Secondly, Coraline seems to think that human relationships are a one way street: that she is entitled to be direct and even confrontational or insensitive, especially if she believes she is "right" or in a "mentor" role, and yet her peers are expected to walk on eggshells around her, lest they be accused of attacking her.
One part that stood out as particularly odd was her insistence to stay at work while she was suffering with a mental health issue that was clearly affecting her job performance, in spite of her manager's request that she take mental health leave. It sounds like she just flat out ignored her manager under the assumption that her manager just needed to accept whatever her therapist advised her to do, which is kind of ridiculous on the face of it.
I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight.
Where you see an instance of her co-workers being accused of attacking her, I see her lines of communication being shut down from above. A simple one-on-one conversation probably could have resolved that situation very easily, but GH management seems in this case to have insulated that person from learning from their mistake. Not the kind of effort I would expect from an organization that's truly trying to be "inclusive.
------------------------------
> As a senior engineer she was in a mentor role.
Being in a mentor role does not mean you have to right to mentor. Assuming you have a superior position, and deciding to use it to explain something obvious to someone else as "educating" them is not a good social interaction for the other person, and may make them feel trapped and uncomfortable. The author never said the junior developer expressed interest in mentorship, merely that "this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it." Not willing engaged, but "benefiting." Without context, it is imaginable that said mentoree didn't want these interactions or this relationship and the author never identified this social cue.
> I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight.
The article starts by complaining about "drive-by issue comments", then described opening what might be considered a drive-by issue. That could be construed as contradictory. Moreover, said issue may be construed as a (company-)public dressing-down. A developer came though and, in a public manner observable by all their peers, informed another that they were not being sensitive enough. It's reasonable, I think, to be upset in that context.
> A simple one-on-one conversation probably could have resolved that situation very easily, but GH management seems in this case to have insulated that person from learning from their mistake
The author could have initiated such a conversation herself in lieu of the issue.
------------------------------
My point is that a lot of things are a matter of perception, and one person's is seldom the whole story. Caroline clearly had a bad go of it at GitHub, that isn't deniable. But individuals' perceptions are fickle things, and it is seldom the case that any one tells the whole story.
Apparently not?
There's all of this talk about all of the code she pushed and all of the popular features she wrote, but there's no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured, e.g. what her management was expecting her to do. So when the negative review is mentioned, we're supposed to be shocked by it. Certainly she is shocked by it. That doesn't mean she should have been.
> My overall review was a "Does Not Meet Expectations." I was shocked and upset. A bad review out of the blue was not something that I had experienced before. I thought I had good rapport with my manager, and that if there was a problem that we would have been addressing it at our weekly meetings. In my mind this was a serious management failure, but there was apparently nothing I could do about it.
Emphasis on "addressing it at our weekly meetings".
This seems to be far more of a management failure than Coraline's failure.
> no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured
But per the blog post:
> Based on the positive feedback from my one-on-ones and how well I was tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level, I was hopeful of getting a promotion and a raise.
I'm confused as to how one could be "tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level" but not be measured by those metrics.
This is the main issue right there.
If anyone is reading this and wants to have a lot of HR/PR related problems in his/her company - start doing this and problems will pile up.
If that's all it takes for your company to come crumbling down, then good riddance.
That's the vibe I got from her post (that the conversation just stopped at a certain point), but that's really my point; in adult, human interactions, if you behave in ways that people find unacceptable, people can and will at one point simply say, "I've had enough" and shut down further dialogue because they do not find communicating with you to be constructive or productive. They are within their rights as human beings to do so.
Some people seem to have a "I have a certain approach and you must accept it and deal with me" attitude and that's just not how the world works. You can try to push a bad, combative attitude on other people, but there's just nothing that says that they have to accept it.
>This was the first instance of what came to be referred to as my "non-empathetic communication style".
I like how she was pissed when she was "out victim-ed" HA!
I think you are right, employees like this have an bigger agenda they are focused on rather than doing work of the company.
And the fact that she says she has bipolar depression (and she was on involuntarily mental commitment for 8-days!?! A 5150 in California is 72-hours!) and yet she can't imagine why somebody would say she is not doing well at work, is also ridiculous on the face of it.
You can of course be involuntarily confined in California for over 72 hours. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80...
I got this vibe too. Empathy on the part of others (or rather its lack) is discussed quite a bit, but no consideration is given for the person who wrote the survey who was upset by her feedback. From the subtext it sounds like we are to believe this person was silly to be upset, because the feedback was so anodyne, but it really does seem like a part of the story there is missing. Based on the usage of the "her" pronoun, I'm guessing this other person is also a woman, who also faces issues of harassment and unfairness in tech. And so the lack of empathy for where that person was coming from was quite striking.
I'm going to hazard a guess that it was Frannie Zlotnick who led the survey [0]. As her research interests include gender and race stereotyping [1], I'm guessing that she objected to being lectured on the subject.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-wor...
[1] https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/frannie-zlotnic...
I'm sorry if this seems unempathetic - getting fired sucks, and is extremely painful. But there's no other way I can put it.
A long time ago, when my career first started, I also went through the "PIP deathspiral", and it took months... maybe years after my termination to realize I was just fired being a shithead.
I see the same "it's not my fault it's theirs" attitude I had at the time in this.
But it's not exactly the first time GitHub has had issues with this kind of thing.
The impression I get from this whole debacle is that GitHub has a shit attitude, and there's more of them than there is of her, so they did what any company does in a similar situation.
But hey! It's just a "culture issue" right. Except, the culture issue is that the whole effing Silicon Valley culture is pure poison.
I don't disagree. I probably should have taken the greater SV problem into consideration in my knee jerk OP :-|
I agree; she's very passionate about what she's doing. I'm really on about her interactions with the team.
The things that really stand out to me:
- Regarding the data scientist's gender question: "I was forbidden to interact any further with the author of the survey"
- Regarding the mentee situation: "I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to 'learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you.'"
- Regarding asynchronous communication: "Asynchronous communication is definitely not my strongest area. When I see a text box on screen, I tend to be very terse and direct instead of typing out a wall of text."
It sounds like there's a lot unsaid in these lines she's getting. As if glaring social cues are being missed, and the managers and teammates are either unable or unwilling to just say "you come across like a jerk a lot. People are scared to say this to you. Please slow down before you type."
It could also be my massive amount of privilege talking. Who knows.
Over all, it paints a picture of GH where the management (and many / some employee) are not fans of directly dealing with problems, which, IMHO, speaks to people who don't do it often enough. Most of the time, when I (or others who've related stories) "turn" to directly deal with a people problem, it turns out not to be much of a problem at all. It's only when you try to deal indirectly, or not all, that things go south and eventually explode.
Interestingly, all of the people at my last company that I had this issue with were in the Bay Area, and I didn't have this issue with folks in other remote offices.
