Looks like they trade "structure based purely on meritocracy" by "promote diversity".
I don't see how this can go well. Meritocracy is important among dev and open source. And they don't care about political diversity. I can only imagine this new "culture of fear" where you can't hire white people (even woman).
Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender.
Anyway, looks like a good time to switch from github to open source solutions.
You're totally right that skills and experiences should be the only way to choose, but right now, tech firms in this society are fundamentally incapable of actually implementing that without diversity initiatives. True meritocracy can only come through promoting diversity.
>> True meritocracy can only come through promoting diversity.
If you are taking diversity into account, you are taking things other than merit into account and so it isn't a 'true' meritocracy. Not only that but it also suffers from the no true Scotsman fallacy.
The best way to promote meritocracy is to base your decisions on merit and nothing else. To avoid unconscious bias, you would have to hire someone without knowing their age, sex, sexual orientation or anything else that you could consider discriminatory. That would mean hiring someone that you haven't and that's a little extreme.
> If you are taking diversity into account, you are taking things other than merit into account and so it isn't a 'true' meritocracy.
Well, no. The point is that due to inherent unconscious biases (see my link for scientific papers documenting this), it's impossible to only take merit into account without social norms biased towards white men skewing the process. Diversity initiatives seek to eradicate this bias, in order to truly measure merit and compensate for the interfering factors.
> Not only that but it also suffers from the no true Scotsman fallacy.
I really don't see what that's got to do with anything here.
> To avoid unconscious bias, you would have to hire someone without knowing their age, sex, sexual orientation or anything else that you could consider discriminatory. That would mean hiring someone that you haven't and that's a little extreme.
Presumably you mean "you haven't met"? Well exactly. Hence, diversity initiatives that seek to compensate in practical ways.
How about a "blind" hiring process? For software engineers, it's easy to imagine tools that could help evaluate skills without revealing that person's race or gender.
Isn't the problem that the majority of the pool of qualified applicants is mostly white/Asian males. Hiring initiatives aren't going to fix the pipeline problem.
If you work at a truly diverse tech company you can assume discriminatory hiring practices are in order.
except that because of the original remote nature of Github the first thing you saw was their work and then the person. by changing the culture they are increasing a bias that may have been less prevalent or even non existent in such a work culture.
Trying to apply normal social dynamics to a play where you have a completely async environment(meaning they don't even see each other), is a little bit of a stretch.
A lot of interviews in tech don't even involve voice or face to face communication. If you take away looks, sound and name, what else is there besides quality of work?
> except that because of the original remote nature of Github the first thing you saw was their work and then the person.
Unless their name is in their username. Or they have a profile picture of themselves. Or they have their real name on their commits. Or their username or picture is something stereotypically masculine/feminine.
I searched for 'things' on Github and looked at the most recent committer of the first 20 responses (easiest way I could think of to get a random sample of users). For 16 of them, I could easily see that they were male. 2 of them had their names, but I wasn't sure if the names were feminine or masculine. 2 had no hints whatsoever.
Because everything name people use online must match their govt issued ID.
I can still remember the first time I uploaded a masculine avatar I had to get a medical exam to prove I was the same gender people seeing my picture assume I am.
Its a hard world, if only we could communicate online with a total identity of our choosing! We could all pick fake names, like a pen name, or a 'pseudo' name thay wasn't real. Wjat a crazy world THAT would be @sanctus.
For bonus points, consider the gender and racial connotations entrenched within your own username - sanctus - based on the language (latin) I'm guessing you're a white roman from antiquity!
Meritocracy is a lie. Look how broken interview processes are - definitely not meritocratic. Meritocracy is a rationalisation for "I hire people I like so long as they don't say anything idiotic during the interview". You'd get better results from having some kind of bar that candidates have to meet and then just selecting one at random and giving that person the job.
Oh yes. No one is any better than anyone else at anything. In fact, github isn't a better hosted SCM/code review/issue tracking platform than any other. Which makes sense, because none of their employees are better at doing anything than anyone else. It's all just a rationalization, and a lie. Old boys club all the way down.
But why didn't the old boys club decide to have microsoft's hosted team foundation server win? Or sourceforge? The silicon valley conspiracy is hard to understand at times ...
