By replacing flat meritocracy and remote work with traditional top-down management?
> "don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion anytime soon, so let's limit their scope of damage"
So the technical director and member of the social-impact team is a blatant racist.
I thought you were being over the top about the racism but then I saw the slides in the article: http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56b3d2462e526543008...
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.
"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").
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.
I tweeted a response stating this was racism and was blocked within 20 seconds.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905356
I've been watching github closely as they are one of our main competitors in the enterprise offerings.
I had the same reaction. I'm surprised nobody else has noticed this and made a comment about it.
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.
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.
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.
Hierarchy != Non-meritocracy
You can have hierarchy and still be based on productivity and merit.
More accurately, that statement is both anti-white and misandrist, almost by definition, by equating white plus male with damage.
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".
"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.
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.
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.
"Privilege is invisible to those who have it". I humbly suggest you watch this TED presentation, https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_kimmel_why_gender_equality...
Granted it's primarily about gender equality, but it does an excellent job also addressing race, ethnicity, etc.
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.)
Let's treat people as individuals, not as faceless members of some caste.
You have to be joking. This is sarcasm, right?
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.
[1] http://parade.com/250591/lynnsherr/cosmos-neil-degrasse-tyso...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I'll talk about race the same way I talk about eye color.
I'll talk about culture the same way I talk about TV preferences.
Without hysteria.
Fuck racists.
Fuck spineless "don't you dare mention race" bullshit.
Both are equally cowardly.
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.
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.
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.
https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/
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.
What do you mean with other weirdness?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
https://twitter.com/rachelmyers/status/629981737121021953 (also see some of her late Tweets about this very thread)
https://twitter.com/agelender/status/629080326736773120 https://twitter.com/agelender/status/573560084837498880
I think it started around the time they threw out their "meritocracy rug" back in early 2014 or somewhat before: http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug
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.
And with that I take my leave of this whiny white bastion called HN. Enjoy your caves, suckas
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, ...).
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 mean, I'm always happy to see competition keeping companies on their toes, but why do you actively want people to leave GitHub?
https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/ http://dancerscode.com/blog/why-the-open-code-of-conduct-isn...
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 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.
GitHub is becoming too large, and code is becoming too centralized, that is dangerous.
How is this even legal? Change 'white' for any other race, and you'd have yourself a workplace discrimination lawsuit.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/yahoo-sued-over-e...
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?
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.
[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.
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.
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 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].
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'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).
[1] https://gogs.io/
(not affiliated with gogs, just started toying with it recently)
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'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?
If you're in a project in GitLab 8.4, simply press `t` to bring up the fuzzy file finder. On a file, simply press 'Blame'.
Let me know if we could speed this or any other action up further.
Can someone explain this ?
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.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-white...
> 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."No joke.
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.
Before we make judgment based solely on mentioning race in a slide. I highly recommend reading Nicole Sanchez's full take on the issue here:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2015/02/12/wome...
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.
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?
FWIW, my anecdata shows that less than 1 out of 20 technical interviews I do are with black applicants. I do wonder why 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
https://library.gv.com/unconscious-bias-at-work-22e698e9b2d#...
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...
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?
Hosted: Bitbucket, GitLab
Self-hosted: GitLab, Gogs
None of these come close to GitHub in my experience.
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.
edit : also : "it is very hard to even interview people who are '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.
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.
The language of that is pretty clear to me. Look up the definition of lead.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050454 and marked it off-topic.
Is it really that difficult to get push notifications for pull requests, issues, and my homepage news feed?
I don't know what it's built with but it's not native in the least, it looks like some awful PhoneGap monstrosity.
I'd think getting a github Android app just right would be a low priority.
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?
I hope this whole SJW-led assault implodes because I just want to get back to writing software.
Make no mistake, this is a political war.
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.
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.
"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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I'm a bit more cynical - if it fails, I suspect the failure will be blamed on "wreckers".
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!
Yes:
Bitbucket
No:
Self hosted Gitlab instance
It's often not a good sign when the top engineers or star salesmen aren't running a tech company.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drummond_(Google)
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)
Of course white privilege exists. Next.
Onto real shit like how do we not lose yet another bastion of web awesomeness.
disclaimer - I'm one of the founders of Aerobatic.
Programmers.
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)
(This on the other hand was great: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050562)
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.
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.
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.
sad to see github losing its way = (
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.
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.
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.
The ease in which y'all are swayed into this article's point of view is the true worry here.
Restructuring and growing pains are normal.
tumbleweeds
Marketing to uber-rich investors?
It will now be fashionable to talk about the emperors new clothes. Even by those who previously strongly vocalized their love of the emperors clothes.
I'll bet you sam a will start talking about being Ramen Profitable soon.
More, supposedly from insiders: https://medium.com/@geeekcore1/facts-conveniently-withheld-d...
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.
It's not exactly paranoia: there has been precedents; see Gamergate.
They've already done that. https://github.com/FeministSoftwareFoundation/C-plus-Equalit...
However, they continue to host a mirror of it: https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality
Not sure why they didn't allow the "official" one but allow the mirror. Guess they just wanted the ability to say they took it down for PR purposes.
My disgust is boundless. To hell with anyone that thinks and behaves like this.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
No wonder they got rid of the meritocracy rug.
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 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.
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.
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."
http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2005/07/19/when-we-ar...
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.
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).
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lMxWWK218
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.
What are some examples where this has ever gone well?
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?
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.
Total shambles.
I make no claims as to the accuracy of this information or any relationship with GitHub. All assertions should be considered parody.
This event is not likely to come any time soon because Andreessen Horowitz bid the price up so high.
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)."
The flat structure is better for creating new products than squeezing money out of what exists.
If people want this type of company, they have to build the company and product around those principles.
".. 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."
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.
