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The main thing I've taken away from the whole github situation is that, as a tech company, you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the soc

The main thing I've taken away from the whole github situation is that, as a tech company, you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. That doesn't mean exclusively hiring white men and sending out Kalanick-style emails; it means keeping your work environment as professional and politically neutral as possible unless absolutely necessary. My employer does a good job of this. We have a lot of women and transgender (not so many POC) employees, but we don't have any special inclusivity initiatives or outreach programs, nor do we officially inject any related ideology into the businessplace. The expectation is that you conduct yourself professionally, and that you exercise your own discretion; the other side of the coin is that you correct what you might think is morally/terminologically wrong (such as confusing biological sex with gender) as diplomatically and non-confrontationally as possible; assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them. As for Coraline herself, I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here. In particular, I'm sure there is more to the "non-empathetic communication style" than the data scientist and other related incidents. Not to be a presumptive asshole, but I do get the impression from this kind of expose that she might be difficult to work with.

microcolonel 9y ago
I agree wholeheartedly. As soon as political and emotional appeals overrule standards of professional conduct, everyone is walking on eggshells. > assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them. Especially big on this. Nobody can read minds, so when people make mistakes, there is no winning tactic other than to assume good intent.
- Thorazul 9y ago
  Especially in a company that seems to communicate through comments/emails etc. and not so much face to face interaction.
emodendroket 9y ago
I don't get it though. Didn't they want to bring her on specifically because her political profile gave them cachet with people they wanted to make overtures to?
- superplussed 9y ago
  Top-down hirings for the sake of culture change don't really work, though do they? It seems like the inevitable outcome is exactly this, a bright-eyed, and then soon-disenfranchised new hire, butting up against an resistant and entrenched culture.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I don't know the answer to that; it just seems odd to say she should have refrained from politicizing her work if that's exactly what they hired her for.
  - whywhywhywhy 9y ago
    Think this is only one side of the story though, what about people who had worked there just doing their job and you're being told there is something wrong with your culture and this person is being brought in to fix it. It's a big company the whole thing can't just be a frat house there must at least be some percentage of decent people trying to do a job that are now being told there is something wrong with them. (Not to mention the whole idea of a remote worker involved in any sort of culture change is utterly absurd)
erikpukinskis 9y ago
> you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere I suspect you will find yourself publicly involved in another kind of justice sphere by accident. That said, there is something to your hesitancy. I did a big part of my education in the social justice sphere, and while I believe in pretty much all of the core theories, in practice I don't think most activists have much of a plan of attack for tech companies. That's partly because they don't really get much practice, because companies are reluctant to give them power, and, as this story shows, quick to give up if results aren't progressing as expected. Your solution—give up on that crew entirely—sort of solves the problem, I guess. But my solution is to keep trying to study and talk and figure out what a good methodology would be for applying the core social justice theories (everyone has valuable compentencies, demographics are a useful signal, other realities exist than yours, consent matters, etc) in a tech corp setting productively.
- opportune 9y ago
  I think the reason my employer is successful at recruiting women is actually precisely because they stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. You think that entails "giving up on that crew entirely", when in reality it does the exact opposite. I think a lot of women/transgender/POC employees don't want to be thought of as an X software developer, just to be thought of as a developer who happens to be X. The thing about strict professionalism is that it avoids the problems of bro-culture while simultaneously preventing issues from blowing up. As of now, Github has pretty much alienated everybody. They've pissed of activists by firing Coraline and some of the stuff they've done in the past. They've pissed off "broflakes" by some of their other more recent cultural changes. But now they're starting to piss off people who may or may not care about social justice, but who definitely don't want the defining topic in the OSS community to be social justice. I think this is a game you can only win by refusing to play.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    > They've pissed off "broflakes" What does this mean? I've never heard the term. Tbh,i don't really understand the "brogrammer" thing either. I got my CS degree, then was at Google, and then the first employee at a tiny startup and none of those experiences gave me any inkling of what the brogrammer stereotype might be. Isn't the programmer stereotype literally the opposite of a "bro"?
specialist 9y ago
