
GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart - easyd
http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2
======
droopybuns
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.

~~~
archagon
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.

~~~
exstudent2
The tweets in this article are militant. A Github employee actually said this:

[http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/56b3d2f12e526555008...](http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/56b3d2f12e526555008b505e-791-385/danilo%20campos-
tweet.png)

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

~~~
kyrra
As someone else here pointed out, that tweet is out of context. It was part of
a 10+ tweet rant about politics and social medicine. (It still is a bit
offensive, but less so than the article makes it out to be)

[https://twitter.com/_danilo/status/690601512813367297](https://twitter.com/_danilo/status/690601512813367297)

~~~
exstudent2
I think it's still offensive and racist. It's also scary to see that he
basically has a university freshmen's outlook on the world but for some reason
has a position to execute these ideas from within Github.

------
StevePerkins
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.

~~~
davesque
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.

~~~
chrisan
> 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"

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

I happen to have a BitBucket account, so I can't speak directly to your point,
but I'm less likely to file issues on a project if I have to register a new
account with their bug tracker to do so. I imagine the same would apply to a
project hosted on BitBucket if I had a GitHub account but not one on
BitBucket.

------
victor9000
> 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.

~~~
yulaow
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.

~~~
dasil003
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.

~~~
dracht
>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.

I hope the irony is not lost on you. What a despicable (and sadly typical)
comment.

------
jsksma2
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_
Well, what are the alternatives?

Hosted: Bitbucket, GitLab

Self-hosted: GitLab, Gogs

None of these come close to GitHub in my experience.

~~~
acidburnNSA
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/](http://phabricator.org/)

~~~
spangry
That product page is gold:

* Even has a serious business mode, for the most serious businesses. * Written in PHP so literally anyone can contribute, even if they have no idea how to program. * Even babies and dogs can contribute. * You, too, can contribute!

And then underneath: 'Companies probably using Phabricator'

------
proc0
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".

~~~
exolymph
"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.

~~~
b6
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?

~~~
mikeash
It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending you've already
achieved it. If current problems are driven by subconscious biases then you
need to eliminate those. It seems to me that the best way to eliminate them is
to forcibly overcome them until people get used to seeing more minorities in
these positions and replace their subconscious biases with new ones.

~~~
leohutson
How is race or sex aware hiring going to help with eliminating subconscious
bias? It reinforces bigotry, because it gives a rationalization for bigots to
not respect their minority coworkers, as they can claim that they were not
subject to the same scrutiny when they were hired.

What is the historical justification for the effectiveness affirmative action?
Certainly, countries like Malaysia and South Africa with extreme disparity
seem to have mixed results at best.

I agree that pretending ethnicity/sex are not visible, is not the same thing
as making ethnicity/sex invisible. But actually implementing enrollment and
employment laws or policies that hide this information from decision makers
could make it _nearly_ invisible.

That's actually not the fundamental problem though. Even if you managed to a
perfectly even proportion of middle class stem graduates from 1st and 2nd tier
universities represented on your payroll, you'll still end up with a
monoculture. Not because of some hard to pin down unconscious bigotry, but
because little has been done to eliminate class from society, and social class
is a big factor in a persons access to education and the quality of their
childhood.

Poor, working class women have less work opportunities than men, as less
educated ( religious ) working class people tend conform to traditional gender
roles more than middle class people, well paid working class jobs require more
physical strength, and unlike middle class mothers, working class mothers
cannot afford childcare or help with housework while working or studying. Like
ethnicity, class is almost hereditary so is easily confused with ethnicity in
statistics.

Making the statistics look better by hiring proportionally more middle class
minorities is a face saving exercise, not a solution.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Who cares what coworkers claim? If job performance is used for evaluations and
promotions, then fairness is preserved.

And the assumption that minorities can _only_ be hired by insufficient
scrutiny is not a very enlightened attitude. Perhaps the company can look
really hard for qualified candidates that help balance the workforce. How
about that?

I agree that real progress is the right way to evaluate hiring/ admissions
programs. Do qualified people end up in a diverse student/worker population?
Then you're doing it right.