The strategy I use is to qualify and de-personalize everything. This is less persuasive writing, verbose, and slightly annoying but is "safer" if you don't know your audience. "It may be better", "X seems like it could be asked better", "help me understand your thoughts for X over Y", "what if we tried asking X like this? It might have this effect".
This is categorically less efficient communication but is arguably more 'effective' if it means people don't get offended. As it's hard to be effective when people are complaining to their managers.
Can't really say I'm expecting someone like that to be low friction.
> In the Ruby world, we insist that “Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice,” ignoring the sexist statements he has made with regard to diversity outreach efforts. We write off Linus Torvalds’ dismissal of diversity as an “unimportant detail” and justify it based on the utility of his creations. But why is it that we can proudly refuse to use software created by corporations whose often aggressive business policies we disagree with, but continue to adopt software written by sexists, racists, homophobes, transphobes?
I feel that's pretty close to directly calling Matz a sexist. Later she proposes a Code of Conduct for Ruby so that there's a robust process for punishing sexism[2]. As far as I understand, Matz' tweet would have counted as an offence.
Also, while her Contributor Covenant seems like it strives to make GitHub interactions more civilised, Caroline has a public Twitter account on which she screenshots people who disagree with her for her followers to sneer at (current, harmless example: [3]). Inexplicably (to me), this behaviour is fine by the logic of the CC. I'd say it's the highway to emotional escalation.
Nothing of this invalidates her viewpoints, but her approach of working for change is more "take no prisoners" than "low friction".
[1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of... [2] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004 [3] https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/882735106070376451
If you encounter attitudes from people that are hostile towards you, you can either speak up and allow them to correct themselves (or double-down) or be silent and give your tacit approval.
This kind of bias is demonstrated over and over in studies, even (and in some cases, especially) among people who are highly educated and even forewarned about the study objectives.
I wish we could have discussions like this in the wider community without people going knee-jerk against the idea of it, itself.
I'd be willing to accept that a lot of companies here are nepotistic. I'd even be willing to accept that they cloak their nepotism in the rhetoric of meritocracy. But I have to draw the line at people opposing the idea itself. I have a hard time understanding how anyone could even hold that position. Don't you want the best people, at least in principle?
If people were more nuanced in these things we could hold discussions like "yes, this is a great ideal, but it gets corrupted. The problem is the corruption, not the ideal"
The idea that the best way to fix biases in favor of wealthy white men is to add new biases against wealthy white men is crazy.
But there are such metrics. For example:
* "I implemented feature X, which increased CTR by Y% thus increasing revenue by Z"
* "New compression scheme reduces bandwidth usage by this much, allowing team B to implement their new feature without worrying about badnwidth usage too much"
* "Team C, who uses our library, needed urgent help investigating a performance issue. I dove in and found that the interface we were providing them didn't allow the most efficient usage; designed, tested and deployed an alternative, which resulted in team C being satisfied with performance"
I could keep going with these examples (I'm paraphrasing these from some actual work my colleagues did). My point is, it's pretty easy to measure merit in earned dollars, shipped features, fixed bugs, saved engineering hours, and resource usage. Those metrics are concrete and public.
I got a new computer. Where news.ycombinator.com hasn't been set to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts yet. So I wanted to check what changed in the last year or so...
And your post reminded me why I stopped visiting here. Thanks.
Merits are important in engineering. If our merit measurements are low resolution, enhance them.
I don't care what team members look or sound like as long as they are good.
I like to think about Neurosurgery to illustrate: if you need a tumor removed from your brain, would you rather have the surgeon be a privileged, elite surgeon from Harvard, or some random dude from the streets?
We should be happy that we are able to produce elite Neurosurgeons, and strive to give more people the opportunity (including random dudes from the street). Attacking elite Neurosurgeons is completely counterproductive.
Good code speaks for itself, and competent programmers will quickly recognize you.
Never really wanted to use opal before, but if this is who is behind it...
I think the main objection to "meritocracy" is that often there is no real meritocracy, and people use it as a way to ignore claims that the place isn't a meritocracy.
Organisation: We're a meritocracy! Member: I'm getting unfairly treated based on race/gender/etc. Org: That's impossible, we're a meritocracy!
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
> The next day I got an urgent request for a call with my manager. She told me that the data scientist who had written the survey questions was very upset and had gone to her manager to complain about me.
I can't help but shake my head reading thru the whole piece. It's like a soap opera. Everyone's so caught up in the social issues it's fucking impossible to not offed anyone.
The fact that Github asked "Transgender" in addition to this shouldn't be seen as offensive, as I am sure they were doing this simply to make sure transgendered people felt included too. Sadly a good deed is not always appreciated.
UK government guidelines [1] for general forms to do with benefits/services &c are fairly thin
Organisations that have to maintain equality metrics in some form [2] have a more complex approach. This second approach seems like the nearest to the Github situation. The example I have cited (third or fourth in goog search results) maps directly to 'protected characteristics' in diversity legislation in UK.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/design/gender-or-sex
[2] http://www.ecu.ac.uk/guidance-resources/using-data-and-evide...
Meta comment: Survey questions are tricky to formulate. Kicking ideas round in a group on a whiteboard with reference to external advice/exemplars seems to help get wording sorted and clarify the taxonomy. Genuine question (I don't work in the software world) is it normal for a lone web developer person to be left just making up the questions as they are coding them?
I've never heard of a PIP working out and both the company and employee being happy -- maybe you only hear about the bad cases, but a PIP often seems to me like a cover your ass plan on the part of the company. They want to get rid of a person, but they're afraid of getting sued, so a PIP is a way to document why a person was fired in the case of litigation.
This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.
Because the PIP exists to to support the argument that the firing was not for a prohibited reason in the event that the employee charges that it was. “At-will” doesn't mean there aren't prohibited reasons for firing, and if you don't have any evidence for what the firing reason was, it doesn't take much evidence of an improper purpose to meet the “preponderance of the evidence” standard for civil litigation.
You could just document the behavior that makes them want to fire them ("you smell funny") and followups in an email, and call it a day after a week or so.
Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer :)
Because sometimes it's a genuine desire for someone who is a good cultural fit to improve.
> If you're ever put on a PIP, get out -- it's a sign someone in the company doesn't want you there.
I've put folks on PIPs before (we don't call them that and we're much more straightforward about it than some employers I hear about who do), and had positive outcomes. The correct way of thinking about a PIP is:
1. We rely on people to work adequately-to-well by themselves 2. If they can't, we tell them they aren't and expect them to improve, 3. If they can't, we get more specific in our feedback and meet more often to discuss course corrections 4. If that doesn't work, because the continued presence of performance problems means we can't work productively as an employer/employee, we try to meet on a MUCH more regular basis than 1, 2, 3 in order to track and improve performance.
