There's a couple of issues that stand out to me: Github is engaging in risky behaviour by reaching out to individuals (specifically activists) for hire explicitly on the basis of "diversity" and trying to incorporate those individuals in a highly merit-based environment.
Secondly, Coraline seems to think that human relationships are a one way street: that she is entitled to be direct and even confrontational or insensitive, especially if she believes she is "right" or in a "mentor" role, and yet her peers are expected to walk on eggshells around her, lest they be accused of attacking her.
One part that stood out as particularly odd was her insistence to stay at work while she was suffering with a mental health issue that was clearly affecting her job performance, in spite of her manager's request that she take mental health leave. It sounds like she just flat out ignored her manager under the assumption that her manager just needed to accept whatever her therapist advised her to do, which is kind of ridiculous on the face of it.
She was right, and as a senior engineer she was in a mentor role.
I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight.
Where you see an instance of her co-workers being accused of attacking her, I see her lines of communication being shut down from above. A simple one-on-one conversation probably could have resolved that situation very easily, but GH management seems in this case to have insulated that person from learning from their mistake. Not the kind of effort I would expect from an organization that's truly trying to be "inclusive.
Being in a mentor role does not mean you have to right to mentor. Assuming you have a superior position, and deciding to use it to explain something obvious to someone else as "educating" them is not a good social interaction for the other person, and may make them feel trapped and uncomfortable. The author never said the junior developer expressed interest in mentorship, merely that "this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it." Not willing engaged, but "benefiting." Without context, it is imaginable that said mentoree didn't want these interactions or this relationship and the author never identified this social cue.
> I don't think that directly communicating a relevant fact - that trans is not a gender - to someone contributing to a survey intended to collect data about marginalized people is the same as expecting her peers to walk on egg shells. That's just asking them to get their facts straight.
The article starts by complaining about "drive-by issue comments", then described opening what might be considered a drive-by issue. That could be construed as contradictory. Moreover, said issue may be construed as a (company-)public dressing-down. A developer came though and, in a public manner observable by all their peers, informed another that they were not being sensitive enough. It's reasonable, I think, to be upset in that context.
> A simple one-on-one conversation probably could have resolved that situation very easily, but GH management seems in this case to have insulated that person from learning from their mistake
The author could have initiated such a conversation herself in lieu of the issue.
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My point is that a lot of things are a matter of perception, and one person's is seldom the whole story. Caroline clearly had a bad go of it at GitHub, that isn't deniable. But individuals' perceptions are fickle things, and it is seldom the case that any one tells the whole story.
> Being in a mentor role does not mean you have to right to mentor.
Exactly. For what we know, the junior could have actively complained to the manager (wrongly or rightly) about her mentoring.
OTOH the junior dev might have appreciated it. We can't say for sure.
Some people (myself included) prefer to get a general direction and then later to come back for further questions.
Too much information in a short amount of time can be overwhelming, I need some time to absorb and read it up in the internet.
A few keywords might be good enough to get someone going and figure it out themselves.
"learn at her own pace, without any pressure from you."
This really sounds as if the manager had the junior dev's best interest in mind.
I don't see how the manager said this to get back at Caroline, as was kind of implied in the article.
> Some people (myself included) prefer to get a general direction and then later to come back for further questions. Too much information in a short amount of time can be overwhelming, I need some time to absorb and read it up in the internet. A few keywords might be good enough to get someone going and figure it out themselves.
I'm in a senior role on my team, and this is exactly how I'd describe the support I try to give my teammates when they ask (and hopefully, they'd agree). Unless someone is going down the significantly wrong path, I'll generally leave them alone until they ask for assistance. Sometimes, they ask for a direction, sometimes they ask for the type of "pair programming" described in the post (screensharing via video calls), but how much or little they get is up to them, and they drive.
In this case, you're right that we don't know the context of the story from the more junior developer's perspective, and it's completely plausible that they weren't happy with the mentorship they were receiving, but also didn't feel comfortable giving that feedback themselves, all of which is a shame.
What makes me a bit skeptical here is that Coraline just writes 'this teammate seemed to be benefiting from it'.
But doesn't mention that the junior dev appreciated it or thanked her for her help.
Didn't the junior complain about the missing mentoring after the intervention of the manager?
But who knows, probably I am reading way too much into these few sentences...
