GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2

by easyd • 10 years ago

808 937 10 years ago

ihsw2• 10 years ago

Whatever happens, I hope they improve their Android app. It is one of the most pathetic things I've ever had the mispleasure of using.

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.

dflock• 10 years ago

The gitskarios app is a good alternative.

tosseraccount3• 10 years ago

I'm truly curious: who uses Android for development?

I'd think getting a github Android app just right would be a low priority.

giaour3• 10 years ago

As a maintainer of a popular and actively developed open source project, I would totally use the app to respond to issues and pull requests if it were usable. Unfortunately, the app is a dumpster fire, so I just use github.com.

If you do use android for development, you wouldn't need a github app to push your code to github. You would need a git app, and several great ones exist.

ihsw2• 10 years ago

I meant to use it as a communications tool, not for pushing/pulling/etc. Responding to issues, accepting/declining PRs, and so forth.

AndyKelley• 10 years ago

Octodroid is a winner.

mschuster914• 10 years ago

With plenty of competitors, including Atlassian, GitLab, and even Google, one thing is certain: If GitHub does stumble, there are plenty of companies that want to pick up its slack.

Atlassian? Oh god. Their software might be ideal for corporate beancounters and expensive consultants, but for everyone else it's a nightmare.

GitLab? A pile of memory leaks and other weirdness.

Google? Not so much, I highly doubt they'll ever re-open Google Code.

edit: and another thing, Github enjoys a massive, massive network effect, next to impossible to recreate by anyone else. Except Sourceforge, but they burned so many bridges that no one sane in his mind will ever trust them again.

seibelj• 10 years ago

Atlassian bitbucket is fine for me, and it gives free private repos. If you just want something for side projects without all of the bells and whistles, bitbucket is fine

tomschlick2• 10 years ago

The frequent bitbucket downtime is what got me to switch my company's stuff to github.

techdragon• 10 years ago

Shame they lack any way to discover active forks that is as useful as the GitHub network graph widget.

the_ancient4• 10 years ago

I love both BitBucket and GitLab, have no issues with either.

mschuster914• 10 years ago

I'm administrating a small-ish Gitlab server and we have to reboot it every week or else it will fail in random and weird ways due to OOM - the machine has 8GB of RAM and 20 active users, so WTF? Isn't the entire point of git to have one pretty dumb server acting as a file server and letting the client do the work?!

ilostmykeys• 10 years ago

You got downvoted by people promoting the companies they work for. Altasian stuff is hideous and Gitlab I heard is a horror show.

This will be downvoted too but honestly who cares. Despite all of Github's problems no one comes anywhere close in terms of adoption and developer mindshare and there is a reason for that.

audessuscest13• 10 years ago

Actually Gitlab could be a replacement, I use it with 10 dev team + customers and we have absolutely no problem.

ex3ndr2• 10 years ago

We tried to switch. After few days devs make a note on the table "X days without GitLab being down". X always was < 2.

smhg• 10 years ago

Google's Cloud Source Repositories [1] aren't related to Google Code if I get it right.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/

mbrock• 10 years ago

I dunno if it's impossible to recreate. You could just scrape GitHub's user data, mirror all public repositories, provide GitHub login, and do everything you can to ensure that your new competing thing lets people move away from GitHub with no friction.

zo1• 10 years ago

I believe Github provides a free data-dump of their publically-available data. That makes things even easier, it's just no one's done it yet.

dorianm• 10 years ago

They mention Google Cloud Source Repositories as a recent concurrent of GitHub: https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/

DannyBee3• 10 years ago

"Google? Not so much, I highly doubt they'll ever re-open Google Code. "

One thing to remember is that the main reason Google did code.google.com was to create competition for sourceforge (I was the third or fourth person to join the code.google.com team)

Now, it's pretty much 100% that Google won't do this again anytime soon, but that doesn't mean some other large company won't have the same thought.

stock_toaster• 10 years ago

Maybe Google Ventures will end up investing in Gitlab, or some similar startup down the line. It seems like it would be a decent hedge, and possibly cheaper than developing and/or running it themselves.

eikenberry3• 10 years ago

They aren't talking Google Code. If you read the linked article, they are talking a new thing Google "Cloud Source Repositories".

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.

quicklyfrozen• 10 years ago

They describe it as "fully-featured private Git repositories" so not a replacement for Google code. Also it's pretty inconceivable they'd retire Google Code early, forcing repos to move to a competitor, then introduce a new public service.

reactor2• 10 years ago

https://notabug.org

sytse14• 10 years ago

I agree that we at Gitlab should do something about the memory leaks and I created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13241

What do you mean with other weirdness?

greenrd17• 10 years ago

I've heard a lot of people complaining about JIRA and so on, but I've never really understood why they hate it. Sure, it's closed source, but so is GitHub, and people seem to like that (this discussion notwithstanding).

the_ancient4• 10 years ago

I Hope to see GitLab, and other Truly Open Systems, replace GitHub as the go to place for source control

andyfleming• 10 years ago

Why?

I mean, I'm always happy to see competition keeping companies on their toes, but why do you actively want people to leave GitHub?

akerro• 10 years ago

I don't like them because they put someones opinions/values above technical skills.

https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/ http://dancerscode.com/blog/why-the-open-code-of-conduct-isn...

noir_lord2• 10 years ago

I think the clue was in "Truly Open", github isn't open source and is fairly expensive for small teams with private repo's (compared to bitbucket for example).

It's network effects are large but beyond that the product doesn't really do anything that others don't do just as well.

the_ancient4• 10 years ago

I do not like the centralization of anything

GitHub is becoming too large, and code is becoming too centralized, that is dangerous.

newjersey• 10 years ago

I am not the GP. To me, supporting GitHub is like supporting Jetbrains. I know they're good people. I know they're trying to do good things. However, I will always have a nagging feeling that wishes that the universe was somehow different and that their business model made it possible for them to freely and openly offer all their software.

I guess I can include things like Aerospike and even Gitlab in that group. I don't actively wish for them to succeed either. I am glad they exist and I actively use their products but I would not cheer for any of them.

zanny• 10 years ago

In some part it can be simple ease of use.

Most larger companies will not use a third party cloud service to host their code like github.com. They want software to run locally on their own servers instead.

Github offers their software to enterprise customers to run on their own servers, but they traditionally have done a bad job doing it, at least relative to gitlab. Today, dozens of open projects and even closed ones are using personal gitlab instances, but since the ecosystem is more open on gitlab contributions come back in to make it a much more friendly tool to self-host.

Tons of larger companies favor gitlab for exactly that reason.

bhvit• 10 years ago

I used bitbucket for a long time because it did the job and it provided private repos. But after I had to start looking for another job, many employers wanted to see my github profile.

chinathrow3• 10 years ago

You can easily make your bitbucket projects public and show them off. No need to be conformed into using a given service.

khyryk3• 10 years ago

So you paste your bitbucket link into the github field.

kyrra2• 10 years ago

I don't understand that as a criteria to be hired. I could see it as something to help show off, but shouldn't you as an employee be focusing on your company's codebase and not OSS products (unless there is some bug in the product you could fix that impacted your company)?

Maybe it's since I've always worked for companies with > 500 employees, but there is always a pile of work on the products I've worked on that there was little time to contribute externally.

smileysteve2• 10 years ago

Doesn't entirely solve the problem. But you could use multiple remotes. Still gives github power in terms of forks and stars, but your commits can be in many places. (and you can decide to do issues where you want)

audessuscest13• 10 years ago

Exactly, It's time for opensource networks to become open source !

pwelch• 10 years ago

Same here. I like that Gitlab is so open. I hope they continue to grow and more people trust them to host both private and public code.

sytse14• 10 years ago

We're certainly growing, and I'll do everything I can to keep and increase the openness. We just made our strategy public https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/

j4kp07• 10 years ago

Assembla offers free private repos (no bells, no whistles). I've been using them for over 4 years now.

jws• 10 years ago

That appears to be free repositories when you sign up for the $24/month personal plan, according to their Pricing page. That is a barrier to many people.

Edit: Hmm, there is also a page that talks about free repositories, but it requires an account. https://www.assembla.com/git/ In any event, they are confusing me.

protomyth4• 10 years ago

uhm... So a company that is an enabler of developers working from anywhere and collaborating on code doesn't have at its core value working remotely? I find that a bit hard to believe, but I guess I've heard stranger things.

I guess I just expect as a matter of dogfooding that a company that strives to do great distributed source code control and all the activities surroundings that would live the remove lifestyle.

grk• 10 years ago

It's enabling developers to work from anywhere. That doesn't mean this approach works for management.

protomyth4• 10 years ago

If the person making the decisions isn't familiar with the basis of the decision then I trust their judgement not at all.

raverbashing• 10 years ago

Given the amount of news talking about SV companies losing stock market value it seems the bubble is popping

spitfire• 10 years ago

It looks like a case of the things no one could talk about can now be talked about.

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.

iza• 10 years ago

"We’re trying to build a new kind of enterprise company where the playbooks of old won’t always work"

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.

at-fates-hands2• 10 years ago

So the technical director and member of the social-impact team is a blatant racist.

I had the same reaction. I'm surprised nobody else has noticed this and made a comment about it.

gaius2• 10 years ago

Search Twitter for #hnwatch.

protomyth4• 10 years ago

The people who would point it out are basically in fatigue mode from talking about it so much. How he was not escorted out of the building after that tweet is beyond me. Seeing the slide is just as bad.

No hatred ever got fixed by pouring more hatred into the cauldron. Sure, you can be the conquerer, but you just created more people gunning for you. If you are not about equality and love of all, then you are just another part of the problem. It is very much like the H1-B threads. Its important to see the system is broken and not the H1-B applicants doing the best they can in the system.

I sit here on a reservation and see the problems. A university adding requirements in a job search that weren't there before for one. I've lived through a bit of it, and people like him won't solve anything. All they will do is cost the company money in lawsuits.

Want to fix diversity? Fix the diversity and STEM education in pre-K and K-6. We learn to dream then. Let's think about everyone having a chance to dream of STEM.

ta140604• 10 years ago

It's becoming the norm in some communities. For example, Mozilla/Rust has a lot of people like that, and one of the core team members has contributed to #hnwatch Twitter tag linked below.

People from that circle were proposing the idea of creating 'black lists' to make people unemployable for political reasons; they managed to get Brendan Eich expelled from Mozilla; they're pushing for "Codes of conducts", which again aim at expelling people from open source communities for political reasons - eg things they said in completely unrelated places, like their own Twitter feeds (see "Opalgate").

Also see PronounGate, DongleGate, past scandals at Github (meritocracy rug, Julie-Ann Horvath departure), discussions/scandals around CoC/"Contributor Covenant", etc etc etc.

seehafer2• 10 years ago

Scary that you're getting downvoted for this comment.

r0muald• 10 years ago

It rather seems that the entire thread is now about this totally minor and uninteresting point, all the while ignoring the GitHub-the-company-is-broken argument. The inability to understand priorities is not surprising but talent isn't leaving GH because of reverse racism: it's the horrible leadership and the dismantling of one of the most innovative workplace cultures that suck.

hitekker5• 10 years ago

This makes me sad.

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.

TheLogothete• 10 years ago

So yeah... github just lost an enterprise customer. And I will be making sure they will lose more.

almostApatriot12• 10 years ago

Don't see what the big deal is. The slide refers to spearheading a diversity program, not the company itself. Seems intuitive to me that such a program with only white, male managers might be problematic.

malandrew33• 10 years ago

I don't know if you even need to see the whole presentation. A few of the full sentences on that one slide are more than enough to project a strong us vs them attitude of hatred and victim versus oppressor, especially the following bullets:

    - "This is not work for white folks to lead"
    - "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
    - "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"

This is blatantly racist language and policy.

nailer2• 10 years ago

Not surprising, they were about to do this a little while ago: https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/

mnglkhn2• 10 years ago

Still trying to parse that slide and I am mostly baffled by the line where "(6) Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women."

I know the slide needs more context, but even so, it is a very disturbing statement to make.

Something is amiss and lots of explanations are needed.

PS: now I am more than happy with my choice of keeping my repos on Bitbucket.

DyslexicAtheist• 10 years ago

This is blatant racism yes. I have posted this with a mention of here name on LinkedIn and Twitter and asked her to clarify this slide. Maybe a bit of public pressure will do the trick for her to come forward.

akavlie• 10 years ago

Clearly you haven't been apprised of the current rules. Hatred of white males is categorically not racism, because they have all the power.

yoodenvranx3• 10 years ago

I am a young white male with no money, no job and bad health. Can I please have some of this mysterious magic power I am supposed to have?

GuiA• 10 years ago

And don't forget that killer quote from their internal presentation:

"Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"

When diversity initiatives become an "us vs them" discourse, everyone loses. Except for the fat cats with full wallets at the top, who have no issue with the plebe infighting as long as it's between themselves (see the not so subtly placed "this is not about socio economic class").

connorshea• 10 years ago

That's not an internal presentation, it explicitly says it's "a diversity training talk held at a different company". She works for GitHub, but we don't have any evidence GitHub explicitly endorses those views.

mjbh7k8• 10 years ago

I've been seeing this discussion a lot lately, particularly in the publishing world. 79% of editors are white and 78% are women [1], so the statement has validity at least when talking about the gatekeepers of what stories get to be told. Marlon James recently posted about his experiences with it [2] and many writers of color have since shared similar experiences.

My take is that it's not "us vs them", but a need to illuminate where the barriers lie.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/27/us-study-finds-...

[2] https://www.facebook.com/marlon.james1/posts/101537967097308...

dominotw2• 10 years ago

I have long been puzzled by this

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.

yaakov343• 10 years ago

Another quote is "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'". This is absurd and disgusting.

I haven't lived in the US for a while, but lately, I keep hearing all these expressions of straight up racial hatred of white people, all the way up to taking pleasure in white people "dying off" and so on. This kind of thing can't end well and needs to be stopped.

ronnier• 10 years ago

To even express that it's absurd will likely brand you as a racist. What in the fuck is happening?

cjcole• 10 years ago

That categorization ("blatant racist") will sadly tend to produce an endless argument over who can and can't be racist. That's fruitless.

More accurately, that statement is both anti-white and misandrist, almost by definition, by equating white plus male with damage.

yoodenvranx3• 10 years ago

an endless argument over who can and can't be racist

It blows my mind that some people really believe that only white people can be racist. It's like they completely redefined the meaning of the word "racist".

morgante9• 10 years ago

GitHub has, since the Horvath incident, made it pretty clear what kind of person they want to hire. And, frankly, that's fine.

There are plenty of places where I, as a competent white male, can get hired and promoted without difficulty. The fact that Github isn't one of those is not a systematic problem. More power to them.

venomsnake• 10 years ago

No it is not. Either we are all allowed to discriminate or none at all. If only some must have power to discriminate - I prefer the status quo. Since I like the white male privilege. I am fine with society without privilege. I will fight tooth and nail against one in which my privilege is transferred to someone else.

brighteyes10• 10 years ago

At what point does it become a systemic problem, though?

