23 ms·

There's a couple of issues that stand out to me: Github is engaging in risky behaviour by reaching out to individuals (specifically activists) for hire explicit

There's a couple of issues that stand out to me: Github is engaging in risky behaviour by reaching out to individuals (specifically activists) for hire explicitly on the basis of "diversity" and trying to incorporate those individuals in a highly merit-based environment. Secondly, Coraline seems to think that human relationships are a one way street: that she is entitled to be direct and even confrontational or insensitive, especially if she believes she is "right" or in a "mentor" role, and yet her peers are expected to walk on eggshells around her, lest they be accused of attacking her. One part that stood out as particularly odd was her insistence to stay at work while she was suffering with a mental health issue that was clearly affecting her job performance, in spite of her manager's request that she take mental health leave. It sounds like she just flat out ignored her manager under the assumption that her manager just needed to accept whatever her therapist advised her to do, which is kind of ridiculous on the face of it.

thehardsphere 9y ago
This one way street also extends to the way Coraline's accomplishments at GitHub are presented in the article. There's all of this talk about all of the code she pushed and all of the popular features she wrote, but there's no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured, e.g. what her management was expecting her to do. So when the negative review is mentioned, we're supposed to be shocked by it. Certainly she is shocked by it. That doesn't mean she should have been.
- pyre 9y ago
  You're saying: > no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured But per the blog post: > Based on the positive feedback from my one-on-ones and how well I was tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level, I was hopeful of getting a promotion and a raise. I'm confused as to how one could be "tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level" but not be measured by those metrics.
  - thehardsphere 9y ago
    That's addressed later by her boss: > I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count. So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period. Here's another question: Why were weekly one-on-one meetings happening to discuss these issues? Are weekly one-on-ones typical at GitHub?
    - pyre 9y ago
      I guess the other issue is why was the review happening 4 months after the period ended, especially if they had started working on improvements in the meantime. What was the point of all that work / those improvements, if they were just going to ignore it because it wasn't in the "correct period?" Shouldn't the review have happened closer to the end of the period, so that all of that progress could be part of improvement?
      - thehardsphere 9y ago
        Those are good questions. I guess I didn't find it implausible on its face, because I've never known any company to do reviews in a prompt and timely fashion. It would help if we had an inside perspective on how their reviews work from someone who isn't invested in this specific story.
      - hosh 9y ago
        There's a book (I can't recall the name) written by a former HR professional on the actual function of HR in a corporation: a way to mitigate liability when firing people. That seems like the most plausible scenario given what I am reading from this blog post. If you were going to fire a well-known activist and you did not want to give away any ammunition for getting sued, there's a whole song and dance to make sure it happens. This way, you can be fired for legal reasons rather than the real reason. I'm obviously taking a cynical take on this -- there are lots of organizations that try to use performance reviews to help an employee's career, and HR that is there to help the employees, not to bail the company out of litigation.
- joatmon-snoo 9y ago
  > [My manager] went back to the issue of my lack of empathy in communications and collaboration. I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count. She went on to say that I was not fulfilling my responsibilities as an engineer because for the first month after a new developer was added to our team, I had not done any code reviews for her. I told my manager that I only participated in code reviews to which I was invited, in large part because of my experience at the beginning with drive-by reviews, and that the new developer hadn't started requesting reviews from me until February. Again, the facts didn't seem to matter. > My overall review was a "Does Not Meet Expectations." I was shocked and upset. A bad review out of the blue was not something that I had experienced before. I thought I had good rapport with my manager, and that if there was a problem that we would have been addressing it at our weekly meetings. In my mind this was a serious management failure, but there was apparently nothing I could do about it. Emphasis on "addressing it at our weekly meetings". This seems to be far more of a management failure than Coraline's failure.
  - bartread 9y ago
