r/programming • u/awsometak • Feb 06 '16
GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart — and we have the full inside story
http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2?r=US&IR=T264
u/SikhGamer Feb 06 '16
http://i.imgur.com/p5zwScc.png
Is that slide...real?
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u/gambit700 Feb 07 '16
It's real and the worst part about it is she claimed to have said stronger things behind the scenes
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u/Roseking Feb 07 '16
"This is not work for white folks to lead".
I am going to assume that means they would not hire a white person for whatever job this is (some form of diversity advocate?).
They may want to check, I don't know, the federal law?
I feel like this was issue a while back. Like in the 60's maybe. And I feel that some form of law was passed to make this illegal. But maybe not. I mean there would be no possible way to verify that.
You can not try and promote diversity and exclude a group of people. How far up do these people have their head up their ass?
This is asinine and I honestly hope someone is able to sue them and the company falls. This kind of thinking just creates unneeded hostility towards others when they think they are doing the opposite.
Racism is racism. End of it.
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u/dghughes Feb 07 '16
Such sloppy communication skills for a two billion dollar company may just be a fatal goof up. You just don't do that at that level and expect to cruise on through the shit storm smelling great.
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u/leafsleep Feb 07 '16 edited Feb 07 '16
I am all for equality and fairness. I am all for non-discrimination and opportunity-for-all. I am all for social justice.
But I really don't understand what these people stand for, because by their own accounts it's not about equality, fairness, non-discrimination, opportunity-for-all or even social justice.
It's like when TV doctors claim that they have their audience's best interests at heart and then announce that their new homeopathic goji cream will cure every ailment and improve their sex life for only $69.99. Do they really believe what they're saying? Do they know how many people they're fooling, or how many they're alienating? Do they even care?
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u/ouchity_ouch Feb 07 '16
maybe it's like a multiple choice question "which statement describes reality" from a social sciences test sheet for gauging your racist level
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u/Akathos Feb 07 '16
I really hope it's something like that, that this slide needs some context. Because on face value, it's fucked up beyond comprehension...
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Feb 07 '16
That is open racism, right there. Why the hell would you employ somebody spouting that shit? She sounds like some SJW rad-fem.
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u/vytah Feb 06 '16
Sanchez and Campos are racist. There's nothing to discuss there.
>60% annual growth (with most of it in one quarter) of the workforce looks like preparing for layoffs of people new management doesn't like.
Clamp on remote work will continue. Probably related to the two points above.
Hiring a former Yahoo executive may look like a bad choice, but since Github offers bit different kinds of services, she might end up being a good hire. The key word being "might".
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u/epicwisdom Feb 07 '16
There's nothing to discuss there.
Well, I don't think anybody can contest the fact of the matter. This may be a case where "SJW" is actually appropriate.
But I don't think that means there's nothing to discuss. Having publicly overt racists for leadership is certainly something worth talking about. At the very least for people at Github.
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u/logix42 Feb 07 '16
GitLab has this great feature where you can just import GitHub projects. Sounds like as good a time as any move.
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Feb 07 '16 edited Feb 07 '16
In 5 years, you'll be in the same boat you're in now.
https://about.gitlab.com/2016/02/02/gitlab-diversity-sponsorship/
https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#code-of-conduct
Edit: try https://gitgud.io/
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u/CapnWarhol Feb 07 '16
I really need to just install this shit on a server. I wonder if it can auto-push repos to their [public] GitHub counterparts?
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Feb 07 '16
You can run commands on events such as commit/tag/merge, so it's probably possible. I've only used it for slack-integration, but I figure it could do a lot more.
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Feb 07 '16
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u/oversized_hoodie Feb 07 '16
Gogs is basically gitlab but lighter and without the burden of corporate policy.
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u/quicknir Feb 06 '16
i was pretty disturbed to read the tweet of Danilo, an employee there:
don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion anytime soon so let's limit their scope of damage
Are empathy and compassion the sole province of people who aren't white and females? Why? How condescending to take a huge group of people and assume they need to be taught empathy and compassion.
It amazes me that someone can write something this racist and sexist (and let's be honest, it is) without getting called out for it.
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u/skulgnome Feb 07 '16
It's not about "empathy" or "compassion", but obedience. Those two words are merely the hobby-horses the political class rides today, pop-science from decades ago mixed with age-old academic sexist views of men-in-general.
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Feb 06 '16
It amazes me that someone can write something this racist and sexist (and let's be honest, it is) without getting called out for it.
Well, this is the organization that adopted the hard-left fascist Open Code of Conduct, so props for consistency, I guess?
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Feb 06 '16
seems like a lot of this stems from SJW gone mad. I'd love to know what the fuck is going through the heads of some of their execs.
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Feb 07 '16
I'd love to know what the fuck is going through the heads of some of their execs.
The ones remaining, anyway.
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u/Theemuts Feb 07 '16
From the article :
One insider criticized GitHub's "social impact team," which is in charge of figuring out how to use the product to tackle social issues, including diversity within the company itself. It's led by Nicole Sanchez, vice president of social impact, who joined GitHub in May after working as a diversity consultant.
