The current dominant themes in certain feminism & diversity cliques in our community are openly hostile towards me. I'm a male. I'm white. I'm middle class. I'm heterosexual.
I'm also a leader. I'm a parent of two daughters. My mother had to fight sexism issues in her career. I am supportive of inclusion & diversity. I am trying to raise my girls to be empowered, confident & curious. But the dominant themes in current diversity & feminist circles are so racist & sexist towards me that my first impulse is outrage.
For those of you who share this impulse- I want to provide the piece of perspective that helps me manage my frustration: Our culture operates under a pendulum. Right now, it's bad, but it will swing back.
There are “equality” people who are openly hostile to certain categories of humans based on gender, sexuality & race. This has happened before and it will happen again.
The pendulum will swing back and we'll look back at these people in the same way as certain stale feminists & race marketeers of the 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s etc. The leaders of these ideas in the tech community who focus on gender & race over building products that people want will not last. They get louder & shriller, but wielding bigotry to fight bigotry always fertilizes suspicion.
You can't fight exclusion with exclusion. So don’t worry about these themes. If people aren’t bitching about their bigotry, their relevance wanes.
Just keep trying to do big things. If someone calls you privileged, it doesn't mean it wasn't hard & that you didn't earn it. You don’t have to argue with every person who writes something stupid on the Internet. To hell with those bigots. Their misery does not earn them the right to rob you of your own self worth and success. Diversity means that all perspectives deserve to be heard. It is ok that someone uses the word diversity to ward off white folks from leading. The community eventually rejects this kind of bigotry.
You can find these people worthy of your contempt and still be supportive of diversity & equality. Now ignore these fools and go build your shit.
I don't understand how people can seriously claim that these are "current dominant themes". I studied at UC Berkeley, one of the liberal capitals of California. Most of my friends are Berkeley students. Most of my friends are feminists.
There's practically no hostility (as you put it) towards white, heterosexual males in these circles. I have never been personally attacked or felt uncomfortable. Most of the discussion is aimed at systemic issues, not individuals. It's been pretty eye-opening, actually.
Based on my experience, I'm fairly certain that stories involving militant feminist/diversity people have been vastly overblown by places like Reddit.
Your Berkeley friends may simply be more educated. In any case, before you pass judgment, try expressing a differing opinion.
Most of the feminists that are my friends aren't 'militant'. I can disagree with them and point out where their little bits of dogma differ with reality. We can usually have a discussion and learn from each other.
But trying to do that with any self-proclaimed feminist who doesn't already know me and it's I don't get it because of male privilege, or I'm ignorant on the subject (even if I cite sources and they don't), or I'm a rapist or rape sympathizer. They give me appeals to (their own) authority, fabricated statistics* , specious arguments about female fear, and I get shouted down if I want to discuss where males have similar struggles to females.
I once pointed out that the term feminism does not espouse the equality the feminist movement is trying to achieve. I said that is a disservice to the movement because it excludes some would-be allies while at the same time encouraging the "bad" type of feminist. I also pointed out that if someone self-identifies as a feminist, I don't really know what that person means. For some, like your friends apparently, it means what I think it means. But for others it means "white males are the devil."
I was immediately attacked. My attacker stated that she had read all the literature and (a million non sequiturs). My feminist friends just bowed out of the conversation, which irked me. The only person who stood up and was like "Uh, this is crazy. You're not even talking about what he said," was another male.
*Did you know murder by males is the number one cause of death among females?
> *Did you know murder by males is the number one cause of death among females?
I've been hearing that myth a lot recently too. I checked the CDC to see the real numbers. Cancer (disturbingly all ages groups), and (traffic) accidents, and heart disease make up the lion's share. Even suicide is larger than murders.
I feel like their general counsel should not have allowed any of this to happen.
Under the Civil Rights Act / Equal Opportunity law, race and gender are protected classes. So having your executives on record saying that "white women" are "some of the biggest barriers to progress" seems dangerous.
I'm not a lawyer, but when your employee tells Business Week that "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'", that seems like a legal disaster.
Replace "white" with any other color and notice how flagrantly racist and illegal that sounds. The law does not distinguish.
They need to fix this quickly.
They should assure people both internally and externally that hiring and promotion will be meritocratic, without regard to gender or race, and then ensure it actually happens that way.
As someone else here pointed out, that tweet is out of context. It was part of a 10+ tweet rant about politics and social medicine. (It still is a bit offensive, but less so than the article makes it out to be)
I think it's still offensive and racist. It's also scary to see that he basically has a university freshmen's outlook on the world but for some reason has a position to execute these ideas from within Github.
The larger context goes beyond a 10+ tweet rant. The larger context is @_danilo's general attitude in many other tweets and even HN comments. This isn't a first or even isolated example of racism and bigotry from him.
Well I know this may be off topic but Mr Danilo's rant against US military seems narrow minded. It's BECAUSE we have US military that US citizens are not exposed to exposure, hunger, fear, rape.
If "white privilege" or "white supremacy" were actually a thing, then a person who said something like that would be summarily fired. The fact that he's not means that their hated white boogeyman is an illusion. The SJW agenda is the agenda in power at the company.
Just a couple of weeks ago I was reading about "PIV is Rape". I had never heard of it before but wow it blew my mind of how different and extremist can some people's view be.
Had that as required reading in a religious studies class. Got yelled at for complaining that if taken serious it was advocating for the extinction of the species.
So, what measures are they taking to match Berkeley undergraduate sex ratio (52.1% female 47.9% male [1]) with the sex ratio of the entire US in the same age range (51% male 49% female [2]). A woman is roughly 1.13 (13%) times more likely to be an undergraduate at Berkeley than a man. Or is this a topic best avoided?
...and they showed photos of Powerpoint slides that were pretty damning as well. Sure, those slides could also be faked, but I think that's well past the believable threshold for giving the benefit of a doubt.
There is no proof that white candidates are hard to interview there.
That quote sounds like the kind of thing that could easily be an immature employee who doesn't like the idea of a "VP of diversity", or doesn't like the tone of the VP's slides, taking something small and blowing it out of proportion.
Like, they tried to recommend a friend of theirs for an open position and the friend didn't get an interview and suddenly that n=1 case becomes "OMG! They won't let us interview white candidates!!"
I am an academic who is a straight white man and who researches things related to race and gender and I don't think I have ever met a militant feminist. If the internet is to believe they are everywhere but somehow I haven't ran into them.
When white men with great credentials, skills and experience have their résumé thrown in the waste bin because a company has to meet "diversity quotas", then yes there is a problem. Discrimination is being battled with discrimination, with the exclusion of qualified people based on their race and gender - which is the original problem to begin with, just turned on its face.
A few days after it passed, I complained about the abuses to liberty in the Patriot Act to an older, and very-wise friend. He talked about a sociological pendulum as well, and predicted those over-reaches of power would be righted in time. Given how often and completely he has been right, before, I started watching and waiting. Except, I've been waiting for fifteen years now, and that pendulum seems to only be going further away from liberty, privacy, and (real) security.
I'm not sure, but I'm starting to think that we've reached a point where sociological constructs that would have flamed out, even just 20 years ago, can be sustained, because the people in power to sustain them now have an echo chamber where the message never quite falls below the point of being lost. It's almost as if improvements in communication have now backfired in raising the noise above the signal.
I hope you turn out to be right. As a white, male, heterosexual programmer who's reached his late 40's, I don't need any extra pressure working against me in my career prospects. I'm already starting to hate the H1-B visa program, but that's a rant for another post.
It will swing back in thirty years. In thirty years I plan to be retired. Or have died of my unhealthy lifestyle. Or at the most optimistic become too old to code competitively.
My point is, far as I'm concerned I can't afford to just sit tight and wait for it to blow over. And neither can the rest of you.
Agreed. I follow this topic for quite some time already, but I cannot understand few fundamental things.
I understand that indeed people could have "issues" because of their gender, race or some other quality. I support they in their effort to make things better.
However, I do not understand this categorization. By categorizing people this way one actually splits a group of people into smaller groups based on given categorization. Those groups have conflicting interests and different level of privileges, and each of the groups tries to change that.
But why, instead of working within this artificial categorized groups, just get away from this categorization completely?
PS It's a sensitive topic and I hope I didn't offend anyone; sorry if I somehow did it, however.
PPS I'm wondering what are the job duties of diversity consultants...
This is just misguided, plain and simple. I am white, male, heterosexual, and from a middle class family, and I absolutely know that my background gives me privilege. It doesn't matter if I earned it or not; I had and still have an advantage over other classes of people, and that is where the hostility is directed.
Instead of taking it personally, use this advantage to eliminate as much privilege as possible. Don't shy away from "leadership," but instead embrace it and make diversity a major focus of your leadership style.
Calling out the underrepresented as "bigots" for being upset is just plain cowardice.
Yes, as a life long White Man who likes football and hot dogs, and it somewhat fat I agree with you 100%.
Radical anti Male Feminism and Euro phobic racism are wonderful things for everyone. And there good for the economy. Just like you, I will continue to watch the glorious Television programming.
Do you seriously think most of this is based in straight-up hatred of white males? Every time I read something like was in the article, I view it as representative of what the author feels every day. God forbid we feel that way for 5 seconds before we throw it away.
Perceived grievances with the unfairness of the world do not entitle you to scapegoat other people or groups. This language is strikingly similar to to the dehumanisation of the Jews (as a race) in the public sphere in the 1920's and 30's after economic collapse and people were looking for a villein. Once you demonize a group as pure unredeemable evil its a short step to advocating physical violence as moral good to eliminate such evil form the world.
These are very dangerous ideas that are being thrown around.
Driving the adoption of identity politics seems to be a synergy between the Western ruling class's interests and those of a subset of leftists. My guess is the ruling class likes the ideology, and supports it, because it provides a moral pretext for weakening historically dominant demographics. Once these demographics are sufficiently cowed, they will be more willing to let go of self-determination and accept supernational rule (rule imposed by the EU on European nations, for example).
This kind of racist "gender politics", along with a level of self-hatred and loathing for certain classes of people is a wider problem with GitHub employees and has been manifesting for a while, for example: https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/pull/17
Right, I disagree with pretty much every point you're making, but maybe your anti-PC screed makes you feel better. I do question what this has to do with the core message of the article: GitHub has growing pains, long-time employees are unhappy because the Investors are bringing in the Suits and making them follow all kinds of corporate oversight stuff. Some unhappy employees also dislike the diversity hiring team, but I would assume the Investors and Suits like it (for lawsuit avoidance if nothing else).
Bottom line: all of these pains are probably inevitable if you want to go from 50 to 500 employees with revenue in the $100-$500 millions. Hopefully they get it right, and manage to keep most of their long term employees happy. If not, hopefully they take care of them, and find people to replace them who know how to keep Github working well.
Perhaps the notion that people are actively discriminating against white guys, and that it's some kind of problem that people should just ignore because eventually it'll go away.
There's about 5 things in there you could disagree with.
(are they actively discriminating? is it just against white guys? is it actually a problem? should people just ignore it? will it eventually go away?)
I'm not saying yes or no to any of these, but I think its pretty obvious people could disagree with any number of things that you've said.
...that said, broadly speaking, I agree with the idea that people should just chill out...but also, that github's growing pains are probably about more than this particular issue you raise.
I think you're making too blanket a statement about culture and bigotry from this one story. This is about something at Github. Specifically, the Github "diversity initiative" appears to have dispensed with the notion of diversity training for certain segments in favor of adopting a bias against members of traditionally privileged class. I can't imagine this will go well for them. It's a pretty clear conflict of mission.
Completely agree with the pendulum hypothesis (a theory indeed already) and not letting any offense make us fall into rage and the other side of the pendulum they are claiming us to be.
Agree also in the big problem with the word 'feminism'. It seems the opposite of 'machism', and machism is bad, to claim supperiority of men over women, so many people still think feminism is claiming supperiority of women over men.
And as you say, there are soooo many variants of feminism that indeed claim that, and so many feminists (men and women) that claim it, that when I say 'of course I'm feminist' I always have to inmediately explain what I mean in case someone doesn't really know it's real meaning, coming from the context of its birth, as an oposition to machism.
And almost always, personal feelings, traumas, etc get into every discussion, deforming reason incredibly. Also prejudices about what you are trying to say (filling everything non explicitly stated with what they want to hear, you being the monster they're desiring to crunch). So you have to loose so much time stating everything about the context of what you are refering to, it's better not to even begin, as if they read you, either wouldn't understand anyway, feelings and lack of practice in logic would make them not to reason properly, or would just be the kind that doesn't really want to listen and be open to change in front of new verified data and reasonings, as all of us should, and will attack you using the lowest use a human can give to its brain, a use we have used over centuries to destroy and kill innocents (evil plots, rumours, false accusations, deformation of claims, lies, ...).
All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing. The reason why this narrative is doing so well is because they've scared everyone else into ducking for cover instead of speaking up. If we don't fight back, we are surrendering to this tyranny.
History doesn't have to play out in any one way. Our culture of individualism and freedom is not guaranteed to survive. It is on each generation to preserve it for the next. When they asked Benjamin Franklin what type of government the Constitution would create, he said "a republic, if you can keep it." We can't win every battle, and we can't win the war if we don't choose our fights, but we must fight to win.
I agree, a common diversion tactic of these activists is to try and tell you to just ignore the bad people and they will go away, eventually...
Usually with some self confirming story like the OP... I'm white just like you! Just ignore these radical racist people. go back to watching the ball game dude!
Its a tactic. The last thing they want is an actual debate because there ideas do not hold merit under scrutiny. If they can't get you to sit down and shut up then they will try to attack attack you.
So yes, everyone needs to stand up and stand firm against these people or they will continue and only get more irrational and nasty.
I think this is one of the core questions that those playing identity politics games completely ignore. The very nature of their own efforts is, itself, something-ism. As you illustrate, they're categorizing a whole group, and assuming that every member of it fits its stereotypical mold.
So in one respect, sure, as a white male I had some advantages, but there are plenty of other ways to look at it. As a "nerd" I was bullied; I suffer from an incurable disease; I'm not a particularly attractive person; I'm notably uncoordinated and bad at sports. And on the other hand, I've got a fairly sharp mind, and have some talents and a supportive network around me. A lot of these things apply to other people in and out of my demographic cohort, to such a degree of ... let's say "diversity" ... that it makes no sense to focus on those demographics when thinking about who has privileges or disadvantages.
Privilege, favor and advantage is completely useless single-dimension concepts when talking about demographics. Statistics can show that men dominate the highest and lowest ranks in society, but every only focus on the few top who succeed and turn a blind eye to everyone else. It as if we would argue that people who gamble are "favored" since they have a slightly higher chance to become millionaires compared to everyone else.
White males has comparably poorer supportive network than most other demographics. Culture assume that all white men are healthy and strong, and society carry a discrimination when reality crash with that imagine. Is that privilege? Privilege for whom and compared to what?
Perhaps, perhaps not -- but your examples do nothing to counteract the idea that it is, as every single one of the groups you've mentioned is, in the US, significantly advantaged over the broader, corresponding group that is identically described without the "white men" or "white male" limitation.
Now, in many case, the system is also stacked against the class described in the other part of the descriptor, such that the intersection of that class with the "white men" restriction is disadvantaged compared to "white men" more generally.
But that doesn't, in any way, change the fact that the system (in the US) is stacked in favor of white men.
> Why is it OK to assume the system is stacked in someone's favor?
There is a difference between "conclude" and "assume".
> How is that not prejudice?
If you assume in the absence of evidence, it is prejudice. If you conclude on the basis of evidence, it isn't prejudice (because there is no "pre".)
Depends on what metric you choose. If your metric is "likelihood to study a technical subject and get a high paying job in the tech industry", maybe. That's pretty meaningless, though, and narrow - there are lots of other ways to have a good, often even better life.
Some random thoughts and observations after reading this thread:
[1] I'm interested in the differences between reactions to this, versus Brendan Eich's gay marriage scandal at Mozilla a couple of years ago.
Don't get me wrong... I supported marriage equality then, and I do not support the worst of the statements called out in this story now. However, there are rational arguments that the HN community overreacted in BOTH cases. You have to assume that self-interest factors into the difference.
[2] Why are people so reluctant to move from GitHub to Bitbucket or GitLab? I've done work with all three, and personally haven't found any of them to be significantly more or less reliable than the others (i.e. they ALL go down occasionally). GitLab's interface is virtually on-par with GitHub at this point, and frankly Bitbucket is far superior if you're using JIRA.
Current architecture trends are moving toward smaller services, with a proliferating number of repositories. So GitHub's pricing model, in which you're charged by the number of repos, is becoming less competitive every day against Bitbucket and GitLab charging per user. I sometimes wonder how many HN people do actual work on teams of significant size, and how many are college students or micro-startup founders who don't really pay much for tooling anyway? GitHub's pricing model makes NO sense for established companies with lots of projects, and it seems weird that so few people here bring this up.
Agreed about Bitbucket. I've used it for a long time and haven't found it to be substantively different from GitHub in either functionality or reliability. The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular.
Popularity is certainly important for open source stuff, and personal code samples that you put online for "resume" purposes. Hell, for that use case you might as well be posting your code on LinkedIn.
But for the use cases in which people actually pay money (i.e. private repos that you don't WANT outsiders to access), then how is lack of popular visibility a downside?
For open source I suppose, since GitHub being so popular makes it easier for people to contribute to your project. Still, though, the only obstacles in using Bitbucket for those purposes (that I know of) are that you need to sign up for a Bitbucket account and learn how to make pull requests. As far as resume code goes, I wouldn't trust an employer who thinks having code samples hosted on Bitbucket is a mark against you. There's just nothing different between GitHub and Bitbucket in that case. Or is there some other issue I'm not aware of?
> The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular.
Has anyone really thought of this? Do people just happen on to a github project because "it is on github" or because someone linked their work and people liked it and wanted to contribute?
Would React, D3, Rails, Bootstrap etc not get what they do now simply because "oh I don't have a bitbucket account, I'm not going to bother"
To me at least this kind of argument (I hear a lot of, nothing personal davesque!) is along the lines of "everybody is on MySpace"
> Has anyone really thought of this? Do people just happen on to a github project because "it is on github" or because someone linked their work and people liked it and wanted to contribute?
I happen to have a BitBucket account, so I can't speak directly to your point, but I'm less likely to file issues on a project if I have to register a new account with their bug tracker to do so. I imagine the same would apply to a project hosted on BitBucket if I had a GitHub account but not one on BitBucket.
Right, and, just to be clear, I actually wasn't trying to suggest that this downside is really justified (and I think you understand this). Mind share is important, however.
Github has become the number one place to show of your portfolio. Half of job postings these days encourage you to include a link to your GitHub profile.
Even for totally private repos, where popularity is not a factor, I continue to turn to Github because the UIs for both Bitbucket and GitLab continue to stand in the way of me easily getting shit done.
Focus on minimizing the friction to doing the most common tasks.
Ex. by far the most common thing I'm doing when going to a repo is looking up a file and doing something with it. So why isn't a file list the first thing which comes up when I open a repo?
Also, generally work on visual hierarchy more. GitHub does a great job of this and it makes the UI both efficient and pleasant. For example, you show the latest commit on a repo's homepage but it is very poorly differentiated from the content around it. This makes scanning the page much harder.
> Ex. by far the most common thing I'm doing when going to a repo is looking up a file and doing something with it. So why isn't a file list the first thing which comes up when I open a repo?
You can set this as default in your profile at /profile/preferences! Note that with GitLab 8.4 we now also have the quick-files finder which you can open from any page in a project by typing `t`[0].
We're working hard on improving the UI and UX and improving visual hierarchy and especially providing context to the current view is very high on our list. I hope the many changes in the last and upcoming releases will help, but any more specific feedback is very welcome.
In fact, GitLab 8.5, due the 22nd of this month, will heavily improve many views for mobile. This has been something we've been holding off on and we'll be slowing working more and more on it, as our UI matures.
GitLab 8.5 will have responsive views for most pages, but their functionality will be slightly limited compared to a full-browser, as we chose to hide certain elements (rather than a separate mobile view).
The mobile experience for github is not amazing either. It rearranges everything for no apparent reason and makes it harder or impossible to access what I want.
I hate to take impinge on your good nature, but you gave such good feedback to sytse I have to ask: what's getting in your way with Bitbucket? As a product company we're pretty focused on UX and spend a lot of time getting it right, so I'd love to hear any suggestions on how we can streamline it!
(I'm one of the founding engineers on Bitbucket Server, but more involved in Bitbucket.org these days)
this comment (not by me) is representative of my impression of atlassian:
Why has it been 7 years and nothing's been done? We're also considering moving everything to github, even if the price is higher... especially since the interface is more user friendly and there are far superior integrations available. It seems Bitbucket has been lagging in improvements :(
streamline your honesty about bb.org. turn it off or get serious. atlassian's handling of bb.org has turned me from "no opinion" to "avoid" on all their products.
Github has a great UI, probably my favorite web app of all time. Not even sure why, I just like it.
Their culture is definitely screwed up - or they wouldn't be in the news like this. Culture starts at the top, a few people, even just one person at the very top. You have to take responsibility for that. The "we can break all the rules" thinking is naive - you'll find some of those rules are there for a reason.
If you wanna develop software without profit motive (and VC investment) that's awesome, but don't think flat org structures are going to fly in a company over 100 people. I'm all for question authority, but profit motive needs organization, which needs order and hierarchies enforce that order.
If I want to see someone's work, and they provide a URL, I'm interested in the content, not the identity of the service it's hosted on. Gee, this sounds familiar...
> GitHub's pricing model makes NO sense for established companies with lots of projects
Totally agree with this assessment. When we were with Github, we actually ended up on a custom plan, negotiated with them directly, because we had too many projects to fit within their normal pricing structure. We eventually moved to Bitbucket two or three years ago and it's far more cost-effective for us. At this point we have 500+ projects on Bitbucket, and we're a company of only 20 people.
I use bitbucket for the same reason. As an agency of <20 employees, we have 30 or more clients and many of them have 5-10 projects. Most of them are small projects that we don't touch often, but bitbucket is the only place we can afford to host with that many. We pay for a plan for our own org and we set up free orgs for most of our larger clients since there are rarely more than 4 devs who need access to the projects.
I suspect that the "microservices" craze will soon have reach a "MongoDB moment". Where everyone has gotten burned from jumped in too quickly and blindly, and the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction.
However, right now microservices are blowing up. The new greenfield project that I'm working on right now started out a year ago as a monolith with one repo. It now has microservice components scattered across several DOZEN repos, with dev teams finding excuses to refactor into smaller and smaller granularity each month.
it's not just "microservices" crazyness, if you do devops, you will end-up with bazillion recipes repositories for each dependency, and will may not want to make all of them public.
Sometime back when I moved from svn to git. My default choice was Github. But their pricing was a hindrance. I guess, its more suited for US (or countries with value-equivalence with USD). 7 USD per user, did not make any sense to me, from India. So I went with AWS CodeCommit. And my experience has been good. Finally how bad can any service which uses Git (done by Linus Torvalds) can be?
I also did not understand the big hoopla. If you can open source your project, then its good for you (free!). But they depend on enterprise and potentially other businesses with private code. But then it really does not make as much sense - as in whats the real gain - most of the use cases are from command line doing git [clone/pull/push].
That's exactly my point in wondering about the ratio of students to established company professionals.
For every company I've ever worked at, the "community" or "network effect" of a source control vendor is meaningless. Because the repos are all private. Sure, the company might have SOME open source stuff mirrored on GitHub for publicity purposes. But the real bread-and-butter daily WORK that pays the bills takes place in private repos. In most cases, private repos that are hosted on-prem rather than in the cloud.
Sure, GitHub and its "network effect" matters for open source projects, and for resume-fodder side projects we tinker with as individuals. But all of that is free anyway. What about the scenarios where you'd have to pay GitHub a lot of money? How many vocal people on HN are actually IN that scenario?
GitHub continuously improves their application and enterprise customers get new features a release or so after its rolled out on github.com.
As a tinkerer, I tend to appreciate a feature when I have it missing during the day and rely on it at night. A self-network effect of sorts?
As mentioned in another comment, I'm trying gitlab to move my stuff there but I'd be a bit pissed if we got off Github Enterprise at work since it "just works" and "needs no fixing because it's great".
I was interested in your comparison in #1, wrt "HN community overreacted".
I've been searching through old HN stories about Eich, but can't seem to find any where the comments generally supported firing him due to supporting Prop 8 (banning gay marriage).
Is there a particular thread you had in mind? Or are you stating the overreaction was being angry that he might have been fired over that support?
I don't have a link, and I'll admit that this is subjective and anecdotal.
I just recall there being a LOT of people who found it perfectly reasonable to oust somebody for long-ago political donations, despite there being no indication that he ever actually discriminated against anyone at Mozilla.
Yeah, you can make arguments that the mere existence of a such past donation creates a symbolically hostile environment, etc. But those arguments seemed pretty thin to me. At the time Eich made that donation, every major Democratic presidential candidate (including Clinton and Obama) were ALSO publicly opposed to marriage equality. So it seemed like extreme mental gymnastics to put a "hate speech" label on Eich.
In the GitHub story today, if you were feeling charitable then you could likewise apply some positive spin too. There IS some context to those slideshow bullet-points and that tweet, which has been buried under the outrage. Once again, I disagree with these messages even when that context is considered. But my point is that it seemed like there were a lot more people willing to do mental gymnastics in the Eich case than in this one.
> At the time Eich made that donation, every major Democratic presidential candidate (including Clinton and Obama) were ALSO publicly opposed to marriage equality. So it seemed like extreme mental gymnastics to put a "hate speech" label on Eich.
No, the extreme mental gymnastics here involve thinking that hate speech can be defined by looking at the content of Clinton and Obama's campaign speeches.
The ouster came six years after his donation. The only way that could be characterized as "long ago" is by the use of extreme mental gymnastics.
Anyway, donating to Proposition 8 is equivalent to making the statement "I will actively work to take other people's rights away, even though it will never affect me". Is it any surprise that he was ousted? It was a disaster for Mozilla to associate with him.
He was on the wrong side of history, but your last sentence was unnecessary and over-the-top. He wasn't hired as a CEO, he was promoted into it. Before he became CEO, his political donations would not necessarily have been a concern.
Does the last 6 months count as history? I don't think enough time has elapsed to fully ascertain the merits of same-sex marriage. Changes in sexual culture take a few dozen years to propagate and get a good read on the real effects.
I haven't bookmarked those threads but I'm certain I saw a lot of comments here saying things along the lines of "the right to free speak only protects you against the government", strongly implying that what happened to him was fair game because it wasn't the government who staged it.
I don't recall hearing that much in the context of Eich, but it certainly is a common go-to argument more recently among those who want to see people punished for having incorrect political views. It came up a lot when Strangeloop kicked out Curtis Yarvin, for example.
I said it back then and I'll say it here: There's a difference between "having a political view" (thinking that non-heterosexual marriages are icky) and taking positive action to prevent others from having equal rights (donating money to a lobbying/social engineering group)
One is a thought, the other is an action.
Punishing people for unknowable bad thoughts is an Orwellian nightmare. Punishing people for visible bad actions is how society moves forward.
"Having a political view" contra SSM might not only take the form of "non-heterosexual marriages are icky." Engaging in caricature doesn't help advance the discussion of PC in the workplace. People might believe that homosexual marriage isn't morally or ethically legit. That a company or large numbers of people disagree doesn't mean the people that have these views should be punished for thoughtcrime or for expressing their opinions, or donating to a non-PC cause.
So people are allowed to have unpopular opinions as long as they don't, you know, tell anyone else about them or anything? Sorry, but that's unacceptable.
What would you propose we do - jail people who call for boycotts? Jail people who criticise corporations?
I'll spell this out very simply: the same laws and social standards that make it OK for you to criticise them, make it OK for them to criticise Mozilla.
And they also make it OK for me to criticize the people who are criticizing Mozilla, and for those people to criticize me for criticizing the people who are criticizing Mozilla, and etc. So now that we've gotten that out of our system, we can realize that there's a difference between being criticized and losing one's job because of one's political opinions, and a society where the second thing happens is a society that has real problems.
> So now that we've gotten that out of our system, we can realize that there's a difference between being criticized and losing one's job because of one's political opinions
As I see it, Eich didn't lose his job because of his political opinions, he lost (or decided to leave) his job because of his inability to perform basic duties of the job -- a CEO, after all, must ultimately be responsible for managing a company, including its public image and relations with its employees, customers, etc.
And, honestly, I think that even with the past donation, the situation was manageable, and that anyone who was up to the task of being CEO of an organization like Mozilla could have managed it.
I don't see how that's relevant in the grand scheme of things. In particular, it doesn't justify what the mob did, or make it good that we have these mobs.
So again I ask, what would you propose we do about it? Criticism leads to boycotts lead to resignations. At what point does it become unacceptable, and unacceptable to whom?
> So again I ask, what would you propose we do about it?
How about for starters, "we" stop getting people fired for holding unpopular political opinions? That said, I don't have a good idea of how to persuade everyone to change this disastrous course we're on, if that's what you were asking.
> At what point does it become unacceptable, and unacceptable to whom?
Unacceptable to people who realize that in a large nation full of people with wildly different lifestyles and cultures, a level of tolerance is required so that we can all go about our business as opposed to murdering each other in the street.
This doesn't mean that you don't speak your mind, advocate for your cause, and criticize those idiots over there who are clearly wrong; it does mean that you acknowledge those idiots still should be able to earn a living and argue for their own causes, no matter how wrong they are.
Both Eich and Mozilla characterize his leaving as voluntary. Now whether that's the case is somewhat disputed, but there's no evidence to suggest any other conclusion.
And for the second or third time this thread, having an opinion and taking an action are two different things. Please address that rather than just repeating your original post.
Society has decided that denying people basic rights is what's "unacceptable" and chooses to punish those that act in that fashion. And it's not like there's any other explanation for the donation either... the group he donated to was a single purpose lobbying campaign.
> Both Eich and Mozilla characterize his leaving as voluntary. Now whether that's the case is somewhat disputed, but there's no evidence to suggest any other conclusion.
Voluntary, in the sense that when you get mugged you can choose between your money or your life? For some reason I suspect Eich did not leave the position he had just taken because he wanted to spend more time with his family. And "voluntary" or not, somebody leaving a position in a private industry because of a mob that's intolerant of his unrelated political views is nothing to celebrate: in fact, it's a symbol of the wild polarization that is destroying this country.
> Society has decided that denying people basic rights is what's "unacceptable" and chooses to punish those that act in that fashion.