    On the face of it your point seems to be entirely reasonable. The problem is that we only have one side of the story here, and it's extremely unlikely we'll ever hear or read the other side. Clearly there have been some pretty serious problems but I don't feel comfortable root-causing them based off an account from a single individual.
    - minusSeven 9y ago
      you will likely never know the whole story. Its entirely up to you to believe what you want.
  - thehardsphere 9y ago
    As I pointed out earlier, her boss addressed the weekly meeting thing directly, and Coraline mentions it: > I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count. So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period. Re-reading it again, I'm not convinced that this is a management failure either. The section titled Empathy starts with: > Starting in December, in my weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager, we would review all of my written communication (issues, pull requests, code reviews, and Slack messages) to talk about how I could improve. It felt ridiculous but I went along with it, and did my best to address my manager's feedback and concerns. One way to read that is that her manager was trying to address these problems, but Coraline didn't understand how serious they were, because she dismissed them as "ridiculous."
RangerScience 9y ago
I didn't get the one-way street at all. In my (limited) experience, one-way streets like this happen because the other party either never starts talking to you, or because they shut down the conversation at some point.
- throwaway8800 9y ago
  > or because they shut down the conversation at some point. That's the vibe I got from her post (that the conversation just stopped at a certain point), but that's really my point; in adult, human interactions, if you behave in ways that people find unacceptable, people can and will at one point simply say, "I've had enough" and shut down further dialogue because they do not find communicating with you to be constructive or productive. They are within their rights as human beings to do so. Some people seem to have a "I have a certain approach and you must accept it and deal with me" attitude and that's just not how the world works. You can try to push a bad, combative attitude on other people, but there's just nothing that says that they have to accept it.
  - RangerScience 9y ago
    You're correct about this, so, let me be clearer: In my experience, they ghost; or they start ghosted. Yes, there's a point at which you're completely justified in shutting down further dialogue because you do not find the communication constructive or productive. That point is after you have said that you do not find the communication constructive or productive. (It sounds like your impression from the OP is that they didn't ghost too early; I didn't form an impression about that, but your take sounds reasonable.) There's a flipside to your (correct) point about "that's not just how the world works"; basically, if you find yourself "having to accept my approach and just deal with it", are you sure you're not yourself requiring me to adopt to your communication modalities? Why are you sure you're not telling me to accept it and deal with you? If I prefer directness and you prefer obliqueness, who is correct, and why? (I find dealing with subtext and other "implies" to be the bad, evasive attitude - why would I have to accept it?).
    - 9y ago
draw_down 9y ago
> Secondly, Coraline seems to think that human relationships are a one way street: that she is entitled to be direct and even confrontational or insensitive, especially if she believes she is "right" or in a "mentor" role, and yet her peers are expected to walk on eggshells around her, lest they be accused of attacking her. I got this vibe too. Empathy on the part of others (or rather its lack) is discussed quite a bit, but no consideration is given for the person who wrote the survey who was upset by her feedback. From the subtext it sounds like we are to believe this person was silly to be upset, because the feedback was so anodyne, but it really does seem like a part of the story there is missing. Based on the usage of the "her" pronoun, I'm guessing this other person is also a woman, who also faces issues of harassment and unfairness in tech. And so the lack of empathy for where that person was coming from was quite striking.
- lucozade 9y ago
  > I'm guessing this other person is also a woman I'm going to hazard a guess that it was Frannie Zlotnick who led the survey [0]. As her research interests include gender and race stereotyping [1], I'm guessing that she objected to being lectured on the subject. [0] https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-worse-tech-overall/ https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-wor... [1] https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/frannie-zlotnick https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/frannie-zlotnic...
det0x 9y ago