Github is a major software company, and there are similar signs at other major companies, most of whom are starting down a similar path.

ElComradio9• 10 years ago

If GitHub is rejecting otherwise qualified white males for employment they are opening themselves up to legal liability. I cannot imagine some of their statements wouldn't serve to hurt them in a trial.

merpnderp• 10 years ago

You may not have a problem with it, but hiring based on gender or race is illegal.

khyryk3• 10 years ago

What a fucking trainwreck.

Pxtl• 10 years ago

I freely agree that there is a lack of diversity in tech, and that we have to bear some of tbe blame ourselves, but this sort of approach is not helping.

IanDrake2• 10 years ago

and that we have to bear some of tbe blame ourselves

I assume you're speaking for yourself. I will bear none of that with you. Never have I participated in any way to hold down anyone because of their race, gender, or otherwise.

When the blameless volunteer to take blame we have serious social problems. Better find the actual cause and fix it.

Disruptive_Dave• 10 years ago

I've always been profoundly confused by people/groups who choose to fight racism with racism. I'm not quite sure that's the best corrective path for this problem. But everyone lets it slide, at least here in the US. Are we just scared?

powertower• 10 years ago

They are not fighting racism, they are creating it.

slavik812• 10 years ago

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster."

It's an inherent problem that as you fight something, you tend to mirror it. You almost have to do so in order to be effective. The problem is that at some point, it just feeds the cycle.

omegaham• 10 years ago

Personally, it's because it's not worth my time. Why should I have any sort of dialogue with such people when it's not going to be productive and will provoke a massive amount of vitriol? At best, it's unproductive, and at worst it's career-ruining.

I think that most people think the same way, and as a result there are absolutely no consequences when the activists go from "challenging" to "outright hateful."

Bluestrike22• 10 years ago

The problem with hard pushes in the aftermath of really bad PR is that it's very easy to over-correct and wind up creating a new problem for yourself. It seems like Github is well on their way to just that with how they've implemented their diversity efforts. A lot of those quotes are truly scary, and are priming the pump for some very nasty lawsuits over hostile work environments that will only wind up creating new PR problems. And if those quotes are any indication, it's unlikely that someone is going to be able to slam on the brakes and stop things from getting further out of hand.

jshevek5• 10 years ago

It is interesting and sad how quick these kinds of racists are to shut down any kind of discussion that does not align with their racist ideology.

I tweeted a response stating this was racism and was blocked within 20 seconds.

timcederman• 10 years ago

The second is a quote from a long-term Hacker News member, but he hasn't been active lately. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=danilocampos

briholt2• 10 years ago

This kind of anti-white, anti-male racism is poisoning Silicon Valley. Honest, meritocratic people can't idly stand by while self-serving idiot racists take over. I'm now cancelling my GitHub account and moving to BitBucket.

lightlyused2• 10 years ago

The above comment makes me like github more.

briholt2• 10 years ago

Done. Also, fantastically, BitBucket is cheaper.

gjulianm• 10 years ago

I searched for that tweet [1] and I think the context makes it different. He doesn't talk about management directly, but about healthcare as a remedy to avoid people getting fired and then losing health, housing or similar things.

The article put that tweet in a context where it could be interpreted as "white males in Github are bad, let's fire them" and I think he says something completely different.

1: https://twitter.com/_danilo/status/690601512813367297

disgruntledphd2• 10 years ago

Thank you for that context, that's extremely helpful. I was totally with him until the white male stuff, sadly.

Karunamon4• 10 years ago

It's... quite heartening, to see HN call out the blatantly anti-equality messaging highlighted in this article, and to not have it buried at the bottom of the page.

Lots of unsourced speculation as to what's going on behind the scenes, but I wonder if a few years from now, we'll all look back at the day they decided to throw out meritocracy (symbolically, as the rug, and realistically, as the reorganization) as the beginning of the end...

Aside: I'm getting rather tired of being downvoted and nobody bothering to at least explain why.

morenoh149• 10 years ago

people don't like meritocracy /sarcasm

alphapapa6• 10 years ago

Yes, it should be an interesting story, how these people took over from the inside, if we ever get to hear it.

iiiggglll• 10 years ago

Man, I feel sorry for anyone who actually buys into the "flat meritocracy" myth.

al_chemist• 10 years ago

What about "remote company" myth?

Its once famous remote-employee culture has been rolled back. Senior managers are no longer allowed to live afar and must report to the office. This was one reason why some senior execs departed or were asked to leave, one person close to the company told us. There was a remote culture and very little hierarchical structure which worked wonderfully when they were 30 and 50 people, but at 500, it doesn't work.

manigandham• 10 years ago

Flat != Meritocracy

Hierarchy != Non-meritocracy

You can have hierarchy and still be based on productivity and merit.

exolymph4• 10 years ago

Right? I thought conflating those disparate concepts was very weird.

beatpanda2• 10 years ago

How is it 2016 and an audience mostly based in California still needs a remedial critical race theory class

malandrew33• 10 years ago

Elaborate.

pkinsky3• 10 years ago

What falsifiable predictions does critical race theory make?

killface• 10 years ago

Yep. This has solidified my opinion. I'm moving all my code off Github.

Sorry, as a white male, I don't have to take this kind of blatant racism, abuse, and shaming when it comes to hosting my code. BitBucket does a good job without the uppity diversity attitude.

RamshackleJ• 10 years ago

This article could have been written better. It has two themes going on. Github is restructuring and the lack of diversity in tech.

Why did they unnecessarily mention diversity in the context of the reorganization of github? Because that is the corporate BS that is popular to spout when you are redefining power within your company. Make no mistake github is doing restructuring to position themselves for large corporate contracts, NOT to be a more diverse workplace.

Using injustice to whitewash your redefined power structure is disingenuous.

sad to see github losing its way = (

pbreit• 10 years ago

It also seemed odd that it implied that whatever the new structure is does not include meritocracy. Does "meritocracy" really mean "no managers"?

hga• 10 years ago

https://www.google.com/search?q=github+meritocracy+rug

audessuscest13• 10 years ago

"Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women."

edit : also : "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'"

sanjeetsuhag2• 10 years ago

Yeah, what does that even mean ?

audessuscest13• 10 years ago

As a european i'm really shocked that this kind of tumblr bullshit invade top tech company like Github...

matthewbauer• 10 years ago

I think what she's saying is that usually when tech companies talk about diversity they mean they really are talking about increasing the number of women in tech. To her, at least, that's not as important as increasing the number of minorities in tech. So as "white women" are in one group but not the other, the are bad because they are minorities in disguise. Even with that, it's a terrible thing to put on a slide without any added context.

sanjeetsuhag2• 10 years ago

Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women.

Can someone explain this ?

victor90002• 10 years ago

yes, it's blatant sexism and racism.

pweepon• 10 years ago

doesn't this also cross a legal boundary? if you're an independent activist fine, but both race and sex are protected categories in the workplace

laurent123456• 10 years ago

More info there:

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."

ktRolster2• 10 years ago

If you try writing a technical book as a woman, other women will discourage you, saying, "No one will buy a computer book written by a woman."

No joke.

audessuscest13• 10 years ago

That's not true, this book [1] is written by a woman and got a lot of support :

[1] http://www.amazon.fr/CSS-Secrets-Lea-Verou/dp/1449372635

(it's really good btw)

DasIch3• 10 years ago

Feminism wasn't always as intersectional as it is now. For a long time it was dominated by white women who wanted more equality ignoring and sometimes even opposing equality for people and women of color. Suffragettes are a very good example of this problem.

There are a few people now that feel a similar thing is happening in the tech industry right now as well. In that diversity is promoted only in so far as it helps white women but not any other underrepresented groups.

chimeracoder• 10 years ago

For a long time it was dominated by white women who wanted more equality ignoring and sometimes even opposing equality for people and women of color

Some of the early suffragettes - including the first female senator in the US[0] - were not just racist, but outright white supremacists.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Latimer_Felton#Racial_...

makomk2• 10 years ago

Yeah, whereas now it's dominated by white women who get book deals off the back of their supposed anti-racist credentials, whereas the black activists who they got their arguments from (and watered them down, naturally) languish unmentioned in obscurity. There's a a lot of complicated history and anger behind the distrust of white feminist activists, most of which I don't think ever reached the mainstream media in any meaningful form, going right up to probably the present day even.

canistr2• 10 years ago

To further extend from the suffrage movement, it is important to note that minorities (men & women) didn't legally have the right to vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

So Sanchez has a point in claiming that historical precedence has shown that "discrimination" was thought to have ended after the suffrage movement when it wasn't until many years later that minorities were legally secured the right to vote. Hence the hierarchy is that white women are the "next-in-line" when it comes to diversity before any other type of minority group.

tim333• 10 years ago

I'm having a guess that companies decide they want to be 'diverse' and not all white guys and the easiest way to hit the number target is to hire some women. The quota approach seems a bit flawed - they should be mostly colour and sex blind, perhaps dropping the bar a little bit for disadvantaged groups.

Another funny thing is after going on about hiring more dark skinned people a lot of companies are hiring Indians just because they are good at the job (eg Nadella) so they're having to say no not that sort of coloured person, the other lot.

psycr• 10 years ago

The content in this article is disgusting and despicable. I will be moving my code from GitHub as soon as possible.

zongitsrinzler• 10 years ago

Will you be moving to Google Code? /s

greenrd17• 10 years ago

It's not like Github and Google Code are the only two choices. (Of course, Google Code isn't a choice, as it's shutting down.)

mrrrgn• 10 years ago

GitLab is pretty nice and auto-imports from GitHub!

WhyDoiPostHere• 10 years ago

Meh, I think we need to fork github. Gitlab supports the same nonsense github does.

owlee2• 10 years ago

Isn't it though? Nicole Sanchez and Danilo Campos are openly advocating racial hatred while creating a toxic environment. If I worked there I would leave too. Never again, Github. There are too many good alternatives out there for me to support this fallen star.

krisdol• 10 years ago

I wonder which startup will chomp off this new sourcefor-- I mean, Github.

I know, totally different companies at this point, but this shift marks me seeing GH as a completely different entity from what it used to be, and I don't look forward to what kind of company they'll become in the future. Kind of disappointing to read about the changes. None of them sound good.

SOLAR_FIELDS3• 10 years ago

Gitlab has already surpassed Github in terms of functionality. I've been hard selling it at my place of employ but I work at a large company so Github is already solidly entrenched and will be so for at least awhile.

sytse14• 10 years ago

Please let us know if we can help convince your company. Email sales@gitlab.com if you need help convincing the higher ups.

chc4• 10 years ago

I already use GitLab for my personal projects, since I don't care about the networking effects and it's open-source. Since it's still just git, there's nothing stopping people from switching: it has inheritably less lock-in than Twitter or Facebook. GitLab even scrapes issues and other GitHub metainfo if you migrate.

hoorayimhelping• 10 years ago

There is one-click repo import functionality that is great also.

bigbadgoose• 10 years ago

i think that is fine by GH. i mean, it's clear that the $$ is in enterprise, not in selling $9/month plans to hobbyists. someone else will step up to fill the void.

tosseraccount3• 10 years ago

"top lawyer, Julio Avalos, 'has amassed great power' in the company"

It's often not a good sign when the top engineers or star salesmen aren't running a tech company.

SOLAR_FIELDS3• 10 years ago

Hence why the development of GH appears to have stagnated in the last few years. I deal with limitations related to permission handling on a daily basis with GH Enterprise.

DannyBee3• 10 years ago

Great power != running the company. It specifically mentions he's taken over corpdev and some other functions

Also note that Julio is a very technical guy.

Note that what you have seen here is nearly identical to what david drummond did at Google (start as legal, take over some other functions like corpdev) in the early years.

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)

wanstrocity• 10 years ago

Interesting perspective but a lawyer heading corporate development can make sense, having a lawyer with no accounting or finance training or experience is reckless at best but very scary to any potential shareholder. How on earth is Avalos making investment decisions? Avalos is not technical at all, he knows markdown, yoga and how to spin records. The company is falling apart under his watch, case closed. His purview is HR and Social Impact, he is calling the shots.

tosseraccount3• 10 years ago

Who's making the assumptions, counsellor(?) ?

I didn't write the article which is fingering him as the root of the problem.

You say he does "corpdev" and the article clearly points out "development of the corporation" has become a big problem.

I'll take your word on Mr. Drummond, though.

grandalf• 10 years ago

This stuff just happens to companies. The kinds of people who enjoy a meritocratic, decentralized kind of system are less likely to really want to be someone's boss or to have a boss who acts like a boss.

It's unlikely that the kind of multi-tiered management structure most larger companies use is ideal, but it's the best thing management science has found (it's a young field, rooted in the buildout of factories in the industrial age).

xiaoma• 10 years ago

"(The social impact team) are trying to control culture, interviewing and firing. Scary times at the company without a seasoned leader. While their efforts are admirable it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging"

No wonder they got rid of the meritocracy rug.

victor90002• 10 years ago

While their efforts are admirable it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging

How is this even legal? Change 'white' for any other race, and you'd have yourself a workplace discrimination lawsuit.

ericjang• 10 years ago

It definitely doesn't sound right. I'm hoping/wishing that this quote was taken out of context. Can anybody with more insider context elaborate?

I'm very interested in the "internal cultural battle" over diversity issues at Github, because my school's CS dept. is having a lot of dialogue lately with similar rhetorical arguments. Teaching Assistants recently had a mandatory student-run training session that I perceived to be frighteningly one-sided.

