You seem to be taking things I'm stating way out of context. Of course I'm not arguing that being an "a-hole" is required. However, some people are jerks. They can't help it and they're never not going to be that way. So what are we going to do? Fire them? We start doing that we'll have to fire a solid 25% of the worlds best people. Whether or not someone is unpleasant or difficult to work with is irrelevant to how valuable they are. This is why decisions need always be based on merit. "Feelings" and "political correctness" are not appropriate in the professional environment. It would be nice if we all could make the working world all "Roses & rainbows" for everyone, but that's not realistic.
You seem to have the term "respect" mixed up with the words "compassion" and "kindness". While they are not mutually exclusive, they are not mutually inclusive either.
It did seem that way, but let's let it go.
Correct. There are many forms of discrimination. Most of them not only lawful but logical. You don't hire a farmer to fly a space shuttle do you? Merit.
Incorrect. I know full well that they are and what it feels like. Everyone does because it's happened to everyone. Are we going to change the rules of the world so that everyone who thinks(likely correctly) that they've been discriminated against in some way a avenue to force a change to accommodate their feelings of inclusiveness? Or does it make more sense to base every decision on merit?
If they're vision of an improvement is not compatible with the vision/scope of whatever they're working on or the views of the employer, then it is possible that such would be harmful. Again, merit.
I call things as they are presented. If someone's behavior merits a particular description or "label"..
Incorrect. I look down on people who create problems because they got their feelings hurt. So yes, as you said, "suck it up".
That depends on perception and the form of mistreatment. Just because someone perceives mistreatment doesn't actually make it so. Examination of the facts will reveal such. And if a form of discrimination is discovered, was it logical and appropriate? Again, merit.
It seem very clear that you missed the whole point of that paragraph. It's ok if you didn't understand it, no one is perfect. This illustrates a good point, mutual understanding. In this case an unintentional lack thereof. Just because you didn't understand it doesn't mean it wasn't valid. Put another way, you may have failed to understand the point of that comment because it was outside the scope of your understanding.
Yes, it does. Again, we don't hire farmers to fly space shuttles. Discrimination is a natural part of life. It happens a lot and for infinitely varied reasons. Someone discriminates against you? Get the over it, brush it off and move on.
Is that perceived unfairness real? Is it actually unfair or is it just in the mind of the beholder? Again, merit.
No, but I do contend that any effort to make said personal environment better needs to also not harm the larger environment. If the person in question can't adapt to the environment they're in, then they need to find somewhere else to be instead of ruining that environment for everyone else. Again merit.
Ah, but when have you ever been in a work environment with more than 10 people were everyone gets a long perfectly? You can't force people to like each other, and you can't change people's character.
Sure, but who gets to define those "norms"? Is it the people leading that environment? Or would you rather it be the people who are not the leaders?
Incorrect. As noted above, discrimination is a natural part of life. We have rules and laws that are meant to prevent certain kinds of discrimination, but they happen anyway. It's never going to stop. I've myself have refuse to accept people on my team because I didn't like them and didn't want to work in the same building as them. Is that discrimination? Yes. It's wrong? That depends on your perspective. However, I'm the leader of my team and I alone decide who's on it. Most of the time a person's skills and qualifications play the largest role in such a decision.
You keep dodging the fact that your definition of merit bluntly accepts the status quo as somehow neutral and "natural", which it isn'y in any way. Even if you accept that there is real discrimination, you refuse the very idea that discrimination is dependent on how it's received. Your belief in somehow documenting the "facts" of social interactions just goes to show how you're attempting to apply a form of positivist logic to a field where it's entirely unsuited.
Also: please stop using silly straw man arguments. The whole point here is the nuances, and nobody is arguing for the abolition of "discrimination" in the overly broad form you're using it in. What
is being promoted is the idea that concepts such as "merit" aren't as simple as they might seem (or you make them out to be), and that many different kinds of context are entirely invaluable in understanding and judging merit.
