Ashe Dryden

Ashe Dryden's excellent work speaks for itself. (As opposed to evidence-free chatter on HN, which NYT says can feel like "hostile territory for women".) It's nice overhearing people in real life speak glowingly about how her voice needs to be better heard. Can't wait to get her upcoming book and use it to help build a healthy team. (http://www.ashedryden.com/) In another thread here, Alan Kay mentions how people with great ideas tend to be burned as heretics. As she mentioned in this article, "I've gotten rape and death threats just for speaking out about this stuff."

Basing hiring decisions on open source contribution rates contributes to the homogeneity (read: white maleness) of the industry at large. Women especially may not have as much time to contribute, since they are likely getting paid 30% less than their male counterparts and are more likely to be single parents than men. Ashe Dryden has a great breakdown of the issue, as well as some suggested alternative hiring techniques: http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-… This isn't a criticism of your comment, just something to keep in mind when making hiring choices. :)

I suggest you be careful with your jokes or they'll put you on their list: http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/weve-all-got-a-list The people you've mentioned curate their own echo chamber. If you read their Twitter stream you can see that they block anybody who even tries to engage them from an ignorant-but-skeptical point of view. Then they crow to their followers about the ignorant "bros" they block to gain plaudits. It's a toxic atmosphere that is best avoided entirely.

Doesn't work: https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq#cocfaqnegativ… > WHY IS THE LANGUAGE SO NEGATIVE/PUNITIVE? THIS'LL TAKE THE FUN/CASUAL ATMOSPHERE OUT OF MY EVENT. THE PEOPLE ATTENDING ARE MY FRIENDS, I'LL VOUCH FOR THEM. ISN'T IT OBVIOUS/COMMON SENSE WHAT'S ACCEPTABLE? WE'RE ALL ADULTS HERE, WHY CAN'T WE SAY "BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER"? Not everyone understands what is unacceptable behavior, especially when we are talking about a group of people that is mostly homogenous and has very little interaction with people different than they are. We focus specifically on what isn't allowed and what violating those rules would mean so there is no gray area, no guessing, no pushing boundaries to see what will happen. "Be nice" or "Be an adult" doesn't inform well enough about what is expected if one attendee's idea of niceness or professionalism are vastly different than another's. On top of that, "be excellent to each other" has a poor track record [link, now broken, previously described a real-world situation where people holding grudges tried to weaponize a community's sole "be excellent" rule against each other]. You may have been running an event for a long time and many of the attendees feel they are "like family", but it actually makes the idea of an incident happening at the event even scarier. If someone is new and not part of "the family" will they be believed? Will they be treated like an invading outsider? Remember that everyone who has…

Oh god. Most of this is hilarious. "A seasoned C developer with 10 years experience can not instantly morph into an advanced front end web application developer" True, but they'll be a damn sight quicker at picking it up than anyone else. And they'll write far better code when they're there. If you're looking for a permanent employee, all development experience is relevant -- there is a huge amount of overlap and retraining just for a different language is no biggie. They'll also have solved (i'd bet) far harder problems than "HOW DO I GET THIS UI WIDGET TO UPDATE WHEN THIS HAPPENS". If you're looking for someone to hit the ground running from day 1, or work as a contractor, it's different. But you generalise too far here. "However, they have failed to mention anything else to back it up. I would expect to see some of the following throughout their CV; Design Patterns (MVC, Factories, Singletons, ActiveRecord), Classes, Objects, UML…" In my CV (highly rated by everyone i've given it to) you won't find a single one of these. Instead, you'll find real descriptions of what i've accomplished, who I worked with (mentoring etc), my methodology (agile, test driven development) and so on. And UML... holy shit, yeah, no. Community work? See Ashe Dryden's "The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS community", http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-… and James Coglan's "Why GitHub is not your CV",…

But IBM, and many of the big corporations in the USA, followed very liberal policies that promoted diversity in the work place. A meritocracy based on raw intelligence and skill (measured by standardized testing) is not exactly what people mean today when they discuss "promoting diversity". In fact, nowadays people typically criticize such practices as inhibiting diversity [1]. As for culture fit, it's a complicated thing. There are some culture issues that can be a real problem - for example, my company really can't deal with people who don't believe in "let data make the decision". Similarly, there are companies out there which highly value civility and team spirit over correctness - my "this is broken, here is why" style would not work for them. A lot of culture fit is just "do I think these guys are cool" silliness, but don't let that overshadow the fact that culture matters. [1] http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-comm… http://flosspols.org/deliverables/D16HTML/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integra…