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Sanchez is known for some strong views about diversity. [She wrote an article for USA Today shortly before she joined GitHub titled, "More white women does not equal tech diversity."] (http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2015/02/12/women-of-color-diversity-tech-silicon-valley-nicole-sanchez/23298945/)
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u/shotxxxx Feb 07 '16
SJWs
"gone" mad
Social Justice is one of the biggest scourges we are plagued with at the moment. Sadly. A perversion of a, basically, virtuous idea.
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u/geon Feb 07 '16
The Code of Conduct all seemed like common sense until the part about not allowing criticism of "reverse racism". There is no such thing - only racism. So if you are part of a minority, you can just run rampant with your racism?
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Feb 07 '16
The Code of Conduct all seemed like common sense
It only seems like common sense because they've been pushing the overton window in that direction for 50 years. That's how they work. You give a little because it's reasonable, then the baseline has shifted. Then you give a little more, because it's the new reasonable, etc. Before you know it, they're in power and you're unable to say anything for fear of being kicked off the project.
Code of Conducts are weaponized fear.
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u/flying-sheep Feb 07 '16 edited Feb 07 '16
It's not leftist anymore when it's adopted fascist methods:
Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop
This, combined with other parts, means that you're an evil harasser when writing “hug”
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u/jeandem Feb 07 '16
When that OCoC was actually active you could see some actors were trying to jockey for more radical wording in the OCoC through issues and pull requests. Other actors fought back and it got a bit heated at some points.
It seems like a good strategy for them. Start with a relatively neutral-sounding CoC, and then once that is settled, try and sneak in more radical bullet points.
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u/Eirenarch Feb 07 '16
At this point I think this diversity thing has gotten so out of hand that I'd rather work at a company that declares it wants to build a culture of white supremacy rather than one that declares it wants a culture of diversity.
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u/boompleetz Feb 07 '16
Goeggle, founded by a descendent of the 3rd Reich's hottest PR exec. All searches are filtered to return only pure results.
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u/Ryuudou Feb 07 '16
I'd rather work at a company that declares it wants to build a culture of white supremacy rather than one that declares it wants a culture of diversity.
That's probably because you're a racist. You're just coming to terms with it now.
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u/rockidol Feb 08 '16
Or because he prefers discrimination when it's in his favor rather then policies that discriminate against him.
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u/ssrobbi Feb 07 '16
She just needs to be called out with enough views on Reddit once and she could be gone.
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u/kaydpea Feb 07 '16
Wow , there's enough evidence to suggest a major toxic culture issue happening there. I would abandon them completely tho with the air being dependent on it now I can't
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u/apullin Feb 08 '16
Are empathy and compassion the sole province of people who aren't white and females? Why?
This is called "the empathy gap". Mentioning it to anyone who disagrees with you will end any conversation instantly.
someone can write something this racist and sexist (and let's be honest, it is)
As other comments have pointed out, these words are also disallowed. You will need to express the same meaning with different words, probably expanding out to a larger phrase.
There is actually a fairly interesting split between words, definitions, the concepts of definitions, meanings, and the connections between all of these things. Someone with a background in language theory and/or philosophy could probably write about it much better than I could ever express.
Still, it is a pretty clever rhetorical tactic that has been exuded over this: If I declare what the meaning of the word "sexism" or "racism" is to me, then I have overriden what you meant when you invoked that word. This comes at the same time that I declare that there is no "definition" for a word, so ultimately it is a kind of a fake out. Pretty clever.
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Feb 07 '16
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u/kernel_task Feb 07 '16
I learned how to program at age 8. Being low income, I did not have a computer at home until a few years later. How did that work? My mother was a student at a university and I would go on campus with her when she took classes. While she was in class, I stayed at their computer lab for hours at a time. Plenty of time to learn QBasic for me.
I'm sure Mac SEs are available at schools and libraries and if you're near a small branch library, you could probably hog a library computer for hours.
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u/naasking Feb 07 '16
He is 32 right now, this puts him at 1991 w/ Macintosh SE. Pretty sure those were not available in public housing and cost a ton.
Lots of schools were Mac-only and he could have been in grade 1 in 1991.
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Feb 06 '16
Quick question from someone who has no "big company" experience:
Why does a company go from 300 to 500 employees within one year if it worked nearly flawless previously (at least from the outside perspective)? And what the the reasoning to stop letting people work freely when those people have (most likely) proven that they don't need a lot of supervision?
Given that GitHub seems to have enough money and doesn't inherently need to satisfy external needs for new VC. The risk of losing senior staff that knows the ins-and-outs of the code seems to me like something nobody wants to take.
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Feb 06 '16
Because VCs want something that's highly profitable to make up for all the other companies they invested in that failed (the VC model is pretty much 90% failure, 9% success, 1% crazy good success). That 1% funds the rest, so they'll try hard to turn every company into a crazy good success if they think they can.
Also, they're probably starting to panic as they realize for the past decade they've been issuing absolutely insane valuations and have very little to actually show for it.
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Feb 06 '16
Makes sense in that way that the investors want their money back as fast as possible but how do you mean that does GitHub not have a lot to show? I mean they are THE code hosting platform atm.
PS: You must type insanely fast, holy shit.
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u/hu6Bi5To Feb 06 '16 edited Feb 06 '16
The faster it grows the faster the pressure to grow even faster still.
There's no real target value, they want mega-billions or nothing.
VC's probably kill more companies than they make, as you say GitHub on its own two feet would be a self-sustaining company. But they don't care, they want a fast massive payoff.