Another thing you'd do well to avoid in the future: false equivalencies. Living with racism is not the same as being bullied in school, which is not the same as living as a woman, which is not the same as being laughed at as a kid for having ears that stick out. Of course, everyone reacts differently to this (due to an unaccountable myriad of factors), but on average, one can quite clearly tell apart the severity of various kinds and degrees of discrimination and mistreatment.
Then, of course, there's your denial of systemic discrimination. You keep talking about this as if it a series of isolated incidents. Culture isn't a series of isolated incidents, but all interconnected, and our bodies and minds form a large part of these connections. If a person has, say, been bullied while growing up, and is thus more sensitive than someone who wasn't to overtly aggressive behaviour in the workplace, should they then simply accept being passed over and given fewer opportunities than their aggressive, assertive colleagues? Is that fair? No. If people acting in a certain way have beaten you up regularly when growing up, your body and mind will both remember this, and react accordingly when encountering similar behaviour. Another, very different example: if someone (a woman, a person of color, whatever) is being pelted with various comments referencing their gender/ethnicity/other attributes not at all relevant to their job every day by various coworkers, is it not reasonable for this to affect them? Is it not reasonable for them to be sad or angry about this? It's not like they can reasonably control or change the attributes in question, after all. Doesn't the fault then lie with the people making these comments, no matter how innocent their intent? So, should they then just accept that it's their lot in life to be put upon by their peers, accept that they're worth less, and shut up? Or would it be reasonable for them to say "Hey, maybe stop making boob jokes every single time I'm in the room?". I'd say the latter. And, if people are unable to comply with a simple request like this, yes, repercussions should be expected.
As for you stating that ""Feelings" (...) are not appropriate in the professional environment.", well ... wow. Really? Are you actually arguing that it's at all possible for people to interact without feelings being a part of the picture? I suppose this might apply to sociopaths, but for anyone else, that is entirely impossible. And thus, as professional environments are also social environments (as are all environments, really),
of course feelings and the discussion of them is entirely appropriate here, just as they are anywhere.
Regarding your statements that you can't change people's character: don't be daft. People change constantly. Our values, ideas, norms, and personality traits evolve
every single day. Of course, changing fundamental personality traits is
difficult, and with some of them so difficult as to be impossible in all practical terms, but our brains are immensely plastic and adaptive. It is entirely possible for someone to stop being rude, sexist, racist, or anything else.
When it comes to
@mtcn77 's post, you're right that I don't understand the specifics of it (I haven't touched the natural sciences since high school, thankfully), but that's not at all required to understand the complete failure of logic that post presents. You can't just transfer the laws of thermodynamics or principles of what "enables work" in a chemical system into an organization and expect that to function as a workable metaphor for an organization existing under an entirely different set of rules (culture, not physics). (As an aside: he even attributes Intel's current woes to Anita Sarkeesian!?! What? Did she make their 10nm process fail? Am I missing something here? This is, quite simply, an entirely misplaced and unworkable metaphor or analogy. It doesn't fit. Period.) In chemistry, you work with known substances of which you have a rather comprehensive understanding of their traits. They're also rather homogeneous (all atoms of the same element are structured similarly, and so on). People, on the other hand, are fundamentally heterogeneous (even within demographic groups, unless you specify them down to such a small level that they become meaningless), we don't have even close to a complete understanding of each others' traits, and last but not least: outside of a scant few possible changes, molecules and chemicals are
far less complex than humans in that they don't have
lives. They don't change or evolve over time, they aren't shaped by what happens to them (outside of a limited set of reactions, mostly making/fusing them into something else or gaining/losing electrons), and they don't work differently based on those experiences. An iron atom is an iron atom no matter the cycles of change it's "experienced". It's not going to act as an argon atom because of its experiences. People don't work that way, and hence, organizations made out of people don't work that way. The laws of thermodynamics apply to systems where thermodynamics are relevant to their functioning. The only way that applies to people is that we couldn't exist as we currently do without these laws; other than that, they don't matter.
