There's no context given here about what the PR is, how big is it, and what's the nature of the comments. It could be a gigantic PR and it could be that most comments are innocuous repetitions such as "add empty line here".

or, it could it be that this person's notoriety followed them to their new workplace and many people were genuinely frustrated that they have to work with an unpleasant person.

EDIT:

> In a return to its meritocratic roots, the company has decided to move forward with a merit-based stock option program

Maybe they realized that trying to appease political agitators doesn't work and that having competent people is the only rational business decision?

I Imagine this read to the survey writer like:

"Hello, I'd like to complain about your use of the term Linux on the corporate intranet. A page provides instructions for running the data parsing scripts "on Linux". Since we do not do any kernel work, it is improper to refer to them as Linux instructions. Instead, people should be familiar with either POSIX, bash(with extensions), or GNU coreutils."

Not everyone is going to like everyone else, and it has nothing to do with gender.

Some people are just not very likeable, others are very likeable.

Coraline based on my impression, is just not terribly likeable.

Github wants people they like, to be part of Github. How can you blame them?

People who don't get that, and go around writing long winded blogs of how they've been mistreated, and claim it has to do with some social justice issue, are unfortunately oblivious to what the real issue is.

I found this interesting:

> I wrote an impassioned piece talking about how this feature closed a security gap that had directly affected and provided an abuse vector against me

I see this "impassioned piece" as a public shaming of the company who employs her. Since her team's product manager encouraged her to write this, it makes the product manager look like a fool.

She probably caused a lot of friction among several of her co-workers and her manager just couldn't help her anymore.

EDIT: I see now it is flagged. To be clear, I didn't, because I still think it's worth discussing some of the points made.

When you get off on the wrong foot, there is very little you can do to correct it, beside changing teams. Once a manager thinks they know something about your performance, or perceived lack, it's hard to counter that. No matter what --colleagues, clients, other managers, etc. I've seen this play out a couple of times.

There is no stopping the snowball.

For me, it was these random things that would come up very suddenly seemingly from out of nowhere. Some one would have 'complained' about something. The thing would be completely ridiculous, and my manager could never tell me exactly what I should have done to fix it, but it would be a problem. One time I was told I was "unavailable to my team", even though we had slack and nobody had tried to contact me and failed or had even gotten a delayed response.

In another situation I had been having problems with 2 specific team members (couldn't handle any kind of feedback that wasn't completely onboard with their amazing ideas), and in the same exact week, my boss said (and this is a quote) ... "the problem may be that you are TOO good at your job", I got a merit based raise (after just 6 months there), and at the end of the week I was put on a PIP and told I had "no future" at the company. Hows that for consistency and your manager working to help you. lol.

The part that is absolutely maddening though?

That same communication style that everyone acts like is a huge problem. Some people get to talk like that to anyone at anytime in pretty much the same way in the same company you're at ... direct, pointed and directly opposed to some idea, sometimes even rudely. But when you do it as a minority (sans the rudeness), its a problem. I remember one Engineer, losing his shit because our company had decided to pay for only part of our parking in our new downtown location. He raised his voice, and he cussed in addressing a SENIOR FEMALE HR executive that was seated in the meeting, full of people. Nothing happened to him. If I'd tried something like that, I'd have been out of there in 1 week flat. That's the kind of double standard you have to just accept as a minority in tech, and I think its absolute trash.

Long story short, this stuff is real, it happens and its absolutely bullshit. It makes you feel like you are going batshit CRAZY (I'm an athlete, and at one point during one of these being-managed-out episodes, my blood pressure hit 140. thats hypertensive) ... and like I've alluded to before, I wouldn't be shocked if something like this played a role in that Uber engineer's suicide a few months back, because it can really wreak havoc with your mental state and sense of self if you don't have a good support system and/or therapist.

The key is to remember, you're not perfect, be humble and fix what you can, but also remember that lots of people and companies are full of shit, and quite often (especially if you're from a minority group in tech), its not you, its them that are fucked up, despite people on HN doubting your every move and intention.

Also always find a manager that will take a bullet for you, and if you're put on a PIP and you know its bullshit, just leave, don't suffer the indignity and mental anguish of getting shit on for weeks, all the way to a crappy severance if you can help it.

Cheers and Good Luck Coraline!

She got what she deserved.

This is common practice for new devs, at least where I work.

I don't see what's wrong with meritocracy as opposed to an unspecified "management system".

--

> Feature releases such as these are frequently promoted on the GitHub blog, and the product manager on my team encouraged me to write a post announcing what I had shipped. Since it was so important to me personally, I wrote an impassioned piece talking about how this feature closed a security gap that had directly affected and provided an abuse vector against me. The post also served as an announcement to the world of the new team and the kinds of problems that we were charged with solving.

>

> The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone of what I had written was too personal and didn't reflect the voice of the company. The reviewer insisted that any mention of the abuse vector that this feature was closing be removed. In the midst of my discussions with the editorial team, trying to reach a compromise, a (male) engineer from another team completely rewrote the blog post and published it without talking to me.