~~~
leohutson
I would care if my coworkers were bigots, and I would especially care if they
were prejudiced against me, how can you effectively work with someone who
doesn't respect you? Pretending bigotry doesn't exist is the same thing as
pretending that race/sex aren't visible. You will also have to apply the same
affirmative action when promoting people, as a couple of years work experience
doesn't erase the generations of privilege you're competing with.

I never said that minorities can only be hired by applying insufficient
scrutiny. What I will say is as a group, minorities can only be hired in a
proportion that is different to the proportion of minorities in group of
qualified applicants if some weighting is taken off the job relevant
qualifications, and applied to their membership in minority groups.

If you could come up with a huge list of entirely fungible, interchangeable
resumes and interview notes, you could consciously pick minorities first
without harming the quality of your recruiting. What kind of roles would have
that weak of a job market though?

If candidates aren't fungible weighting any importance to race/sex means
taking some weighting off something else, and it means that bigots will assume
_individuals_ from minority groups are less qualified, because of the fact
that the _group_ as a whole is less qualified, because of your own policies.
It perpetuates both inequality and bigotry.

~~~
mikeash
If you merely _know_ about the race/sex/whatever of your candidates then
you're _already_ giving some weight to those attributes whether you want to or
not.

If we had some way of scoring candidates numerically, then yes, you'd just
pick the biggest number. But I've never heard of a hiring system that worked
like that. There's always some subjectivity. You can look at a bunch of
resumes and rank them, but a good chunk of that ranking is guesswork and
opinion. That gives room for your biases to play, and you'll end up with the
"best" candidates tending to match those biases. And don't tell me you don't
have any racial or gender biases; you do, everybody does.

You shouldn't give up a 9.9/10 because he's white, and hire a 2.4/10 because
she's black. But if you have a bunch of candidates around 8/10, consider
hiring the minority candidate who's a 7.9 rather than the candidate who
matches the existing demographics of your team and is an 8.1. Your numbers are
probably ±3 anyway, so it's not the irrational decision it sounds like it
would be in a universe of pure numbers.

~~~
leohutson
So you'll just take a guess at your biases and then try to counteract them
arbitrarily?

I'd like to know how you even begin to judge what ethnicity someone is just by
looking at them. Sounds like an extremely fraught game to play.

Part of the answer is surely to try your utmost to take all the subjectivity
out of the process. I've mentioned it here previously, and people said that
they enjoy getting to make subjective value judgments of candidates. I think
that is a poor attitude.

This is the kind of process I was thinking:

One person strips CV's of irrelevant info (names, ages, schools, etc). They
hand that to another person who decides who to interview. When the candidate
is interviewed, pre-determined questions get asked, and then notes are taken
of their answers and any _relevant_ info, and that gets handed over to the
person who makes the ultimate hiring decision.

Even that process probably leaks a bit, but it's better than simply trying to
guess.

~~~
mikeash
You don't have to guess at your biases. Look at the demographics of your
company and you will see them.

Your idea sounds great too. I think there's still room for error there, in how
the questions are formulated or answers interpreted. Think a mild version of
the old Jewish Problems. But it could certainly make things a lot better.

------
gedy
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
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.

~~~
greenrd
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.

------
CryoLogic
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.

~~~
mikegioia
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.

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

~~~
mikegioia
For us it was a combination of things. It was never really service/uptime
related, but I can't count the number of in-app Javascript errors or weird UI
decisions they made. The issues were just not good enough and the web pages
were continually slow/bloated to load.

