isn't, nor does it get us closer to what the idea of America promises us all. I think that providing the resources to build skills to those whose parents didn't or couldn't provide them is a great idea. I think shaking up our education system (because the numbers show that investing doesn't produce better results) is a great idea. I want to be fellow citizens with educated, driven people who are so in part because society ensured it'd happen. Lets not go too far or go in the wrong direction.

drhayes9 10y ago
I think GH is starting from the point of "the distribution of our employees doesn't line up with the larger population of the country we operate in". If you think each of those groups of people has the potential to be as talented as any other, then why is there a discrepancy? I think they're saying, "We don't think the market is working." There are hidden biases at work. For example, people with "non-white sounding" names don't get hired at the same rate as those with "white sounding" names when they have the same skillset. http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html I think these biases operate at a low level, below most of our understanding. I like that GH is having this conversation in the open and working to rid themselves of these biases as much as possible. To me, this is all relevant socioeconomic data. Why not look at the distribution of gender, race, sexuality, religion, etc, in your workplace? If there's a discrepancy, why not figure out what the root cause is? Given the starting point of "all these groups of people have the same capacity for talent and skill", why is the distribution skewed? What does it hurt to ask?

vemv 10y ago

It's like a law of nature... your organisation grows, its culture becomes braindead. There should be more Basecamps around. I don't know what their equality policy is, but they sure have very little tolerance to bullshit - and don't mind letting you know!

dijit 10y ago

every time I hear about "inclusive" practices at github it makes me grimace, not because it's not a good idea. Diversity is good. But because it's rather racist, partially sexist and it's increasingly the norm to be this way. Equal opportunity, not outcome, if 4% of your applicants are British, but do not pass because of technical reasons. (I'm using British because I am one, replace with $minority), then why should I hire them? Ideally we'd interview blind and whoever is the best tech, is the best. I'm not sure why this isn't possible in our technology culture, do you really need to be face to face with a person to assess their technical merits and ensure they are the right fit for a company. But, anyway, to me this stuff is exclusionary, I am apparently cursed to be a white male in tech, and as a majority I now have to work much harder for SV to acknowledge me for my merits, I am of the firm belief that if I were a black lady I would have enough support to prop me up above my current experienced position in no time. I'd love to test this theory honestly. And anyway, who cares who delivers github/facebook/$website at the end of the day, hire who you think will do the job, nobody is going to feel excluded from the services you provide because you didn't meet your quota of transgender people.. and if they were, you could very easily mislead them. edit: I know it's against etiquette to mention downvotes, but if you must downvote me please reply stating why. That is also against etiquette.

throwaway934825 10y ago

The last time this topic came up was around the same time that that open letter of from maintainers of GitHub repositories was making its rounds. If I recall correctly, GitHub responded to that open letter by implementing the lowest hanging fruit - bug templates and +1s - and then went radio silent. Have there been meaningful product updates since? Now we know what happened: they minimally addressed the PR needs of their business, and then went back to doing nothing interesting to advance their products. I was on the fence before, but now I'm certain: GitLab is the superior experience.

igorgue 10y ago

What's going on is that this company is under a magnifying glass over everything even their fucking rug: http://15809-presscdn-0-93.pagely.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/MTIyMjkzMDg3MTE1NDM5Mzg1.jpg http://15809-presscdn-0-93.pagely.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/... Crackers in Silicon Valley are so PC police...

yuhong 10y ago

I have been thinking of the problems anti-discrimination laws. Not all kinds of discrimination leave evidence. I have a feeling that they should be restricted to certain job categories. Similarly, sexual harassment leave evidence more often, but this don't mean they are worth the costs. I have been thinking of this Ask HN for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11666857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11666857

exstudent2 10y ago

As a Hispanic, I would never work at Github because I find this quest for "diversity" to be extremely patronizing and objectifying. As a male, I'd never work at Github because their policies are sexist.

BurningFrog 10y ago

How many republicans work at GitHub? How many evangelical christians? How do these numbers compare to the distribution in the larger population of the country?

jshevek 10y ago
I'm outraged that github has not reported these numbers. What are they hiding?

kkirsche 10y ago

Diversity for the sake of diversity. So dumb. Promote for qualifications not junk like this

pwim 10y ago

Previously I thought hiring diversity for diversity's sake didn't make sense, and hiring should be based solely on "merit". After all, as a company, you want to hire the best people. However, since then, I have found there is research that indicates diverse groups can be more advantageous than homogenous groups of highly talented people [1], [2]. So from this perspective, striving for diversity makes economic sense. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full [2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-make...