Besides the photo, what else did the talk discuss?

greenrd17• 10 years ago

This is very odd. I know universities can be very liberal places, but where did this combination of "mandatory" and "student-run" come from? I'm actually in favour of flattening hierarchies - but not inverting them. Why should students barely out of high school get to dictate the behaviour of teaching assistants who may be up to 40 years their senior? Why should the power relationships be temporarily inverted like that?

yulaow• 10 years ago

Well tumblerinas says you can't be racist against white because patriarchy. /s

No really, just read reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction and realize wtf people are saying these days shielding behind (false)feminist propaganda and some very confused idea of oppression.

ceejayoz2• 10 years ago

No really, just read reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction

Before reading that subreddit, one should probably be aware of Poe's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

dasil0032• 10 years ago

Well to be fair, a white man's opinion on racism or sexism is sort of like a Pacific Islander's idea of how cold it is in Siberia. But on the other hand being ignorant does not make you less-than-human which seems to have become a common opinion in the age of Twitter lynch mobs.

jcoffland• 10 years ago

Well, you have to remember that this statement is the opinion of one anonymous employee. Some of the other more blatant racial statements are much more worrying.

tajen2• 10 years ago

A lawsuit would be nice to confirm that 1. This is not legal, then 2. Confirm that it's the role of GitHub to get rid of such employees, 3. Have it happen regularly at GitHub for both racist and revert-racist attitudes, until clean, 4. and in the IT sector in general.

dominotw2• 10 years ago

Its not, but lawsuits are finally happening

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/yahoo-sued-over-e...

yuhong2• 10 years ago

I dislike anti-discrimination laws in general of course. I think a good compromise would be to limit to manual labor jobs and the like which the laws was originally designed for.

argonaut12• 10 years ago

You have to take the article with a grain of salt. Their anonymous sources are likely the most disgruntled of the disgruntled employees.

anonicode2• 10 years ago

This isn't true of GitHub as a whole, and I'm not sure it is true of any part of GitHub. Their team page shows everybody on staff in the order they were hired. Scroll to the bottom and you will see that there is no shortage of white people being hired. https://github.com/about/team

cookiecaper5• 10 years ago

Is that up to date? They used to introduce each employee on their blog but they hadn't done one for months last time I checked.

amelius• 10 years ago

We need a decentralized (federated) system to store our source repositories.

audessuscest13• 10 years ago

Exactly

hermanbergwerf• 10 years ago

Yeah, that sounds pretty cool.

bitL3• 10 years ago

So where should I move all my repos now?

chinathrow3• 10 years ago

Is anyone else using it?

Yes:

Bitbucket

No:

Self hosted Gitlab instance

reactor2• 10 years ago

https://notabug.org might be a good place, in fact it is.

ryanackley2• 10 years ago

This is standard stuff for a growing company. Right down to the disillusionment of the rank and file. I'm curious if anyone in the HN community has worked for a > 500 person company with a flat structure.

What a lot of commenters seemed to miss is that the remote work policy applies exclusively to senior managers.

Senior managers are no longer allowed to live afar and must report to the office.

These are the people that are usually on a separate bonus plan and receive an order of magnitude more stock options. It seems totally reasonable that they should have to come into the office.

officialchicken• 10 years ago

How does a GPS fence lead to better management/leadership?

Until you realize their whole reason for github existing (and why Linus wrote git in the first place) is to support product development for large remote/distributed/non-centralized teams or projects. It just happens to also work identically for very small teams/projects too.

ryanackley2• 10 years ago

I wasn't commenting on the effectiveness of remote work. My point was that it's reasonable to ask more from senior management.

I'm sensing righteous indignation in your comment and a lot of the other comments. It's missplaced. Remote vs. in-office work is not a right vs. wrong battle. I work 100% remotely and sometimes I wish I was in the office.

Every company, employee, situation, etc. is different. It should be up to Github and its employees to decide what is right for their particular situation.

mcguire• 10 years ago

HN seems to have a white-male persecution complex. No one here is talking about the interesting parts of the story:

"10 or more executives have departed in recent months."

"In addition to previously reported executive departures, Business Insider has learned that Ryan Day, VP of business development; Adam Zimman, senior director of technology partnerships; and Scott Buxton, controller, have all left in the last six months."

"Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers. This has ticked off many people in the old guard."

"...key technical people from the old days like CTO Ted Nyman and third cofounder PJ Hyett are mostly absent from the office and not contributing much technically."

Github is very likely going to be a different company by the end of the year. The question is, is that going to be good or bad for its current leadership position? I'm a pessimist: I'll go with bad.

sportanova• 10 years ago

The most interesting part for me is that the CEO talks to 2 of his VC's every day

Animats• 10 years ago

First Sourceforge went over to the dark side. Next, Github? This is a huge setback for open source.

We need federated open source hosting, where several companies all host the important projects, they all stay in sync, and any client can go to any service for any operation.

audessuscest13• 10 years ago

Maybe because Sourceforge and Github are not open source.

JohnTHaller• 10 years ago

SourceForge is open source. The software underpinning the way the whole setup works is called Allura. Paid developers at SourceForge keep enhancing it. It's hosted by Apache: http://allura.apache.org/

Github is closed source.

yuhong2• 10 years ago

What BIZX did with SourceForge is already promising I think.

fideloper2• 10 years ago

Total conjecture, with a tad of sensationalist on a topic that is otherwise unremarkable: Company grows large, needs to adjust to survive.

The ease in which y'all are swayed into this article's point of view is the true worry here.

fideloper2• 10 years ago

Even the decision to show the image of the scotch collection is subtly (actually, not so subtle) using our ideas of appropriative work culture to lead us down the path of believing how terrible GitHub is.

Restructuring and growing pains are normal.

morgante9• 10 years ago

Serious question: why can't someone make a good Github replacement that is anywhere near feature parity?

I've tried both Bitbucket and GitLab, but their UIs continue to be leagues behind Github. It takes twice as long to do something in them (ex. find and blame a file) than it does with Github.

If they could just get the UI right, I'd migrate in a second. Hosting providers should enforce political opinions (beyond defending free speech).

MatthewMcDonald• 10 years ago

When's the last time you looked at GitLab? I've been using it since last February, and the UI improvements have been pretty dramatic.

audessuscest13• 10 years ago

I agree it's quite good now, and still improving

audessuscest13• 10 years ago

You could help gitlab getting better... It's open source.

err4nt3• 10 years ago

I have checked Gitlab out in the past, and fully intend to mirror my stuff from Github over to there soon.

How do we know that Gitlab, as an open-source project, can't be infected with the same ideological virus? Should I just start by self-hosting Gitlab so I never have to migrate again?

protomyth4• 10 years ago

Serious question: why can't someone make a good Github replacement that is anywhere near feature parity?

Time and Github executed well at the start giving them experience.

I get the feeling that a company starting out now and doing all of their development and management remotely through the site they are building might have a good chance at catching Github in capability. Getting buy-in from customers is the problem.

tracker1• 10 years ago

I think something like gitlab + diaspora might actually have a chance of gaining some mindshare... at least the intent of diaspora, not the execution.

Maybe using something like keybase as an orchestration layer for gitlab either central and/or decentralized?

galaktor• 10 years ago

The 'gogs' project [1] is decent and could use some support.

[1] https://gogs.io/

(not affiliated with gogs, just started toying with it recently)

jobvandervoort3• 10 years ago

ex. find and blame a file

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.

kannonboy4• 10 years ago

I realize it was just an example, but in Bitbucket you can hit 'f' on the file view, type part of a filename, select it and hit blame.

I'm a dev attached to the Bitbucket team and we're pretty proud of our design, and always looking for ways to streamline the UX. Are there any other operations that you find cumbersome or unintuitive?

politician• 10 years ago

Over the past year, we've moved to limit our exposure to GitHub by shifting repos over to Bitbucket, but it looks like that'll have to accelerate that now. The cultural and leadership turmoil described in the article sounds worse then those DDoS attacks last year. How can they stay focused on building a great product?

CryoLogic• 10 years ago

This is just gross. I've spent the last 10 years of my life listening to various minority leaders discriminate against whites with no consequence.

I hope someone stands up for themselves and sues GitHub for this type of behavior. First off, this is very irrational and not based in any facts. Second off, it's blatant racism and sexism.

I will probably migrate my repos to GitLab or even BitBucket shiver. We need to vote with our dollars if that's the only way to get a point across.

mikegioia2• 10 years ago

If you can, avoid Bitbucket. We used them for a few years and it just wasn't good, through and through.

I've been really impressed with Gitlab and we use that as a backup right now but I really think I'll be moving all of our repos over to them. Plus, you can even host your own Gitlab server.

dvirsky2• 10 years ago

I've been using Gitlab for a couple of years, and it's really great. Used a self hosted repo for a team of ~40, and I can't recall any major incidents or any loss of code, ever.

tehbeard• 10 years ago

Why avoid Bitbucket? We switched to it from github at work and haven't encountered any major issues.

s986s• 10 years ago

In defense of github, they can create whatever culture they desire. Same with npm and every other company out there. If they succeed, they will be seen as a company who took ethics and equality very seriously. If they don't theyll be seen as racists and confused leftists.

They are making a big risk with no obvious gain (outside of hypothetical culture and numbers). But this is their risk to make. If it does well they will be considered heroes.

bitL3• 10 years ago

Seems like another instance of "let the nerds build a company and then take over"...

cfcef• 10 years ago

Should this be considered an example of entryism, or just opportunism?

bitL3• 10 years ago

It might be neither if it were the default (uncommunicated) strategy of investors...

eecks• 10 years ago

Just out of interest, what are other examples of this?

qb452• 10 years ago

Not OP, but I think the "let the nerds build" quote may have referred to this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10238132

douche11• 10 years ago

Anybody use Microsoft's Team Services git hosting? Looks like they have unlimited free repos, although I don't know about public.

systemz• 10 years ago

I don't trust Microsoft

brightball• 10 years ago

That's a pretty blistering take. Really wonder if Bitbucket will see an uptick in business from this. I can see something like this influencing their users as well as employees.

melted• 10 years ago

This would be a good lesson for other companies with SJWs on staff: do what _you_ believe is right, don't let them drive the discussion.

cookiecaper5• 10 years ago

Software guys seem really impressionable if the argument is coming from the right sectors. I'd be really interested in learning more about that.

canistr2• 10 years ago

Hold on.

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...

adamsea2• 10 years ago

Agreed.

guelo• 10 years ago

Too late. The pitchforks are out, the angry nerd mob is on a crusade now.

b614• 10 years ago

Thanks, good idea. I read it. To me it seems saturated with the insidious mutant form of racism and sexism that I've been very worried about.

humanrebar8• 10 years ago

Yeah, in her coda, "be honest" and have "uncomfortable conversations" read more like, "let's end the conversation and agree with me".

These comments are a conversation. I'll take it in good faith that people are being honest. But I doubt that Ms. Sanchez has this in mind:

"We refuse to accept the current paradigms that reflect rather than challenge the status quo..."

So you want to have an honest conversation about how you're refusing to accept the status quo?

greenrd17• 10 years ago

Again another diversity piece that claims that trans people are somehow "locked out" of tech. I've seen no evidence for this, and in fact some evidence for the opposite - that they're overrepresented. That makes sense, I would expect trans people to find it easier to work as a programmer than say, a construction worker or any kind of customer-facing job.

But trans people are kind of invisible, both (usually) statistically and (sometimes) passing so well that they are not known to be trans. With other minorities the situation is more clear-cut and obvious. I hope at least no-one will pretend that Asians are not overrepresented in Silicon Valley relative to population.

jcromartie6• 10 years ago

Trans people have contributed some crucial developments in tech. The ARM processor was invented by a trans woman. If trans people were barred from the industry we might not have all these amazing mobile devices right now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson

jcromartie6• 10 years ago

those of us who are non-white, older than 40, disabled, trans, not neurotypical, queer, from low-income backgrounds, and/or a host of other identities will continue to be locked out of tech.

What if those people are just less likely (note: this is about probability, for all I know the best programmer in the world could be a disabled queer 50 year old black person from a poor family) to be competitive among candidates? This basically amounts to hiring as charity.

There is no end to the list of possible "identities". You can ALWAYS slice humanity up into smaller and smaller groups to find some identity that is underrepresented. Everybody is clamoring to grab a niche identity to claim oppression points. This is why identity politics is garbage.

Unless for-profit corporations are actually jobs programs in disguise, there's only one sensible thing to do: value people for what they can do for the company. Period. Though maybe favoring a candidate because they have the right skin color IS actually good for companies? Who knows?

yaakov343• 10 years ago

She certainly doesn't say "only white" and she explicitly excludes white women ("some of the biggest barriers to progress"). You can make convoluted excuses for her, but it's obvious that she sees white people (of whatever gender or socioeconomic status) as essentially enemies, and doesn't want them as allies (let alone is willing to accept some of them as people with different, but valid opinions). It's not acceptable to write "we're not looking for Indian folks to lead this", and it shouldn't be if it's "white".

Also, it's definitely not just her, expressions like this have popped up in a number of mainstream places. I am definitely not imagining the various celebrations of white people "dying off", their share in the population dropping, and what have you.

specialk• 10 years ago

There is a subtle irony in your comment. I think it is interesting to tease out because much of the arguments on diversity come from one's own perspective.

So, if you'll indulge me, your argument is essentially 'us vs them' is a bad thing. About right? If so, I agree. We're not going to solve an exclusionary tech culture by excluding people or creating two sides to a debating war.

But what strikes me is that your comment didn't even reference Nicole Sanchez by name once. Your comment was "she" and "her" time and time again. Did you even notice yourself do it? I somehow doubt it was intentional. But I'm an optimist.

moistgorilla• 10 years ago

Explain to me your subtle irony. Because frankly, it's so subtle it doesn't seem to exist.

ohnomrbill• 10 years ago

Who cares if he didn't mention her by name? I refer to my own mother using pronouns sometimes - it's a feature of the English language. What about using pronouns in place of a proper name is problematic to you?

yaakov343• 10 years ago

I'm happy to indulge, although HN is not the most convenient forum for long discussions.

The reason that I didn't, and don't, want to make this about Nicole Sanchez is that, unfortunately, I don't think that she is unique in holding these views, or acting on them within a mainstream company. In fact, the original comment in this thread quotes an even more explicit statement by someone else in Github (about how you can't "teach empathy to white male middle managers). There is also the matter of the "open code of conduct", subscribed to by Github among others (apparently not so open, since they refused to change it) which up and says that "we will not act on complaints of reverse racism", which rather clearly means racism against white people.

So yes, avoiding mentioning Nicole Sanchez was intentional in the sense that I am not interested in arguing ad hominem. Her name and person don't hold any particular significance for the discussion or for me personally, and I hope that you are mature enough not to retort "well, that's because she is not a white male". I am absolutely certain down to the inner core of my soul that I wouldn't care to weave her name into my comments if it was "Dwight Higginbotham".

almostApatriot12• 10 years ago

I was referring to the first line, "This is not work for white folks to lead."

The language of that is pretty clear to me. Look up the definition of lead.

dang15• 10 years ago

Those conclusions exceed that evidence. This subthread went haywire as a result, so we detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049513 and marked it off-topic.

scrollaway3• 10 years ago

specialk's comment thread went haywire, not this one. yaakov34's comment is a reply to the GP and very much on the same topic. Can you reconsider?

_pmf_• 10 years ago

One person familiar with Wanstrath's relationship with these VCs told us they are "thrilled" with him and with the changes he's been making at the company.

I, too, like watching a nice horror story unfold.

It's led by Nicole Sanchez, vice president of social impact

Does she have more or less to say than the vice president of sanitary hygiene? Maybe the chef of the cantina wants to have a word about the hiring process of technical personnel, too.

dudul• 10 years ago

Since github doesn't want to deal with white male developers, I'm migrating my repos to GitLab. So long octocat.

eikenberry3• 10 years ago

I love how the guy quoted saying that they can't teach white, male middle managers empathy is a white male middle manager. I guess he's saying that he's proud of what he is.

facepalm3• 10 years ago

He could be a Latino, profile says he is from Puerto Rico.

eikenberry3• 10 years ago

Possibly. Though Latino's range from standard white European (usually Spanish or Danish decent) to near full blooded Indian. So it is hard to use it as a differentiating category.