I'm in a senior role on my team, and this is exactly how I'd describe the support I try to give my teammates when they ask
I think this level of support is a fairly widespread target for the first interaction on a topic. We're (generally speaking) working among fellow talented professionals within a small-enough window of related disciplines and skill levels. The reasonable assumption is that someone requesting help needs just enough new information to establish connective tissue in their own mental understanding of a problem to become self-sufficient again (even if that means doing more research, learning, digging, etc... on their own). Topics that require a "brain dump" from someone with the institutional knowledge is a sign of technical debt and that information belongs in internal documentation.
> The article starts by complaining about "drive-by issue comments", then described opening what might be considered a drive-by issue. That could be construed as contradictory.
The article is reasonably clear that "drive-by issues" are ones where people leave comments uninvited, and it's also explicit that Caroline was specifically asked to review the survey in question. So it's hard to read that as contradictory.
> Caroline was specifically asked to review the survey in question.
Yes and no. From the article:
> One day a notification came to me that a repo for the open source developer survey had been created and that the survey questions were in progress. My director followed up with me to make sure that I was aware of the survey and asked me to review the questions. I worked my way through, and stopped short at one particular question...
She got a notification of the repository, was asked by someone (not the person working on it) to review the questions, and decided that these two interactions separately constituted an invitation to give public feedback.
Then, her primary feedback was in the form of creating an issue about a specific question, with a terse description. (If you look at the repository in question [0], it appears her feedback came in the form of opening two similarly-terse issues about back-to-back questions with no further comments on the survey for 10 days.)
It's easy to imagine viewing that as a negative interaction from the other side.
I'm not saying it was handled well, or that it wasn't possible to resolve it in another way, but, yeah, I can imagine getting a little upset about that sort of thing happening in the author's shoes.
This one way street also extends to the way Coraline's accomplishments at GitHub are presented in the article.
There's all of this talk about all of the code she pushed and all of the popular features she wrote, but there's no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured, e.g. what her management was expecting her to do. So when the negative review is mentioned, we're supposed to be shocked by it. Certainly she is shocked by it. That doesn't mean she should have been.
> [My manager] went back to the issue of my lack of empathy in communications and collaboration. I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count. She went on to say that I was not fulfilling my responsibilities as an engineer because for the first month after a new developer was added to our team, I had not done any code reviews for her. I told my manager that I only participated in code reviews to which I was invited, in large part because of my experience at the beginning with drive-by reviews, and that the new developer hadn't started requesting reviews from me until February. Again, the facts didn't seem to matter.
> My overall review was a "Does Not Meet Expectations." I was shocked and upset. A bad review out of the blue was not something that I had experienced before. I thought I had good rapport with my manager, and that if there was a problem that we would have been addressing it at our weekly meetings. In my mind this was a serious management failure, but there was apparently nothing I could do about it.
Emphasis on "addressing it at our weekly meetings".
This seems to be far more of a management failure than Coraline's failure.
As I pointed out earlier, her boss addressed the weekly meeting thing directly, and Coraline mentions it:
> I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count.
So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period.
Re-reading it again, I'm not convinced that this is a management failure either. The section titled Empathy starts with:
> Starting in December, in my weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager, we would review all of my written communication (issues, pull requests, code reviews, and Slack messages) to talk about how I could improve. It felt ridiculous but I went along with it, and did my best to address my manager's feedback and concerns.
One way to read that is that her manager was trying to address these problems, but Coraline didn't understand how serious they were, because she dismissed them as "ridiculous."
On the face of it your point seems to be entirely reasonable. The problem is that we only have one side of the story here, and it's extremely unlikely we'll ever hear or read the other side. Clearly there have been some pretty serious problems but I don't feel comfortable root-causing them based off an account from a single individual.
> no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured
But per the blog post:
> Based on the positive feedback from my one-on-ones and how well I was tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level, I was hopeful of getting a promotion and a raise.
I'm confused as to how one could be "tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level" but not be measured by those metrics.
I'm reading between the lines a lot, and therefore am probably wrong, but I suspect what happened was one of the two following scenarios:
1. (Less likely) She did a lot of work, but it was not high priority work. It was good engineering but on things that the company did not consider important. She was given this freedom and then, in the company's eyes (fairly or unfairly) considered to have wasted it.