GitHub was correct here. Feature announcements on the company blog should remain neutral in tone. In addition, the published feature announcement seems to mention the motivations behind the feature quite well:

> Previously, anyone could automatically add other developers to their repositories without explicit permission. This model openly provided some users with opportunities to harass members of our community by inviting them to offensive or attention-seeking repositories.

So, it was rewritten to a neutral explanation of why this feature is a benefit to those who have had experiences like that of the author.

--

> In addition to my development work, I had started weekly mentoring sessions with one of my teammates (a recent boot camp graduate) on Ruby and Rails fundamentals that she had not been exposed to in her program. When I talked to my manager about how she was progressing, I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to "learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you." I was mystified: mentoring is an essential part of being a senior engineer, and this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it.

No quote was given from the manager telling the author to stop mentoring entirely, just that they wanted the _formal_ mentoring to stop (by formal, I assume it to mean it was initiated by the author, not the student). It's possible the manager's intention was as quoted: to see how this "recent boot camp graduate" was able to grow on her own.

--

> I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake, and sadly opened an issue referencing the question.

This has a presumptuous tone to it.

--

> The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication. When I reached out to my therapist for help, she recommended that I go to the emergency room. This was the start of an eight day ordeal involving involuntary commitment to a mental health facility. I shared this experience on Twitter and won't rehash it here, but suffice it to say that I was severely traumatized by what happened to me in the hospital.

I read the "experience on Twitter". It sounds to me that the author's judgement was impaired (re: the author's self-described overdose of anti-anxiety medication) and the hospital/psychiatrist believed they were enough of a risk to themselves to warrant admitting them as a patient.

--

> Thursday and Friday were not good days. I had a lot of trouble focusing. I was making simple mistakes and in some cases doing the wrong work. Friday afternoon I reached out to my boss to tell her that I was having trouble and that I didn't know what to do. She suggested that I take medical leave, but I told her what my therapist had said about the importance of getting back to normal life. My manager was adamant that if I couldn't work at full capacity that I had no choice but to take medical leave.

> ...

> The following week I had scheduled conferences to attend, so my focus on work was put on hold.

> ...

> After the meeting I messaged her and shared the more personal aspects of what I was going through, the trauma that I had experienced in the hospital and its lingering effects on my mental health. I was told that I should have accepted the offer of medical leave, and she said she felt like I was trying to manipulate her by sharing my feelings in the hopes of influencing the PIP. I was dismayed.

The author "had a lot of trouble focusing". It was recommended multiple times that she take medical leave. Instead, the author's "focus on work was put on hold" in order to attend conferences. I'm as suspicious of PIPs as much as the next person, but this seems pretty cut-and-dry to me as unsatisfactory work performance.

--

Regarding the firing on grounds of lack of empathetic communication, perhaps it was related to why this person was hired in the first place?

> They wanted to offer me a job. They had just created a team called Community & Safety, charged with making GitHub more safe for marginalized people and creating features for project owners to better manage their communities.

--

> I think back on the lack of options I was given in response to my mental health situation and I see a complete lack of empathy.

As stated above, they provided the option of medical leave. The author chose not to take it.

> In the past several months GitHub has fired at least three transgender engineers and many more cisgender women.

Why were they fired? How many others were fired in the past several months? What's the ratio there?

> In a return to its meritocratic roots, the company has decided to move forward with a merit-based stock option program despite criticism from employees who tried to point out its inherent unfairness.

Again, what's unfair about rewarding based on merit? Should people who contribute relatively little compared to others get just as much reward? Why would the higher-performers bother to burden themselves in that case?

> So yes, in looking back over my year at GitHub I see that there was, in fact, a real problem with empathy.

>

> But that problem wasn't mine.

So in the end, the author seems to absolve themselves of responsibility. This shows a lack of growth; in my opinion you should _always_ try to fault yourself if you're going to fault others.

- Other engineers dog-piling on her first few PRs showed that there was a complete lack of trust in her, and perhaps an active distrust in her abilities. I have no comments regarding whether this was deserved or not, but the known facts point to such a reality.

- Writing a feature blog post based on a personal perspective and personal past experience is not something a matured corporation can allow. This should not have been a surprise.

- Being the most productive engineer is not the goal of a Principal level engineer. I don't believe any software management would expect their Principal engineers to be sitting at the desk cranking out code all day. Influencing large scale initiatives across the org is more of the job expectation. This means building relationships with lots of people, which means less coding and more guidance of other engineers to do the coding.

- By that point, the expectation must have been high for what she can contribute on the diversity front. The terse messaging regarding the survey probably didn't help, but I also don't see it as a big deal. It's probably just piling on past issues.

- The rest is standard PIP procedure of managing out someone who isn't working out. I would love to say that I know how better to handle a PIP, but I don't.

It seems to me that Github expected a much stronger engineer, but feel like they didn't get one and that she was underperforming. Was that the actual reality? I don't know, and I don't feel qualified to pass judgment.