ElComradio9• 10 years ago

Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers. This has ticked off many people in the old guard.

This is almost certainly a mistake, from my experience. Our fairly small team's productivity dropped by I'd estimate 300% even with a much larger team once HQ decided we needed to bring in management layers. I wonder what GH hopes to gain from these changes.

jsksma2• 10 years ago

Bring on the suits! While GH is busy distracting their world-class engineers with B.S. reverse-racism meetings, they will successfully free up their equity pool for more suit hires. That should suck the life out real quick...

Goodbye revolutionary, forward-thinking work culture & hierarchy (meritocracy). You will be gravely missed. Good luck hiring sub-par engineers for the next 2 years and watching your data centers go down on a daily basis.

I guess the only question left is... who are you switching to?

obelisk_• 10 years ago

Well, what are the alternatives?

Hosted: Bitbucket, GitLab

Self-hosted: GitLab, Gogs

None of these come close to GitHub in my experience.

coderjames• 10 years ago

Now you can self-host BitBucket also with BitBucket Server[1]. We're starting a migration to it at my work right now.

[1] https://www.atlassian.com/software/bitbucket/download

acidburnNSA• 10 years ago

We've been using self-hosted Phabricator at work for building nuclear reactor design software and it has been pretty darn amazing. It's quite easy to get going and has been very low-maintenance.

http://phabricator.org/

golergka• 10 years ago

At the moment.

Destroying company culture takes some time.

cheez• 10 years ago

I would suggest Atlassian. I've met both founders professionally and at least one of the duo is not weak enough to let this happen to his company. If even they capitulate, then you're fucked.

TranquilMarmot• 10 years ago

Haven't seen anybody mention Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services[1]... private repos, reasonably priced for teams, and some pretty sweet extra tools and integration into other services. I've used it for a few projects and prefer some parts of it to github. You don't have to use Visual Studio itself or, really, ANY other Microsoft tools.

[1] https://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-team-ser...

clinta• 10 years ago

I use GitLab at work and I think the only thing GitLab is lacking is the community. What do you find lacking in GitLab?

Kequc• 10 years ago

I have just switched to Bitbucket, since in my experience anything feminists touch turns to shit shortly thereafter.

I get free unlimited private repositories and everything works. It's blazingly fast. I absolutely love it, not a single issue so far.

Should have switched sooner.

brandoncordell• 10 years ago

Since our team is small and will remain small for a while we're going to run Bitbucket on one of our private servers. For the first 10 users it's only $10 (one-time payment).

TACIXAT• 10 years ago

I activated my student account (was formerly paying) and voiced my disapproval in the comment section of that form. I'm really happy with GitLab at work though, so I will be switching to that.

reitanqild8• 10 years ago

Generally, - use the contact form, esp if you have a paid account.

jpeg_hero• 10 years ago

I am a white customer.

Am I welcome at Github???

jcromartie6• 10 years ago

How many more years before all of these orgs finally come to the realization that making hiring decisions based on skin color or genitals isn't a winning strategy?

gedy• 10 years ago

The irony is remote workers are one of the best ways to remove much the physical power politics due to human biology. Size, body language, sexual attraction, etc.

timrpeterson• 10 years ago

Valuable comment. Also, gender and ethnicity get neutralized when remote employees have text-based conversation, allowing your words to be the focus as they should.

greenrd17• 10 years ago

Possibly, but only if people actively choose usernames that remove hints of such things, avoid disclosing their ethnicity or gender, avoid using stereotypical male or female communication patterns... it's a rather unstable equilibrium.

uptownJimmy• 10 years ago

Fantastic point. In a sea of not-fantastic points.

jgalt2122• 10 years ago

When this bubble pops, no one is gonna care about diversity in tech. It's only because there's big money do people care about diversity.

jgalt2122• 10 years ago

Some of these folks may be hanging out until GitHub offers some kind of "liquidity event" — a way for longtime employees or investors to sell some of their shares — which one person believes could take place soon. (A GitHub spokesperson refused comment on that.)

This event is not likely to come any time soon because Andreessen Horowitz bid the price up so high.

elcapitan• 10 years ago

Can we have a seal for services and software that are not run by the SJW crowd? That would be helpful. No racist "Code of Conduct"? Check.

greenrd17• 10 years ago

Codes of conduct generally act to protect people from racist and sexual harassment, by prohibiting and deterring it. Name one example of racist harassment against white people that a code of conduct hasn't prevented.

tumbleweeds

OJFord2• 10 years ago

If they pursue this genuinely, they'll be perpetually flip-flopping between states - it won't take long under this leadership for the hard-done-by minority to change to white/male, and then 'reverse sex/racism' would be sex/racism towards non-white/female...

marshray• 10 years ago

Is it ever a good idea to mix shipping products with social activism?

What are some examples where this has ever gone well?

StevePerkins5• 10 years ago

Some random thoughts and observations after reading this thread:

[1] I'm interested in the differences between reactions to this, versus Brendan Eich's gay marriage scandal at Mozilla a couple of years ago.

Don't get me wrong... I supported marriage equality then, and I do not support the worst of the statements called out in this story now. However, there are rational arguments that the HN community overreacted in BOTH cases. You have to assume that self-interest factors into the difference.

[2] Why are people so reluctant to move from GitHub to Bitbucket or GitLab? I've done work with all three, and personally haven't found any of them to be significantly more or less reliable than the others (i.e. they ALL go down occasionally). GitLab's interface is virtually on-par with GitHub at this point, and frankly Bitbucket is far superior if you're using JIRA.

Current architecture trends are moving toward smaller services, with a proliferating number of repositories. So GitHub's pricing model, in which you're charged by the number of repos, is becoming less competitive every day against Bitbucket and GitLab charging per user. I sometimes wonder how many HN people do actual work on teams of significant size, and how many are college students or micro-startup founders who don't really pay much for tooling anyway? GitHub's pricing model makes NO sense for established companies with lots of projects, and it seems weird that so few people here bring this up.

noobermin• 10 years ago

At least for [2], I'd suggest the community around Github is the reason many are reluctant to leave.

StevePerkins5• 10 years ago

That's exactly my point in wondering about the ratio of students to established company professionals.

For every company I've ever worked at, the "community" or "network effect" of a source control vendor is meaningless. Because the repos are all private. Sure, the company might have SOME open source stuff mirrored on GitHub for publicity purposes. But the real bread-and-butter daily WORK that pays the bills takes place in private repos. In most cases, private repos that are hosted on-prem rather than in the cloud.

Sure, GitHub and its "network effect" matters for open source projects, and for resume-fodder side projects we tinker with as individuals. But all of that is free anyway. What about the scenarios where you'd have to pay GitHub a lot of money? How many vocal people on HN are actually IN that scenario?

davesque3• 10 years ago

Agreed about Bitbucket. I've used it for a long time and haven't found it to be substantively different from GitHub in either functionality or reliability. The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular.

bybjorn• 10 years ago

bitbucket for private repos, github for public. No downside there :-)

StevePerkins5• 10 years ago

Popularity is certainly important for open source stuff, and personal code samples that you put online for "resume" purposes. Hell, for that use case you might as well be posting your code on LinkedIn.

But for the use cases in which people actually pay money (i.e. private repos that you don't WANT outsiders to access), then how is lack of popular visibility a downside?

chrisan• 10 years ago

The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular.

Has anyone really thought of this? Do people just happen on to a github project because "it is on github" or because someone linked their work and people liked it and wanted to contribute?

Would React, D3, Rails, Bootstrap etc not get what they do now simply because "oh I don't have a bitbucket account, I'm not going to bother"

To me at least this kind of argument (I hear a lot of, nothing personal davesque!) is along the lines of "everybody is on MySpace"

codyps• 10 years ago

I was interested in your comparison in #1, wrt "HN community overreacted".

I've been searching through old HN stories about Eich, but can't seem to find any where the comments generally supported firing him due to supporting Prop 8 (banning gay marriage).

Is there a particular thread you had in mind? Or are you stating the overreaction was being angry that he might have been fired over that support?

reitanqild8• 10 years ago

I haven't bookmarked those threads but I'm certain I saw a lot of comments here saying things along the lines of "the right to free speak only protects you against the government", strongly implying that what happened to him was fair game because it wasn't the government who staged it.

StevePerkins5• 10 years ago

I don't have a link, and I'll admit that this is subjective and anecdotal.

I just recall there being a LOT of people who found it perfectly reasonable to oust somebody for long-ago political donations, despite there being no indication that he ever actually discriminated against anyone at Mozilla.

Yeah, you can make arguments that the mere existence of a such past donation creates a symbolically hostile environment, etc. But those arguments seemed pretty thin to me. At the time Eich made that donation, every major Democratic presidential candidate (including Clinton and Obama) were ALSO publicly opposed to marriage equality. So it seemed like extreme mental gymnastics to put a "hate speech" label on Eich.

In the GitHub story today, if you were feeling charitable then you could likewise apply some positive spin too. There IS some context to those slideshow bullet-points and that tweet, which has been buried under the outrage. Once again, I disagree with these messages even when that context is considered. But my point is that it seemed like there were a lot more people willing to do mental gymnastics in the Eich case than in this one.

sauere2• 10 years ago

It is not about the software.

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.

Lazare3• 10 years ago

Do you think a link to a Bitbucket profile would be ignored?

morgante9• 10 years ago

It is not about the software.

For me, it emphatically is about the software.

Even for totally private repos, where popularity is not a factor, I continue to turn to Github because the UIs for both Bitbucket and GitLab continue to stand in the way of me easily getting shit done.

jcromartie6• 10 years ago

If I want to see someone's work, and they provide a URL, I'm interested in the content, not the identity of the service it's hosted on. Gee, this sounds familiar...

adriand2• 10 years ago

GitHub's pricing model makes NO sense for established companies with lots of projects

Totally agree with this assessment. When we were with Github, we actually ended up on a custom plan, negotiated with them directly, because we had too many projects to fit within their normal pricing structure. We eventually moved to Bitbucket two or three years ago and it's far more cost-effective for us. At this point we have 500+ projects on Bitbucket, and we're a company of only 20 people.

douche11• 10 years ago

What do you do with that many different projects? Genuinely curious.

aws_ls• 10 years ago

Sometime back when I moved from svn to git. My default choice was Github. But their pricing was a hindrance. I guess, its more suited for US (or countries with value-equivalence with USD). 7 USD per user, did not make any sense to me, from India. So I went with AWS CodeCommit. And my experience has been good. Finally how bad can any service which uses Git (done by Linus Torvalds) can be?

I also did not understand the big hoopla. If you can open source your project, then its good for you (free!). But they depend on enterprise and potentially other businesses with private code. But then it really does not make as much sense - as in whats the real gain - most of the use cases are from command line doing git [clone/pull/push].

jhou2• 10 years ago

This articl was a bit of a hit job. GitHub is changing as revenue and staff increase. That makes sense. There are always growing pains. A flat, so-called meritocratic structure only works in a few situations. GitHub makes the majority of its revenue from enterprise. It only makes sense to mirror the structure of your most valued customers. A VP of important corporate enterprise customer expects to talk to another VP at GitHub to get things done.

I am not sure there are many success stories for increasing diversity in any industry. There are minor improvements to diversity but not much. At most companies I've worked for, the majority of the HR department were white female and the majority of engineering department were male. It was a very clean separation. I've always found that a bit odd in terms of diversity.

I think it's unfair to class everyone with white skin as "white", or darker skin as black or south asian or middle eastern. There is so much diversity in culture and backgrounds that stretch far beyond skin color. Can we stop classifying people based on skin color and just build great software to make the world a better place?

ryan-allen• 10 years ago

The irony is corporate sales is even less diverse than tech. Bring back the whiskey, the strippers, the boozy sales lunches, the white guys in suits.

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.

popmystack• 10 years ago

Can you people please not pollute this board with your over the top non-sense?

imfine-ok• 10 years ago

This has nothing to do with growth or even sexism/racism. This is a political takeover and shakedown of a valueable company. Moving out of a meritocracy to a hierarchy like this is to move away from performance based influence to political based influence.

The SJWs behind this just want money and they are importing their people into the company to increase their control. The use of discrimination is part of the mechanism to increase their numbers. Once they get a lot of people below them, they'll demand larger and larger paychecks and stock options. That's it, it's a fairly simple plan. Find a valuable company and raid it. All this inclusion/sexism talk is just dressing. Even githubs ceo's motivation is pretty clear. If he grows the org, he'll argue that he deserves more money because he's managing more people. Then when he exits he can position himself as the manager of a much larger org of thousands instead of this insanely profitable 70 person org.

dang15• 10 years ago

We've banned this account for crossing into personal attack. There are a lot of new accounts in this thread commenting in a way that pushes the limits of HN's rules, but given that it's a highly charged topic, we've cut most of them some slack. But stuff like the end of this one is not allowed.

verylongaccount3• 10 years ago

It seems that a large number of posters believe that discriminating against white men is okay because they enjoy "white privilege", whatever that is. Either you believe it is okay to discriminate against someone on the basis of their skin color or you don't. Attempts to redefine the word notwithstanding, those who subscribe to the former philosophy are known as racists.

It is hard to distinguish the anti-white vitriol I see on this page from the antisemitism of yesteryear. It was often said that Jews were over-represented in various occupations not because their industriousness, intelligence or other virtues, but because of devious trickery (they plot together to deprive others of opportunities). I fail to see how the arguments regarding white men are any different.

exolymph4• 10 years ago

I think you're misunderstanding the argument people make about the concept of privilege. Nothing about it is intentional in the standard sense. It's more that people behave to benefit themselves -- which is natural and fine -- and power has slowly accrued over time to white men more than to other types of people. The argument is not that white men are malicious, but that their traits are implicitly favored and promoted because we tend to gravitate toward and feel more comfortable around people who are similar to ourselves. Ergo, white men in power enable other white men to gain more power.

verylongaccount3• 10 years ago

I understand perfectly. This is precisely what was (and is still to an extent) said of Jews.

bmh_ca4• 10 years ago

Either you believe it is okay to discriminate against someone on the basis of their skin color or you don't.

In most anti-discrimination policy discussions, the question being asked is not what colour ones skin is. It is whether the person belongs to an identifiable group that has suffered systemic prejudice.

The ordinary intention of anti-discrimination is to rectify past and prevent future wrongs, and in particular to break cycles of stereotype, poverty, and crime.

Colour of skin is incidental to the formula, being an identifiable group. The primary consideration for preferential bias is belonging to a group that has suffered prejudice.

One could as readily substitute for skin colour those discriminations founded upon language, hair colour, sexual orientation, height, and body shape, among many others. The factor itself is not an entitlement to preference; it is the history of prejudice and prospect of systemic improvement that determines suitability for discrimination.