Naw. Starbucks has done a good job with their corporate responsiblity efforts, bumpy road and all. So it's possible to do well. Any nail that sticks up will get pounded down, someone somewhere will be offended no matter what. So just do your thing and ignore the haters. Edit: To the skeptics, Starbucks was among the first to extend health insurance to domestic partners, and I'm a big fan of their CARE programs. That said, it was still the worst job I've ever had.
- foota 9y ago
  Bit OT, but I've somewhat always had a desire to work in a software developer role at Starbucks because I drink a lot of their coffee and i like how they seem to treat their regular partners (in an externally facing role, not internal IT). I'm not searching for a new position now, but can I ask what you didn't like there?
  - specialist 9y ago
    Circa 1992, during the first hyper growth period. I was in Store Planning, a particularly stressful, dysfunctional group. I know many others who've had great jobs, careers there. I was just unlucky, immature, naive, etc.
    - foota 9y ago
      I'm sorry you had a negative experience. Thank you for your response! :)
openmosix 9y ago
Reading the full article, it strikes me how you can be "inclusive" if you are constantly highlighting the differences. The fact, for example, she dismisses PRs or code reviews because made by white males. Or the blog post on her first deliverable, rewritten by a white male. I don't see what could be the benefit to point that out in every sentence: that all of that is made in malice because of gender and race? If I had a white male colleague who would constantly point out - in a work environment - that a PR should be dismissed because made by a woman or that a deliverable sucks because made by a black guy, I would not tolerate that behavior for a second. I don't get why the opposite should be considered "inclusion and safety".
- RangerScience 9y ago
  > she dismisses PRs or code reviews because made by white males. I didn't see this and can't find it. Can you point me at where this happens?
  - inarush0 9y ago
    > For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written. One PR actually had over 200 comments from 24 different individuals. First paragraph under the section "Collaboration"
  - openmosix 9y ago
    [...] For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written. [...] Shortly after this happened to me, the code review feature was prioritized. This functionality was rolled out internally pretty quickly. From that point on I didn't get dogpiled anymore [...] Re: who cares if they were all male? If I open a PR and I get dozens of feedback, either they are legit feedback or not. Or maybe they are all sexist comments, that you should absolutely report. But it sounds like the "all of who were male" wants to imply a specific subtext, but the accusation is neither explicit nor provides any justifications. Saying it in other words: if a colleague would say "I am getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of who were black women)", wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?
thatswrong0 9y ago
> assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them. I think many social activists, esp. those I see on social media, could use a heavy dose of this kind of thinking. People are human, humans make mistakes, and most people I run into in life are too busy with their own affairs to always be perfectly conscious about their words and actions.
- pyre 9y ago
  Well, the other issue is that if they are constantly barraged by trolls trying to offend them on social media (just because they find offending people to be funny), then it could be more of a "if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail" situation.
- acobster 9y ago
  True. And at the same time, people submitting their code for review could use some thicker skin.
politician 9y ago
I thought her positive reaction on being placed into such an obviously intentionally isolated team was odd. A team of people just so, without the undesirables, their own org structure with dedicated PMs, QCs, and backlog. The way things fell apart when that cocoon was breached -- both from within and without -- was entirely predictable. How was this supposed to work in the first place? What did they hope to accomplish with this design? There must be better designs for these sorts of initiatives, right? What are Microsoft, Apple, or Google doing?
- RangerScience 9y ago
  This happened to me at my last job - there were a bunch of us in a celebrated cocoon, and then everything fell apart when it was breached. It wasn't about undesirable people, it was about undesirable management influences; whiplash from constantly changing projects and reorgs, moving goal posts, etc etc. It definitely came with it's fair share of problems. We were trying to isolate ourselves from the craziness in the rest of the company, and we got a lot of cool shit done while it lasted.
  - politician 9y ago
    It sounds like you felt it was a net-positive experience. Is there anything you'd want to do differently next time (i.e. to avoid the crash)?
    - RangerScience 9y ago
      Oh 'doh, I got my GP comments mixed up :P Definitely a net-positive. We should have done more outreach and attempts to bring people into our way-less-drama bubble; but if the theories that the other groups were jealous of our successes was true, it might have accelerated our demise. Ditto for being clearer with upper management why were liking the isolation. I think there's an catch-22 problem tho: Anything we could have done would have just been political in some way, which would have been contributing to the drama. Possibly the appropriate middle ground is to clearly and consistently seek feedback and share successes with the top of our management chain; avoid the politics of multi-person, but keep the awareness that we're doing well and will continue to do so with those that make the decisions about whether we'd get to keep going that way. -- Original response: It was definitely a net-positive; I got out (I was encouraged to get out by people I trust and respect) before it had a chance to properly explode, and there's a lot I'd have done