Every time I'd open a support ticket I felt like I was a second-class citizen
or that the issue I raised wasn't important to them. Continual, multiple years
or bad support from them. I get that we were paying $25/mo but I just couldn't
deal with it anymore.

~~~
kannonboy
Bitbucket dev here, I am truly sorry to hear that Mike. I've been an Atlassian
for almost a decade and "legendary support" has always been something that
we've prided ourselves on, so it hurts to hear about your experience! I'm not
sure how long it's been, but things have hopefully improved since last time
you checked out Bitbucket - the unification of Bitbucket.org with Bitbucket
Server (née Stash) has meant a lot of refurbishment of the front-end code,
much of which is now common across products. Our front-end and design teams
have grown a lot more muscle too. If you have any specific feedback about the
UI/UX I'd love to pass it on to the team.

------
jhou2
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
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
Can you people please not pollute this board with your over the top non-sense?

------
canistr
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...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2015/02/12/women-
of-color-diversity-tech-silicon-valley-nicole-sanchez/23298945/)

~~~
greenrd
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.

~~~
jcromartie
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson)

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

~~~
hga
[https://www.google.com/search?q=github+meritocracy+rug](https://www.google.com/search?q=github+meritocracy+rug)

------
xiaoma
> _" (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.

------
anon42424242
"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](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.

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

~~~
andyfleming
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?

~~~
newjersey
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.

~~~
sytse
Why do you put GitLab in that category? We're trying hard to freely and openly
offer as much as we can. We do have an open core business model with a
proprietary GitLab EE. But I wonder what you think we have to change.

------
ryanackley
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.

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

------
madebysquares
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.

~~~
noelsusman
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.

~~~
xtracto
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.

------
verylongaccount
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.

~~~
greenrd
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.

------
verylongaccount
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.

~~~
bmh_ca
> 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.

~~~
striking
> 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.

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

I find it telling that you think it is my argument. What I wrote is neither
mine nor an argument. It is a description of a theory.

> Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination.

Not all discriminations are equal.

To argue that all discrimination is discrimination is to give equivalence to
police murdering for traffic violations and being denied the pole position on
a job application. Both are wrong, but there are quantitative differences –
they can be measured.

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

We can measure the effect of discrimination by the number of people affected,
and the impact a discrimination has on an individual. It's not an unknown
problem; statisticians measure it on jobs, income, applications, promotions,
employment types. The data exists or can be gathered, and it can ascribed
monetary value ("damages" in law). No formula will be ideal in all cases, but
that is not an excusable barrier.

Societies with affirmative action have in essence determined, whether founded
or not, that the aggregate of prejudice against classes of victims outweighs
the aggregate prejudice of attempting to correct it.

If you want to discredit the theory you must first understand that it is a
widely published and peer reviewed theory of many facets of society and not
just an argument from some guy on the internet. The theory is founded in the
philosophy of law, and touches on many other aspects ranging from the
relationship between culture and economics through criminology.

~~~
striking
I didn't think that first quote was your argument, I just thought it was the
dumbest thing you said. I think it's silly that you believe that past wrongs
can be rectified and that future wrongs are definitely going to happen, and
that that invalidates the argument you presented about discrimination against
white people not existing. Theory or argument, that's pedantry.

> Not all discriminations are equal.

Never said that.

I was implying that anything that was discrimination was wrong. Are you
arguing the opposite?

> We can measure the effect [etc] and the impact [etc] and it can ascribed
> monetary value [etc]. _No formula will be ideal in all cases, but that is
> not an excusable barrier. [emphasis mine]_

You'll have to inform me then why there's debate on the ballpark percentage of
the wage gap or even that it exists in general, just as an example. (not
arguing for or against, but that there _is a debate_ ) And it is perfectly
excusable for someone not to take action, or not to execute a very big action,
if it is not the correct action, unless you think justice is necessarily
coexistent with wrongful imprisonment.

And how do you pick who gets affirmative action anyway? I'm a Polish
immigrant. My ancestors have been fucked 5 ways from Tuesday by just about
every major happening in Europe. It was still 1989 when communism fell (only
_27 years ago_ ), and it left desolation and despair in its wake. Coming to
the US, my parents and I had just about nothing.

And better yet, I'm not going to claim I deserve something. Because the world
dealt me and everyone a shitty hand and the best I can do is play it, no
matter the odds. Even if someone got a better hand than I did.