ASpring 10y ago
I'm glad someone is making this point. Here is a concise summary pdf from NCWIT. https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/impactgenderdiversitytechbusinessperformance_print.pdf https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/impactge...

Futurebot 10y ago

The goal of hiring diversity is to reach Proportional Representation; you want your workforce to resemble the demographics of the nation as a whole. If you accept that anyone, regardless of their genetic heritage, gender identity, sexual identity, skin color, etc. can do the job just as well as anyone else can, then you should be supportive of, or at least not oppose, efforts like these. If you don't think so (with regards to genetic heritage especially), there's really no discussion to be had, as that's a likely irreconcilable conflicting understanding of the science, especially at the individual level (intra-haplogroup potential ability swamps any supposed inter-haplogroup potential ability) or just plain, old-fashioned prejudice. What are the benefits to PR? Two major ones: - Countering structural biases in society. There has not historically been anything like a level playing field with regards to inherent attributes in this country. Many of those attributes cause people to get discriminated against, and this gets perpetuated across time. It's a "market" solution to a societal problem, which means that it can't magically counter much larger structural forces all by itself, but it can help. - Producing better results. Many studies claim that diverse teams operate better, and potentially produce superior products and services. A major part of the reason is the introduction of diversity in perspectives, which can allow a company to understand different potential markets better and can make a company potentially more welcoming, which can improve hiring (i.e., a great candidate who might feel out of place in an environment with non-diverse demographics might decide to join if the demographics were more diverse. This can become a virtuous cycle.) Whether this is true or not, or how much it's true, is not that relevant. It certainly can't hurt. There are valid criticisms of hiring diversity methods, but I'm not seeing many of them in the comments here: - Can PR be achieved? Getting PR at a place with 10 employees is going to be very tough, so coming down on companies this small who can't do so should not be done, IMO. 100? Easier. 1000. Much easier. The larger the organization is, the more possible it becomes. So no, it's not always possible, and some perhaps well-intentioned activists beat up on companies they shouldn't, but that does not mean it should not be a goal that is pursued as a general principle for hiring. - Do the people who get hired necessarily represent who those hiring them think they represent? Not always, no. If you're hiring a perfect rainbow coalition of identities, but all of them come from wealthy backgrounds or elite schools, for example, you may be getting less diversity than you think. It's not tokenism, but it's definitely not PR. Many Left criticisms of our current version elite liberal meritocratic culture center around this. The antidote is to include things like educational background, economic class/upbringing circumstances, etc. when considering a candidate vis a vis diverse hiring; that's what intersectionality is all about. You do not consider advantaging/disadvantaging attributes in isolation. Many companies have do a very poor job of the latter, but in this case, GH has explicitly said they are more open to non-traditionally educated candidates. PR and hiring diversity is not going to fix all society's problems; for that, we need major reforms like free higher ed, federal, rather than local, funding of K-12 education, GBI, UHC, ending the drug war and a dozen other things. Can it help, especially by helping push American culture towards greater acceptance of diversity and pluralism? Yes, so companies should strive for it.

ps4fanboy 10y ago

I dont want to live or work in a society where employees at every company reflect the demographics of that society, where everyone gets equal pay, feels less and less like diversity and more and more about conformity. Its the road to socialism, if all of this diversity was valuable the market will reward companies accordingly.

ASpring 10y ago
And it does. More diverse companies perform better financially. https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/impactgenderdiversitytechbusinessperformance_print.pdf https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/impactge...
- ps4fanboy 10y ago
  After reading the sources I would say there is evidence that employees in the survey they conducted self reported better financial performance from the following options: "how would you compare your organization’s performance over the past two years in terms of market share? .|.|. Would you say that it was (1) much worse, (2) somewhat worse, (3) about the same, (4) somewhat better, or (5) much better?” Surely we can be more factual than this?
  - ASpring 10y ago
    You are truly grasping at straws. There are 15 citations there, many of which show direct data of market cap and share price performance for these companies and you hunt down a single survey you have an issue with. Please.
    - ps4fanboy 10y ago
      I dont have time to review all 15 citations, it was the first one I picked based on the claim made in your document. It was also the most closely related claim that you linked to the document in question: >"An investigation of 500 U.S. businesses found that companies with more race and gender diverse teams had higher sales revenue, more customers, greater market share, and greater profits than did less diverse companies.4" You are being very uncharitable to suggest I am "grasping at straws" by reviewing the very document you are using as evidence. Lets review page 3, each paragraph is a claim. 1. executive boards 2. executive boards 3. top management level 4. top management teams 5. greater profit and market share 6. student study make believe Now you can see why I Chose 5 to investigate as 1-4,6 are pretty much unrelated to what we are talking about which is diversity of the work force, not high level management.

