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Females != Feminists Going into a workplace with a feminist agenda is a distraction and problem waiting to happen. Twitter Followers != Engineer https://gith

• eropple 13y ago
  Going into a workplace with the idea that everyone should be treated fairly and equally is a distraction and a problem waiting to happen? "Feminism" isn't "women better, dudes worse." (And the always popular implication that people who aren't engineers don't matter...)
  • rds2000 13y ago
    > the always popular implication that people who aren't engineers don't matter There is also the popular implication when there is a girl on twitter starting trouble again, they're not coding and trying to claim some form of discrimination, instead of developing programming skill.
    • eropple 13y ago
      Implied by the deranged, yes. Are you deranged? You can't--and obviously I mean in the "if you're a basically functioning, mostly vertebrate human being it's morally repugnant" sense of "can't", not the physical, over-literal sense that I feel like you're going to use--blame shitty workplace behaviors (and this isn't the first I've heard of GitHub having problems) on people not knowing how to code. I mean, what kind of world do you want to live in where you can excuse mistreating people because they don't "develop programming skill"? Actually, don't answer that. I don't want to know what kind of world you want to live in.
    • nav1 13y ago
      How is she starting trouble? I suppose not being harassed at work is not too much to ask for, is it? What does programming even have to do with it?
    • sp332 13y ago
      But that's an unfair implication, not one you should be looking to imitate. Edit: I see from your profile that you're an undergrad. Hopefully you'll grow out of the attitude that only super-coders are valuable to a project, like I did.
    • hmason 13y ago
      Only women have to prove that they are engineers enough to matter to HN. Men get that for free.
  • sergiotapia 13y ago
    "Feminism" isn't "women better, dudes worse." Woah woah woah - all those she-beasts online had led me to believe otherwise. Hell just take a look at /r/tumblrinaction.
    • oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
      If you choose to judge a group of people by the standards of a subreddit that claims to represent that group of people, we're all pretty much f*cked.
    • michh 13y ago
      Tumblr isn't representative of feminism or humankind for that matter. And a collage of Tumblr posts cherry-picked for their awfulness isn't even representative of Tumblr itself.
      • sixbrx 13y ago
        How about university courses about feminism, taught by self-proclaimed feminists? I've been dropped from such a course against my will for no other reason than being male IMO, after two days of class, having said nothing (like everybody else). "Too many people in the class", the only two dropped were the two males of which I was one. I don't think it's a stretch either to say that a great deal of feminist writing reeks of misandry.
        • Fomite 13y ago
          The last women's studies course I took in college had the professor actively thanking the men in the class for their contribution to the discussion. Some people are Assholes. Feminists are people. Ergo, some Feminists are Assholes. It doesn't say anything more about feminism than it does people in the checkout line at the grocery store.
          • sixbrx 13y ago
            I think we can expect more from full professors than people in the checkout line. It's hard to imagine any professor in any other discipline not being fired for that. Here's another feminist who also did the same (and was eventually made to resign for it, thankfully): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Daly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Daly
  • facepalm 13y ago
    Correction: going into a workplace with the idea that women are treated unfairly is a problem to happen.
    • eropple 13y ago
      Uh. They generally fucking are, bruv.
      • facepalm 13y ago
        In my opinion that is a belief, not a fact.
        • deleted 13y ago
          [deleted]
        • eropple 13y ago
          So a 20% average lower salary for women compared to men (and even lower for women of color) is...just a figment, right?
          • facepalm 13y ago
            Sigh... No it's not, it is just comparing apples to oranges. If you cite the 20% number I know you have no interest in understanding the issue, because that number is a comparison across all jobs, and it ignores education, part time, everything. You don't have women and men working in the same company with 20% difference in wages (at least not significantly many - of course such things happen, but also with men vs men). The 20% number definitely is not from the tech industry either. So you have women picking different jobs. You have different incentives and preferences (motherhood is the big one here), different preferred industry (like media vs mining or whatever). You also have women getting half of the income of their husbands, having the option to drop out of unpleasant jobs, not being under the same pressure to feed their family, and so on. There are many many aspects to this. So far I haven't seen anything that convinces me women are being treated unfairly. There are issues, but only if you consider staying at home with kids degrading. For example I suppose the incentive to get a good education is less if you know you will miss out several years where you could earn back the money invested. I don't think "unfair" is the right way to characterize that issue, though.
• sp332 13y ago
  I downvoted you for the "marketer/enthusiast" comment. I think that was out of line. Deciding whether she's an engineer or a marketer is not up to you, it's between her and Github. That said, feminism describes lots of different things, and I think she was addressing a broad group with that first statement. The sooner you realize that not all feminists have the same agenda, the easier it will be for you to understand what's going on.
  • exo762 13y ago
    > Deciding whether she's an engineer or a marketer is not up to you This is not a subjective distinction. It is very objective thing and such judgement can be done by outsider.
    • akerl_ 13y ago
      It's also not a relevant distinction. What job she did there has no relevance to whether or not harassment is worth investigating.
      • EC1 13y ago
        How is it not relevant? The title is "Prominent GitHub Engineer Quits, Alleging Gender-Based Harassment". Github ENGINEER. If she's not an engineer, she's not an engineer, it's pretty simple.