"Society" has decided this, has it? When did that happen? Last I heard, there was a lot of arguing going on about that very point.
> And it's not like there's any other explanation for the donation either... the group he donated to was a single purpose lobbying campaign.
And as I stated previously, "you can hold any opinion you want as long as you don't tell anyone about it" is unacceptable.
> I support the right of the KKK to march through the streets, but that doesn't mean I should have to hire one of their members.
That's not the analogy. It's contrived, but to stick with the theme of white racists, is it ethical (legality aside) for a board full of clansmen to fire a CEO that donated to the ADL? To keep it simple, let's say the CEO is not Jewish, but does financially support the ADL.
I'm familiar to the case. My point was that I don't find it particularly analogous to the Eich case. Having no relationship to some people who walk down the street occasionally is substantially different than actually having to be professionally associated with someone and practice tolerance on a regular basis. I'd also argue that free speech should be protected in both cases (socially if not legally).
> If your ideology is motivated by bigotry, that's the problem.
I agree. I'm not sure corporate leaders need legal protection. Perhaps. But the right to publicly assemble and speak absolutely needs legal protection. That's why I was trying to draw another analogy. To explore the difference between the Eich and Skokie incidents.
> My point was that I don't find it particularly analogous to the Eich case.
I think there's been a miscommunication, because neither do I.
They're fundamentally different cases, in that I think the NSDAP should have the legal right to march but they can absolutely be punished socially.
Likewise, I think what happened to Eich was perfectly legal but not necessarily moral. They're not the same and that was my point: invoking "free speech" as a Constitutional right has no bearing on the Eich case.
> They can fire him for any or no reason and it's completely ethical.
You must have a different definition of ethics than the rest of us do. I'm having a hard time reconciling that opinion with a definition of "ethical" that actually means anything, to be honest. Would you care to provide a definition?
It definitely doesn't sound right. I'm hoping/wishing that this quote was taken out of context. Can anybody with more insider context elaborate?
I'm very interested in the "internal cultural battle" over diversity issues at Github, because my school's CS dept. is having a lot of dialogue lately with similar rhetorical arguments. Teaching Assistants recently had a mandatory student-run training session that I perceived to be frighteningly one-sided.
Besides the photo, what else did the talk discuss?
This is very odd. I know universities can be very liberal places, but where did this combination of "mandatory" and "student-run" come from? I'm actually in favour of flattening hierarchies - but not inverting them. Why should students barely out of high school get to dictate the behaviour of teaching assistants who may be up to 40 years their senior? Why should the power relationships be temporarily inverted like that?
Well tumblerinas says you can't be racist against white because patriarchy. /s
No really, just read reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction and realize wtf people are saying these days shielding behind (false)feminist propaganda and some very confused idea of oppression.
It's a deep, and scary, rabbit hole. If you're at all curious, it seems Sargon of Akkad and Thunderf00t on YouTube are not just slinging shit. I've watched some, and sources have always been included.
Don't get me wrong, they clearly kick things up a notch in the drama department, but they do the ground work in sourcing articles for you.
My fiancée enjoys watching TLDR (teal deer) on youtube because he's the only youtuber speaking on these topics who literally only ever speaks facts. Theres not a thing he says that he doesn't back up for you.
Well to be fair, a white man's opinion on racism or sexism is sort of like a Pacific Islander's idea of how cold it is in Siberia. But on the other hand being ignorant does not make you less-than-human which seems to have become a common opinion in the age of Twitter lynch mobs.
But in that case you aren't blaming the Pacific Islanders for the lack of warmth in Siberia. If you were, I would like to hear their opinion on the matter.
Well, you have to remember that this statement is the opinion of one anonymous employee. Some of the other more blatant racial statements are much more worrying.
A lawsuit would be nice to confirm that 1. This is not legal, then 2. Confirm that it's the role of GitHub to get rid of such employees, 3. Have it happen regularly at GitHub for both racist and revert-racist attitudes, until clean, 4. and in the IT sector in general.
This isn't true of GitHub as a whole, and I'm not sure it is true of any part of GitHub. Their team page shows everybody on staff in the order they were hired. Scroll to the bottom and you will see that there is no shortage of white people being hired. https://github.com/about/team
I dislike anti-discrimination laws in general of course. I think a good compromise would be to limit to manual labor jobs and the like which the laws was originally designed for.
Bring on the suits! While GH is busy distracting their world-class engineers with B.S. reverse-racism meetings, they will successfully free up their equity pool for more suit hires. That should suck the life out real quick...
Goodbye revolutionary, forward-thinking work culture & hierarchy (meritocracy). You will be gravely missed. Good luck hiring sub-par engineers for the next 2 years and watching your data centers go down on a daily basis.
I guess the only question left is... who are you switching to?
We've been using self-hosted Phabricator at work for building nuclear reactor design software and it has been pretty darn amazing. It's quite easy to get going and has been very low-maintenance.
* Even has a serious business mode, for the most serious businesses.
* Written in PHP so literally anyone can contribute, even if they have no idea how to program.
* Even babies and dogs can contribute.
* You, too, can contribute!
And then underneath: 'Companies probably using Phabricator'
We have also been using Phabricator for the last year in the FinTech startup were I direct the technical team. Phabricator is really awesome in general and has been a live saver.
We started using it due to the Arcanist pre-commit hooks. We now use it for issue tracking and may be soon migrating our "scrum" functionality from JIRA to Ph.
The only downside I see is that it is not very well documented... in fact I will say it is all the opposite. But still, the fact that we use it happily shows how good it is!
If you're seeking to stay within the Atlassian ecosystem, the product that you're looking for is actually FishEye[0]. (Yes, yes, paying money, etc., but if you're a large organization, you're already used to buying stuff off the shelf to solve problems like this.)
On the other hand, if you don't feel like drinking the Atlassian sugary beverage with an odd taste, there's LXR[1] (and LXRng[2]), OpenGrok[3] (remember OpenGrok?), and Etsy's Hound[4], not to mention Russ Cox's standalone Go implementation of Google's code search tool[5].
Just an FYI. I've been contacted by Atlassian to make my search technology available for Bitbucket's ecosystem. Right now it's being developed as a chrome extension, and you can learn more about it here:
If things go smoothly, Bitbucket users will be able to make search, a first class citizen.
Edit:
I should have mentioned it, but the current version of GitSense in the Chrome store doesn't support Bitbucket. I'm still testing it out but it should be updated within the next couple of days.
Stash (Bitbucket Server now) lacks a ton of features that Bitbucket (and Github) have. Like most Atlassian products, the base product has subpar functionality that you can theoretically expand with overpriced and/or low-quality plugins.
Also, the degree to which Atlassian products integrate varies a lot. FishEye and Crucible integrate closely. Both of them integrate OK with Jira. Neither of them really integrate at all with Stash, which has its own implementation of code browsing, search, and review. Jira and Stash integrate acceptably, but not very flexibly, and not to a level that surpasses any number of third-party integrations.
And there's no level of integration that would make Confluence worth using.
There is no good reason to be a full-boat Atlassian shop, period. If Jira is what you want, use it; I'm not a huge fan of it conceptually but it there's nothing wrong with it. Crucible is decent if you're willing to put the effort in to get it set up for your workflow. Nothing else of theirs I've used is worth the time it takes to set up, let alone the cost.
> Stash (Bitbucket Server now) lacks a ton of features that Bitbucket (and Github) have
CEO of Atlassian here. Can you list the features you deem missing? I want to check them against our roadmap, as I don't believe we have many gaps, and a host of things better.
I'm at US Customs so we have pretty much the entire atlassian suite self hosted: stash, jira, fisheye, confluence and crucible, some plugins... some of the parent/sibling comments have spelled out the poor integration between stash and the rest of the suite.
Here's some additional things off the top of my head...
- search! maybe our fisheye isnt indexing all our repos properly (we just recently migrated 10+ years of svn codebases too, in addition to a slew of new git repos) but I would have hoped to be able to do deep code searches within stash itself, across many/all repos.
- project areas: Only one level hierarchy. we'd rather be able to form adhoc groups (think github organizations) under those project areas
cant think of any more right now but it's late saturday evening :) but you can certainly have your folks contact us at CBP and we'd be happy to give deeper feedback if you want it
Thanks for taking the time to write feedback. I really appreciate it.
Search is known and being worked on. FishEye should work in the interim until we do Stash native search - if not - please contact our support team.
Project areas - will get the team to dig into this more, and understand the real underlying use-case you need this. Is it search? Permissions? Discovery?
It sounds like you might also (or rather) be looking to do things by groups people (ie self-organised teams), rather than a multi-level repository structure?
I'm a product manager at Atlassian, feel free to email me (rbarnes@) if you'd like to crack this open, I'd love to hear more.
(I'm going to refer to Bitbucket Server as Stash here because that's what it's been called for most of the time I've used it and to keep it distinct from the public offering I'm comparing it to.)
Stash and Bitbucket have converged more than I expected, mostly because my recollection of Bitbucket was closer to Github than it actually is. But versus Bitbucket, Stash is missing Mercurial support, snippets, issues, wiki, project overview pages, and some social features. The lack of snippets was particularly vexing to me in my day-to-day work until we started using Slack. And Slack snippets are still a poor substitute for Gists.
Versus Github, the difference is more pronounced. Github has better search (and it isn't even that good), much nicer pull requests with superior integration to the issue tracking system, a much better API, better profile pages, static site generation, and in-place editing.
Yes, I know the answer to the lack of some of those features is "use our other products too", but Atlassian's competitors offer products with lightweight issue tracking and wikis. And while the features Stash provides are generally decently implemented and usable (the last few versions have been a big improvement), Confluence... is poorly suited to be used as a programmers' wiki, to use the gentlest language I can muster.
The removal of wiki-formatting from Confluence was a huge blunder. Every programmer who comes into contact with the Atlassian suite is now going to do their best to avoid it in the future.
Started moving from TFS over to Bitbucket server (local install for legal reasons). Have thus far created one project and a half dozen repos in it.
Using this for work:
- Would love to be able to see something on my profile page. I've got hundreds of commits but my user page is completely empty. Maybe this is because our repos are private, but since I'm logged in I would expect to see something.
- I love GitHubs personal commits page, as well as the reporting features baked into each repo. I think it would make the higher ups happy if they could see how active we are.
Note that there is a plugin that seems to do this, but while it's cheap for 10 users the price escalates at a weird rate ($1 to $6 to $8 /user at the first three tiers). At this point I'm hoping we can trial it out to show how much it would help with reporting/at a glance metrics, and then hopefully find funds for it. Or find a package to generate these locally. I'm not sure why this isn't just baked in though.
- Triggering emails when commits are made seems to be a plugin? Or email isn't setup correctly yet. This one still needs to be dug into.
- This is a value add: README file support for projects?
Maybe it's intentional, but coming from GitHub a local server install of Bitbucket is just so plain.
Edit: And kudos for reading Hacker News and leaving a comment asking for feedback.
I'll see what we can do on the profile page part. Would be easy to "put something" on the page - harder to put the right thing. Email me if you have thoughts (scott@).
Email should be built in. Raise a support ticket with our amazing support team if any issues with that.
I'll check on README. I thought we had equivalent, but perhaps in a different place. Will have to wait until the team wakes up.
> Maybe it's intentional, but coming from GitHub a local server install of Bitbucket is just so plain
We try to be deliberate about adding features that matter. The Bitbucket server team is one of the best at Atlassian, so hopefully you're saying the lack of "right features" is the issue, not just the extra whitespace.
Thanks for taking time to add feedback. I really appreciate it & helps us make a better product.
You're right about commit notification emails, an add-on is currently the best way to get this. It's something we'd love to add soon but isn't being worked on right now. You can hook up HipChat notifications for new commits as an alternative, and one that means less email.
While we've got your attention, the number one feature I'd like to see is installation and configuration that meshes well with devops tools.like Chef, Puppet or Ansible. Your current installers require multiple phases of installing the files/dbs and then interacting with running apps via a web ui to configure.
Could you make it so that you could just lay down files, attach storage and start the service?
As for clustering, Bitbucket Data Center[4] provides the same self-hosted functionality as Bitbucket Server for 500+ user tiers, with active-active clustering for performance at scale and HA, as well as Smart Mirroring for distributed git read performance.
Feel free to email me (rbarnes@) if you have feedback on how these options work for you.
I'll check. There are ways to set them up without using the web UI, but we can probably do a better job of documenting them for the power user. Stay tuned.
For Clustering - any reason you need active/active? We have mirroring[1] which (from our chats with most of our customers) is what people prefer.
That bugs me also. We're working on it, but will take a while I'm afraid. One of those "death by a thousand cuts" issues, but really difficult to fix & migrate millions of users.
You're kidding, right? Search in github is so bad that I typically clone a repo and grep it rather than try to find things with their search. And they built a wiki feature without search whatsoever?! (from what I can find) That's absurd
> has practically no search capability. it's the underappreciated killer feature of github IMO
I honestly have to ask: have you used GitHub Enterprise? It's search functionality is horrible. Oh, it searches for things, but it won't find things. And this isn't a rare issue. And I'm not talking about anything other than searching through master branches.
Just an FYI. GitHub's Enterprise search will get significantly better once I'm able to integrate my search technology with it. You can learn more about the search technology here:
Searching is done at the branch level and you'll have niceties like case sensitive searches and you'll be able to search across multiple branches at once to verify bug fixes and what not. It also introduces commits and diffs search, which are currently not possible with GitHub. And once again, these searches are at the branch level.
I would suggest Atlassian. I've met both founders professionally and at least one of the duo is not weak enough to let this happen to his company. If even they capitulate, then you're fucked.
Haven't seen anybody mention Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services[1]... private repos, reasonably priced for teams, and some pretty sweet extra tools and integration into other services. I've used it for a few projects and prefer some parts of it to github. You don't have to use Visual Studio itself or, really, ANY other Microsoft tools.
GitLab.com certainly is much smaller. But it is growing fast and projects like mailman and fdroid are already using it. If you think of a community as the people that make the platform itself better, more than 1000 people have contributed to Gitlab.
I activated my student account (was formerly paying) and voiced my disapproval in the comment section of that form. I'm really happy with GitLab at work though, so I will be switching to that.
Since our team is small and will remain small for a while we're going to run Bitbucket on one of our private servers. For the first 10 users it's only $10 (one-time payment).
The irony is remote workers are one of the best ways to remove much the physical power politics due to human biology. Size, body language, sexual attraction, etc.
Valuable comment. Also, gender and ethnicity get neutralized when remote employees have text-based conversation, allowing your words to be the focus as they should.
Possibly, but only if people actively choose usernames that remove hints of such things, avoid disclosing their ethnicity or gender, avoid using stereotypical male or female communication patterns... it's a rather unstable equilibrium.
This is just gross. I've spent the last 10 years of my life listening to various minority leaders discriminate against whites with no consequence.
I hope someone stands up for themselves and sues GitHub for this type of behavior. First off, this is very irrational and not based in any facts. Second off, it's blatant racism and sexism.
I will probably migrate my repos to GitLab or even BitBucket shiver. We need to vote with our dollars if that's the only way to get a point across.
If you can, avoid Bitbucket. We used them for a few years and it just wasn't good, through and through.
I've been really impressed with Gitlab and we use that as a backup right now but I really think I'll be moving all of our repos over to them. Plus, you can even host your own Gitlab server.
For us it was a combination of things. It was never really service/uptime related, but I can't count the number of in-app Javascript errors or weird UI decisions they made. The issues were just not good enough and the web pages were continually slow/bloated to load.
Every time I'd open a support ticket I felt like I was a second-class citizen or that the issue I raised wasn't important to them. Continual, multiple years or bad support from them. I get that we were paying $25/mo but I just couldn't deal with it anymore.
Bitbucket dev here, I am truly sorry to hear that Mike. I've been an Atlassian for almost a decade and "legendary support" has always been something that we've prided ourselves on, so it hurts to hear about your experience! I'm not sure how long it's been, but things have hopefully improved since last time you checked out Bitbucket - the unification of Bitbucket.org with Bitbucket Server (née Stash) has meant a lot of refurbishment of the front-end code, much of which is now common across products. Our front-end and design teams have grown a lot more muscle too. If you have any specific feedback about the UI/UX I'd love to pass it on to the team.
I've been using Gitlab for a couple of years, and it's really great. Used a self hosted repo for a team of ~40, and I can't recall any major incidents or any loss of code, ever.
I actually had this happen once when I was running a small filesystem based git server. Users could login with normal shell sessions with their public key, and repo permissions were handled with the unix permissions system. Some user with a funky git UI client for windows actually deleted a repo completely from the server.
It wasn't much of an issue because of local copies, but we moved to git-shell right after that, and to gitlab not long after when then team grew beyond a handful of people.
I would expect more from a tech company that is supposed to be by programmers for programmers.
Programmers are abstract thinkers, and it's disgusting to see them lower themselves and adopt the semantics and memes of obvious cultural constructs like race. What does it even mean to be "white"? Who exactly are they talking about and what is it about this group of people that is so bad? There's no need to bring in this gross oversimplification of culture and biology into professional talks. If they're seeing some kind of pattern within their company that correlates with some ethnicity or culture, it's just a coincidence! Start hiring less asshole managers! Who cares what color they are?
American culture is such a bummer when it comes to how it shoves people into categories. We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT. There is simply no excuse at all to mention it. People CANNOT be categorized based on skin color at all, AT ALL. People cannot be categorized based on culture either. Virtually everyone is multi-ethnic and multi-racial at some level. To identify even yourself as belonging to a distinct "color" is just a fabrication of American culture that is an unfortunate outcome of the history in this country.
The only way forward is to forget about categorizing people, and just speak to their qualities -> not "white managers are assholes", instead "asshole managers are assholes".
It has more to do with the current cultural war in USA than anything else. Like all wars it's about power, it's a power grab.
"Reverse-racism" is now an acceptable ideology in the media and in the tech community, and all the social-studies crowd now get jobs as "diversity officers" in Tech companies. It isn't going to end well for some companies, that might get "disrupted" from the inside because of people pushing politics before anything else.
It's a protection racket. If you don't have these worthless diversity officers, if you don't kiss Jesse Jackson's ass when he accuses you of racism, they drag you through the media with the worst implications and associations put next to your name.
It's not some grand conspiracy. There's no secret committee toasting to their success. It's just what has happened when the press and a lot of people believe all of the vitriol that comes out of people like Jackson and Sharpton, or lesser known race-baiters in other communities. South Park did a whole episode about this phenomenon (episode titled "With apologies to Jesse Jackson").
I've been a member of multiple institutions that have fallen on the wrong end of this kind of activism. My Catholic high school has been dragged through the local media for not listing a gay marriage in the Marriages section of the alumni magazine. The inter-fraternity council at my alma mater has a speech code for offensive language and a dress code for offensive clothing, like Indian mascots. I saw the behind-the-scenes arm-twisting by the college administration to make them do it. Every big tech company has to pay the protection money here too. Jesse Jackson and his allies in Congress started saying that the tech industry was racist for not having enough black people, a totally absurd accusation because the only reason why there aren't many black employees is that there aren't many black applicants. Then he got invited to a few board meetings, extracted some donations, and went on his way.
France takes this stance on matters of race. So much so any numbers regarding race in France are simply estimates because there are no official numbers.
In practice so far, it hasn't fared any better, but probably not worse either.
Like in the U.S., one of the biggest hindrances or obstacles to success is segregation (forced or by choice). Wanting success essentially entails assuming the culture and practices of the successful, but for some fraction of people, being malleable and becoming like the mainstream is antithetical as it's interpreted as "giving in" to the larger culture, while simultaneously wanting to be part of the larger culture and to be accepted by the larger culture. So there is that ambivalence.
Personally, if I wanted to succeed in China or Mexico, I'm willing to bet I'd improve my chances by adopting local customs, manners and attitudes, rather than being steadfast about my own. [it's somewhat peculiar some Americans are sheepish about being "too American" while abroad but simultaneously believe that integration into the mainstream isn't all that necessary. It tells me that their brain tells them one thing, but in practice, when given the opportunity, try to be like Romans while in Rome]
Personally, I think people put too much stock in group identity over say, personal identity. But you know, let people do as they wish.
Do you look non-Asian? If you do, you will never be fully accepted in Chinese society, as I've heard from a few white people that have lived in China. Even if you marry and settle down there and raise kids.
I'm not saying be undistinguishable from native Chinese, I'm saying adapt to the culture and you'll do better. Don't think, "I'm going native" think of it as transitioning into the mainstream of Chinese society. Celebrate New Years with your coworkers, eat the local fare, defer to ancestor worship, observe deference to elders, etc... the things that allow locals to function within their society. You don't go ahead and show them how "guanxi" is bad, etc. you function within the local framework.
A perfect example of this is DaShan (Henry Mark Roswell).
That said, mainstream Chinese society is basically Han Chinese, which is largely eastern China. There's a lot more to China than just the eastern areas. Xinjiang and Tibet are two areas of the PRC that are essentially occupied countries experiencing ethnic cleansing via dilution. The ethnicities that are the majority (or used to be the majority) in these regions are second class citizens in the PRC.
Insterestingly, I think by using China as an example is an example of an issue I've raised a few times in this thread. Countries as large as the United States and the US are hard to generalize about. There are many remarkably different regions flying the same flag. One of the issues the frustrates me is that Silicon Valley needs to be representative of the United States instead of California, neighboring states and those US states and cities that many California transplants come from. Large countries have utility insofar as exerting economic, political and military force upon other nations, but they present internal complications because of internal diversity. There's no reason that Silicon Valley should be representative of US diversity. US diversity is and should be merely one of several contributors to diversity of Silicon Valley. The US, like China, is one nation composed of many states many of which could function as their own nation as many countries in the EU do.
I think the question about how wide the net of diversity should cover geographically is an interesting one. Some people will say that because the users are a worldwide audience that the demographics of the product/service producer should reflect that demographic (so reflect the demographics of the user base rather than the more traditional local talent pool or population, regional talent pool or population, etc.
But I think people make these demands arbitrarily [or rather not, but whenever it benefits them]. So as an Irishwoman or an Indian man, I might not fret about the diversity of a product/service from Ireland or India, but then if a product or service from the US or Japan is used extensively in Ireland or India, I might insist on it having representation of my country/ethnicity.
You also don't hear people saying, HonHai (Foxconn) should hire a more diverse workforce, or Xiomi [or even Lexus, for example] even though many of the products out put by these companies are used in diverse places.
I don't even know if a company necessarily needs to even hire people representative of the people that use their products. Some user testing, focus groups and great analytics to discover how a product might be used elsewhere should be sufficient to make sure a product meets the needs of people elsewhere. If they are doing a good job of meeting those needs then they will be successful. If they don't a competitor can be founded that does better understand and cater to that audience.
TBH, I find it positively weird to concern myself in any way about the identity of the people that make products I use. I am a human being after all and that is most important for the overwhelming majority of product decisions. Gender and body size may also be important depending on the product. For example, the only trait I wish more product designers understood and catered to is my height (I'm 6'5" (196cm)), but it's insane for me to demand a firm to employ someone my height or even design products for me when I'm well past the 99th percentile (I guess that makes me part of that 1%, right?). Accommodating people of my height may not be cost effective for most firms, especially if it raises the price enough to make them less competitive. If I can't use their product, then I won't and hopefully I'll find a product that caters specifically to me or solve my own problem.
He is completely culturally Chinese, although in a rural kind of way, in his speech and mannerisms. If you can read Chinese, the comments are very inclusive.
"Non-Asian" people have settled in China for hundreds of years, especially Arab traders who arrived through the silk road. Multiculturalism is not a foreign concept in China.
100% sure. Chinese society is quite racist (I'm talking about the country China, not the race). I'm not sure what you think a single example of a villager (who I'm sure faces discrimination based on his skin color) shows.
They have settled for hundreds of years. And never been fully accepted.
Looks like they trade "structure based purely on meritocracy" by "promote diversity".
I don't see how this can go well. Meritocracy is important among dev and open source. And they don't care about political diversity. I can only imagine this new "culture of fear" where you can't hire white people (even woman).
Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender.
Anyway, looks like a good time to switch from github to open source solutions.
You're totally right that skills and experiences should be the only way to choose, but right now, tech firms in this society are fundamentally incapable of actually implementing that without diversity initiatives. True meritocracy can only come through promoting diversity.
>> True meritocracy can only come through promoting diversity.
If you are taking diversity into account, you are taking things other than merit into account and so it isn't a 'true' meritocracy. Not only that but it also suffers from the no true Scotsman fallacy.
The best way to promote meritocracy is to base your decisions on merit and nothing else. To avoid unconscious bias, you would have to hire someone without knowing their age, sex, sexual orientation or anything else that you could consider discriminatory. That would mean hiring someone that you haven't and that's a little extreme.
> If you are taking diversity into account, you are taking things other than merit into account and so it isn't a 'true' meritocracy.
Well, no. The point is that due to inherent unconscious biases (see my link for scientific papers documenting this), it's impossible to only take merit into account without social norms biased towards white men skewing the process. Diversity initiatives seek to eradicate this bias, in order to truly measure merit and compensate for the interfering factors.
> Not only that but it also suffers from the no true Scotsman fallacy.
I really don't see what that's got to do with anything here.
> To avoid unconscious bias, you would have to hire someone without knowing their age, sex, sexual orientation or anything else that you could consider discriminatory. That would mean hiring someone that you haven't and that's a little extreme.
Presumably you mean "you haven't met"? Well exactly. Hence, diversity initiatives that seek to compensate in practical ways.
How about a "blind" hiring process? For software engineers, it's easy to imagine tools that could help evaluate skills without revealing that person's race or gender.
Isn't the problem that the majority of the pool of qualified applicants is mostly white/Asian males. Hiring initiatives aren't going to fix the pipeline problem.
If you work at a truly diverse tech company you can assume discriminatory hiring practices are in order.
except that because of the original remote nature of Github the first thing you saw was their work and then the person. by changing the culture they are increasing a bias that may have been less prevalent or even non existent in such a work culture.
Trying to apply normal social dynamics to a play where you have a completely async environment(meaning they don't even see each other), is a little bit of a stretch.
A lot of interviews in tech don't even involve voice or face to face communication. If you take away looks, sound and name, what else is there besides quality of work?
> except that because of the original remote nature of Github the first thing you saw was their work and then the person.
Unless their name is in their username. Or they have a profile picture of themselves. Or they have their real name on their commits. Or their username or picture is something stereotypically masculine/feminine.
I searched for 'things' on Github and looked at the most recent committer of the first 20 responses (easiest way I could think of to get a random sample of users). For 16 of them, I could easily see that they were male. 2 of them had their names, but I wasn't sure if the names were feminine or masculine. 2 had no hints whatsoever.
Because everything name people use online must match their govt issued ID.
I can still remember the first time I uploaded a masculine avatar I had to get a medical exam to prove I was the same gender people seeing my picture assume I am.
Its a hard world, if only we could communicate online with a total identity of our choosing! We could all pick fake names, like a pen name, or a 'pseudo' name thay wasn't real. Wjat a crazy world THAT would be @sanctus.
For bonus points, consider the gender and racial connotations entrenched within your own username - sanctus - based on the language (latin) I'm guessing you're a white roman from antiquity!
Meritocracy is a lie. Look how broken interview processes are - definitely not meritocratic. Meritocracy is a rationalisation for "I hire people I like so long as they don't say anything idiotic during the interview". You'd get better results from having some kind of bar that candidates have to meet and then just selecting one at random and giving that person the job.
Oh yes. No one is any better than anyone else at anything. In fact, github isn't a better hosted SCM/code review/issue tracking platform than any other. Which makes sense, because none of their employees are better at doing anything than anyone else. It's all just a rationalization, and a lie. Old boys club all the way down.
But why didn't the old boys club decide to have microsoft's hosted team foundation server win? Or sourceforge? The silicon valley conspiracy is hard to understand at times ...
I've come to the conclusion that most people cannot grasp how meritocracy works, because the majority of the "real" world simply doesn't work like that.
One side of the equation are people that grew up with an alternate reality, because they spend a lot of their time online, growing up, working on their own projects and only later joining "society". In that world you get indeed ridiculed by how good or bad your code is, but not generally based on your socioeconomic background.
The other side of the equation is people that grew up in society where things do indeed work like in an old boys club. I will never get access to the people, that people studied international affairs at columbia do. I will also never get access to the people that MBAs from Harvard do.
But I still very well remember when I graduated from "the annoying kid that doesn't know shit" to "the kid that wrote a LR parser in IRC almost 20 years ago. And most of those people never ever found out my real name, my gender, my socioeconomic background, nor my ethnicity.
In fact the reality that this shit does matter in real life was as inconceivable for me back then, as the concept of meritocracy must be for someone that spent his entire life in society now.
Yes, I think this is the heart of these issues. Most people are fundamentally incapable of ascertaining objective merit, and thus the concept of a meritocracy is meaningless to them. This is instructive in business too; never trust your customers to be able to tell that your offering is superior, you have to TELL them.
Thats part of it. But there is a whole other group that is using victim hood and distorted diversity arguments to extract monetary gain and organisational power from usually large companies who reflexively instantiated paid positions with little or no research and vague PR-friendly mission statements.
If the only real goal put down on paper is to hire x% black people and y% brown people and reduce z% of white people under some fuzzy equality rubric its no surprise these positions attract people who have ideologically compatible beliefs.
There has been a small collection of black/brown power radical organisations in California for over 50 years. There views are openly racist and have anti white, anti European, anti Colonial America sentiments. These diversity jobs are a magnet for people with that mindset who live every day with there race on there sleeve. When they get in they can twist whatever mandate there is to promote there own agenda and beliefs.
The sheltered Ivy league set who runs these companies have no street smarts or experience with race politics in California. So you end up with what we have now with genuinely nasty ideologues hired into these organisations and they eventually do lots of damage.
> If the only real goal put down on paper is to hire x% black people and y% brown people and reduce z% of white people under some fuzzy equality rubric
I suspect that in GitHub's case, the diversity officer was tasked with defining those goals, on the basis that the straight white male executives would have no clue what the "right" goals should be.
I hire developer where I work, I hired white, non-white and women, and every time I make my choice by testing their skills and asking about their past experiences because that's how you get the most competent employees. And every tech company want best employees...
You are human. You are not a robot. That's the problem. Humans judge people, make snap judgments, fit people into sterotypes. I'm not saying you do that. I bet you don't. But if you start scaling the interviewing process, adding more and more people into it, you'll eventually get a few who do make racial/other unfair judgments.
