Is anyone – anyone – even remotely surprised that things went badly awry for the company that hired the tranny SJW who was pushing Codes of Conduct on Open Source projects last year?
At first I had my doubts. I was well aware of GitHub’s very problematic past, from its promotion of meritocracy in place of a management system to the horrible treatment and abuse of its female employees and other people from diverse backgrounds. I myself had experienced harassment on GitHub. As an example, a couple of years ago someone created a dozen repositories with racist names and added me to the repos, so my GitHub profile had racial slurs on it until their support team got around to shutting them down a few days after I reported the incident. I didn’t get the sense that the company really cared about harassment.
My contact at GitHub insisted that the company was transforming itself. She pointed to a Business Insider article that described the culture changes that they were going through, and touted the hiring of Nicole Sanchez to an executive position leading a new Social Impact team. I was encouraged to talk to some other prominent activists that had recently been hired. Slowly, I opened my mind to the possibility. Given my work in trying to make open source more inclusive and welcoming, what could give me more influence in creating better communities than working at the very center of the open source universe?
With these thoughts in mind, I agreed to interview with the team. The code challenge was comparable to other places where I’d interviewed, as was the pairing exercise. I was impressed by the social justice tone of some of the questions that I was asked in the non-technical interviews, and by the fact that the majority of people that I met with were women. A week later, I had a very generous offer in hand, which I happily accepted. My team was 5 women and one man: two of us trans, three women of color. We had our own backlog separate from the rest of the engineering group, our own product manager, and strong UX and QC resources. I felt that my new job was off to a promising start.
However, it soon became apparent that this promising start would not last for long. For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written. One PR actually had over 200 comments from 24 different individuals. It got to the point where the VP of engineering had to intervene to get people to back off. I thought that maybe because I was a well-known Rubyist, other engineers were particularly interested in seeing the kind of code I was writing. So I asked Aaron Patterson, another famous Rubyist who had started at GitHub at the same time as I did, if he was experiencing a lot of scrutiny too. He said he was not.
Shortly after this happened to me, the code review feature was prioritized. This functionality was rolled out internally pretty quickly. From that point on I didn’t get dogpiled anymore, since I could request reviews from specific engineers familiar with the area of the codebase that I was working in and avoid the kind of drive-by code reviews that plagued my initial PRs.
A couple of months later, I finished up a feature that I was very excited about: repository invitations. With repository invitations, no one could add someone else to a repository without their consent. Being invited to contribute to a repository resulted in an email notification, from which the recipient could accept or decline to join and even report and block the inviter.
Feature releases such as these are frequently promoted on the GitHub blog, and the product manager on my team encouraged me to write a post announcing what I had shipped. Since it was so important to me personally, I wrote an impassioned piece talking about how this feature closed a security gap that had directly affected and provided an abuse vector against me. The post also served as an announcement to the world of the new team and the kinds of problems that we were charged with solving.
The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone of what I had written was too personal and didn’t reflect the voice of the company. The reviewer insisted that any mention of the abuse vector that this feature was closing be removed….
In speaking up like this, I felt like I was simply doing my job. I was trying to make a positive impact by speaking up for the minority of users who are regularly targeted for abuse. I wasn’t just trying to represent the values of the Community & Safety team, I was trying the represent the values of marginalized communities. I tried my best to make a positive impact. I kept the needs and best interests of the most vulnerable people on our platform at the front of my mind at all times, and prioritized my work according to what would make the biggest difference to this population of users.
SJWs always – always – put themselves and their social justice before the interests of the project, the company, and the community. Like insects, they are always looking for a chance to further infest their surroundings.
Finally in January I got the chance to work on the one feature that I wanted GitHub to have most of all: a tool to make adding a code of conduct to a project easy… The code of conduct adoption feature was launched in May 2017, and was widely praised. It would be my last feature for GitHub.
I’ll bet it was not widely praised within the company, but rather, by SJWs outside both the company and the tech industry. It is never, ever, a good idea to hire SJWs. Even the lesser ones are a serious problem; that’s how Coraline was hired in the first place. Notice that as I warned in SJWAL, the lesser SJW had installed itself in HR and created a locus for infestation called the Social Impact team.
But don’t worry, it has a happy ending. Of sorts.
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.
The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication. When I reached out to my therapist for help, she recommended that I go to the emergency room. This was the start of an eight day ordeal involving involuntary commitment to a mental health facility.