differently. Probably the most valuable skill is recognizing that you're in a tailspin; a good way to notice this is failing to achieve your own core values. In my case, people were feeling unheard; I pride myself on listening skills, so that should have been a pretty serious red flag. If you're sucking at stuff you really care about, something's pretty wrong. I would have liked to have the presence of mind and skill to directly address the meta-problem; but that might have just backfired more, since I gathered that my directness was part of the issue. So in that case, just bailing earlier. Make sure you don't stick around past the point where the bridges are burned; I'm a little past that, since I don't feel good when I think about going back, but I know I can. The other option (which was one I was encouraged to take, that then turned into a full departure) was to take a sabbatical. I probably set down 70% of the baggage in the first month, which might have been enough to make a successful comeback - at least in attitude. (There's other complicating factors).
Diamons 9y ago
The main takeaway should be a company has one obligation to you: a job to do and money to be paid. You as an adult bring your services to fix the problem in exchange for said compensation. Personal tesponbility is everything and Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired and removed from any workplace where they act as a menace to their coworkers.
- opportune 9y ago
  I don't agree that she was acting as a menace to her coworkers. At least, I don't think you can come to that conclusion from her blog post alone. I would be pissed too if I wrote an official blog post for a feature that I cared about, and someone else went behind my back and rewrote it and published it without even telling me. A better way to put what I wrote is this: these problems can all be avoided by approaching problems from a professionalism point of view, rather than a social justice one. Both Coraline and her coworkers did unprofessional things that could have been avoided with better communication, and perhaps more attentive management.
- dang 9y ago
  > Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired You can't comment like this here regardless of how strongly you feel or how wrong you think someone else is. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704439. Edit: since you've done this repeatedly and we warned you before, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
  - revmoo 9y ago
    This is ridiculous. If you're not going to allow dissenting opinions then you shouldn't be hosting discussions like this at all.
Diamons 9y ago
The main takeaway should be a company has one obligation to you: a job to do and money to be paid. You as an adult bring your services to fix the problem in exchange for said compensation. Personal tesponbility is everything and Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired and removed from any workplace where they act as a menace to their coworkers.
Diamons 9y ago
The main takeaway should be a company has one obligation to you: a job to do and money to be paid. You as an adult bring your services to fix the problem in exchange for said compensation. Personal tesponbility is everything and Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired and removed from any workplace where they act as a menace to their coworkers.
eqdw 9y ago
> The main thing I've taken away from the whole github situation is that, as a tech company, you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. That doesn't mean exclusively hiring white men and sending out Kalanick-style emails; it means keeping your work environment as professional and politically neutral as possible unless absolutely necessary. At my previous employer, we achieved a 50-50 gender balance on our engineering team. Not through identity politics, outreach initiatives, and politicking, but through professionalism and politeness. We were able to attract many incredibly talented women and minority engineers, by just not being assholes and treating them like any other engineers. In fact, for somewhat of a natural experiment: there was a bifurcation in our engineering organization, a split between the web dev side (our teams) and the functional programming side. The FP side was full of politicking. The FP side's morale was terrible. It was kind of ridiculous. By the time I chose to move on from this company, four out of the six women in our engineering organization were backchanneling with me about how uncomfortable the women-in-tech political rhetoric made them feel. They didn't want to be singled out as special snowflakes. They didn't want everyone else wondering if they were just diversity hires. They just wanted to participate on an equal footing, with everyone else. The fact that they felt more comfortable talking to me, a senior engineer, than HR or the company's Womens' Group is fairly absurd. You don't need all this campaigning and activism to achieve these goals. You just need to be good, competent, professional, and kind people. You need management that has no tolerance for asshole behaviour, regardless of whether it's an ism, or just an asshole. You need a company that notices and rewards good work, even (and especially!) from those people who would otherwise fade into the background. Thing is, a lot of the complaints made by "SJWs" are legit! Racism sucks. Assholes making shitty comments suck. Favouritism and nepotism sucks. But all of these concerns are already dealt with by healthy norms of professionalism, and those norms do a lot better job of advocating fair treatment for everyone, than the activists seem to do. The women on our team didn't want special treatment or top-down interventions. They just wanted to be treated like the equals that they were! They really appreciated the fact that, on our team, they got that, and it wasn't a big deal. When you're facing a team, company, or culture that appears problematic, consider that instead of being sexist, management may just be shitty, incompetent assholes _in general_. Healthy, mature, capable, professional teams are not like this.