Also, it's kind of funny how you claim to champion this supposedly "objective" definition of merit (seriously, there is no such thing outside of pure abstraction, which isn't really useful unless you're a philosopher), and call yourself out as being a hypocrite for not wanting to work with people you don't like. A
far superior solution there would be to admit that
merit isn't such a static entity as you claim it to be, and that interpersonal relations (such as the ability to work together productively, or stand to be in the same room as each other) also factor into what constitutes merit. In any type of cooperative setting, the ability to cooperate is in and of itself a part of what constitutes merit. If you're coding alone, from scratch, that's (largely) a situation where "merit" would be only the quality of the code you produce. However, if you're working on a code project with someone else - even someone anonymous, who you never see, hear, or even communicate directly with - the definition of merit changes due to the simple fact that the work being done has become more complex. Now it's not coding alone, it's coding together. Those are fundamentally different things, and need to be treated as such. If you refuse to accept this, you're not doing anything but willfully blinding yourself to the inescapable realities of living and acting in a complex, interconnected world.
Except there is no "problem" when the software works as intended, especially *free* software. You want to know of a *real* "problematic condition" that's plaguing many developers worldwide? "Crunch time." It destroys relationships, families, and individuals alike. Torvalds outbursts pales by comparison. But no, let's all jump on the one guy that's pissed off because someone did a thing that makes a lot more work for him that he shouldn't have to do.
I research games for a living. Please don't talk to me as if I don't know or care about crunch time. Caring about one thing does not negate the possibility of caring about other things. Solving crunch time requires unionization of the programming workforce, which is thankfully starting to happen, but it's slow as all hell. Thankfully things
are improving, at the very least, even if the current situation is entirely unacceptable.
Why do you think they use it in the first place? It's free and good. Compare Linux's kernel to Windows NT kernel. It took how long for Windows to implement basic USB Audio Class 2.0 drivers? A decade? More? Linux is attractive because it isn't corporate. If someone sees a problem or lacking feature, they fix it. They don't wait for a project manager to do a risk assessment for a month, then a lot three months to work on five months later, then another month or three of testing to make sure it doesn't break anything, then release it and find out it breaks a lot of stuff they didn't test for. They just do it. Not only does it cost a lot less, the results are usually better. Corporate approaches are usually their own worst enemies.
Being intrinsically linked to corporate life and corporate culture doesn't have to mean adopting corporate culture in its entirety (such as, as you point out, the risk-aversion and bureaucracy of large corporations), but that doesn't negate the need to adapt to your own development. Linux isn't a tiny, "rebel" OS any longer, and it needs to stop acting like it is. That ship has sailed.
False. Individuals make code, they make it public and license it for use an amendment. That is open source. It has nothing to do with community. It's intentionally individualist because developers looking at their own code is like reading ones own thoughts. Reading someone else's code is like learning a new language. The only reason why most developers consider looking at someone else's code is if they identified a problem and are looking for a solution. The only "community" is the original developer pulling the fix back into their version.
So no programmer ever studied existing code to learn how to write their own? Programming projects don't have style guides? Yeah, sorry, I don't buy that. Even if seasoned programmers rarely read other people's code (unless they're working on the same part of the same project, I suppose), they've formed their "language" by studying the work of others and adapting it to their own desires. Also, isn't having "identified a problem and (...) looking for a solution" cooperation when another person made the thing with the problem? Particularly when the changes have to be accepted by the original developer? Yes it is. This is, however spaced out and nodal, a community. People are interacting, making things together, communicating. This is a community.
Put bluntly, SJWs (or anyone that isn't actually contributing code) in programming is like a bull in a China shop. Nothing good can come from it.
Conservativism doesn't generally lead to good things either. Over the last centuries, conservatives have fought to preserve slavery, fought against democracy, fought against the right of everyone to own property, against the implementation of laws to prevent the wealthy abusing the poor, against women's rights, civil rights, and LBGTQI rights. Thankfully, they've (mostly) lost these fights. In the meantime, the world has progressed immensely in every single metric (outside of environmental damage; we've yet to fix that, sadly). Your statement is ahistorical in the long term, and pessimistic in the short term. Who is to say that this won't lead to an influx of capable developers who have previously avoided involvement in this community because of its toxicity? That is just as likely as what you're proposing.