I've come to the conclusion that most people cannot grasp how meritocracy works, because the majority of the "real" world simply doesn't work like that.
One side of the equation are people that grew up with an alternate reality, because they spend a lot of their time online, growing up, working on their own projects and only later joining "society". In that world you get indeed ridiculed by how good or bad your code is, but not generally based on your socioeconomic background.
The other side of the equation is people that grew up in society where things do indeed work like in an old boys club. I will never get access to the people, that people studied international affairs at columbia do. I will also never get access to the people that MBAs from Harvard do.
But I still very well remember when I graduated from "the annoying kid that doesn't know shit" to "the kid that wrote a LR parser in IRC almost 20 years ago. And most of those people never ever found out my real name, my gender, my socioeconomic background, nor my ethnicity.
In fact the reality that this shit does matter in real life was as inconceivable for me back then, as the concept of meritocracy must be for someone that spent his entire life in society now.
Yes, I think this is the heart of these issues. Most people are fundamentally incapable of ascertaining objective merit, and thus the concept of a meritocracy is meaningless to them. This is instructive in business too; never trust your customers to be able to tell that your offering is superior, you have to TELL them.
Thats part of it. But there is a whole other group that is using victim hood and distorted diversity arguments to extract monetary gain and organisational power from usually large companies who reflexively instantiated paid positions with little or no research and vague PR-friendly mission statements.
If the only real goal put down on paper is to hire x% black people and y% brown people and reduce z% of white people under some fuzzy equality rubric its no surprise these positions attract people who have ideologically compatible beliefs.
There has been a small collection of black/brown power radical organisations in California for over 50 years. There views are openly racist and have anti white, anti European, anti Colonial America sentiments. These diversity jobs are a magnet for people with that mindset who live every day with there race on there sleeve. When they get in they can twist whatever mandate there is to promote there own agenda and beliefs.
The sheltered Ivy league set who runs these companies have no street smarts or experience with race politics in California. So you end up with what we have now with genuinely nasty ideologues hired into these organisations and they eventually do lots of damage.
> If the only real goal put down on paper is to hire x% black people and y% brown people and reduce z% of white people under some fuzzy equality rubric
I suspect that in GitHub's case, the diversity officer was tasked with defining those goals, on the basis that the straight white male executives would have no clue what the "right" goals should be.
I hire developer where I work, I hired white, non-white and women, and every time I make my choice by testing their skills and asking about their past experiences because that's how you get the most competent employees. And every tech company want best employees...
You are human. You are not a robot. That's the problem. Humans judge people, make snap judgments, fit people into sterotypes. I'm not saying you do that. I bet you don't. But if you start scaling the interviewing process, adding more and more people into it, you'll eventually get a few who do make racial/other unfair judgments.
Everyone has some level of bias. The best thing you can really do is try and counter your own bias when you notice it. In most jurisdictions not hiring someone based on racial or unfair judgements is illegal. Trying to change workplace culture away from meritocracy for the sake of diversity might sound noble and well intended, but just as 'meritocracy is a lie', so is diversity in that sense.
Hiring people based on how much diversity they provide based purely on their gender, race, etc is prejudice in itself, even if well intended.
I agree with you that everyone has some level of bias, but we disagree on to what degree people are biased. Race is a very complex issue in American society. It permeates everything: politics, economics, academia. And it's visually obvious. The evidence is pretty clear to me (all the statistics related to how racial judgments are made, how stunningly often resumes get rejected if they have names that sound like they belong to certain racial groups), that race plays a very large role in people's snap judgments of others.
What do you mean by "having some kind of bar ... to meet"?
Isn't that what most interviewers do? For example have a expectation of javascript knowledge and ask questions to determine how knowledgable they are?
You cannot prove meritocracy doesn't work. Fortunately you don't have to. The burden of proof is required for positive claims.
We don't have a lot of evidence meritocracy works. We have several pieces of evidence suggesting that it, in fact, didn't serve github very well. The fact there was a sexual harassment lawsuit with a barely kept secret about a whole group of women bound by arbitration and non-disparage agreements is probably evidece it doesn't.
The sad part, most people will never really understand how much Tom sacrificed to protect his friends during his final days there.