Everyone has some level of bias. The best thing you can really do is try and counter your own bias when you notice it. In most jurisdictions not hiring someone based on racial or unfair judgements is illegal. Trying to change workplace culture away from meritocracy for the sake of diversity might sound noble and well intended, but just as 'meritocracy is a lie', so is diversity in that sense.
Hiring people based on how much diversity they provide based purely on their gender, race, etc is prejudice in itself, even if well intended.
I agree with you that everyone has some level of bias, but we disagree on to what degree people are biased. Race is a very complex issue in American society. It permeates everything: politics, economics, academia. And it's visually obvious. The evidence is pretty clear to me (all the statistics related to how racial judgments are made, how stunningly often resumes get rejected if they have names that sound like they belong to certain racial groups), that race plays a very large role in people's snap judgments of others.
What do you mean by "having some kind of bar ... to meet"?
Isn't that what most interviewers do? For example have a expectation of javascript knowledge and ask questions to determine how knowledgable they are?
You cannot prove meritocracy doesn't work. Fortunately you don't have to. The burden of proof is required for positive claims.
We don't have a lot of evidence meritocracy works. We have several pieces of evidence suggesting that it, in fact, didn't serve github very well. The fact there was a sexual harassment lawsuit with a barely kept secret about a whole group of women bound by arbitration and non-disparage agreements is probably evidece it doesn't.
The sad part, most people will never really understand how much Tom sacrificed to protect his friends during his final days there.
If you're referencing GH with that sexual harassment lawsuit comment, it fizzled, and from the outside, it seemed like it wasn't anything sketchy, just that the accuser's work wasn't very good and people didn't treat her with kid gloves. The only inappropriate thing was one of the founder's wives trying to manipulate her, but that doesn't sell as well.
The philosophic burden of proof is on you as you're making a statement counter to user "audessuscest"'s claim that meritocracy is important and the ideal is to make solely skill-based hires.
> The philosophic burden of proof is on you as you're making a statement counter to user "audessuscest"'s claim that meritocracy is important and the ideal is to make solely skill-based hires.
Let's just... ignore the larger societal angle of harassment, denigration, fear and uncertainty that plagues women and some minorities in STEM fields or finance, okay? Let's say, "It exists but let's not discuss it here."
I really don't wanna do this conversation AGAIN but the contention is that right now "whiteness" and "maleness" are implicitly part of the meritocratic process as positive traits. That happens in 2 ways:
1. Young, single, white (and Asian!) men are targeted by recruiters because of a perception of a "work ethic". This ethic is "I expect people to prop up my life so I can work 80+ hours a week, which is not sustainable if you have ANY responsibilities at all outside of basic sustenance". Historically, they has been a safe bet.
2. Subsequent "pattern matching" be it implicit or explicit, kind or cruel, expects that kind of commitment and education and ethos. That this wasn't ever reasonable is lost because people are just trying to recognize someone who can likely work in the same way they're expecting or have worked.
You can argue that people should work that hard and that it's fair, if you want. But what actually happens is that people find that there is a specific profile of people most likely to be willing and able to commit to that kind of lifestyle and then they optimize for selecting that. Therefore, Meritocracy is not a hedge against racism or sexism. Indeed, Meritocracy may be selecting "merit" based on attributes which explicitly reinforce sexism or racism.
So when you say, "skill-based hires" I can't help but hear, "people like me" every time. Because if anyone actually gave a shit about skill based hires they'd be blinding their recruiting efforts, doing pre-filter tests and desperately trying to remove every drop of bias from the industry to identify them.
>Let's just... ignore the larger societal angle of harassment, denigration, fear and uncertainty that plagues women and some minorities in STEM fields or finance, okay? Let's say, "It exists but let's not discuss it here."
No, let's not just agree to a narrative that you want to sell. I strongly reject your premise that uses weasel words and emotive language. You already tried manipulating the conversation by referencing a lawsuit without mentioning that the outcome ran counter to your narrative of endemic sexism.
>I really don't wanna do this conversation AGAIN but the contention is that right now "whiteness" and "maleness" are implicitly part of the meritocratic process as positive traits.
It's clear that you're used to "arguing" with people that agree with your ideology. If you don't want to deal with disagreement, then don't bother responding -- stay in your echo chamber.
The/my meritocratic process doesn't care about race or gender. When I hire consultants and contract-out work, I often don't know their race or gender and I'm not interested. I choose candidates in my price range based on the best work-samples.
>1. Young, single, white (and Asian!) men are targeted by recruiters because of a perception of a "work ethic". This ethic is "I expect people to prop up my life so I can work 80+ hours a week
Sorry, you forgot to mention that those people have experience in the industry or are otherwise credentialed -- your phrasing either intentionally or unintentionally suggests that recruiters just contact arbitrary white and asian men: "Hey, so we see that you're currently painting fences. Want to run a tech startup?" That's not the case.
Further, your assignment of "work ethic" to mean "I put my career first" reflects a personal choice. Either gender and any race can make this choice. By the way, "working really hard" isn't a "perception of a work ethic", that's just what's meant by work ethic. It's okay for words to have definitions.
>2. Subsequent "pattern matching" be it implicit or explicit, kind or cruel, expects that kind of commitment and education and ethos.
If I'm unpacking your assertion correctly, you're just saying that an interviewer or recruiter wants/looks-for commitment, relevant education, qualifications, and a career-first mentality. What a shock.
>But what actually happens is that people find that there is a specific profile of people most likely to be willing and able to commit to that kind of lifestyle and then they optimize for selecting that.
Which makes me think that I'm understanding you. The person that makes the personal choices and sacrifice required to excel in an industry is the logical pick over the person that didn't.
>Indeed, Meritocracy may be selecting "merit" based on attributes which explicitly reinforce sexism or racism...if anyone actually gave a shit about skill based hires they'd be blinding their recruiting efforts, doing pre-filter tests and desperately trying to remove every drop of bias from the industry to identify them.
According to your reasoning, hiring someone with a very strong work ethic is a "reinforcement of sexism and racism". Your prior suggestion that that those traits are unique to "young, single, white (and Asian!) men" is disgusting and offensive. Stop diminishing the importance of personal agency in becoming successful in a highly competitive field.
I'm going to stick with my approach of not caring about the gender, race, or any other _not at all relevant to their work or how I treat them as a person_ detail. If this wave of "social justice" parasites actually wanted change instead of attention and money, they'd quit the bullshit and put in the work to become great engineers or create their own companies.
> The/my meritocratic process doesn't care about race or gender. When I hire consultants and contract-out work, I often don't know their race or gender and I'm not interested. I choose candidates in my price range based on the best work-samples.
It might be true for you. We know it's not true for many other people. That's why orchestras stick auditionees behind curtains. It's why people are advised to remove any protected characteristic information from their resumes/CVs.
> I'm going to stick with my approach of not caring about the gender, race, or any other _not at all relevant to their work or how I treat them as a person_ detail
I'd be interested in how you know you've eliminated this bit of strong conditioning, or whether you're operating under a cognitive bias.
Because so far when we test people who say "I don't care about race / sex / etc" we find people who do in fact care about it.
>It might be true for you. We know it's not true for many other people. That's why orchestras stick auditionees behind curtains. It's why people are advised to remove any protected characteristic information from their resumes/CVs.
In a highly-competitive field with strong compensation and a lack of qualified candidates, I have a hard time believing that it's any sort of normal for recruiters (who require placement for compensation or to keep their jobs) to discount people based on race or gender, especially with the amount of good press and cheap marketing that now comes from having an outwardly diverse company.
I don't buy into the narrative that the engineering field is flush with discriminatory practices. Companies are even paying non-STEM people to spew inflammatory garbage about the STEM industry -- if the tech industry is financially tolerant of these parasites, why is it insane to think that we, as an engineering workforce, have healthy/tolerant views?
>I'd be interested in how you know you've eliminated this bit of strong conditioning, or whether you're operating under a cognitive bias.
This one is easy -- I'm not interested in someone's race/gender/religion/appearance/other-non-consequential-factors when it comes to work. I'm primarily interested in taking care of my family and in personal growth; working with others that help the success of my company and challenge me to better myself help in these goals.
By definition, I wouldn't know if this is some sort of cognitive bias, but evidence would suggest that I'm in good shape on this front. If it's a bad thing to not raise or lower my expectations of others based on race/gender, then I'm comfortable being a jerk that judges people based on their merits.
>Because so far when we test people who say "I don't care about race / sex / etc" we find people who do in fact care about it.
I feel like you're trying to indirectly accuse me of something, so if you are, own up to it and make the accusation directly.
People who fixate on race/sex/etc that have deeply rooted issues with it, not those who focus on thoughts, ideas, and ability.
It's a truth and a lie depending on how you want to interpret the meaning if meritocracy.
For many people it means, atomically, when you're filling a position, you're not just going thru the motions to get your buddy, mate, someone you owe a favor, your cousin, etc. in and not doing due diligence in finding someone capable of executing the position. For many people merit does not equate to reversing historical injustices, but it does mean not being unjust during this process. That's to say you don't disqualify people out of hand, just because.
> Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender.
Exactly. The issue should not be how many percent are what "race", but if companies are dumb enough to leave good programmers, managers etc waiting tables, manning the help desk etc because they doesn't fit our stereotypes.
Or: If if companies does spectacularly bad hires because of political correctness.
I didn't get this 'we are afraid and only want to hire non-whites' from the article. Hiring a diverse workforce is a good good thing, generally. Why do you think that should mean we don't hire white people? Every tech company that isn't going out of business in the world has open headcount, and they'd like to hire all capable people.
> Not talking or thinking about race ... does absolutely nothing to help.
But in the better future world we're trying to create where there is much less discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or sex or other body attributes, isn't that exactly what we'd be doing, not talking or thinking about race because it just isn't important to us? Isn't not talking or thinking about race exactly what we should be doing, as much as possible?
It's true there's a case for having people interact with many cultures and races, but forcing it can be a problem because you will only persist the segregation because you will have to continue to divide people in order to treat some of them in a special way to attempt a fix.
The initial problem is seeing the world as if people are different, and then identifying yourself as part of a group, and then seeing people outside of that group as "others". This is even worse when the categories are inaccurate, and are actually not races, but rather sub-cultures.
We shouldn't be promoting these inaccurate categories. Many "white" people are actually "black", and many "black" people "white". It just so happens that American culture has incorrectly correlated certain physical traits as markers for these sub-cultures, and now in an attempt to fix inequality we have persisted this mistake into government forms and professional business in the name of fixing the inequality, but we're simply promoting this mis-categorization and actually persisting the segregation into the future. There are definitely ways to address racist people and the damage they're causing without using these incorrect labels.
This! So much this! Just about any communal animal likes to be around others that look, communicate, and behave like themselves. It's a natural effect that promotes safety and efficiency.
To acknowledge that we have this blind spot and ensure that we shine extra light into it is the only way to mitigate its effect. Cultural, like genetic, diversity is a good thing. We achieve by standing on the shoulders of giants. Giants come in all shapes and colors.
If we continue to surround ourselves with like-minded individuals, we will never learn what we don't know. It is by gradually incorporating foreign ideas and concepts that initially challenge our own that we grow as a society. Two hundred fifty years ago, we thought it was acceptable to own another human. Two thousand five hundred years ago, we thought the earth was flat. Twenty years ago, we thought the Spice Girls were the pinnacle of musical achievement.
It is particularly difficult to accept these new people and ideas because it forces us to reconsider our beliefs and admit we were wrong. But when we know better, we do better. Be self critical and form new opinions when exposed to the new and different.
This is like saying I shouldn't be worrying about my budget, because in the future that I am trying to create where I have plenty of money, I won't need to.
No, because it doesn't actually address the existing situation. Maybe "I don't want it to be a problem that I'm an alcoholic, so no one should ever talk about my alcohol problem".
> But in the better future world we're trying to create where there is much less discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or sex or other body attributes, isn't that exactly what we'd be doing, not talking or thinking about race because it just isn't important to us
Acting like your goal has already been achieved doesn't necessarily get you any closer to your goal. If my closet has a bunch of stuff I don't use, it's not going to get any cleaner if I just pretend it's already clean.
No, not talking or thinking about race leads to erasure, which is another form of racism. (For race/racism, you can substitute gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, etc.)
To try to make this clear by analogy, one of the reasons that #OscarsSoWhite is a meme is because if black children only ever see white people winning Oscars…they won’t believe that they themselves could win one (and there’s 95%+ white winners for all acting categories in the Oscars). Having visible role models is important. Having discussions about equality and representation are important.
> No, not talking or thinking about race leads to erasure, which is another form of racism.
Erasure seems to be jargon with no widely accepted meaning outside of social justice. For now I will stick to what I perceive to be the average of the various dictionary definitions of racism. By that meaning, not talking about or thinking about ethnicity is definitely not racism.
> if black children only ever see white people winning Oscars…they won’t believe that they themselves could win one ... Having visible role models is important.
I think you're saying it's important to have visible role models with the same ethnicity and/or sex, and/or whatever other bodily attribute we're focusing on at the moment. But why would anyone think that unless they already have racist and/or sexist beliefs?
> I think you're saying it's important to have visible role models with the same ethnicity and/or sex, and/or whatever other bodily attribute we're focusing on at the moment. But why would anyone think that unless they already have racist and/or sexist beliefs?
That's a new low in victim-blaming. It's not Hollywood that's racist - it's black people!
Well, first, this talk is mostly about gender, which is completely different than race.
If you think about what race really is, it's not what it seems (unlike sex and gender, which have not only a more consistent historical difference, and a stronger biological one as well). Race is more cultural than anything else.
Sure it starts with physical traits, but whether or not you're black, white, or asian, does not depend on your biology. You're actually not born that way (even if the labels make it seem like you belong to a certain geographical location, they're just labels), and the proof is people who are of mixed race.
People who are half black, half white, from my experience, they choose which culture to belong to, and we all confuse it with their race. Obama is a great example. People saying he's our "black" president. What? What does that really mean? He's clearly half white, half black, so why is he a "black president"? That statement is inaccurate, and people should always say, he's our first "half black, half white, president". So what's going on there? People just categorize themselves, and it's just a matter of the stories and memes they adopt from a set of some kind of cultural background. In other words, it's all made up. Half-white, half-black people often choose to be black because they think black is cool. They adopt that culture and roll with it.
So in short, if people keep categorizing themselves, there's no way out of this. Categorization will lead to division among people. "Black" people are just Americans with a different sub-culture, that's it. "Black" people are just as racially diverse among themselves as they are in comparison to "white" people. There are "blacks" from east Africa, west Africa, and Saudi Arabia. Every "black" group is culturally and ethnically different. Why group them?
I'll recognize there is a history to be dealt with here. And that is that we've inherited inequality that is for the most part based on skin color (because that's how our ignorant ancestors decided to categorize people), so that division of inequality still lingers. But there is a case for both repairing the damage, while at the same time getting everyone to forget there is any kind of racial categorization. There is only sub-cultures within American culture.
All jokes aside, some white people grow up dirt poor in predominantly black neighborhoods and identify more with black Anerican culture then their own skin color.
Do they get better access to schools, scholarships, government jobs, funding for small businesses? Etc...
What about the black kid who grew up in the suburbs with a stable family and all whote friends. Should their access to the same programs be cut because they're less likely to need it.
Categorization will never go away as long as people are incentivized to promote their identity as a 'protected class'.
It has gotten to the point where everybody except white males falls under one or more protected classes.
I'm not claiming inequality is an issue that should continue to be addressed. I'm creating government mandated classes of people based on their race/ethnicity and throwing money at the problem isn't the solution. It replaces implicit descriminatiom with explicit descrimination.
The problem is that white kid could dress up in a suit and tie, go into an interview, and be totally free of racial judgment (also dropping any obvious mannerisms). A black man can do that, including dropping any mannerisms, but they will still be black.
I don't know how many poor white people you know, but this isn't true. You can't undue the effects of poverty by putting on a suit and tie.
I grew up as a poor white kid in a multicultural neighborhood and I've spent the last 20 years trying to fit into middle class white society. It is a constant struggle. I've had to work harder than every one of my peers to get to where I'm at. When I hear upper middle class white women and minorities whining about how hard it is for them my blood boils.
Your parents read to you, paid for you to go to college, talked like middle class people do about middle class things, taught you how to manage money, a growth mindset, encouraged you, teachers expected you to be something when you grew up and treated you appropriately. Poor white kids, like poor black kids don't get any of this. Putting on a suit and tie doesn't improve your vocabulary or make you think about yourself like an equal. It doesn't teach you how to write a good resume or cover letter. It doesn't put internships or solid educational credentials on that resume.
This is not true, if the person doing the interview is also black. Or are you saying a black interviewer would also be racist against another black person in a suit and a tie? The fact is that race is matter of in-group, out-group thinking, and mentioning it exacerbates the problem because we are persisting the group-think. It's true the problem won't go away if we ignore it, but we should identify behavior and hunt down people who are racist, regardless of their race, and without mentioning their race so as to not keep persisting the grouping problem.
Under most circumstances you're right and that's sad.
So what's the alternative? Systematically killing off all the old white guys who still cling to their anachronistic perceptions? Their children are still going to inherit their wealth and the 1% will continue to be the 1%.
Hand the power over to militant feminists who happen to be as -- if not more -- biased based on race and/or gender? IMHO, that's just trading one class of terrible people for another.
Tech is a the perfect place to foster a diverse working environment. I wish there were more people from varied backgrounds rather then 50/50 white/asian males in development and mostly white women and men in design.
But I don't know how to rewind the clock 10-15 years and teach inner city kids that all of their idols are frauds and that being a computer is the path to being a real success in life.
The kids I knew from the inner city who were into computers and tech didn't start in college. They got deeply involved in tech in their teens partly to stay out of trouble and fell in love with learning and creating things.
My own path wasn't much different except I grew up in thr suburbs and had more resources. I had my own bad influences to get away from and I didn't need to go to school to be taught what I was happy to learn on my own.
Yes I agree with you. And I'm not a fan of affirmative action. I'm just seeing a stunning number of people in this thread who are in denial that race is even an issue at all, or who think the best course of action is to stop talking about it.
A problem to be sure. But I'm not convinced of the ubiquitousness of the problem - that folks really suffer much from 'reverse discrimination'. Or that folks do much to promote their identity as a protected class. Most of us just muddle on.
And I'm not ready to resist every attempt to re-level the playing field as 'explicit dicrimination'. Is the alternative to do nothing, and hope it all works out?
First, there is no such thing as 'reverse descrimination'. Descrimination is descrimination, no matter who it is aimed at. Assuming that only specific classes of people can be subjected to negative prejudice based on superficial characteristics such as race/gender/creed is dismissive and a clear sign of ignorance.
Second, I'm all for leveling the playing field when it comes to education and building community. By which I mean, multicultural communities not 'stick with your own, fuck the other guys' communities.
I went to school at one such community and it deeply saddened me when I left because the same degree of diversity can't be found anywhere else. Ironically, the military (ie USMC) is probably the closest I've found to a true, 'not just for the photo op', diverse community that doesn't explicitly try hard to be. The difference there is, everybody is American first and individuals have the courage to stand up for each other in the face of injustice.
"We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT." We live in a world where this is not remotely possible. Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism.
But do you agree that the goal should be, more or less, to create a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes matter as little as, say, eye color does today?
If so, what is the plan to achieve that goal? Don't we achieve it by actually acting that way as much as possible? That's what makes sense to me.
Suppose we, in the name of equality or diversity or fairness, actually elevate the importance of bodily attributes like ethnicity and sex, deliberately considering them during hiring, and build that practice into our culture. Having practiced doing it wrong for however many years, will we someday decide it isn't needed anymore and get rid of it?
It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending you've already achieved it. If current problems are driven by subconscious biases then you need to eliminate those. It seems to me that the best way to eliminate them is to forcibly overcome them until people get used to seeing more minorities in these positions and replace their subconscious biases with new ones.
How is race or sex aware hiring going to help with eliminating subconscious bias?
It reinforces bigotry, because it gives a rationalization for bigots to not respect their minority coworkers, as they can claim that they were not subject to the same scrutiny when they were hired.
What is the historical justification for the effectiveness affirmative action? Certainly, countries like Malaysia and South Africa with extreme disparity seem to have mixed results at best.
I agree that pretending ethnicity/sex are not visible, is not the same thing as making ethnicity/sex invisible.
But actually implementing enrollment and employment laws or policies that hide this information from decision makers could make it nearly invisible.
That's actually not the fundamental problem though. Even if you managed to a perfectly even proportion of middle class stem graduates from 1st and 2nd tier universities represented on your payroll, you'll still end up with a monoculture. Not because of some hard to pin down unconscious bigotry, but because little has been done to eliminate class from society, and social class is a big factor in a persons access to education and the quality of their childhood.
Poor, working class women have less work opportunities than men, as less educated ( religious ) working class people tend conform to traditional gender roles more than middle class people, well paid working class jobs require more physical strength, and unlike middle class mothers, working class mothers cannot afford childcare or help with housework while working or studying.
Like ethnicity, class is almost hereditary so is easily confused with ethnicity in statistics.
Making the statistics look better by hiring proportionally more middle class minorities is a face saving exercise, not a solution.
Who cares what coworkers claim? If job performance is used for evaluations and promotions, then fairness is preserved.
And the assumption that minorities can only be hired by insufficient scrutiny is not a very enlightened attitude. Perhaps the company can look really hard for qualified candidates that help balance the workforce. How about that?
I agree that real progress is the right way to evaluate hiring/ admissions programs. Do qualified people end up in a diverse student/worker population? Then you're doing it right.
I would care if my coworkers were bigots, and I would especially care if they were prejudiced against me, how can you effectively work with someone who doesn't respect you? Pretending bigotry doesn't exist is the same thing as pretending that race/sex aren't visible. You will also have to apply the same affirmative action when promoting people, as a couple of years work experience doesn't erase the generations of privilege you're competing with.
I never said that minorities can only be hired by applying insufficient scrutiny. What I will say is as a group, minorities can only be hired in a proportion that is different to the proportion of minorities in group of qualified applicants if some weighting is taken off the job relevant qualifications, and applied to their membership in minority groups.
If you could come up with a huge list of entirely fungible, interchangeable resumes and interview notes, you could consciously pick minorities first without harming the quality of your recruiting.
What kind of roles would have that weak of a job market though?
If candidates aren't fungible weighting any importance to race/sex means taking some weighting off something else, and it means that bigots will assume individuals from minority groups are less qualified, because of the fact that the group as a whole is less qualified, because of your own policies. It perpetuates both inequality and bigotry.
If you merely know about the race/sex/whatever of your candidates then you're already giving some weight to those attributes whether you want to or not.
If we had some way of scoring candidates numerically, then yes, you'd just pick the biggest number. But I've never heard of a hiring system that worked like that. There's always some subjectivity. You can look at a bunch of resumes and rank them, but a good chunk of that ranking is guesswork and opinion. That gives room for your biases to play, and you'll end up with the "best" candidates tending to match those biases. And don't tell me you don't have any racial or gender biases; you do, everybody does.
You shouldn't give up a 9.9/10 because he's white, and hire a 2.4/10 because she's black. But if you have a bunch of candidates around 8/10, consider hiring the minority candidate who's a 7.9 rather than the candidate who matches the existing demographics of your team and is an 8.1. Your numbers are probably ±3 anyway, so it's not the irrational decision it sounds like it would be in a universe of pure numbers.
So you'll just take a guess at your biases and then try to counteract them arbitrarily?
I'd like to know how you even begin to judge what ethnicity someone is just by looking at them. Sounds like an extremely fraught game to play.
Part of the answer is surely to try your utmost to take all the subjectivity out of the process. I've mentioned it here previously, and people said that they enjoy getting to make subjective value judgments of candidates. I think that is a poor attitude.
This is the kind of process I was thinking:
One person strips CV's of irrelevant info (names, ages, schools, etc). They hand that to another person who decides who to interview.
When the candidate is interviewed, pre-determined questions get asked, and then notes are taken of their answers and any relevant info, and that gets handed over to the person who makes the ultimate hiring decision.
Even that process probably leaks a bit, but it's better than simply trying to guess.
You don't have to guess at your biases. Look at the demographics of your company and you will see them.
Your idea sounds great too. I think there's still room for error there, in how the questions are formulated or answers interpreted. Think a mild version of the old Jewish Problems. But it could certainly make things a lot better.
OK, I can readily believe lots of our problems stem from subconscious biases. But what do you think about the questions I posed? Are we trying to create a world where we don't care about body attributes? If so, do you advocate doing the exact opposite behavior (deliberately paying attention to body attributes and factoring them into decisions) for some temporary period and then stopping?
We're already factoring these things into decisions whether we want to or not. I don't see anything weird about saying that we should change how we do so, as a step towards getting rid of it altogether.
I think that as long as we have large discrepancies in how many people with or without a particular attribute are in a particular profession, we'll have subconscious biases in evaluating who's good at that profession. If you spend your whole life in an environment where almost all the best programmers are purple people, you'll have a hard time overcoming the notion that purple people are generally better programmers. Pretending not to notice color will simply persist the status quo. If we deliberately include more orange people for a time, then we may be able to overcome that.
I don't want to be unfair to you or your argument, but I can't understand what you're saying any other way than that we should build racism and sexism into our policies and processes as a step toward eliminating racism and sexism.
I don't see why you should understand it any other way, done that is in fact what I'm saying. It's like putting wheels on an airplane. You want to be in the air, but you have to deal with the fact that you're on the ground or else you won't get anywhere.
We're all familiar with the possibly apocryphal experiment of five monkeys, a ladder, and an electric shock - with the end of the experiment being five monkeys that have never been shocked, but their behaviour is changed. I think we all like to think we've evolved above this kind of manipulation, though I also suspect we each have stories of having worked in professional environments, staffed by evidently smart people, where we observe this same phenomenon.
(Aside -- it's sobering to consider that the people we've worked with may have stories about such effects operating upon us.)
Anyway, point being that while you may be correct in the assertion:
> It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending
> you've already achieved it.
What if the goal is to have the next generation(s) achieve a way of thinking by pretending (I'm not ecstatic about that word, but it'll have to do) we think that way now.
Do you think that may have a positive effect?
I'm reminded of the Garbage Dump Troop - a fascinating story, told in many places, but here's a succinct explanation of the effect:
I think the next generation will tend to do what we do. If a certain profession has a racial makeup that greatly differs from that of the general population, that will tend to cause the next generation to think of that profession as being typically whatever race is predominant. In short, if you grow up in an environment where almost all programmers are young black women (being deliberately opposite here) then you'll tend to see young black women as being more qualified, all else being equal, and this will perpetuate the disparity.
It seems to me that if you want to get to a state where diversity just happens by not consciously thinking about race, you need to first get to a state where diversity happens, let it sit for a while, then relax it. I don't see how it's supposed to work if you just stop deliberately discriminating against people and otherwise let things take their course. It seems like trying to achieve flight by making airplane noises and thinking real hard about being up in the air.
Let's say we all started ignoring everything you're talking about today.
Currently a black family making $100k will live in roughly the same area as a white family making $30k.
This family is also much more likely to have family that has gone to prison due to previous racist institutions, and less likely to have had 3 generations of parents having gone to Stanford.
So sure, race gets ignored, but do you think people will start ignoring all the other social signals? Even if you ignore everything else, being born to a white family in itself means you inherit centuries of advantages
This is the justification behind affirmative action. Even if it might not be "fair" when looking at an individual case, its also pretty unfair when a kid just happens to be born to a family that has had opportunity robbed from them until extremely recently.
Your end goal might be laudable, but the path to reach it requires corrections
Currently a black family making $100k will live in roughly
the same area as a white family making $30k.
I've heard this figure several times and no one using it has yet cited a source for this. Could you please provide a citation for this figure and any secondary sources that study primary sources attempting to explain this disparity.
I don't doubt this figure could exist at some time pre-1990, but I don't understand how this could possibly be the case since the start of the housing bubble that burst in 2008 in which many many firms pretty much threw out all prejudices in the pursuit of money as people tried to source any and all loans to sell Wall Street. They not only threw out prejudices, they actively overlooked issues that might correlate with and work against some identity groups like credit rating and earning power.
>Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed.
>Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.
The logic here seems circular. How do you get from a world with racism/sexism/etc issues, to one without? Simply by assuming it to be true?
How does acting like the problem doesn't exist solve the problem? If that's not what you mean, then do you mean we should all just suddenly stop being racist/sexist/bigotted/etc? Just like that? How would that work? How do you get your neighbor to go along with that? Or white middle manager, who means well but is uncomfortable hiring people of certain ethnicities or sexualities because of "culture fit"? It seems that anyone willing to do what you are saying, if I'm understanding it correctly, is probably already of the belief that a world without racism/sexism/etc would be better, and already behaves in the manner you suggest. In which case, we still live in a fucked up world and system where these things are actually still big problems.
When is the disease distinct from the cure? At a certain point, we need to move forward and strive towards a harmonious ideal. Otherwise we delay true equality.
What about tactics that are antagonistic and counter-productive? Isn't it about time someone asked "What could possibly go wrong?" when discussing each tactic?
I agree it may be idealistic, especially because part of the problem is people thinking themselves into a category, and adopting it as an identity. It is however the right direction, because all this "racial" problems are caused by categorization of people in the first place.
Why? Let me apply the principle you claim to be the case in a different, ahistorical way:
"'We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about denigrating and enslaving blacks, and NOT MENTION IT.' We live in a world where this is not remotely possible. Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism." --some Southern slave owner, 1859
The same could be applied to historical anti-semitic movements, anti-suffrage groups--anti-anything groups, really.
It can be boiled down to: "We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about treating other people badly because of their appearance or where they are from, and NOT MENTION IT," and people like you saying, "That's impossible. We will always be just as hateful and prejudiced as the worst of us are now. You shouldn't even suggest that it's possible to make any progress in human society."
It boggles my mind that you could even think this way. But, then, people thinking and acting in unreasonable ways is the root of these problems.
You are setting up an enormous straw man. When you say people like the GP say:
> We will always be just as hateful and prejudiced as the worst of us are now.
That is emphatically not what the GP is saying. The problem is not the ideal that race should not matter, it's that history does not go away, or more generally we can not build the ideal world from first principles.
Those with privilege often wish it was as simple as simply being "color-blind", then everything would be fair, right? Wrong. Because even if no white person harbored racist thoughts of any kind, we are still saddled with racist institutions and wealth distribution. Even if police magically became completely egalitarian, black people would still suffer the brunt of police brutality, because they still live in the poorest areas where there is the most crime.