The best and most effective feedback is given in the moment: you are doing [x], here's how it has an impact on [y], here's what we think would be a better way. A PIP basically means you get more refined and structured feedback way more often.
I'm not saying that a PIP is a hugely positive or stress-free thing for anyone, but we try to assume positive intent and treat it as a great opportunity to help someone constructively get over a block to being a better contributor to our company.
At least where i've worked, they work out about 50% of the time. That tracks with the PIP's i've been involved in.
I can also give you anecdotes if you like, but i'm not sure you care.
"This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why. " I'd agree plenty of PIPs are written and delivered at various companies as a cover your ass.
But where I am, and what I do, they are used as a hopeful wakeup call with some formal tracking and feedback mechanism. Really. As you say, there is no point if there is no hope of improvement.
(I know how cynical HN is, of course, so i don't expect this to be believed)
Not the GP, but I care, and would like to hear them.
It was a revenge and scape goat PIP. An employee was leaving a team, so they decided to pin all the disasters of the preceding 6 months on him.
Of course they didn't raise the issue until after he had joined my team, but it was performance review time, and he'd been on their team for almost all of the review period, so they got to declare him "unsatisfactory" and force me to do the PIP process with him.
But he really was a good performer, and our team had worked with him before and knew the whole thing was bullshit, so he quite appropriately sailed through the PIP, and that allowed us to draw a line and say "it has been dealt with, the problem is resolved and whatever took place in that team has no relevance to his performance here".
It's the PIPs where the attitude is what you describe that are doomed to fail. And if everyone has that perception to begin with, I can't reach for PIPs as a tool anymore because the outcome is determined already. Vicious cycle.
This being said, I get where you're coming from. PIPs can be used to let people go. For good and not so good reasons. One way we try to defend against that is that if things aren't working, we do our best to move the employee you a different manager with an as-clean-as-possible shot after giving clear feedback and before the PIP. After all, people leave managers, not jobs.
PS: Not github. Also Europe, not US.
The third instance was "we wanna fire this person but if we see improvement then they can stay". This person stayed for almost a year.
In all cases the PIP was to create a paper trail to support an argument of firing for legal cause in a potential lawsuit.
Sometimes you might really like an employee, but _need_ them to improve on a few things for their employment to work. PIPs can definitely work in this circumstance.
Sometimes an employee is just incredibly toxic, and you may have reason to believe that they'll sue the company if you fire them without well-defined cause, (like the parent article here). In this case you are simply creating a paper trail to cover your ass legally. Of course the PIP is not going to "work" for the employee, they will be fired regardless as you want them gone. But the PIP may "work" for the company, by limiting liability.
The key quote:
"According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time."
I think this means we overlay what we think the intended tone was meant to be on top of the email, and usually it's more to do with us than the content of the email, and I suspect in Coraline's case it was uniformly negative due to unrecognised prejudice. I would suggest that in the corporate setting, if you've not got a relationship with the author of code you shouldn't be able to feedback initially as text, but instead either in person or on the phone. In that way you get the relationship between reporter and coder off to a good start, and follow up text communications will have a better chance of working.
I would actually go so far as to say no-one in a corporate setting should be communicating with each other as text without a phone call or a meeting to introduce each other.
Here's the article that's stuck with me so long:
https://www.wired.com/2006/02/the-secret-cause-of-flame-wars...
Also re-reading e-mails whilst mentally putting myself in the shoes of the recipient to see if I think it could be mis-intepreted helps avoid potential issues, I find.
I know I'm probably rehashing an argument many here have had before, but consider: With text, the whole of your message is visible at once, for rereading. You can include links or files, and the recipient doesn't have to take any notes or do anything special to make this communication archived and searchable. With voice, you need to set aside a specific time to make the call, and the other person needs to drop whatever they're doing to accept it. And, unless you can find some special nook to do it, everyone around you is both subtly bothered by having to listen to you, and able to eavesdrop on your conversation.
The stated reason doesn't seem to hold up either--having one initial voice conversation won't help with any tone conveyance problems down the line. Unless it is used to convince you that the other person is indeed a person, and you shift your default assumption of what their tone might be (which is itself a worrying tribalistic bias, but separate). This, however, could backfire. What if your voice or in-person conversation with the person reveals some personal detail of theirs that makes you dislike them (such as an annoying voice, or personal style, or hygiene, or, more seriously, race or gender)? You'd then be less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt in future text conversations.
Finally, I know I'm in the minority in this, but I don't get any extra benefit out of voice communications myself anyway. I'm oversimplifying somewhat, but I could say that all non-yelling "tone" is basically indistinguishable to me. Instead, voice communications often end up being a way for the more extroverted speaker to dominate a conversation through sheer force of will. My current boss does this all the time--his writing style is pretty scattered, but, whenever we Skype with someone, he'll rhapsodize at length about his abstract ideas about the current project before some of the other speakers are able to get anything in. I don't mean to be too harsh on him, because, one-on-one, his ideas and direction are often useful, but in these Skype conversations, it often turns out that it's the others' more focused additions that end up being the real product of the meeting, and his only contribution is some high-minded, well, tone-setting.
1) I prefer text too and ongoing communication requires lots of this. 2) You should be able to call people over simple things. 3) You should have a work environment where calls are OK. I've solved to many problems with a phone in 10 minutes that others have spent a week playing email ping-pong with. 4) An initial conversation does have lasting effects, "First impressions count" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_impression_(psychology) 5) It's not about making people like you, it's about reducing misunderstandings. If you've got open prejudice then this could help to address even that. 6) While you may not learn about someone from a call, especially if you struggle to understand the emotional content of a call, but that doesn't mean they don't understand something about you which eases future communications with that person. 7) Tone setting is really valuable for some people who struggle with focus.
(Yes, people's hardships which prevent them achieving their full potential should be taken into account, when determining "merit"; anything causing these hardships, including (especially?) past discrimination, should be countered; and people who had been subjected to the hardship should be treated with care and compassion, but that's orthogonal to meritocracy itself.
Also, obviously, your skills and abilities (in the context of work and meritocracy) have no bearing on your intrinsic value as a human being (so we need something like guaranteed basic income or progressive taxes to reduce issues like pay inequality).)
I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an
eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a
guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with
Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.
The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief
of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving
recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at
Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an
undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat
Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got
William an internship at the White House; how he talked to
friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and
secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and
how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach
at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.
With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving
what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving
replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.'For example, I could say: whenever I think of anti-racism, I think of [insert quote about someone who claims to be anti-racist and then says/does something racist]. Does that say anything about the concept of anti-racism itself? Or is it just irrelevant commentary about the fact that there are dishonest people claiming the mantle of every ideal while not living up to it?