If you're referencing GH with that sexual harassment lawsuit comment, it fizzled, and from the outside, it seemed like it wasn't anything sketchy, just that the accuser's work wasn't very good and people didn't treat her with kid gloves. The only inappropriate thing was one of the founder's wives trying to manipulate her, but that doesn't sell as well.
The philosophic burden of proof is on you as you're making a statement counter to user "audessuscest"'s claim that meritocracy is important and the ideal is to make solely skill-based hires.
> The philosophic burden of proof is on you as you're making a statement counter to user "audessuscest"'s claim that meritocracy is important and the ideal is to make solely skill-based hires.
Let's just... ignore the larger societal angle of harassment, denigration, fear and uncertainty that plagues women and some minorities in STEM fields or finance, okay? Let's say, "It exists but let's not discuss it here."
I really don't wanna do this conversation AGAIN but the contention is that right now "whiteness" and "maleness" are implicitly part of the meritocratic process as positive traits. That happens in 2 ways:
1. Young, single, white (and Asian!) men are targeted by recruiters because of a perception of a "work ethic". This ethic is "I expect people to prop up my life so I can work 80+ hours a week, which is not sustainable if you have ANY responsibilities at all outside of basic sustenance". Historically, they has been a safe bet.
2. Subsequent "pattern matching" be it implicit or explicit, kind or cruel, expects that kind of commitment and education and ethos. That this wasn't ever reasonable is lost because people are just trying to recognize someone who can likely work in the same way they're expecting or have worked.
You can argue that people should work that hard and that it's fair, if you want. But what actually happens is that people find that there is a specific profile of people most likely to be willing and able to commit to that kind of lifestyle and then they optimize for selecting that. Therefore, Meritocracy is not a hedge against racism or sexism. Indeed, Meritocracy may be selecting "merit" based on attributes which explicitly reinforce sexism or racism.
So when you say, "skill-based hires" I can't help but hear, "people like me" every time. Because if anyone actually gave a shit about skill based hires they'd be blinding their recruiting efforts, doing pre-filter tests and desperately trying to remove every drop of bias from the industry to identify them.
>Let's just... ignore the larger societal angle of harassment, denigration, fear and uncertainty that plagues women and some minorities in STEM fields or finance, okay? Let's say, "It exists but let's not discuss it here."
No, let's not just agree to a narrative that you want to sell. I strongly reject your premise that uses weasel words and emotive language. You already tried manipulating the conversation by referencing a lawsuit without mentioning that the outcome ran counter to your narrative of endemic sexism.
>I really don't wanna do this conversation AGAIN but the contention is that right now "whiteness" and "maleness" are implicitly part of the meritocratic process as positive traits.
It's clear that you're used to "arguing" with people that agree with your ideology. If you don't want to deal with disagreement, then don't bother responding -- stay in your echo chamber.
The/my meritocratic process doesn't care about race or gender. When I hire consultants and contract-out work, I often don't know their race or gender and I'm not interested. I choose candidates in my price range based on the best work-samples.
>1. Young, single, white (and Asian!) men are targeted by recruiters because of a perception of a "work ethic". This ethic is "I expect people to prop up my life so I can work 80+ hours a week
Sorry, you forgot to mention that those people have experience in the industry or are otherwise credentialed -- your phrasing either intentionally or unintentionally suggests that recruiters just contact arbitrary white and asian men: "Hey, so we see that you're currently painting fences. Want to run a tech startup?" That's not the case.
Further, your assignment of "work ethic" to mean "I put my career first" reflects a personal choice. Either gender and any race can make this choice. By the way, "working really hard" isn't a "perception of a work ethic", that's just what's meant by work ethic. It's okay for words to have definitions.
>2. Subsequent "pattern matching" be it implicit or explicit, kind or cruel, expects that kind of commitment and education and ethos.
If I'm unpacking your assertion correctly, you're just saying that an interviewer or recruiter wants/looks-for commitment, relevant education, qualifications, and a career-first mentality. What a shock.
>But what actually happens is that people find that there is a specific profile of people most likely to be willing and able to commit to that kind of lifestyle and then they optimize for selecting that.
Which makes me think that I'm understanding you. The person that makes the personal choices and sacrifice required to excel in an industry is the logical pick over the person that didn't.