The bottom line is that, if you are a white male (which I am), then you really and truly should be listening and not proclaiming any strong opinion or solution, because privilege is a blind, and so you really are not qualified to have an opinion about what should be done about sexism or racism. I feel like this is especially onerous for geeks (again, like me) who value their ability to reason, but understand that your (my) feelings being hurt is much less of an indignity than most black people face on a regular basis. Don't get defensive and try to prove how non-racist you are. Instead just take a deep breath and realize that this country forcibly imported 10 million African slaves. Despite how uncomfortable that makes a lot of people, there really is no way for that legacy to ever be erased.
No. As a white male, as any other type of male, you should be seeking to be educated about the subject on which you wish to voice your opinion. Having privilege does not render privilege invisible.
You saying "If you are a white male, you should hold your tongue" is hugely problematic, because it means white males should not be part of the solution to racism and should have no voice in any changes.
I disagree. That is, indeed, effectively what the GP is saying: that we can never rise above the mistakes of the past. That we can never let go of the past and move forward. That we will always be guilty of the sins of people who lived on this plot of land 150 years ago.
And that's all balderdash. In fact, go back in time a few decades, and this was not such a big deal. We were moving on. Fast-forward to today, and we have a new generation of agitators learning how to be outraged at the distant past, fomenting dissent and unrest.
We are not saddled with racist institutions--we are building a new breed of them. And poverty knows not skin color.
And what is it with this idea of police brutality? "black people would still suffer the brunt of police brutality, because they still live in the poorest areas where there is the most crime." There is less police brutality in this country than there has been at any time in its history. Those people you're talking about are suffering from crime. The problem is not police brutality--the problem is crime. Most murdered blacks are murdered by other blacks.
Frankly, how dare you tell anyone that they are not qualified to have an opinion on what is just or fair or right or wrong. That is a stone age attitude if I ever heard one. What you are advocating is effectively a detatched kind of /lex talionis/, one in which the distant descendants of people who were wronged are asked how they should be compensated by the perpetrating of further injustice upon innocents who are in no way responsible for said wrongs of the distant past.
And as a rational human being, I am fully qualified to recognize that injustice, regardless of my skin color or sex.
It's ludicrous. Ask any human being, "Hey, some folks way up your family tree a long time ago were treated wrongly. Therefore, we can give you some free money and bump you to the top of the resume pile. Is that okay with you?" and what do you think they are going to say? The problem is that, in some ways, it is a zero-sum game, because every time one person is given preferential treatment over another, that other person suffers. And that is unjust, unfair, and wrong.
And at the same time, in some ways, it's not a zero-sum game, because when one person suffers injustice, we are all wronged. The only way to stop this is to stop all injustice and treat all people equally. That is the only truly fair, just, and right thing to do. Justice should be blind, and that includes being blind to skin color and sex.
> Don't get defensive and try to prove how non-racist you are.
Why are you saying these things? Show me where I am defensive and trying to prove anything about myself. I am not and have never been the subject of this discussion. You're parroting lines, not participating in a discussion.
> Despite how uncomfortable that makes a lot of people, there really is no way for that legacy to ever be erased.
So, tell me, what is the statute of limitations? When is the expiration date? Apparently 150+ years is not it. Apparently the 600,000 deaths of Union soldiers who died as part of the effort to end slavery isn't part of the equation. So what is it then? 200 years? 500 years? 1,000 years? The dissolution of the nation altogether? If there is truly no end to this "legacy," then why are we stopping at slavery? Why aren't we going back more hundreds or thousands of years to all the other horrific tragedies perpetrated by one group upon another?
Quite seriously, where do you draw the line, and who are you--or anyone else--to make that call?
You don't bail out a sinking ship by pouring water into the ship; you stop the leak and pump out the water. You don't heal broken bones by breaking other people's bones. You cannot solve racism by applying more racism.
Yours is akin to saying, "Let's sweep slavery under the rug and pretend it doesn't exist."
Mine is akin to saying, "We should no longer even consider enslaving people or treating people badly because their skin is a certain color."
Yours would certainly be ineffective in eliminating slavery because it advocates pretending that it doesn't exist.
Mine is standing up against slavery and saying that the underlying principle used to justify it is morally wrong.
Applied to the issue of reverse racism, yours would be akin to saying, "Let's ignore or even advocate one kind of racism, while condemning another kind."
Mine would be akin to saying, "All racism is wrong. We should all stop being racist in any way, period."
I think the issue is that one side bases its position on moral principles, while the other side bases its position on utilitarianism.
One side says, "Two wrongs don't make a right. -1 - 1 = -2". The other side says, "It's acceptable to do wrong to compensate for another wrong. -1 - 1 = 0."
One side says, "We are not all-knowing or all-wise. We cannot fairly do a concrete injustice to an innocent person to compensate for a perceived injustice done to another innocent person." The other side says, "This innocent person should not complain about being treated unjustly, because this other innocent person has probably been treated unjustly."
One side sees it as a zero-sum game. The other side recognizes that, as long as racism exists in any form, we all lose.
HA! no.
What's being advocated by this '...NOT THINK... NOT MENTION...' is essentially racial pacifism. In theory, yes, we shouldn't perpetrate violence or war upon each other. But if those who seek to eliminate violence rely solely on pacifism, it leaves those with no such intentions to perpetuate war uncontested. Should people ignore genocide because they idealize a non-violent future?
The thought promoted by the OP (of this idea) seems to imply that by setting an example behavior based on our ideals, others, with no such ideals, will somehow be compelled to adopt them. I just can't imagine anyone actually thinks that's true.
A German citizen in 1940 doesn't want anyone to see murder in the world, so he sets an example by NOT THINKING and NOT MENTIONING murder. And millions of people get murdered by his fellow countrymen who don't share the same ideals.
Pacifism has it's place and is often respectable. But non-confrontational, silent pacifism is a holey personal journey and has little hope of having any influence outside oneself.
> "We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and
> NOT MENTION IT." We live in a world where this is not remotely possible.
> Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism.
This saddens me.
I'm somewhat curious on knowing some other data points on your spectrum of (bad) idealism..
But the 'not remotely possible' claim sounds like you've decided for all of us that we're incapable of ever thinking of skin colour in the future the same way we think of, say, hair colour today.
I suspect your position is based upon your current cultural surroundings, in which case I'd prescribe travel. Lots of it.
I don't think anyone is advocating that we ignore racism, let alone that the ideal state is one where it exists and we ignore it.
Rather, we aim to be in a place where racism simply doesn't exist.
I am painfully aware that for many people this is an unsettling proposition as it sounds like rampant fantasy and/or they don't comprehend how (or believe that) any society could reach that position.
But in turn I believe those people exhibit a poverty of imagination, and are exhibiting an ignorance of various historical examples of comparably profound cultural shifts.
Not talking about race has been the status quo in tech. Only in recent years have people even brought it up. To think that not talking about it further will cause racism to not exist is the fantasy.
The parent's point was that not all places are racist in the same way and when you see the diversity in how racism plays out across countries and cultures, you realize that is exists because people believes it exists.
Racism is not reality.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Just to point out... the US is the western only country on the planet which cares, or even mentions, people's skin colour/race AT ALL.
Literally every other western country calls people... people. A man is "a man" not "a green/blue/pink/red/etc man". A women is "a women" not "a green/blue/pink/red/etc woman".
Continuously giving skin colour qualifiers in descriptions of people... is (to non-US people) bizarre, and seems to be a large part of the language used to keep racism alive in the US.
That's as far as I've been able to tell so far anyway. :(
You haven't been paying much attention then. Especially with all of the refugees coming into Europe, there is absolutely racism and discrimination based on race.
There is also a long history of racism in Australia towards the indigenous population, and more recently towards immigrants.
Pretty much everywhere you have two different cultures meeting you have racism. The modern western cultures are no exception.
That's not at all what I said. I'm saying the US is the only country which prefaces descriptions of people with info about their skin colour. It seems (to someone not from the US) a truly strange cultural behaviour.
I dunno if Europe is really recent, or just a bigger problem now. My experience of Berlin circa 2009 was that the natives were as racist towards Turkish immigrants as my hillbilly folk back in the states were towards Mexicans. There were also waves around that time about North African and Muslim immigrants in France.
> People CANNOT be categorized based on skin color at all, AT ALL.
People are categorized in that manner every day. Perhaps you're trying to say that's regrettable and inaccurate?
> To identify even yourself as belonging to a distinct "color" is just a fabrication of American culture
Certainly, but it's a culture which still exists. It doesn't go away just because you announce that it's illogical and unfortunate. I think you may be falling prey to the is-ought problem[1].
(To be clear, I'm not expressing a view on Github's actions, but I think it's somewhat naive to suggest that there aren't real problems out there.)
Yes, I'm saying it's a wrong categorization, and inaccurate. People inaccurately categorize themselves as well. It would be more accurate to not refer to those categories as race, but as sub-cultures, because then it becomes something that isn't inherent to someone's identity. People of mixed race, for example, half "black", half "white", will often choose to be "black", and identify as such, when in fact, their race is a mix, yet they see themselves as "black". This is clear proof it's all fabricated, but most people can't see this.
The problem is that people do it. Telling people to stop talking about it is not going to solve the problem while the reality remains that many, many people out there judge others based on race and other "inaccurate categorizations."
That's true, in practice it's different and it could be hard. But still, companies that take into consideration this incorrect categorization are exacerbating the problem, because I'm sure there are alternatives to helping unfortunate people without considering their race.
Everything you said is factually correct. Race is a social construct with just as much meaning as society chooses to give it, which ideally should be none, because it's inherently nonsensical.
The problem is, society chooses to give it a significant amount of meaning.
> People of mixed race, for example, half "black", half "white", will often choose to be "black", and identify as such, when in fact, their race is a mix, yet they see themselves as "black".
Yes, but they're generally treated by society as "black". And since race is construct rather than a scientific or genetic reality, that's all that really matters.
Racial categories ought not to matter, but the cold truth is they do.
The problem is, society chooses to give it a significant
amount of meaning.
But why do we have the society we currently have? Can't we foster a society where race is less important by making it less important to the point it's not a concept we consider at all?
Personally, I felt as though we were progressing towards a society where we were giving it less and less meaning but in recent years we're regressing towards elevating its importance again and that is resulting in animosity.
I think we can both acknowledge race, which often goes hand-in-hand with different cultures, and treat people as individual human beings. You can make all sorts of statistical inferences based on race, but they're not really useful when you're dealing with individual people. There's so much individual variation, that a judgment based on race is silly.
Let's treat people as individuals, not as faceless members of some caste.
This definitely, in addition to the fact that, at least in the U.S., we incorrectly correlate certain physical traits as markers for a certain sub-culture. This is why it's an inaccurate categorization, and by continuously bringing it up in professional settings in the name of "fixing the problem", we're simply persisting the mistake that allows racists to have a framework to continue causing problems.
> Programmers are abstract thinkers, and it's disgusting to see them lower themselves and adopt the semantics and memes of obvious cultural constructs like race.
As a programmer, I just care that you write good code. In fact, I might as well be interacting with your mind across the internet, and don't even have to look at you in the face, and we will be collaborating just fine.
Why does it matter for someone who deals with 0's and 1's what the color of the skin of your coworker is? Once again, if you're a programmer and you're swimming in abstractions and code, my coworker might as well be a robot, and I could give two shits.
Then we should hunt down this racist people, regardless of what their race is. It doesn't matter that the people doing this are white or whatever, what matters is that they're acting that way.
> Why does it matter for someone who deals with 0's and 1's what the color of the skin of your coworker is?
It seems crazy to me that someone would have to explain this on a public forum.If you are a white male I'm sure it might be hard for you to understand why race, gender, and class matter and how they intersect with your life, your work, and that of your colleagues.
If you contribute to an open source product under then name 'anotherc', nobody cares if you are black, white, pink, male or female. All they will care about is the quality of your code
Likewise at work, all that people should care about is the quality of your work, and being respectful of others.
IF YOU THINK SOMEONES RACE MATTERS YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM
Lets not deliberately ignore the point that was trying to be made. Its possible in this industry, to not even know the race or ethnicity of a coworker. That's a positive thing.
Lol. So true. I had a co-worker that I talked with several times a week about technical issues via HipChat for almost a year before I met him in person and the entire time I knew nothing about him other than he was a guy or identified as a guy and he was really good at his job (we have a few trans co-workers, so I don't assume cis-male). When I finally met him, it turns out that he was on the same floor about 50 meters away despite the fact that we're at a company with 1500 engineers spread across multiple offices.
There is a lot of overlap between the HN user base and the delusional SJW ilk that is running Github into the ground. People here are defending the blatantly racist sentiments mentioned in the article. They are performing some serious mental gymnastics to both hold the belief that race is an irrelevant social construct and that too many people of one race (cough whiteys cough) in one place is bad.
There's a lot of overlap between the HN user base and both sides of this argument, because the tech community itself is divided and HN reflects that. Each side feels that the other is over-represented here, but that's probably just cognitive bias.
From my view, race seems arbitrary. You could also split people into blue-eyed and brown-eyed or something. It still doesn't say anything about that person. Its just that many normal persons act like its a huge difference.
Many people would agree with you that race doesn't say that much about a person. However, it's quite naive to argue that racial issues are not a part of every day life. We live in a world built on racial divides and conflicts. It's obviously venerable to strive towards a non-racist society, but to do so one needs to understand the issues at hand.
Sure, but that emphatically does not mean abandoning principles of merit and equality and letting bullies and shakedown artists run your companies, as Github and too many others are doing.
Its a pretend-game anyway and i'm well aware of it.
Money justifies itself because it allows trade and therefore specialization of individuals. Its required for the technological progress we already done.
Same goes with Companies, Math, or most Science things.
Race is used by people who want to discriminate (independent of direction) or seek justification by victim-hood (and everything derived). Both are harmful behaviors. I will not support that.
> We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT. There is simply no excuse at all to mention it.
So when Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about his experience constantly being treated as a shoplifter solely based on his race [1], there's "simply no excuse at all"? I'd counter there's simply no excuse at all to attempt silencing necessary discussion about ongoing mass injustice.
You misinterpret proc0's comment: they are saying there is no excuse to treat Neil deGrasse Tyson as a shoplifter because of his race, that there is no excuse to ever decide that all people of a certain race or any category are all something or share something (in their comment "assholes" in yours "shoplifting").
Basically racism (using this definition: [1]) is never OK, regardless to which race and with which attributes.
> they are saying there is no excuse to treat Neil deGrasse Tyson as a shoplifter because of his race
If that's really what he's saying, then that's even dumber. You can change how you think. You can help to change the thinking of the people you come in contact with. You can't change anyone you've never met, particularly the people who treated Tyson as a shoplifter. I'd love it if racism were to just disappear too. But wanting it to happen doesn't make it happen.
> I'd love it if racism were to just disappear too. But wanting it to happen doesn't make it happen.
The point being made here is that making the system even more racist is going to make the problem even worse. It's bad to assume Neal DeGrasse Tyson is a shoplifter because of the color of his skin. It's also bad (it may or may not be worse, but it is in no way good) to assume a person will discriminate against others because of the color of his skin.
The problem is proc0's comment is saying that any discussions of racism are racist and should be shut down. This is clearly wrong, because not talking about something does not make it go away.
If the discussion of racism is honest, it can help. There are generally no honest discussions of racism, however, because people cannot separate the emotional content sufficiently, and so most discussions are useless at best.
I acknowledge it seems I'm dismissing and even excusing people who are racists. This is definitely not the case.
Let's pretend there are no races for a second. What would racist people do? They would probably still hate on "others". They would probably not have the vocabulary or the knowledge to group people, but they would still hate "others". The fact that racist hate other races is just incidental to the fact that we categorize people, and then they use that as a tool / avenue for their hatred. So why would we promote their tool for hatred? We don't categorize people based on eye color, so why skin color?
The idea is not to lose identity and pretend we're all the same, but rather to avoid explaining things with race. When someone behaves a certain way, or when someone can't get a job, or got the job, the explanation should not include race, because it's just not needed, it's inaccurate, and it promotes the semantic tools for racist to leverage and keep hating.
I'm definitely open to why this is wrong, so corrections are more than welcome.
You're wrong because you're making the assumption that diversity programs are intended to promote hatred of anyone. That is the opposite of what they are intended for.
We are sadly forced to "categorize" people of certain "races" because when you in fact meet an enormously successful astrophysicist who is African American, that person almost certainly had to achieve that status in the face of many completely intractable obstacles put up by society, compared to an enormously successful astrophysicist who is white and had no such obstacles.
Now, any person that achieves anything had to overcome obstacles; however if you met a successful scientist who was say, an injured Iraq war veteran, or someone who went through struggles above and beyond what most of us go through, you'd likely give that person some credit for achievement in the face of very great obstacles. Looking at the plight of African Americans in this country in a critical fashion would reveal that they also are subject to significant struggles that should be acknowledged.
Nowhere in that above sentiment lies any notion of spreading hatred towards white people. Only that, since I'm not an Iraq war veteran, I don't get to run up on stage and claim a purple heart.
Well, there are those claims of unwarranted scrutiny and his assumptions that they were race-based... and then there are his bogus claims about what was said about him in the media and before Congress, which have been documented.
No, it says that Tyson's views on global warming defy the actual data, then links to an article referencing why.
And neither article says that warming would not be a problem, instead indicating that popular climate models for rates of warming have a lot of errors... and shows some.
The race aspect is basically a footnote in the article regarding the exodus (the complaints largely center around a change in leadership and the company's hierarchical structure).
Yet a comment about the race aspects is the top comment here.
Your complaints have already been addressed many many times in academic literature and popular media. But I have to say, there is something amazing about reading someone comment that we should not be talking about race. I guess the current alternative, where we don't talk about it, but people both consciously and subconsciously continue discriminating by race seems far more palatable to you.
It was a bullet point in the company's slide presentation that "white women" were the problem. That's not just a minor detail, and I would be outraged if it were my company, even though I'm not white or female.
Racism or 'seeing in race' isn't just a natural group-think behavior. It provides poeple with concrete benefits both emotionally (meaning, it allows people to tell themselves a story where they're better than other people) and logistically through the racial equivalent of cronyism.
So don't get caught up in the idea that racism is just a random behavior, or holdout from an earlier time, or something that people want to think themselves out of.
Acting with love towards all people and believing it's in your best interest requires a level of abstract thought and faith that isn't a prerequisite for tribalism & racial discrimination.
I think it's a weakness to omit thought and speech of outward appearance.
Race for some is more than outward appearance. It's a line of community strategy. It's a shared language. It's shared food. Shared customs. Shared values. There's something beautiful and treacherous there.
Race as a social reality exists whether we talk about or it not. Omitting speech destroys a valuable technique for counterbalancing instinct. Omitting thought disarms people from contemplating social reality.
But why? You can have a shared language, shared food, shared customs and shared values despite race. Brazil is exemplary in this regard, where most of the country is mixed race and everyone is having sex with everyone else despite race. A former co-worker of mine, Wesley poignantly lamented this when he was in the US, when people ask questions like "What are you, Japanese, Chinese, Korean or something else?" and he was like "Huh? None of those. I'm Brazilian."
> American culture is such a bummer when it comes to how it shoves people into categories. We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT.
This is something that had wondered about the USA race culture... the fact that you mention "there are x Latin-like population" or "Y black population" or "Z white population", the mere separation means that people are thinking in terms of races...
I don't think there is anything wrong with thinking about race or identifying as one thing or another. I think the problem is when we start thinking what we identify as is better than what others identify as.
Yes race is a social construct but so are lots and lots of things that we talk about all the time and don't see to have problems with.
The moment you mention race, you are fighting the racist's battle. Instead if you avoid it, you are side-stepping and leaving the racists on their own ground, where they are just insane and/or ignorant people. History gave us inaccurate representations of people, and racists use these to spew their hatred. Why promote the tool and framework for racists to continue using?
Your argument, the way I see it: "People say lies about race[0]. So let's not talk about race anymore". This is, appallingly, the current state of the art of racial discussions in the west.
Try to apply that logic to any other subject however, and the insanity will reveal itself.
"People say lies about used cars. So let's not talk about used cars anymore"
"People say lies about the mistakes of The One Party. So let's not talk about the mistakes of The One Party anymore"
There is no excuse for suppressing legitimate, non-racist speech on racial issues. Also, that kind of speech exists, and if you haven't heard it, that's because decent people around you are scared shitless of being labelled a racist for bringing up race, however innocuously. And actual racists don't care. Which exactly the scenario that your argument is designed to enable.
[0] every racist statement is by definition a lie. That's very important.
That's not the argument, granted it's very subtle and hard to see.
The argument is "race as used in the U.S. is a social construct that is incorrectly correlated with some physical traits. So lets avoid bringing up someone's race when trying to explain their behavior and/or intentions."
Just because someone has dark skin doesn't automatically mean they are "black" because black is more of a cultural thing than a race. It's incorrectly attributed as a race in the U.S., and in many cases it does coincide, so someone that looks black is probably black, but not everyone. This is more so the case with white people. The white label is a huge generalization on many sub-cultures and races, not just one. So it is inefficient to try and explain behavior with these labels that are incorrectly seen as race.
To further expand, yes there is a problem with racist people, but what's the point of saying they are "white" racist people? They're just racist. No need to be further promote the same mis-categorization that racist people love to use. Racist people are ignorant and/or crazy, and we can continue analyzing them and fighting without mentioning anyone's race.
> So lets avoid bringing up someone's race when trying to explain their behavior and/or intentions
Normal people already do that most of the time, because most of the time race, ethnicity, or culture does not matter for whatever you're talking about.
However, a blanket statement that such things never explain anything is false. A person's upbringing and environment influences them tremendously, and it does correlate with ethnicity, nationality, country of origin, socioeconomic status, and many other variables.
For example, an average russian doesn't like gays. That's a fact. There are cultural reasons for that, it's not just something that happened randomly. If I want to explain to someone why my russian friend doesn't like gays, I will tell them that it's because he's from Russia, where it's normal.
Here, I've used ethnicity to explain someone's actions. In America this would cause hysteria, and I would be branded a racist, because in America every statement that involves race is racism thanks to the argument you're promoting.
However, there is no racism in my statement. It's factually correct – if my russian friend was raised in Canada, he probably would have internalized the normalcy of varying sexual preferences long ago. But he was brought up in Russia, where casual racism, sexism, and other assorted intolerance is the norm. My statement is also not judgmental. I'm just explaining the probable reason for a person's behaviour using information available to me.
But again, for the sole reason that it involves ethnicity, in America this valid statement is widely considered racism. Not to mention that if my statement was similarly correct, but involved blacks or mexicans or whatever other ethinicites are conversationally popular in America, I would be in even bigger trouble for no reason other than the reader / listener's prior experiences with racial issues, which are, I might add, dependent on the reader / listener's race, ethnicity, and country of origin (and here we go again...).
Look beyond the labels. Yes, sometimes a white person that grew up among black people is more black than a black person who grew up with only white people. Think about half-white, half-black people, why aren't people talking about mixed race people? Why do mixed race people often choose what side to identify with? Because "black" and "white" is just sub-cultures within American culture. Yes there is a correlation with physical trait, but this correlation is misleading and was started by our ignorant ancestors that lived in a world that is completely different from today.
Dark skin alone doesn't make you black, and I know I'm right because there are plenty of dark skinned foreigners that complain they get lumped in with black people when they're actually Arabs or something else. This is even worse for white people. Italians and Russians are in the same category, and that really makes no sense. Skin color should just be forgotten altogether.
This is why I tend to trend in many comments to talking about "identity in-groups". I do occasionally use examples based on race or gender, but abstractly, I prefer "identity in-group" because it explicitly highlights that whatever it is we are talking about is an abstract concept that is not reality but something that exists as discrete quanta merely because we believe it does.
American culture is such a bummer when it comes to how it shoves people into categories. We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT. There is simply no excuse at all to mention it. People CANNOT be categorized based on skin color at all, AT ALL. People cannot be categorized based on culture either. Virtually everyone is multi-ethnic and multi-racial at some level. To identify even yourself as belonging to a distinct "color" is just a fabrication of American culture that is an unfortunate outcome of the history in this country.
Nope, the left won't let that happen. Leftists have to categorize to divide, conquer, and marginalize their enemies...all under the guise of compassion and the other bullshit they make up to further their agenda.
Dang, as someone that is supposed to be objective, I'd be careful showing your true political colors. I'm sure there are people that watch your commentary.
I didn't post that because I agree or disagree with you politically, but because ideological name-calling (a) isn't substantive discussion, and (b) invariably provokes worse.
This articl was a bit of a hit job. GitHub is changing as revenue and staff increase. That makes sense. There are always growing pains. A flat, so-called meritocratic structure only works in a few situations. GitHub makes the majority of its revenue from enterprise. It only makes sense to mirror the structure of your most valued customers. A VP of important corporate enterprise customer expects to talk to another VP at GitHub to get things done.
I am not sure there are many success stories for increasing diversity in any industry. There are minor improvements to diversity but not much. At most companies I've worked for, the majority of the HR department were white female and the majority of engineering department were male. It was a very clean separation. I've always found that a bit odd in terms of diversity.
I think it's unfair to class everyone with white skin as "white", or darker skin as black or south asian or middle eastern. There is so much diversity in culture and backgrounds that stretch far beyond skin color. Can we stop classifying people based on skin color and just build great software to make the world a better place?
This has nothing to do with growth or even sexism/racism. This is a political takeover and shakedown of a valueable company. Moving out of a meritocracy to a hierarchy like this is to move away from performance based influence to political based influence.
The SJWs behind this just want money and they are importing their people into the company to increase their control. The use of discrimination is part of the mechanism to increase their numbers. Once they get a lot of people below them, they'll demand larger and larger paychecks and stock options. That's it, it's a fairly simple plan. Find a valuable company and raid it. All this inclusion/sexism talk is just dressing. Even githubs ceo's motivation is pretty clear. If he grows the org, he'll argue that he deserves more money because he's managing more people. Then when he exits he can position himself as the manager of a much larger org of thousands instead of this insanely profitable 70 person org.
We've banned this account for crossing into personal attack. There are a lot of new accounts in this thread commenting in a way that pushes the limits of HN's rules, but given that it's a highly charged topic, we've cut most of them some slack. But stuff like the end of this one is not allowed.
How is that comment a personal attack? For saying that the Github CEO would hypothetically argue for more money? Other than the Github CEO, who has been singled out for personal attack? There are really no personal details or singling out of individuals here.
This comment is low-signal for sure, and smells like a newly minted account to avoid repercussions on a primary account, but banning it for "personal attack" is suspect at best.
It accuses the GitHub CEO of planning to gut his own company for personal gain. Evidence? None, just his "motive is pretty clear". No, it isn't, and that's a personal attack.
If an established account did this, we'd ask them not to. If a brand new account does this, I'm calling troll.
Again another diversity piece that claims that trans people are somehow "locked out" of tech. I've seen no evidence for this, and in fact some evidence for the opposite - that they're overrepresented. That makes sense, I would expect trans people to find it easier to work as a programmer than say, a construction worker or any kind of customer-facing job.
But trans people are kind of invisible, both (usually) statistically and (sometimes) passing so well that they are not known to be trans. With other minorities the situation is more clear-cut and obvious. I hope at least no-one will pretend that Asians are not overrepresented in Silicon Valley relative to population.
Trans people have contributed some crucial developments in tech. The ARM processor was invented by a trans woman. If trans people were barred from the industry we might not have all these amazing mobile devices right now.
> those of us who are non-white, older than 40, disabled, trans, not neurotypical, queer, from low-income backgrounds, and/or a host of other identities will continue to be locked out of tech.
What if those people are just less likely (note: this is about probability, for all I know the best programmer in the world could be a disabled queer 50 year old black person from a poor family) to be competitive among candidates? This basically amounts to hiring as charity.
There is no end to the list of possible "identities". You can ALWAYS slice humanity up into smaller and smaller groups to find some identity that is underrepresented. Everybody is clamoring to grab a niche identity to claim oppression points. This is why identity politics is garbage.
Unless for-profit corporations are actually jobs programs in disguise, there's only one sensible thing to do: value people for what they can do for the company. Period. Though maybe favoring a candidate because they have the right skin color IS actually good for companies? Who knows?
This article could have been written better. It has two themes going on. Github is restructuring and the lack of diversity in tech.
Why did they unnecessarily mention diversity in the context of the reorganization of github? Because that is the corporate BS that is popular to spout when you are redefining power within your company. Make no mistake github is doing restructuring to position themselves for large corporate contracts, NOT to be a more diverse workplace.
Using injustice to whitewash your redefined power structure is disingenuous.
>"(The social impact team) are trying to control culture, interviewing and firing. Scary times at the company without a seasoned leader. While their efforts are admirable it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging"
"Technical director Danilo Campos" was part of a major shitshow a year and a half ago on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389163). He called HN a cesspit and then tried to work up a Twitter mob against someone who made the mistake of challenging his points.
If a vindictive, narrow-minded individual like that is a technical director and a member of Github's social-impact team, no wonder people are leaving in droves.
This is standard stuff for a growing company. Right down to the disillusionment of the rank and file. I'm curious if anyone in the HN community has worked for a > 500 person company with a flat structure.
What a lot of commenters seemed to miss is that the remote work policy applies exclusively to senior managers.
Senior managers are no longer allowed to live afar and must report to the office.
These are the people that are usually on a separate bonus plan and receive an order of magnitude more stock options. It seems totally reasonable that they should have to come into the office.
HN seems to have a white-male persecution complex. No one here is talking about the interesting parts of the story:
"10 or more executives have departed in recent months."
"In addition to previously reported executive departures, Business Insider has learned that Ryan Day, VP of business development; Adam Zimman, senior director of technology partnerships; and Scott Buxton, controller, have all left in the last six months."
"Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers. This has ticked off many people in the old guard."
"...key technical people from the old days like CTO Ted Nyman and third cofounder PJ Hyett are mostly absent from the office and not contributing much technically."
Github is very likely going to be a different company by the end of the year. The question is, is that going to be good or bad for its current leadership position? I'm a pessimist: I'll go with bad.
How does a GPS fence lead to better management/leadership?
Until you realize their whole reason for github existing (and why Linus wrote git in the first place) is to support product development for large remote/distributed/non-centralized teams or projects. It just happens to also work identically for very small teams/projects too.
I wasn't commenting on the effectiveness of remote work. My point was that it's reasonable to ask more from senior management.
I'm sensing righteous indignation in your comment and a lot of the other comments. It's missplaced. Remote vs. in-office work is not a right vs. wrong battle. I work 100% remotely and sometimes I wish I was in the office.