Just because Irving Kristol is too dumb to understand the concept of meritocracy doesn't mean the concept is without merit.
It's the ingroup club made manifest. What you describe would be great, but it's not what "meritocracy" actually means in practice.
But then again, I'm a white caucasian heterosexual male, so maybe I just don't notice. (Previous sentence is meant literally, not ironically.)
I'm not sure whether this is sufficient to convince me to stop using the term "meritocracy" — the term is already ingrained in popular usage, irrespective of its provenance, and quite nice in that the word conveys the idea behind it relatively well, so I'm not sure whether the baggage associated with it is sufficiently toxic to justify dropping it.
As for the idea of meritocracy, at least in the narrow sense of selecting people based on their (potential) skills and abilities, I don't really see any better alternatives. The issues of social stratification, lack of inter-generational mobility, unequal access to education, income inequality and self-satisfaction are very severe, but with the partial exception of the last one, I don't agree that they're exacerbated by meritocracy (and regarding the last one, people will always find a reason to be self-satisfied/self-congratulatory).
The problem of political representatives not actually being representative of the population as a whole is indeed worrying. Perhaps sortition [0] might work (???). (If sortition were shown to be functional and implemented, but "meritocracy" continued to be used everywhere else, then meritocracy would become a terrible misnomer...)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
As an aside, assuming that the word "meritocracy" was coined in a book satirising the concept, as stated in the article (as well as wikipedia), why did it start being used in a positive sense?
What makes you so sure of that..
If your company ever communicates this badly to you, it's time to question whether this company can be fixed.
"'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
For contrast, this reminds me of Gene Wilder's feedback about his Willy Wonka costume:
https://www.bustle.com/articles/181340-this-letter-gene-wild...
I now try to emulate this style, in every situation.
As for the triggered data scientist... Well. Whaddya gonna do? I guess my skin's thicker than most.
Enjoyed the letter you shared. Gene is truly missed.
Their interpretation was that github is upset they are viewed as sexist, so they want to figure out how to change their public reputation, without actually changing anything.
Good ol' Diversity Theatre :/
My employer does a good job of this. We have a lot of women and transgender (not so many POC) employees, but we don't have any special inclusivity initiatives or outreach programs, nor do we officially inject any related ideology into the businessplace. The expectation is that you conduct yourself professionally, and that you exercise your own discretion; the other side of the coin is that you correct what you might think is morally/terminologically wrong (such as confusing biological sex with gender) as diplomatically and non-confrontationally as possible; assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them.
As for Coraline herself, I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here. In particular, I'm sure there is more to the "non-empathetic communication style" than the data scientist and other related incidents. Not to be a presumptive asshole, but I do get the impression from this kind of expose that she might be difficult to work with.
If I had a white male colleague who would constantly point out - in a work environment - that a PR should be dismissed because made by a woman or that a deliverable sucks because made by a black guy, I would not tolerate that behavior for a second. I don't get why the opposite should be considered "inclusion and safety".
I didn't see this and can't find it. Can you point me at where this happens?
> The fact, for example, she dismisses PRs or code reviews because made by
> white males. Or the blog post on her first deliverable, rewritten by a
> white male.
> However, it soon became apparent that this promising start would not last
> for long. For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from
> literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams,
> nitpicking the code I had written. One PR actually had over 200 comments
> from 24 different individuals.
Secondly, it seems more like her issue was that she felt like she was getting dogpiled on via the PR. I've never worked anywhere that I felt the need to start critiquing the code of people from other teams who were working on systems that I might not even have experience with. It especially seems not very inclusive to make a new hire feel like she is immediately on the defensive. 200 comments seems excessive. (Granted we can't see the content so it may not have been all unjustified, but still).
Here is the other excerpt that you reference:
> The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone
> of what I had written was too personal and didn't reflect the voice of the
> company. The reviewer insisted that any mention of the abuse vector that
> this feature was closing be removed. In the midst of my discussions with
> the editorial team, trying to reach a compromise, a (male) engineer from
> another team completely rewrote the blog post and published it without
> talking to me.
Also, like the previous excerpt the gender of the person is referenced to drive home the whole 'inclusiveness' angle. The real issue here isn't that the offender is male, but that he apparently went around her while her content was tied up in editorial review. That seems like a total dick move, IMHO.
To be fair, it's possible that to also blame the managerial systems in place for allowing this too. How was this person able to publish the blog post while a "competing" version of the post was held up in editorial review (though presumably not fully rejected)? Was this a mistake due to poor communication?
It's so obviously correct that you can't even argue about it, and if you do (and you're white and male) you are mansplaining, and if you're not, you have internalized self hatred (which is the patriarchy fault, no less).
It's OK to promote Democrats internally at a company but if you're a Trump supporter you are EVIL. This is also obvious and requires no explanation and cannot be argued.
/s
In all seriousness, this stuff needs to stay out of the professional sphere. It's a swing back in the other direction of toxicity.
Really, I couldn't have said it better. This is the crux of the issue.
I think many social activists, esp. those I see on social media, could use a heavy dose of this kind of thinking. People are human, humans make mistakes, and most people I run into in life are too busy with their own affairs to always be perfectly conscious about their words and actions.
The way things fell apart when that cocoon was breached -- both from within and without -- was entirely predictable.
How was this supposed to work in the first place? What did they hope to accomplish with this design?
There must be better designs for these sorts of initiatives, right? What are Microsoft, Apple, or Google doing?
We were trying to isolate ourselves from the craziness in the rest of the company, and we got a lot of cool shit done while it lasted.
Any nail that sticks up will get pounded down, someone somewhere will be offended no matter what. So just do your thing and ignore the haters.
Edit: To the skeptics, Starbucks was among the first to extend health insurance to domestic partners, and I'm a big fan of their CARE programs. That said, it was still the worst job I've ever had.
I get that impression as well, but I also get the impression that GitHub is a difficult place to work (from things like the data scientist going straight to her boss to complain, instead of trying to resolve any issue at the coworker level first, which is what would happen in a professional workplace).
> assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them.
Especially big on this. Nobody can read minds, so when people make mistakes, there is no winning tactic other than to assume good intent.
At my previous employer, we achieved a 50-50 gender balance on our engineering team. Not through identity politics, outreach initiatives, and politicking, but through professionalism and politeness.
We were able to attract many incredibly talented women and minority engineers, by just not being assholes and treating them like any other engineers.
In fact, for somewhat of a natural experiment: there was a bifurcation in our engineering organization, a split between the web dev side (our teams) and the functional programming side. The FP side was full of politicking. The FP side's morale was terrible.