>Indeed, Meritocracy may be selecting "merit" based on attributes which explicitly reinforce sexism or racism...if anyone actually gave a shit about skill based hires they'd be blinding their recruiting efforts, doing pre-filter tests and desperately trying to remove every drop of bias from the industry to identify them.
According to your reasoning, hiring someone with a very strong work ethic is a "reinforcement of sexism and racism". Your prior suggestion that that those traits are unique to "young, single, white (and Asian!) men" is disgusting and offensive. Stop diminishing the importance of personal agency in becoming successful in a highly competitive field.
I'm going to stick with my approach of not caring about the gender, race, or any other _not at all relevant to their work or how I treat them as a person_ detail. If this wave of "social justice" parasites actually wanted change instead of attention and money, they'd quit the bullshit and put in the work to become great engineers or create their own companies.
> The/my meritocratic process doesn't care about race or gender. When I hire consultants and contract-out work, I often don't know their race or gender and I'm not interested. I choose candidates in my price range based on the best work-samples.
It might be true for you. We know it's not true for many other people. That's why orchestras stick auditionees behind curtains. It's why people are advised to remove any protected characteristic information from their resumes/CVs.
> I'm going to stick with my approach of not caring about the gender, race, or any other _not at all relevant to their work or how I treat them as a person_ detail
I'd be interested in how you know you've eliminated this bit of strong conditioning, or whether you're operating under a cognitive bias.
Because so far when we test people who say "I don't care about race / sex / etc" we find people who do in fact care about it.
>It might be true for you. We know it's not true for many other people. That's why orchestras stick auditionees behind curtains. It's why people are advised to remove any protected characteristic information from their resumes/CVs.
In a highly-competitive field with strong compensation and a lack of qualified candidates, I have a hard time believing that it's any sort of normal for recruiters (who require placement for compensation or to keep their jobs) to discount people based on race or gender, especially with the amount of good press and cheap marketing that now comes from having an outwardly diverse company.
I don't buy into the narrative that the engineering field is flush with discriminatory practices. Companies are even paying non-STEM people to spew inflammatory garbage about the STEM industry -- if the tech industry is financially tolerant of these parasites, why is it insane to think that we, as an engineering workforce, have healthy/tolerant views?
>I'd be interested in how you know you've eliminated this bit of strong conditioning, or whether you're operating under a cognitive bias.
This one is easy -- I'm not interested in someone's race/gender/religion/appearance/other-non-consequential-factors when it comes to work. I'm primarily interested in taking care of my family and in personal growth; working with others that help the success of my company and challenge me to better myself help in these goals.
By definition, I wouldn't know if this is some sort of cognitive bias, but evidence would suggest that I'm in good shape on this front. If it's a bad thing to not raise or lower my expectations of others based on race/gender, then I'm comfortable being a jerk that judges people based on their merits.
>Because so far when we test people who say "I don't care about race / sex / etc" we find people who do in fact care about it.
I feel like you're trying to indirectly accuse me of something, so if you are, own up to it and make the accusation directly.
People who fixate on race/sex/etc that have deeply rooted issues with it, not those who focus on thoughts, ideas, and ability.
It's a truth and a lie depending on how you want to interpret the meaning if meritocracy.
For many people it means, atomically, when you're filling a position, you're not just going thru the motions to get your buddy, mate, someone you owe a favor, your cousin, etc. in and not doing due diligence in finding someone capable of executing the position. For many people merit does not equate to reversing historical injustices, but it does mean not being unjust during this process. That's to say you don't disqualify people out of hand, just because.
> Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender.
Exactly. The issue should not be how many percent are what "race", but if companies are dumb enough to leave good programmers, managers etc waiting tables, manning the help desk etc because they doesn't fit our stereotypes.
Or: If if companies does spectacularly bad hires because of political correctness.
I didn't get this 'we are afraid and only want to hire non-whites' from the article. Hiring a diverse workforce is a good good thing, generally. Why do you think that should mean we don't hire white people? Every tech company that isn't going out of business in the world has open headcount, and they'd like to hire all capable people.
I don't see how this can go well. Meritocracy is important among dev and open source. And they don't care about political diversity. I can only imagine this new "culture of fear" where you can't hire white people (even woman).
Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender.
Anyway, looks like a good time to switch from github to open source solutions.