Every company, employee, situation, etc. is different. It should be up to Github and its employees to decide what is right for their particular situation.
Diversity is a touchy subject. As a black engineer myself I've worked at three companies where I've been the only black technical worker and it's hard some times. I've gone to conferences where I've been maybe 1 of 5 or 6 engineers out of hundreds. i don't do any hiring but I often wonder if there is a lack of qualified black male or female engineers or what but sometimes I do feel isolated.
You'll see pretty much the same numbers at top American engineering universities. Most of the race/gender disparities we see in tech companies are a direct result of the same disparities seen in tech universities. The problem starts before freshman year of college.
In the case of black, latinos (I am one of them myself) and other minorities I think it is partly a matter of numbers. Black people account for around 13% of the population in the USA.
So in theory, a "natural" number would be to have around 13 black students for every 100 at every university. If it is less, then it may be due to either a) Lack of opportunities or b) Lack of desire enroll in specific subjects.
Here in Mexico face a similar issue with the lack of Women in technical careers (programming in my experience). The fact is that for some reason less women enroll in Soft. Eng. or Comp. Sci. courses... And from the few that enroll, several get out after the first or second "filter subjects" (Data Structures, Programming I, algorithms). Given that there are more females (61 million) than males (58 million), in theory there should be roughly the same number of both in schools.
It seems that many posters here believe that it is okay to discriminate against white men because they enjoy "white privilege," whatever that is. There are those who believe that it is okay to discriminate on the basis of skin color and those who do not. The former are called racists, attempts to redefine the term notwithstanding.
What I find most interesting is that the comments about white men are roughly equivalent to commonly heard antisemitic statements. It is often said that Jews are over represented in various occupations not because of any virtue on their part, but rather because of devious trickery. I don't see much distinction between such sentiments and those being expressed here.
The claim is not that white people are overrepresented because of devious trickery, but because white people are usually doing the hiring and they are often biased, consciously or unconsciously, against non-white people, and women.
It's not something that's exclusive to white people, by the way. Racial and religious nepotism should be resisted wherever and whenever it occurs, in favour of meritocracy.
It's interesting how most of the comments here are focusing on the diversity part of the article. Reading it, the thing that screamed at me the most was the influence of VC culture. It seems as though the owners of GitHub are making the decision to appease their investors by going the traditional route - fast growth with a traditional top heavy hierarchy. This always consolidates money and power at the higher levels of the hierarchy. This is great for VCs and those at the top because they can allocate more revenue and profits to them, but bad for employees and to low revenue (high volume) customers because the immediate ROI is not as good there.
This trend is fine for most companies because ultimately, the only people that matter are the ones with ownership control in the company. However, GitHub is different because of it's position in the Open Source community and with the type of people they serve - developers. If they burn the community too much, their customer base can and are fully capable of leaving the platform. The interesting thing to wonder is, have they built up a Facebook level of momentum yet? If not, the changes they are making now could ultimately turn them into an enterprise-only company and cap their potential.
I wonder which startup will chomp off this new sourcefor-- I mean, Github.
I know, totally different companies at this point, but this shift marks me seeing GH as a completely different entity from what it used to be, and I don't look forward to what kind of company they'll become in the future. Kind of disappointing to read about the changes. None of them sound good.
Gitlab has already surpassed Github in terms of functionality. I've been hard selling it at my place of employ but I work at a large company so Github is already solidly entrenched and will be so for at least awhile.
I already use GitLab for my personal projects, since I don't care about the networking effects and it's open-source. Since it's still just git, there's nothing stopping people from switching: it has inheritably less lock-in than Twitter or Facebook. GitLab even scrapes issues and other GitHub metainfo if you migrate.
i think that is fine by GH. i mean, it's clear that the $$ is in enterprise, not in selling $9/month plans to hobbyists. someone else will step up to fill the void.
I think this article pretty much shakes all the confidence in Github and for several (good) reasons:
Whenever a new CEO steps in and starts making big changes like that to the company, it usually results in big changes in the product. Whereas before, the product was controlled by programmers, now it will be controlled by CEO, his inner circle, and VCs that have the most influence. That means a product that's more "money-friendly" toward investors rather than users.
The fact that a lot of high-ranking people left and possibly, many remote developers will stop working there is yet another sign that Github as we know it will change. Maybe for the better, maybe not.
One thing that really disappoints me is killing off the remote option. I've always looked up to Github and would use it as the perfect example of how "remote can work, even at scale". Facebook recently (a year or two) implemented the same thing which is a shame.
I won't address the leadership thing but that last quote in the paragraph summed it up perfectly.
Anyways, from the looks of it, Github will become an enterprise-friendly place with less of a focus on ordinary developers and smaller businesses. This makes me think that there is growing space for a new company to take up that "developer-friendly" social network/code repository.
It seems that a large number of posters believe that discriminating against white men is okay because they enjoy "white privilege", whatever that is. Either you believe it is okay to discriminate against someone on the basis of their skin color or you don't. Attempts to redefine the word notwithstanding, those who subscribe to the former philosophy are known as racists.
It is hard to distinguish the anti-white vitriol I see on this page from the antisemitism of yesteryear. It was often said that Jews were over-represented in various occupations not because their industriousness, intelligence or other virtues, but because of devious trickery (they plot together to deprive others of opportunities). I fail to see how the arguments regarding white men are any different.
> Either you believe it is okay to discriminate against someone on the basis of their skin color or you don't.
In most anti-discrimination policy discussions, the question being asked is not what colour ones skin is. It is whether the person belongs to an identifiable group that has suffered systemic prejudice.
The ordinary intention of anti-discrimination is to rectify past and prevent future wrongs, and in particular to break cycles of stereotype, poverty, and crime.
Colour of skin is incidental to the formula, being an identifiable group. The primary consideration for preferential bias is belonging to a group that has suffered prejudice.
One could as readily substitute for skin colour those discriminations founded upon language, hair colour, sexual orientation, height, and body shape, among many others. The factor itself is not an entitlement to preference; it is the history of prejudice and prospect of systemic improvement that determines suitability for discrimination.
The argument that white people are being discriminated against based on a formula that rectifies past wrongs and undoes future ones belies a misunderstanding of the purpose, benefit, and impact. One may only come to this conclusion by discounting those past and future wrongs that have been committed and will continue to be committed by a system with inherent biases.
> The argument that white people are being discriminated against based on a formula that rectifies past wrongs and undoes future ones belies a misunderstanding of the purpose, benefit, and impact.
That's perfectly absurd. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination.
How do we measure wrongs? How do we "undo future wrongs"?
I can't. Totally cannot. 100% can't deal with your argument.
> I can't. Totally cannot. 100% can't deal with your argument.
I find it telling that you think it is my argument. What I wrote is neither mine nor an argument. It is a description of a theory.
> Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination.
Not all discriminations are equal.
To argue that all discrimination is discrimination is to give equivalence to police murdering for traffic violations and being denied the pole position on a job application. Both are wrong, but there are quantitative differences – they can be measured.
> How do we measure wrongs? How do we "undo future wrongs"?
We can measure the effect of discrimination by the number of people affected, and the impact a discrimination has on an individual. It's not an unknown problem; statisticians measure it on jobs, income, applications, promotions, employment types. The data exists or can be gathered, and it can ascribed monetary value ("damages" in law). No formula will be ideal in all cases, but that is not an excusable barrier.
Societies with affirmative action have in essence determined, whether founded or not, that the aggregate of prejudice against classes of victims outweighs the aggregate prejudice of attempting to correct it.
If you want to discredit the theory you must first understand that it is a widely published and peer reviewed theory of many facets of society and not just an argument from some guy on the internet. The theory is founded in the philosophy of law, and touches on many other aspects ranging from the relationship between culture and economics through criminology.
I didn't think that first quote was your argument, I just thought it was the dumbest thing you said. I think it's silly that you believe that past wrongs can be rectified and that future wrongs are definitely going to happen, and that that invalidates the argument you presented about discrimination against white people not existing. Theory or argument, that's pedantry.
> Not all discriminations are equal.
Never said that.
I was implying that anything that was discrimination was wrong. Are you arguing the opposite?
> We can measure the effect [etc] and the impact [etc] and it can ascribed monetary value [etc]. No formula will be ideal in all cases, but that is not an excusable barrier. [emphasis mine]
You'll have to inform me then why there's debate on the ballpark percentage of the wage gap or even that it exists in general, just as an example. (not arguing for or against, but that there is a debate) And it is perfectly excusable for someone not to take action, or not to execute a very big action, if it is not the correct action, unless you think justice is necessarily coexistent with wrongful imprisonment.
And how do you pick who gets affirmative action anyway? I'm a Polish immigrant. My ancestors have been fucked 5 ways from Tuesday by just about every major happening in Europe. It was still 1989 when communism fell (only 27 years ago), and it left desolation and despair in its wake. Coming to the US, my parents and I had just about nothing.
And better yet, I'm not going to claim I deserve something. Because the world dealt me and everyone a shitty hand and the best I can do is play it, no matter the odds. Even if someone got a better hand than I did.
As a matter of interest, the school of thought you are describing is the Deontologists. In "Capitalism and Freedom" Milton Friedman captured this as:
> [Antidiscrimination] legislation involves the acceptance of a principle that proponents would find abhorrent in almost every other application. If it is appropriate for the state to say that individuals may not discriminate in employment because of color or race or religion, then it is equally appropriate for the state, provided a majority can be found to vote that way, to say that individuals must discriminate in employment on the basis of color, race or religion. The Hitler Nuremberg laws and the law in the Southern states imposing special disabilities upon Negroes are both
examples of laws similar in principle to [antidiscrimination legislation]
This is in contrast with a focus upon either consequence or virtues. Deontological theory falls down on some observed economic scenarios. For example, banker bonuses are generally deontological in nature, and as a result paid out quarterly regardless of performance; a consequentialist or "virtuist" might formulate banker bonuses on practical timelines or overall long-term results, in contrast.
In any case, what I thought was a reasonably balanced emperical study by John Donohue is worth reading [The Law and Economics of Antidiscrimination
Law] <http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... (it is the paper from which I drew Milton's quote).
That same society at a different time determined slavery, jim crow laws and other prejudicial treatments were once okay just as it did affirmative action. An appeal to authority or populism doesn't make it good or right. It merely makes it lawful and/or socially acceptable.
There are many widely published and peer reviewed theories that turned out to be wrong after implementing them and empirically seeing that they are imperfect. There are scientific theories and there are non-scientific theories and the one you've put forth is squarely in the camp of non-scientific theory, which typically are hypotheses that lack the ability to be disproved.
I would like to think we can do better than replacing one system of prejudices with another. We've seen the pendulum swing both ways enough time now to better predict where the ideas contributing to momentum of the pendulum will lead to an over-correction and novel injustices.
So you're telling me that it's okay to tell someone, X, from group A that they are being disadvantaged in favor of someone else, Y, from group B because Y belongs to group B and because years ago someone, M, from group A unrelated to X disadvantaged someone, N, from group B unrelated to Y. How is this right? X isn't responsible for any wrongdoing committed by M or others like M, so why should X suffer the consequences?
It's fine to rectify past wrongs when X is responsible for the past wrongs, but guilt by identity association with M is absurd. I'm mixed-race mostly caucasian that immigrated to the US from South America in the 1980s but look vanilla white to most. Please explain to me what past wrong me and others like me are guilty of here?
I am aware and fully understand the purpose and anticipated benefit/impact. A question worth asking is if those that propose a "formula that rectifies past wrongs and undoes futures ones" understand how that formula will produce present wrongs and foster unintended future ones? After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions[0]. You're merely converting one system with inherent biases for another with inherent biases. That is a non-solution the problem[1] you purport to fix.
It wasn't uncommon to hear in Eastern Europe a short while ago that "Jews control the world" and that's why we should take their power from them. Clearly absurd, but that's how people felt. (And I'm not making points about the Nazis, I'm making points about Poland in 1989 during the fall of Communism.)
But now we hear "white men control the world," and are expected to take their power away.
Just because they're similar doesn't mean they're the same, I realize. But we should at least be self-aware about that similarity, because it means something.
I think you're misunderstanding the argument people make about the concept of privilege. Nothing about it is intentional in the standard sense. It's more that people behave to benefit themselves -- which is natural and fine -- and power has slowly accrued over time to white men more than to other types of people. The argument is not that white men are malicious, but that their traits are implicitly favored and promoted because we tend to gravitate toward and feel more comfortable around people who are similar to ourselves. Ergo, white men in power enable other white men to gain more power.
> believe that discriminating against white men is okay because they enjoy "white privilege", whatever that is
> It is hard to distinguish the anti-white vitriol I see on this page from the antisemitism of yesteryear. It was often said that Jews were over-represented in various occupations not because their industriousness, intelligence or other virtues, but because of devious trickery (they plot together to deprive others of opportunities). I fail to see how the arguments regarding white men are any different.
It's because you don't even make an attempt to understand the terms of the debate. White privilege is a structural, societal-level advantage that white people have stemming from centuries of economic and cultural disenfranchisement of ethnic minorities, that while you personally can't change, can be worked towards overcoming it. Educate yourself before you throw Godwins around.
> Educate yourself before you throw Godwins around.
He's not invoking Hitler or Nazism, he's making a comparison between white privilege and anti-semitism. It's pertinent because of whites and Jews being races; it's not just a random invocation of whatever to win an argument. Not all anti-semites are Nazis. There are plenty of otherwise normal people who just randomly hate Jews for literally no reason.
There's a point there, and I think you missed it. (Please note I am not arguing for or against that point, just that you may have missed it.)
I also appreciate the "Educate yourself" thought-terminating cliche. It's an interesting one.
If you call an argument Godwinesque but turn out to be wrong, who has lost the argument?
Isn't it though? Nicole Sanchez and Danilo Campos are openly advocating racial hatred while creating a toxic environment. If I worked there I would leave too. Never again, Github. There are too many good alternatives out there for me to support this fallen star.
What nonsense are you blathering? Github isn't open source so you can't fork it. Meanwhile there are lots of other GitHub-a-likes out there - Gitlab is only one of them. So if you don't like Gitlab either, there are other choices.
Over the past year, we've moved to limit our exposure to GitHub by shifting repos over to Bitbucket, but it looks like that'll have to accelerate that now. The cultural and leadership turmoil described in the article sounds worse then those DDoS attacks last year. How can they stay focused on building a great product?
I think what she's saying is that usually when tech companies talk about diversity they mean they really are talking about increasing the number of women in tech. To her, at least, that's not as important as increasing the number of minorities in tech. So as "white women" are in one group but not the other, the are bad because they are minorities in disguise. Even with that, it's a terrible thing to put on a slide without any added context.
well, the only important thing that matter is skills / experiences, because choosing people (or not) for their race or gender is really... at least weird.
uhm... So a company that is an enabler of developers working from anywhere and collaborating on code doesn't have at its core value working remotely? I find that a bit hard to believe, but I guess I've heard stranger things.
I guess I just expect as a matter of dogfooding that a company that strives to do great distributed source code control and all the activities surroundings that would live the remove lifestyle.
All "diversity" programs, along with other legalisms like "minority" status, "historically disprivileged groups", etc. are entirely about anti-white racism and dispossession. They have no moral standing and no logical consistency, and they don't pretend to, nor do they even need to. It's utilitarian and provides benefits to a specific group at the expense of another.
I'm happy GitHub is getting to experience the runaway consequences of this toxic and repugnant ideology. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving group of "progressive" folks.
Yes. Free college would be a good start. Stopping over policing of black/brown neighborhoods would be another. Basically anything that actively seeks to break the cycle started with slavery and continued through Jim Crow. Occupying black/brown neighborhoods and using jay walking as a pretext to throw as many in jail as possible needs to stop - immediately.
Right. Fucking. There. Let me guess, you are a white male tired of people bringing up diversity? Or maybe you have forgotten about the special status given to minorities that brings us to todays topic? If enough was done, we wouldn't be having this conversation. As if "whitey" hasn't been shaking down different groups over the years.
It's clear that the diversiteers doesn't ever intend to define what constitutes "doing enough", and why would they? We keep falling for it.
As for whitey shaking down other groups, so what? That's how the world works... shake or be shaken. I realize this is a topic that brings out a lot of emotions and moralizing in people, but it really is that simple...
People aren't robots so meritocracy is a pipe dream. Everyone has biases (just different ones). And if that's how the world works, then why the criticism of "whitey" being shaken down?
Your post smacks of "don't hate the player, hate the game" kind of reasoning. Another word for this is "Supremacy" or "Entitlement". A black candidate doesn't get the job so maybe he or she isn't qualified, but as soon as the tables are turned for a white candidate, then all hell breaks loose.
In an ideal setting, the best candidate gets the job. But who is the best candidate? The black guy who doesn't live in the bay area, with no formal education but had to self teach himself programming because he couldn't afford to go to school?
Or the recent Stanford grad that is more likely a culture fit (looks and sounds like the interviewer) with the grades but not the real world experience (yet)?
> And if that's how the world works, then why the criticism of "whitey" being shaken down?
I'm not criticizing it per se. I'm trying to describe Diversity Inc. as a much simpler phenomenon than it's being made out to be. It's a battle between two groups with a conflict of interests, and one of those groups isn't even taking its own side in the fight. It sounds simplistic, but without an understanding of the basic political dynamics at work, there's not much use bickering over the details.
As for who is the "best" candidate for a given role, I didn't comment on that, but human interactions and group dynamics are highly complex phenomena. The problem as you described it may turn out to be unsolvable. This raises the question of who exactly benefits from these futile attempts to solve it. See above.
Considering when the "shakedown" laws were written the power structure was exclusively white I disagree with your premise. White men shaking down "whitey" to no benefit of the lawmakers doesn't really hold water. Try again.
First Sourceforge went over to the dark side. Next, Github? This is a huge setback for open source.
We need federated open source hosting, where several companies all host the important projects, they all stay in sync, and any client can go to any service for any operation.
SourceForge is open source. The software underpinning the way the whole setup works is called Allura. Paid developers at SourceForge keep enhancing it. It's hosted by Apache: http://allura.apache.org/
Way back in 2005, Shelley Powers made the argument that a diverse workforce helped a company deal with crisis. The inverse was also implied, that a rejection of diversity was an indicator of some kind of resistance, which would make it difficult to deal with crisis.
Powers wrote:
"When jobs are plentiful, diversification within the job pool is not seen as a threat. In fact, diversification can be seen as a way of extending one’s power over a larger base of people. Book companies see more people buying books, conference organizers hope for more butts in seats, industries have less stressed and healthier, happier workers. However, when jobs are threatened, any change in the status quo will be seen as a risk–even those in an industry populated by people who consider themselves free of bias. It is a natural inclination to want to pull in, like the turtle into its shell, when threatened. Except in the tech industry, this ‘pulling in’ materializes as a resistance to difference."
My interpretation of this is that the problems that Github has had with diversity in its teams was a leading indicator of the wider management problems that we now see.
Even the decision to show the image of the scotch collection is subtly (actually, not so subtle) using our ideas of appropriative work culture to lead us down the path of believing how terrible GitHub is.
This stuff just happens to companies. The kinds of people who enjoy a meritocratic, decentralized kind of system are less likely to really want to be someone's boss or to have a boss who acts like a boss.
It's unlikely that the kind of multi-tiered management structure most larger companies use is ideal, but it's the best thing management science has found (it's a young field, rooted in the buildout of factories in the industrial age).
In defense of github, they can create whatever culture they desire. Same with npm and every other company out there. If they succeed, they will be seen as a company who took ethics and equality very seriously. If they don't theyll be seen as racists and confused leftists.
They are making a big risk with no obvious gain (outside of hypothetical culture and numbers). But this is their risk to make. If it does well they will be considered heroes.
I wonder if remote-work culture helps with diversity. It obviously does with geographic culture diversity, and with nationality (due to visas), but does it particularly help with racial or gender or age or anything else?
I'd assume it does with gender diversity (since women more often end up taking care of kids/elders/etc. even with a full time job of their own); race/ethnicity seems more indirect.
Look, social experiments of the sort taking place at GitHub are good things - they can teach us something. If their policies make the organization stronger, that's awesome - we get a stronger GitHub. If their policies end up damaging the organization, that's also awesome - because it'll become evident they're bad policies, and companies will stop implementing them.
Everyone just sit back, let the market do its job, and be sure to take note of the results when it's time for you to do your own company-building.
> If their policies end up damaging the organization, that's also awesome - because it'll become evident they're bad policies, and companies will stop implementing them.
I'm a bit more cynical - if it fails, I suspect the failure will be blamed on "wreckers".
Well, sure, and if it succeeds, some people will claim the success was in spite of the policies. Ideologues gotta ideologue, and all that. But that doesn't mean we can't learn something useful - since those 'wrecker'-style arguments give off the political equivalent of code smell.
I'm inclined to agree. I wonder, however, about the huge amount of VC money and the pressures of money and capitalism. I wouldn't be surprised if these experiments are more lip service than actual concrete restructuring given that people in positions of power tend to want to protect their power bases, and investors tend to want to protect their investments.
Edits - I am not losing anything by them changing things. I have not invested any money in them, I use their service though, and pay for a pro account. I am curious to see what happens and am optimistic about humans but pessimistic about VC money!
It is interesting to see how race is discussed on a site like HN vs. a political website. Even people posting opinions I disagree with state their point(s) with respect.
I understand how a white person could feel "under fire" in a discussion about "diversity" and "white privilege." For all the talk about the importance of empathy, it sure seems like some on the left don't have very much for our white brothers and sisters.
We have to understand that no one is born with historical context and we should't be so harsh on white people who either don't have it (context) or who do and feel singled out for being white.
We can't speak of the ingenious, invisible hand of institutional racism and then be mystified when a 23 year old white guy is skeptical of its existence.
If we could all grow up and act like professionals, that would be great. I have a hard time understanding why the tech industry always tends to create this much drama.
At the end of the day, this is about software, not about your genitals. I don't care if you're liberal or conservative, black or white, straight or gay, or anything in between! In fact, i won't bring it up, or ask. I simply do not care, the only thing i care about is your pull request.
How any company can include a slide like the one in the article (backup link here: http://i.imgur.com/p5zwScc.png) is absolutely beyond me. I am paying you to make a great product, not to make daily diversity meetings.
Codes of conduct generally act to protect people from racist and sexual harassment, by prohibiting and deterring it. Name one example of racist harassment against white people that a code of conduct hasn't prevented.
The biggest 'privilege' someone can have is not white skin, its money. All the people who bang on about diversity are usually upper class, and never talk about the socioeconomic component of it.
> With plenty of competitors, including Atlassian, GitLab, and even Google, one thing is certain: If GitHub does stumble, there are plenty of companies that want to pick up its slack.
Atlassian? Oh god. Their software might be ideal for corporate beancounters and expensive consultants, but for everyone else it's a nightmare.
GitLab? A pile of memory leaks and other weirdness.
Google? Not so much, I highly doubt they'll ever re-open Google Code.
edit: and another thing, Github enjoys a massive, massive network effect, next to impossible to recreate by anyone else. Except Sourceforge, but they burned so many bridges that no one sane in his mind will ever trust them again.
Atlassian bitbucket is fine for me, and it gives free private repos. If you just want something for side projects without all of the bells and whistles, bitbucket is fine
Dev attached to the Bitbucket team here. While we love and support open source where we can, the vast majority of repositories on Bitbucket are private or public but maintained by a single organization. Our core focus is professional teams, which typically means branching (rather than forking) workflows. This has lead us to prioritize features like branch level permissions over network graphs and other features focused on forking workflows, because they are of higher value to our users. We're not ideologically opposed to them (indeed, forks are useful for some professional workflows too - such as working with contractors or external contributors), but they just haven't bubbled up to the top of our roadmap just yet.
My company has been using bitbucket for a couple of years and I personally haven't noticed much in the way of unscheduled downtime. Maybe once or twice during that time.
"Google? Not so much, I highly doubt they'll ever re-open Google Code.
"
One thing to remember is that the main reason Google did code.google.com was to create competition for sourceforge (I was the third or fourth person to join the code.google.com team)
Now, it's pretty much 100% that Google won't do this again anytime soon, but that doesn't mean some other large company won't have the same thought.
Maybe Google Ventures will end up investing in Gitlab, or some similar startup down the line. It seems like it would be a decent hedge, and possibly cheaper than developing and/or running it themselves.
I'm administrating a small-ish Gitlab server and we have to reboot it every week or else it will fail in random and weird ways due to OOM - the machine has 8GB of RAM and 20 active users, so WTF? Isn't the entire point of git to have one pretty dumb server acting as a file server and letting the client do the work?!
GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket etc are not simply a GitServer, if that is all you want then there are better projects out there for that. hell basic ssh or http server can be used a gitserver with no front end at all or gitweb http://git-scm.com/docs/gitweb.html
GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket etc are project Management platforms that enable Bug Tracking, Documentation, Social networking all on top of and around basic git functions
just use git directly then without a gui server? or hell if you need a gui use upsource, that needs 8 gb ram however it is down you still could use everything else.
https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/ (just repository browsing and code review not hosting, for hosting you need to create your bare repos yourself which is not hard)
This is definitely not normal. For 20 users, 8GB is more than enough and it should not require constant restarts. Please check out https://about.gitlab.com/getting-help. Message me on Freenode #GitLab @ dblessing or Twitter @drewblessing or @GitLabSupport. I'm happy to help.
We run a Gitlab server at our company, with about 25 people using it to host their repos. I don't know the technical specs of the server, but it's only been down two times for the last year, so OOM seems unlikely.
If it was that horrid, I'm pretty sure the admin would have said something by now.
You probably have pretty good sysadmins. My experience with Gitlab is pretty similar but you kind of have to have a bit of knowledge of systems, network and the software itself to set it up properly with the right amount of memory, CPU, etc. to accommodate for the user base.
Gitlab is one project that absolutely needs to be rebuilt using Java. Both from a performance and a deployment perspective (deploying a jar is a one line step through jetty).
Something like Akka is probably well suited for Gitlab and it's git hooks.
been using gitlab for the past two years at work and the only time it's inaccessible is when upgrading it. it does have a lot of other issues like response time and a difficult to navigate ui but crashing is not one of them.
What version are you on? Since GitLab 8.0 great improvements have been made to the UI and if there is something still wrong on the latest version we would love to know.
it is generally hard to navigate, every time i'm adding a user and giving him access to groups/projects i have to spend a minute to figure out where. the new CI gui is worse than the old one (pre-8).
I dunno if it's impossible to recreate. You could just scrape GitHub's user data, mirror all public repositories, provide GitHub login, and do everything you can to ensure that your new competing thing lets people move away from GitHub with no friction.
Haven't had a change to review it yet but seems to be they retired Google Code in preparation for this, not because they were acquiescing the market to Github.
They describe it as "fully-featured private Git repositories" so not a replacement for Google code. Also it's pretty inconceivable they'd retire Google Code early, forcing repos to move to a competitor, then introduce a new public service.
I've heard a lot of people complaining about JIRA and so on, but I've never really understood why they hate it. Sure, it's closed source, but so is GitHub, and people seem to like that (this discussion notwithstanding).
You got downvoted by people promoting the companies they work for. Altasian stuff is hideous and Gitlab I heard is a horror show.
This will be downvoted too but honestly who cares. Despite all of Github's problems no one comes anywhere close in terms of adoption and developer mindshare and there is a reason for that.
Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers. This has ticked off many people in the old guard.
This is almost certainly a mistake, from my experience. Our fairly small team's productivity dropped by I'd estimate 300% even with a much larger team once HQ decided we needed to bring in management layers. I wonder what GH hopes to gain from these changes.
Can someone explain to me why GitHub needs a "Social Impact Team". What benefits do they bring to the organisation? It looks to me like a massive money pit.
How many more years before all of these orgs finally come to the realization that making hiring decisions based on skin color or genitals isn't a winning strategy?
Hey, mods, did the top level comments get resequenced in this thread? Up until an hour ago, iza's comment was the first comment; now it's the fifth.
I understand that the post itself may be inflammatory but the resulting discussion actually avoided a lot of the diversity v.s. meritocracy ("it's my side or the highway!") that some of the other comment threads are focusing on.
As far as I understand it you mostly don't see it because once a thread gets to the top it is receiving a net positive stream of incoming vote and since it is already at the top it will receive more votes that threads further down the page.
Sometimes threads are detached by admins and end up at the bottom of the page. In those cases they are usually (possibly always) clearly marked as such.
Perhaps that's the case, but isa's comment was the first comment for 4 hours after it was posted. Round about two hours ago, it suddenly dropped down to the fifth slot, not the second or third.
I don't know what HN's policy is on resequencing; I thought I would ask to see if I'm not understanding something correctly.
Regarding diversity issues, it is interesting to go back and look at this interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, from 1972. What I find worrisome is that the conversation is still being discussed in 2016. For all the progress in technology, there are some social issues that change only very slowly.
What has changed is that some corporations now have formal programs in place to try to make progress on diversity issues. But the resistance to progress on this issue is remarkable.
Cancelled my subscription as soon as I read the tweet from @_danilo. If the races and genders were switched and the context instead was some horrendous civil war in Africa, it would be outrage fodder in the mainstream media for weeks, but because it's white males, it's totally alright to claim they're not just devoid of empathy and compassion, but constitutionally incapable of ever acquiring it.
My disgust is boundless. To hell with anyone that thinks and behaves like this.
For contrast, look how Pax Dickinson was fired from the CTO role at Business Insider for his joking tweets that were perceived as anti-black racist. Such tweets were on a personal account, unrelated to work matters, and obviously ironic jokes about news items. (The context was ignored in order to paint a picture of Dickinson as a bigot.)
Here, @_danilo is also on a personal account, and tweeting specifically about work matters. The difference? His tweets were anti-white rather than anti-black. Given the prevailing SJW agenda infesting Silicon Valley his job should be safe for now. But activists should keep our eyes on him.
"We’re trying to build a new kind of enterprise company where the playbooks of old won’t always work,"
Code for, "lots more money to be made here, move over hackers, let the ^professionals^ do their work". I'm not surprised, the hippy dream of work as you please is no more. Take and want the big money? don't be surprised when big money dictates how the company will be run.
Big question, will github be run to the benefit of users or share holders?
Meanwhile, github has quietly dropped the "owner" / "collaborator" tag for contributors to open source projects.
Either you're part of an org, or you're not.
Not too many OS projects have their own org, and commercial entities will be reluctant to add non-employees to their org, in order to distinguish contributors from employees.
Users of OS projects now have now easy way to tell if they're interacting with a collaborator.
Serious question: why can't someone make a good Github replacement that is anywhere near feature parity?