balls187 10y ago

It chaffes me when I see companies talk about diversity and inclusion (ignore that the blog post is written by a young white guy). You want to use data to make Github more diverse--great. Just shut up about it and make it happen. Posting your diversity data like this, like it's some badge of honor, is ridiculous. Someone wants to know how diverse you are? Great, show them the data, and tell them you're working on it. Just please stop it with the public discourse. You know what I don't see--companies like MSFT, and Google, and Facebook, and Github who talk about their inclusion showing up to the poorer parts of my neighborhood trying to address diversity issues there.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ghrifter 10y ago

I am now a #GitLabMissile

nolepointer 10y ago
I moved all my code over to BitBucket when this nonsense started.

jchiu1106 10y ago

In NBA, 74% players are Blacks while Asians are at 0.2%. Maybe some SJWs should lobby to get NBA "reflect more the demographics of the society"??? If you haven't figured out already, I was being sarcastic. This just shows how ridiculous and superficial this whole trend is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA

Gigablah 10y ago
You jest, but discrimination in the NBA is a real issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvaM0pMj-8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvaM0pMj-8o

alva 10y ago

I expect this is a well intentioned mission. But to what extent do you take this? Does not making sure other (less in the zeitgeist) groups are involved mean they are failing at this? Hasidic Jews, Inuits, Wheelchair users, Men named Reginald, A person with a southern drawl, a person with one hand, a person with no hands, a 45 year old. Quick googling suggests Jews make up 1.4% of the US population. You can't really pull out the privilege card on them before anyone tries it. This is far higher than the estimates of transexual people. Are GitHub anti-semitic? Why do they hate Jews so much that they refuse to include them in diversity reports? Do they not care for their struggle? Why is it important to stress the number of transexual people they hire over the number of Jews they hire? It is a race to the bottom.

MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
You're making a false equivocation between arbitrary demographic "groups" and demographic groups that have faced well documented systemic discrimination in America, both historically and continuing in the present. And to preempt a counterargument via your chosen example, yes, you could argue Jews have and do face discrimination in America - but garden variety American anti-semitism is not of the systemic, historical nature that makes a random Jewish American more likely to be passed over for a job because of their name, or treated drastically differently by the average police officer, or less likely to have become engaged in tech earlier in life, etc.
- alva 10y ago
  > but garden variety American anti-semitism is not of the systemic, historical nature that makes a random Jewish American more likely to be passed over for a job because of their name, or treated drastically differently by the average police officer, or less likely to have become engaged in tech earlier in life. Many people would find that highly offensive and ignorant. Why are you trying to diminish the struggles faced by the Jewish people in America? Why are you trying to defend a now well known anti-semitic organisation Github?? Your hateful statements are dangerous and violent. (Oh, away from my posturing as an online hate-mob, you are completely incorrect in that statement) This game is very, very easy to play, but unfortunately, everyone loses. Lets go on. You are saying wheelchair users, disabled people have not faced a large amount of societal discrimination that can affect their job chances? Don't you know how many public buildings and spaces aren't accessible? I cannot believe how ableist you are. Does your employer know of your hateful, bigoted views? Do your colleagues? The problem with presenting the argument that the workplace and other groups need to be representative of wider culture, is that it will always run into this issue. If you say, discriminated groups need to be represented, and present it as a tautology, then you cannot decide which trendy group of the moment is more important.

ballsohardy 10y ago

when you horizontally scale a rails app this well, you can do whatever doofy shit you want lol

garfieldnate 10y ago

My questions: * Do you run the same diversity program in every country you have an office, so that, say, in Japan you try to hire Chinese and Brazilians? * Do you actually give points to someone over other candidates for filling a minority slot, or do you just focus your recruiting towards the target groups? * If you hire remote workers from anywhere in the world, do you even bother with diversity for them, since the definition of diversity would have to depend on their country? * Do you look for diversity in communication styles, personalities, philosophies, etc. (read Quiet), or do you only look for diversity in the trends you mentioned (sex, "race", etc.)? * What about fighting ageism? * Will you please write a post giving basic information on the advantages/goals you hope to achieve through American-style diversity? As it is I think everyone will just argue about what your agenda is.