roguecoder 9y ago
Those consequences are only present for women or people of color: white men don't take the same reputation hit for promoting diversity and fairness: https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-for-promoting-diversity https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-f...
- opportune 9y ago
  Sorry, could you clarify what you mean by "those consequences"?
  - roguecoder 9y ago
    For women and people of color, supporting diversity was found to have a negative impact on how effective they were perceived to be, lowering performance ratings and reducing the chance of promotion. The same wasn't true for white men, so even though white dudes weren't rewarded for it, we can support marginalized people without sacrificing our careers.
- ForHackernews 9y ago
  HBR also claims that "Diversity policies rarely make companies fairer, and they feel threatening to white men" https://hbr.org/2016/01/diversity-policies-dont-help-women-or-minorities-and-they-make-white-men-feel-threatened https://hbr.org/2016/01/diversity-policies-dont-help-women-o...
roguecoder 9y ago
And of course, many of the products we code are inherently political. It is no more possible for a social network like Github to be "politically neutral" than it would be possible for a bank to be "security neutral".
- opportune 9y ago
  Hence the qualifier "absolutely necessary." For example, harassment is bad, period. Github did the right thing in taking steps to address it by forming a team of developers to address harassment vectors. That said, it might not have been the best idea to frame harassment in the context of the wider social justice movement. It may or may not fall into that group (depending on what you believe) and I'm not trying to argue whether it does or doesn't; what I am saying is that regardless, it might not actually be a good idea to inject politics into this situation. Nobody would say that preventing harassment is bad, but you will piss people off by injecting larger narratives into the issue. If I could summarize, I guess I'm saying "go easy on the intersectionality."
kevintb 9y ago
You are so sadly mistaken to think that you can "stay away from social justice sphere". Taking the example of a survey question in the blog post, > What is your gender?" The multiple-choice options were "Male", "Female", and "Transgender" What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case? I would think, at the very least, an "Other" field would be a 1000x improvement from a "Transgender" option. > I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here People like you (and the kind of reaction you are describing here) are the reason why more people don't report discrimination and harassment issues.
- YorickPeterse 9y ago
  > What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case? * "Male" * "Female" * "Other (feel free to specify in the text field below)" Or something along those lines, it's not that hard.
  - pfooti 9y ago
    One could imagine just putting a text entry field for gender, so as to not other any gender identity that doesn't align with the male-female binary. One could also imagine putting other fields in for respondents to self-identify as trans, should they want. That said, it seems a very neutral approach to gender self-reporting is self-defeating (consider that, at least for bathroom laws in some US states), the very notion of something that's not on the assigned-at-birth male-female binary is itself controversial. I guess if your gender choices included "deconstruct the male-female binary" or something, that'd be overtly political, but at least in this political climate just acknowledging the existence of some people seems to be a political act. (one I'm in favor of, fwiw, but I'm one of those people that argue that being "apolitical" is just cover for being politically in favor of the status quo).
    - sethrin 9y ago
      Right, the problem of the gender binary is that it never existed. What we have is trans-erasure. More generally it seems to me to prove that, with respect to Mr Burke, all that is necessary for evil to be done to a person is for good people to do nothing.
pdonis 9y ago
> I do get the impression from this kind of expose that she might be difficult to work with. I get that impression as well, but I also get the impression that GitHub is a difficult place to work (from things like the data scientist going straight to her boss to complain, instead of trying to resolve any issue at the coworker level first, which is what would happen in a professional workplace).
rmc 9y ago
> it means keeping your work environment as professional and politically neutral as possible unless absolutely necessary. This sounds good, but I think to some people in tech "professional" and "political neutral" are contradictory goals. And your company has to choose which to take. For example a professional workplace might say "You can't display photos of scantily clad women in the office" or "We're not hiring (female) strippers for our office party" (or "We have reprimanded $MANAGER for taking their team to a strip club") or "You can't use that word in the office to refer to a co-worker because it's mildly/very insulting and has political baggage". And all of those decision are derided by some as "political correctness" or taking political stances.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  Those things aren't really non "politically neutral", they bring risks of lawsuits. being politically neutral means not being active on an issue when there are no laws to follow, and otherwise taking no stated stance on topics, other than to cite legislative rules.
sotojuan 9y ago
See my comment form yesterday[1], you're absolutely right. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14702902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14702902