I've tried both Bitbucket and GitLab, but their UIs continue to be leagues behind Github. It takes twice as long to do something in them (ex. find and blame a file) than it does with Github.
If they could just get the UI right, I'd migrate in a second. Hosting providers should enforce political opinions (beyond defending free speech).
> Serious question: why can't someone make a good Github replacement that is anywhere near feature parity?
Time and Github executed well at the start giving them experience.
I get the feeling that a company starting out now and doing all of their development and management remotely through the site they are building might have a good chance at catching Github in capability. Getting buy-in from customers is the problem.
I have checked Gitlab out in the past, and fully intend to mirror my stuff from Github over to there soon.
How do we know that Gitlab, as an open-source project, can't be infected with the same ideological virus? Should I just start by self-hosting Gitlab so I never have to migrate again?
I realize it was just an example, but in Bitbucket you can hit 'f' on the file view, type part of a filename, select it and hit blame.
I'm a dev attached to the Bitbucket team and we're pretty proud of our design, and always looking for ways to streamline the UX. Are there any other operations that you find cumbersome or unintuitive?
I understand why GitHub feels it needs to add structure to their organization. It's impossible for 500 people to coordinate themselves - Combine that with the remote work environment and it gives some people a free ticket to do nothing at all.
That said, I think the remote working aspect won't be a problem if you add a middle management layer. So I agree with adding management but disagree about cancelling remote work.
There's real fear about a user driven backlash against policies coming down the pipe. One recent slide deck was titled "Kill Your Idols?" and examined ways to prevent a LinkedIn esque reputation from forming during proposed policy changes to accelerate growth.
I make no claims as to the accuracy of this information or any relationship with GitHub. All assertions should be considered parody.
People who want to build large companies are just plain scum. They are the upper class version of the aspirational middle class. The aspirational middle class can't wait to leave their peers behind and start managing them like slaves. The aspirational upper class can't wait to build a giant slave farm.
Since the agricultural era, humans have been taken over by slave drivers. We should be going back to small, decentralised groups of people. Big business and big government have done nothing but destroy this planet.
I used to work for a large company and that experience solidified my disgust for these places. I can fully understand why people would want to resign now that the company wants to grow. I decided that I would rather go down fighting then ever work for a large company again.
Has anyone asked why GitHub needs to grow? If there are other products that could benefit from GitHub integration, provide an api and let some other small group of hackers build it. All GitHub is doing is laying the foundations for their slave farm.
You'll get hammered, I'm sure for the rest of it, but this is a good question:
> Has anyone asked why GitHub needs to grow?
They are a making a pretty decent profit now. They could keep the lights on and keep doing what they are doing for the foreseeable future, make incremental improvements and scale out servers to pick up additional load without shaking things up drastically and taking in loads of VC money. That's not the sexy, billion dollar unicorn move, but it is a safe, sustainable bet.
None of these big companies ever do anything useful after their initial product. They just start buying small companies and sucking them into the big shitty company.
>Some of these folks may be hanging out until GitHub offers some kind of "liquidity event" — a way for longtime employees or investors to sell some of their shares — which one person believes could take place soon. (A GitHub spokesperson refused comment on that.)
This event is not likely to come any time soon because Andreessen Horowitz bid the price up so high.
It's interesting to see how people react to this, in the context of the reactions to their first VC raise of 100 million dollars -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220353
e.g. "They want to do bigger and better things with Github. They're not quite done trying to change the world. Now they are not only profitable, but they have substantial capital to invest in further innovations."
and "I bet nobody here as anything bad to say about the exceptional skills of the github team. However such a huge investment may force them to "overscale" in order to be able to reach the expected return (by the VC)."
Great power != running the company. It specifically mentions he's taken over corpdev and some other functions
Also note that Julio is a very technical guy.
Note that what you have seen here is nearly identical to what david drummond did at Google (start as legal, take over some other functions like corpdev) in the early years.
It's hard to say this didn't work out amazingly well.
I'm also completely unsure why, without any evidence (in this article or elsewhere), you would assume that whatever power Julio has, he's using in a way that stagnates things, instead of using it in a way that enables folks to get shit done.
(David is the reason Google was willing to take so many legal/etc risks for the past N years)
Interesting perspective but a lawyer heading corporate development can make sense, having a lawyer with no accounting or finance training or experience is reckless at best but very scary to any potential shareholder. How on earth is Avalos making investment decisions? Avalos is not technical at all, he knows markdown, yoga and how to spin records. The company is falling apart under his watch, case closed. His purview is HR and Social Impact, he is calling the shots.
You are.
Let's take what you said
"... aren't running a tech company."
Nothing in the article said he's running the company, you are making an assumption here.
Nothing you have provided at all backups up your claim that "It's often not a good sign when the top engineers or star salesmen aren't running a tech company.
". So there's an unproven statement combined again with the assumption that engineers aren't running the place (the article says it's being run by one of the co-founders, who was an engineer - "Prior to founding GitHub he worked as an engineer at CNET Networks on Gamespot and the launch of Chow.")
"You say he does "corpdev" and the article clearly points out "development of the corporation" has become a big problem.
"
This badly misunderstands what corpdev does.
It's pretty much not worth continuing this discussion, i'm just pointing out that you are making wildly silly generalizations to how to run companies and what the article actually says.
And yeah, you are making a ton of assumptions to do it.
Hence why the development of GH appears to have stagnated in the last few years. I deal with limitations related to permission handling on a daily basis with GH Enterprise.
If they pursue this genuinely, they'll be perpetually flip-flopping between states - it won't take long under this leadership for the hard-done-by minority to change to white/male, and then 'reverse sex/racism' would be sex/racism towards non-white/female...
Christ, the wonderful platform for learning, sharing, and doing that is GitHub is potentially under threat and the majority of discussion here is consumed with questions and accusations of racism?!
Of course white privilege exists. Next.
Onto real shit like how do we not lose yet another bastion of web awesomeness.
It's embarrassing that you don't think this is something worth having a discussion about. You're basically suggesting we abandon critical thought. There's clearly more to this than white privilege.
It seems that people disagree with how obvious the existence of white privilege is. I don't think 600 comments would get posted over something obvious.
That's a pretty blistering take. Really wonder if Bitbucket will see an uptick in business from this. I can see something like this influencing their users as well as employees.
There is a lot of anger in this thread. I understand. Honest question though: how much of it isn't coming from white men? I ask because the tone of what is causing this anger has been publicly said, and masked as "culture" and other phrases, about women and people of color for a very long time.
I love how the guy quoted saying that they can't teach white, male middle managers empathy is a white male middle manager. I guess he's saying that he's proud of what he is.
Possibly. Though Latino's range from standard white European (usually Spanish or Danish decent) to near full blooded Indian. So it is hard to use it as a differentiating category.
My first reaction is that the language of "us" vs "them", victims vs oppressors, reeks of hatred. Hatred undermines productive conversation, which undermines any attempt at building a good culture.
I would have to listen to the whole presentation before I render final judgement.
I don't know if you even need to see the whole presentation. A few of the full sentences on that one slide are more than enough to project a strong us vs them attitude of hatred and victim versus oppressor, especially the following bullets:
- "This is not work for white folks to lead"
- "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"
It's actually written into GitHub's Open Code of conduct. (The 'Open' Code has not accepted any changes for quite some time even though this particular issue was under discussion [1].) The Open Code expressly excuses discrimination against some races and genders, specifically by explicitly ignoring any critique which might fall under a 'reverse'-ism; 'reverse-racism' or 'reverse-sexism' [2]. This line in the Open Code was previously discussed here [3].
I wasn't aware of this history. One thing to note is the sentence that precedes 'reverse'-ism:
>Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding:
> ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
I'm okay with it, because I can get a job elsewhere. Some minorities can't. I don't need to be able to get a job at GitHub, because for some stupid reason, society has a general bias in favor of me. I can work anywhere, but the folks they're giving a shot are folks who don't have it as good as I do.
If this continues to proliferate, instead of achieving a World where minorities have equal opportunity with non-minorities, we will instead end up with a mix of institutions where those in the majority have an advantage and other institutions where those who are minorities have an advantage. This doesn't look like equality, but a reversion to something looking like "separate but equal".
> (6) Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women.
I'm just glad I dumped Github. I'm pretty sure they'd find my white female friends [some of whom needed to transition] being discriminated against as okay based on those slides.
Do you mean that it does not exist or that it cannot exist? I've heard this exact phrase before, "reverse racism is a myth," and it seems like an example of a thought-terminating cliché.
So, as far as I'm aware, there is "racism-as-defined-in-some-academic-circles", where it's only racism when it's systematic and directed by a privileged ethnic group against an unprivileged ethnic group. Which is (IMHO) different from what non-academic people understand racism. Maybe that's what parent means?
> "when it's systematic and directed by a privileged ethnic group against an unprivileged ethnic group"
Honest question: does it have to be directed by "a privileged ethnic group" or is it valid if it is by any general group or even a single, privileged person?
Presumably, the "privileged group" should have a perceived ethnic composition different from that of the "unprivileged group", otherwise discrimination can't be based on ethnicity. But I guess it doesn't mean that all members of that ethnic group need to share this outlook.
That said, I'm no academic, but I remember reading something about this a few years ago, in the case of a woman in France accused of anti-white racism.
Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
- "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
Second wave feminism, largely led by white women, often leaves out women of color. I mentioned this below, but the publishing industry is 79% white and 78% female. This has a huge impact on the types of stories that get to be published, which subsequently has real results on culture and society.
- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"
I mean yeah, sure, nothing super deep on that one. There should also be solidarity with white friends and colleagues, preferably ones that do a lot of listening and understand how not to take up all the space.
> Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
On the one hand, sure, it would be odd if it were entirely led by a group of people that the initiative is not meant to directly benefit.
But on the other,
1. The title implies it is white people that must be left out of leadership there. It does not mention Asian people, which is odd, as the tech industry is currently mostly white and Asian men. Asian people are highly overrepresented, much more than white people, relative to their percentage in the country. That means if you have objections to putting a white person in a leadership position for a diversity initiative, you should have a similar objection to an Asian person. Not having that mentioned can't help but seem racist against white people.
2. Diversity initiatives need to work with everyone, not just the newcomers, but also the existing tech industry, which is mostly white and Asian men. White and Asian men could be helpful in guiding the industry towards more diversity, in particular, by doing so in a way that gets as many other white and Asian men on board with such changes. They might know best what would work to convince them, for example.
3. And, in the end, it is just always wrong to say "this is not work for [race X]". That's racist and offensive. Instead, it would have been fine to say "this is work where we need a strong leadership presence of currently underrepresented groups".
Asian people are highly overrepresented, much more than
white people, relative to their percentage in the country.
But not relative to California. This is important to note because the base rates of the state in which a company is located or an industry is concentrated matter. Very very few people move farther than 500 miles from the place where they are born. This means that the overwhelming majority of the people in this country would never take a job in California.
That said, I believe Asian people are overrepresented, more than white people, relative to their percentage in California, but it's not nearly as disproportionate as the figures relative to the entire country.
No, even relative to California, their overrepresentation is far larger.
Your link shows 14.4% for Asian people in California, but in the tech industry, they are at least twice that. Whereas in California white people are 73.2%, which is about equal or even less than their ratio in tech.
And about most people not moving more than 500 miles - is that true for tech jobs in California? See for example
which indicates that your general rule might not apply, as over a third of Silicon Valley people are foreign-born. That means even from outside of the US, not just outside of California. And it's obvious the valley is full of people from the rest of the US, in fact tech workers that grew up in the area are a clear minority.
Thanks for this thought/argument about mobility. It's extremely valid and not one someone has yet made when I bring up base rates.
With this in mind, I'm very curious if we're asking the question of what these overrepresented groups are doing differently and if there are lessons to be learned by and applied by underrepresented groups.
As someone born in Brazil, when I meet a Brazilian in SF, we get to talking about where in Brazil we're both from at some point and one thing I've discovered is that Brazilians from the state of Goias are very much overrepresented in SF despite the fact that São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are typically more represented globally with Brazilian expats. Why are Brazilians from Goias over-represented in the Bay Area? Near as I can tell from the numerous conversations is that there is a strong network of weak ties, à la Granovetter, at play and that this is the same phenomena that can be see among Asian and Indian communities in SF.
In fact, the only Indian-Brazilian person I know in the Bay Area (and in the world, since there isn't much cultural exchange between Brazil and India) is a VC and he has commented that he wishes there was as much community and support on the Brazilian side of the Silicon Valley as there is on the Indian side, because he has seen that as one of the greatest external factors (i.e. outside what the individual himself is capable of) helping Indians move to the region in the first place and be successful once they arrive and establish themselves. Perhaps more efforts to establish professional and social networks of weak ties would be an effective strategy within identities group that are underrepresented. I'm curious how effective directing energy towards helping those within your identity in-group is versus fighting for your identity in-group as a whole relative to other identity in-groups?
"...you should have a similar objection to an Asian person. Not having that mentioned can't help but seem racist against white people."
It's not purely about representation, although that is important too. It's about centuries of white dominance. A couple decades of people of Asian descent having a strong presence in an industry isn't enough. How many of those overrepresented Asians are holding positions of senior leadership?
"And, in the end, it is just always wrong to say "this is not work for [race X]"."
You're missing the ending part of that statement, which is "to lead". That makes it very different. No one said white people can't be involved, as long as they are not taking up all the space.
The historical question has to address the current facts on the ground, though. Those centuries matter in some ways, for example, in currently poverty rates among black people, for example, which are a disgrace to the US. But how do those centuries justify focusing only on white people in that slide, if the goal of the slide is diversity?
I didn't miss "to lead", I referred to it. My point is that no matter the position - rank and file, or leadership; technical or non-technical; etc. etc. - it is never ok to say "this position is not for [race of gender X]". It's just wrong.
Again, it's fine to say "it would be helpful to have a presence of [group X] here". That focuses on the positive, doesn't exclude a specific group, and there are valid reasons to indeed want a presence of underrepresented minorities, because it's about them.
In other words, this entire initiative could be done in a non-racist way.
"But how do those centuries justify focusing only on white people in that slide, if the goal of the slide is diversity?"
Again, no one said white people can't be involved. It says it is not for white people to lead. No one is leaving white people out of this.
"...and there are valid reasons to indeed want a presence of underrepresented minorities, because it's about them."
Think about that for a second. Do you see the subtlety in what you're saying? You're acknowledging that some power should be yielded from those that hold it "because it's about them", but you're not giving people of color the power to run the thing that is in and of itself about them. Only giving up token pieces instead of yielding power is one of many ways that white supremacy gets passed on over the centuries.
No, I disagree with that point of view. You see things as groups holding power and that distribution of power shifting. I think that's a combative and counterproductive perspective.
Instead, I focus on fairness and equal treatment. Individuals - all of them - should be given respect and opportunity. That's what really matters, and if we do that, then we can wipe out discrimination and intolerance.
Our points of view lead to some identical things we want - we both want to end any and all existing discrimination against underrepresented minorities. However, from there, there is divergence.
This is a political difference of opinion. It can't easily go away. What I think is important is that people like you and people like me find ways to meet on common ground and work towards those shared goals. But to do so, we have to accept some political viewpoint differences.
Side note: I find comments like "think about that for a second" etc. from you as potentially condescending. As if you're trying to play the role of a teacher, guiding me to some truth that you already grasp. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't mean it that way.
Sorry if I came off as condescending, that wasn't my intention. I once held a similar position as yours, but it was because I wasn't well read about the subtleties of white supremacy and power structures. That changed as soon as I first read Malcolm X and had my mind blown as a teenager. I thought maybe you also didn't see it, but now I realize you do see it but don't think it's about power. My apologies.
But yes we disagree. Of course all individuals should be given respect and opportunity, no one is arguing otherwise. The fact of the matter is that that's not the current state of the world. We can talk about fairness and equal treatment all we want, but that doesn't address the systemic racism that is happening right this second. People of color don't have the time to wait around for white people to decide to be respectful and fair. I don't see any way to overcome it than from a yielding of power.
I'm down to find common ground, but it has to be on something concrete, not vague ideas of fairness (which are subjective anyways). I personally think it's silly to have diversity initiatives led by white men. What do you suggest?
> I once held a similar position as yours, but it was because I wasn't well read
Again, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but I think any reasonable person could interpret that as condescending.
> I personally think it's silly to have diversity initiatives led by white men.
I might see a 10-person board of a diversity nonprofit that is 100% white men as silly. But to have some Chief of Diversity officer in one company happen to be a white man sounds fine to me - if he's good at it. No more odd than a professor of Russian history being Indonesian.
To say otherwise, as you just did, strikes me as racist. Do you really not see it?
> What do you suggest?
For example:
1. Educate hiring committees on implicit bias.
2. Make sure hiring is done as blindly as possible, e.g., coding tests can be done via text and not in person. This has worked wonders in other industries.
3. Have companies' HR departments focus on diversity, e.g. talking to employees (anonymously, or as they prefer) to see if there are current issues, and if so, to try to address them.
All those steps are already being taken by most major software companies, including the one I work at. Progress is happening. And it can happen without
1. Posing the problem as "group A" vs "group B", as you are doing. That's the type of thinking that got us into this problem in the first place, that led to prejudice and racism.
2. Acting and talking in ways that appear racist to a large segment of the tech industry, as Github is doing.
Nope, I really don't think saying the chief of diversity should be non-white is racist. I can intellectually understand the impacts of racism, but I'm seen as a cis-gendered white male when I'm out in the world and don't experience the effects of racism personally. It's a different thing to live in the US as a person of color and experience the small daily abuses that that comes with. When I come home with my girlfriend, who is a woman of color, and she starts crying because a white person followed her in a store, or assumed she didn't have money, or she overheard a comment made about her, yet I was treated with respect and dignity all day, it's very difficult to deal with. I can intellectually understand the effects of racism, yet I don't experience it.
Forgive me if I think she is more qualified for that job running diversity initiatives than I am, even though I'm very well read on the topic.
That's all true, and definitely that perspective matters a lot.
But it's not the only qualification necessary for the job. The other is to effect change in the organization. By your logic, if a black person is better at understanding the problems black people face, perhaps a white person would be better at getting white people to change things in the company.
I actually think both of those are wrong. You can feel horror at the Rwandan genocide or the holocaust or other massive injustices without being African or Jewish. You don't just intellectually understand racism in the US - I hope - you also feel it has to change.
Again, I agree the perspectives of underrepresented minorities are crucial here. But that doesn't lead to "every single chief of diversity must be non-white."
"But it's not the only qualification necessary for the job."
Exactly, but it is one qualification of many. If you have a white man with a stellar application for that position, and a woman of color with a similarly stellar application for that position, doesn't the woman of color necessarily get the job because she has more qualifications than the white man?
The point is there is always going to be a person of color that is more qualified than the white man for that leadership position because their experience as a person of color makes them more qualified for the position, everything else being equal, and they should thus be given it. Is that not reasonable?
I don't actually believe the following statement, but just to play devil's advocate, what would you say if I made the argument which is a direct corollary to the argument you are making:
"The head of diversity should be a white male because they are the only ones qualified to understand white male privilege and therefore will be more effective at working and communicating with others that also have the same privilege and coming up with ways to get others with privilege to change their behavior. Seeing that those with privilege are a majority in the industry, a white male leading it would be more effective leading more people to changing attitudes."
You're ignoring the parallel argument I made to yours (not that I believe it, but I'm saying it makes as much sense as yours), which would suggest the white man is more qualified.
Anyhow, in practice, I doubt it matters: most applicants to such positions are likely not white men anyhow. So the racism inherent in such statements as "white folks are not suitable for this role" is not only wrong, it is also unnecessary.
Again, no one ever said white people are not suitable for this role or can't be involved in any way. This is the third time I've pointed this out. No one is saying white people can't be empathetic, or thoughtful, or innovative when it comes to topics of race. It's just that people of color are even more qualified to lead these programs as they have first hand experience existing in an exceptionally racist system.
White people are already in charge of everything, they don't also need to be in charge of diversity. That's exactly why these positions are being created in the first place.
>>It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
How can anybody who advocates equality say no white person can lead a diversity movement? Just because somebody is white doesn't mean they aren't an oppressed minority (female, transgender, Jewish or some other oppressed group like a furry).
I think we collectively need to declare it's not okay to say "people with skin color ____" cannot possibly understand Y or have an opinion on Y. To do so is institutionalized racism.
When the discussion is about "social impact", the conversation is about diversity. Diversity != equality. In the view of many, equality isn't enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged. The concept of "reverse racism" is there to deflect the inevitable awkward questions that arise, when clearly biased statements are made and practices get institutionalized.
IMO, all this stuff is problematic. I wish we could all embrace the golden rule and move on.
I don't understand what you're arguing. Equal opportunity will lead to diversity. Equality is about removing processes that look at privilege (e.g. your rich father donated X dollars so welcome to our college).
If your idea of fairness requires we become systematically biased against certain majorities (white, heterosexual, male, cis-gender) for your cause then I don't want to be part of your cause, and moreover I find that cause discriminitory and dangerous.
> If your idea of fairness requires we become systematically biased against certain majorities (white, heterosexual, male, cis-gender) for your cause then I don't want to be part of your cause, and moreover I find that cause discriminitory and dangerous.
Exactly. As mentioned earlier, in the case of Github the cultural transition appears to be from prioritizing meritocracy to codified diversity for the sake of diversity.
"In the view of many, equality isn't enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged."
Then that's not equality - equality is, or should be enough, because if the issue of diversity and equality is 'minimizing / eliminating privilege' then by definition, equality is that privilege is the same for all (or zero).
For many though, this becomes a good cover for 'preferential treatment above and beyond equality, in the name of 'compensation'.'
I'm sorry to move the discussion to politics, but such affairs trigger sentiments among White people which end up in favor of Trump, if I understand politics properly. So would it be clever for the Trump team to highlight and exaggerate such stories/Is this article the result of it?
I don't agree that if they can't lead the program, that means they are being prevented from having a meaningful opinion about it. That's all they're talking about, right? Who leads the program?
Yes, presumably the leaders are to issue orders and everyone else is to follow them. That is not the kind of participation that allows opinions.
You may be saying that the non-white leadership is the kind of leadership that allows collaboration and influence from followers, which is what I would do, but the evidence in the Github case is to the contrary.
Considering that they are moving to a more enterprise-y management style where there are lots of middle managers, I would imagine that that is a very real possibility.
Race is a goofy power structure which puts certain people ("whites") on top of others.
Whiteness changes with political needs. Hilariously, Irish-Americans, Jews, etc weren't always considered white. They had to become white. Nowadays, certain Asians are held up as model minorities and may get some honorary whiteness.
With children getting murdered by the state for being black, it's obvious race is about white supremacy. (Analogously, sexism is about male supremacy, also known as patriarchy.)
I think you mean 77.7% white? It should be noted that the census counts North African and Middle Eastern as white, which is inaccurate. That number also drops to 62.6% when you take out Hispanics that describe themselves as white. So it's probably more like a 20 point difference than 2.
Do you want to also take out the jewish % from the white group, and see how much of an 'imbalance' there is amongst top management / successful founders?
Again, are you arguing that it's ok for the publishing industry to be 79% white and 78% female? Do you oppose diminishing white supremacy and racism? Because it sounds like you do.
You: White people are 79% of the publishing industry. Do you oppose diminishing White Supremacy (I mean, they're way overrepresented!)? Are you saying it's okay?
White Supremacists: Jewish people are 2% of the american population, but they hold the majority of top positions in the publishing industry. Do you oppose diminishing Jewish Supremacy? Are you saying it's okay?
Both of these arguments are terrible, and are both based on the premise that over-representation of some group in some industry or position constitutes a serious problem and probable conspiracy.
"...based on the premise that over-representation of some group in some industry or position constitutes a serious problem and probable conspiracy."
Ah, ok, so you don't think representation is an issue. Most people of color that have dealt with white gatekeepers will disagree with you. If you care to examine the part of you that holds that belief I'd suggest reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, followed by some James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, and bell hooks to start. Hate read it if you must, but give some experiences orthogonal to yours a chance.
> Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people.
1) Diversity isn't just about race and the fact you think it is is why I'm honestly horrified by you.
2) Sexual orientation, transgender issues are serious problems and not really protected classes in many respects and they have as much of a "fixed" bag from genetics as you do.
The really sad thing is that there actually is sexism and racism towards women and minorities in various subtle ways at lots of tech companies. I've seen it first-hand myself. But this antagonistic line of thinking isn't helping. It just makes things worse for everyone.
The majority of sexism and racism that I've seen is probably subconscious and doesn't really seem intentional per se. People often just don't realize the side-effects of what they're saying or doing, or how it can come across to people sometimes. You certainly won't build shared camaraderie and empathy by antagonizing entire classes of people.
This one I actually don't think is so bad, in context. The title of the slide is "Diversity and Inclusion in Tech". It is difficult for someone that is not part of a minority to spearhead efforts to outreach to one, because they don't experience the same issues. Literally, they don't have the right experience for the job.
It's a stretch as a comparison, but no-one gets sued for refusing to hire ugly models. It's because a model's job is to be good looking. That's just the way it is. In a similar way, a head of diversity should probably be... diverse. Although that could include gay white men, for example - maybe that text is shorthand that was qualified in the actual presentation, none of us know.
The white women one mystifies me, though. Women are usually a minority in the workplace, surely their views are valid.
I'm a white person. My family came from Cuba with the clothes on their backs 50 years ago. Everything they ever had was taken by the Communists. Like millions of other Cubans, they came here with nothing and had to rebuild their lives. I grew up in a very unique environment, the Cuban-American community in Miami. I'd say that's a pretty "diverse" background. But I guarantee that in Github's book, I'm one of the "white folks" that shouldn't be leading this.
I'm sick of this politics of division. It pits people against each other and treats them as members of some helpless group instead of as individual human beings, with their own unique story and their own untapped potential.
But I guarantee that in Github's book, I'm one of the "white folks" that shouldn't be leading this.
I don't see how you can guarantee that. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand what you're saying. But this is a one-line bullet point in a slideshow, I'd like to see some more context before I grab my pitchfork.
> It is difficult for someone that is not part of a minority to spearhead efforts to outreach to one, because they don't experience the same issues. Literally, they don't have the right experience for the job.
We've invented tools to deal with this: language and literature. Almost everyone has experienced some form of discrimination, even if for many it is only occasional and minor, and that's enough to give a good writer an opening to get inside the reader's head and use that to build upon and paint a vivid picture of the more frequent or major discrimination the writer has dealt with.
Yes, sorry, I just edited my comment to address that. I wonder whether the point was expanded upon in the actual presentation to address that or not - bullet points on slides are usually "launching off points".
I'm honestly shocked at the lack of empathy on display in this comment thread. The technology world has a diversity problem—why not assume that this is a good-faith effort to address it, just expressed in words you don't like? Why instead flip directly into Internet Outrage Status?
This kind of outpouring of rage, to be frank, is why Hacker News has such a bad reputation. Look around at the comments here: there are people complaining about the very notion that there might be something wrong with how hiring and promotion happens in technology. There are people, like @yoodenvranx, equating their own anecdotal problems with the victimization of white men. There are countless comments asserting that we are capable of "pure meritocracy," a notion that is invalidated by research on implicit bias.
The overwhelming consensus here is that (a) there is no problem, and (b) GitHub's attempts to address it are unjust. This is why Hacker News looks to the outside world like a self-affirming bubble with no grounding in reality.
Did you read that slide and the comments others have made addressing it? Even after going through some seriously generous contortions to assume good faith, it's racist and alarming.
I also don't think your comment extends good faith you are demanding to the comment and commenters which you're addressing.
there are people complaining about the very notion that
there might be something wrong with how hiring and
promotion happens in technology.
I haven't gotten past the topmost comment thread on this HN post, but I have yet to read one comment here that makes this argument. Many here are addressing a particularly troublesome form of racism using a slide and other primary evidence as exemplary of this type of creeping racism. I haven't yet read a comment that argues that "(a) there is no problem", so the "consensus" you're asserting isn't there. I do agree that there is generally consensus about your second point " (b) GitHub's attempts to address it are unjust.", but maybe it's because GitHub's attempts just might be unjust?
Comments like the one you replied to, threaten to derail our discourse with the distortions you've already pointed out.
Comments like yours, on the other hand, are the reason I come to HN. Measured rebuttals without being too biased one way or the other-- it really enhances the reading experience of those going through this thread.
It's hard to convey my appreciation through an upvote, since that can be confused for just popularity, so I had to say it here.
Personally it irks me that tech has excellent representation of diversity in the forms of people of colour, specifically Asians from different a diverse set of backgrounds, yet they don't count in the tally of diversity.
But we also have to remember that, to someone not in those well-represented groups, it's not a huge consolation. Diversity isn't a floating-point number between 0.0 and 1.0.
True, but we need to ask valid questions like "Why do we have a bunch of diversity in this vector, but not this other vector? If tech was fundamentally intolerant of diversity in general like many claim, wouldn't we lack diversity in all vectors? Why causes might contribute to the disparity between these two diversity vectors with different representations?
Overall, I rarely if ever see anyone arguing for diversity asking hard questions like "Why are there many Asians and Indians even though there aren't many Women, Hispanics/Latinos and Black people?". What are these successful identity groups doing differently that is affording them much success in being well represented or even over represented? How might the under represented groups adopt the same approaches to achieve the same success?
I'm not saying that we shouldn't solve unconscious bias as well, but I'm less inclined to first consider solutions that address unconscious bias if those solutions are proposed by someone who hasn't also considered other explanations and solutions because they aren't applying the null hypothesis in their thought process.
Also, how about some multi-variate analysis to determine which factors most greatly contribute to the diversity gap for each underrepresented group? We can't adequately fix what we don't measure and I really don't see a lot of measurement going on. For example, all successful startups understand and apply concepts of a user acquisition funnel and pipeline, but then people complain loudly in simplistic terms that the "pipeline problem is a myth". I don't understand how you can the former technique with great success and hold the latter incongruous thought in your head at the same time.
Perhaps you should actually take some time and read the article? This was given at a presentation not aligned with Github (so this isn't an official policy as you and others are making it out as). Further, its context is obviously needed to limit all of this specious extrapolation on how this is a contribution to the current shifts at Github; I'm impressed so many have been so easily taken in by this blogspam.
If people can get thrown out of conferences for their tweets on unrelated things, if Eich can get in hot water over a political donation, then it is little surprise to see the knife cutting both ways.
You wouldn't forgive a developer for speaking at an MRA conference--why should these people be forgiven for unrelated presentations?
This is the future you chose.