The argument that white people are being discriminated against based on a formula that rectifies past wrongs and undoes future ones belies a misunderstanding of the purpose, benefit, and impact. One may only come to this conclusion by discounting those past and future wrongs that have been committed and will continue to be committed by a system with inherent biases.

striking7• 10 years ago

The argument that white people are being discriminated against based on a formula that rectifies past wrongs and undoes future ones belies a misunderstanding of the purpose, benefit, and impact.

That's perfectly absurd. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination.

How do we measure wrongs? How do we "undo future wrongs"?

I can't. Totally cannot. 100% can't deal with your argument.

malandrew33• 10 years ago

So you're telling me that it's okay to tell someone, X, from group A that they are being disadvantaged in favor of someone else, Y, from group B because Y belongs to group B and because years ago someone, M, from group A unrelated to X disadvantaged someone, N, from group B unrelated to Y. How is this right? X isn't responsible for any wrongdoing committed by M or others like M, so why should X suffer the consequences?

It's fine to rectify past wrongs when X is responsible for the past wrongs, but guilt by identity association with M is absurd. I'm mixed-race mostly caucasian that immigrated to the US from South America in the 1980s but look vanilla white to most. Please explain to me what past wrong me and others like me are guilty of here?

I am aware and fully understand the purpose and anticipated benefit/impact. A question worth asking is if those that propose a "formula that rectifies past wrongs and undoes futures ones" understand how that formula will produce present wrongs and foster unintended future ones? After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions[0]. You're merely converting one system with inherent biases for another with inherent biases. That is a non-solution the problem[1] you purport to fix.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_road_to_hell_is_paved_with...

[1] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=problem

rotw5• 10 years ago

believe that discriminating against white men is okay because they enjoy "white privilege", whatever that is
It is hard to distinguish the anti-white vitriol I see on this page from the antisemitism of yesteryear. It was often said that Jews were over-represented in various occupations not because their industriousness, intelligence or other virtues, but because of devious trickery (they plot together to deprive others of opportunities). I fail to see how the arguments regarding white men are any different.

It's because you don't even make an attempt to understand the terms of the debate. White privilege is a structural, societal-level advantage that white people have stemming from centuries of economic and cultural disenfranchisement of ethnic minorities, that while you personally can't change, can be worked towards overcoming it. Educate yourself before you throw Godwins around.

https://library.gv.com/unconscious-bias-at-work-22e698e9b2d#...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...

striking7• 10 years ago

Educate yourself before you throw Godwins around.

He's not invoking Hitler or Nazism, he's making a comparison between white privilege and anti-semitism. It's pertinent because of whites and Jews being races; it's not just a random invocation of whatever to win an argument. Not all anti-semites are Nazis. There are plenty of otherwise normal people who just randomly hate Jews for literally no reason.

There's a point there, and I think you missed it. (Please note I am not arguing for or against that point, just that you may have missed it.)

I also appreciate the "Educate yourself" thought-terminating cliche. It's an interesting one.

If you call an argument Godwinesque but turn out to be wrong, who has lost the argument?

Globrazu2• 10 years ago

Who exactly are you reffering to when you talk about "white people"? Anglo-Saxons/Saxons? Franks/Gauls? Celts? Slavs? Greco-Romans? Nordic people?

You're talking and generalizing an awful lot of people.

striking7• 10 years ago

It wasn't uncommon to hear in Eastern Europe a short while ago that "Jews control the world" and that's why we should take their power from them. Clearly absurd, but that's how people felt. (And I'm not making points about the Nazis, I'm making points about Poland in 1989 during the fall of Communism.)

But now we hear "white men control the world," and are expected to take their power away.

Just because they're similar doesn't mean they're the same, I realize. But we should at least be self-aware about that similarity, because it means something.

verylongaccount3• 10 years ago

It seems that many posters here believe that it is okay to discriminate against white men because they enjoy "white privilege," whatever that is. There are those who believe that it is okay to discriminate on the basis of skin color and those who do not. The former are called racists, attempts to redefine the term notwithstanding.

What I find most interesting is that the comments about white men are roughly equivalent to commonly heard antisemitic statements. It is often said that Jews are over represented in various occupations not because of any virtue on their part, but rather because of devious trickery. I don't see much distinction between such sentiments and those being expressed here.

greenrd17• 10 years ago

The claim is not that white people are overrepresented because of devious trickery, but because white people are usually doing the hiring and they are often biased, consciously or unconsciously, against non-white people, and women.

It's not something that's exclusive to white people, by the way. Racial and religious nepotism should be resisted wherever and whenever it occurs, in favour of meritocracy.

gyardley2• 10 years ago

What an utter mess of a thread.

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.

defen• 10 years ago

If their policies end up damaging the organization, that's also awesome - because it'll become evident they're bad policies, and companies will stop implementing them.

I'm a bit more cynical - if it fails, I suspect the failure will be blamed on "wreckers".

gyardley2• 10 years ago

Well, sure, and if it succeeds, some people will claim the success was in spite of the policies. Ideologues gotta ideologue, and all that. But that doesn't mean we can't learn something useful - since those 'wrecker'-style arguments give off the political equivalent of code smell.

chippy• 10 years ago

I'm inclined to agree. I wonder, however, about the huge amount of VC money and the pressures of money and capitalism. I wouldn't be surprised if these experiments are more lip service than actual concrete restructuring given that people in positions of power tend to want to protect their power bases, and investors tend to want to protect their investments.

Edits - I am not losing anything by them changing things. I have not invested any money in them, I use their service though, and pay for a pro account. I am curious to see what happens and am optimistic about humans but pessimistic about VC money!

ianwalter• 10 years ago

Seriously? You guys are complaining that they are saying that white people shouldn't lead their diversity initiative? Just take a minute and think about why they've decided there should be a diversity initiative in the first place.

scoot• 10 years ago

Meanwhile, github has quietly dropped the "owner" / "collaborator" tag for contributors to open source projects.

Either you're part of an org, or you're not.

Not too many OS projects have their own org, and commercial entities will be reluctant to add non-employees to their org, in order to distinguish contributors from employees.

Users of OS projects now have now easy way to tell if they're interacting with a collaborator.

Total shambles.

seivan2• 10 years ago

You might be upset by some quotes here. It's important to not to let that take over you. You end up becoming exactly like the things that bother you. Don't get bothered over the people in the article expressing their opinions. It's the only way to live. Trust me, it takes over.

".. that is life. I cannot change them overnight. I think society, their own experiences, their own reading, their own observations, will bring about the change despite their innate biases."

proc016• 10 years ago

I would expect more from a tech company that is supposed to be by programmers for programmers.

Programmers are abstract thinkers, and it's disgusting to see them lower themselves and adopt the semantics and memes of obvious cultural constructs like race. What does it even mean to be "white"? Who exactly are they talking about and what is it about this group of people that is so bad? There's no need to bring in this gross oversimplification of culture and biology into professional talks. If they're seeing some kind of pattern within their company that correlates with some ethnicity or culture, it's just a coincidence! Start hiring less asshole managers! Who cares what color they are?

American culture is such a bummer when it comes to how it shoves people into categories. We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT. There is simply no excuse at all to mention it. People CANNOT be categorized based on skin color at all, AT ALL. People cannot be categorized based on culture either. Virtually everyone is multi-ethnic and multi-racial at some level. To identify even yourself as belonging to a distinct "color" is just a fabrication of American culture that is an unfortunate outcome of the history in this country.

The only way forward is to forget about categorizing people, and just speak to their qualities -> not "white managers are assholes", instead "asshole managers are assholes".

anotherc3• 10 years ago

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.

You have to be joking. This is sarcasm, right?

blueflow3• 10 years ago

From my view, race seems arbitrary. You could also split people into blue-eyed and brown-eyed or something. It still doesn't say anything about that person. Its just that many normal persons act like its a huge difference.

reitanqild8• 10 years ago

Why would it be? Are things really so much different where you live as compared to western Europe?

proc016• 10 years ago

Nope. But I don't know what you're getting at.

As a programmer, I just care that you write good code. In fact, I might as well be interacting with your mind across the internet, and don't even have to look at you in the face, and we will be collaborating just fine.

Why does it matter for someone who deals with 0's and 1's what the color of the skin of your coworker is? Once again, if you're a programmer and you're swimming in abstractions and code, my coworker might as well be a robot, and I could give two shits.

dracht3• 10 years ago

There is a lot of overlap between the HN user base and the delusional SJW ilk that is running Github into the ground. People here are defending the blatantly racist sentiments mentioned in the article. They are performing some serious mental gymnastics to both hold the belief that race is an irrelevant social construct and that too many people of one race (cough whiteys cough) in one place is bad.

exolymph4• 10 years ago

"We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT." We live in a world where this is not remotely possible. Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism.

api_or_ipa• 10 years ago

When is the disease distinct from the cure? At a certain point, we need to move forward and strive towards a harmonious ideal. Otherwise we delay true equality.

alphapapa6• 10 years ago

Why? Let me apply the principle you claim to be the case in a different, ahistorical way:

"'We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about denigrating and enslaving blacks, and NOT MENTION IT.' We live in a world where this is not remotely possible. Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism." --some Southern slave owner, 1859

The same could be applied to historical anti-semitic movements, anti-suffrage groups--anti-anything groups, really.

It can be boiled down to: "We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about treating other people badly because of their appearance or where they are from, and NOT MENTION IT," and people like you saying, "That's impossible. We will always be just as hateful and prejudiced as the worst of us are now. You shouldn't even suggest that it's possible to make any progress in human society."

It boggles my mind that you could even think this way. But, then, people thinking and acting in unreasonable ways is the root of these problems.

b614• 10 years ago

But do you agree that the goal should be, more or less, to create a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes matter as little as, say, eye color does today?

If so, what is the plan to achieve that goal? Don't we achieve it by actually acting that way as much as possible? That's what makes sense to me.

Suppose we, in the name of equality or diversity or fairness, actually elevate the importance of bodily attributes like ethnicity and sex, deliberately considering them during hiring, and build that practice into our culture. Having practiced doing it wrong for however many years, will we someday decide it isn't needed anymore and get rid of it?

jefurii• 10 years ago

So I shouldn't celebrate the interesting and cool things about other peoples' cultures (and my own)? That's sad.

justinclift2• 10 years ago

Just to point out... the US is the western only country on the planet which cares, or even mentions, people's skin colour/race AT ALL.

Literally every other western country calls people... people. A man is "a man" not "a green/blue/pink/red/etc man". A women is "a women" not "a green/blue/pink/red/etc woman".

Continuously giving skin colour qualifiers in descriptions of people... is (to non-US people) bizarre, and seems to be a large part of the language used to keep racism alive in the US.

That's as far as I've been able to tell so far anyway. :(

Jedd3• 10 years ago

  > "We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and
  > NOT MENTION IT." We live in a world where this is not remotely possible.
  > Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism.

This saddens me.

I'm somewhat curious on knowing some other data points on your spectrum of (bad) idealism..

But the 'not remotely possible' claim sounds like you've decided for all of us that we're incapable of ever thinking of skin colour in the future the same way we think of, say, hair colour today.

I suspect your position is based upon your current cultural surroundings, in which case I'd prescribe travel. Lots of it.

proc016• 10 years ago

I agree it may be idealistic, especially because part of the problem is people thinking themselves into a category, and adopting it as an identity. It is however the right direction, because all this "racial" problems are caused by categorization of people in the first place.

jp_sc• 10 years ago

We live in a world where this is not remotely possible

No, you live in a COUNTRY where that seems not remotely possible.

aikah• 10 years ago

It has more to do with the current cultural war in USA than anything else. Like all wars it's about power, it's a power grab.

"Reverse-racism" is now an acceptable ideology in the media and in the tech community, and all the social-studies crowd now get jobs as "diversity officers" in Tech companies. It isn't going to end well for some companies, that might get "disrupted" from the inside because of people pushing politics before anything else.

wildmusings8• 10 years ago

It's a protection racket. If you don't have these worthless diversity officers, if you don't kiss Jesse Jackson's ass when he accuses you of racism, they drag you through the media with the worst implications and associations put next to your name.

audessuscest13• 10 years ago

Looks like they trade "structure based purely on meritocracy" by "promote diversity".

I don't see how this can go well. Meritocracy is important among dev and open source. And they don't care about political diversity. I can only imagine this new "culture of fear" where you can't hire white people (even woman).

Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender.

Anyway, looks like a good time to switch from github to open source solutions.

reitanqild8• 10 years ago

Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender.

Exactly. The issue should not be how many percent are what "race", but if companies are dumb enough to leave good programmers, managers etc waiting tables, manning the help desk etc because they doesn't fit our stereotypes.

Or: If if companies does spectacularly bad hires because of political correctness.

DanBC3• 10 years ago

Meritocracy

Meritocracy is a lie. Look how broken interview processes are - definitely not meritocratic. Meritocracy is a rationalisation for "I hire people I like so long as they don't say anything idiotic during the interview". You'd get better results from having some kind of bar that candidates have to meet and then just selecting one at random and giving that person the job.

rotw5• 10 years ago

The entire point of diversity initiatives is that the meritocracy in theory doest not translate into a meritocracy in practice, due to unconscious bias: https://library.gv.com/unconscious-bias-at-work-22e698e9b2d#... as well as other factors.

You're totally right that skills and experiences should be the only way to choose, but right now, tech firms in this society are fundamentally incapable of actually implementing that without diversity initiatives. True meritocracy can only come through promoting diversity.

tootie• 10 years ago

My reading is that the reorg and push for diversity are two different things.

NotSammyHagar• 10 years ago

I didn't get this 'we are afraid and only want to hire non-whites' from the article. Hiring a diverse workforce is a good good thing, generally. Why do you think that should mean we don't hire white people? Every tech company that isn't going out of business in the world has open headcount, and they'd like to hire all capable people.

wildmusings8• 10 years ago

I think we can both acknowledge race, which often goes hand-in-hand with different cultures, and treat people as individual human beings. You can make all sorts of statistical inferences based on race, but they're not really useful when you're dealing with individual people. There's so much individual variation, that a judgment based on race is silly.

Let's treat people as individuals, not as faceless members of some caste.

lerpa3• 10 years ago

Best comment here.

Khaine4• 10 years ago

Finally some common sense.

All people should be treated with respect.

proc016• 10 years ago

This definitely, in addition to the fact that, at least in the U.S., we incorrectly correlate certain physical traits as markers for a certain sub-culture. This is why it's an inaccurate categorization, and by continuously bringing it up in professional settings in the name of "fixing the problem", we're simply persisting the mistake that allows racists to have a framework to continue causing problems.

dragonshed• 10 years ago

Not talking or thinking about race, or any other marginalization category, does absolutely nothing to help.

"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.

b614• 10 years ago

Not talking or thinking about race ... does absolutely nothing to help.