microcolonel 9y ago

I agree wholeheartedly. As soon as political and emotional appeals overrule standards of professional conduct, everyone is walking on eggshells. > assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them. Especially big on this. Nobody can read minds, so when people make mistakes, there is no winning tactic other than to assume good intent.

Thorazul 9y ago
Especially in a company that seems to communicate through comments/emails etc. and not so much face to face interaction.

emodendroket 9y ago

I don't get it though. Didn't they want to bring her on specifically because her political profile gave them cachet with people they wanted to make overtures to?

superplussed 9y ago
Top-down hirings for the sake of culture change don't really work, though do they? It seems like the inevitable outcome is exactly this, a bright-eyed, and then soon-disenfranchised new hire, butting up against an resistant and entrenched culture.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I don't know the answer to that; it just seems odd to say she should have refrained from politicizing her work if that's exactly what they hired her for.
- whywhywhywhy 9y ago
  Think this is only one side of the story though, what about people who had worked there just doing their job and you're being told there is something wrong with your culture and this person is being brought in to fix it. It's a big company the whole thing can't just be a frat house there must at least be some percentage of decent people trying to do a job that are now being told there is something wrong with them. (Not to mention the whole idea of a remote worker involved in any sort of culture change is utterly absurd)

erikpukinskis 9y ago

> you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere I suspect you will find yourself publicly involved in another kind of justice sphere by accident. That said, there is something to your hesitancy. I did a big part of my education in the social justice sphere, and while I believe in pretty much all of the core theories, in practice I don't think most activists have much of a plan of attack for tech companies. That's partly because they don't really get much practice, because companies are reluctant to give them power, and, as this story shows, quick to give up if results aren't progressing as expected. Your solution—give up on that crew entirely—sort of solves the problem, I guess. But my solution is to keep trying to study and talk and figure out what a good methodology would be for applying the core social justice theories (everyone has valuable compentencies, demographics are a useful signal, other realities exist than yours, consent matters, etc) in a tech corp setting productively.

opportune 9y ago
I think the reason my employer is successful at recruiting women is actually precisely because they stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. You think that entails "giving up on that crew entirely", when in reality it does the exact opposite. I think a lot of women/transgender/POC employees don't want to be thought of as an X software developer, just to be thought of as a developer who happens to be X. The thing about strict professionalism is that it avoids the problems of bro-culture while simultaneously preventing issues from blowing up. As of now, Github has pretty much alienated everybody. They've pissed of activists by firing Coraline and some of the stuff they've done in the past. They've pissed off "broflakes" by some of their other more recent cultural changes. But now they're starting to piss off people who may or may not care about social justice, but who definitely don't want the defining topic in the OSS community to be social justice. I think this is a game you can only win by refusing to play.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  > They've pissed off "broflakes" What does this mean? I've never heard the term. Tbh,i don't really understand the "brogrammer" thing either. I got my CS degree, then was at Google, and then the first employee at a tiny startup and none of those experiences gave me any inkling of what the brogrammer stereotype might be. Isn't the programmer stereotype literally the opposite of a "bro"?

specialist 9y ago

Naw. Starbucks has done a good job with their corporate responsiblity efforts, bumpy road and all. So it's possible to do well. Any nail that sticks up will get pounded down, someone somewhere will be offended no matter what. So just do your thing and ignore the haters. Edit: To the skeptics, Starbucks was among the first to extend health insurance to domestic partners, and I'm a big fan of their CARE programs. That said, it was still the worst job I've ever had.