> She told me that the data scientist who had written the survey questions was very upset and had gone to her manager to complain about me. >This was the first instance of what came to be referred to as my "non-empathetic communication style". I like how she was pissed when she was "out victim-ed" HA! I think you are right, employees like this have an bigger agenda they are focused on rather than doing work of the company. And the fact that she says she has bipolar depression (and she was on involuntarily mental commitment for 8-days!?! A 5150 in California is 72-hours!) and yet she can't imagine why somebody would say she is not doing well at work, is also ridiculous on the face of it.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  > And the fact that she says she has bipolar depression (and she was on involuntarily mental commitment for 8-days!?! A 5150 in California is 72-hours!) You can of course be involuntarily confined in California for over 72 hours. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80%93Short_Act#5250 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80...
- Gaelan 9y ago
  She said in Twitter that she inadvertently signed away the right to release after 72 hours.
acobster 9y ago
She was right, and as a senior engineer she was in a mentor role. I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight. Where you see an instance of her co-workers being accused of attacking her, I see her lines of communication being shut down from above. A simple one-on-one conversation probably could have resolved that situation very easily, but GH management seems in this case to have insulated that person from learning from their mistake. Not the kind of effort I would expect from an organization that's truly trying to be "inclusive.
- throwaway8800 9y ago
  > She was right, and as a senior engineer she was in a mentor role. Apparently not?
- ninjaboy2 9y ago
  To play devil's advocate: ------------------------------ > As a senior engineer she was in a mentor role. Being in a mentor role does not mean you have to right to mentor. Assuming you have a superior position, and deciding to use it to explain something obvious to someone else as "educating" them is not a good social interaction for the other person, and may make them feel trapped and uncomfortable. The author never said the junior developer expressed interest in mentorship, merely that "this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it." Not willing engaged, but "benefiting." Without context, it is imaginable that said mentoree didn't want these interactions or this relationship and the author never identified this social cue. > I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight. The article starts by complaining about "drive-by issue comments", then described opening what might be considered a drive-by issue. That could be construed as contradictory. Moreover, said issue may be construed as a (company-)public dressing-down. A developer came though and, in a public manner observable by all their peers, informed another that they were not being sensitive enough. It's reasonable, I think, to be upset in that context. > A simple one-on-one conversation probably could have resolved that situation very easily, but GH management seems in this case to have insulated that person from learning from their mistake The author could have initiated such a conversation herself in lieu of the issue. ------------------------------ My point is that a lot of things are a matter of perception, and one person's is seldom the whole story. Caroline clearly had a bad go of it at GitHub, that isn't deniable. But individuals' perceptions are fickle things, and it is seldom the case that any one tells the whole story.
romanovcode 9y ago
> Github is engaging in risky behaviour by reaching out to individuals (specifically activists) for hire explicitly on the basis of "diversity" and trying to incorporate those individuals in a highly merit-based environment. This is the main issue right there. If anyone is reading this and wants to have a lot of HR/PR related problems in his/her company - start doing this and problems will pile up.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  The reasoning behind that is (probably) that unless they hire for diversity, it will remain a highly merit-based environment. Have to start somewhere.
  - Danihan 9y ago
    God forbid
  - xkcd-sucks 9y ago
    So diversity isn't its own merit?!
  - jubalfh 9y ago
    Pray explain.
  - jubalfh 9y ago
    Pray explain.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- andkon 9y ago
  The sum of "problems" she brought was that she was direct in her feedback (surely that doesn't matter to a merit-based company?). If that's all it takes for your company to come crumbling down, then good riddance.
BFatts 9y ago
"It sounds like she just flat out ignored her manager under the assumption that her manager just needed to accept whatever her therapist advised her to do, which is kind of ridiculous on the face of it." How, exactly, is this ridiculous? Is her manager qualified to give her mental health advice? Is her therapist less qualified? Is there some business "thing" that must be considered when suffering with a mental health issue? You make it sound like she basically told her boss to "fuck off" while expounding what her therapist said. In reality, if was her boss who wasn't very empathetic. Probably because the cunt couldn't be. Sympathy is showing concern for others where you don't have direct experience yourself. Empathy is where you share the experience or something very similar. So, for a company to claim that she had lack of empathy is what is ridiculous.
- sctb 9y ago
  You'll have to please leave out the personal insults if you don't want this account to be banned.