EDIT:
Downvote all you want. This is the kind of goodthink/badthink politicking that happens once you move away from "Does the code work?"
The thing being complained about by my parent poster here is completely consistent with the social norms that have prevailed lately. I would say don't be surprised at the sudden double-standard, but logic apparently isn't the strong point of the mobs.
We've spent so much time lately attacking meritocracies that it is somewhat cathartic to watch the inevitable consequences.
EDIT2:
Just to make this painfully clear--we have decided as a community that it is okay to judge people based on their actions in unrelated contexts. That applies just as much to folks that have slides about "white women being obstacles" in some unrelated context to their work in HR as it does to people that tweet bigoted things while being maintainers of projects.
"Racial" is not the same as "racist." I don't think it helps the conversation to conflate them, and it's anti-intellectual criticism that inhibits even speaking about race.
This is blatant racism yes. I have posted this with a mention of here name on LinkedIn and Twitter and asked her to clarify this slide. Maybe a bit of public pressure will do the trick for her to come forward.
Don't see what the big deal is. The slide refers to spearheading a diversity program, not the company itself. Seems intuitive to me that such a program with only white, male managers might be problematic.
Your use of "only" is undeservedly generous of the attitude reflected on that slide. Furthermore, the slide actually doesn't even really address gender as a reason to disqualify someone, just race. They aren't talking about having a diverse group of people, including white males and females, leading diversity. Instead that slide near as I can tell communicates a policy of excluding white people.
Furthermore, I don't understand the racist attitude that somehow white or male people are somehow less qualified to lead a diversity program. Interpersonal skills, knowledge of the myriad diversity initiatives and approaches tried elsewhere and how effective they have been, knowledge of hiring practices, knowledge of recruiting practices, knowledge of retention practices, knowledge of the law surrounding hiring, recruiting and retention practices, professional network, etc. are all the type of things that should be relevant when choosing the most qualified candidates for such a position. Discounting all these and elevating someone's race and gender to utmost importance is blatantly racist policy/attitude.
What about experience? If nothing else (and there is else), it's reasonable to think that someone from a group which has been discriminated against may have more insight about battling systemic discrimination and racism (i.e. diversity hiring) than someone from a more privileged background (privileged in the sense of being from a majority group which was not the subject of systemic discrimination). Note that, like for any other hire, this type of personal experience is only one element involved in selecting the best fit for a role. I shouldn't have to say that last bit, but people like to think in black-and-white (pun intended) about race, sex, and class.
Experience is valid too. Being white or male doesn't mean you don't understand discrimination because you don't have experience with it.
An equally absurd corollary to "those that have experienced discrimination have unique insight into preventing discrimination" is "those that have experienced privilege have unique insight into privilege and how to dismantle it".
Just because you're on one side or the other doesn't make you more qualified by experience. We need people with understanding of both sides of the coin. In other words, we need diversity with respect to experiencing privilege and discrimination to understand what is happening and how to address it. When you don't have people on the other side of the coin, racist attitudes like the ones reflected in that slide proliferate.
Being white doesn't disqualify you from having experience being discriminated either. There are gay, lesbian and transgender white men, women and other gender identities. Head over to The Advocate and read some essays/blog posts from gay white males.
Furthermore, discriminating white people and men from this sphere of work (or any other) gives them some similar experiences and insight into discrimination.
What this thread shows is the sentiment that, if you claim diversity is important, leaving out a group specifically to increase diversity (as opposed to, say, merely reducing their proportion in the cohort) is in fact not being intellectually consistent or honest.
Don't fall into the flippant "Oh ho ho if white's aren't involved I guess it can't ever be legit" sarcastic dismissal. That's neither fair nor accurate.
And don't forget that killer quote from their internal presentation:
"Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
When diversity initiatives become an "us vs them" discourse, everyone loses. Except for the fat cats with full wallets at the top, who have no issue with the plebe infighting as long as it's between themselves (see the not so subtly placed "this is not about socio economic class").
I've been seeing this discussion a lot lately, particularly in the publishing world. 79% of editors are white and 78% are women [1], so the statement has validity at least when talking about the gatekeepers of what stories get to be told. Marlon James recently posted about his experiences with it [2] and many writers of color have since shared similar experiences.
My take is that it's not "us vs them", but a need to illuminate where the barriers lie.
I don't really understand this. I've published books. It isn't particularly difficult or expensive, any printer can do it. If any group feels their books are being overlooked, they can start a publishing company with little difficulty. If they are correct, their company will make a nice profit for them.
OK, but like 63% of the U.S consists of whites. If it were an even distribution it would be disproportionate. Whites are somewhat over represented based on your numbers, but not as much as you seem to imply.
It sounds small when you put it that way, but try looking at the same stats from the other side: 37% of Americans aren't white, but only 21% of editors aren't. Or to put it another way, white people are twice as likely to become editors as non-white people. That's not a small difference.
And men are how much more likely to become firemen? And women are how much more likely to be flight attendants? And men or how less likely to be in marketing?
For the life of me I can't understand why people insist on having equal representation in every industry. It'd be on thing if there were numbers proving a massive backlog of people of a certain race/gender wanting positions in a field but unable to get them. It's another entirely when there's no demand, and we insist on artificially generating it to make people feel warm and fuzzy that every job on the planet has equal representation across race/age/gender.
> 37% of Americans aren't white, but only 21% of editors aren't.
how many chinese restaurants are run by non-chinese?
these stats don't make any sense, if you just look at them that way.
maybe whites like being editors more…
if you don't find the reason, you won't find the solution.
Furthermore, the distribution of race is not equal across the US and very very few people move further than 500 miles away from where their parents lived. The racial makeup you should expect in a company (or geographically focused industry) should be approximate that of the state and neighboring states in which that company is located (or that industry is concentrated).
Sure, but we're talking about white women, which make up about 33% of the population of the US. Are you arguing that it's ok that 79% of the publishing industry is white and 78% is female?
I'm not really trying to make a judgement on the moral aspects, I'm just a fan of accurately representing the situation. What if a disproportionate amount of the applications are from women? That'd be a societal thing and not necessarily the direct fault of hiring managers. There are a lot of important factors that need sussed out to make good decisions here.
There are plenty of women of color applying for editor positions. Yet you go to the National Book Awards and the audience is predominantly white women and Daniel Handler makes jokes about watermelon on stage [1].
Ya, but we don't even know if the racial disparity and gender disparity are affected by the same factors. I'm not arguing they don't exist I'm arguing for comprehensive evaluation instead of assumptions based on incomplete information. We can do better than a survey.
It's not necessarily okay or not okay. You first need to determine what you believe the correct percentage to be and justify why you believe that that percentage is "correct" or "okay".
I'm inclined to believe that there is no correct percentage and that even trying to simplify as you have is disingenuous and leads to simple but wrong explanations that ignore all sorts of contributory factors.
I'm a cis-male that identifies as agender, but I haven't seen any evidence that I'm under-represented in the publishing industry because my gender is discriminated against. That's an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.
Furthermore, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on base rates and how they contribute to measurements of diversity?
This is what really confused me. "33% is barely enough to change culture" To me that strikes the perfect balance. You don't get diversity by only pushing on one side.
That's not an internal presentation, it explicitly says it's "a diversity training talk held at a different company". She works for GitHub, but we don't have any evidence GitHub explicitly endorses those views.
They are views directly related to that persons job responsibilities. So Github endorses the views by hiring the person and putting the person in a leadership role. It would be different if the views were not directly related to the persons job responsibilities and policies of the company.
The problem with hard pushes in the aftermath of really bad PR is that it's very easy to over-correct and wind up creating a new problem for yourself. It seems like Github is well on their way to just that with how they've implemented their diversity efforts. A lot of those quotes are truly scary, and are priming the pump for some very nasty lawsuits over hostile work environments that will only wind up creating new PR problems. And if those quotes are any indication, it's unlikely that someone is going to be able to slam on the brakes and stop things from getting further out of hand.
I've always been profoundly confused by people/groups who choose to fight racism with racism. I'm not quite sure that's the best corrective path for this problem. But everyone lets it slide, at least here in the US. Are we just scared?
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster."
It's an inherent problem that as you fight something, you tend to mirror it. You almost have to do so in order to be effective. The problem is that at some point, it just feeds the cycle.
God damn, that is painfully true to the point of nausea.
I am at fault for that, and have been trying to stop recently.
It's funny how we (I) is okay with using old wisdom when it comes to engineering, but dismiss quotes like that even though it comes with significant experience across generation and culture. Chalk it up to young and (incredibly) stupid
I'm sure he did in some ways, but certainly not in the ways that matter to me. I have tremendous respect for MLK and his work is a stunning example of what's possible. The warning would be somewhat pointless if becoming a monster were inevitable.
Personally, it's because it's not worth my time. Why should I have any sort of dialogue with such people when it's not going to be productive and will provoke a massive amount of vitriol? At best, it's unproductive, and at worst it's career-ruining.
I think that most people think the same way, and as a result there are absolutely no consequences when the activists go from "challenging" to "outright hateful."
This is one reason I am inspired by reading about Nelson Mandela. He fought for both equality and forgiveness of his former oppressors. Once apartheid ended in South Africa he fought against the desire from many of the former oppressed to extract revenge. An early example:
"During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." ~ Nelson Mandela [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Prepared_to_Die]
IMHO, this position is more philosophically consistent than what many circles in American academia espouse. As I recall, Mr Mandela had to fight a lot of over-zealous activists in his own party who wanted to implement punishment or retribution to the white apartheid supporters. Though it cost him greatly in terms of discontent and difficulty but stands to me as an example. But it's been widely acclaimed after the fact.
This kind of anti-white, anti-male racism is poisoning Silicon Valley. Honest, meritocratic people can't idly stand by while self-serving idiot racists take over. I'm now cancelling my GitHub account and moving to BitBucket.
GitHub has, since the Horvath incident, made it pretty clear what kind of person they want to hire. And, frankly, that's fine.
There are plenty of places where I, as a competent white male, can get hired and promoted without difficulty. The fact that Github isn't one of those is not a systematic problem. More power to them.
If Github wants to pass on solid talent just because of that person's race or sex, that's their (foolish) decision. It's a seller's market, and that talent will go elsewhere.
That's not really what I'm asking, though. Yes, let's say it's not actually hard yet. Is it reasonable to ignore signs that things might get to that point and wait for if and when it does?
I think it's reasonable to worry well before that.
(I don't know what if anything we can or should do aside from worry.)
I don't know what your definition of major is, but Github is not it in my book. Don't get me wrong, they make a semi-decent product, better than anyone else at this point, but they are by no means the only solution in their market.
The problem will self-correct at some point once the lawsuits are filed and the cost of such efforts is visible to executive leadership and investors. Even if they settle the suits early on, it'll still be a very expensive lesson. Workplaces with problems like Github is apparently developing rarely get better on their own without first experiencing the consequences.
No it is not. Either we are all allowed to discriminate or none at all. If only some must have power to discriminate - I prefer the status quo. Since I like the white male privilege. I am fine with society without privilege. I will fight tooth and nail against one in which my privilege is transferred to someone else.
I wouldn't mind transferring my "privilege" whatever that is supposed to mean. Actually I would laugh at them. This "privilege" thing doesn't make me happy. Even if a lack of "privilege" would make me unhappy I don't care. I already am. The real world is a shitty place. Nothing here is worth living for.
Hey, very scary to hear you say that. My email is in my profile. Write me anytime if you want. Lots of people on HN love to help other people. Don't be shy about reaching out.
Obviously this is a controversial sentiment but it's refreshing to see somebody state it so plainly. The idea that I get special privileges I didn't earn is uncomfortable, but if we're going to try and change that I am scared of a simple reversal in which we punish me for being part of a privileged class.
That said, I don't think I "prefer" anything about the way the world works now.
If GitHub is rejecting otherwise qualified white males for employment they are opening themselves up to legal liability. I cannot imagine some of their statements wouldn't serve to hurt them in a trial.
I searched for that tweet [1] and I think the context makes it different. He doesn't talk about management directly, but about healthcare as a remedy to avoid people getting fired and then losing health, housing or similar things.
The article put that tweet in a context where it could be interpreted as "white males in Github are bad, let's fire them" and I think he says something completely different.
It's... quite heartening, to see HN call out the blatantly anti-equality messaging highlighted in this article, and to not have it buried at the bottom of the page.
Lots of unsourced speculation as to what's going on behind the scenes, but I wonder if a few years from now, we'll all look back at the day they decided to throw out meritocracy (symbolically, as the rug, and realistically, as the reorganization) as the beginning of the end...
Aside: I'm getting rather tired of being downvoted and nobody bothering to at least explain why.
That's the core truth people don't seem to want to directly address. Most criticism of meritocracy approaches it from the angle that it is meant to give everyone an equal shot and has failed, when the real goal is to sift away those who can't contribute, at which it works marvelously (which isn't to say everyone who deserves a given shot gets one).
What some people seem to want instead is some sort of egalitocracy, but I have no idea how to make such a beast productive or useful, particularly for tech work, which has a fairly high intellectual bar.
It's becoming the norm in some communities. For example, Mozilla/Rust has a lot of people like that, and one of the core team members has contributed to #hnwatch Twitter tag linked below.
People from that circle were proposing the idea of creating 'black lists' to make people unemployable for political reasons; they managed to get Brendan Eich expelled from Mozilla; they're pushing for "Codes of conducts", which again aim at expelling people from open source communities for political reasons - eg things they said in completely unrelated places, like their own Twitter feeds (see "Opalgate").
Also see PronounGate, DongleGate, past scandals at Github (meritocracy rug, Julie-Ann Horvath departure), discussions/scandals around CoC/"Contributor Covenant", etc etc etc.
One thing they frequently claim, is that they are NOT censoring anything, people are free to do whatever they want.
Yet they keep pushing for this behaviour (black listing people that disagree with feminism, nagging companies until they decide to not launch products in some markets because fear of feminist backlash, and so on).
I honestly don't see how they don't notice how illogical their position are.
>> I honestly don't see how they don't notice how illogical their position are.
I have a friend on Twitter who's a raging feminist. I asked her if she was concerned about Carly Fiorina being excluded from the GOP debate since she was the only woman and actually had more votes in the Iowa caucus than two other male candidates who they kept in the debate.
Her response was that she never cared about any GOP candidate. It just makes no sense to me. If you're for women's rights, then it shouldn't matter what race, religion or political party someone is, in order to support them - they're women, and should be supported regardless.
Exactly it, but your friend is just a typical hypocrite. She says she is for women's rights, but is really just for any woman who has the same worldview as her and f the rest.
> If you're for women's rights, then it shouldn't matter what race, religion or political party someone is, in order to support them - they're women, and should be supported regardless.
WTH are you talking about? If you're for women's rights you support people who are also for women's rights, regardless of race, religion or gender they are.
I don't know who Carly Fiorina is, but I know Margaret Thatcher, and she did nothing for women. By your logic though, just because she was a woman, feminists should have supported her over men in the opposing (socialist) party that supported women's rights?
if we think some pattern should be called "censorship", then it is called that. if your interlocutor refuses to move beyond "argument about definition of words" and you still want to communicate, you then have to taboo the word, which slows your thinking+communication down a bit, but so be it.
The people who would point it out are basically in fatigue mode from talking about it so much. How he was not escorted out of the building after that tweet is beyond me. Seeing the slide is just as bad.
No hatred ever got fixed by pouring more hatred into the cauldron. Sure, you can be the conquerer, but you just created more people gunning for you. If you are not about equality and love of all, then you are just another part of the problem. It is very much like the H1-B threads. Its important to see the system is broken and not the H1-B applicants doing the best they can in the system.
I sit here on a reservation and see the problems. A university adding requirements in a job search that weren't there before for one. I've lived through a bit of it, and people like him won't solve anything. All they will do is cost the company money in lawsuits.
Want to fix diversity? Fix the diversity and STEM education in pre-K and K-6. We learn to dream then. Let's think about everyone having a chance to dream of STEM.
It rather seems that the entire thread is now about this totally minor and uninteresting point, all the while ignoring the GitHub-the-company-is-broken argument. The inability to understand priorities is not surprising but talent isn't leaving GH because of reverse racism: it's the horrible leadership and the dismantling of one of the most innovative workplace cultures that suck.
Wasn't it pretty obvious github was broken when the hovarth episode happened?
They are in a special cognitive dissonance zone, they are wildly successful and that cures a lot of problems. They have time and money to worry about issues that aren't the products, and be vocal about it. Now the community seems to be mostly pacified, they like git and github has the mindshare, but they are coasting. Or so it seems, maybe the enterprise version I've never used has some badass features.
Another quote is "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'". This is absurd and disgusting.
I haven't lived in the US for a while, but lately, I keep hearing all these expressions of straight up racial hatred of white people, all the way up to taking pleasure in white people "dying off" and so on. This kind of thing can't end well and needs to be stopped.
As a white middle-aged male, Tumblr is the only place I've experienced what it is like to be on the receiving end of racism. It's quite fascinating to see just how vile some of it gets. Of course it is only fascinating to me because I can trivially withdraw from it and not be particularly affected.
It's not always fun and games: I'm Assyrian (a middle eastern, ethnically Christian ethnicity). When the first news reports of ISIS ethnically cleansing Assyrians in areas under their control came out, prominent members of social justice tumblr started joking about it being 'karma' because white-passing Christian-ish people were on the receiving end of genocide.
My point about Tumblr is that it's a huge site containing a lot of blogs. Seems like half (or over half) is porn. Most of the other half seems dedicated to rabid fanbases of various bits of pop culture. There's some politics like everywhere else on the net, but I have no idea why so many people here, including my downvoters, think it's this despicable bastion of frothy far leftism when that's only a small part of it. Hell, there's a dedicated base of white power blogging on Tumblr but no one ever mentions that.
It's like saying Reddit is nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types, or HN is nothing more than clueless Valley types. Or that Twitter is nothing but people sending each other 140 character descriptions of lunch. I really hate lazy stereotypes of complex interactions, especially on a place like HN where people should be "native" enough to digital culture to know better.
It's the social "flows" of the sites that differentiate them. On Reddit, you subscribe to a number of communities, and then you only see content that a bunch of people agree fits those communities' standards. On Tumblr, you subscribe to a bunch of individuals' blogs, where those bloggers all have 1. a very simple/encouraged inbuilt mechanism for sharing things they see from their own subscriptions onto their own blog, and 2. a culture of "signal-boosting"—a term loosely meaning "passing along chain letters", or more generally, sharing something they wouldn't have posted for its own sake, with an audience that didn't sign up for such content, because "it's important that this spread until it reaches the people who are affected by it." As if it were a local weather emergency or an amber alert or something.
The combined result is that, on Tumblr, you'll subscribe to people for one thing, and then inevitably they'll "signal-boost" other things into your feed that you didn't sign up for. The most often "signal-boosted" thing is Social Justice discourse. This is why people get the impression Tumblr is a Social Justice website: if you subscribe to blogs about porn, cats, and tech, you'll end up with a dashboard containing porn, cats, tech, and "signal-boosted" Social Justice.
Personally, my problem isn't with Social Justice, but with "signal-boosting" itself. I (very carefully) use Tumblr, and enjoy doing so, but only by strictly following a policy of unsubscribing from any blog that "signal-boosts" anything. I think this means that I end up following only blogs that are completely disconnected from Tumblr's social graph, though, so I don't know how precisely I can be said to be "using Tumblr" at this point, rather than just being subscribed to some blogs that happen to be hosted there.
> I have no idea why so many people here, including my downvoters, think it's this despicable bastion of frothy far leftism when that's only a small part of it.
I have no idea how you know what your downvoters think about Tumblr.
> It's like saying Reddit is nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types [...] I really hate lazy stereotypes
Who is the "they" in your post then, below, if not a generalised "Reddit" of nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types?
"Reddit is leaking. Tumblr: the scapegoat for everything they don't like."
>I have no idea how you know what your downvoters think about Tumblr.
Because Tumblr is brought up here and on Reddit frequently as this hellhole of idiotic far leftist thought. All I can think is: "have you actually looked at Tumblr beyond following some link at /r/tumblrinaction?" because there's so, so much more than that.
>Reddit is leaking...
Well, one thing you can count on from Reddit (or at least the vocal people in the defaults and conservative subs) is a fear and loathing of Tumblr, as well as considering SRS to be the root of all evil. Any time someone wants to panic about the threat of "SJWs", Tumblr is not far behind in the fear factor.
Hence, "reddit is leaking.." which was a joking way of referring to "tumblr is leaking".
But I still defend Reddit to my friends who are dismissive of it. Reddit contains a lot more than the awful stuff it's well known for. The defaults might be a hive of scum and villainy but there's a ton of great stuff in the smaller subs.
It's both or neither depending on how you want to look at it. The problem isn't any website or subculture, the problem is the entire overarching culture being created by digital natives that are coming into their own.
Internet induced sociopathy has infected an entire generation. No conversation is ever a conservation, everything is a performance for the benefit of third parties. Even face to face every conversion is haunted by what will this sound like when it is posted online. No one deserves the benefit of the doubt because they aren't real people, just words on a screen.
It's the so-called SJWs and the alt-right. It's GG and anti-GG. It's facebook and tumblr and twitter and reddit and lord knows 4chan.
It's sick, it's no ones fault, it's probably unfixable and that's heartbreaking.
Just to confirm this, I read a lot of time about black/asian people attacking those of the same ethnicity who don't agree on "white patriarchy" as being "just white inside!".
I even read of people claiming they are trans-black because they inside them feel black (and I am quoting literally) and so other people must see them that way.
You find this on tumblr, on pseudo-feminism propaganda sites, etc... a lot of this is collected in the subreddit reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction
> I even read of people claiming they are trans-black because they inside them feel black (and I am quoting literally) and so other people must see them that way.
Ideological intolerance is part of it, but it's clearly not the only part, given that the very first point in her slide is "this is not work for white folks to lead", i.e. she doesn't want white allies. I don't see how much more explicit this lady can make the fact that she hates white people as such.
As for German or Russian philosophers - that seems far fetched. This is an American phenomenon, and in its explicit and mainstream form, it is a fairly recent one.
It's a department at a company. You're not allowed to say that 'people of ethnicity X will never be given a leadership position'. That's blatant racism.
Do white-passing gay people not get to have a say in diversity issues?
I really don't like this trend of painting everyone with white-ish skin as a homogenous oppressor class. It's pretty clear to me that a diversity department that explicitly bans white people from leadership positions will not represent my interests if I am discriminated against.
Yep. This has solidified my opinion. I'm moving all my code off Github.
Sorry, as a white male, I don't have to take this kind of blatant racism, abuse, and shaming when it comes to hosting my code. BitBucket does a good job without the uppity diversity attitude.
I freely agree that there is a lack of diversity in tech, and that we have to bear some of tbe blame ourselves, but this sort of approach is not helping.
>and that we have to bear some of tbe blame ourselves
I assume you're speaking for yourself. I will bear none of that with you. Never have I participated in any way to hold down anyone because of their race, gender, or otherwise.
When the blameless volunteer to take blame we have serious social problems. Better find the actual cause and fix it.
> Its once famous remote-employee culture has been rolled back. Senior managers are no longer allowed to live afar and must report to the office. This was one reason why some senior execs departed or were asked to leave, one person close to the company told us.
> There was a remote culture and very little hierarchical structure which worked wonderfully when they were 30 and 50 people, but at 500, it doesn't work.
> an endless argument over who can and can't be racist
It blows my mind that some people really believe that only white people can be racist. It's like they completely redefined the meaning of the word "racist".
> It blows my mind that some people really believe that only white people can be racist. It's like they completely redefined the meaning of the word "racist".
That's the point. Redefine words so that it's impossible for someone who doesn't share their point of view to have any moral high ground.
Redefining common words makes your ideology impossible to discuss with outsiders.
That makes your followers who have adopted the new definitions fairly immune to persuasion. Some cults work like this. I've never seen it done by anyone with a defendable agenda.
Yes, they did completely redefine the term. And they hold that their definition is the only 'correct' definition; all other definitions were a mistake and it is racist to use them.
"white" people's power is not that they are given money, a job, or great health. their power is that they are the ones given those opportunities. Being white doesn't remove you from being poor, jobless, or in poor health, you just have a lot more options to get out of it.
Being poor and white is a lot better than being poor and black or poor and <not white> because you're not fighting additional problems that come with being a minority.
> If you're white, male and poor enough to qualify for a free meal at school then you face the toughest challenge when starting out in life.
> That's what the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said in "the most comprehensive review ever carried out on progress towards greater equality in Britain".
Frankly the debate should really be "How do we give everyone the best start in life" rather than "how do we cripple some groups so everyone gets an equal start in life".
What you're citing is how well academically poor kids did in school. That is not because of discrimination or racism, that is merely what occurred. I think a further study about how well each group does in terms of say, getting a job or getting to university would be more valuable.
Poor students have an immensely huge problem already (being poor), the problem is how do they climb out of poverty? There is no easy path but being "white" is easier in that (for ex.) looking for a job, there won't be people who discriminate against you because you're black, asian or latino. The same minority applying to the same job now also has to deal with any preconceived discriminatory outlooks of the hiring manager. that is the _out_ that white people get.
I agree that we should, "we give everyone the best start in life", but you act as though whites don't already get that or are being penalized now by your, "how do we cripple some groups so everyone gets an equal start in life" statement. White people have always been unequal from other minorities in that they've always had an advantage. Your view of "crippling" is everyone else's view of a level playing field.
Do you have an arrest record? If not: there's the magic power. Statistically speaking, a poor young black male is much more likely to have an arrest record than a poor young white male.
Edit: holy batman the downvotes. I never considered the possibility that maybe #hnwatch is right.
You are comparing an individual to a group which is a mismatch.
It would be absurd to tell someone to recognize their privilege that the odds were in their favor but nonetheless they rolled poorly. It's like telling some white guy on death row to feel privileged he had a lower chance of being there.
Being a white male is being allowed at a table in a casino where the expected value of the game is positive, and much higher than any other table. You can still lose, but the players in general don't. You should be thankful for being allowed to play a game with the highest expected value.
If you lose all your chips at the "black table" and I lose mine at the "white table", as we cry over our beers it would be ridiculous for you to assert that I should feel privileged compared to you when our outcomes have turned out to be identical.
If we look around the bar, and see that the vast majority of people crying over the beers are black, would it be a reasonable thing for me to assert that the white folk that are here (you included) must've gotten extra unlucky?
I think that's a reasonable thing to assert. That's what privilege is: the number of times you can fuck up (self-inflicted bad things) or be unlucky (externally inflicted bad things) before you lose all your chips.
That's the nice things about probability and statistics. They allow us to compare an individual to a group.
As a fellow loser at the bar, how is the knowledge that I am extra unlucky supposed to make me feel towards you? Am I supposed to consider myself fortunate that I had a greater chance at winning even as we both sit there with no chips? Am I supposed to buy you a beer because you had less of a chance?
"How is this supposed to make you feel?" - I have no idea, and I certainly don't think that in your sorry state you owe a beer to anyone. However, I do think you should say to your fellow losers "I am sorry that you guys are forced play a harder game, and I promise to remember that if I ever manage to leave the losers' bar."
Now we get down to it- It's really a call to action. We are both losers, but you want the guys at the winners' tables to buy you a beer first, because you had a harder time, and disregard the fact that you and I are both equally losers.
Of course feelings are important- The feeling you wish to elicit is guilt, not simply acknowledgement.
The call to action is the acknowledgment, not the beer or the guilt.
Getting white males, whether successful or not, to even say "yes, the system discriminates for us, regardless of outcomes" is such a huge barrier that their acknowledgment of the issue is the first thing that must happen before any kind of "fixing of the system" could happen.
Acknowledgement is useless and not actionable. The end goal of people who bring up privilege is to engender a sense of guilt over undeserved advantages, which then leads to resources flowing out of the guilty group.
So at our losers' table, you would ask the white winners to help you out over me, and over the other white guys at the losers' table, because we, the white losers, must have fucked up more to get here. The underprivileged losers are entitled to disproportionate aid from the winners.
Let's assume that this whole discussion really is about resource redistribution. I don't actually think so, but we can take that as a hypothetical.
A winner comes over to the losers bar, and you want him to give every loser, white or black, the same number of chips.
The problem is that after you all get your re-up, you get to go play at the white table again, and they go back to play at the black table again, which means that you have a way greater chance to not come back to the losers' bar.
Ideally, you'd make both games have the same probability distributions, and that might happen eventually, but until then, the underprivileged losers should get more resources to have similar outcomes.
What is the conversation about if not resource redistribution? Simple acknowledgment gets you what, exactly? Nothing.. There's obviously some desired action. That action is what, if not some kind of favoritism or balancing of scales?
In this simplistic example, it comes down to one party using guilt tactics to convince the other party to provide an advantage or a leg up, which necessitates working against their own interests. Guilt tactics are required because it's a social engineering goal; the total number of people at the losers' bar remains the same.
If you thought that simple acknowledgement has no subsequent results, you wouldn't have any issues with it. What it seems you are afraid of is that acknowledging that the games are rigged puts you on a slippery slope that will eventually lead you to gladly and voluntarily showing up at the losers' bar offering parts of your unfairly-won gains.
It sounds like you are agreeing with me and not realizing it- We seem to agree that the ultimate goal of conversations about privilege is to guilt the privileged group members into supporting members of underprivileged groups, ignoring the actual personal circumstances of the individuals.
No, I realize exactly what I am saying, and I am not agreeing with you.
What I am saying is: "Regardless of personal outcomes, whites and blacks are playing a game with a different probability distribution. That's a statistical fact. I want you to either acknowledge that it's a fact, or provide evidence that it is not. If you do agree that it's a fact, I want you to say 'I'm sorry you guys are playing a statistically rigged game', however, I don't want you to feel guilty and give up your shit."
Saying 'I am sorry' is not the same as feeling guilty. If you really object to the words 'I'm sorry' and can't fathom saying them and not feeling guilty, try saying 'it sucks that you guys are playing a statistically rigged game'. If the words "I promise to remember that if I ever manage to leave the losers' bar" seem to imply to you that it's a promise to later feel guilty and give up some of your shit when you have some, it isn't. Certainly you can remember what it is like to be a loser while being a winner, and then do nothing to help current losers.
What you seem to be saying is: "Regardless of whether 'the black game is disadvantageous to the white game' is a fact or not, the reason anyone tells me that is because they want to elicit guilt and then proceed with resource redistribution, rebalancing and social engineering", and I think that's wrong.