foota 9y ago
Bit OT, but I've somewhat always had a desire to work in a software developer role at Starbucks because I drink a lot of their coffee and i like how they seem to treat their regular partners (in an externally facing role, not internal IT). I'm not searching for a new position now, but can I ask what you didn't like there?
- specialist 9y ago
  Circa 1992, during the first hyper growth period. I was in Store Planning, a particularly stressful, dysfunctional group. I know many others who've had great jobs, careers there. I was just unlucky, immature, naive, etc.
  - foota 9y ago
    I'm sorry you had a negative experience. Thank you for your response! :)

openmosix 9y ago

Reading the full article, it strikes me how you can be "inclusive" if you are constantly highlighting the differences. The fact, for example, she dismisses PRs or code reviews because made by white males. Or the blog post on her first deliverable, rewritten by a white male. I don't see what could be the benefit to point that out in every sentence: that all of that is made in malice because of gender and race? If I had a white male colleague who would constantly point out - in a work environment - that a PR should be dismissed because made by a woman or that a deliverable sucks because made by a black guy, I would not tolerate that behavior for a second. I don't get why the opposite should be considered "inclusion and safety".

RangerScience 9y ago
> she dismisses PRs or code reviews because made by white males. I didn't see this and can't find it. Can you point me at where this happens?
- inarush0 9y ago
  > For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written. One PR actually had over 200 comments from 24 different individuals. First paragraph under the section "Collaboration"
- openmosix 9y ago
  [...] For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written. [...] Shortly after this happened to me, the code review feature was prioritized. This functionality was rolled out internally pretty quickly. From that point on I didn't get dogpiled anymore [...] Re: who cares if they were all male? If I open a PR and I get dozens of feedback, either they are legit feedback or not. Or maybe they are all sexist comments, that you should absolutely report. But it sounds like the "all of who were male" wants to imply a specific subtext, but the accusation is neither explicit nor provides any justifications. Saying it in other words: if a colleague would say "I am getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of who were black women)", wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?

thatswrong0 9y ago

> assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them. I think many social activists, esp. those I see on social media, could use a heavy dose of this kind of thinking. People are human, humans make mistakes, and most people I run into in life are too busy with their own affairs to always be perfectly conscious about their words and actions.

pyre 9y ago
Well, the other issue is that if they are constantly barraged by trolls trying to offend them on social media (just because they find offending people to be funny), then it could be more of a "if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail" situation.
acobster 9y ago
True. And at the same time, people submitting their code for review could use some thicker skin.

politician 9y ago

I thought her positive reaction on being placed into such an obviously intentionally isolated team was odd. A team of people just so, without the undesirables, their own org structure with dedicated PMs, QCs, and backlog. The way things fell apart when that cocoon was breached -- both from within and without -- was entirely predictable. How was this supposed to work in the first place? What did they hope to accomplish with this design? There must be better designs for these sorts of initiatives, right? What are Microsoft, Apple, or Google doing?

RangerScience 9y ago
This happened to me at my last job - there were a bunch of us in a celebrated cocoon, and then everything fell apart when it was breached. It wasn't about undesirable people, it was about undesirable management influences; whiplash from constantly changing projects and reorgs, moving goal posts, etc etc. It definitely came with it's fair share of problems. We were trying to isolate ourselves from the craziness in the rest of the company, and we got a lot of cool shit done while it lasted.
- politician 9y ago
  It sounds like you felt it was a net-positive experience. Is there anything you'd want to do differently next time (i.e. to avoid the crash)?
  - RangerScience 9y ago
    Oh 'doh, I got my GP comments mixed up :P Definitely a net-positive. We should have done more outreach and attempts to bring people into our way-less-drama bubble; but if the theories that the other groups were jealous of our successes was true, it might have accelerated our demise. Ditto for being clearer with upper management why were liking the isolation. I think there's an catch-22 problem tho: Anything we could have done would have just been political in some way, which would have been contributing to the drama. Possibly the appropriate middle ground is to clearly and consistently seek feedback and share successes with the top of our management chain; avoid the politics of multi-person, but keep the awareness that we're doing well and will continue to do so with those that make the decisions about whether we'd get to keep going that way. -- Original response: It was definitely a net-positive; I got out (I was encouraged to get out by people I trust and respect) before it had a chance to properly explode, and there's a lot I'd have done differently. Probably the most valuable skill is recognizing that you're in a tailspin; a good way to notice this is failing to achieve your own core values. In my case, people were feeling unheard; I pride myself on listening skills, so that should have been a pretty serious red flag. If you're sucking at stuff you really care about, something's pretty wrong. I would have liked to have the presence of mind and skill to directly address the meta-problem; but that might have just backfired more, since I gathered that my directness was part of the issue. So in that case, just bailing earlier. Make sure you don't stick around past the point where the bridges are burned; I'm a little past that, since I don't feel good when I think about going back, but I know I can. The other option (which was one I was encouraged to take, that then turned into a full departure) was to take a sabbatical. I probably set down 70% of the baggage in the first month, which might have been enough to make a successful comeback - at least in attitude. (There's other complicating factors).