But in the better future world we're trying to create where there is much less discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or sex or other body attributes, isn't that exactly what we'd be doing, not talking or thinking about race because it just isn't important to us? Isn't not talking or thinking about race exactly what we should be doing, as much as possible?

proc016• 10 years ago

Well, first, this talk is mostly about gender, which is completely different than race.

If you think about what race really is, it's not what it seems (unlike sex and gender, which have not only a more consistent historical difference, and a stronger biological one as well). Race is more cultural than anything else.

Sure it starts with physical traits, but whether or not you're black, white, or asian, does not depend on your biology. You're actually not born that way (even if the labels make it seem like you belong to a certain geographical location, they're just labels), and the proof is people who are of mixed race.

People who are half black, half white, from my experience, they choose which culture to belong to, and we all confuse it with their race. Obama is a great example. People saying he's our "black" president. What? What does that really mean? He's clearly half white, half black, so why is he a "black president"? That statement is inaccurate, and people should always say, he's our first "half black, half white, president". So what's going on there? People just categorize themselves, and it's just a matter of the stories and memes they adopt from a set of some kind of cultural background. In other words, it's all made up. Half-white, half-black people often choose to be black because they think black is cool. They adopt that culture and roll with it.

So in short, if people keep categorizing themselves, there's no way out of this. Categorization will lead to division among people. "Black" people are just Americans with a different sub-culture, that's it. "Black" people are just as racially diverse among themselves as they are in comparison to "white" people. There are "blacks" from east Africa, west Africa, and Saudi Arabia. Every "black" group is culturally and ethnically different. Why group them?

I'll recognize there is a history to be dealt with here. And that is that we've inherited inequality that is for the most part based on skin color (because that's how our ignorant ancestors decided to categorize people), so that division of inequality still lingers. But there is a case for both repairing the damage, while at the same time getting everyone to forget there is any kind of racial categorization. There is only sub-cultures within American culture.

zzzeek2• 10 years ago

We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT. There is simply no excuse at all to mention it.

So when Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about his experience constantly being treated as a shoplifter solely based on his race [1], there's "simply no excuse at all"? I'd counter there's simply no excuse at all to attempt silencing necessary discussion about ongoing mass injustice.

[1] http://parade.com/250591/lynnsherr/cosmos-neil-degrasse-tyso...

arama471• 10 years ago

You misinterpret proc0's comment: they are saying there is no excuse to treat Neil deGrasse Tyson as a shoplifter because of his race, that there is no excuse to ever decide that all people of a certain race or any category are all something or share something (in their comment "assholes" in yours "shoplifting").

Basically racism (using this definition: [1]) is never OK, regardless to which race and with which attributes.

[1] https://www.google.ca/search?btnG=1&pws=0&q=define+racism&gw...

DrScump2• 10 years ago

Well, there are those claims of unwarranted scrutiny and his assumptions that they were race-based... and then there are his bogus claims about what was said about him in the media and before Congress, which have been documented.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/09/15/did-neil-degrasse-tyson-...

mc324• 10 years ago

France takes this stance on matters of race. So much so any numbers regarding race in France are simply estimates because there are no official numbers.

In practice so far, it hasn't fared any better, but probably not worse either.

Like in the U.S., one of the biggest hindrances or obstacles to success is segregation (forced or by choice). Wanting success essentially entails assuming the culture and practices of the successful, but for some fraction of people, being malleable and becoming like the mainstream is antithetical as it's interpreted as "giving in" to the larger culture, while simultaneously wanting to be part of the larger culture and to be accepted by the larger culture. So there is that ambivalence.

Personally, if I wanted to succeed in China or Mexico, I'm willing to bet I'd improve my chances by adopting local customs, manners and attitudes, rather than being steadfast about my own. [it's somewhat peculiar some Americans are sheepish about being "too American" while abroad but simultaneously believe that integration into the mainstream isn't all that necessary. It tells me that their brain tells them one thing, but in practice, when given the opportunity, try to be like Romans while in Rome]

Personally, I think people put too much stock in group identity over say, personal identity. But you know, let people do as they wish.

argonaut12• 10 years ago

Do you look non-Asian? If you do, you will never be fully accepted in Chinese society, as I've heard from a few white people that have lived in China. Even if you marry and settle down there and raise kids.

mikerichards2• 10 years ago

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.

proc016• 10 years ago

Yes, I'm mostly a liberal, but I agree that it fails completely to see certain truths if the truth even remotely violate political correctness.

dang15• 10 years ago

Please don't post generically ideological comments like this. The thread is bad enough even without going there.

Lazare3• 10 years ago

People CANNOT be categorized based on skin color at all, AT ALL.

People are categorized in that manner every day. Perhaps you're trying to say that's regrettable and inaccurate?

To identify even yourself as belonging to a distinct "color" is just a fabrication of American culture

Certainly, but it's a culture which still exists. It doesn't go away just because you announce that it's illogical and unfortunate. I think you may be falling prey to the is-ought problem[1].

(To be clear, I'm not expressing a view on Github's actions, but I think it's somewhat naive to suggest that there aren't real problems out there.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

proc016• 10 years ago

Yes, I'm saying it's a wrong categorization, and inaccurate. People inaccurately categorize themselves as well. It would be more accurate to not refer to those categories as race, but as sub-cultures, because then it becomes something that isn't inherent to someone's identity. People of mixed race, for example, half "black", half "white", will often choose to be "black", and identify as such, when in fact, their race is a mix, yet they see themselves as "black". This is clear proof it's all fabricated, but most people can't see this.

addicted• 10 years ago

The race aspect is basically a footnote in the article regarding the exodus (the complaints largely center around a change in leadership and the company's hierarchical structure).

Yet a comment about the race aspects is the top comment here.

Your complaints have already been addressed many many times in academic literature and popular media. But I have to say, there is something amazing about reading someone comment that we should not be talking about race. I guess the current alternative, where we don't talk about it, but people both consciously and subconsciously continue discriminating by race seems far more palatable to you.

proc016• 10 years ago

It was a bullet point in the company's slide presentation that "white women" were the problem. That's not just a minor detail, and I would be outraged if it were my company, even though I'm not white or female.

raquo3• 10 years ago

No thanks.

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.

proc016• 10 years ago

The moment you mention race, you are fighting the racist's battle. Instead if you avoid it, you are side-stepping and leaving the racists on their own ground, where they are just insane and/or ignorant people. History gave us inaccurate representations of people, and racists use these to spew their hatred. Why promote the tool and framework for racists to continue using?

jccalhoun2• 10 years ago

I don't think there is anything wrong with thinking about race or identifying as one thing or another. I think the problem is when we start thinking what we identify as is better than what others identify as.

Yes race is a social construct but so are lots and lots of things that we talk about all the time and don't see to have problems with.

awakeasleep• 10 years ago

I think you're seeing the tail wag the dog here.

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.

threatofrain2• 10 years ago

I think it's a weakness to omit thought and speech of outward appearance.

Race for some is more than outward appearance. It's a line of community strategy. It's a shared language. It's shared food. Shared customs. Shared values. There's something beautiful and treacherous there.

Race as a social reality exists whether we talk about or it not. Omitting speech destroys a valuable technique for counterbalancing instinct. Omitting thought disarms people from contemplating social reality.

malandrew33• 10 years ago

But why? You can have a shared language, shared food, shared customs and shared values despite race. Brazil is exemplary in this regard, where most of the country is mixed race and everyone is having sex with everyone else despite race. A former co-worker of mine, Wesley poignantly lamented this when he was in the US, when people ask questions like "What are you, Japanese, Chinese, Korean or something else?" and he was like "Huh? None of those. I'm Brazilian."

xtracto4• 10 years ago

American culture is such a bummer when it comes to how it shoves people into categories. We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about race, and NOT MENTION IT.

This is something that had wondered about the USA race culture... the fact that you mention "there are x Latin-like population" or "Y black population" or "Z white population", the mere separation means that people are thinking in terms of races...

jondubois2• 10 years ago

I understand why GitHub feels it needs to add structure to their organization. It's impossible for 500 people to coordinate themselves - Combine that with the remote work environment and it gives some people a free ticket to do nothing at all.

That said, I think the remote working aspect won't be a problem if you add a middle management layer. So I agree with adding management but disagree about cancelling remote work.

captain_jamira6• 10 years ago

the only mention of remote work limitations I saw in the article was specific to senior managers.

jondubois2• 10 years ago

Ok. I guess I fully agree with it then ;p

emehrkay• 10 years ago

There is a lot of anger in this thread. I understand. Honest question though: how much of it isn't coming from white men? I ask because the tone of what is causing this anger has been publicly said, and masked as "culture" and other phrases, about women and people of color for a very long time.

atmosx• 10 years ago

Wasnt github already involved in a scandal with a female employee who quit and came out a few years back?

b614• 10 years ago

Yes. Here's some information: http://www.businessinsider.com/github-harassment-story-2014-...

More, supposedly from insiders: https://medium.com/@geeekcore1/facts-conveniently-withheld-d...

captain_jamira6• 10 years ago

Holy bejeebus, people are defensive as all getup about this. WTF, people?!?

Do people think that the quote, "...it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'..." is about the difficulty this person finds in sitting in a room across from a white person, chatting with him? I understood it to be a perception on this person's part that the efforts to increase diversity have created a condition where such a significant portion of their new hires need to be non-white or non-white-male that it's difficult to get on the interview schedule if you are. And my speculation is that this was an expression due to personal experience - perhaps this person tried to refer a friend and felt he was getting nowhere.

THEY ARE BULLET POINTS PEOPLE...

Going out on a limb, I'd say just about everyone here has seen a PowerPoint presentation with a slide full of what the presenter intends to be attention catching points that beg the question 'what's that about? do tell."

I'm going to play devil's advocate here with some plausible explanations. I don't know the author and wasn't there so this is purely speculative, but I love speculation, it's why my favorite sport is spelunking. I tried to do this with an imagined 'voice' of the presenter but it ended up being mixed with my own - whatever.

- "This is not work for white folks to lead"

--- We're all familiar with congressional committees composed of a group of old white men discussing the legal policy issues related to healthcare access for women. It's a sorry sight. Let's put it up there front and center, that has not and will not constitute and acceptable effort, so it can't happen in this case. Does this mean that white people can't be a party to diversity efforts? no. but really, what's a bigger risk/likelihood, no white people/men on a committee or all white people/men on a committee? yeah.

- "This is not about socio-economic class, mostly."

--- I'm guessing this has something to do with the culture of distorted libertarian ideals held by many in the tech space, and how easy it is to discount racial bias and claim racial indifference while laying the blame for lack of diversity on childhood access to tech and the statistical differences in access based on purely socio-economic demographics. So this is a point to avoid the argument that diversity isn't a tech problem, and that if society fixed schools and whatnot, tech would naturally become more diverse.

- "Why we refer our friends and family (or don't) are where a lot of the answers can be found."

--- If you're a white employee and all your friends are white and you work for a company that is highly dependent on employee network referrals for hiring, you're going to just get more white people. --- "Even my conditioning has been conditioned" ... https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm1glnnHKg1qbce9oo1.mp3 American (global) society is centuries deep in conditioning to value white people more highly than others, irrespective of the opinion-holder's racial identity.

- "33% is barely enough to change the culture."

--- I don't exactly know, but I would suspect that 33% is some arbitrary base target for a diverse workforce created by a group of advisers who were indicative of the reason for the 1st bullet point.

- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"

--- Asians are a minority. Asians have a singularly unique experience in tech-employment (although that's probably specific to Asian males). Let's not get bogged down in intra-minority finger-pointing. I suspect there are plenty of tech companies that point to their Asian-identifying employees when confronted (at least internally) with diversity questions, which probably doesn't satisfy non-Asian minorities.

- "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"

--- There is a perception that historically, some successful women who have had to fight hard for their positions and put up with a great deal of crap from men along the way, have a tendency to reinforce the traditional barriers for subsequent aspiring female colleagues rather than aid in the dismantling of those barriers, due to a sense of personal fairness - sort of "I had it hard, why should you get to cruise in my wake?" or in defense of a space they perceive as arbitrarily limited by men - the thought potentially being "These men were cajoled into making room for one token female law partner at the firm so a rising female colleague is direct competition for my job." Highlight PERCEPTION and SOME please! If this is an actual, documented thing (I don't know?), I'd speculate that it's universal, and not specific to females or white females, but rather to the culture of numbers - meaning white men would do it too if put in the same position. So let's call it out in this presentation - We don't want that, we want understanding, supportive trailblazers, and those trailblazers in tech at this time are white women.

As for the business side, wow what a more rational conversation RE: growth, size, and manageable company cultures.

said• 10 years ago

Holy bejeebus, people are defensive as all getup about this. WTF, people?!?

It should be very easy to understand why people are upset about this.

Do people think that the quote, "...it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'..." is about the difficulty this person finds in sitting in a room across from a white person, chatting with him? I understood it to be a perception on this person's part that the efforts to increase diversity have created a condition where such a significant portion of their new hires need to be non-white or non-white-male that it's difficult to get on the interview schedule if you are. And my speculation is that this was an expression due to personal experience - perhaps this person tried to refer a friend and felt he was getting nowhere.

I believe most people here are correctly assuming the second interpretation. And both interpretations are indicative of a terribly toxic culture.

THEY ARE BULLET POINTS PEOPLE...

Yes.

If there existed a slide half as hostile toward blacks as this slide is toward whites, would you not use the opportunity to sternly lecture us?

'Cause I've seen frenzies occur with out-of-context words before. And those were were far milder. And taken much further our of context.

Each time, the tech press produced weeks of articles lecturing us that the words alone are irreparably hurtful and damaging.

- "This is not work for white folks to lead"
--- We're all familiar with congressional committees composed of a group of old white men discussing the legal policy issues related to healthcare access for women. It's a sorry sight. Let's put it up there front and center, that has not and will not constitute and acceptable effort, so it can't happen in this case. Does this mean that white people can't be a party to diversity efforts? no. but really, what's a bigger risk/likelihood, no white people/men on a committee or all white people/men on a committee? yeah.

"This is extremely important work—that's why we have a department at our company devoted to it. We are constantly trying to expand this breadth and scope of this work, hence this presentation at your company.

"We want more talks and more exposure. We need more paid positions at more companies. And in this expanding sector, if you are white, you are not welcome to lead. You must help us, but in doing so, you must subordinate to us. And we'll feign shock if you suddenly seem uneasy or defensive."

- "This is not about socio-economic class, mostly."
--- I'm guessing this has something to do with the culture of distorted libertarian ideals held by many in the tech space, and how easy it is to discount racial bias and claim racial indifference while laying the blame for lack of diversity on childhood access to tech and the statistical differences in access based on purely socio-economic demographics. So this is a point to avoid the argument that diversity isn't a tech problem, and that if society fixed schools and whatnot, tech would naturally become more diverse.