It was kind of ridiculous. By the time I chose to move on from this company, four out of the six women in our engineering organization were backchanneling with me about how uncomfortable the women-in-tech political rhetoric made them feel. They didn't want to be singled out as special snowflakes. They didn't want everyone else wondering if they were just diversity hires. They just wanted to participate on an equal footing, with everyone else. The fact that they felt more comfortable talking to me, a senior engineer, than HR or the company's Womens' Group is fairly absurd.
You don't need all this campaigning and activism to achieve these goals. You just need to be good, competent, professional, and kind people. You need management that has no tolerance for asshole behaviour, regardless of whether it's an ism, or just an asshole. You need a company that notices and rewards good work, even (and especially!) from those people who would otherwise fade into the background.
Thing is, a lot of the complaints made by "SJWs" are legit! Racism sucks. Assholes making shitty comments suck. Favouritism and nepotism sucks. But all of these concerns are already dealt with by healthy norms of professionalism, and those norms do a lot better job of advocating fair treatment for everyone, than the activists seem to do.
The women on our team didn't want special treatment or top-down interventions. They just wanted to be treated like the equals that they were! They really appreciated the fact that, on our team, they got that, and it wasn't a big deal.
When you're facing a team, company, or culture that appears problematic, consider that instead of being sexist, management may just be shitty, incompetent assholes _in general_. Healthy, mature, capable, professional teams are not like this.
> What is your gender?" The multiple-choice options were "Male", "Female", and "Transgender"
What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case? I would think, at the very least, an "Other" field would be a 1000x improvement from a "Transgender" option.
> I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here
People like you (and the kind of reaction you are describing here) are the reason why more people don't report discrimination and harassment issues.
> What would a "professional and politically neutral as possible" company, in your definition, do in this case?
* "Female"
* "Other (feel free to specify in the text field below)"
Or something along those lines, it's not that hard.
I suspect you will find yourself publicly involved in another kind of justice sphere by accident.
That said, there is something to your hesitancy. I did a big part of my education in the social justice sphere, and while I believe in pretty much all of the core theories, in practice I don't think most activists have much of a plan of attack for tech companies. That's partly because they don't really get much practice, because companies are reluctant to give them power, and, as this story shows, quick to give up if results aren't progressing as expected.
Your solution—give up on that crew entirely—sort of solves the problem, I guess.
But my solution is to keep trying to study and talk and figure out what a good methodology would be for applying the core social justice theories (everyone has valuable compentencies, demographics are a useful signal, other realities exist than yours, consent matters, etc) in a tech corp setting productively.
The thing about strict professionalism is that it avoids the problems of bro-culture while simultaneously preventing issues from blowing up.
As of now, Github has pretty much alienated everybody. They've pissed of activists by firing Coraline and some of the stuff they've done in the past. They've pissed off "broflakes" by some of their other more recent cultural changes. But now they're starting to piss off people who may or may not care about social justice, but who definitely don't want the defining topic in the OSS community to be social justice. I think this is a game you can only win by refusing to play.
This sounds good, but I think to some people in tech "professional" and "political neutral" are contradictory goals. And your company has to choose which to take.
For example a professional workplace might say "You can't display photos of scantily clad women in the office" or "We're not hiring (female) strippers for our office party" (or "We have reprimanded $MANAGER for taking their team to a strip club") or "You can't use that word in the office to refer to a co-worker because it's mildly/very insulting and has political baggage". And all of those decision are derided by some as "political correctness" or taking political stances.
being politically neutral means not being active on an issue when there are no laws to follow, and otherwise taking no stated stance on topics, other than to cite legislative rules.
That said, it might not have been the best idea to frame harassment in the context of the wider social justice movement. It may or may not fall into that group (depending on what you believe) and I'm not trying to argue whether it does or doesn't; what I am saying is that regardless, it might not actually be a good idea to inject politics into this situation. Nobody would say that preventing harassment is bad, but you will piss people off by injecting larger narratives into the issue.
If I could summarize, I guess I'm saying "go easy on the intersectionality."
A better way to put what I wrote is this: these problems can all be avoided by approaching problems from a professionalism point of view, rather than a social justice one. Both Coraline and her coworkers did unprofessional things that could have been avoided with better communication, and perhaps more attentive management.
You can't comment like this here regardless of how strongly you feel or how wrong you think someone else is. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704439.
Edit: since you've done this repeatedly and we warned you before, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Keep in mind that her team helps writes her performance reviews.
> For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written.
Oh no people were reviewing a new engineer's code. (male employees. you know what that means)
> The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone of what I had written was too personal and didn't reflect the voice of the company.
Translation: I wrote a ranty screed and my employer, which unlike me understands the importance of polite communication and cares about its public image, declined to publish it verbatim.
> But pair programming simply didn't happen at GitHub. I would occasionally get another engineer to share a screen to walk me through a particularly hairy subsystem, but actual pairing was extremely rare and I missed it.
Gee I wonder why nobody wanted to pair program with you.
> When I talked to my manager about how she was progressing, I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to "learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you."
Translation: Your mentee is complaining about you being a huge asshole.
> She told me that the data scientist who had written the survey questions was very upset and had gone to her manager to complain about me.
Guessing this wasn't the first incident.
> This was the first instance of what came to be referred to as my "non-empathetic communication style".
Lol.
> My manager accused me of shutting down the conversation by making it personal.
You would never do such a thing.
> My overall review was a "Does Not Meet Expectations."
Surprise! Your coworkers hate you.
> The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally
Aaand here come the excuses.
> she said she felt like I was trying to manipulate her by sharing my feelings in the hopes of influencing the PIP.
You weren't though, right? Right?
> GitHub has made some very public commitments to turning its culture around, but I feel now that these statements are just PR.
Yes this has everything to do with Github's culture and nothing to do with your performance as an employee.
That seems too harsh a conclusion given the scant evidence provided.
That said, this part stood out to me as potentially troubling:
> mentoring is an essential part of being a senior engineer, and this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it
Learning by way of a mentorship is an essential part of being a junior engineer. That doesn't imply that all senior engineers must mentor junior engineers. And it definitely does not require or even suggest that senior engineers should seek out junior engineers for potential mentorship (nor even make casual offers for informal mentorship for that matter).
Further, the language the author uses in the description is vague as to who requested the mentorship in the first place. It's also vague as to whether the company actually approved or encouraged such a formal mentorship.
Very self absorbed and childish. Just reading it makes me feel like working with that person would be really annoying.
Unsubstantiated, folk-lorish Ad-homs like "tells a lot more about yourself" shouldn't be made.
(But then.. I have a terse style myself. But I'm glad we're discussing this.)
It feels dumb to me but I know for a fact that some people who are quick to take offense ease when they see it.
Irony, sarcasm and humor don't scale well.
How I look when I reply: :|
(It has a name, but I keep forgetting it.)
In my experience, this is equally applicable to social interactions and works surprisingly well.
I think, looking back on that interaction with Coraline, there was, in fact, a real problem with empathy.