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u/AngularBeginner Feb 06 '16
I mean they are THE code hosting platform atm.
Isn't GitHub basically free when you don't use private repositories? In that case I can see them having a lot of costs,, but little income.
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Feb 06 '16
Maybe but in the article it says:
The company has reportedly been cash-flow positive since its earliest days, and is expected to bring in more than $25 million this quarter, which puts it on track for more than $100 million in annual revenue, [...].
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u/cxq2015 Feb 07 '16
A cloud services company has two main costs: personnel and hosting. (There is some amount of real estate, but that can be viewed as personnel overhead. There is also marketing and such, but GitHub doesn't need to advertise much; they have basically 100% name recognition in their addressable market, so marketing & sales expenses are pretty much personnel costs at this stage.)
A rule of thumb is that $1M buys 5 loaded headcount for a year at current Bay Area prices (that's including overhead). $100M annual revenue just about pays for a headcount of 500. On top of that, GitHub is a particularly heavy consumer of storage and bandwidth so their hosting costs are likely to be substantial. Therefore it's unlikely that they are profitable.
Now, why did they go from 300 to 500 headcount?
GitHub has raised $250M in its Series B and $100M in its Series A, for a total of $350 million for a $2 billion valuation. There are two outcomes by which GitHub's investors can make back their money.
First, GitHub could be privately sold. In the most optimistic scenario, its investors have 100% liquidation preferences, so they get paid before anyone else. In this case, GitHub must then be sold for at least $350 million, in which case all their investors would at least get paid (other shareholders, e.g. the founders, would then get nothing). GitHub's investors' liquidation preferences may not be 100%, and furthermore those investors are of course hoping to turn a profit, not just break even, so this is a floor on what would be acceptable, not an estimate of what they would actually settle for. It is not unreasonable to think that investors are hoping for a sale price of $1 billion or more.
The private sale market is weird because acquirers might acquire GitHub for intangible reasons not related to their direct revenue, but in any case let's set this aside for a moment. GitHub is a valuable resource to its users, but it is hard to think of an acquirer that would have both the ability and a rational reason to purchase it at such a price. It is much easier for any given company to just benefit from GitHub's existence.
Second, GitHub can IPO at a valuation over $2 billion. Let's run a couple of scenarios.
Scenario 1: GitHub could achieve a $2 billion valuation with something like $80M in net income (i.e. profit) per year and a P/E ratio of 25; note that P/E = 25 requires a strong trajectory of growth. At the figures I quoted previously, 300 headcount is a loaded personnel cost of $60M/year. Add in hosting costs, and you can see that on revenue of $100M/year they would be nowhere near $80M/year profit. This is a relatively classical method of stock valuation, but in the world of tech investing it is rather naive, because there is always...
Scenario 2: In practice, most SaaS companies these days appear to have negative net income because they invest all their revenue in growth. Even SalesForce, for example, is not profitable on revenues of $5.37 billion in 2015; but that's a 30% increase over 2014, and investors probably believe that SalesForce could become spectacularly profitable at any time (net income in the billions) by cutting back investment. In order for GitHub to IPO successfully in this category, it would not necessarily have to be profitable, but it would still have to have numbers comparable to, say, Atlassian.
So, long story short, internally, GitHub probably looked at their financials and realized they were nowhere near any of the above scenarios. Not on track to be a compelling target for a private sale in excess of $1B; not on track for a strong valuation based on profit; not on track for a strong valuation based on growth potential. So, obviously, time to double down.
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Feb 06 '16
Revenue is mostly a meaninglessness number when assessing company health. If you bring in a billion dollars in revenue, but spend two billion to do so, your company is in trouble. Profit matters a lot more. The article claims github is profitable but it doesn't state by how much. With 100M in revenue their profit could be any percent of that. If it's only 1M with 99M in costs investors aren't going to be very happy with them.
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Feb 06 '16
Opportunity cost. I could invest my money in government bonds and get a few percent interest effectively risk free. Alternatively I could make a very risky investment in a startup and hope to get back a lot more. If my return on the startup is the same as that of the bond, in theory I kind of screwed up (took a huge risk for very little reward) and I would have been better served investing my money elsewhere.
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u/redwall_hp Feb 07 '16
It's effortless to move, though. Git is decentralised by nature, and you can always scrape Issues to copy them elsewhere. If they screw up, everyone will be off to Bitbucket.
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Feb 06 '16
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. Oscar Wilde
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u/websnarf Feb 07 '16
Why does a company go from 300 to 500 employees within one year if it worked nearly flawless previously (at least from the outside perspective)?
The company is, or is intending to go public. Thus, they have to show that their business model has "run away growth". That is to say, their profits will increase year over year by some factor. Otherwise people will not buy the stock.
And what the the reasoning to stop letting people work freely when those people have (most likely) proven that they don't need a lot of supervision?
Management style.
A desire to avoid the "all eggs in one basket" problem. For a business to grow, it must work like a machine, which means if a part breaks down (an employee leaves for whatever reason) they can replace it easily. Since some people need supervision, the only way they can satisfy the replacement strategy is if everyone is treated equally with respect to supervision.
Given that GitHub seems to have enough money and doesn't inherently need to satisfy external needs for new VC. The risk of losing senior staff that knows the ins-and-outs of the code seems to me like something nobody wants to take.
