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Any reaction should be towards Joyent - not Ben. What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing. So

by yapcguy 13y ago

Any reaction should be towards Joyent - not Ben. What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing. So don't work for Joyent as there is no job security when you can be fired for a commit. If you're a Joyent employee and you're not part of the Node.js groupie love-fest, better spend your holiday looking for a new job. Imagine a lunch-time conversation over the Affordable Care Act, would you dare voice your opinion? To Bryan Cantrill, just because you're the boss doesn't mean you can fire at will, without cause, and ruin a programmer's life, unless that is you like the idea of a lawsuit and getting into the press since literally nobody is talking about Joyent and SmartOS anymore.

smtddr 13y ago
I don't agree with you at all. Ben's dismissive attitude, and yours, is exactly the issue tech-communities needs to tackle & extinguish. No, sed 's/him/them/' isn't going to suddenly make the world a better place but it's the thought that counts. Every small step counts. Ben's attitude about it, just closing the PR and claiming not to be concerned with trivial matters is something that at least needed a serious HR sensitivity discussion. Firing Ben for it is extreme, but not unreasonable if a company wanted to send a pro-diversity message; albeit extreme. These kinds of actions also provide a good filter for future employees. If you're so bothered by Joyent's blog post that you won't work there and you tell others to quit, it's probably better for Joyent not to have you as an employee to begin with. +1 on that PR and on Joyent's blog post. EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  I think you have a fair point. HR issue. For an employee this is a big red flag - now Ben's employer will probably receive some angry emails this weekend and Ben will probably face some angry comments this weekend too. Nasty situation. If we do let Ben be a good man as he claims to be, then maybe it was a stupidity to rule out the ticket so quickly. How would a clever "sexist" person do? This "sexist" person would probably say "well, I don't like they. Not the way my teacher taught me grammar. Rephrase the whole sentence." Or just don't bother deal with any pull request related to sexist. But I agree with the parent. The CEO is afraid of any negativity. This is a typical way people handle crisis - find someone responsible and fire that person. A true heroic responsible CEO should first accept / address issue with the PR, then if the community thinks "YES DO IT" then accept the pull request and requires at least 2 contributors with sign off privilege to accept a pull request from that point onward. Firing someone quickly is the worst way to be a boss.
- yapcguy 13y ago
  I'm not talking about the pronoun issue, I'm focusing on the hypothetical firing. It's completely unreasonable to fire someone over what in essence is reversing a commit. It might warrant a discussion with a manager, it might warrant an official warning, and perhaps some other measure but summary dismissal? No way. In my opinion, this is Bryan backing Isaacs, perhaps in a clash of egos with Ben, and grand-standing over an issue which he believes will earn Joyent brownie points. I don't want any developer to work in an environment where the CEO openly boasts about firing people, so in summary, I guess, fuck Joyent.
  - smtddr 13y ago
    And I'm focusing on what you wrote: >> What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing. If you think what took place in that github thread was nothing, you represent exactly the dismissive attitude of sexism the tech-industry needs to get rid of.
    - yapcguy 13y ago
      I don't see anything in that Github thread to warrant summary dismissal of an employee. A good CEO would ask the relevant manager to sit the two parties down and resolve the situation. If it were not possible, human resources could be brought in to assess the situation and perhaps administer training and/or disciplinary action. A sign of a bad CEO is knee-jerk firing and to write a blog post, boasting about such a hypothetical firing, shows incredibly poor judgement. Let us imagine though that Bryan was right. So why doesn't Bryan fire Isaacs too? Isaacs broke commit rules by not getting his patch signed... what if this was some other commit which made it into deployment and brought down services for paying customers? Shouldn't Bryan view Isaacs as a bad employee who disregards rules and is thus a dangerous liability to the company? "@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided." https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
      - 13y ago
- vezzy-fnord 13y ago
  EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned. Oh no, quite the contrary, I'm afraid. They constantly attract large discussions and pointless drama that always gets nowhere. As we are observing right now.
- mercurial 13y ago
  Wonderful. We need tags on HN. You could tag this #pointless_open_source_drama. What happened: a maintainer refuses a pull request changing a pronoun in a doc on the grounds of "triviality", without giving more context. Joyent at this stage had two options: a) reach out to him to stress why they thought it was actually really, really important, or at least get his deeper reasons b) act as if somebody peed in their coffee and write an angry blog post talking about firing people, because Open Source doesn't have enough drama already - it's just missing some more good keywords like Pulseaudio to trigger the best flamewars It's fascinating to see how supposedly smart people behave with the emotional maturity of a toddler. Anyway, as of a couple of hours ago, Ben posted this comment on the Github issue: Hi all, let me try to clear up a few things. Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc. That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object? Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them. To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field? I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks. Well, thanks Joyent. Hope the extra publicity was worth it.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    I wish I had the gut to scream at the people who were commenting on the pull request and the reverted action page. But they are scary. Anyhow, I don't think Ben should continue contributing. There is going to be some distrust between Joyent and Ben. Though I am surprised they haven't taken his privilege away yet.
- dec0dedab0de 13y ago
  EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned. That is for anything 'controversial' There was a post the other day that found it was any story that has more comments than likes, and atleast 40 comments will be penalized. So, if you want stories like this to last on the front page longer do not comment on them as much.