2. (More likely) She had good technical skills and bad social skills. When she was able to go heads-down and crank out PRs and tickets, everyone was happy, but she was socially abrasive and alienated her coworkers. This could be because she is an unpleasant person, or because they are unpleasant people, or it could be an honest misunderstanding or personality conflict, but in every case it detracts from the productivity of everyone, generally.
I suspect (2) played a big part, mostly because I've seen this same dynamic play out at other places before. As a borderline autist, I'm highly sympathetic to people in that position, and generally believe that it's better for everyone involved if management can find a way to work to their strengths. However, drastic differences in interaction style are what they are, and at the end of the day, your employer's priority is their productivity, not your happiness. Sometimes these things happen. They suck. At least we're fortunate enough to work in an industry where we have half a dozen other options for work at any time
> This could be because she is an unpleasant person, or because they are
> unpleasant people, or it could be an honest misunderstanding or personality
> conflict, but in every case it detracts from the productivity of everyone,
> generally.
This could also become a "Tyranny of the Majority" type situation though. If
all of the other people are unpleasant, and they are being unpleasant because
the new hire is a minority, then the company's easiest course of action (i.e.
fire the one person rather than fire the many) becomes oppressive and enabling.
I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case here, but the behaviour of "well let's just fire this one person, no matter who was in the wrong" is only good from a "anything for the company's bottomline" perspective.
> I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case here, but the behaviour of "well let's just fire this one person, no matter who was in the wrong" is only good from a "anything for the company's bottomline" perspective.
Regardless of one's opinions on ethics, this is the attitude your employer _will_ take and it will _never_ change unless they are forced to do so. Tech companies are the shepherds of billions of dollars worth of assets, and they are going to protect those assets over you, when push comes to shove. Consequently, it is important to always keep this in mind, to expect it, and to proceed accordingly. Ignoring this doesn't make it untrue
No, not all companies put their bottom line above their principles.
In fact, some people coming consider it an inalienable part of their masculinity, personality, religion, etc, that they will put their principles above their checkbook.
In fact, some people start companies specifically because they want to put their principles above their paycheck.
> I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count.
So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period.
Here's another question: Why were weekly one-on-one meetings happening to discuss these issues? Are weekly one-on-ones typical at GitHub?
This sort of bugged me as well. Why was the review done in April but the review period ended in January?
Whilst the article is (as I've pointed out elsewhere) only one side of the story, GitHub isn't that big a company, so how crap do your management processes have to be that you only get around to reviewing somebody 3 months after the review period ended? It doesn't sound like the scheduling of the review was a surprise to Coraline: she saw it coming, it wasn't late, etc. So why didn't it cover the period up to the date of the review?
Bashing somebody with months old feedback when they've been working with you to improve against goals that you've both agreed specifically related to that feedback is an extremely poor way to operate, and obviously hugely demotivating to the reviewee.
Problem is, as I've already said, we've only read one side of the story.
Do you work at a big company? If you do, take a look at your last review, comparing when you received it to the period it technically applies to.
In my experience, both as a manager and an individual contributor, the periods will be offset by 2-4 months. The delivery of the review, while it feels like the start of something to the recipient, is the end of what's often a long and stressful period of planning, writing, and distributing reviews that lead to raises, bonuses, and promotions.
So nothing seems odd about that timeline to me, unless her manager failed to explain "this is a review that applies to the period before you made marked improvement".
The last time I had to worry about this I worked for a 300-ish person company, so a little under half the size of GitHub.
We used to do 6 monthly reviews but scrapped them in favour of more regular meetings every 4 - 8 weeks, largely for the reasons you've stated. That being said, in my experience reviews are one of those tasks that take up as much time as you give them. If you only give yourself a month to gather feedback and prepare them you'll find a way to get it done, and I always wanted to work off the most current information available when meeting with members of my teams, hence doing the prep as late as possible.
As I said, GitHub is not a large company at around 700 employees, so I'm not really sure what their excuse is. The largest company I've worked for, as a contractor this time, was around 400k employees, and they seem to have much better processes around this with regular one-to-ones in the place of annual reviews, at least for permanent tech staff.
I guess the other issue is why was the review happening 4 months after the period ended, especially if they had started working on improvements in the meantime. What was the point of all that work / those improvements, if they were just going to ignore it because it wasn't in the "correct period?"