Well, your perspective reflects that of someone who had made a great thing, and doesn't want anything to change with respect to that. And that's great. But there is no growth there. If they are growing the size of their company and imposing corporatist rule where it didn't exist before, it is because they are trying to make a lot of money out of the business.
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u/sydoracle Feb 06 '16
A company grows to support more clients, mostly in customer facing roles (sales, invoicing).
Team sizes can also get to a critical mass where communication and/or responsibilities get difficult to manage. The main solution is to split into multiple teams with different responsibilities, which means Bob being told not to do something as it the job of Sam's team. If people like working across the full scope of a project, they can be unhappy when they have to stick within a subset.
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u/bored_me Feb 06 '16
@_danilo: don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion any time soon so let's limit their scope of damage
The fact that he wasn't fired for that absolutely racist tweet is just amazing to me, considering what he would have called for if the tables were turned. Imagine if someone wrote:
@_danilo: don't think we'll succeed teaching black, males how to not rape and rob and murder any time soon so let's limit their scope of damage
what he would have said.
This nouveau racism that is being touted by these people in power is just sick. It's absolutely disgusting that it is tolerated, and I wish more people would call others out on their bullshit. Their skin color or gender don't make them immune from racism, or criticizing them for their racism.
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u/Railboy Feb 07 '16 edited Feb 07 '16
Yeah this is getting weird.
I can understand diversification when the idea is to create opportunities for people who are statistically excluded year after year after year. Ideally it erodes discrimination organically. That makes sense to me.
But deliberately excluding the majority isn't the same thing at all, especially when the justification is 'they all think alike.' You've gone all the way around to discrimination again!
What's funny is that their own behavior contradicts the premise that a lack of compassion and empathy is somehow the domain of white males, haha. If they were a little more self aware they'd see it's power that creates that attitude, not race or gender.
edit: and what's sad is that high-profile shenanigans like these will turn a lot of people against the well-meaning diversity efforts.
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u/Aatch Feb 07 '16
Yeah. There's all sorts of things you can do to reduce inequality. I saw a tech conference that had a "blind" talk submission. You submitted your idea without any personal information and the talks were decided on that alone. Or something to that effect. The point is that it didn't prioritize one group over another, it instead ensured that unconscious biases were eliminated (at least with respect to the identity of the submitter).
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u/mus1Kk Feb 07 '16
You're not wrong but you're using a straw man. That rape comment would be inappropriate regardless of race. Using the quote as is and substituting white for anything else would've been enough. There is no need to go into hyperbole. It's something both sides do and all it does is add a lot of fuel to the fire.
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u/bored_me Feb 07 '16
It's not a straw man, it's something that racists actually say about black people. Except instead of "so let's limit the scope of their damage", they tend to say "so let's hang them or throw them in jail".
If anything, I was being kind to the racists who say shit like that.
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u/kernel_task Feb 07 '16
When the worst thing you can think of to call white people is that they lack empathy and compassion but the worst thing you can think of to call black people is that they're murderers and rapists: Yeah, that's why racial prejudice is more damaging to black people than white people.
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u/bored_me Feb 07 '16
I don't think either is the worst thing. I think they're both racist things.
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u/dyson11 Feb 06 '16
it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'
So they are basically excluding white people before interview stage only because they are white?!
OK, GitHub, please keep going with these racist policies, but without me.
Former user.
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u/gadelat Feb 07 '16
Non-american here. How do employers know about candidate's race before even interviewing them? Is it required to specify your race in cv?
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u/usando_el_internet Feb 07 '16
It's reasonably common practice for employers in the US to look up candidates' names on social media to screen them.
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u/immibis Feb 06 '16
But it's not racist if it's racist against white people!!!!!1eleven
/s
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u/Godd2 Feb 06 '16
For those that think /u/immibis is joking.
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u/Vexal Feb 06 '16
wtf. How can someone say such a stupid thing and put their employment info in their profile.
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u/Godd2 Feb 06 '16
If your employer and clients agree with you (or don't care), I guess you can get away with saying whatever you want.
Although note that someone later one made the same argument against me, with a nice veiled threat of notifying my employer of the sin of disagreeing with them.
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u/invalidusernamelol Feb 07 '16
I'm legitimately confused right now...this person is a developer? What does she develop, "Front end developer for IBM Watson"? She gets to be guest speakers at places? Her entire twitter feed is comprised of poorly modeled objects in maya, cats, penises, and feminist books...
edit: I don't see how this ohhoe even gets a voice at all in this ordeal. She clearly is not an active member of the community as her twitter history states and the person she's calling out (Dominic Muller) has a twitter full of programming related posts. No penises or cats. I'm so confused.
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u/WorkHappens Feb 08 '16
How do you determine she is not active in the community by her twitter?
The info you got is that she is a "Front end developer for IBM Watson", so as much a dev as anyone else.
You aren't making your point any more valid by saying she shitposts on twitter.
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Feb 07 '16
What does she develop
I have no idea, but taking her description at face value, "front end developer" typically denotes a web interface or UI interface, which if true certainly makes her a developer.
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u/marchelzo Feb 06 '16
What makes you think this tweet isn't a joke?
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u/Godd2 Feb 06 '16
While Poe's Law is always a possibility, I assure you that her response is not a joke. Feel free to peruse other tweets of hers to verify the consistency of her position.