Which leads me to my final thought: it does seem like Github might have an empathy problem. My guess is that Coraline had her own set of insecurities about being at Github going into the job, and the first few encounters with the rest of the org put them into overdrive. It's unfortunate that her manager did not deem it productive to learn what her insecurities were and validate her on those fronts, which I believe might have put her back on the right track towards success. Instead, Coraline hunkered down and started cranking out code, and possibly withdrawing from the org around her? Rather than doing her intended job.

But, it is a lot to ask for a manager to do all of that, and she was a Principal engineer after all.

Getting a job is like getting married, even if things look all good at the ceremony, there's still years of sustained work/relationship-building to come. This one looks like a case of bad matching. In no way as to diminish Coraline's story, I've seen this happen to a lot of different kinds of people from all walks of life.

My 2 pennies.

> In the midst of my discussions with the editorial team, trying to reach a compromise, a (male) engineer from another team completely rewrote the blog post and published it without talking to me.

The entire paragraph about her writing a blog post has nothing to do with gender, why is it relevant to explicitly try to correlate it with gender in a situation where someone has done something which she wasn't happy about? It reads sexist to me as an outsider.

> In addition to my development work, I had started weekly mentoring sessions with one of my teammates... When I talked to my manager about how she was progressing, I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to "learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you."

Yes mentoring is an essential part, but mentorig is not becoming someone's teacher. That is very weird indeed. Here she says that she was additionally mentoring someone on a weekly basis, which implies that she was doing some sort of teaching lessons to another team member outside of regular development work. This is not mentoring AFAIK. Mentoring is something you do along the way as you work with someone together. You offer help when help is needed, you give advice when advice is requested, you keep your ears open and chip in with help or information when you see someone is struggling, you lead and teach by example and not by lessons.

I can totally understand if the manager was thinking that his person should not feel the pressure of a more senior developer in such a situation. She thinks the developer was benefitting, but how does she even know that? Perhaps the more junior developer was too shy to speak up or felt intimidated by a senior employee telling him/her what and how to do things.

> Discussions were directed to comments on issues and pull requests.

I can see how this was in some situations difficult, but I (as someone who thinks of himself as very open minded) can also totally see why it might be beneficial:

- A discussion on an open issue or pull request provides automatic documentation - It can be found and read by anyone - It fosters more of a culture where anyone feels invited to contribute if they think they have relevant information - It doesn't get lost among other conversations. In Slack or in real life you might talk about 3 issues at the same time and the history of one issue is totally swamped among the chat of all other issues. In GitHub each issue/PR has it's own discussion. - A discussion is often far more civilised when it is done in an issue or PR than in real life or in Slack, which is a huge benefit to establish a positive work culture IMHO.

Again, I can agree that there is also downsides to it, but as someone who prides themselves as an open minded person I would have hoped that she would have looked a bit further than just the downsides and also try to make an effort and understand why it was done like this at GitHub. Being open minded, look at positives and try to foster a positive attitute is one of the most important skills in an employee in my opinion.

> I asked my manager what had happened to upset her and was told that it was the feedback I provided on the gender question. I read back to her the body of the issue that I had opened and asked what I should have done differently. She responded that she didn't know, that my wording seemed direct but non-confrontational, but that I was forbidden to interact any further with the author of the survey.

I have really no foundation for this assumption, but it really reads that her tone in approaching other co-workers was rather direct and harsh, which from my personal experience is never a good way to get people on your side. Especially with people who you have never met or rarely seen I think it is crucial to put some thoughts into how certain things are phrased. At the end of the day you don't know the other person, don't know how they will read it and react to it. If you have a genuine interest to get the best out of this together, rather than just trying to show off that you are more knowledgable than someone else, then you would certainly phrase things more friendly.

Say what you want, but I have 10+ years of experience as well and I know that there was never a situation where I was not able to get my point across in a VERY obvious friendly tone.

> Starting in December, in my weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager, we would review all of my written communication (issues, pull requests, code reviews, and Slack messages) to talk about how I could improve. It felt ridiculous but I went along with it, and did my best to address my manager's feedback and concerns.

What attitute is that? A good manager will try to get the best of evey reportee and focus on personal strenghts/weaknesses. What is ridiculous about trying to improve communication skills? Honestly that is such a bad attitute, as if anyone would ever be such a communication god that there's nothing to improve anymore. That sentence alone is very negative IMHO.

--

Obviously it is very sad and unfortunate that she had to go through mental health issues and the loss of her grandmother, but it really feels like her manager was trying to work with her to go through all these situations and Coraline was doing her own thing. I think it was very responsible of her manager to ask her to take medical leave. Imagine what would have happenend if she didn't? If her manager would have been like "alright, just continue working then", then later she would sue GitHub for not taking her mental health problems seriously and firing her based on that. Her manager was extremely open about her weaknesses, was putting effort into working through them with her and taking the right and responsible steps to get her back on track, but honestly there's only so much you can do before you have to let someone go...