        • matthewmacleod 13y ago
          It's also totally irrelevant.
          • gte910h 13y ago
            I think people often look at distinctions like that to find out of they're "one of his tribe", aka, another programmer. It shouldn't matter, but it does to many people.
          • 13y ago
• akerl_ 13y ago
  Does she need to be an engineer or a "good engineer" to have a non-hostile workplace? Considering that GitHub appears to have hired her partially for the purpose of bettering the culture, your point about "feminist agendas" also falls short. I'll wait for real facts before coming to any conclusions, but immediately rejecting her statements like you're doing is not constructive for anyone.
  • ehutch79 13y ago
    To be referred to as a prominent engineer, yes.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • Kudos 13y ago
      prominent - adjective 1. important; famous. 12.6K twitter followers disagree with you. For comparison, founder PJ Hyett has 14.9K.
      • ehutch79 13y ago
        prominent employee, sure, engineer no. you can be a really shitty engineer, or not one at all and have thousands of twitter followers.
        • Kudos 13y ago
          That's not what prominent means.
          • vacri 13y ago
            'prominent engineer' makes it sound like the prominence is due to being well-respected for skill in engineering, when it's apparently not. This is what ehutch79 is saying. As an example, my primary role in my company is administration of systems. I very rarely take out the trash, and sometimes refill the toilet rolls if they're low. It would be misleading to refer to me as a janitor, prominent or otherwise. Edit: I say 'apparently not' because she may be an awesome engineer, but her code is in private repos.
• unfunco 13y ago
  The article calls her an engineer, she describes herself as a designer and front-end developer. And just because someone doesn't have many publicly available repositories doesn't mean they don't contribute to private repositories. This isn't even the controversy, what she does for a living is of little consequence, it's the alleged harassment that's up for discussion – we shouldn't be judging how good she is at programming.
• steveklabnik 13y ago
  Julie has contributed to one of my projects, but due to my own fuckup, the code has not yet made it into master, and so doesn't appear on that graph: https://github.com/resque/resque.github.com/pull/3 https://github.com/resque/resque.github.com/pull/3 It's an incredibly valuable contribution that I thanked her for and apologized for not yet merging in person.
• Kudos 13y ago
  My Github profile is similarly sparse. Github is a private company with private repositories. If you identify as a developer, you're probably a developer.
  • silencio 13y ago
    Ditto. I had private repos on github, even, but moved to bitbucket because their pricing model made more sense to me. My bitbucket account looks equally empty to anyone that isn't logged in as me. That's excluding the dummy github and bitbucket accounts I have, just like the dummy irc and email and twitter and more accounts I have because some people are assholes and my real name (Jane) is so very obviously feminine. Oh, I can't forget to include HN in there too - I picked a very gender ambiguous username all those years ago for a reason. Not to mention I can't actually share the code to a lot if not all of the work that I do, and I'm too busy elsewhere (a restaurant...) or dealing with impostor syndrome to share anything else most days. Hell, sometimes I have a hard time just opening my mouth to talk to other people because of impostor syndrome. But I code for a living, and I thought that was enough to call myself a coder. But according to some people, including people I used to consider friends and allies of my very laid back feminism, nothing is ever fucking good enough for them so I don't really know what I am in the end. Amateur hour involving a part time restaurant owner that is clearly a fake coder and couldn't possibly have majored in CS in college because she has big boobs and she has other hobbies that aren't staring at the computer for the entire day? Gasp. I really have no fucking clue, why don't you tell me what I am? :|
• manish_gill 13y ago
  So a person has to have lots of open source code available to prove that they are good engineer? Maybe, just maybe, they were too busy earning money and the code they wrote, however brilliant, was commercial?
• strict9 13y ago
  >Does anyone here have proof of gender discrimination or she was a good engineer? Her skills and/or experience as a software developer have absolutely nothing to do with this. Someone's performance on a job is completely irrelevant when it comes to harassment or intimidation in the workplace. You are part of the problem with sexism that exists in software development teams.
  • zobzu 13y ago
    indeed it has nothing to do with gender: the article quotes hint that she was performing poorly and thus raged against people - used any kind of things available to her to circunvent the performance issue - including saying shes being harrassed or told she perform poorly because shes a women - even thus they seem to imply it has not been the case. see the problem? the only gender based issue is calling her queen. i think people like you are the problem with toxic workplaces in general l you're blindly transforming arguments into whatever serves your cause - even when unjustified.
  • GeneralMayhem 13y ago
    If she feels like people are treating her as if she's not good at her job because she's a woman when the reality is that she's just not good at her job, then yes, that is relevant. Not every time a woman gets passed over for a promotion is sexism, and all we've heard is one, obviously biased, detail-free version of the "story."
• codelap 13y ago
  You realize this is a dictionary definition of an ad hominem logical fallacy?
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• jd0 13y ago
  The ultimate sign of a piece of shit with no social comprehension is a programmer who uses the not equal relational operator in conversation. Human lives are not as simple as the PHP you write at your day job, dude. Then you turn it into some sort of fucked up meritocracy thing. She wrote No Code therefore her opinions are invalid! I've got more bitcoins than her too!!