6 ms·

The most surprising part to me was that go devs are feeling less and less welcome in "the community" and less and less welcome to contribute. I wonder why that

The most surprising part to me was that go devs are feeling less and less welcome in "the community" and less and less welcome to contribute. I wonder why that is.

axaxs 6y ago
For me at least, it's because the size of both the community and the official team expanded hugely in the last few years. I don't feel like they need or want outside help anymore.
taklimakan 6y ago
This is probably a rhetorical question, anyway if the feeling of being less welcomed comes from how likely the devs are to accept random or poorly thought-out proposals, I don’t think there’s any problem at all. I say, do not welcome them! The core Go team is made of extremely competent and professional engineers, and I expect successful language change proposals or pull requests to be on par with that. Otherwise what are we even talking about?
- rhabarba 6y ago
  I’d wish more technical projects would focus on competent and professional engineers again. Instead, we see calls for more diversity everywhere, including this very survey. I wonder what would be the advantage of having people from different ethnical backgrounds over having people from different tech backgrounds...
  - rudi-c 6y ago
    The idea of focusing diversity isn't at odds with focusing on competence. The premise is that certain groups of people who do not fit the stereotype of a male, nerdy, white or asian programmer are often assumed to be less technically competent because of their appearance. As an Asian male, I can't tell you how often people assume I'm smart just by appearance alone. This leads to a hiring process that does _worse_ at hiring component engineers. Even if they are hired, the company culture might not be inclusive enough to retain them - e.g. lots of women leave the industry for that reason. This also leads to a _loss_ of talent. It's true that some companies might do diversity poorly and hire solely to hit diversity numbers. I don't personally feel good about that. However, in practice I've seen companies that focus on diversity adopt the practice of putting more effort into reaching out to diverse candidates, but have the exact same hiring process & hiring bar applied to them. Those reasonable companies don't make the news -- after all, the unreasonable stories tend to be the ones that get attention. Again, it's not to say that your concern never happens. However, framing diversity as if it was fundamentally at odds with competence, especially in a completely unrelated thread about a programming language, does a disservice to both diversity _and_ competence.
    - postpostpost 6y ago
      Black Lives Matter is just the name for a political movement and organization aligned with Critical Social Justice and specifically Critical Race Theory which actually dispenses with the idea of meritocracy as a worthwhile goal (see postmeritocracy.org for an explanation of this view; the author of that site is Coraline Ada Ehmke, author of the Contributor Covenant, which has been adopted by many projects including Golang) The diversity you're talking about uses the definition everyone is familiar with from English. The diversity Black Lives Matter is talking about is a technical term with the definition coming from Critical Race Theory, which defines whites as the least diverse categorically due to historically injustices against BIPOC folx. > The idea of focusing diversity isn't at odds with focusing on competence It is explicitly such, as stated by the movement you defend.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        > The diversity you're talking about uses the definition everyone is familiar with from English. > The diversity Black Lives Matter is talking about is a technical term with the definition coming from Critical Race Theory, which defines whites as the least diverse categorically due to historically injustices against BIPOC folx. Can you provide a citation for that from a CRT source, not a political opponent to CRT? > > The idea of focusing diversity isn't at odds with focusing on competence > It is explicitly such, as stated by the movement you defend. I think you're misunderstanding the major points of Ehmke and others. It's not that we should give up on competency being a driving factor, but instead that the set of organizational tools grouped together as "meritocracy" don't actually make competency the final end result because of the biases those tools impart. "Not a great culture fit" and all that.
      - alexkarbiv 6y ago
        Don't "overthink". Just obey corporations, don't question or doubt their agents, propagandists, storytellers("theorists"), city mayors, kapo, etc.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      It seems like we might try to measure and confirm that the problem exists in the first place and to what extent. Then we might try something and measure again to see if it helped or hurt.
  - vulcan01 6y ago
    Competence and professionalism are not quantifiable; diversity is. Hence, when a $manager wants to improve $project (for a raise), they will invariably try to push for diversity. This is in the context of open-source projects where identity does not matter (and is often not known).
