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> There is nothing whatsoever preventing a person of any sort from creating a code portfolio You're wrong. Here are some likely hypotheticals: * I'm lower mid
by drhayes9 13y ago
> There is nothing whatsoever preventing a person of any sort from creating a code portfolio
You're wrong. Here are some likely hypotheticals:
* I'm lower middle class with four kids and don't own a computer that isn't owned by work. They own all the code I write on that machine and I'd be fired if they found out I was using it recreationally.
* My security clearance prevents me from publicly contributing for fear of getting swept in a security audit and losing my job.
* I've been harassed in the past by dogged pursuers who have doxed me and SWATed me. Publishing anything under my name is a no-go. If I don't use my real name, how do I participate on mailing lists and collaborate with other users?
So, yeah, I choose not to contribute and I own those choices. But pretending like there's "nothing whatsoever preventing a person" from open source contribution is, like I said, willfully wrongheaded.
That's the point of this article and Ashe Dryden's and the others linked before: there is demographic information associated with open source work in that a particular demographic overwhelmingly is able to contribute vs. others. They're not making idle suppositions; they're backing this stuff up.
- yummyfajitas 13y agoAshe Dryden and others conflate able to contribute with do contribute. They aren't the same thing.
- drhayes9 13y agoFrom the perspective of someone who can make hiring decisions, how do you differentiate the two? Besides, I see it the other way around: they're identifying "can't contribute" instead of "don't contribute" and asking people who make hiring decisions not to assume "don't".
- yummyfajitas 13y agoNear as I can tell, all Ashe Dryden does is digs up some statistics about the overall population (women choose to be caregivers and earn less than men on average) and declares victory. Among other things, if these statistics implied women can't create content and push it to free internet services, wouldn't that imply women couldn't contribute to facebook/instagram/etc? As for distinguishing the two, I don't. My goal is to find good coders, simple as that. In the absence of information suggesting someone is good, I need to assume they aren't.
- drhayes9 13y agoIn the quest of finding "information suggesting someone is good", ignoring the known, recognized biases inherent in your sampling method seems like not such a good idea. You're throwing away data and then saying you have an absence of information. Additionally, her statistics are not solely about women. They are about the multiple, separate groups that encounter obstacles when trying to contribute to open source projects. They include not just gender but race and health. You're brushing away a lot of the subtlety of her argument and then misrepresenting her stance as "victory". On the contrary, she's exhorting us to work together to make our field more equitable and to recognize the deeper social realities underneath the shallow veneer of meritocracy. Two things about your comparison: 1. There's a huge difference between contributing to Instagram/Facebook and contributing to GitHub that I'm sure I don't have to explain to you. 2. Dryden's blog post is not about "creating content and pushing it to free services". It is specifically about contributions to OSS not being inherently meritocratic. I'm not sure why you'd conflate the two.