by yapcguy 13y ago

smtddr 13y ago

I don't agree with you at all. Ben's dismissive attitude, and yours, is exactly the issue tech-communities needs to tackle & extinguish. No, sed 's/him/them/' isn't going to suddenly make the world a better place but it's the thought that counts. Every small step counts. Ben's attitude about it, just closing the PR and claiming not to be concerned with trivial matters is something that at least needed a serious HR sensitivity discussion. Firing Ben for it is extreme, but not unreasonable if a company wanted to send a pro-diversity message; albeit extreme. These kinds of actions also provide a good filter for future employees. If you're so bothered by Joyent's blog post that you won't work there and you tell others to quit, it's probably better for Joyent not to have you as an employee to begin with. +1 on that PR and on Joyent's blog post. EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned.

yeukhon 13y ago
I think you have a fair point. HR issue. For an employee this is a big red flag - now Ben's employer will probably receive some angry emails this weekend and Ben will probably face some angry comments this weekend too. Nasty situation. If we do let Ben be a good man as he claims to be, then maybe it was a stupidity to rule out the ticket so quickly. How would a clever "sexist" person do? This "sexist" person would probably say "well, I don't like they. Not the way my teacher taught me grammar. Rephrase the whole sentence." Or just don't bother deal with any pull request related to sexist. But I agree with the parent. The CEO is afraid of any negativity. This is a typical way people handle crisis - find someone responsible and fire that person. A true heroic responsible CEO should first accept / address issue with the PR, then if the community thinks "YES DO IT" then accept the pull request and requires at least 2 contributors with sign off privilege to accept a pull request from that point onward. Firing someone quickly is the worst way to be a boss.
yapcguy 13y ago
I'm not talking about the pronoun issue, I'm focusing on the hypothetical firing. It's completely unreasonable to fire someone over what in essence is reversing a commit. It might warrant a discussion with a manager, it might warrant an official warning, and perhaps some other measure but summary dismissal? No way. In my opinion, this is Bryan backing Isaacs, perhaps in a clash of egos with Ben, and grand-standing over an issue which he believes will earn Joyent brownie points. I don't want any developer to work in an environment where the CEO openly boasts about firing people, so in summary, I guess, fuck Joyent.
- smtddr 13y ago
  And I'm focusing on what you wrote: >> What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing. If you think what took place in that github thread was nothing, you represent exactly the dismissive attitude of sexism the tech-industry needs to get rid of.
  - yapcguy 13y ago
    I don't see anything in that Github thread to warrant summary dismissal of an employee. A good CEO would ask the relevant manager to sit the two parties down and resolve the situation. If it were not possible, human resources could be brought in to assess the situation and perhaps administer training and/or disciplinary action. A sign of a bad CEO is knee-jerk firing and to write a blog post, boasting about such a hypothetical firing, shows incredibly poor judgement. Let us imagine though that Bryan was right. So why doesn't Bryan fire Isaacs too? Isaacs broke commit rules by not getting his patch signed... what if this was some other commit which made it into deployment and brought down services for paying customers? Shouldn't Bryan view Isaacs as a bad employee who disregards rules and is thus a dangerous liability to the company? "@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided." https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
    - 13y ago
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned. Oh no, quite the contrary, I'm afraid. They constantly attract large discussions and pointless drama that always gets nowhere. As we are observing right now.
mercurial 13y ago
Wonderful. We need tags on HN. You could tag this #pointless_open_source_drama. What happened: a maintainer refuses a pull request changing a pronoun in a doc on the grounds of "triviality", without giving more context. Joyent at this stage had two options: a) reach out to him to stress why they thought it was actually really, really important, or at least get his deeper reasons b) act as if somebody peed in their coffee and write an angry blog post talking about firing people, because Open Source doesn't have enough drama already - it's just missing some more good keywords like Pulseaudio to trigger the best flamewars It's fascinating to see how supposedly smart people behave with the emotional maturity of a toddler. Anyway, as of a couple of hours ago, Ben posted this comment on the Github issue: Hi all, let me try to clear up a few things. Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc. That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object? Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them. To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field? I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks. Well, thanks Joyent. Hope the extra publicity was worth it.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  I wish I had the gut to scream at the people who were commenting on the pull request and the reverted action page. But they are scary. Anyhow, I don't think Ben should continue contributing. There is going to be some distrust between Joyent and Ben. Though I am surprised they haven't taken his privilege away yet.
dec0dedab0de 13y ago
EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned. That is for anything 'controversial' There was a post the other day that found it was any story that has more comments than likes, and atleast 40 comments will be penalized. So, if you want stories like this to last on the front page longer do not comment on them as much.