Ashe Dryden

Did you read the linked article on the subject?

http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community

Here's some key points from it if it is tl;dr

Marginalized people in tech - women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others - have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity.

Women are far more likely to be a primary caregiver of not only children, but other ailing and aging relatives. 59-75% of caregivers are women.1

52% of women caregivers with incomes at or below of the national median of $35k spend 20+ hours each week providing care. The largest racial demographics in this group are black and hispanic2.

Women perform more unpaid labor (most visible in domestics and child care) than men. On childcare alone, mothers spend more than twice as much time per day as fathers do. On average, working fathers spend only 10min more per day on child care when they are not working, whereas working mothers spend nearly twice as much when not working3.

Due to additional pay inequity contributing to less access to paid childcare, women of color perform far more child care than white women.

Those with medical conditions requiring that they regularly visit medical facilities or perform other health-related activities such as getting additional sleep, regularly exercising, doing physical therapy, being away from backlit screens, not sitting in a…

Doesn't work: https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq#cocfaqnegative

> WHY IS THE LANGUAGE SO NEGATIVE/PUNITIVE? THIS'LL TAKE THE FUN/CASUAL ATMOSPHERE OUT OF MY EVENT. THE PEOPLE ATTENDING ARE MY FRIENDS, I'LL VOUCH FOR THEM. ISN'T IT OBVIOUS/COMMON SENSE WHAT'S ACCEPTABLE? WE'RE ALL ADULTS HERE, WHY CAN'T WE SAY "BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER"?

Not everyone understands what is unacceptable behavior, especially when we are talking about a group of people that is mostly homogenous and has very little interaction with people different than they are.

We focus specifically on what isn't allowed and what violating those rules would mean so there is no gray area, no guessing, no pushing boundaries to see what will happen. "Be nice" or "Be an adult" doesn't inform well enough about what is expected if one attendee's idea of niceness or professionalism are vastly different than another's. On top of that, "be excellent to each other" has a poor track record [link, now broken, previously described a real-world situation where people holding grudges tried to weaponize a community's sole "be excellent" rule against each other].

You may have been running an event for a long time and many of the attendees feel they are "like family", but it actually makes the idea of an incident happening at the event even scarier. If someone is new and not part of "the family" will they be believed? Will they be treated like an invading outsider?

Remember that everyone who has…

Oh god. Most of this is hilarious.

"A seasoned C developer with 10 years experience can not instantly morph into an advanced front end web application developer"

True, but they'll be a damn sight quicker at picking it up than anyone else. And they'll write far better code when they're there.

If you're looking for a permanent employee, all development experience is relevant -- there is a huge amount of overlap and retraining just for a different language is no biggie. They'll also have solved (i'd bet) far harder problems than "HOW DO I GET THIS UI WIDGET TO UPDATE WHEN THIS HAPPENS".

If you're looking for someone to hit the ground running from day 1, or work as a contractor, it's different. But you generalise too far here.

"However, they have failed to mention anything else to back it up. I would expect to see some of the following throughout their CV; Design Patterns (MVC, Factories, Singletons, ActiveRecord), Classes, Objects, UML…"

In my CV (highly rated by everyone i've given it to) you won't find a single one of these. Instead, you'll find real descriptions of what i've accomplished, who I worked with (mentoring etc), my methodology (agile, test driven development) and so on.

And UML... holy shit, yeah, no.

Community work? See Ashe Dryden's "The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS community", http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community, and James Coglan's "Why GitHub is not your CV",…

But IBM, and many of the big corporations in the USA, followed very liberal policies that promoted diversity in the work place.

A meritocracy based on raw intelligence and skill (measured by standardized testing) is not exactly what people mean today when they discuss "promoting diversity". In fact, nowadays people typically criticize such practices as inhibiting diversity [1].

As for culture fit, it's a complicated thing. There are some culture issues that can be a real problem - for example, my company really can't deal with people who don't believe in "let data make the decision". Similarly, there are companies out there which highly value civility and team spirit over correctness - my "this is broken, here is why" style would not work for them.

A lot of culture fit is just "do I think these guys are cool" silliness, but don't let that overshadow the fact that culture matters.

[1] http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community http://flosspols.org/deliverables/D16HTML/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.htm

This line was really interesting to me:

> From the perspective of the employer, Github, Bitbucket and other code sharing sites simply do not have these biases - when employers look at these sites, there is no demographic information on users to look at other than what the user voluntarily puts up.

But there is demographic information there. Ashe Dryden's original article (http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community) called it out in this paper on gender in FLOSS: http://flosspols.org/deliverables/D16HTML/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.htm

Essentially, I can guess that any particular GitHub user is a white, upper-middle class man and be right most of the time.

I understand that this article isn't saying "We Use Only GitHub Profiles" when hiring but acting as though the code present there exists with zero social context seems willfully wrongheaded.

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

This isn't a criticism of your comment, just something to keep in mind when making hiring choices. :)