[antirez]

Both Madelyn and Zhao are terrific programmers. In case you wonder, they are not random people put there for reasons, like for example since Madelyn is a woman so there was some pressure to add she. She deserves this 100% and is one of the top Redis contributors of the last times, with deep technical knowledge in basically every aspect of Redis. The same for Zhao, he is simply impressive, can track bugs about complex conditions like almost nobody can. I'm happy to see them aboard. Btw they were both effectively part of the informal "core team" that was forming spontaneously in the recent times.

[miked85]

> In case you wonder, they are not random people put there for reasons, like for example since Madelyn is a woman so there was some pressure to add she

Kind of a strange thing to call out.

[phroobster]

These are the times we live in. Thanks to widespread racist/sexist hiring practices, every time I see a woman or minority in an upper level position I can’t help but wonder if they are there because someone wanted to fill a diversity quota. The thought never even crossed my mind 10 years ago.

[majormajor]

This is a bizarre claim. People getting labeled as "diversity hires" and being assumed to be less competent than their peers is a decades-old thing.

It wasn't even a particularly new observation when South Park literally named a character after it almost 25 years ago.

(Probably many of the same people getting labeled that way for holding high-level positions today were similarly judged in their entry-level positions back then! But if people are no longer suspicious of women or minorities in "regular" roles and resume their judgement for upper-level roles, I guess that's a change in the right direction, at least. :| )

[dijit]

> This is a bizarre claim. People getting labeled as "diversity hires" and being assumed to be less competent than their peers is a decades-old thing.

The truth is that it kind of doesn't matter if it's new or not, it's a very hot subject right now and people are touchy about it.

I understand why; Women are facing a lot of abuse on the internet and it feels like many are coming forward with icky things that people have said/done.

On the other side it feels like there's been a cataclysmic overreaction- and many people get annoyed when we're asked to "make sure the next one you hire is a $under-represented" or getting overruled by HR when hiring otherwise.

(yes, this happened, and it was frustrating because the person we hired was not able to lead the project we needed and was hired anyway- she later left, burned out, nearly wrecked her career and I feel incredibly guilty for not being more vocal about it and keeping it mostly to myself for fear of being called a bigot)

[wwright]

Are you claiming that you couldn’t find any woman who was qualified for your project?

[ghufran_syed]

More likely that they couldn't find a woman who was qualified for the project and actually wanted to join at the price the company was willing to pay.

[dijit]

It was true, at the time.

I live in a third city in Sweden, in a slice of time that the company needed to find someone and we do not pay competitive wages.

I’m sure we could find someone qualified eventually and if we paid enough, and we have had good female candidates at other times albeit for different roles than this one, however they didn’t want to relocate.

Context being what it is, it takes us roughly 2 years to hire a new person to our team because people don’t want to live where we are or accept the rates we pay.

[throwaway373438]

It's often hard to find anyone of any characteristic for many projects so it shouldn't be surprising that it's also hard to find people of a specific sub-group.

[SPBS]

Why are you jumping to that conclusion? The parent comment probably couldn't even find a person qualified to lead and you had to make it a gender thing.

[Supermancho]

> This is a bizarre claim.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/05/alexis-ohanian-steps-down-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/us/california-boardroom-g...

This isn't new news. Diversity hiring and promotion is all over, alongside the recent BLM relevance.

[majormajor]

Yes, there's been ongoing activism, hand-wringing, counter-activism, legislation, etc, in this space for several decades.

So claiming that it's a phenomenon of just the last decade as a way to justify suspicion of merit is very bizarre. Where have you all been?

[iateanapple]

> Where have you all been?

The pressure on management to hire diverse candidates has increased 100 fold over the past decade.

[asveikau]

25 years ago it was already old news. I remember in my childhood even further back than that, the grownups would make comments about affirmative action hires.

If you think about it this is just one more layer of discrimination people face. If you are in one of those categories, no matter how smart, competent, and worthy you are, many people will assume you didn't get there on merit, and that you took the job from someone better. We ought to reject this.

[tialaramex]

Surely the weirder thing is to see, for example, a dozen member board for a global corporation where every single member is a middle aged white guy? Or an outfit where everybody in the C-suite went to the same school.

Like, it's not quite as astonishing as a "government committee on women's health" in which every single member is a man, but it's getting up there.