"I don't care that poor white people don't have access to technology. I don't care that they are left out, too. I don't care that our policies would specifically hurt them further. This isn't about helping poor whites."

- "Why we refer our friends and family (or don't) are where a lot of the answers can be found."
--- If you're a white employee and all your friends are white and you work for a company that is highly dependent on employee network referrals for hiring, you're going to just get more white people. --- "Even my conditioning has been conditioned" ... https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm1glnnHKg1qbce9oo1.mp3 American (global) society is centuries deep in conditioning to value white people more highly than others, irrespective of the opinion-holder's racial identity.

“It’s morally wrong to prefer one ethnicity over another. That’s why we specifically exclude whites from leadership. It’s morally wrong to believe the voices of one ethnicity are more trustworthy. That’s why we explicitly disregard everything whites say on account of white privilege.

- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"

"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."

owlee2• 10 years ago

Well put. What a disgusting person Nicole Sanchez is. Hopefully the next company will know better than to hire someone so destructive.

captain_jamira6• 10 years ago

great story bro. I get it, you took offense to me taking 'devil's advocate' - look, it was just a figure of speech and I don't want to discriminate against your sensitive sense of fairness, so we'll split it; I'll take the figurative half and you can keep the literal half that you've already claimed.

but seriously, you're use of unattributed quotes is confusing. Is this supposed to be cited material or something you just wish you were citing?

Now I know why Stack Exchange folks are such nazis about formatting.

jmorphy884• 10 years ago

All "diversity" programs, along with other legalisms like "minority" status, "historically disprivileged groups", etc. are entirely about anti-white racism and dispossession. They have no moral standing and no logical consistency, and they don't pretend to, nor do they even need to. It's utilitarian and provides benefits to a specific group at the expense of another.

I'm happy GitHub is getting to experience the runaway consequences of this toxic and repugnant ideology. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving group of "progressive" folks.

alistproducer24• 10 years ago

You don't believe any actions should be taken to try and unwind the lingering effects of chattel slavery and jim crow?

b614• 10 years ago

Do you think actions should be taken? If so, what actions?

jmorphy884• 10 years ago

Nope. Plenty already has been done, and why do other non-white groups get special status too?

Like I said, it's all about shaking down whitey.

rdl• 10 years ago

I wonder if remote-work culture helps with diversity. It obviously does with geographic culture diversity, and with nationality (due to visas), but does it particularly help with racial or gender or age or anything else?

I'd assume it does with gender diversity (since women more often end up taking care of kids/elders/etc. even with a full time job of their own); race/ethnicity seems more indirect.

gitthrowaway• 10 years ago

There's real fear about a user driven backlash against policies coming down the pipe. One recent slide deck was titled "Kill Your Idols?" and examined ways to prevent a LinkedIn esque reputation from forming during proposed policy changes to accelerate growth.

I make no claims as to the accuracy of this information or any relationship with GitHub. All assertions should be considered parody.

anon42424242• 10 years ago

"Technical director Danilo Campos" was part of a major shitshow a year and a half ago on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389163). He called HN a cesspit and then tried to work up a Twitter mob against someone who made the mistake of challenging his points.

If a vindictive, narrow-minded individual like that is a technical director and a member of Github's social-impact team, no wonder people are leaving in droves.

brianzelip• 10 years ago

Christ, the wonderful platform for learning, sharing, and doing that is GitHub is potentially under threat and the majority of discussion here is consumed with questions and accusations of racism?!

Of course white privilege exists. Next.

Onto real shit like how do we not lose yet another bastion of web awesomeness.

thatswrong0• 10 years ago

It's embarrassing that you don't think this is something worth having a discussion about. You're basically suggesting we abandon critical thought. There's clearly more to this than white privilege.

striking7• 10 years ago

It seems that people disagree with how obvious the existence of white privilege is. I don't think 600 comments would get posted over something obvious.

droopybuns3• 10 years ago

The current dominant themes in certain feminism & diversity cliques in our community are openly hostile towards me. I'm a male. I'm white. I'm middle class. I'm heterosexual.

I'm also a leader. I'm a parent of two daughters. My mother had to fight sexism issues in her career. I am supportive of inclusion & diversity. I am trying to raise my girls to be empowered, confident & curious. But the dominant themes in current diversity & feminist circles are so racist & sexist towards me that my first impulse is outrage.

For those of you who share this impulse- I want to provide the piece of perspective that helps me manage my frustration: Our culture operates under a pendulum. Right now, it's bad, but it will swing back.

There are “equality” people who are openly hostile to certain categories of humans based on gender, sexuality & race. This has happened before and it will happen again.

The pendulum will swing back and we'll look back at these people in the same way as certain stale feminists & race marketeers of the 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s etc. The leaders of these ideas in the tech community who focus on gender & race over building products that people want will not last. They get louder & shriller, but wielding bigotry to fight bigotry always fertilizes suspicion.

You can't fight exclusion with exclusion. So don’t worry about these themes. If people aren’t bitching about their bigotry, their relevance wanes.

Just keep trying to do big things. If someone calls you privileged, it doesn't mean it wasn't hard & that you didn't earn it. You don’t have to argue with every person who writes something stupid on the Internet. To hell with those bigots. Their misery does not earn them the right to rob you of your own self worth and success. Diversity means that all perspectives deserve to be heard. It is ok that someone uses the word diversity to ward off white folks from leading. The community eventually rejects this kind of bigotry.

You can find these people worthy of your contempt and still be supportive of diversity & equality. Now ignore these fools and go build your shit.

yakult2• 10 years ago

It will swing back in thirty years. In thirty years I plan to be retired. Or have died of my unhealthy lifestyle. Or at the most optimistic become too old to code competitively.

My point is, far as I'm concerned I can't afford to just sit tight and wait for it to blow over. And neither can the rest of you.

archagon• 10 years ago

I don't understand how people can seriously claim that these are "current dominant themes". I studied at UC Berkeley, one of the liberal capitals of California. Most of my friends are Berkeley students. Most of my friends are feminists.

There's practically no hostility (as you put it) towards white, heterosexual males in these circles. I have never been personally attacked or felt uncomfortable. Most of the discussion is aimed at systemic issues, not individuals. It's been pretty eye-opening, actually.

Based on my experience, I'm fairly certain that stories involving militant feminist/diversity people have been vastly overblown by places like Reddit.

exstudent22• 10 years ago

The tweets in this article are militant. A Github employee actually said this:

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/56b3d2f12e526555008...

That would not be possible if it wasn't a dominant culture (without him getting fired).

cgriswald2• 10 years ago

Your Berkeley friends may simply be more educated. In any case, before you pass judgment, try expressing a differing opinion.

Most of the feminists that are my friends aren't 'militant'. I can disagree with them and point out where their little bits of dogma differ with reality. We can usually have a discussion and learn from each other.

But trying to do that with any self-proclaimed feminist who doesn't already know me and it's I don't get it because of male privilege, or I'm ignorant on the subject (even if I cite sources and they don't), or I'm a rapist or rape sympathizer. They give me appeals to (their own) authority, fabricated statistics* , specious arguments about female fear, and I get shouted down if I want to discuss where males have similar struggles to females.

I once pointed out that the term feminism does not espouse the equality the feminist movement is trying to achieve. I said that is a disservice to the movement because it excludes some would-be allies while at the same time encouraging the "bad" type of feminist. I also pointed out that if someone self-identifies as a feminist, I don't really know what that person means. For some, like your friends apparently, it means what I think it means. But for others it means "white males are the devil."

I was immediately attacked. My attacker stated that she had read all the literature and (a million non sequiturs). My feminist friends just bowed out of the conversation, which irked me. The only person who stood up and was like "Uh, this is crazy. You're not even talking about what he said," was another male.

*Did you know murder by males is the number one cause of death among females?

Edit: Formatting

teen• 10 years ago

did you even read op's article? look at the slides

jccalhoun2• 10 years ago

I am an academic who is a straight white man and who researches things related to race and gender and I don't think I have ever met a militant feminist. If the internet is to believe they are everywhere but somehow I haven't ran into them.

dba7dba5• 10 years ago

Did you not read the article? It says they can't even interview white candidates for jobs.

htns• 10 years ago

So, what measures are they taking to match Berkeley undergraduate sex ratio (52.1% female 47.9% male [1]) with the sex ratio of the entire US in the same age range (51% male 49% female [2]). A woman is roughly 1.13 (13%) times more likely to be an undergraduate at Berkeley than a man. Or is this a topic best avoided?

[1] http://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data

[2] http://www.census.gov/population/age/data/files/2012/2012gen... @ 15-19yo

taneq• 10 years ago

Most of my friends are feminists.
There's practically no hostility

There are many people who identify as feminists who are fair, rational, and genuinely want equal opportunities for all.

There are many other people who identify as feminists who are militantly against anything but total female domination.

The word is used by so many different groups with different ideologies in different contexts that it's become meaningless.

developer2• 10 years ago

When white men with great credentials, skills and experience have their résumé thrown in the waste bin because a company has to meet "diversity quotas", then yes there is a problem. Discrimination is being battled with discrimination, with the exclusion of qualified people based on their race and gender - which is the original problem to begin with, just turned on its face.

argonaut12• 10 years ago

I don't know why you are so frustrated. It seems misplaced. The system is totally stacked in your favor (and my favor).

humanrebar8• 10 years ago

The system is totally stacked in your favor

Is it? What about white men who grew up as orphans? Or with parents that had severe mental illness? What about white men with emotional disorders?

What about white male cancer survivors? Or white male single parents?

What about white men who grew up as historically disadvantaged minorities in their home countries?

Why is it OK to assume the system is stacked in someone's favor? How is that not prejudice?

OJFord2• 10 years ago

Not if shit like this continues. Positive discrimination by definition stacks against the incumbent privileged.

jinushaun• 10 years ago

Because it's wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right, etc.

facepalm3• 10 years ago

Depends on what metric you choose. If your metric is "likelihood to study a technical subject and get a high paying job in the tech industry", maybe. That's pretty meaningless, though, and narrow - there are lots of other ways to have a good, often even better life.

wildmusings8• 10 years ago

All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing. The reason why this narrative is doing so well is because they've scared everyone else into ducking for cover instead of speaking up. If we don't fight back, we are surrendering to this tyranny.

History doesn't have to play out in any one way. Our culture of individualism and freedom is not guaranteed to survive. It is on each generation to preserve it for the next. When they asked Benjamin Franklin what type of government the Constitution would create, he said "a republic, if you can keep it." We can't win every battle, and we can't win the war if we don't choose our fights, but we must fight to win.

johnny22• 10 years ago

this is not some battle of civilizations

generic_user4• 10 years ago

I agree, a common diversion tactic of these activists is to try and tell you to just ignore the bad people and they will go away, eventually...

Usually with some self confirming story like the OP... I'm white just like you! Just ignore these radical racist people. go back to watching the ball game dude!

Its a tactic. The last thing they want is an actual debate because there ideas do not hold merit under scrutiny. If they can't get you to sit down and shut up then they will try to attack attack you.

So yes, everyone needs to stand up and stand firm against these people or they will continue and only get more irrational and nasty.

hox2• 10 years ago

This is just misguided, plain and simple. I am white, male, heterosexual, and from a middle class family, and I absolutely know that my background gives me privilege. It doesn't matter if I earned it or not; I had and still have an advantage over other classes of people, and that is where the hostility is directed.

Instead of taking it personally, use this advantage to eliminate as much privilege as possible. Don't shy away from "leadership," but instead embrace it and make diversity a major focus of your leadership style.

Calling out the underrepresented as "bigots" for being upset is just plain cowardice.

mistermann• 10 years ago

So what would you call this?

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/56b3d2f12e526555008...

generic_user4• 10 years ago

Yes, as a life long White Man who likes football and hot dogs, and it somewhat fat I agree with you 100%.

Radical anti Male Feminism and Euro phobic racism are wonderful things for everyone. And there good for the economy. Just like you, I will continue to watch the glorious Television programming.

droopybuns3• 10 years ago

It is not the underrepresented that are bigots.

It's the ones who say that certain people must shut up because $GENDER or $RACE who are bigots.

I don't think this describes the majority of reasonable people defending diversity.

novel• 10 years ago

Agreed. I follow this topic for quite some time already, but I cannot understand few fundamental things.

I understand that indeed people could have "issues" because of their gender, race or some other quality. I support they in their effort to make things better.

However, I do not understand this categorization. By categorizing people this way one actually splits a group of people into smaller groups based on given categorization. Those groups have conflicting interests and different level of privileges, and each of the groups tries to change that.

But why, instead of working within this artificial categorized groups, just get away from this categorization completely?

PS It's a sensitive topic and I hope I didn't offend anyone; sorry if I somehow did it, however. PPS I'm wondering what are the job duties of diversity consultants...

dba7dba5• 10 years ago

We laugh at Iran's theocracy. But this militant push for diversity for the sake of diversity does not seem much different to me.

pacala• 10 years ago

History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. Down with the Kulaks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak

Zappabain• 10 years ago

Completely agree with the pendulum hypothesis (a theory indeed already) and not letting any offense make us fall into rage and the other side of the pendulum they are claiming us to be.

Agree also in the big problem with the word 'feminism'. It seems the opposite of 'machism', and machism is bad, to claim supperiority of men over women, so many people still think feminism is claiming supperiority of women over men. And as you say, there are soooo many variants of feminism that indeed claim that, and so many feminists (men and women) that claim it, that when I say 'of course I'm feminist' I always have to inmediately explain what I mean in case someone doesn't really know it's real meaning, coming from the context of its birth, as an oposition to machism.

And almost always, personal feelings, traumas, etc get into every discussion, deforming reason incredibly. Also prejudices about what you are trying to say (filling everything non explicitly stated with what they want to hear, you being the monster they're desiring to crunch). So you have to loose so much time stating everything about the context of what you are refering to, it's better not to even begin, as if they read you, either wouldn't understand anyway, feelings and lack of practice in logic would make them not to reason properly, or would just be the kind that doesn't really want to listen and be open to change in front of new verified data and reasonings, as all of us should, and will attack you using the lowest use a human can give to its brain, a use we have used over centuries to destroy and kill innocents (evil plots, rumours, false accusations, deformation of claims, lies, ...).

TheRealDunkirk• 10 years ago

A few days after it passed, I complained about the abuses to liberty in the Patriot Act to an older, and very-wise friend. He talked about a sociological pendulum as well, and predicted those over-reaches of power would be righted in time. Given how often and completely he has been right, before, I started watching and waiting. Except, I've been waiting for fifteen years now, and that pendulum seems to only be going further away from liberty, privacy, and (real) security.

I'm not sure, but I'm starting to think that we've reached a point where sociological constructs that would have flamed out, even just 20 years ago, can be sustained, because the people in power to sustain them now have an echo chamber where the message never quite falls below the point of being lost. It's almost as if improvements in communication have now backfired in raising the noise above the signal.