But that problem wasn't mine.
There are a lot of gender expectations that punish assertive and matter of fact women as 'bitchy' and 'insensitive'. If a white guy behaves the same way no one thinks twice about it. To me it sounds like management at Github is uncomfortable with her perspectives. We often see women and minorities censured for not trying to conform to the model of a demure, inoffensive, and compliant minority.
Much like the comments here, Github management appears to prefer to focus on the perceived personality flaws of someone who makes others uncomfortable by her presence rather than underlying issues causing their discomfort.
The "insensitivity" mentioned in the piece appears to be largely based on the fact that the author behaves much like a white guy would in these situations.
As it stands right now, the discussion here is basically a debate over whether or not Coraline was discriminated against in some way, or if she was fired for some legitimate reason. Even if you dispute the facts of this case, there's a potential larger issue about inclusivity and discrimination in tech there that is worth talking about at least somewhat, regardless of what you think of it.
If Coraline were a man, then all that entire larger issue goes away and this post would be nothing more than a man whining about being fired. There's nothing much worth discussing about a man being fired. If anything, I'd expect that they would be censured for acting in an unseemly way for a man.
Did you just assume my reaction? (partly sarcastic).
If you know anything about tech and blogging and HN, you should know that most posts get flamed and dissected very quickly. People have very strong opinions and have very low tolerance for BS.
The only difference is, people from the "social justice" community always make it personal.
"What? You criticize me? It must be because of my race/skin/gender/religion/orientation, you bigoted monster!".
One example is that the post needed several attempts here at Hacker News to be not flagged.
As a Deaf programmer I also experience this marginalisation. Of course the causes are different. One thing is exactly the same: I need to fight for my own power. And this fighting is sadly already enough to tick people off.
Edit: Clarified language.
I have low expectations for tech companies understanding these kind of issues, but to separate _transgender_ as an option completely misses the point of what "transgender" actually means.
transgender: adjective denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender.
Though I agree that it clearly isn't a gender, it does seem like a sensible option to be included in a survey when asking about gender. Maybe they should have kept the options but rephrased the question?
Edit: On second thought, I get it; you can be transgender and identify as male or female.
I think it is possible that there is some sexism here in that I'm not confident a male employee at Github would ever be challenged over failing this communication standard. That is, I think we implicitly expect women to be more empathetic and polite than men are, and get confused when they are not.
Edit: Also, I have never, ever heard of a PIP being used as anything other than a strategy for building a case for firing someone. Does anyone have any counter-examples?
Edit 2: Also also, the author says she had to turn down Github's severance package because it included an NDA, so she could write the article. Gross. [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/882636914981036032
I've seen others performance planned for being complete jerks to others on a repeated basis.
Please remember that no amount of genius should make up for being an asshole. Some companies don't take this to heart, for sure, but those that actually want a good culture, do.
So yeah, regardless of this case (i don't have enough facts), but i've definitely seen people fired/etc for not being able to communicate empathetically.
Also, in academia, there is a similar phenomenon for letters of recommendation that can actually really hurt your chances if you are not familiar with the intricacies. For example, if you are applying for an American position, letters are expected only shower praise upon the applicant. But for European positions, letters are intended to be a straightforward and honest assessment of the applicant--highlighting both the good and the bad (e.g. [0]).
I'm not trying to justify this action by any means. I can just see how it may come about.
[0]: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/53876/postdoc-r...
Old Polish [0] saying, back from the days when Poland was a communist country.
[0] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dajcie_mi_cz%C5%82owieka,_a_pa...
Now, if you're asking whether or not "lack of empathetic communication" is a real thing worth firing somebody over, that depends. Certainly interpersonal abuse is something that can happen and can rise to the level where it becomes a good reason to fire somebody.
In this case, we largely do not see most of the communication that took place. We really only have her word to take that it wasn't that bad or not worth being fired over. We also don't see much in this story about how her behavior affected the people around her. So, I wouldn't draw a conclusion on whether or not the firing over "empathetic communication" is appropriate.
At-will means "for basically any reason." PIPs are used to try and demonstrate cause so that collecting benefits is harder.
It's not always in these words, sometimes it's presented as "culture fit", which is a bit broader but "communication style" fits under it.
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
I only found out about this post because the alternative (unofficial) interface https://hckrnews.com/ manages to surface this given the number of votes it has received.
I appreciate HN's moderation, on average. It's a shame the process of moderation isn't more transparent. I have no idea why this was flagged.
The reason they gave for firing her is just bizarre, making me wonder if there was a different reason that they didn't want to admit.
I can see it either way, honestly. I think the issues raised are worth discussing here. I don't know that the post itself is.
Not everyone is going to like everyone else, and it has nothing to do with gender.
Some people are just not very likeable, others are very likeable.
Coraline based on my impression, is just not terribly likeable.
Github wants people they like, to be part of Github. How can you blame them?
People who don't get that, and go around writing long winded blogs of how they've been mistreated, and claim it has to do with some social justice issue, are unfortunately oblivious to what the real issue is.
I found this interesting:
> I wrote an impassioned piece talking about how this feature closed a security gap that had directly affected and provided an abuse vector against me
I see this "impassioned piece" as a public shaming of the company who employs her. Since her team's product manager encouraged her to write this, it makes the product manager look like a fool.
She probably caused a lot of friction among several of her co-workers and her manager just couldn't help her anymore.
EDIT: I see now it is flagged. To be clear, I didn't, because I still think it's worth discussing some of the points made.
When you get off on the wrong foot, there is very little you can do to correct it, beside changing teams. Once a manager thinks they know something about your performance, or perceived lack, it's hard to counter that. No matter what --colleagues, clients, other managers, etc. I've seen this play out a couple of times.
There is no stopping the snowball.
For me, it was these random things that would come up very suddenly seemingly from out of nowhere. Some one would have 'complained' about something. The thing would be completely ridiculous, and my manager could never tell me exactly what I should have done to fix it, but it would be a problem. One time I was told I was "unavailable to my team", even though we had slack and nobody had tried to contact me and failed or had even gotten a delayed response.
In another situation I had been having problems with 2 specific team members (couldn't handle any kind of feedback that wasn't completely onboard with their amazing ideas), and in the same exact week, my boss said (and this is a quote) ... "the problem may be that you are TOO good at your job", I got a merit based raise (after just 6 months there), and at the end of the week I was put on a PIP and told I had "no future" at the company. Hows that for consistency and your manager working to help you. lol.
The part that is absolutely maddening though?