~~~
bmh_ca
As a matter of interest, the school of thought you are describing is the
Deontologists. In "Capitalism and Freedom" Milton Friedman captured this as:

> [Antidiscrimination] legislation involves the acceptance of a principle that
> proponents would find abhorrent in almost every other application. If it is
> appropriate for the state to say that individuals may not discriminate in
> employment because of color or race or religion, then it is equally
> appropriate for the state, provided a majority can be found to vote that
> way, to say that individuals must discriminate in employment on the basis of
> color, race or religion. The Hitler Nuremberg laws and the law in the
> Southern states imposing special disabilities upon Negroes are both examples
> of laws similar in principle to [antidiscrimination legislation]

This is in contrast with a focus upon either consequence or virtues.
Deontological theory falls down on some observed economic scenarios. For
example, banker bonuses are generally deontological in nature, and as a result
paid out quarterly regardless of performance; a consequentialist or "virtuist"
might formulate banker bonuses on practical timelines or overall long-term
results, in contrast.

In any case, what I thought was a reasonably balanced emperical study by John
Donohue is worth reading [The Law and Economics of Antidiscrimination Law]
<[http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...](http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=lepp_papers>)
(it is the paper from which I drew Milton's quote).

~~~
striking
Thanks for the well-reasoned reply, and for the excellent link. I apologize
for having lost my cool.

Could you link me a paper describing the perspective you mentioned in your
earlier comments? I'd like to try challenging my own beliefs.

~~~
bmh_ca
It's my pleasure, I am glad you are interested in spending more time on the
topic.

Here's an reasonable read on the US history and positions:
[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/affirmative-
action/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/affirmative-action/)

I hope that helps and serves as a good starting position.

------
hysan
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.

------
krisdol
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_FIELDS
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.

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

------
antjanus
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.

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

~~~
mrrrgn
GitLab is pretty nice and auto-imports from GitHub!

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

~~~
greenrd
What nonsense are you blathering? Github isn't open source so you can't fork
it. Meanwhile there are lots of other GitHub-a-likes out there - Gitlab is
only one of them. So if you don't like Gitlab either, there are other choices.

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

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

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

------
politician
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?

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

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

~~~
sanjeetsuhag
Yeah, what does that even mean ?

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

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

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

------
jmorphy88
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.

~~~
alistproducer2
You don't believe any actions should be taken to try and unwind the lingering
effects of chattel slavery and jim crow?

~~~
jmorphy88
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.

~~~
headhuntermdk
Right. Fucking. There. Let me guess, you are a white male tired of people
bringing up diversity? Or maybe you have forgotten about the special status
given to minorities that brings us to todays topic? If enough was done, we
wouldn't be having this conversation. As if "whitey" hasn't been shaking down
different groups over the years.

~~~
jmorphy88
It's clear that the diversiteers doesn't ever intend to define what
constitutes "doing enough", and why would they? We keep falling for it.

As for whitey shaking down other groups, so what? That's how the world
works... shake or be shaken. I realize this is a topic that brings out a lot
of emotions and moralizing in people, but it really is that simple...

~~~
headhuntermdk
People aren't robots so meritocracy is a pipe dream. Everyone has biases (just
different ones). And if that's how the world works, then why the criticism of
"whitey" being shaken down? Your post smacks of "don't hate the player, hate
the game" kind of reasoning. Another word for this is "Supremacy" or
"Entitlement". A black candidate doesn't get the job so maybe he or she isn't
qualified, but as soon as the tables are turned for a white candidate, then
all hell breaks loose.

In an ideal setting, the best candidate gets the job. But who is the best
candidate? The black guy who doesn't live in the bay area, with no formal
education but had to self teach himself programming because he couldn't afford
to go to school? Or the recent Stanford grad that is more likely a culture fit
(looks and sounds like the interviewer) with the grades but not the real world
experience (yet)?

~~~
jmorphy88
> And if that's how the world works, then why the criticism of "whitey" being
> shaken down?

I'm not criticizing it _per se_. I'm trying to describe Diversity Inc. as a
much simpler phenomenon than it's being made out to be. It's a battle between
two groups with a conflict of interests, and one of those groups isn't even
taking its own side in the fight. It sounds simplistic, but without an
understanding of the basic political dynamics at work, there's not much use
bickering over the details.

As for who is the "best" candidate for a given role, I didn't comment on that,
but human interactions and group dynamics are highly complex phenomena. The
problem as you described it may turn out to be unsolvable. This raises the
question of who exactly benefits from these futile attempts to solve it. See
above.

------
Animats
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.