I hope you turn out to be right. As a white, male, heterosexual programmer who's reached his late 40's, I don't need any extra pressure working against me in my career prospects. I'm already starting to hate the H1-B visa program, but that's a rant for another post.

Globrazu2• 10 years ago

This kind of racist "gender politics", along with a level of self-hatred and loathing for certain classes of people is a wider problem with GitHub employees and has been manifesting for a while, for example: https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/pull/17

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

nickbauman2• 10 years ago

I think you're making too blanket a statement about culture and bigotry from this one story. This is about something at Github. Specifically, the Github "diversity initiative" appears to have dispensed with the notion of diversity training for certain segments in favor of adopting a bias against members of traditionally privileged class. I can't imagine this will go well for them. It's a pretty clear conflict of mission.

spopejoy• 10 years ago

Adapt or die. Integrated workforces are more successful.

And with that I take my leave of this whiny white bastion called HN. Enjoy your caves, suckas

jcromartie6• 10 years ago

You say "adapt" but you mean "capitulate."

nikdaheratik• 10 years ago

Right, I disagree with pretty much every point you're making, but maybe your anti-PC screed makes you feel better. I do question what this has to do with the core message of the article: GitHub has growing pains, long-time employees are unhappy because the Investors are bringing in the Suits and making them follow all kinds of corporate oversight stuff. Some unhappy employees also dislike the diversity hiring team, but I would assume the Investors and Suits like it (for lawsuit avoidance if nothing else).

Bottom line: all of these pains are probably inevitable if you want to go from 50 to 500 employees with revenue in the $100-$500 millions. Hopefully they get it right, and manage to keep most of their long term employees happy. If not, hopefully they take care of them, and find people to replace them who know how to keep Github working well.

droopybuns3• 10 years ago

I'm perplexed that you disagree.

My intention is to get the angry dudes to chill out on arguing with every social justice warrior they meet.

Is that the thing you want to disagree with? Or did I make my point poorly?

hitekker5• 10 years ago

Hey, mods, did the top level comments get resequenced in this thread? Up until an hour ago, iza's comment was the first comment; now it's the fifth.

I understand that the post itself may be inflammatory but the resulting discussion actually avoided a lot of the diversity v.s. meritocracy ("it's my side or the highway!") that some of the other comment threads are focusing on.

reitanqild8• 10 years ago

Votes affect ordering even of top level comments.

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.

hitekker5• 10 years ago

Perhaps that's the case, but isa's comment was the first comment for 4 hours after it was posted. Round about two hours ago, it suddenly dropped down to the fifth slot, not the second or third.

I don't know what HN's policy is on resequencing; I thought I would ask to see if I'm not understanding something correctly.

spc476• 10 years ago

How about George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, who shot Trayvon Martin, a Black. CNN called him "white": <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/cnn-white-hispanic_.... So did the New York Times: <http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-demotes-george-zimmerman-from-....

untog5• 10 years ago

...I'm not seeing how this relates to GitHub. Did GitHub hire the authors of those articles..?

lazyant• 10 years ago

"Hispanics or Latinos can be of any race, any ancestry, any ethnicity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic

dang15• 10 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050351 and marked it off-topic.

masterleep• 10 years ago

Discrimination is fairness. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

rotw5• 10 years ago

Being considerate of other people is Stalinism, is that what you're saying?

qb452• 10 years ago

That's what Stalin said.

But since parent was being sarcastic, yes, Stalinism is about being considerate.

nailer2• 10 years ago

The peasants were actually, legitimately being oppressed. Someone rose up to fight a good fight and ended up saying (as a well known someone in these circles frequently says) the non oppressed group should be killed. Yep: it's pretty Stalinist.

argonaut12• 10 years ago

What a total non sequitur. You haven't showed that rotw is saying "meritocracy is discrimination." You've merely insinuated that by saying this total cliche.

dang15• 10 years ago

Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, especially on inflammatory topics.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050454 and marked it off-topic.

tdkl2• 10 years ago

Just wow. I'm thinking about pulling my personal Jekyll site hosted off GitHub pages and host somewhere else. Not sure about the alternatives though, with custom domain support. Ah well, a nice weekend task.

bioinformatics• 10 years ago

I have an Octopuses on Heroku, it seems a good solution for a static site.

jgowans2• 10 years ago

One option is to host the repo on Bitbucket and use the Aerobatic (https://www.aerobatic.com) static hosting add-on. Free custom domain and more, included.

disclaimer - I'm one of the founders of Aerobatic.

tdkl2• 10 years ago

Thanks, I already stumbled upon Aerobatic and it's in Todo list for trying it out :] One thing though, is it possible to use a naked domain ? Although I could use CloudFlare which supports ALIAS records.

madebysquares• 10 years ago

Diversity is a touchy subject. As a black engineer myself I've worked at three companies where I've been the only black technical worker and it's hard some times. I've gone to conferences where I've been maybe 1 of 5 or 6 engineers out of hundreds. i don't do any hiring but I often wonder if there is a lack of qualified black male or female engineers or what but sometimes I do feel isolated.

atdt• 10 years ago

You may like "The darker side of tech", a talk Bryan Liles gave at Velocity 2015 in New York: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ5wYZqHQGo>.

hablahaha• 10 years ago

Also, this is a great perspective from Twitter's only black engineer in a leadership position: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the-bar

humanrebar8• 10 years ago

...I often wonder if there is a lack of qualified black male or female engineers or what but sometimes I do feel isolated.

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.

noelsusman• 10 years ago

You'll see pretty much the same numbers at top American engineering universities. Most of the race/gender disparities we see in tech companies are a direct result of the same disparities seen in tech universities. The problem starts before freshman year of college.

xtracto4• 10 years ago

In the case of black, latinos (I am one of them myself) and other minorities I think it is partly a matter of numbers. Black people account for around 13% of the population in the USA.

So in theory, a "natural" number would be to have around 13 black students for every 100 at every university. If it is less, then it may be due to either a) Lack of opportunities or b) Lack of desire enroll in specific subjects.

Here in Mexico face a similar issue with the lack of Women in technical careers (programming in my experience). The fact is that for some reason less women enroll in Soft. Eng. or Comp. Sci. courses... And from the few that enroll, several get out after the first or second "filter subjects" (Data Structures, Programming I, algorithms). Given that there are more females (61 million) than males (58 million), in theory there should be roughly the same number of both in schools.

sauere2• 10 years ago

If we could all grow up and act like professionals, that would be great. I have a hard time understanding why the tech industry always tends to create this much drama.

At the end of the day, this is about software, not about your genitals. I don't care if you're liberal or conservative, black or white, straight or gay, or anything in between! In fact, i won't bring it up, or ask. I simply do not care, the only thing i care about is your pull request.

How any company can include a slide like the one in the article (backup link here: http://i.imgur.com/p5zwScc.png) is absolutely beyond me. I am paying you to make a great product, not to make daily diversity meetings.

yakult2• 10 years ago

The real question is: is a repo purge going to follow from their internal purge? Will they start deleting projects with diverging political views?

It's not exactly paranoia: there has been precedents; see Gamergate.

cookiecaper5• 10 years ago

The real question is: is a repo purge going to follow from their internal purge? Will they start deleting projects with diverging political views?

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.

bootload• 10 years ago

"We’re trying to build a new kind of enterprise company where the playbooks of old won’t always work,"

Code for, "lots more money to be made here, move over hackers, let the ^professionals^ do their work". I'm not surprised, the hippy dream of work as you please is no more. Take and want the big money? don't be surprised when big money dictates how the company will be run.

Big question, will github be run to the benefit of users or share holders?

cooper122• 10 years ago

They targeted programmers.

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)

striking7• 10 years ago

The points you made about programmers aren't invalid, but are taken to an absurd level and also imply the existence of the "other side." I mean, you could have written a feelgood snippet about programming, but I guess a meme is okay too.

dang15• 10 years ago

Good grief. Please don't, and please, no more "shitposts" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050922). We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050478 and marked it off-topic.

(This on the other hand was great: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050562)

cooper122• 10 years ago

Yeah sorry dang, won't happen again. I usually come to HN for serious discussion but that thread was just ridiculous.

susan_hall2• 10 years ago

Way back in 2005, Shelley Powers made the argument that a diverse workforce helped a company deal with crisis. The inverse was also implied, that a rejection of diversity was an indicator of some kind of resistance, which would make it difficult to deal with crisis.

Powers wrote:

"When jobs are plentiful, diversification within the job pool is not seen as a threat. In fact, diversification can be seen as a way of extending one’s power over a larger base of people. Book companies see more people buying books, conference organizers hope for more butts in seats, industries have less stressed and healthier, happier workers. However, when jobs are threatened, any change in the status quo will be seen as a risk–even those in an industry populated by people who consider themselves free of bias. It is a natural inclination to want to pull in, like the turtle into its shell, when threatened. Except in the tech industry, this ‘pulling in’ materializes as a resistance to difference."

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.

antjanus• 10 years ago

I think this article pretty much shakes all the confidence in Github and for several (good) reasons:

Whenever a new CEO steps in and starts making big changes like that to the company, it usually results in big changes in the product. Whereas before, the product was controlled by programmers, now it will be controlled by CEO, his inner circle, and VCs that have the most influence. That means a product that's more "money-friendly" toward investors rather than users.

The fact that a lot of high-ranking people left and possibly, many remote developers will stop working there is yet another sign that Github as we know it will change. Maybe for the better, maybe not.

One thing that really disappoints me is killing off the remote option. I've always looked up to Github and would use it as the perfect example of how "remote can work, even at scale". Facebook recently (a year or two) implemented the same thing which is a shame.

I won't address the leadership thing but that last quote in the paragraph summed it up perfectly.

Anyways, from the looks of it, Github will become an enterprise-friendly place with less of a focus on ordinary developers and smaller businesses. This makes me think that there is growing space for a new company to take up that "developer-friendly" social network/code repository.

mianos• 10 years ago

You know the corporate rot has set in when you see titles like "vice president of social impact".

avivo• 10 years ago

It's interesting to see how people react to this, in the context of the reactions to their first VC raise of 100 million dollars -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220353

e.g. "They want to do bigger and better things with Github. They're not quite done trying to change the world. Now they are not only profitable, but they have substantial capital to invest in further innovations."

and "I bet nobody here as anything bad to say about the exceptional skills of the github team. However such a huge investment may force them to "overscale" in order to be able to reach the expected return (by the VC)."

susan_hall2• 10 years ago

Regarding diversity issues, it is interesting to go back and look at this interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, from 1972. What I find worrisome is that the conversation is still being discussed in 2016. For all the progress in technology, there are some social issues that change only very slowly.

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.

hysan• 10 years ago

It's interesting how most of the comments here are focusing on the diversity part of the article. Reading it, the thing that screamed at me the most was the influence of VC culture. It seems as though the owners of GitHub are making the decision to appease their investors by going the traditional route - fast growth with a traditional top heavy hierarchy. This always consolidates money and power at the higher levels of the hierarchy. This is great for VCs and those at the top because they can allocate more revenue and profits to them, but bad for employees and to low revenue (high volume) customers because the immediate ROI is not as good there.

This trend is fine for most companies because ultimately, the only people that matter are the ones with ownership control in the company. However, GitHub is different because of it's position in the Open Source community and with the type of people they serve - developers. If they burn the community too much, their customer base can and are fully capable of leaving the platform. The interesting thing to wonder is, have they built up a Facebook level of momentum yet? If not, the changes they are making now could ultimately turn them into an enterprise-only company and cap their potential.

Khaine4• 10 years ago

Can someone explain to me why GitHub needs a "Social Impact Team". What benefits do they bring to the organisation? It looks to me like a massive money pit.

humanrebar8• 10 years ago

What benefits do they bring to the organisation?

Marketing to uber-rich investors?

Khaine4• 10 years ago

The biggest 'privilege' someone can have is not white skin, its money. All the people who bang on about diversity are usually upper class, and never talk about the socioeconomic component of it.

alistproducer24• 10 years ago

It is interesting to see how race is discussed on a site like HN vs. a political website. Even people posting opinions I disagree with state their point(s) with respect.

I understand how a white person could feel "under fire" in a discussion about "diversity" and "white privilege." For all the talk about the importance of empathy, it sure seems like some on the left don't have very much for our white brothers and sisters.

We have to understand that no one is born with historical context and we should't be so harsh on white people who either don't have it (context) or who do and feel singled out for being white.

We can't speak of the ingenious, invisible hand of institutional racism and then be mystified when a 23 year old white guy is skeptical of its existence.

5747477752• 10 years ago

People who want to build large companies are just plain scum. They are the upper class version of the aspirational middle class. The aspirational middle class can't wait to leave their peers behind and start managing them like slaves. The aspirational upper class can't wait to build a giant slave farm.

Since the agricultural era, humans have been taken over by slave drivers. We should be going back to small, decentralised groups of people. Big business and big government have done nothing but destroy this planet.

I used to work for a large company and that experience solidified my disgust for these places. I can fully understand why people would want to resign now that the company wants to grow. I decided that I would rather go down fighting then ever work for a large company again.

Has anyone asked why GitHub needs to grow? If there are other products that could benefit from GitHub integration, provide an api and let some other small group of hackers build it. All GitHub is doing is laying the foundations for their slave farm.

douche11• 10 years ago

You'll get hammered, I'm sure for the rest of it, but this is a good question:

Has anyone asked why GitHub needs to grow?

They are a making a pretty decent profit now. They could keep the lights on and keep doing what they are doing for the foreseeable future, make incremental improvements and scale out servers to pick up additional load without shaking things up drastically and taking in loads of VC money. That's not the sexy, billion dollar unicorn move, but it is a safe, sustainable bet.

5747477752• 10 years ago

None of these big companies ever do anything useful after their initial product. They just start buying small companies and sucking them into the big shitty company.

Joof• 10 years ago

It's hard to have a meritocracy when a limited set of people make decisions for (or otherwise own) the company and are beholden to VC money.

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.

etherael• 10 years ago

Cancelled my subscription as soon as I read the tweet from @_danilo. If the races and genders were switched and the context instead was some horrendous civil war in Africa, it would be outrage fodder in the mainstream media for weeks, but because it's white males, it's totally alright to claim they're not just devoid of empathy and compassion, but constitutionally incapable of ever acquiring it.

My disgust is boundless. To hell with anyone that thinks and behaves like this.

theorique3• 10 years ago

For contrast, look how Pax Dickinson was fired from the CTO role at Business Insider for his joking tweets that were perceived as anti-black racist. Such tweets were on a personal account, unrelated to work matters, and obviously ironic jokes about news items. (The context was ignored in order to paint a picture of Dickinson as a bigot.)

Here, @_danilo is also on a personal account, and tweeting specifically about work matters. The difference? His tweets were anti-white rather than anti-black. Given the prevailing SJW agenda infesting Silicon Valley his job should be safe for now. But activists should keep our eyes on him.

GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

Related Stories