- lhorie 6y ago
  Here's a different (and potentially offensive, please put away the pitchforks) perspective. Recently at work, I was prompted by a coworker to look at a code review page for some go code they wrote. I don't normally review go code at work, so something that struck me was that the code review comments left by a go developer seemed quite a bit more nitpicky than code reviews I'm used to seeing as a non-go developer working with non-go languages. A lot of it was minor stuff like styleguide line items (isn't that sort of stuff what go fmt and go vet are for?) Golang is an extremely simple language (a good thing, IMHO!), but that means two things: 1) a simple language may lack safety features (e.g. anyone can ignore an err or forget to check for nil pointers), which lead to the need to compensate in other ways, which leads to: 2) the bikeshedding bar is very low in simple languages, and it can lead to institutionalizing opinions in the form of styleguide gospels or other types of "improvements" (think overuse of patterns in Java, another relatively simple language), to the point where the institutional rules put off newcomers who were expecting a breath of fresh air but instead find an "old boys club" (in the sense that they don't feel they have leverage to discuss whatever rules have been set). I also see this phenomenon in other areas, for example, in Javascript, eslint/prettier are supposed to curb bikeshedding, yet there's an awkward dynamic when a new employee wants a new rule, and what follows is 2 hours of bikeshedding with the old guard.
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    Prettier lost me forever over how they handled the issue of massive (IMO correct) pushback over not allowing "break before else". Mozilla got it right on that one. Setting aside "right" from a technical perspective, the Prettier response to the issue was very, very disappointing.
archsurface 6y ago
Strangely, sometime last year I commented on HN about a contribution fiasco, and a bunch of "community" jumped on me, downvoted every response to their refusals to believe it. I've mostly abandoned Go at this point, partly due to the language, very much due to the "community". (Posted from a different account - to save you the time of looking).
tick_tock_tick 6y ago
Google and the core Golang team are getting increasing political and allowing it to leak into the language / infrastructure of the language such a running banner ads for political causes on the main the docs site, https://golang.org/doc https://golang.org/doc. It's not surprising that this makes people feel less welcome.
- pstuart 6y ago
  I can only imagine one group of people who would feel less welcome by that banner. I'd be happy to expand upon that if you would like.
  - tick_tock_tick 6y ago
    Sure! Feel free to expand on it I would be interested in hearing what you have to say. I hope it's at-least nuanced enough to understand that people can be turned away from a programing language's community when it starts to focus on political movements and other aspects unrelated to the language itself even if they don't disagree? That's not even accounting for how perhaps the focus exclusively on American issues could leave the the rest of the world feeling less welcome?
    - monocasa 6y ago
      FWIW, BLM wasn't just an American movement but has had sizeable protests across the world as well.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        The protests in America don’t make much sense as it is—obviously we would expect police deaths to mirror trends in crime, socio-economic status, etc. But in countries like the U.K. where one third of their police killings in a whole year are a terrorist who was in the middle of a stabbing spree? That’s just ideological fashion.
        6y ago
epage 6y ago
As an outsider, my guess is not "bad contributors" or "diversity" like sibling posters but an increasing perception that Go is a Google language and not a community language with how events have played out in scenarios like the package management work where a replacement for what the community was doing came seemingly out of nowhere despite the community trying to work with the core team Note: I could have facts wrong but this is the general impression left which is just as important for respondents on this survey item.
- jidiculous 6y ago
  It is 100% a Google language. Step 0 of their contributor guidelines is to use a Google product (ie a Google account) for authorship of your commits[1]. It's insane to me that this is required for contribution to the language's development. [1]: https://golang.org/doc/contribute#google_account https://golang.org/doc/contribute#google_account
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    Wow. That is egregious.
styluss 6y ago
if you ask a question in r/reddit (I know it's not officially part of the community) you get answers telling you to google stuff or to "just" check the docs where someone writes a package name.
- thiht 6y ago
  I lurk on /r/golang and to be fair there are a lot of crappy low effort questions, so yeah. I wouldn't consider these answers as non inclusive, but I understand that the people asking these crappy questions could feel not included.