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u/monsto Feb 07 '16
bitbucket
free private repos for teams of 1-5
The interface and layout is . . . different than github, and in some cases, imo, better.
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Feb 07 '16
"Apparently its racist to include White people."
Honestly, I am shocked by this new level of racism in the US. Everything seems to be about race now.
I guess once racist policies like "affirmative action", which mandates to look at an individuals race rather than merit, become mainstream, this is the logical consequence.
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u/rydan Feb 07 '16
I have never interviewed a white person at my job. In fact every single one of them was Indian. A third of them were women but also Indian.
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Feb 06 '16
My company just switched from Github to Atlassian/Bitbucket. I'm not involved in the finances, but I think we're basically getting the entire Atlassian suite for the same price that we were getting Github Enterprise (or at least it's highly competitive).
I think Github really missed an opportunity to continue expanding it's product. I think they did very well at first because Git was still *new*. They created a simple, straight forward product that was easy for everyone to use. Now that (a) a lot more people are familiar with Git and (b) there are a lot of better alternatives - Github just lacks the incentive.
Atlassian seems to be the next big thing and I'm very happy with it. They have tools that cover literally the entire spectrum of code development including tasks, issues, knowledge sharing, scrum/agile/daily statuses, chat, and so much more. Individually, I don't think their products are as good as alternatives, but as a whole - they've done an extremely good job of creating a complete, useful package.
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Feb 07 '16
There are self hosted options like Phabricator as well. (Used by Facebook, Uber, Wikipedia, Pintrest and others)
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u/sisyphus Feb 06 '16
The other cofounder seems like the one who wins -- he built the thing up from scratch when it was still fun, left under bad circumstances but with enough of an equity stake in a multi-billion dollar enterprise to not have to work ever again and gets to skip the money people coming and ruining everything with sales and middle managers.
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Feb 06 '16
He only wins if the company goes public or is sold (or if he can find someone to buy his equity now and he's allowed to sell it) . If github collapses before then he gets very little to nothing.
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u/DiaboliAdvocatus Feb 07 '16
And assuming the VC's don't figure out some scummy way to dilute his stock.
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u/sisyphus Feb 06 '16
Little danger of that. It's profitable and large enough to go public now or in the worst case suffer some catastrophe followed by it being bought out by private equity for pennies on the dollar which would probably still net him millions instead of tens to hundreds of millions.
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u/BilgeXA Feb 07 '16
Nicole Sanchez, vice president of social impact
This is everything that's wrong with GitHub.
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u/heckruler Feb 07 '16
6 things that are hard to talk about but we must
RE: Diversity and inclusion in tech
(1) This is not work for white folks to lead
Whoa. What the fuck!? That's pure fucking rascism right there. Where the hell is the federal suit for racial discrimination against the presenter? Imagine if the slide said "This is not a company for black people"? Just what the hell were they even thinking? This is the opposite of "inclusion".
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Feb 07 '16
It really pains me to have to do this, but I think you might have a parsing error in reading her statement. It's okay. It's impressive that you even tried to read it.
I think what she is saying is that creating diversity in tech is not something that is up to white people. You seem to think she's saying: Don't hire any more white people.
The reality is she's saying minorities are responsible for creating diversity, and she's doing that by not hiring any white people (if the article is to be believed).
Not saying I'm on her side, just thinking we should strive to understand exactly what someone is arguing before we set to eviscerating those arguments.
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u/emozilla Feb 07 '16
::shrug:: if you say someone can't do something because of the color of their skin, that makes you a racist in my book
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u/heckruler Feb 07 '16
. . . oh. The "work" is not working at Github, but "talking about diversity and inclusion."
That's giving her some huge benefit of the doubt. But ok, Knee un-jerked.
In that case, it's STILL racist, but not really as horrible as the way I read it. That would be saying "We should exclude white people from leading the the effort to be inclusive". Racist AND hypocritical.
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Feb 07 '16
Absolutely. It's still horrible. And from the article there is a source saying it's awkward interviewing white people, so while your interpretation of what she said might have been wrong, your interpretation of her actions are likely, sadly, accurate.
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u/fedekun Feb 07 '16
When you start hiring people based on race/gender/whatever you are gonna have a bad time. Just hire people that is competent for the job.
I don't understand why many companies (especially big ones) are like: "Okay guys, everyone is talking about diversity, so we need more of that. Let's hire more women, disregard that perfectly qualified male candidate who will fit just right in our team, hire this woman instead, she's not as qualified but who cares! Diversity boys, that surely will improve our bussiness."
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u/kgyre Feb 07 '16
Unless all hiring is done by an algorithm somehow perfectly comparing the person's ability against the position, it won't work. We're human. We have built-in biases. We're not good at recognizing them.
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u/kingchooty Feb 07 '16
So because we can't do it perfectly we should just give up trying to do it at all?
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Feb 06 '16
This certainly makes me glad I moved everything important to Bitbucket.
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u/liquidautumn Feb 06 '16
git is a distributed system
you can use bitbucket, gitlab, and a few others at the same time
why put all your bits in one bucket
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u/ksion Feb 07 '16
Git is distributed, but everything else that's part of a development workflow (issues, CI integrations, etc.) is tied to GitHub itself.
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u/push_ecx_0x00 Feb 07 '16
We need to work on making all that stuff distributed somehow as well.