>Was politely calling out a data scientist on a problematic and transphobic survey answer a demonstration of lack of empathy?

How presumptuous. Ever thought that maybe the person putting it together didn't know any better? What does framing oneself as the victim accomplish here?

In addition, this is hilariously ironic given that GitHub employed (still employs?) people who actively promote racism against white men (and women): http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...

Secondly she says that transgender is not a gender, but she doesn't provide any constructive feedback or improvement with it. She could have explained what transgender means, or linked to a website which explains the topic well, or at least offered something along the lines "hey I happen to know a lot about this topic and would love to help you phrasing this question. Feel free to reach out to me on Slack with any questions or if you need more advice.".

"If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question". That sentence alone comes across very much top-down as in "omg you're so stupid and don't even know what that is and you should do this or that if you want".

This is certainly not the message and tone that you want to say to someone the very first time you communicate with someone, unless you obviously don't care about how you come across, how other people feel and how it might affect them, which is fine, but then don't be surprised if people think you are unfriendly, not pleasant to work with and toxic.

For instance, if I know a lot about a programming topic and I would review someone's work for the first time I would not just say "Hey dude, what you've done here is wrong. If you want to do it right do it right man."

First I would avoid to say wrong at all and say that I think it can be improved, because my goal is to improve things and not tell people if they are right or wrong, I don't gain anything from that. Further I would offer constructive suggestions on how it can be improved and also provide extra material/links for them to educate more on that topic, because I would want them to get better and not just me look superior to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portlandia_(TV_series)

I read it as an indictment of the company and its procedures. The data scientist was not even named. The bulk of the post is indicting management, HR, company culture, and insane bureaucratic nightmares designed to push someone out.

The key point is that this is likely the first time these two individuals had communicated - she effectively introduced herself to this person by saying "you are wrong", or "your work is incorrect". This isn't a professional way in a business to talk to someone. Even a simple greeting and explanation to say "I have some experience in this area, and here's some suggestions that would improve it" is infinitely better than the framing she gives: > I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake > sadly opened an issue referencing the question The emotions portrayed there give a good indication to the tone that the writing likely gave - instead of being constructive it could easily be perceived as hostile.

Yes, I think the data scientist over reacted. But I don't think her tone or approach was at all appropriate either.

In short, calling the statement in question transphobic is correct.

She explicitly stated both that including “transgender” as a gender identity option was wrong, and that the right way was to ask about transgender status as a seperate question.

> If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question.

How is this not saying what is right?

There are of course some people who are a) actively assholes and b) genuinely oblivious to the rules applying to them. But you gotta believe they're in the tiny minority in the world.

She doesn't care about said project, but to promote the idea of political cleansing in open source.

Meh's comments, while to course, are correct in the sentiment that she isn't really contributing anything, but is instead attacking. HOWEVER, he should of said "because you won't" rather than "can't", since that's just an unjustified attack on her competence as a dev.

  > Protip: you won't because you can't.

It's a simply stated requirement but difficult, I think, to fulfill. Often there's not a clear path forward to fix the problem(s). Employers don't always make this judgment of what needs to be done correctly. And, of course, there's always the possibility that the employee doesn't follow through on their end.

There are lots of small things, which if more people do, would lead to friendlier communications. E.g. replying with a greeting, to a mail which has greeting.

Fifty years ago people were doing it for not being a good enough Christian. Now it's for not buying into every detail of an incredibly specific (and quite flawed, imo) political philosophy, or even just claiming that perhaps it's counter productive to fight every battle simultaneously in every forum.

What often happens, though, is that responses to these claims become these backhanded dismissals. "Oh, you're just overreacting." "Well, I don't see it." I'm a straight, white, cis dude, too, so for a long time it was hard for me to notice it. I promise you, there is a point--and maybe it's not one you will ever personally see, but it exists--where it becomes too big, too obvious to ignore.

It's a big company the whole thing can't just be a frat house there must at least be some percentage of decent people trying to do a job that are now being told there is something wrong with them.

(Not to mention the whole idea of a remote worker involved in any sort of culture change is utterly absurd)

They find a project they're associated with. They go on it's github repo and they start an issue with a title of "Transphobic maintainer should be removed from project". Not "Potentially transphobic maintainers and how their association with the project hurts it in the long run". Not even "My feelings were hurt after I interpreted some comment of one of the maintainers in some way, please let's discuss". No, they simply demanded removal of someone, based on an, at best, ambiguously "transphobic" twitter comment.

And you're here telling me that person isn't the one with the problem.

> I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count.

So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period.

Re-reading it again, I'm not convinced that this is a management failure either. The section titled Empathy starts with:

> Starting in December, in my weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager, we would review all of my written communication (issues, pull requests, code reviews, and Slack messages) to talk about how I could improve. It felt ridiculous but I went along with it, and did my best to address my manager's feedback and concerns.

One way to read that is that her manager was trying to address these problems, but Coraline didn't understand how serious they were, because she dismissed them as "ridiculous."