The most surprising part to me was that go devs are feeling less and less welcome in "the community" and less and less welcome to contribute. I wonder why that is.

axaxs 6y ago

For me at least, it's because the size of both the community and the official team expanded hugely in the last few years. I don't feel like they need or want outside help anymore.

taklimakan 6y ago

This is probably a rhetorical question, anyway if the feeling of being less welcomed comes from how likely the devs are to accept random or poorly thought-out proposals, I don’t think there’s any problem at all. I say, do not welcome them! The core Go team is made of extremely competent and professional engineers, and I expect successful language change proposals or pull requests to be on par with that. Otherwise what are we even talking about?

rhabarba 6y ago
I’d wish more technical projects would focus on competent and professional engineers again. Instead, we see calls for more diversity everywhere, including this very survey. I wonder what would be the advantage of having people from different ethnical backgrounds over having people from different tech backgrounds...
- rudi-c 6y ago
  The idea of focusing diversity isn't at odds with focusing on competence. The premise is that certain groups of people who do not fit the stereotype of a male, nerdy, white or asian programmer are often assumed to be less technically competent because of their appearance. As an Asian male, I can't tell you how often people assume I'm smart just by appearance alone. This leads to a hiring process that does _worse_ at hiring component engineers. Even if they are hired, the company culture might not be inclusive enough to retain them - e.g. lots of women leave the industry for that reason. This also leads to a _loss_ of talent. It's true that some companies might do diversity poorly and hire solely to hit diversity numbers. I don't personally feel good about that. However, in practice I've seen companies that focus on diversity adopt the practice of putting more effort into reaching out to diverse candidates, but have the exact same hiring process & hiring bar applied to them. Those reasonable companies don't make the news -- after all, the unreasonable stories tend to be the ones that get attention. Again, it's not to say that your concern never happens. However, framing diversity as if it was fundamentally at odds with competence, especially in a completely unrelated thread about a programming language, does a disservice to both diversity _and_ competence.
  - postpostpost 6y ago
    Black Lives Matter is just the name for a political movement and organization aligned with Critical Social Justice and specifically Critical Race Theory which actually dispenses with the idea of meritocracy as a worthwhile goal (see postmeritocracy.org for an explanation of this view; the author of that site is Coraline Ada Ehmke, author of the Contributor Covenant, which has been adopted by many projects including Golang) The diversity you're talking about uses the definition everyone is familiar with from English. The diversity Black Lives Matter is talking about is a technical term with the definition coming from Critical Race Theory, which defines whites as the least diverse categorically due to historically injustices against BIPOC folx. > The idea of focusing diversity isn't at odds with focusing on competence It is explicitly such, as stated by the movement you defend.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      > The diversity you're talking about uses the definition everyone is familiar with from English. > The diversity Black Lives Matter is talking about is a technical term with the definition coming from Critical Race Theory, which defines whites as the least diverse categorically due to historically injustices against BIPOC folx. Can you provide a citation for that from a CRT source, not a political opponent to CRT? > > The idea of focusing diversity isn't at odds with focusing on competence > It is explicitly such, as stated by the movement you defend. I think you're misunderstanding the major points of Ehmke and others. It's not that we should give up on competency being a driving factor, but instead that the set of organizational tools grouped together as "meritocracy" don't actually make competency the final end result because of the biases those tools impart. "Not a great culture fit" and all that.
    - alexkarbiv 6y ago
      Don't "overthink". Just obey corporations, don't question or doubt their agents, propagandists, storytellers("theorists"), city mayors, kapo, etc.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    It seems like we might try to measure and confirm that the problem exists in the first place and to what extent. Then we might try something and measure again to see if it helped or hurt.
- vulcan01 6y ago
  Competence and professionalism are not quantifiable; diversity is. Hence, when a $manager wants to improve $project (for a raise), they will invariably try to push for diversity. This is in the context of open-source projects where identity does not matter (and is often not known).
lhorie 6y ago
Here's a different (and potentially offensive, please put away the pitchforks) perspective. Recently at work, I was prompted by a coworker to look at a code review page for some go code they wrote. I don't normally review go code at work, so something that struck me was that the code review comments left by a go developer seemed quite a bit more nitpicky than code reviews I'm used to seeing as a non-go developer working with non-go languages. A lot of it was minor stuff like styleguide line items (isn't that sort of stuff what go fmt and go vet are for?) Golang is an extremely simple language (a good thing, IMHO!), but that means two things: 1) a simple language may lack safety features (e.g. anyone can ignore an err or forget to check for nil pointers), which lead to the need to compensate in other ways, which leads to: 2) the bikeshedding bar is very low in simple languages, and it can lead to institutionalizing opinions in the form of styleguide gospels or other types of "improvements" (think overuse of patterns in Java, another relatively simple language), to the point where the institutional rules put off newcomers who were expecting a breath of fresh air but instead find an "old boys club" (in the sense that they don't feel they have leverage to discuss whatever rules have been set). I also see this phenomenon in other areas, for example, in Javascript, eslint/prettier are supposed to curb bikeshedding, yet there's an awkward dynamic when a new employee wants a new rule, and what follows is 2 hours of bikeshedding with the old guard.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  Prettier lost me forever over how they handled the issue of massive (IMO correct) pushback over not allowing "break before else". Mozilla got it right on that one. Setting aside "right" from a technical perspective, the Prettier response to the issue was very, very disappointing.