That same communication style that everyone acts like is a huge problem. Some people get to talk like that to anyone at anytime in pretty much the same way in the same company you're at ... direct, pointed and directly opposed to some idea, sometimes even rudely. But when you do it as a minority (sans the rudeness), its a problem. I remember one Engineer, losing his shit because our company had decided to pay for only part of our parking in our new downtown location. He raised his voice, and he cussed in addressing a SENIOR FEMALE HR executive that was seated in the meeting, full of people. Nothing happened to him. If I'd tried something like that, I'd have been out of there in 1 week flat. That's the kind of double standard you have to just accept as a minority in tech, and I think its absolute trash.
Long story short, this stuff is real, it happens and its absolutely bullshit. It makes you feel like you are going batshit CRAZY (I'm an athlete, and at one point during one of these being-managed-out episodes, my blood pressure hit 140. thats hypertensive) ... and like I've alluded to before, I wouldn't be shocked if something like this played a role in that Uber engineer's suicide a few months back, because it can really wreak havoc with your mental state and sense of self if you don't have a good support system and/or therapist.
The key is to remember, you're not perfect, be humble and fix what you can, but also remember that lots of people and companies are full of shit, and quite often (especially if you're from a minority group in tech), its not you, its them that are fucked up, despite people on HN doubting your every move and intention.
Also always find a manager that will take a bullet for you, and if you're put on a PIP and you know its bullshit, just leave, don't suffer the indignity and mental anguish of getting shit on for weeks, all the way to a crappy severance if you can help it.
Cheers and Good Luck Coraline!
She got what she deserved.
This is common practice for new devs, at least where I work.
I don't see what's wrong with meritocracy as opposed to an unspecified "management system".
--
> Feature releases such as these are frequently promoted on the GitHub blog, and the product manager on my team encouraged me to write a post announcing what I had shipped. Since it was so important to me personally, I wrote an impassioned piece talking about how this feature closed a security gap that had directly affected and provided an abuse vector against me. The post also served as an announcement to the world of the new team and the kinds of problems that we were charged with solving.
>
> The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone of what I had written was too personal and didn't reflect the voice of the company. The reviewer insisted that any mention of the abuse vector that this feature was closing be removed. In the midst of my discussions with the editorial team, trying to reach a compromise, a (male) engineer from another team completely rewrote the blog post and published it without talking to me.
GitHub was correct here. Feature announcements on the company blog should remain neutral in tone. In addition, the published feature announcement seems to mention the motivations behind the feature quite well:
> Previously, anyone could automatically add other developers to their repositories without explicit permission. This model openly provided some users with opportunities to harass members of our community by inviting them to offensive or attention-seeking repositories.
So, it was rewritten to a neutral explanation of why this feature is a benefit to those who have had experiences like that of the author.
--
> In addition to my development work, I had started weekly mentoring sessions with one of my teammates (a recent boot camp graduate) on Ruby and Rails fundamentals that she had not been exposed to in her program. When I talked to my manager about how she was progressing, I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to "learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you." I was mystified: mentoring is an essential part of being a senior engineer, and this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it.
No quote was given from the manager telling the author to stop mentoring entirely, just that they wanted the _formal_ mentoring to stop (by formal, I assume it to mean it was initiated by the author, not the student). It's possible the manager's intention was as quoted: to see how this "recent boot camp graduate" was able to grow on her own.
--
> I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake, and sadly opened an issue referencing the question.
This has a presumptuous tone to it.
--
> The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication. When I reached out to my therapist for help, she recommended that I go to the emergency room. This was the start of an eight day ordeal involving involuntary commitment to a mental health facility. I shared this experience on Twitter and won't rehash it here, but suffice it to say that I was severely traumatized by what happened to me in the hospital.
I read the "experience on Twitter". It sounds to me that the author's judgement was impaired (re: the author's self-described overdose of anti-anxiety medication) and the hospital/psychiatrist believed they were enough of a risk to themselves to warrant admitting them as a patient.
--
> Thursday and Friday were not good days. I had a lot of trouble focusing. I was making simple mistakes and in some cases doing the wrong work. Friday afternoon I reached out to my boss to tell her that I was having trouble and that I didn't know what to do. She suggested that I take medical leave, but I told her what my therapist had said about the importance of getting back to normal life. My manager was adamant that if I couldn't work at full capacity that I had no choice but to take medical leave.
> ...
> The following week I had scheduled conferences to attend, so my focus on work was put on hold.
> ...
> After the meeting I messaged her and shared the more personal aspects of what I was going through, the trauma that I had experienced in the hospital and its lingering effects on my mental health. I was told that I should have accepted the offer of medical leave, and she said she felt like I was trying to manipulate her by sharing my feelings in the hopes of influencing the PIP. I was dismayed.
The author "had a lot of trouble focusing". It was recommended multiple times that she take medical leave. Instead, the author's "focus on work was put on hold" in order to attend conferences. I'm as suspicious of PIPs as much as the next person, but this seems pretty cut-and-dry to me as unsatisfactory work performance.
--
Regarding the firing on grounds of lack of empathetic communication, perhaps it was related to why this person was hired in the first place?
> They wanted to offer me a job. They had just created a team called Community & Safety, charged with making GitHub more safe for marginalized people and creating features for project owners to better manage their communities.
--
> I think back on the lack of options I was given in response to my mental health situation and I see a complete lack of empathy.
As stated above, they provided the option of medical leave. The author chose not to take it.
> In the past several months GitHub has fired at least three transgender engineers and many more cisgender women.
Why were they fired? How many others were fired in the past several months? What's the ratio there?
> In a return to its meritocratic roots, the company has decided to move forward with a merit-based stock option program despite criticism from employees who tried to point out its inherent unfairness.
Again, what's unfair about rewarding based on merit? Should people who contribute relatively little compared to others get just as much reward? Why would the higher-performers bother to burden themselves in that case?
> So yes, in looking back over my year at GitHub I see that there was, in fact, a real problem with empathy.
>
> But that problem wasn't mine.
So in the end, the author seems to absolve themselves of responsibility. This shows a lack of growth; in my opinion you should _always_ try to fault yourself if you're going to fault others.
- Other engineers dog-piling on her first few PRs showed that there was a complete lack of trust in her, and perhaps an active distrust in her abilities. I have no comments regarding whether this was deserved or not, but the known facts point to such a reality.
- Writing a feature blog post based on a personal perspective and personal past experience is not something a matured corporation can allow. This should not have been a surprise.
- Being the most productive engineer is not the goal of a Principal level engineer. I don't believe any software management would expect their Principal engineers to be sitting at the desk cranking out code all day. Influencing large scale initiatives across the org is more of the job expectation. This means building relationships with lots of people, which means less coding and more guidance of other engineers to do the coding.
- By that point, the expectation must have been high for what she can contribute on the diversity front. The terse messaging regarding the survey probably didn't help, but I also don't see it as a big deal. It's probably just piling on past issues.
- The rest is standard PIP procedure of managing out someone who isn't working out. I would love to say that I know how better to handle a PIP, but I don't.