~~~
audessuscest
Maybe because Sourceforge and Github are not open source.

~~~
JohnTHaller
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/](http://allura.apache.org/)

Github is closed source.

------
susan_hall
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...](http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2005/07/19/when-we-are-needed/)

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.

------
fideloper
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.

~~~
fideloper
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.

------
grandalf
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).

------
s986s
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.

------
rdl
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.

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

~~~
hermanbergwerf
Yeah, that sounds pretty cool.

------
gyardley
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
> 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".

~~~
gyardley
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.

------
alistproducer2
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.

------
sauere
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](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.

------
elcapitan
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.

~~~
greenrd
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_

------
Khaine
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.

------
mschuster91
> 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
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

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

~~~
fredsted
For us, Github has been down more than Bitbucket due to all the recent DDoS
attacks.

------
ElComradio
_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.

------
Khaine
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.

~~~
humanrebar
> What benefits do they bring to the organisation?

Marketing to uber-rich investors?

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

~~~
spitfire
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.

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

------
jcromartie
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?

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

------
jgalt212
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.

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

~~~
b6
Yes. Here's some information: [http://www.businessinsider.com/github-
harassment-story-2014-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/github-harassment-
story-2014-4)

More, supposedly from insiders: [https://medium.com/@geeekcore1/facts-
conveniently-withheld-d...](https://medium.com/@geeekcore1/facts-conveniently-
withheld-d96f431f4e8e)

------
jpeg_hero
I am a white customer.

Am I welcome at Github???

------
hitekker
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.

~~~
reitanqild
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.

~~~
hitekker
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.

~~~
reitanqild
Possibly brigading downvoters then, I don't know.

------
tdkl
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.

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

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

~~~
tdkl
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.

~~~
jgowans
Yep, naked domains are supported, as is SSL.

------
susan_hall
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](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.

------
yakult
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.

~~~
cookiecaper
>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...](https://github.com/FeministSoftwareFoundation/C-plus-Equality)

However, they continue to host a mirror of it:
[https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality](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.

------
etherael
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.

~~~
theorique
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.

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

What are some examples where this has ever gone well?

------
bootload
_" 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?

------
scoot
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. __

------
morgante
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
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.

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

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

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

------
gitthrowaway
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.

------
jgalt212
>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.

------
j4kp07
Assembla offers free private repos (no bells, no whistles). I've been using
them for over 4 years now.

~~~
jws
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/](https://www.assembla.com/git/) In any event,
they are confusing me.

------
avivo
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](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)."

------
bitL
So where should I move all my repos now?

~~~
reactor
[https://notabug.org](https://notabug.org) might be a good place, in fact it
is.

------
seivan
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."

------
tosseraccount
"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.

~~~
DannyBee
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)](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)

~~~
tosseraccount
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.

~~~
DannyBee
"Who's making the assumptions, counsellor(?) ? "

You are. Let's take what you said "... aren't running a tech company."

Nothing in the article said he's running the company, you are making an
assumption here.

Nothing you have provided at all backups up your claim that "It's often not a
good sign when the top engineers or star salesmen aren't running a tech
company. ". So there's an unproven statement combined again with the
assumption that engineers aren't running the place (the article says it's
being run by one of the co-founders, who was an engineer - "Prior to founding
GitHub he worked as an engineer at CNET Networks on Gamespot and the launch of
Chow.")

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

This badly misunderstands what corpdev does.

It's pretty much not worth continuing this discussion, i'm just pointing out
that you are making wildly silly generalizations to how to run companies and
what the article actually says. And yeah, you are making a ton of assumptions
to do it.

------
melted
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.

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

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

~~~
systemz
I don't trust Microsoft

------
Joof
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.

------
OJFord
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...

------
brianzelip
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
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.

------
574747775
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.

~~~
douche
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.

~~~
574747775
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.

------
brightball
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.

------
emehrkay
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.

------
eikenberry
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.