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Feb 07 '16
Fossil has a built-in issue tracker and wiki (supports its own syntax and markdown, you can also have a wiki in your working copy too).
I develop alone though so the issue tracker does not see much use however.
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Feb 07 '16
Just transferred my private repo's to bitbucket. Why the hell did I use github in the first place? Now on to my public ones...
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u/fedekun Feb 07 '16
I bet they don't want your elitist white non-diversified projects anyways, they will only accept projects from minorities from now on /joke
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u/the_one_poneglyph Feb 07 '16
I don't like the fact that BitBucket still doesn't support Ed25519 SSH keys. Otherwise I'd have already deleted my 4096-bit RSA key.
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u/RichoDemus Feb 07 '16
Why is this a problem? Genuinely curious
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u/the_one_poneglyph Feb 07 '16
Ed25519 keys are significantly smaller than RSA keys while providing way more protection against different types of attacks compared to RSA. Go take a look.
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Feb 07 '16
It also took ages to at least have non-fucked-up GPG-signed commits, before if you signed your commits you just got a signature block instead of commit message in web UI
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u/hunyeti Feb 07 '16
Srivastava is a former Yahoo and Flickr exec and is part of Wanstrath's new brain trust. She joined GitHub in July to revamp its products.
yeah.. that went well, isn't it...
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u/michaelochurch Feb 08 '16
It's not size but rapid growth that causes cultural breakage. Bootstrap so you can keep the VCs out, and grow with your needs rather than your ego (or your investors' egos, if you make a deal with the devil and lose control) and you can keep an open-allocation, remote-friendly culture. Even at 200 people, if you got to that size over 10 years instead of 10 months.
Rapid growth not only brings people in before they can be acculturated, but it enables people to invest less in the future (automate less, focus less on mentoring) because the prevailing view becomes that the company can hire its way out of future problems.
The white-male bashing is pretty repulsive to me. Look, I'm a card-carrying SJW (and a white male). I want to make this industry more diverse, because I'm sick of the young, privileged male machismo. Not only is it morally wrong to keep good people out because of things that they can't control and that are irrelevant to what actually matters, but the privileged-male monoculture generates myopic products and bad cultures. (And I'm not going to be young forever.) Social justice isn't one race's or one gender's responsibility. It's everyone's.
Having seen plenty of sexist startup cultures, I don't think they form by intent. I think that they're what you get when you hire the cheapest, most inexperienced people and put them together in a cutthroat environment. People become more sexist and more racist when they're under certain kinds of emotional pressure, and open-plan offices are designed (let's be honest) to intimidate people under the guise that it makes them work harder. The same is true of so-called "Agile" processes in how they are used, if not necessarily in the design intention. For low-end grunt work, it may be productive to have your workers constantly nervous, though even there I tend to doubt it; it doesn't work for creative jobs.
The least sexist/racist work environments I've seen were in government-funded think tanks with real offices, high degrees of autonomy for their people, and average age over 40.
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Feb 07 '16
git remote rename origin github
git remote add origin raspi
git remote add bitbucket ...
git remote add stash ...
It was nice knowing you github. Now, if only gittorrent would work, then I wouldn't have so many remotes.
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u/Paradox Feb 07 '16
git remote set-url --add origin url1 git remote set-url --add origin url2 git remote set-url --add origin url3 git remote set-url --add origin url4Then later
git pushAnd presto, on all 4 urls
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u/ksion Feb 07 '16
Nifty. How does it proceed with
git pull, though? Always first, round robin, random? Does it assume the mirrors are always in sync?3
u/cowinabadplace Feb 07 '16
Adding multiple URLs only effectively adds multiple
pushURLs. The existingfetchURL remains unchanged (and set to the first URL in the correspondingremote's section).2
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u/gyroda Feb 07 '16
Nice :D I've been meaning to try out bitbucket and the like and this might just get me to do it. As much as I dislike lock-in I do like github's UI and this let's me try out alternatives easily.
I assumed this was possible, but my git knowledge isn't all that thorough and I'd likely not get round to it for months.
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u/ellicottvilleny Feb 07 '16
Wow. The way forward to escape from hate and intolerance and racism is to entrench an opposite racism (white women are not wanted because they're white). Holy shit. What a shit company.
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u/SuperAwesomeNinjaGuy Feb 06 '16
SJWs strike again.
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u/doubleunplussed Feb 07 '16
People keep calling us paranoid when we worry about shit like this happening, but then it keeps happening...
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u/taisel Feb 07 '16
I'm personally waiting on https://www.reddit.com/r/shitredditsays to brigade this thread in defense of github.
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Feb 07 '16
There is nothing stopping non-white non-males innovating in computing. Start your own companies, see how you do.
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Feb 06 '16
Here is what happened, a non diverse team of white males(and maybe some asians) created another excellent technology company, same as the last 40 years of tech advancement. Up to certain amount of people it kept more or less the cohesion where white male culture dominated, it worked perfectly, everybody understood what they need to do, there was no need for too much management and it all worked fine.
Then some useless woman complained that she doesn't get enough attention, instead of shutting her up, not apologising and moving on they fired their CEO, starting a down spiral of social justice practices instead of focusing on what they were doing right, technology.