Reading some of the comments here confirmed for me that this woman is on to something. People are claiming that there's more to the story, or that she must be a bitch/bad at social interactions (with no evidence worth mentioning and despite a respectful and genuinely empathetic writing style).

In fairness to GitHub, there may indeed be more to the story. However, I think if the tech community didn't have the issues she's talking about, the comment section here would be very different. Nothing she said sounds remotely unbelievable, nor is she selling us something, but people here read that she was forced into a mental health institution and felt free to jump to wild conclusions and publicly speculate on her job performance.

I'd have liked to see more discussion of BI, merit strategies, ideas on humanising large organisations, commiseration, maybe job offers and suggestions. And in fairness to this thread, there is a bit of that too. But experience has shown me that when people react this defensively to polite and well though out criticism, there is a measure of projection / delusion going on.

Now, I'm not saying that all non-substantive discussions should always be deemed kosher, but I feel like it's worth pointing out the irony here - the poor quality discussion has verified the quality of the OP.

On the content of this story in particular: it's not a win/win. But there's an inherent risk in becoming too insular by letting a majority of users decide the outcome on posts the are about minorities. The flag button looks a lot more like a "censor this" button or a "down vote" button than it does a "this doesn't fit the guidelines" button. Maybe that's the goal, but if it is, it should be made clear that's what it is.

Yes, there's a point at which you're completely justified in shutting down further dialogue because you do not find the communication constructive or productive. That point is after you have said that you do not find the communication constructive or productive.

(It sounds like your impression from the OP is that they didn't ghost too early; I didn't form an impression about that, but your take sounds reasonable.)

There's a flipside to your (correct) point about "that's not just how the world works"; basically, if you find yourself "having to accept my approach and just deal with it", are you sure you're not yourself requiring me to adopt to your communication modalities? Why are you sure you're not telling me to accept it and deal with you?

If I prefer directness and you prefer obliqueness, who is correct, and why?

(I find dealing with subtext and other "implies" to be the bad, evasive attitude - why would I have to accept it?).

What if the biases are deep-rooted and subtle and difficult to address without destroying productivity with endless ceremony? What if the biases exist beyond that single organization's control, but still affect them? If the waves are pushing you in one direction, pointing your bow slightly in the opposite direction might really be the right thing to do.

> The idea that the best way...

Few think it's the best way. The problem is, eliminating systemic bias will take a long time. During that time, new victims of that bias will continue to be created. If the introduction of a contrary bias helps more people than it harms, is that really so crazy?

Like there's a spectacular outage and the terse person is updating someone important that's already irritated. Then, sometime later, another interaction with the same person...but they now have some bias.

Maybe you've worked with better employers than I have, but it's pretty much been an open secret in a few different places I've worked, both inside and outside of tech.

Or, sometimes it's not a PIP, but something similar. Many fast food places have a policy where if you're underperforming, your hours get reduced. If they want to fire you, they don't fire you: they give you one, four-hour shift a week at the slowest possible time of the week. That way, they didn't fire you; you quit, and so you don't get unemployment, etc. If you don't show up for your shift, then you're fired with cause, and so you don't get unemployment, etc.

Academia usually garants a minimum of performance - i will give you that, it is no indicator for a maximum.

Unless you're fixing tens of thousands of bugs I don't think you're going to have a good sample size to judge the output of 2 people based on just how many bugs they've closed.

This can also be gamed ie. pick up easier bugs to appear more productive, open bugs for small issues you notice yourself and fix, and this has the byproduct that real work never gets done.

Rewrites, infrastructure, code reviewers, mentoring. No earned dollars, no "features" shipped, good luck measuring "saved engineering hours".

There are no objective measures of productivity in the majority of cases for tech workers.

I'm not sure that's "easy to measure" since how do you know how many hours have been saved without doing it the "slow" way first?

> earned dollars

Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs or implementing flashy new features but is providing good mentoring to the team, writing onboarding documentation, helping them understand the large-scale ramifications of their changes, etc., is essentially invisible to "metrics" yet providing a vital role.

I can't help but feel though that the OP is... not very good, and they haven't had very good interactions on some other posts, but also I get the feeling that GH handled everything incredibly badly all along as well.

This is probably a side effect of how GitHub evolved. Watching some of their earlier talks and comparing that with how they function now, the introduction of managers was a recent addition. It probably didn't change how past engineers operate in the company, e.g., "chime in if your comments are relevant, even if you aren't necessarily requested to chime in."

I've actually found myself in precisely this scenario. Last time it happened, it was because I was called upon to help try to talk some sense into a somewhat stubborn junior engineer who couldn't grasp that they were making sub-optimal and potentially dangerous decisions.

What does this mean? I've never heard the term.

Tbh,i don't really understand the "brogrammer" thing either. I got my CS degree, then was at Google, and then the first employee at a tiny startup and none of those experiences gave me any inkling of what the brogrammer stereotype might be. Isn't the programmer stereotype literally the opposite of a "bro"?

No. How about, the tone of the post is completely different?

http://meh.schizofreni.co/random/lulz/2016/01/08/tales-from-...