Diamons 9y ago

The main takeaway should be a company has one obligation to you: a job to do and money to be paid. You as an adult bring your services to fix the problem in exchange for said compensation. Personal tesponbility is everything and Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired and removed from any workplace where they act as a menace to their coworkers.

opportune 9y ago
I don't agree that she was acting as a menace to her coworkers. At least, I don't think you can come to that conclusion from her blog post alone. I would be pissed too if I wrote an official blog post for a feature that I cared about, and someone else went behind my back and rewrote it and published it without even telling me. A better way to put what I wrote is this: these problems can all be avoided by approaching problems from a professionalism point of view, rather than a social justice one. Both Coraline and her coworkers did unprofessional things that could have been avoided with better communication, and perhaps more attentive management.
dang 9y ago
> Im glad she was fired. Individuals like her should be fired You can't comment like this here regardless of how strongly you feel or how wrong you think someone else is. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704439. Edit: since you've done this repeatedly and we warned you before, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
- revmoo 9y ago
  This is ridiculous. If you're not going to allow dissenting opinions then you shouldn't be hosting discussions like this at all.

Diamons 9y ago

eqdw 9y ago

> The main thing I've taken away from the whole github situation is that, as a tech company, you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. That doesn't mean exclusively hiring white men and sending out Kalanick-style emails; it means keeping your work environment as professional and politically neutral as possible unless absolutely necessary. At my previous employer, we achieved a 50-50 gender balance on our engineering team. Not through identity politics, outreach initiatives, and politicking, but through professionalism and politeness. We were able to attract many incredibly talented women and minority engineers, by just not being assholes and treating them like any other engineers. In fact, for somewhat of a natural experiment: there was a bifurcation in our engineering organization, a split between the web dev side (our teams) and the functional programming side. The FP side was full of politicking. The FP side's morale was terrible. It was kind of ridiculous. By the time I chose to move on from this company, four out of the six women in our engineering organization were backchanneling with me about how uncomfortable the women-in-tech political rhetoric made them feel. They didn't want to be singled out as special snowflakes. They didn't want everyone else wondering if they were just diversity hires. They just wanted to participate on an equal footing, with everyone else. The fact that they felt more comfortable talking to me, a senior engineer, than HR or the company's Womens' Group is fairly absurd. You don't need all this campaigning and activism to achieve these goals. You just need to be good, competent, professional, and kind people. You need management that has no tolerance for asshole behaviour, regardless of whether it's an ism, or just an asshole. You need a company that notices and rewards good work, even (and especially!) from those people who would otherwise fade into the background. Thing is, a lot of the complaints made by "SJWs" are legit! Racism sucks. Assholes making shitty comments suck. Favouritism and nepotism sucks. But all of these concerns are already dealt with by healthy norms of professionalism, and those norms do a lot better job of advocating fair treatment for everyone, than the activists seem to do. The women on our team didn't want special treatment or top-down interventions. They just wanted to be treated like the equals that they were! They really appreciated the fact that, on our team, they got that, and it wasn't a big deal. When you're facing a team, company, or culture that appears problematic, consider that instead of being sexist, management may just be shitty, incompetent assholes _in general_. Healthy, mature, capable, professional teams are not like this.

roguecoder 9y ago

Those consequences are only present for women or people of color: white men don't take the same reputation hit for promoting diversity and fairness: https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-for-promoting-diversity https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-f...