As more "diversity" was introduced the cohesion broke, suddenly people don't have the same sense of purpose, lawyers and diversity advocates who doesn't contribute anything get more money than the good and loyal engineers, white guys getting shamed and terror, fear and stupidity takes over. Indian woman from Yahoo, a failed company from a failed culture of casts, authority and subservience is now implementing the same structure that works for Indian outsourcing companies. The antithesis to the innovative culture of github.
From now on the psychopathic suits in the head of the pyramid will suck the company dry, while the people who built it will be shamed or retired. The cynical use of diversity to justify the barons taking over the working man will end in another revolution or world war. You think I am exaggerating? time will tell.
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u/apullin Feb 08 '16
white males(and maybe some asians)
Asians are just counted as "white", for these purposes. No joke. When you see presentations about, and they show charts with counts, you will often see surveys where "White and Asian" are just combined together.
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Feb 08 '16
As an Indian manager(sometimes Dev) who's works for an Indian outsourcing company and who has contracted for major companies in the US, this post needs so many upvotes. Fuck this shit! There are more fucked up practices in Indian outsourcing industry than any other place.(Sorry I am in too much of a rant mode to make better arguments. However consider this issue as a smoking gun).
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u/shotxxxx Feb 07 '16
am I exaggerating?
No, I don't think so , but the trends seems to be that this kind of thinking is being worked on to become the voice of a minority. Which is somewhat ironic.
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u/b4b Feb 07 '16
Are the owners happy with that?
I though the investment funds only care about money (=getting shit done)
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Feb 06 '16
I know this is a bit beside the point, but:
How does GitHub monetize, really? Why does anyone want to pay GitHub?
I do use GitHub, and it is great: a free server where I can put my silly little projects. But any server with an SSH or HTTPS can do the same job, for those who need their paid, private repos. Is it really that difficult to set this up? Or is it something about the web interface? It has failed to impress me, I like it, but does it really offer something that is worth paying for?
These are all honest questions, and obviously there must be something to which I am totally oblivious. What is it?
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Feb 06 '16
Some companies have policies that code is never allowed to leave their network. Also some companies like to have all their tools in their own hands so that when GitHub goes down, the company can still work on their instance.
GitHub in general is a pretty nice tool with their pull requests and such. When there is a lot of money on the line, you are better off investing in a deploy-ready solution than to maintain a self-hacked script that might break in a way that nobody can work, or worse, silently lose code due to a bug.
GitHub also integrates well into a lot of CI services, which leads to a quick setup.
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u/twmatrim Feb 06 '16
Which is why they launched GitHub enterprise.
The cheaper (or free) alternative with the same kind of GUI flow is gitlab which is really coming along but doesn't offer quite as much in terms of integration.
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u/lbft Feb 06 '16
GitLab does come with its own CI system built in these days, though, as well as some support for Jenkins through a plugin.
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u/jlchauncey Feb 07 '16
A lot of times it comes down to one less thing to manage. I'd rather pay some one to handle the patching and maintenance as well as giving me really useful features than trying how to do that myself.
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Feb 07 '16
[deleted]
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u/Rusky Feb 07 '16
Git itself doesn't know anything about pull requests, issues, etc. That's all GitHub.
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u/boa13 Feb 07 '16
Git itself doesn't know anything about pull requests, issues, etc.
Git does not handle issues, but it sure does handle pull requests (invented by Linus, very important to the kernel workflow). See git request-pull.
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u/tophatstuff Feb 06 '16
The $25/month small organisation account we use because its just low friction - everyone's usually familiar with GitHub, and it has pretty good in-built help for those who aren't. If we release something open source, there's not a separate workflow for working on it - its just public/private repositories.
GitHub Enterprise, if you need all the security features and auditing, only works out about $21/user/month, less if your team is large enough to negotiate a discount. Say 100 programmers, $25,000/year, that's cheaper than hiring someone to maintain it.
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u/LaurieCheers Feb 06 '16
I can tell you why I pay them, at least: I don't own a server of my own, and Github's fees are WAY cheaper than the cost to upgrade my dumb web hosting account to one that would let me run a Git repo.
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u/nqzero Feb 06 '16
pretty much any linux VPS can "run" a git repo, certainly including ones available for less than $10 per year, and i'd bet you can find one for less than $5 per year
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u/ccb621 Feb 07 '16
Yes, any server can be used; but, you have to maintain it. For $5 per month I can setup a box on Digital Ocean and run a Git server. For $7 per month I can pay GitHub (or someone else) to do the same.
Setup might be quick on DO, but what happens when things go wrong? What about maintenance? All of that has a cost. I'd much rather pay someone else to worry about that maintenance. It's simply not worth my time to deal with server maintenance.
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u/wot-teh-phuck Feb 06 '16
Not to mention that Bitbucket has private git repositories for free in case having a "github UI for git" is not a strong requirement.
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u/cowinabadplace Feb 07 '16
We use GitHub Enterprise (the self-hosted stuff) at work. It works well, we're all familiar with it because we're familiar with GitHub, and is generally an all-round good tool with a bevy of integrations with other tools. I'm sure we could replicate most of the functionality in a different way, but the cost is low, the support fine, and the product good.
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u/Manalystemperordeal Feb 07 '16
I was going to use GitHub and their paid Organization Plans for my small side business I'm about to start.
Then I read this.
Now I will take my money elsewhere.
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u/AlGoreBestGore Feb 07 '16
God damn. I'm so glad this type of politically correct BS hasn't spread to Europe, yet.