Shouldn't the review have happened closer to the end of the period, so that all of that progress could be part of improvement?
There's a book (I can't recall the name) written by a former HR professional on the actual function of HR in a corporation: a way to mitigate liability when firing people. That seems like the most plausible scenario given what I am reading from this blog post. If you were going to fire a well-known activist and you did not want to give away any ammunition for getting sued, there's a whole song and dance to make sure it happens. This way, you can be fired for legal reasons rather than the real reason.
I'm obviously taking a cynical take on this -- there are lots of organizations that try to use performance reviews to help an employee's career, and HR that is there to help the employees, not to bail the company out of litigation.
I believe the book you're referring to is called _Corporate Confidential_. People think I'm cynical when I talk about that book, but I've seen the scenarios you mention play out word for word multiple times.
Corporate confidential is fantastic. Everyone employed should read it. It's not about cynicism, it's about understanding the typical incentives and expectations driving the operations of a function affecting everyone in a typicsl large corp. I think the legal environment in US ups the ante thus incentivizing for wily maneuvers.
I wanted to follow up on this though I don't know if anyone will hear it.
This past week, our small team had brought in an executive coach that works with the material from Crucial Conversations. A wiki summary was circulated around. When I read it, I knew it applied to what was going on with our team as well as personal relationships.
Crucial conversations are moments when opinions vary, the stakes are high, and emotions run strong. Being able to have crucial conversations and handle them well allows someone to be effective, influential, and helps out the team and community tremendously. The follow-on book is called Crucial Accountability, which teaches how to deal with people who breaks promises and violates expectations.
So I stand by what I said about the cynical view of "Corporate Confidential". The thesis of "corporate confidential" is that corporaions want to fire someone using legal means because the real reasons is not legal. it might sound like a case of corporate greed and that is true to some extent. In addition, I think people are -not- having those crucial conversations. It is easier to plot a way to ease someone out than to have the crucial conversation about what is really going on.
Taking that frame with Coraline's story: if seems to me neither Corolaine, nor the github manager was able to have crucial conversations. In some ways, Coraline admitted to it in her blog post.
I also wonder if Github's earlier trouble -- what with the controversies, were also a series of crucial conversations that wete not held, or they were handled badly. They tried to fix it by hiring activists, but then, the crucial conversations and the shared meaning that includes social justice did not get discussed.
Finally: I think perhaps Coraline might benefit from skills in crucial conversations, as far as her activism goals.
I have sone friends for whom SJW rubs them the wrong way -- because it adds fuel to the fire and increases conflict. (Ironic, being that most of my friends who feel this way are committed martial artists and explore violence with each other). While crucial conversations is not a pancea, there are often some deep meaning held by both social activists and social conservatives.
I have always felt that Code of Conducts as imperfect substitutes for what we really want. I think people (generally speaking), deep down, want to speak their truths while getting along, even when disagreeing, when stakes are high, and emotions run strong.
That sounds like an interesting book. I'd appreciate if you could let me know if you recollect the name.
As someone who has poohpoohed the idea of a human resources department in a large company, I've almost done a 180 on it now that I have a small company of my own and I'd be very interested in reading some good books on the utility and function of the organisation in a large company.
Those are good questions. I guess I didn't find it implausible on its face, because I've never known any company to do reviews in a prompt and timely fashion.
It would help if we had an inside perspective on how their reviews work from someone who isn't invested in this specific story.
Weekly one-on-ones are pretty common in companies I've been part of, and GitHub has a lot of remote workers. Weekly one-on-ones seem more likely than not, in general.
> Github is engaging in risky behaviour by reaching out to individuals (specifically activists) for hire explicitly on the basis of "diversity" and trying to incorporate those individuals in a highly merit-based environment.
This is the main issue right there.
If anyone is reading this and wants to have a lot of HR/PR related problems in his/her company - start doing this and problems will pile up.
I didn't get the one-way street at all. In my (limited) experience, one-way streets like this happen because the other party either never starts talking to you, or because they shut down the conversation at some point.
> or because they shut down the conversation at some point.
That's the vibe I got from her post (that the conversation just stopped at a certain point), but that's really my point; in adult, human interactions, if you behave in ways that people find unacceptable, people can and will at one point simply say, "I've had enough" and shut down further dialogue because they do not find communicating with you to be constructive or productive. They are within their rights as human beings to do so.