It seems to me that Github expected a much stronger engineer, but feel like they didn't get one and that she was underperforming. Was that the actual reality? I don't know, and I don't feel qualified to pass judgment.
Which leads me to my final thought: it does seem like Github might have an empathy problem. My guess is that Coraline had her own set of insecurities about being at Github going into the job, and the first few encounters with the rest of the org put them into overdrive. It's unfortunate that her manager did not deem it productive to learn what her insecurities were and validate her on those fronts, which I believe might have put her back on the right track towards success. Instead, Coraline hunkered down and started cranking out code, and possibly withdrawing from the org around her? Rather than doing her intended job.
But, it is a lot to ask for a manager to do all of that, and she was a Principal engineer after all.
Getting a job is like getting married, even if things look all good at the ceremony, there's still years of sustained work/relationship-building to come. This one looks like a case of bad matching. In no way as to diminish Coraline's story, I've seen this happen to a lot of different kinds of people from all walks of life.
My 2 pennies.
> In the midst of my discussions with the editorial team, trying to reach a compromise, a (male) engineer from another team completely rewrote the blog post and published it without talking to me.
The entire paragraph about her writing a blog post has nothing to do with gender, why is it relevant to explicitly try to correlate it with gender in a situation where someone has done something which she wasn't happy about? It reads sexist to me as an outsider.
> In addition to my development work, I had started weekly mentoring sessions with one of my teammates... When I talked to my manager about how she was progressing, I was told to stop the formal mentoring and allow this person to "learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you."
Yes mentoring is an essential part, but mentorig is not becoming someone's teacher. That is very weird indeed. Here she says that she was additionally mentoring someone on a weekly basis, which implies that she was doing some sort of teaching lessons to another team member outside of regular development work. This is not mentoring AFAIK. Mentoring is something you do along the way as you work with someone together. You offer help when help is needed, you give advice when advice is requested, you keep your ears open and chip in with help or information when you see someone is struggling, you lead and teach by example and not by lessons.
I can totally understand if the manager was thinking that his person should not feel the pressure of a more senior developer in such a situation. She thinks the developer was benefitting, but how does she even know that? Perhaps the more junior developer was too shy to speak up or felt intimidated by a senior employee telling him/her what and how to do things.
> Discussions were directed to comments on issues and pull requests.
I can see how this was in some situations difficult, but I (as someone who thinks of himself as very open minded) can also totally see why it might be beneficial:
- A discussion on an open issue or pull request provides automatic documentation - It can be found and read by anyone - It fosters more of a culture where anyone feels invited to contribute if they think they have relevant information - It doesn't get lost among other conversations. In Slack or in real life you might talk about 3 issues at the same time and the history of one issue is totally swamped among the chat of all other issues. In GitHub each issue/PR has it's own discussion. - A discussion is often far more civilised when it is done in an issue or PR than in real life or in Slack, which is a huge benefit to establish a positive work culture IMHO.
Again, I can agree that there is also downsides to it, but as someone who prides themselves as an open minded person I would have hoped that she would have looked a bit further than just the downsides and also try to make an effort and understand why it was done like this at GitHub. Being open minded, look at positives and try to foster a positive attitute is one of the most important skills in an employee in my opinion.
> I asked my manager what had happened to upset her and was told that it was the feedback I provided on the gender question. I read back to her the body of the issue that I had opened and asked what I should have done differently. She responded that she didn't know, that my wording seemed direct but non-confrontational, but that I was forbidden to interact any further with the author of the survey.
I have really no foundation for this assumption, but it really reads that her tone in approaching other co-workers was rather direct and harsh, which from my personal experience is never a good way to get people on your side. Especially with people who you have never met or rarely seen I think it is crucial to put some thoughts into how certain things are phrased. At the end of the day you don't know the other person, don't know how they will read it and react to it. If you have a genuine interest to get the best out of this together, rather than just trying to show off that you are more knowledgable than someone else, then you would certainly phrase things more friendly.
Say what you want, but I have 10+ years of experience as well and I know that there was never a situation where I was not able to get my point across in a VERY obvious friendly tone.
> Starting in December, in my weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager, we would review all of my written communication (issues, pull requests, code reviews, and Slack messages) to talk about how I could improve. It felt ridiculous but I went along with it, and did my best to address my manager's feedback and concerns.
What attitute is that? A good manager will try to get the best of evey reportee and focus on personal strenghts/weaknesses. What is ridiculous about trying to improve communication skills? Honestly that is such a bad attitute, as if anyone would ever be such a communication god that there's nothing to improve anymore. That sentence alone is very negative IMHO.
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Obviously it is very sad and unfortunate that she had to go through mental health issues and the loss of her grandmother, but it really feels like her manager was trying to work with her to go through all these situations and Coraline was doing her own thing. I think it was very responsible of her manager to ask her to take medical leave. Imagine what would have happenend if she didn't? If her manager would have been like "alright, just continue working then", then later she would sue GitHub for not taking her mental health problems seriously and firing her based on that. Her manager was extremely open about her weaknesses, was putting effort into working through them with her and taking the right and responsible steps to get her back on track, but honestly there's only so much you can do before you have to let someone go...
>Was politely calling out a data scientist on a problematic and transphobic survey answer a demonstration of lack of empathy?
How presumptuous. Ever thought that maybe the person putting it together didn't know any better? What does framing oneself as the victim accomplish here?
In addition, this is hilariously ironic given that GitHub employed (still employs?) people who actively promote racism against white men (and women): http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
She was disappointed. She explained her problem with the survey in a non-judgmental way- "This question is based on a false premise, the correct way to ask this question is X". I don't see how she could have handled this particular interaction any better.
How would you answer her core question of whether or not the comment she made is appropriate?
There's no context given here about what the PR is, how big is it, and what's the nature of the comments. It could be a gigantic PR and it could be that most comments are innocuous repetitions such as "add empty line here".
or, it could it be that this person's notoriety followed them to their new workplace and many people were genuinely frustrated that they have to work with an unpleasant person.
EDIT:
> In a return to its meritocratic roots, the company has decided to move forward with a merit-based stock option program
Maybe they realized that trying to appease political agitators doesn't work and that having competent people is the only rational business decision?
I Imagine this read to the survey writer like:
"Hello, I'd like to complain about your use of the term Linux on the corporate intranet. A page provides instructions for running the data parsing scripts "on Linux". Since we do not do any kernel work, it is improper to refer to them as Linux instructions. Instead, people should be familiar with either POSIX, bash(with extensions), or GNU coreutils."
In such a question, it would be perfectly reasonable to point out that "Linux is not a text editor. Linux users may use vi, emacs, pico, sam... If you want to know if a survey respondent is a Linux user, you need to explicitly ask that question".