Diversity is an attribute you want unless you've got some weird demographic quirk as focus for your organisation. Just as you shouldn't try to solve "Two is one and one is none" by just purchasing duplicate tools, but instead look to duplicate functionality, you want senior management (and hires throughout but this pattern matters most at the top) to each have a different range of skill sets and life experiences not just be carbon copies of each other. If the most notable difference between the senior management team is their golf handicaps then they are going to miss all the same opportunities so why are you duplicating their salary cost?

It stands to reason that there are going to be women (in particular) with the innate abilities you want, but with a different set of life experiences that are valuable. If your rivals won't hire them then it's even more likely you can find them available than their male counterparts.

Now, like a "Rust programmers, must have at least 20 years Rust experience" bogus requirement, if you hire based on what people already did, not what you assess they can do in the future then sure, you're going to conclude that there aren't many women, or black people, or whatever in a role that has not historically hired women or black people or whatever. But that means now you're bad at hiring people too.

[basilgohar]

This might be unpleasant to say, but I don't think it's _weird_ that a C-suite is all middle-aged, white men. As in, it's pretty common and unsurprising. That is very different than saying that is what is _best_, which I would disagree with. There's a lot of inertia and it would be no doubt obvious that these middle-aged, white men have had more opportunities than women and have had greater chances to progress professionally. Again, I don't mean that's better or right, it just is what is for historical reasons.

The social and cultural shifts that would change this need years or even decades to play out before it stops becoming weird.

And, again, this doesn't mean middle-aged white men are just better or more suited for these kinds of positions – it's just that they've been in the best position, generally speaking, from an education, networking, and cultural position to get access to such positions in contrast to folks from a different background, race, or sex.

[tialaramex]

To me whether something is weird is distinct from it being usual or familiar.

It's weird that Americans tend to cheerfully eat cow meat but not horse meat for example. Much of natural language grammar such as the adjective order rules in English - pretty weird ("My old blue hat" is OK but "My blue old hat" is wrong!). The fact that there are five Fermat primes but then no other Fermat numbers seem to be prime is weird.

[iateanapple]

> It stands to reason that there are going to be women (in particular) with the innate abilities you want

Since when was hiring about innate abilities?

> if you hire based on what people already did, not what you assess they can do in the future

That’s literally how the majority of tech companies both hire and promote.

Good luck getting a promotion at Google (for example) based on potential.

[agustif]

Hiring !== Promoting

[wwright]

I think the widespread practices may be calling from inside the house.

[baddox]

Are you suggesting that tech or corporate culture now is more discriminatory in its hiring practices than it was 10 years ago?

[bzb3]

This is very sad but I share your sentiment. Thanks for having the courage to write this comment.

[Jestar342]

Jesus this is the kind of handwringing excuse Trump could only dream of coming up with on his own. So your own sexism is the fault of women or non-white men getting promoted on merit. That is weapons grade bullshit.

[sitkack]

You know what, when I see a woman in a male dominated field like infantile fcking tech, I have found they are literally 2x-10x better than their peers. That they can cut through bullshit, navigate metric tons of stupidity and still get their jobs done. They are in the position in spite of their sex, not because of it.

If you can't help think it, it is probably because you believe it. If you look for excuse you will find one.

Maybe you could illuminate another forum with your wisdom.

[iateanapple]

> I have found they are literally 2x-10x better than their peers.

So either your organisation is horribly sexist by not promoting these women or you are horribly sexist and think they are better because they are women.

[sitkack]

Those are the only two options?

[iateanapple]

> Those are the only two options?

Do you have another reason a developer 10x better than her peers isn’t promoted to senior, to principal, etc?

[dupjor]

I'm pretty sure Antirez doesn't mean it the way you're interpreting it. Just like me, he's not a native English speaker. I believe what he means is that she has NOT been chosen simply because she's a woman, but because of her skills.

[antirez]

Exactly, I wanted to make sure people realize she was picked as a human being that is suited to the role. Without consideration for any other metric.

[eropple]

Tech's got plenty of the pince-nez set who would Just Ask Questions about a core contributor getting their spot for those reasons.

Can't blame him for being proactive about nipping them in the bud.

[nojvek]

Until you called out Madelyn as a she. I had no idea.

Fundamentally men and women have similar brain physiology, so an equal amount of compute and memory. Which would imply there are no differences when it comes to programming ability. It's just a matter of experience.

I'm glad HN doesn't have profile pictures and things.

[antirez]

> I'm glad HN doesn't have profile pictures and things.