archsurface 6y ago

Strangely, sometime last year I commented on HN about a contribution fiasco, and a bunch of "community" jumped on me, downvoted every response to their refusals to believe it. I've mostly abandoned Go at this point, partly due to the language, very much due to the "community". (Posted from a different account - to save you the time of looking).

tick_tock_tick 6y ago

Google and the core Golang team are getting increasing political and allowing it to leak into the language / infrastructure of the language such a running banner ads for political causes on the main the docs site, https://golang.org/doc https://golang.org/doc. It's not surprising that this makes people feel less welcome.

pstuart 6y ago
I can only imagine one group of people who would feel less welcome by that banner. I'd be happy to expand upon that if you would like.
- tick_tock_tick 6y ago
  Sure! Feel free to expand on it I would be interested in hearing what you have to say. I hope it's at-least nuanced enough to understand that people can be turned away from a programing language's community when it starts to focus on political movements and other aspects unrelated to the language itself even if they don't disagree? That's not even accounting for how perhaps the focus exclusively on American issues could leave the the rest of the world feeling less welcome?
  - monocasa 6y ago
    FWIW, BLM wasn't just an American movement but has had sizeable protests across the world as well.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      The protests in America don’t make much sense as it is—obviously we would expect police deaths to mirror trends in crime, socio-economic status, etc. But in countries like the U.K. where one third of their police killings in a whole year are a terrorist who was in the middle of a stabbing spree? That’s just ideological fashion.
      - 6y ago

epage 6y ago

As an outsider, my guess is not "bad contributors" or "diversity" like sibling posters but an increasing perception that Go is a Google language and not a community language with how events have played out in scenarios like the package management work where a replacement for what the community was doing came seemingly out of nowhere despite the community trying to work with the core team Note: I could have facts wrong but this is the general impression left which is just as important for respondents on this survey item.

jidiculous 6y ago
It is 100% a Google language. Step 0 of their contributor guidelines is to use a Google product (ie a Google account) for authorship of your commits[1]. It's insane to me that this is required for contribution to the language's development. [1]: https://golang.org/doc/contribute#google_account https://golang.org/doc/contribute#google_account
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  Wow. That is egregious.

styluss 6y ago

if you ask a question in r/reddit (I know it's not officially part of the community) you get answers telling you to google stuff or to "just" check the docs where someone writes a package name.

thiht 6y ago
I lurk on /r/golang and to be fair there are a lot of crappy low effort questions, so yeah. I wouldn't consider these answers as non inclusive, but I understand that the people asking these crappy questions could feel not included.