Re: who cares if they were all male? If I open a PR and I get dozens of feedback, either they are legit feedback or not. Or maybe they are all sexist comments, that you should absolutely report. But it sounds like the "all of who were male" wants to imply a specific subtext, but the accusation is neither explicit nor provides any justifications. Saying it in other words: if a colleague would say "I am getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of who were black women)", wouldn't that raise an eyebrow or more?

First paragraph under the section "Collaboration"

Is the point you're not actually making that Coraline previously was known as Corey and appeared to be a man?

Instead you could do some research on your own and find the information that's out there.

It comes back to that implicit expectation. Something I've been bringing up a lot in this thread as I read the comments throughout it is that whether we consider somebody rude or not seems to depend a lot on a) who they are, and b) whether we agree with them. We are more charitable to people who are more like us and whose ideas we find more correct. We're all human, so that's part of life. However, as an organization, Github can and should do better than that, and I think here that it did not. The sexism here, if it exists, is implicit in the way problems with this person were handled and in the expectations (mostly unwritten, at least at first) about how she'd behave.

That said, it seems a very neutral approach to gender self-reporting is self-defeating (consider that, at least for bathroom laws in some US states), the very notion of something that's not on the assigned-at-birth male-female binary is itself controversial. I guess if your gender choices included "deconstruct the male-female binary" or something, that'd be overtly political, but at least in this political climate just acknowledging the existence of some people seems to be a political act. (one I'm in favor of, fwiw, but I'm one of those people that argue that being "apolitical" is just cover for being politically in favor of the status quo).

Exactly. For what we know, the junior could have actively complained to the manager (wrongly or rightly) about her mentoring. OTOH the junior dev might have appreciated it. We can't say for sure.

Some people (myself included) prefer to get a general direction and then later to come back for further questions. Too much information in a short amount of time can be overwhelming, I need some time to absorb and read it up in the internet. A few keywords might be good enough to get someone going and figure it out themselves.

"learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you." This really sounds as if the manager had the junior dev's best interest in mind. I don't see how the manager said this to get back at Caroline, as was kind of implied in the article.

The article is reasonably clear that "drive-by issues" are ones where people leave comments uninvited, and it's also explicit that Caroline was specifically asked to review the survey in question. So it's hard to read that as contradictory.

It's easy to turn your own logic back around on you. Since it's a more-or-less open secret that most PIPs are part of managed termination, every competent company that issues one knows they're running a huge risk of sabotaging their relationship with an employee by issuing one. There are lots of ways to manage improved performance from an employee without invoking the dreaded PIP. If the company merely wants to improve performance, they can issue MBOs or schedule a special series of 1:1s.

It's also easy to see why companies would issue PIPs despite potentially backing themselves into a corner when the targeted employee exceeds the stated expectations of the PIP. PIPs are how HR wants employees to be fired; they simple are the whole firing process. But that doesn't mean the people who actually write the PIPs know how to write them effectively. In Coraline's story, you have what reads to me like a pretty standard Kafkaesque PIP story: Github wanted her out, HR demanded they follow the standard process, they PIP'd her, the PIP didn't anticipate that Coraline would keep diligent records, and they were forced to go through contortions to pretend that it was the PIP that had been failed, rather than the "will" part of Github's "at-will employment".

1. (Less likely) She did a lot of work, but it was not high priority work. It was good engineering but on things that the company did not consider important. She was given this freedom and then, in the company's eyes (fairly or unfairly) considered to have wasted it.

2. (More likely) She had good technical skills and bad social skills. When she was able to go heads-down and crank out PRs and tickets, everyone was happy, but she was socially abrasive and alienated her coworkers. This could be because she is an unpleasant person, or because they are unpleasant people, or it could be an honest misunderstanding or personality conflict, but in every case it detracts from the productivity of everyone, generally.

I suspect (2) played a big part, mostly because I've seen this same dynamic play out at other places before. As a borderline autist, I'm highly sympathetic to people in that position, and generally believe that it's better for everyone involved if management can find a way to work to their strengths. However, drastic differences in interaction style are what they are, and at the end of the day, your employer's priority is their productivity, not your happiness. Sometimes these things happen. They suck. At least we're fortunate enough to work in an industry where we have half a dozen other options for work at any time

For the interested, this seems like a pretty good overview of gender identity (primarily from a developmental perspective, of course):

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/appsych/opus/issues/2011/spring/ge...

If the gender data is somehow critical to the data then it's worth being accurate. If not, why even ask?

I don't need to imagine, I do live in such a world, and here's what I do:

I either don't bother commenting on the first place, or I keep some links handy so that if someone genuinely asks I have something ready to share.

Surely passing a simple link is easier than what you're doing.

Documenting something that has no objective criteria does very little to defeat even slight evidence of another motive for firing where the proferred reason is purely pretextual.

> Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer

That's true; that cost is weighed against losing wrongful-termination lawsuits.