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

~~~
eikenberry
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.

~~~
malandrew
The same goes for caucasian. It's a remarkably broad category that includes a
lot of different nationalities and ethnicities.

------
iza
> _" 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.

~~~
hitekker
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...](http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56b3d2462e526543008b5049-705-529/nicole%20sanchez-
diversity-training2.png)

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.

~~~
malandrew
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.

~~~
mjbh7k
\- "This is not work for white folks to lead"

Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is
being run by white people.

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

Second wave feminism, largely led by white women, often leaves out women of
color. I mentioned this below, but the publishing industry is 79% white and
78% female. This has a huge impact on the types of stories that get to be
published, which subsequently has real results on culture and society.

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

I mean yeah, sure, nothing super deep on that one. There should also be
solidarity with white friends and colleagues, preferably ones that do a lot of
listening and understand how not to take up all the space.

~~~
alexandercrohde
>>It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by
white people.

How can anybody who advocates equality say no white person can lead a
diversity movement? Just because somebody is white doesn't mean they aren't an
oppressed minority (female, transgender, Jewish or some other oppressed group
like a furry).

I think we collectively need to declare it's not okay to say "people with skin
color ____" cannot possibly understand Y or have an opinion on Y. To do so is
institutionalized racism.

edit: typo

~~~
Spooky23
Who said anything about equality?

When the discussion is about "social impact", the conversation is about
_diversity_. Diversity != equality. In the view of many, equality isn't
enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged. The concept
of "reverse racism" is there to deflect the inevitable awkward questions that
arise, when clearly biased statements are made and practices get
institutionalized.

IMO, all this stuff is problematic. I wish we could all embrace the golden
rule and move on.

~~~
alexandercrohde
I don't understand what you're arguing. Equal opportunity will lead to
diversity. Equality is about removing processes that look at privilege (e.g.
your rich father donated X dollars so welcome to our college).

If your idea of fairness requires we become systematically biased against
certain majorities (white, heterosexual, male, cis-gender) for your cause then
I don't want to be part of your cause, and moreover I find that cause
discriminitory and dangerous.

~~~
AOsborn
> If your idea of fairness requires we become systematically biased against
> certain majorities (white, heterosexual, male, cis-gender) for your cause
> then I don't want to be part of your cause, and moreover I find that cause
> discriminitory and dangerous.

Exactly. As mentioned earlier, in the case of Github the cultural transition
appears to be from prioritizing meritocracy to codified diversity for the sake
of diversity.

------
yaakov34
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
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.

~~~
yaakov34
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".

------
sanjeetsuhag
> Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women.

Can someone explain this ?

~~~
DasIch
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.

~~~
makomk
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.

~~~
facepalm
I can't deny that I feel some amount of Schadenfreude. And also a strange
longing for popcorn.

------
cooper12
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](https://redd.it/3o82sn))

~~~
dang
Good grief. Please don't do this here, and please, no more "shitposts"
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050922](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050922)).
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050478](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050562))

~~~
cooper12
Yeah sorry dang, won't happen again. I usually come to HN for serious
discussion but that thread was just ridiculous.

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

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

~~~
qb45
That's what Stalin said.

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

------
spc476
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_...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/cnn-white-
hispanic_n_3588744.html>). So did the New York Times:
<[http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-demotes-george-zimmerman-
from-...](http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-demotes-george-zimmerman-from-white-
hispanic-to-white/>).

~~~
dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050351)
and marked it off-topic.

------
_pmf_
> 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.

------
captain_jamira
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](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
_> 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](https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm1glnnHKg1qbce9oo1.mp3)
American (global) society is centuries deep in conditioning to value white
people more highly than others, irrespective of the opinion-holder's racial
identity._

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

 _> \- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"_

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

"Whites are slightly overrepresented in tech. We consider this to be an
enormous problem. Asians are far, far more overrepresented in tech, but don't
you dare be diverted by that. Our enemy is white people, not the
overrepresentation of an ethnicity."

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

~~~
dang
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't do this again.

------
ianwalter
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.

------
ihsw
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.

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

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

~~~
giaour
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.

