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I may agree with your point but don't understand the social justice aspect at all; makes it feel like it's something just added in. I think both our perspective

I may agree with your point but don't understand the social justice aspect at all; makes it feel like it's something just added in. I think both our perspective as a society and thereforo educational goals have changed over decades, laterally to any social justice aspect. If nothing else, there are order of magnitude more developers of all sorts today than 25 years ago, both as absolute numbers and as relative percentage of population. Basically the enthusiastic nerds who geek out about anything and everything and want to be hands on are still there, but also a LOT of people who just want a paycheck or just have more limited / specific interests. And they do ok. And education system will provide for them. But I just don't see e.g. for-profit bootcamps with their simplified curriculum as any kind of social justice project.

Spivak 3y ago
And when there is social justice or involved it's about getting more people involved in engineering. I can see where "hey, quit being gross to women" can be read as excluding the unsavory but that framing presumes that a world where that's an intrinsic immutable property of a person. I really don't buy the "some people just can't help being an asshole so having a rule against assholes is exclusionary." The most controversial CoC is by far the Contributor Covenant and rules are be kind and empathetic, show others respect, don't insult or demean others, don't be creepy or sexually harass others, don't doxx people, and behave like adults at work. Like the bar is so low.
- monksy 3y ago
  This is kind of where I was going with that, but I don't agree with the way its being described. I 100% agree with cracking down on individuals who are hostile based on identity, that was unreasonable and should continue to be excluded from projects. The history of the developer circles is that we've been a bit rough with the language. (mount, finger, touch, zip, etc are perfectly acceptable things for linux commmands.. theres even a joke about it). Unsavory jokes in mailing list/code bases, etc. However, we've come upon a bunch of people who take the aggressively negative view on the words and interactions used and have taken it upon themselves to rename things and force changes. (Master/main, master/slave, whitelist/blacklist, [theres a whole list of these "undesirable" language things] etc ). On top of that the CoC has implemented toxic positivity rules on projects. Implementers overlook the fact that they have been used as a weapon to be put in the project it's self. (There have been examples of racial, and gender based discrimination in the enforcement of the rules) All of this brings in people who do not contribute in a UX, DX, engineering, management sort of way. Even when these things are abused/enforced poorly it still has a significant silencing effect and distancing effect from those who would be a positive contributor but is reluctant to participate.
fipar 3y ago
> But I just don't see e.g. for-profit bootcamps with their simplified curriculum as any kind of social justice project. And you're right not seeing them that way! While I'm sure there are now good-faith bootcamps that have the goal of improving the career options of people who may otherwise never get those, the first time I saw the programming/sysadmin bootcamp concept implemented was around 2002, where a company was recruiting kids still in high school to train them for their openings. They did that because there were not enough skilled IT workers back then. Right, what that really meant is, they did that because there were not enough skilled IT workers they could afford back then. Someone did the math and estimated that for some openings, it would be more profitable to train first-time-job-seekers (in a lot of cases, not-yet-job-seekers) than to offer a better deal. They're still in business so I guess it worked!
monksy 3y ago
The SJ part I gave more context in a reply to: Spivak But to address the level of statements: I see SJ as one part of it, not the only or major part. > enthusiastic nerds Maybe it's the spaces I'm in but I'm not seeing that these days. I'm not hearing about personal projects people have made anymore. I'm not seeing a lot of enthusiastic young presenters at conferences etc. I'm just seeing younger people trying to stand out in the rat race and they aren't similar to when I was growing up. (I.e. lan parties, identifying as nerdy people and grouping together, etc). The last young person I recall being like that was a guy who did a presentation on using Joycons at Scaladays 2017? This was a kid that did have experience in the us first robotics group. But f me.. a high schooler pretty good at Scala.. that's awesome!

Spivak 3y ago

And when there is social justice or involved it's about getting more people involved in engineering. I can see where "hey, quit being gross to women" can be read as excluding the unsavory but that framing presumes that a world where that's an intrinsic immutable property of a person. I really don't buy the "some people just can't help being an asshole so having a rule against assholes is exclusionary." The most controversial CoC is by far the Contributor Covenant and rules are be kind and empathetic, show others respect, don't insult or demean others, don't be creepy or sexually harass others, don't doxx people, and behave like adults at work. Like the bar is so low.

monksy 3y ago
This is kind of where I was going with that, but I don't agree with the way its being described. I 100% agree with cracking down on individuals who are hostile based on identity, that was unreasonable and should continue to be excluded from projects. The history of the developer circles is that we've been a bit rough with the language. (mount, finger, touch, zip, etc are perfectly acceptable things for linux commmands.. theres even a joke about it). Unsavory jokes in mailing list/code bases, etc. However, we've come upon a bunch of people who take the aggressively negative view on the words and interactions used and have taken it upon themselves to rename things and force changes. (Master/main, master/slave, whitelist/blacklist, [theres a whole list of these "undesirable" language things] etc ). On top of that the CoC has implemented toxic positivity rules on projects. Implementers overlook the fact that they have been used as a weapon to be put in the project it's self. (There have been examples of racial, and gender based discrimination in the enforcement of the rules) All of this brings in people who do not contribute in a UX, DX, engineering, management sort of way. Even when these things are abused/enforced poorly it still has a significant silencing effect and distancing effect from those who would be a positive contributor but is reluctant to participate.

fipar 3y ago

> But I just don't see e.g. for-profit bootcamps with their simplified curriculum as any kind of social justice project. And you're right not seeing them that way! While I'm sure there are now good-faith bootcamps that have the goal of improving the career options of people who may otherwise never get those, the first time I saw the programming/sysadmin bootcamp concept implemented was around 2002, where a company was recruiting kids still in high school to train them for their openings. They did that because there were not enough skilled IT workers back then. Right, what that really meant is, they did that because there were not enough skilled IT workers they could afford back then. Someone did the math and estimated that for some openings, it would be more profitable to train first-time-job-seekers (in a lot of cases, not-yet-job-seekers) than to offer a better deal. They're still in business so I guess it worked!

monksy 3y ago

The SJ part I gave more context in a reply to: Spivak But to address the level of statements: I see SJ as one part of it, not the only or major part. > enthusiastic nerds Maybe it's the spaces I'm in but I'm not seeing that these days. I'm not hearing about personal projects people have made anymore. I'm not seeing a lot of enthusiastic young presenters at conferences etc. I'm just seeing younger people trying to stand out in the rat race and they aren't similar to when I was growing up. (I.e. lan parties, identifying as nerdy people and grouping together, etc). The last young person I recall being like that was a guy who did a presentation on using Joycons at Scaladays 2017? This was a kid that did have experience in the us first robotics group. But f me.. a high schooler pretty good at Scala.. that's awesome!