Also, very often formal PIPs follow undocumented informal ones that have the same purpose in reality that a formal one does on paper (but which avoid any adverse record for an employee you end up keeping), and the success criteria in the formal PIP are things the manager knows (to a fair certainty) the employee will not meet based on the informal one.

> I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count.

So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period.

Here's another question: Why were weekly one-on-one meetings happening to discuss these issues? Are weekly one-on-ones typical at GitHub?

Hey, have you seen the HRC's recommendations for surveying gender? I've used their guidelines in the past. Very helpful! http://www.hrc.org/resources/collecting-transgender-inclusiv...

TLDR: They suggest splitting the gender question into two parts.

As you know, this is a super important issue for me. Progress! Exciting! If you're busy, I'll make a pull request. Please let me know if I can help in any way. Thank you, Specialist"

Our problem has never been a deliberately underperforming employee though - all of our issues to date have been people who start doing light slacking or who are too easily distracted/focus on the wrong things. Careful hiring and luck.

I have personally managed a serious problem employee who basically did not want to work and put a great deal of effort into actively avoiding work (writing long soliloquies in "documentation" instead of writing code or meaningful and appropriate docs); that was decidedly unpleasant and exacerbated by the (very large) company in question basically protecting certain classes of employees but refusing to add a resource. In the end it came down to me doing half of his job for him.

In fact, some people coming consider it an inalienable part of their masculinity, personality, religion, etc, that they will put their principles above their checkbook.

In fact, some people start companies specifically because they want to put their principles above their paycheck.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/268598-struggle-reclaim-word-jihad...

I think the word meritocracy is in a similar situation. It's an interesting and useful concept, but the word tends to get thrown around by people you probably don't want to get associated with or confused with, so if you want to be heard and understood maybe try a different word.

Maybe not. In many situations you want the best team, and the best team is not necessarily the team that has the most top flight individual contributors.

The best teams I've been on seem stronger than the sum of their individual members, and I've definitely been on teams I rate less highly that had some very strong individual contributors.

Along these lines, I found this article interesting: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-mak...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

So you just say "don't do <<idea>>" and, rather than expand and qualify the statement with a paragraph like the above, you just move on to the actual topic you want to focus on.

Like, the statement wasn't an opening for dialogue about or investigation into the best way to fulfill the work project. It went straight into making a power play. You can't discuss your way out of someone who's trying to control and gain power over you.

Yes, but that applies just as well to the data scientist--who, when she saw this comment, didn't do what any reasonable person would do and call up/message/whatever the coworker who made the comment and straighten out any confusion/misunderstanding, but instead went right to her boss and complained. That should not be the first resort--it should be the last resort. A little empathy on the data scientist's part would have led to: "Hm, that seemed abrasive at first glance, but she does have a valid point..."

> Because empathy is important to communicating effectively.

I learned the hard way that displaying empathy and applying sugarcoating are two very different things, back when I was conflating the former with the latter and ended up dismissing both in name of the latter (which made me sound like a pretentious prick), then trying to correct course and applying the latter in lieu of making use of the former (which made me sound political and manipulative).

> Try this exercise: read the sentence out loud to yourself.

To me it sounded like someone who is alarmed at a subject that matters to them and haphazardly made an assertive statement.

People generally can't stand assertive discourse as they perceive it as being judgemental, unless you take a chance at discovering them as well as give them a chance do discover you. Sugarcoating doesn't help with that, it's just trying to state the same thing in a roundabout, artificially lightened way, which most of the time ends up feeling heavy, gooey, pretenseful and manipulative, when what matters is the build-up, the foreplay if you will, leading to a common level of understanding. Ultimately this is all about people and openness, not facts and opinions. Being openly and genuinely kind, querying for people's thoughts and listening to them helps a lot in getting a point across, but it leaves you vulnerable to abusive personalities, also sometimes you really have to stand your ground. It's really tough to strike a balance.

I honestly don't know where truth lies in this exact matter but what I'm sure of is that when you have to second-guess your every words then the place is mentally exhausting and toxic in a terribly pernicious way as it makes you feel in constant danger and gradually destroys your self-esteem.

I really don't see that much wrong with it as a comment.

its to the point and precise.

There are perhaps two failing:

o No offer to help o No opening for conversations

Is that a reason to block someone? I doubt it. However I'm not the data scientist, so who knows

- I was taught etiquette, to a large extent, in an online fiction workshop called Critters. There, critiques are all peer reviews, and diplomatic critiques are essential. I try to keep some of that friendly peer spirit in every review and issue I make.

We used to do 6 monthly reviews but scrapped them in favour of more regular meetings every 4 - 8 weeks, largely for the reasons you've stated. That being said, in my experience reviews are one of those tasks that take up as much time as you give them. If you only give yourself a month to gather feedback and prepare them you'll find a way to get it done, and I always wanted to work off the most current information available when meeting with members of my teams, hence doing the prep as late as possible.

As I said, GitHub is not a large company at around 700 employees, so I'm not really sure what their excuse is. The largest company I've worked for, as a contractor this time, was around 400k employees, and they seem to have much better processes around this with regular one-to-ones in the place of annual reviews, at least for permanent tech staff.

