This is not me: this is from a code monkey. But the same thing applies elsewhere. Reading about medications on-line is different from having to prescribe them: and only those who do prescribe them should write the guidelines about this. (And yes, I’ve done both). If you don’t have that experience, you keep on finding irrelevancies — which is why I delete between half to nine-tenths of the papers in a search result after reading the abstract and methods section.
Or as Taleb would note, only those with skin in the game count. Political officers do not count. The Social Justice Wounded want us to have codes of conduct that appoint them as Zampolits.
Fresh perspectives are the only diversity that matters in software, and that comes from people who practice development. Your crotch and melanin content do absolutely nothing to aid your development knowledge, so don’t bring it up. I. Just. Don’t. Care. If you try to make me care, then I don’t want to deal with you.
It’s rude and disrespectful to treat a developer with years of experience as if he or she is equal to a novice who wants attention in a corrupted form of “diversity.” If you are not skilled, then you are not equal to the skilled. There’s a reason why racers don’t cross the finish line at the same time, and why video games have high scores. Some people are just plain better than you, and that’s okay. Healthy people see inequality of merit as motivation. Learning from others is infinitely better than getting upset over feeling “unwelcome” or “excluded.”
Developers aren’t born into knowledge like some spoiled brats are born into wealth. We all started as beginners, and we all have all the access we will ever need to tutorials and tools on cheap laptops that you can find with the help of friends, public libraries and thrift stores. Computers are dirt cheap compared to just a few decades ago, so unless you are literally incapable of reading this article, you can learn to code.
Cyberbullying? I understand that is difficult because I’ve had people call me names and give me a really hard time when I got started, but I did okay because I learned what bullies said didn’t matter in the end. That is, of course, unless the bullies have the power to get me fired over lies like you do.
There is a way around this, and the open source community is getting smarter. It is to not let the code of conduct people run the place. For they will set themselves up as a censoring body.
Their latest attempt is in the community of Ruby, one of the most popular programming languages. Earlier this week, Coraline Ada Ehmke, a self-described “intersectional technologist, transgender feminist, and code witch” and creator of the SJW-backed Contributor Code on GitHub made a post calling for its implementation in the Ruby community. Here’s an excerpt:
Our community prides itself on niceness. What a code of conduct does is define what we mean by nice. It states clearly that we value openness, courtesy, and compassion. That we care about and want contributions from people who may be different from us. That we pledge to respect all contributors regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other factors. And it makes it clear that we are prepared to follow through on these values with action when and if an incident arises.
Niceness! Who could object to that?
Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, for one. In a response, Matsumoto (known as “Matz” in the Ruby community), said that while he agreed with the general principle of anti-harassment, he thought the SJWs were going too far. In particular, Matsumoto objected to the idea of banning coders from a project as a punishment, and instead advocated the deletion of offensive material, a much milder punishment.
Crucially, he also rejected the principle that coders could be punished for actions and speech that takes place outside the Ruby community. This rule is a holy grail for SJWs – coders living in fear of exile for the programming communities for anything they say, anywhere on the internet. This rule, already implemented on an alarming number of coding projects, gives SJWs a Stasi-like incentive to monitor coders’ activities across the entire web.
Matsumoto was hardly alone. Other Ruby contributors piled in to reject Ehmke’s latest attempt to spread political correctness further into the coding community.
“As a minority far oppressed more than Coraline, she needs to just drop it”, said one coder. “Well this is how we work” wrote another, in a parody of SJWs. “We see a healthy community with no conflict. We come along, propose our trojan horse (CoC). Divide and conquer the community. Once its in ruins, we move on.”
If you do not have skin in the game, help those who do. Do not retrospectively change disclosure rules — and try to disqualify the main investigators: yes they may have been involved in jobs for big Pharma, or something else you don’t like but the number of talented people is limited and they generally try to do as much as they can.
We need to not allow the political officers control our discourse. This is starting with facebook. And many businesses and community groups use Facebook as their main way of communicating with members. We need to move away from this: MeWe may be an alternative.
At present, therefore.
If there is an open alternative, use it. If there is an alternative without a code of conduct, use it. If it censors, find an alternative. And if you are trapped using closed systems with the Zampolits watching you, polish your CV. For your employment, then, is fragile, and you want to work for an organization that is robust.
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