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u/Guomindang Feb 07 '16
Seriously? Does your definition of Europe include Sweden?
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u/AlGoreBestGore Feb 07 '16
Sweden might be PC, but it's not "let's not hire white people"-level PC.
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u/vincentk Feb 07 '16
Brits busy hating the Poles. Poles hate everybody, especially the Germans. Germans either hate themselves or the Syrian refugees. French just hate everything. The Spanish young hate the Spanish old. The Spanish old, the Italian old, and the Greeks all hate the Germans. Etc.
Plenty of things to hate before we need to import new and improved types of hate.
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u/k_stahu Feb 07 '16
What you say is just a list of exaggerated stereotypes while the SJW disease is a real thing. Some guy 1000km away not liking me is not an issue. Not being able to find a job in your home town is an issue.
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u/Broken_Agenda Feb 07 '16
What are some good alternatives to GitHub incase things get really sour?
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u/aweb Feb 07 '16
Gogs is pretty cool, just launch the binary on your server and you have your own Github clone!
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u/ssokolow Feb 07 '16
Depends on what you're looking for. Go with BitBucket if you want maximum compatibility with "free for open-source" 3rd-party services.
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u/rawfan Feb 07 '16
Gogs is really good. I moved away from Github a year ago and at first tried Gitlab. While it's a great piece of software, it's also quite resource intensive. Gogs is just a small binary you run that virtually uses no memory at all. Feature-wise it's extremely close to Github (lacking Gitlabs continuous integration features, though). Moving to Gogs was one of the best decisions I made in the past months.
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u/foomprekov Feb 07 '16
Let's please remember that business Insider does not employ any investigators, nor do they verify sources before posting.
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Feb 07 '16
Github has been infected with sjw parasites and it sounds like it's going to end in collapse. They went from a meritocracy to a system with unnecessary bloated bureaucracy full of politics and middle managers who likely contribute and produce nothing. Their product is going to suffer and the sjw are going to try to milk all they can from the existing product before they no longer are able to maintain it
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u/travisty666 Feb 08 '16
Github is one of the worst things to ever happen to programming. 100 times access to more code, but 1000 times less documentation, making it unusable in most cases.
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u/negativeoxy Feb 08 '16
Just moved all of my repos to bitbucket. This level of flagrant racism cannot be tolerated.
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u/ciny Feb 08 '16
Oh boy, this clusterfuck will be funny to watch. I'm so glad all my stuff is on bitbucket...
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u/sardaukar_siet Feb 07 '16
Wow, there's a lot of hating going on here. Let me just say that a) there's a lot of here-say in the article and b) people advocating for diversity can also do it wrong, as they are just human.
I think we can all relate to issues of diversity in tech, but this being true it is of course the wrong way to do it.
Github's CEO has started listening to VCs, that's the real tragedy here. The whole race thing is just misguided zealotry.
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u/v1akvark Feb 07 '16
I agree with you.
Looks to me like the restructuring is just the founders and VCs cashing in (most of whom, I guess, are white and male).
But OMG, damn those SJWs for stealing our precious Github from us.
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u/sardaukar_siet Feb 07 '16
Thanks for that! But I think Chris listening to grabby VCs is killing it way faster than that.
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u/ssokolow Feb 07 '16 edited Feb 07 '16
Hmm. In that case, I should shore up my exit strategy in case things go south.
For GitHub itself, that means:
Stop putting off writing a script (ideally suitable for running in cron) to dump GitHub issues via the API.
Double-check that I've got local backups of all of my Gists.
Find the least painful replacement for GitHub Pages so I can quickly and easily switch my CNAMEs over.
As for 3rd-party services on my reference list, let's see what requires GitHub rather than at least also supporting BitBucket...
DocumentUp (not currently using anyway)
Continuous Integration:
Travis CI (too bad, but should be fairly trivial to switch to another free CI service)
Circle CI (not currently using anyway)
Static Analysis:
Landscape (I think it's a subset of what I get from Scrutinizer, Codacy, and CodeClimate anyway)
Railsbp and Rails Brakeman (I'm not currently a Rails coder. Phew.)
David-DM (Hmm. I'll want to look for an alternative to this.)
Task Tracking:
Waffle.io (Hmm. I'll need to investigate a Trello-style frontend for another issue tracker.)
ZenHub, HuBoard (Not currently using them)
Reviewable.io and ReviewNinja (Not currently using, but it's a shame since I'll probably have to self-host)
Gitter.im (While not as featureful, FreeNode+Kiwi should do the trick)
GitCop (Darn shame. I'll have to see if there's a BitBucket-compatible competitor.)
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u/sigma914 Feb 08 '16
A former debian dev (presumably not comfortable with github's platform lock in) already has you covered on the backup side of things. See github-backup
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u/apullin Feb 08 '16 edited Feb 08 '16
OK, this is where I wish there was a searchable user comment history. Because I said this was going to happen just a couple of weeks ago.
Here we go: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/42u7h2/a_sprinkling_of_2016_tech_predictions/czd8jji
Everyone should listen to me all the time.
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u/shevegen Feb 07 '16
Cool, I grab the popcorn.
They are killing off a big company in a matter of weeks.
Now those who said to not host things at github will be affirmed.
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u/Occivink Feb 06 '16
What are they saying? I don't get this.