THIS

[the-dude]

As a non-native English speaker, I am always thrown off by the word terrific. It sounds horrible to me, and apparently it can also mean very bad.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terrific

[travmatt]

I was interested enough in the etymology to do some googling; terrific has its roots in ‘terror’, much like horror/horrific. It was used as a generic intensifier, often hyperbolically, which became common enough that it lost its negative connotation.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/56865/why-does-terrible-...

[MiroF]

> it can also mean very bad

this usage is definitely uncommon/archaic

[antirez]

Yep it's the same in italian, it means "generating strong fear" or alike. But at this point I got accustomed to the English meaning when I write English.

[xeromal]

Awesome is a similar word. It used to mean awe-inspiring, but now can simply describe an enjoyable bowel movement. lol

[bryanlarsen]

The original meaning of awful used to be awe-inspiring too. Awesome came about as a replacement when awful started acquiring significant negative connotations.

[mellosouls]

I don't remember hearing it used in that way before; I think you would have to go back a couple of centuries for that usage.

You can be confident that you won't need that definition in your own usage unless you decide to write an 18th century character or something.

To add to the etymology links (I was also intrigued):

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/08/terror-terrific.h...

[pfranz]

I always think of the famous Hindenburg crash tape. "it's a terrific crash" 1937 for those, like me, that weren't sure of the decade.

https://genius.com/Herbert-morrison-hindenburg-disaster-broa...

[mellosouls]

Sure - but that is "terrific" in the still-current sense of "massive, of great size" - not the archaic use in the parent.

[pfranz]

The only reason I remember that use is because it sounded out of place to me.

This posting [1] puts the usage change from around 1880-1930. I've always taken the modern usage to mean unusually fine/magnificent.

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38606/what-gave-...

[sdesol]

You certainly leave some big shoes to fill, as shown in the quick stats below:

https://imgur.com/QUPER9q

https://imgur.com/RnlzECa

but like you say, these aren't nobodies. However, I am curious to see how the pace will change (if at all), with you no longer doing the lion share of work.

[atombender]

What site are those screenshots from?

[sdesol]

It's a product that I'm working on, which is focused on developer first metrics. I want to create software metrics, that developers can trust, which in turn can be used to properly gauge productivity and risk.

I've studied software metrics for quite sometime and they are widely despised by developers, because they are

a) not useful for developers

b) never put effort into context that can be discussed, vetted and refined.

What I'm trying to do is fix the stigma associated with software metrics, by focusing on how they can be used by developers. For example, code churn metrics can be used in a positive way for developers as the following example shows:

https://imgur.com/OMD8rFF

Without looking a single line of code, you can estimate the impact each commit will have, which can be useful for domain experts, team leaders, etc.

I'm hoping to have a version of the product that people can install via docker or on bare metal linux by the end of this month.

[atombender]

Looks promising. Are you active on Reddit? Because the screenshots looked familiar, and I think I've seen screenshots of your app posted there before.

Good points about software metrics. I'm not a big believer in them, either. I think the most useful metric I've ever needed or been able to use was in one case where I needed to see a developer's contribution activity. Looking at a specific developer, aggregated across a Github organization, it was clear they were just not doing much work!

Hoping you'll post a "Show HN" when you release.

[sdesol]

Thanks for the kind words. I'm on reddit but I haven't posted in a while, so I'm not sure if what you saw was mine.

Actionable software metrics is extremely hard to create, which is why we are often left with VERY LOW hanging fruit metrics or novelty metrics, as I like to call them. I honestly believe we are at a point now, where hardware is cheap and good enough, that we can generate very meaningful software metrics.

With GitPrime having sold for 180 USD in cash, and with GitHub and GitLab both investing in software development insights, there is a clear sign that managers and business leaders want to know what is going on. Unfortunately what we have now, in my opinion, borders on snake oil, which I'm hoping to use to my advantage to contrast my solution with others.

> Hoping you'll post a "Show HN" when you release.

Great, I'm looking forward to your upvote as getting traction is really hard :-)

[atombender]

Feel free to email me when you release! My email is in my profile.

[ricardobeat]

That looks amazing! Is there a way to subscribe to updates / releases?

[sdesol]

Hey thanks for the interest. Unfortunately I don't have an automated way to sign up (my focus really is on the technology as it's not trivial), but if you send me an email (see profile), I can add you to my list.

[rurban]

I know Zhao Zhao personally. He is one of the very best. Better than antirez IMHO.