Just like it is incorrect to say that there is a white/asian/indian-male-libertarian-programmer-hivemind on Hacker News, it is incorrect to state that everyone that makes the observation that I am making is there to elicit guilt and proceed with resource redistribution.
There is a philosophical maxim that states "you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'." Interpret your opponents with sufficient charitability to believe that they are obeying this maxim, especially when they say "I am obeying that maxim."
I understood that, what I'm trying to state with my rhetorical question was that all his statement served to say was "Germany created the Nazis, you should feel guilt for that". And even if you think that people deserve some sort of retribution or culpability for the supposed actions of the ancestors (which I personally don't), Germany paid for it already considering the post war fallout and the Russian occupation of Eastern Germany.
> I understood that, what I'm trying to state with my rhetorical question was that all his statement served to say was "Germany created the Nazis, you should feel guilt for that".
I think he simply couldn't back up his own argument with any logic, so resorted to a tired cheap shot about Nazis in frustration.
Actually, I have plenty of logic to back up my argument in a sister thread with ElComradio, and I just apologized to the German kid. FWIW, only ElComradio was engaging with me in an actual discussion there, and his replies are reasonable, but I am thoroughly downvoted anyway, so how's that for evidence of a hivemind?
It's a pity your apology makes it seem like you simply referred to the Nazis without knowing he was German, when you actually specifically blamed him and every other (white) German ("you guys") for what the Nazis did, because he said he was in Germany.
> FWIW, only ElComradio was engaging with me in an actual discussion there, and his replies are reasonable, but I am thoroughly downvoted anyway, so how's that for evidence of a hivemind?
Out of five posts in that discussion, you have one post that is white. I wouldn't call that "thoroughly downvoted".
And what if he does have an arrest record? Got any other stats instead to conclusively demonstrate his undeniable white magic? Where does a black person with no arrest record fit on your magic powers scale?
Oh, never mind, I forgot for a second you're addressing something/someone specific with generalisations that are meaningless to him and have nothing to do with his life or status.
Your argument is piss poor; that's why you were downvoted (not by me). Congrats on your successful upvote fishing, by implying/imagining some kind of HN conspiracy/agenda/hive mind.
This comment breaks the HN guidelines, as do several other of the comments you've posted, including in this thread. We ban accounts that do this, and it's the last thing this angry thread needs more of. Kindly reread the HN guidelines and follow them when posting here:
The poster I replied to was whining about being downvoted in order to score upvotes ("Please resist commenting about being downvoted."), when in fact their argument was just a bad one. In another post he made a stupid and offensive reference to the Nazis because someone said they were from Germany. So either he was trolling or he's an idiot.
I'm not sure if pointing that out was what violated the guidelines or just the way I did it, but in future, assuming this has not been banned, I'll try to keep my opinion of someone's argument or intellect to myself. Thanks for the heads up.
Yes, the comment about downvoting broke the rules, and yes the comment about Germany would have merited chiding if the author hadn't deleted it. But the HN guidelines apply to you, as to all of us, whether the other person breaks the rules or not.
Your entire comment upthread was uncivil. If you're sincere about abiding by the guidelines (as I hope you are), it would be an instructive exercise to rewrite it in a neutral, respectful way, editing out the nose-tweaking and every trace of snark. Do that on three or four occasions and you'll see how much better your contributions get, regardless of what you're arguing for. I know that sounds patronizing, but I don't mean it that way—it's a process that many of us, including me, have gone through, and it helps.
Thanks. I don't know if you mean edit posts I've made (which AFAICS is not possible) or future posts, before posting, but I agree, polite, respectful posts mean better signal to noise, and I'll try not to slip into bad habits.
I hope it's still possible to disagree, argue or take a negative position towards someone's post or argument without it necessarily being taken as personal or uncivil though.
By "posts I've made (which AFAICS is not possible)" I meant the messages further up the thread, where the edit link had long since expired, but I wasn't 100% sure if there was another way to do it.
> Do you have an arrest record? If not: there's the magic power. Statistically speaking, a poor young black male is much more likely to have an arrest record than a poor young white male.
> Edit: holy batman the downvotes. I never considered the possibility that maybe #hnwatch is right.
Its unfortunate that you are being downvoted without comment. The downvotes may or may not be evidence that #hnwatch is correct, it would depend on the motivation. It would not be rational for us to assume that the downvotes are evidence that #hnwatch is correct, in the absence of any explanation for the downvotes.
The mistake of sociological studies labeling a concept called white privilege was when people started using it to villify others for the negative space of discrimination they didn't receive.
IDK why, but people tend to not like being blamed for things they didn't do.
If that's not the mesaage we're supposed to take out of the concept, them somebody has got a lot of work to do to figure out a better way of communicating it. Someone who is not me, because I'm a programmer, just trying to take care of my own family, not a sociologist.
I don't see how your comment relates to mine. My point was that the simple fact of the existence of downvotes alone are a wholly insufficient basis for reaching a conclusion about #hnwatch.
Its too common for people to be so certain of their own viewpoint that they will simply assume the worst (ie racism and sexism) of anyone who disagrees with them, rather than consider that their critics might have damn good (non-racist, non-sexist) reasons for disagreeing with them.
No one talking about white privilege says it means white people can't ever have a tough life. Just as being black doesn't mean you can't ever be successful.
It's simply argued that if all other things were equal, chances are you'd have it harder as a minority.
> No one talking about white privilege says it means white people can't ever have a tough life.
False. Many people who speak frequently about white privilege actually do sometimes make the argument that white people's lives are so intrinsically easier than POCs, that we need not ever worry about harming any white people.
This mentality is most visible when a gang of righteous ideologues are waging a vicious doxxing or "harass their employer until they fire them" campaign against an accused white person.
"Racism" is a system where a racial group with a monopoly on power in society arranges the rules of that society to continue priveleging their own racial group. "Bigotry" is when you dislike someone because of their race. And the comments that everyone on HN are getting all in their feelings about are neither bigoted nor racist; they are basic, uncontroversial observations from people who have been doing anti-racist and anti-sexist work since before most members of HN's audience had heard either of those terms.
That's not the standard definition of racism. You're repeating a variation of "racism = prejudice + power", a component of the social justice meme I've been seeing everywhere.
To me it seems like rhetorical sleight of hand, redefining "racism" to depend on a mysterious "power" component which is never adequately demonstrated or explained, or only explained in terms which are themselves actually racist, e.g., "whites have power because most politicians are white".
So I should place "critical race theory" squarely in the camp of theories that do not have the elements of a scientific theories. Redefining words with a commonly accepted usage to further an agenda is academically dishonest, IMHO.
In other words, "Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." - Philip K Dick.
She certainly doesn't say "only white" and she explicitly excludes white women ("some of the biggest barriers to progress"). You can make convoluted excuses for her, but it's obvious that she sees white people (of whatever gender or socioeconomic status) as essentially enemies, and doesn't want them as allies (let alone is willing to accept some of them as people with different, but valid opinions). It's not acceptable to write "we're not looking for Indian folks to lead this", and it shouldn't be if it's "white".
Also, it's definitely not just her, expressions like this have popped up in a number of mainstream places. I am definitely not imagining the various celebrations of white people "dying off", their share in the population dropping, and what have you.
I'm happy to be wrong about this but here's why I snipped the thread where I did: (1) "some of the biggest barriers to progress" does not at all "explicitly exclude"; (2) it's not at all "obvious" that she "sees white people as enemies and doesn't want them as allies"—that's projection, filling in a lot of blanks based on assumptions; (3) the bit about "white people dying off" is hauling in a big barrel of off-topic petrol from elsewhere, the last thing we need in a flamewar.
If the comment had shown any care for sticking to the evidence and/or hadn't charged into flameland, I'd agree with you.
We all need to at least try to stick to evidence regardless of ideological position. When we don't, and/or when we pour fuel on the flames, we're partly responsible for what results (in this case a bizarre turn into personal attack).
I think all your points are correct but they'd be better suited as a reply, rather than as mod action.
I don't see a personal attack anywhere and, in fact, user themselves mentions below they avoided mentioning anyone by name because this is about more than this one particular person.
Won't be fighting this, though - if you think it's better this way, so be it.
There is a subtle irony in your comment. I think it is interesting to tease out because much of the arguments on diversity come from one's own perspective.
So, if you'll indulge me, your argument is essentially 'us vs them' is a bad thing. About right? If so, I agree. We're not going to solve an exclusionary tech culture by excluding people or creating two sides to a debating war.
But what strikes me is that your comment didn't even reference Nicole Sanchez by name once. Your comment was "she" and "her" time and time again. Did you even notice yourself do it? I somehow doubt it was intentional. But I'm an optimist.
I'm happy to indulge, although HN is not the most convenient forum for long discussions.
The reason that I didn't, and don't, want to make this about Nicole Sanchez is that, unfortunately, I don't think that she is unique in holding these views, or acting on them within a mainstream company. In fact, the original comment in this thread quotes an even more explicit statement by someone else in Github (about how you can't "teach empathy to white male middle managers). There is also the matter of the "open code of conduct", subscribed to by Github among others (apparently not so open, since they refused to change it) which up and says that "we will not act on complaints of reverse racism", which rather clearly means racism against white people.
So yes, avoiding mentioning Nicole Sanchez was intentional in the sense that I am not interested in arguing ad hominem. Her name and person don't hold any particular significance for the discussion or for me personally, and I hope that you are mature enough not to retort "well, that's because she is not a white male". I am absolutely certain down to the inner core of my soul that I wouldn't care to weave her name into my comments if it was "Dwight Higginbotham".
Who cares if he didn't mention her by name? I refer to my own mother using pronouns sometimes - it's a feature of the English language. What about using pronouns in place of a proper name is problematic to you?
We're certainly growing, and I'll do everything I can to keep and increase the openness. We just made our strategy public https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/
I used bitbucket for a long time because it did the job and it provided private repos. But after I had to start looking for another job, many employers wanted to see my github profile.
I don't understand that as a criteria to be hired. I could see it as something to help show off, but shouldn't you as an employee be focusing on your company's codebase and not OSS products (unless there is some bug in the product you could fix that impacted your company)?
Maybe it's since I've always worked for companies with > 500 employees, but there is always a pile of work on the products I've worked on that there was little time to contribute externally.
Yes but many employers want to look at how many stars and forks your repo got on github. It's a nice metric to filter repos from candidates, it is not enough for sure but usually repos with tons of stars are considered a good signal and it allows employers to save time before they start looking at your code. Bitbucket doesn't have enough users to offer these kinds of interesting metrics unfortunately.
Wow, I've never seen that. I mean, people often like to see some kind of evidence of something you've worked on, and looking at someone's Github profile is an easy way to do that. But I've never heard of stars and forks being used as a crude filtering mechanism.
There are so many factors that go into whether or not a repo becomes popular, which aren't necessarily related to anything that reflects on the creator's merits as an engineering hire. I think you'd skew your candidate pool in a weird way if you leaned on these metrics too heavily. Honestly, I'd be curious to hear more about how it's used in hiring.
I'm not sure about your sampling of "many". I can count the number of interviews where my code was actually looked at on one hand; no doubt this is different for unicorn-type companies.
At any rate, enter the law of triviality. Making something simple that lots of people will understand is more likely to lead to more stars than something brilliant but complex, yet more indicative of development skill. This selects for gaming of the system and/or salesmanship; no doubt said employers will screech about a lack of "qualified" candidates before long.
Doesn't entirely solve the problem. But you could use multiple remotes. Still gives github power in terms of forks and stars, but your commits can be in many places. (and you can decide to do issues where you want)
While I fully agree, there's somewhat of a chicken-n-egg problem here though, because part of the profile shows contributions to other projects/repos, and that's more of a github thing, partly because their profile is designed differently to focus on that, and partly because there are just many more popular repos on github to begin with, so to contribute to those, an Atlasssian bitbucket profile doesn't help much, IF the primary intent is to 'show off' activity. Personally, I couldn't care less, I very much like the fact that Bitbucket offers free private repos, and I also prefer the tooling and cleaner UI of Bitbucket over github's.
I know others have waxed on the irony of the centralized role GitHub plays in a supposedly decentralized world of the DVCS that is git.
It would be cool if there were a Behance or even a Dribbble for programmers: a way for us to present our creations well but also easily in a host agnostic and semi or fully automated way.
Many of us or don't invest the effort necessary to maintain a work portfolio, unlike say design oriented fields where it's the norm. I think there could be something to it.
I think the clue was in "Truly Open", github isn't open source and is fairly expensive for small teams with private repo's (compared to bitbucket for example).
It's network effects are large but beyond that the product doesn't really do anything that others don't do just as well.
I am not the GP. To me, supporting GitHub is like supporting Jetbrains. I know they're good people. I know they're trying to do good things. However, I will always have a nagging feeling that wishes that the universe was somehow different and that their business model made it possible for them to freely and openly offer all their software.
I guess I can include things like Aerospike and even Gitlab in that group. I don't actively wish for them to succeed either. I am glad they exist and I actively use their products but I would not cheer for any of them.
Why do you put GitLab in that category? We're trying hard to freely and openly offer as much as we can. We do have an open core business model with a proprietary GitLab EE. But I wonder what you think we have to change.
Most larger companies will not use a third party cloud service to host their code like github.com. They want software to run locally on their own servers instead.
Github offers their software to enterprise customers to run on their own servers, but they traditionally have done a bad job doing it, at least relative to gitlab. Today, dozens of open projects and even closed ones are using personal gitlab instances, but since the ecosystem is more open on gitlab contributions come back in to make it a much more friendly tool to self-host.
Tons of larger companies favor gitlab for exactly that reason.
Feminism wasn't always as intersectional as it is now. For a long time it was dominated by white women who wanted more equality ignoring and sometimes even opposing equality for people and women of color. Suffragettes are a very good example of this problem.
There are a few people now that feel a similar thing is happening in the tech industry right now as well. In that diversity is promoted only in so far as it helps white women but not any other underrepresented groups.
Yeah, whereas now it's dominated by white women who get book deals off the back of their supposed anti-racist credentials, whereas the black activists who they got their arguments from (and watered them down, naturally) languish unmentioned in obscurity. There's a a lot of complicated history and anger behind the distrust of white feminist activists, most of which I don't think ever reached the mainstream media in any meaningful form, going right up to probably the present day even.
To further extend from the suffrage movement, it is important to note that minorities (men & women) didn't legally have the right to vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
So Sanchez has a point in claiming that historical precedence has shown that "discrimination" was thought to have ended after the suffrage movement when it wasn't until many years later that minorities were legally secured the right to vote. Hence the hierarchy is that white women are the "next-in-line" when it comes to diversity before any other type of minority group.
She might've been racist as fuck, but I seriously do not get how she could be declared as "one of the biggest barriers to progress". She wasn't even allowed to vote, god damnit.
It's completely incoherent. If the power is overwhelmingly in the hands of straight white man, than straight white women very unlikely to become not some of the biggest "barriers to progress."
White women make progress towards equality faster than any other group that's being discriminated.
The argument is that instead of focusing on the core issue that discrimination is inherently bad and needs to be fought against, white women put the focus specifically on them. This means other groups are ignored until white women have achieved their goals until a new conversation can be started.
I'm not sure whether other groups would have made progress sooner without this problem but it's a possiblity and that would make white women significant barrier.
I admit it's hard to go from that further to biggest barrier but I don't think one should discard that notion too easily. "Moderates" pushing for some bad compromise is the worse is better of politics. MLK famously considered white moderates to be a bigger issue than racist groups at one point.
That seems to be humanity in a nutshell - fuck you, got mine.
Most of us are not altruistic enough to put other people ahead of us and ours. Self > family > clan > tribe > race > everybody else. However you choose to segment your identity up and what characteristics you base it upon, that's generally the hierarchy of fucks you give about other people.
It's a hard problem we've been working on for at least a couple thousand years. When we find the universal solution, the philosophers can pack it in.
Meanwhile, I've got to live as best I can in the world as it exists, rather than as I might ideally like it. There's a lot of smaller, more manageable windmills out there.
> A person familiar with the matter told us this talk was not
> done by Sanchez at GitHub, but was part of a seminar geared
> specifically for people of color.
>
> We were told that it was based on research published in the
> Racism Review as part of its "Trouble with White Women"
> series in 2014.
>
> In particular, one article delves into data that suggests
> that white women have "disproportionately" benefited from
> affirmative-action policies. It then suggests that instead
> of being advocates for affirmative action, white women
> "have been at the forefront of lawsuits brought to
> challenge affirmative action."
Practical object oriented design in Ruby by Sandi Metz is hugely popular, and not just inside the Ruby community, and rightly so, it's one of if not the greatest texts on programming I've read.
I'm having a guess that companies decide they want to be 'diverse' and not all white guys and the easiest way to hit the number target is to hire some women. The quota approach seems a bit flawed - they should be mostly colour and sex blind, perhaps dropping the bar a little bit for disadvantaged groups.
Another funny thing is after going on about hiring more dark skinned people a lot of companies are hiring Indians just because they are good at the job (eg Nadella) so they're having to say no not that sort of coloured person, the other lot.
Just wow. I'm thinking about pulling my personal Jekyll site hosted off GitHub pages and host somewhere else. Not sure about the alternatives though, with custom domain support. Ah well, a nice weekend task.
One option is to host the repo on Bitbucket and use the Aerobatic (https://www.aerobatic.com) static hosting add-on. Free custom domain and more, included.
disclaimer - I'm one of the founders of Aerobatic.
Thanks, I already stumbled upon Aerobatic and it's in Todo list for trying it out :] One thing though, is it possible to use a naked domain ? Although I could use CloudFlare which supports ALIAS records.
That appears to be free repositories when you sign up for the $24/month personal plan, according to their Pricing page. That is a barrier to many people.
Edit: Hmm, there is also a page that talks about free repositories, but it requires an account. https://www.assembla.com/git/ In any event, they are confusing me.
You might be upset by some quotes here. It's important to not to let that take over you. You end up becoming exactly like the things that bother you. Don't get bothered over the people in the article expressing their opinions. It's the only way to live. Trust me, it takes over.
".. that is life. I cannot change them overnight. I think society, their own experiences, their own reading, their own observations, will bring about the change despite their innate biases."
We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a successful build saying we did.
We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun.
We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the runtime of an algorithm to draw out a single extra millisecond of runtime per element.
Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same design patterns over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such programmer nirvana that they can literally write these programs blindfolded.
Do these people have any idea how many keyboards have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and VMs destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our repository? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? programmers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the service our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a prewritten script. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
Programmers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another bug report.
(If you actually read through all of this and found yourself agreeing, it's a modified copypasta from a toxic subreddit and I hope you feel silly: https://redd.it/3o82sn)
The points you made about programmers aren't invalid, but are taken to an absurd level and also imply the existence of the "other side." I mean, you could have written a feelgood snippet about programming, but I guess a meme is okay too.
I guess you missed the bit where Github is both promoting university campus diversity and looking to engage in enterprise sales.
The two things are so far from compatible it boggles the mind. How can they keep a straight face? I have no idea.
Business ultimately is about making money, politics is brought in to it as late stage PR.
Founders of their own company being ousted is nothing short of combative. Are you 'allowed' to work for Github if you support Donald Trump? It's OK to have ideas and opinions as long as they're the 'right' ideas.
This whole diversity crap is so hypocritical it makes me sick, and I can't call it how I see it, and that is a power play, without being chided like I'm a bloody kid?
For some reason, you told me to "call [you] a dipshit on hackernews you big pussy see how that goes" [1], but not before telling me to "go fuck [my] mom" [2].
Here I am. None of us understands what you're trying to accomplish here, but unironically using the term "SJW" would have been a giant, neon dipshit detector even before reading the rest of your posts. Thanks for self-identifying.
The peasants were actually, legitimately being oppressed. Someone rose up to fight a good fight and ended up saying (as a well known someone in these circles frequently says) the non oppressed group should be killed. Yep: it's pretty Stalinist.
What a total non sequitur. You haven't showed that rotw is saying "meritocracy is discrimination." You've merely insinuated that by saying this total cliche.
> Everybody knows Hispanics are too lazy to achieve anything great.
We've banned this account for obvious reasons.
There are strong feelings all around, so we try to assume good faith, but no one gets to use HN as a dumping ground for the ugly bits of their id.
All: if there are more comments like this and we've missed them, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We can't come close to reading all the comments.
Did you read my own response to this? The feelings should be strong about this! This is exactly what is happening right now inside Github. It is inexcusable.
Assuming that everything you said is true doesn't change the outcome here. You can't post outright slurs to HN, whether others are doing inexcusable things or not. There's no substantive view that demands being expressed that way.
If you don't want your account to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to unban accounts when people give us reason to believe that they'll follow the rules in the future.
As a maintainer of a popular and actively developed open source project, I would totally use the app to respond to issues and pull requests if it were usable. Unfortunately, the app is a dumpster fire, so I just use github.com.
If you do use android for development, you wouldn't need a github app to push your code to github. You would need a git app, and several great ones exist.
I'm sure folks will disagree, but I really enjoy Visual Studio Online. Free private repositories and tools (agile board, etc).
Unfortunately, GitHub is where people expect open source projects to be, so it's almost an inconvenience for contributors to be on anything other than GitHub
> One person familiar with Wanstrath's relationship with these VCs told us they are "thrilled" with him and with the changes he's been making at the company.
I, too, like watching a nice horror story unfold.
> It's led by Nicole Sanchez, vice president of social impact
Does she have more or less to say than the vice president of sanitary hygiene? Maybe the chef of the cantina wants to have a word about the hiring process of technical personnel, too.
Holy bejeebus, people are defensive as all getup about this. WTF, people?!?
Do people think that the quote, "...it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'..." is about the difficulty this person finds in sitting in a room across from a white person, chatting with him? I understood it to be a perception on this person's part that the efforts to increase diversity have created a condition where such a significant portion of their new hires need to be non-white or non-white-male that it's difficult to get on the interview schedule if you are. And my speculation is that this was an expression due to personal experience - perhaps this person tried to refer a friend and felt he was getting nowhere.
THEY ARE BULLET POINTS PEOPLE...
Going out on a limb, I'd say just about everyone here has seen a PowerPoint presentation with a slide full of what the presenter intends to be attention catching points that beg the question 'what's that about? do tell."
I'm going to play devil's advocate here with some plausible explanations. I don't know the author and wasn't there so this is purely speculative, but I love speculation, it's why my favorite sport is spelunking. I tried to do this with an imagined 'voice' of the presenter but it ended up being mixed with my own - whatever.
- "This is not work for white folks to lead"
--- We're all familiar with congressional committees composed of a group of old white men discussing the legal policy issues related to healthcare access for women. It's a sorry sight. Let's put it up there front and center, that has not and will not constitute and acceptable effort, so it can't happen in this case. Does this mean that white people can't be a party to diversity efforts? no. but really, what's a bigger risk/likelihood, no white people/men on a committee or all white people/men on a committee? yeah.
- "This is not about socio-economic class, mostly."
--- I'm guessing this has something to do with the culture of distorted libertarian ideals held by many in the tech space, and how easy it is to discount racial bias and claim racial indifference while laying the blame for lack of diversity on childhood access to tech and the statistical differences in access based on purely socio-economic demographics. So this is a point to avoid the argument that diversity isn't a tech problem, and that if society fixed schools and whatnot, tech would naturally become more diverse.
- "Why we refer our friends and family (or don't) are where a lot of the answers can be found."
--- If you're a white employee and all your friends are white and you work for a company that is highly dependent on employee network referrals for hiring, you're going to just get more white people.
--- "Even my conditioning has been conditioned" ... https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm1glnnHKg1qbce9oo1.mp3
American (global) society is centuries deep in conditioning to value white people more highly than others, irrespective of the opinion-holder's racial identity.
- "33% is barely enough to change the culture."
--- I don't exactly know, but I would suspect that 33% is some arbitrary base target for a diverse workforce created by a group of advisers who were indicative of the reason for the 1st bullet point.
- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"
--- Asians are a minority. Asians have a singularly unique experience in tech-employment (although that's probably specific to Asian males). Let's not get bogged down in intra-minority finger-pointing. I suspect there are plenty of tech companies that point to their Asian-identifying employees when confronted (at least internally) with diversity questions, which probably doesn't satisfy non-Asian minorities.
- "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
--- There is a perception that historically, some successful women who have had to fight hard for their positions and put up with a great deal of crap from men along the way, have a tendency to reinforce the traditional barriers for subsequent aspiring female colleagues rather than aid in the dismantling of those barriers, due to a sense of personal fairness - sort of "I had it hard, why should you get to cruise in my wake?" or in defense of a space they perceive as arbitrarily limited by men - the thought potentially being "These men were cajoled into making room for one token female law partner at the firm so a rising female colleague is direct competition for my job." Highlight PERCEPTION and SOME please! If this is an actual, documented thing (I don't know?), I'd speculate that it's universal, and not specific to females or white females, but rather to the culture of numbers - meaning white men would do it too if put in the same position. So let's call it out in this presentation - We don't want that, we want understanding, supportive trailblazers, and those trailblazers in tech at this time are white women.
As for the business side, wow what a more rational conversation RE: growth, size, and manageable company cultures.
> Holy bejeebus, people are defensive as all getup about this. WTF, people?!?
It should be very easy to understand why people are upset about this.
> Do people think that the quote, "...it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'..." is about the difficulty this person finds in sitting in a room across from a white person, chatting with him? I understood it to be a perception on this person's part that the efforts to increase diversity have created a condition where such a significant portion of their new hires need to be non-white or non-white-male that it's difficult to get on the interview schedule if you are. And my speculation is that this was an expression due to personal experience - perhaps this person tried to refer a friend and felt he was getting nowhere.
I believe most people here are correctly assuming the second interpretation. And both interpretations are indicative of a terribly toxic culture.
> THEY ARE BULLET POINTS PEOPLE...
Yes.
If there existed a slide half as hostile toward blacks as this slide is toward whites, would you not use the opportunity to sternly lecture us?
'Cause I've seen frenzies occur with out-of-context words before. And those were were far milder. And taken much further our of context.
Each time, the tech press produced weeks of articles lecturing us that the words alone are irreparably hurtful and damaging.
> - "This is not work for white folks to lead"
> --- We're all familiar with congressional committees composed of a group of old white men discussing the legal policy issues related to healthcare access for women. It's a sorry sight. Let's put it up there front and center, that has not and will not constitute and acceptable effort, so it can't happen in this case. Does this mean that white people can't be a party to diversity efforts? no. but really, what's a bigger risk/likelihood, no white people/men on a committee or all white people/men on a committee? yeah.
"This is extremely important work—that's why we have a department at our company devoted to it. We are constantly trying to expand this breadth and scope of this work, hence this presentation at your company.
"We want more talks and more exposure. We need more paid positions at more companies. And in this expanding sector, if you are white, you are not welcome to lead. You must help us, but in doing so, you must subordinate to us. And we'll feign shock if you suddenly seem uneasy or defensive."
> - "This is not about socio-economic class, mostly."
> --- I'm guessing this has something to do with the culture of distorted libertarian ideals held by many in the tech space, and how easy it is to discount racial bias and claim racial indifference while laying the blame for lack of diversity on childhood access to tech and the statistical differences in access based on purely socio-economic demographics. So this is a point to avoid the argument that diversity isn't a tech problem, and that if society fixed schools and whatnot, tech would naturally become more diverse.
"I don't care that poor white people don't have access to technology. I don't care that they are left out, too. I don't care that our policies would specifically hurt them further. This isn't about helping poor whites."
> - "Why we refer our friends and family (or don't) are where a lot of the answers can be found."
> --- If you're a white employee and all your friends are white and you work for a company that is highly dependent on employee network referrals for hiring, you're going to just get more white people. --- "Even my conditioning has been conditioned" ... https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm1glnnHKg1qbce9oo1.mp3 American (global) society is centuries deep in conditioning to value white people more highly than others, irrespective of the opinion-holder's racial identity.
“It’s morally wrong to prefer one ethnicity over another. That’s why we specifically exclude whites from leadership. It’s morally wrong to believe the voices of one ethnicity are more trustworthy. That’s why we explicitly disregard everything whites say on account of white privilege.
> - "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"
--- Asians are a minority. Asians have a singularly unique experience in tech-employment (although that's probably specific to Asian males). Let's not get bogged down in intra-minority finger-pointing. I suspect there are plenty of tech companies that point to their Asian-identifying employees when confronted (at least internally) with diversity questions, which probably doesn't satisfy non-Asian minorities.
"Whites are slightly overrepresented in tech. We consider this to be an enormous problem. Asians are far, far more overrepresented in tech, but don't you dare be diverted by that. Our enemy is white people, not the overrepresentation of an ethnicity."
great story bro. I get it, you took offense to me taking 'devil's advocate' - look, it was just a figure of speech and I don't want to discriminate against your sensitive sense of fairness, so we'll split it; I'll take the figurative half and you can keep the literal half that you've already claimed.
but seriously, you're use of unattributed quotes is confusing. Is this supposed to be cited material or something you just wish you were citing?
Now I know why Stack Exchange folks are such nazis about formatting.
Seriously? You guys are complaining that they are saying that white people shouldn't lead their diversity initiative? Just take a minute and think about why they've decided there should be a diversity initiative in the first place.
I'm also a leader. I'm a parent of two daughters. My mother had to fight sexism issues in her career. I am supportive of inclusion & diversity. I am trying to raise my girls to be empowered, confident & curious. But the dominant themes in current diversity & feminist circles are so racist & sexist towards me that my first impulse is outrage.
For those of you who share this impulse- I want to provide the piece of perspective that helps me manage my frustration: Our culture operates under a pendulum. Right now, it's bad, but it will swing back.
There are “equality” people who are openly hostile to certain categories of humans based on gender, sexuality & race. This has happened before and it will happen again.
The pendulum will swing back and we'll look back at these people in the same way as certain stale feminists & race marketeers of the 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s etc. The leaders of these ideas in the tech community who focus on gender & race over building products that people want will not last. They get louder & shriller, but wielding bigotry to fight bigotry always fertilizes suspicion.
You can't fight exclusion with exclusion. So don’t worry about these themes. If people aren’t bitching about their bigotry, their relevance wanes.
Just keep trying to do big things. If someone calls you privileged, it doesn't mean it wasn't hard & that you didn't earn it. You don’t have to argue with every person who writes something stupid on the Internet. To hell with those bigots. Their misery does not earn them the right to rob you of your own self worth and success. Diversity means that all perspectives deserve to be heard. It is ok that someone uses the word diversity to ward off white folks from leading. The community eventually rejects this kind of bigotry.
You can find these people worthy of your contempt and still be supportive of diversity & equality. Now ignore these fools and go build your shit.