I am confused about last sentence -- are you saying that requiring high-quality open source code will somehow help with "balanced racial or gender demographics"? Because I am pretty sure this is false. Anecdotally, the women in my group do not have any public code. And web searches found confirmations for this as well [0] [1] So if you want diversity, stay away from methods like the one described in this post. [0] https://www.toptal.com/open-source/is-open-source-open-to-women [1] https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss…

This article provides more context: http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-…

Unfortunately, needs to remind people about the social distribution of OSS work in the community: http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-… Of course OSS work is good, and we're happy you found time in 2006 to learn ajax or whatever, but considering open source as a measure for good developers is unfair. Even John Resig (quoted in this article) already made a post explaining his views abt this, (that differs from the OP) http://ejohn.org/blog/project-based-interviews/

> men do hobby programming and women don't One possible reason: Women have less free time available for hobby programming. There are some statistics on this at http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-… Another possibility: Women are in such demand in the industry that a hobbyist contributor will soon be hired by someone, and no longer be a hobbyist.

"Some companies I work for write the contract that all code written while employed belongs to the company." That's why - because it shows evidence of code you produce, are interested in coding on a personal level (as opposed to doing it purely for the paycheck), how you solve problems, how you document code, how well you communicate with others etc. It does feel like having an active Github is almost a requirement these days - but there are plenty of people who feel this is unfair, see for example -> http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-…

I'd point you to a few well written articles that address this line of thinking pretty well: * http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-… * https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/ * http://www.garann.com/dev/2012/you-keep-using-that-word/

At least you should try. Maybe start small (and stay small..), there is always some path to escape from cubicle nation.. ;) As for "github is your CV" hype: http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-… https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/

Expecting that people will put stuff on github gives an unfair advantage to rich people who can afford to spend more time doing unpaid work, among other things. You can read more about such arguments here -> http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-…

I typed the word "blacklist" in Dryden's blog search bar and the evidence magically manifested itself: http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/weve-all-got-a-list

Looks like he's just trying to shed some light on how bogus those activity graphs are (and also illustrating how easy it is to game them). The GitHub contributions graph probably shouldn't be used for any sort of meaningful measurement of skill, open source involvement, job candidacy—or anything else really. I found the two related articles linked in the readme really interesting: http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-… https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/ (Still reading the first one.)

This line was really interesting to me: > From the perspective of the employer, Github, Bitbucket and other code sharing sites simply do not have these biases - when employers look at these sites, there is no demographic information on users to look at other than what the user voluntarily puts up. But there is demographic information there. Ashe Dryden's original article (http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-comm… called it out in this paper on gender in FLOSS: http://flosspols.org/deliverables/D16HTML/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integra… Essentially, I can guess that any particular GitHub user is a white, upper-middle class man and be right most of the time. I understand that this article isn't saying "We Use Only GitHub Profiles" when hiring but acting as though the code present there exists with zero social context seems willfully wrongheaded.

Did you read the linked article on the subject? http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-comm… Here's some key points from it if it is tl;dr Marginalized people in tech - women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others - have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity. Women are far more likely to be a primary caregiver of not only children, but other ailing and aging relatives. 59-75% of caregivers are women.1 52% of women caregivers with incomes at or below of the national median of $35k spend 20+ hours each week providing care. The largest racial demographics in this group are black and hispanic2. Women perform more unpaid labor (most visible in domestics and child care) than men. On childcare alone, mothers spend more than twice as much time per day as fathers do. On average, working fathers spend only 10min more per day on child care when they are not working, whereas working mothers spend nearly twice as much when not working3. Due to additional pay inequity contributing to less access to paid childcare, women of color perform far more child care than white women. Those with medical conditions requiring that they regularly visit medical facilities or perform other health-related activities such as getting additional sleep, regularly exercising, doing physical therapy, being away from backlit screens, not sitting in a…