I agree, I think this is where the "fishy"-ness I spoke of earlier comes in. Giving the benefit of the doubt to Coraline, there is definitely more at play than being rude in a few emails. I just feel uncomfortable jumping from an individual account to broadly concluding an organization is sexist.

What I see in this is a sort of passive transphobia. It's not that anyone harbors any grudge, it's that they harbor no kind feelings. The idea that someone deserves whatever happens to them, for good or ill, is just an excuse to turn a blind eye to any harm that occurs to them. When the best response you get from people is indifference, you're probably not going to have a long and happy life.

I think Coraline has more passion than good judgment, but on the other hand. I'm glad someone is out there to raise these issues and take the resulting flak. I worry about what kind of similar discrimination I'm going to face. If this is what goes on in the enlightened liberal utopias we've all got a tough row to hoe.

I'm going to strongly disagree with this one, but it's clear you and i will not agree about this.

"More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :) " I still believe think it's incredibly cynical to assume and write that the only purpose of a PIP is to formally make up evidence so you can fire someone. Precisely because i've worked at places where that is very specifically not the intent.

I suggest that if you want to change minds and improve the status quo, you should engage these people who you find tiresome anyway. Not to persuade them, but the third-parties who will read the discussion and could be persuaded. Or, if that's too much work, simply don't engage, if only so you don't sabotage someone else's effort to persuade.

There are professional sports franchises who go out and just throw money at "the best" players in their leagues. And the track record of doing that is pretty mixed; it turns out that just hiring a bunch of top individuals easily loses to putting together a group of players who are each objectively "worse" but whose play as a team is superior.

Meritocracy is still the best we have. It may be flawed, yes, but there exists no superior alternative. It's likely possible to get away with a few minor tweaks - but there doesn't seem to be anyone looking into what exactly those could be, instead they shit on the concept without providing any viable alternative.

It seems like many of the things she and others mention are not necessarily bias in individuals in the workplace, but "resources, free time, life experiences" - which seem much easier to attack and if done fully I think could help make up for other biases too. I think the best bet honestly is stuff like Black Girls Code where they try to get people up to speed in order to compete successfully by merit.

I can tell you right now, though, the people who will keep demanding sources and want to re-litigate even the existence of discrimination/bias, in every single thread which mentions the topic, will not be convinced by providing them walls of links and sources. They've already made up their minds, and the only thing they'd do in response is exactly what I said: nitpicks and non sequiturs and "well, I don't find that convincing..." and so what's the point? If someone is genuinely and truly unaware, they can use Google. If someone just wants to try to discredit a basic established fact about the world, it's not my job to coddle them or make them feel good about it or "engage" with them or make them feel that they were properly listened to and had their concerns addressed, any more than it would be my job to do that for someone who denies evolution.

As someone who has poohpoohed the idea of a human resources department in a large company, I've almost done a 180 on it now that I have a small company of my own and I'd be very interested in reading some good books on the utility and function of the organisation in a large company.

* Able to clearly communicate technical concepts. Evidenced by seeing displaying in wiring logical ordering of thought, separation of complex pieces into smaller, less complicated, and clearly delineated pieces, effective and actuate command of technical vocabulary.

* Able to code. Evidenced by watching them code.

* Familiarity with the data structures and algorithmic approaches native to the problem domain. Evidenced by discussion around that domain, perhaps a psuedo-code exercise with a relevant problem paired with discussion of design tradeoffs of different approaches.

* Understanding of the cross-cutting concerns related to maintainable software: testing, documentation, modularity, etc. Evidenced by Socratic discussion of said topics. "Given this problem common to sustainable software development, what would you do/have you done?"

I still believe in the value of meritocracy. Actually pursuing meritocracy solves a lot of the inclusivity problems we think we have. The problem is that people are inherently biased and unless we are purposeful in accounting for these biases it is easy to weave then into any system you design, no matter what the name or started goals.

Doesn't change the value of an actual meritocracy. Just highlights one of the challenges of being human.

Defining the "best people" is _obviously_ subjective. _People_ are subjective. There isn't just one "best"-- there is a set of "bests" that you can strive for. Just like the above example, it depends on your requirements, your priorities, etc.-- but most importantly, it doesn't need to be objective to work well, which brings us full circle to:

> "Best people" can mean the best team.

If you prioritize teamwork among individual contributors, this is what best people would imply.

The awesome part about a capitalist system is that companies have the freedom to experiment with these configurations of how they define "best". GitHub may define it differently from you, but that doesn't make their definition less valid.

Meritocracy is an idea, not a specification-- there is no one true meritocracy implementation. The discussion needs to start from there.

And what about in reverse? What if, rather than finding the "best", we merely have a metric/s that weed out the worst? If I remove the bottom 15% effectively, and replace them with average performers, then the net gain is massive, especially as each extra bug introduced is a massive time sink for any team, and poor developers are a massive cause of that.