opportune 9y ago
Sorry, could you clarify what you mean by "those consequences"?
- roguecoder 9y ago
  For women and people of color, supporting diversity was found to have a negative impact on how effective they were perceived to be, lowering performance ratings and reducing the chance of promotion. The same wasn't true for white men, so even though white dudes weren't rewarded for it, we can support marginalized people without sacrificing our careers.
ForHackernews 9y ago
HBR also claims that "Diversity policies rarely make companies fairer, and they feel threatening to white men" https://hbr.org/2016/01/diversity-policies-dont-help-women-or-minorities-and-they-make-white-men-feel-threatened https://hbr.org/2016/01/diversity-policies-dont-help-women-o...

roguecoder 9y ago

And of course, many of the products we code are inherently political. It is no more possible for a social network like Github to be "politically neutral" than it would be possible for a bank to be "security neutral".

opportune 9y ago
Hence the qualifier "absolutely necessary." For example, harassment is bad, period. Github did the right thing in taking steps to address it by forming a team of developers to address harassment vectors. That said, it might not have been the best idea to frame harassment in the context of the wider social justice movement. It may or may not fall into that group (depending on what you believe) and I'm not trying to argue whether it does or doesn't; what I am saying is that regardless, it might not actually be a good idea to inject politics into this situation. Nobody would say that preventing harassment is bad, but you will piss people off by injecting larger narratives into the issue. If I could summarize, I guess I'm saying "go easy on the intersectionality."

kevintb 9y ago

You are so sadly mistaken to think that you can "stay away from social justice sphere". Taking the example of a survey question in the blog post, > What is your gender?" The multiple-choice options were "Male", "Female", and "Transgender" What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case? I would think, at the very least, an "Other" field would be a 1000x improvement from a "Transgender" option. > I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here People like you (and the kind of reaction you are describing here) are the reason why more people don't report discrimination and harassment issues.

YorickPeterse 9y ago
> What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case? * "Male" * "Female" * "Other (feel free to specify in the text field below)" Or something along those lines, it's not that hard.
- pfooti 9y ago
  One could imagine just putting a text entry field for gender, so as to not other any gender identity that doesn't align with the male-female binary. One could also imagine putting other fields in for respondents to self-identify as trans, should they want. That said, it seems a very neutral approach to gender self-reporting is self-defeating (consider that, at least for bathroom laws in some US states), the very notion of something that's not on the assigned-at-birth male-female binary is itself controversial. I guess if your gender choices included "deconstruct the male-female binary" or something, that'd be overtly political, but at least in this political climate just acknowledging the existence of some people seems to be a political act. (one I'm in favor of, fwiw, but I'm one of those people that argue that being "apolitical" is just cover for being politically in favor of the status quo).
  - sethrin 9y ago
    Right, the problem of the gender binary is that it never existed. What we have is trans-erasure. More generally it seems to me to prove that, with respect to Mr Burke, all that is necessary for evil to be done to a person is for good people to do nothing.

pdonis 9y ago

> I do get the impression from this kind of expose that she might be difficult to work with. I get that impression as well, but I also get the impression that GitHub is a difficult place to work (from things like the data scientist going straight to her boss to complain, instead of trying to resolve any issue at the coworker level first, which is what would happen in a professional workplace).

rmc 9y ago

> it means keeping your work environment as professional and politically neutral as possible unless absolutely necessary. This sounds good, but I think to some people in tech "professional" and "political neutral" are contradictory goals. And your company has to choose which to take. For example a professional workplace might say "You can't display photos of scantily clad women in the office" or "We're not hiring (female) strippers for our office party" (or "We have reprimanded $MANAGER for taking their team to a strip club") or "You can't use that word in the office to refer to a co-worker because it's mildly/very insulting and has political baggage". And all of those decision are derided by some as "political correctness" or taking political stances.

Chris2048 9y ago
Those things aren't really non "politically neutral", they bring risks of lawsuits. being politically neutral means not being active on an issue when there are no laws to follow, and otherwise taking no stated stance on topics, other than to cite legislative rules.

sotojuan 9y ago

See my comment form yesterday[1], you're absolutely right. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14702902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14702902