Some people seem to have a "I have a certain approach and you must accept it and deal with me" attitude and that's just not how the world works. You can try to push a bad, combative attitude on other people, but there's just nothing that says that they have to accept it.
You're correct about this, so, let me be clearer: In my experience, they ghost; or they start ghosted.
Yes, there's a point at which you're completely justified in shutting down further dialogue because you do not find the communication constructive or productive. That point is after you have said that you do not find the communication constructive or productive.
(It sounds like your impression from the OP is that they didn't ghost too early; I didn't form an impression about that, but your take sounds reasonable.)
There's a flipside to your (correct) point about "that's not just how the world works"; basically, if you find yourself "having to accept my approach and just deal with it", are you sure you're not yourself requiring me to adopt to your communication modalities? Why are you sure you're not telling me to accept it and deal with you?
If I prefer directness and you prefer obliqueness, who is correct, and why?
(I find dealing with subtext and other "implies" to be the bad, evasive attitude - why would I have to accept it?).
> are you sure you're not yourself requiring me to adopt to your communication modalities?
They are. That's the whole point. If someone comes to try and convince you of their point, you can either listen and engage in a discussion, or if you believe that isn't going to work out, you can refuse. Both are valid options and necessary at times.
Likewise if you want to convince someone of your point and they refuse to listen to you, you can either change your approach so that they do, or declare them a lost cause and move on. Both are again valid options and necessary at times.
The problem is when you keep trying the approach that the other person doesn't want to listen to. That will just alienate them further, and can easily turn into harassment.
> Why are you sure you're not telling me to accept it and deal with you? If I prefer directness and you prefer obliqueness, who is correct, and why?
I've always wondered the same, after all, doesn't it take two people to have an argument or misunderstanding? And why is simply stating outright what the issue is considered unspeakable, is it some sort of an ego/pride thing?
I just don't get how people behave, but I'm pretty sure I'm the odd one out.
> She told me that the data scientist who had written the survey questions was very upset and had gone to her manager to complain about me.
>This was the first instance of what came to be referred to as my "non-empathetic communication style".
I like how she was pissed when she was "out victim-ed" HA!
I think you are right, employees like this have an bigger agenda they are focused on rather than doing work of the company.
And the fact that she says she has bipolar depression (and she was on involuntarily mental commitment for 8-days!?! A 5150 in California is 72-hours!) and yet she can't imagine why somebody would say she is not doing well at work, is also ridiculous on the face of it.
> And the fact that she says she has bipolar depression (and she was on involuntarily mental commitment for 8-days!?! A 5150 in California is 72-hours!)
You can of course be involuntarily confined in California for over 72 hours. For example:
> Secondly, Coraline seems to think that human relationships are a one way street: that she is entitled to be direct and even confrontational or insensitive, especially if she believes she is "right" or in a "mentor" role, and yet her peers are expected to walk on eggshells around her, lest they be accused of attacking her.
I got this vibe too. Empathy on the part of others (or rather its lack) is discussed quite a bit, but no consideration is given for the person who wrote the survey who was upset by her feedback. From the subtext it sounds like we are to believe this person was silly to be upset, because the feedback was so anodyne, but it really does seem like a part of the story there is missing. Based on the usage of the "her" pronoun, I'm guessing this other person is also a woman, who also faces issues of harassment and unfairness in tech. And so the lack of empathy for where that person was coming from was quite striking.
I'm going to hazard a guess that it was Frannie Zlotnick who led the survey [0]. As her research interests include gender and race stereotyping [1], I'm guessing that she objected to being lectured on the subject.
Secondly, Coraline seems to think that human relationships are a one way street: that she is entitled to be direct and even confrontational or insensitive, especially if she believes she is "right" or in a "mentor" role, and yet her peers are expected to walk on eggshells around her, lest they be accused of attacking her.
One part that stood out as particularly odd was her insistence to stay at work while she was suffering with a mental health issue that was clearly affecting her job performance, in spite of her manager's request that she take mental health leave. It sounds like she just flat out ignored her manager under the assumption that her manager just needed to accept whatever her therapist advised her to do, which is kind of ridiculous on the face of it.