thehardsphere 9y ago

This one way street also extends to the way Coraline's accomplishments at GitHub are presented in the article. There's all of this talk about all of the code she pushed and all of the popular features she wrote, but there's no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured, e.g. what her management was expecting her to do. So when the negative review is mentioned, we're supposed to be shocked by it. Certainly she is shocked by it. That doesn't mean she should have been.

pyre 9y ago
You're saying: > no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured But per the blog post: > Based on the positive feedback from my one-on-ones and how well I was tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level, I was hopeful of getting a promotion and a raise. I'm confused as to how one could be "tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level" but not be measured by those metrics.
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  That's addressed later by her boss: > I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count. So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period. Here's another question: Why were weekly one-on-one meetings happening to discuss these issues? Are weekly one-on-ones typical at GitHub?
  - pyre 9y ago
    I guess the other issue is why was the review happening 4 months after the period ended, especially if they had started working on improvements in the meantime. What was the point of all that work / those improvements, if they were just going to ignore it because it wasn't in the "correct period?" Shouldn't the review have happened closer to the end of the period, so that all of that progress could be part of improvement?
    - thehardsphere 9y ago
      Those are good questions. I guess I didn't find it implausible on its face, because I've never known any company to do reviews in a prompt and timely fashion. It would help if we had an inside perspective on how their reviews work from someone who isn't invested in this specific story.
    - hosh 9y ago
      There's a book (I can't recall the name) written by a former HR professional on the actual function of HR in a corporation: a way to mitigate liability when firing people. That seems like the most plausible scenario given what I am reading from this blog post. If you were going to fire a well-known activist and you did not want to give away any ammunition for getting sued, there's a whole song and dance to make sure it happens. This way, you can be fired for legal reasons rather than the real reason. I'm obviously taking a cynical take on this -- there are lots of organizations that try to use performance reviews to help an employee's career, and HR that is there to help the employees, not to bail the company out of litigation.
joatmon-snoo 9y ago
> [My manager] went back to the issue of my lack of empathy in communications and collaboration. I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count. She went on to say that I was not fulfilling my responsibilities as an engineer because for the first month after a new developer was added to our team, I had not done any code reviews for her. I told my manager that I only participated in code reviews to which I was invited, in large part because of my experience at the beginning with drive-by reviews, and that the new developer hadn't started requesting reviews from me until February. Again, the facts didn't seem to matter. > My overall review was a "Does Not Meet Expectations." I was shocked and upset. A bad review out of the blue was not something that I had experienced before. I thought I had good rapport with my manager, and that if there was a problem that we would have been addressing it at our weekly meetings. In my mind this was a serious management failure, but there was apparently nothing I could do about it. Emphasis on "addressing it at our weekly meetings". This seems to be far more of a management failure than Coraline's failure.
- bartread 9y ago
  On the face of it your point seems to be entirely reasonable. The problem is that we only have one side of the story here, and it's extremely unlikely we'll ever hear or read the other side. Clearly there have been some pretty serious problems but I don't feel comfortable root-causing them based off an account from a single individual.
  - minusSeven 9y ago
    you will likely never know the whole story. Its entirely up to you to believe what you want.
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  As I pointed out earlier, her boss addressed the weekly meeting thing directly, and Coraline mentions it: > I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count. So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period. Re-reading it again, I'm not convinced that this is a management failure either. The section titled Empathy starts with: > Starting in December, in my weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager, we would review all of my written communication (issues, pull requests, code reviews, and Slack messages) to talk about how I could improve. It felt ridiculous but I went along with it, and did my best to address my manager's feedback and concerns. One way to read that is that her manager was trying to address these problems, but Coraline didn't understand how serious they were, because she dismissed them as "ridiculous."

RangerScience 9y ago

I didn't get the one-way street at all. In my (limited) experience, one-way streets like this happen because the other party either never starts talking to you, or because they shut down the conversation at some point.

throwaway8800 9y ago
> or because they shut down the conversation at some point. That's the vibe I got from her post (that the conversation just stopped at a certain point), but that's really my point; in adult, human interactions, if you behave in ways that people find unacceptable, people can and will at one point simply say, "I've had enough" and shut down further dialogue because they do not find communicating with you to be constructive or productive. They are within their rights as human beings to do so. Some people seem to have a "I have a certain approach and you must accept it and deal with me" attitude and that's just not how the world works. You can try to push a bad, combative attitude on other people, but there's just nothing that says that they have to accept it.
- RangerScience 9y ago
  You're correct about this, so, let me be clearer: In my experience, they ghost; or they start ghosted. Yes, there's a point at which you're completely justified in shutting down further dialogue because you do not find the communication constructive or productive. That point is after you have said that you do not find the communication constructive or productive. (It sounds like your impression from the OP is that they didn't ghost too early; I didn't form an impression about that, but your take sounds reasonable.) There's a flipside to your (correct) point about "that's not just how the world works"; basically, if you find yourself "having to accept my approach and just deal with it", are you sure you're not yourself requiring me to adopt to your communication modalities? Why are you sure you're not telling me to accept it and deal with you? If I prefer directness and you prefer obliqueness, who is correct, and why? (I find dealing with subtext and other "implies" to be the bad, evasive attitude - why would I have to accept it?).
  - 9y ago

draw_down 9y ago

> Secondly, Coraline seems to think that human relationships are a one way street: that she is entitled to be direct and even confrontational or insensitive, especially if she believes she is "right" or in a "mentor" role, and yet her peers are expected to walk on eggshells around her, lest they be accused of attacking her. I got this vibe too. Empathy on the part of others (or rather its lack) is discussed quite a bit, but no consideration is given for the person who wrote the survey who was upset by her feedback. From the subtext it sounds like we are to believe this person was silly to be upset, because the feedback was so anodyne, but it really does seem like a part of the story there is missing. Based on the usage of the "her" pronoun, I'm guessing this other person is also a woman, who also faces issues of harassment and unfairness in tech. And so the lack of empathy for where that person was coming from was quite striking.

lucozade 9y ago
> I'm guessing this other person is also a woman I'm going to hazard a guess that it was Frannie Zlotnick who led the survey [0]. As her research interests include gender and race stereotyping [1], I'm guessing that she objected to being lectured on the subject. [0] https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-worse-tech-overall/ https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-wor... [1] https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/frannie-zlotnick https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/frannie-zlotnic...

