GitHub will be the next Silicon Valley domino to fall?

by philg

“Antisocial Coding: My Year At GitHub” by Coraline Ada Ehmke is an interesting cultural artifact.

The author likes her job:

I really enjoyed the job I had in 2015. I was a principal engineer at a health tech company, with a polyglot team comprised of Ruby and Clojure developers ranging from very early career to very seasoned. I was learning a lot and doing really interesting work. I felt like I had finally found a company that I could stick with for a few years or so.

But GitHub is irresistible:

Someone at GitHub wanted to talk to me. I thought I knew what it was about: a year before, I had been talking to a diversity consultant (who was contracting there at the time) about working with GitHub on diversity and inclusivity and exploring their interest in adopting the Contributor Covenant across all of their open source projects. … They had just created a team called Community & Safety, charged with making GitHub more safe for marginalized people

GitHub was a bad place because, among other things, they promoted “meritocracy”:

At first I had my doubts. I was well aware of GitHub’s very problematic past, from its promotion of meritocracy in place of a management system to the horrible treatment and abuse of its female employees and other people from diverse backgrounds.

But they are smart enough to keep the white males in a closet:

I was impressed by the social justice tone of some of the questions that I was asked in the non-technical interviews, and by the fact that the majority of people that I met with were women. A week later, I had a very generous offer in hand, which I happily accepted. My team was 5 women and one man: two of us trans, three women of color.

It is not enough to code like a demon anymore:

In April it was time for my annual review. … when I joined the video call with my manager, it became clear that something was wrong. She went back to the issue of my lack of empathy in communications and collaboration.

If you’re not willing to assume straightforward profit-seeking, it is tough to figure out the company’s real motivation:

I am increasingly of the opinion that in hiring me and other prominent activists, they were attempting to use our names and reputations to convince the world that they took diversity, inclusivity, and social justice issues seriously. … 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.

Oh no:

the company’s platform is still not appealing to anyone but straight white guys.

Ouch! As a customer I guess I should be grateful that she didn’t say “old white guys.”

Readers: What do you think? Will anyone care about this? Will the management team at GitHub need to slink away to Travis Kalanick’s private island? Or is it just going to be interesting to future historians who want to know how people mixed work and social justice goals back in 2017?

13 thoughts on “GitHub will be the next Silicon Valley domino to fall?”

  1. Poor Linus, now that 1 of his inventions has created so much corporate office politics. Wonder if Linux ever created such animosity or if it predated the social justice movement by too long to have any problems.

  2. My only interaction with this person is when she was a no-show to a talk she was supposed to give at a conference. It turned out her car broke down a couple hours before and instead of arranging transportation or at least calling, she tweeted something like “really sorry, can’t make it!” to the conference Twitter account so no one knew about it.

    Her poor handling of minor setbacks seems to be a habit rather than a one-time fluke. I am sympathetic to people who struggle to make work work for them, but she did not sound like a good employee. And yes, I think GitHub did the right thing putting her on a PIP because she sounds litigious and exhausting to deal with.

    Similarly, there was an issue with another employee a few years ago who wrote a very similar long blog post, and reading between the lines, was clearly difficult to work with; in her case she mixed work with her romantic life and then tried to portray a fight with her ex-boyfriend as workplace sexual harassment.

    So there may be something about the company that encourages these weird dramatic flameouts that needs fixing, but making the flameouts happy is probably a hopeless goal to chase.

  3. +1

    I also found the piece ambiguous. Trying to use your job as “therapy” may not be a good idea. I felt their offer of a medical leave was appropriate.

  4. Have we really reached the point where a company that provides tools for programmers needs “diversity consultants”, “community and safety teams”, “social impact teams”, and gender surveys for code authors? Yikes.

  5. Github had a big thing about Codes of Conduct a while ago. Weaponized and aimed at you know who.

  7. “My team was 5 women and one man: two of us trans, three women of color.”

    If the man was one of the trannies then there were zero actual men on the team. These people don’t actually want “diversity”, they just want to get rid of all white men.

    This reads like a parody but I’m afraid it was all too real.

  9. Also, after reading her blog post, this woman, by her own admission, has a serious psychiatric disorder. Reading between the lines, I can only imagine what a nightmare she must have been to her manager.

  10. I wouldn’t have thought that sexuality and marginalization would be a big deal on a platform where nobody ever sees each other and the bulk of the communication is about abstract technical stuff. How long until we straight white nerds get rounded up and sent in for re-education?

  12. Jack D, “Coraline looks exactly how I imagined she would look.”

    And they say you can’t judge a book by the cover.

    A lot of work goes into a book cover, *precisely* to give the reader a certain impression, before they even pick it up to read the flap.

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