det0x 9y ago

> She told me that the data scientist who had written the survey questions was very upset and had gone to her manager to complain about me. >This was the first instance of what came to be referred to as my "non-empathetic communication style". I like how she was pissed when she was "out victim-ed" HA! I think you are right, employees like this have an bigger agenda they are focused on rather than doing work of the company. And the fact that she says she has bipolar depression (and she was on involuntarily mental commitment for 8-days!?! A 5150 in California is 72-hours!) and yet she can't imagine why somebody would say she is not doing well at work, is also ridiculous on the face of it.

pcwalton 9y ago
> And the fact that she says she has bipolar depression (and she was on involuntarily mental commitment for 8-days!?! A 5150 in California is 72-hours!) You can of course be involuntarily confined in California for over 72 hours. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80%93Short_Act#5250 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80...
Gaelan 9y ago
She said in Twitter that she inadvertently signed away the right to release after 72 hours.

acobster 9y ago

She was right, and as a senior engineer she was in a mentor role. I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight. Where you see an instance of her co-workers being accused of attacking her, I see her lines of communication being shut down from above. A simple one-on-one conversation probably could have resolved that situation very easily, but GH management seems in this case to have insulated that person from learning from their mistake. Not the kind of effort I would expect from an organization that's truly trying to be "inclusive.

throwaway8800 9y ago
> She was right, and as a senior engineer she was in a mentor role. Apparently not?
ninjaboy2 9y ago
To play devil's advocate: ------------------------------ > As a senior engineer she was in a mentor role. Being in a mentor role does not mean you have to right to mentor. Assuming you have a superior position, and deciding to use it to explain something obvious to someone else as "educating" them is not a good social interaction for the other person, and may make them feel trapped and uncomfortable. The author never said the junior developer expressed interest in mentorship, merely that "this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it." Not willing engaged, but "benefiting." Without context, it is imaginable that said mentoree didn't want these interactions or this relationship and the author never identified this social cue. > I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight. The article starts by complaining about "drive-by issue comments", then described opening what might be considered a drive-by issue. That could be construed as contradictory. Moreover, said issue may be construed as a (company-)public dressing-down. A developer came though and, in a public manner observable by all their peers, informed another that they were not being sensitive enough. It's reasonable, I think, to be upset in that context. > A simple one-on-one conversation probably could have resolved that situation very easily, but GH management seems in this case to have insulated that person from learning from their mistake The author could have initiated such a conversation herself in lieu of the issue. ------------------------------ My point is that a lot of things are a matter of perception, and one person's is seldom the whole story. Caroline clearly had a bad go of it at GitHub, that isn't deniable. But individuals' perceptions are fickle things, and it is seldom the case that any one tells the whole story.

romanovcode 9y ago

> Github is engaging in risky behaviour by reaching out to individuals (specifically activists) for hire explicitly on the basis of "diversity" and trying to incorporate those individuals in a highly merit-based environment. This is the main issue right there. If anyone is reading this and wants to have a lot of HR/PR related problems in his/her company - start doing this and problems will pile up.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
The reasoning behind that is (probably) that unless they hire for diversity, it will remain a highly merit-based environment. Have to start somewhere.
- Danihan 9y ago
  God forbid
- xkcd-sucks 9y ago
  So diversity isn't its own merit?!
- jubalfh 9y ago
  Pray explain.
- jubalfh 9y ago
  Pray explain.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
andkon 9y ago
The sum of "problems" she brought was that she was direct in her feedback (surely that doesn't matter to a merit-based company?). If that's all it takes for your company to come crumbling down, then good riddance.

BFatts 9y ago

"It sounds like she just flat out ignored her manager under the assumption that her manager just needed to accept whatever her therapist advised her to do, which is kind of ridiculous on the face of it." How, exactly, is this ridiculous? Is her manager qualified to give her mental health advice? Is her therapist less qualified? Is there some business "thing" that must be considered when suffering with a mental health issue? You make it sound like she basically told her boss to "fuck off" while expounding what her therapist said. In reality, if was her boss who wasn't very empathetic. Probably because the cunt couldn't be. Sympathy is showing concern for others where you don't have direct experience yourself. Empathy is where you share the experience or something very similar. So, for a company to claim that she had lack of empathy is what is ridiculous.

sctb 9y ago
You'll have to please leave out the personal insults if you don't want this account to be banned.