Comment by icecreampain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icecreampain | Hacker News Reader

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> The demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed toward white men than the software industry is

What the fuck am I reading? Is this asshole author trying to inject racism into something that is inherently race-, age-, gender-, wealth- and location-agnostic? Github doesn't care who you are, what you code or in what language you code it. And yet here we are with a dumbfuck author who, for the sake of clicks, just absolutely needs to shit on white men, that have been the bane of all tech-interested non-white men since the dawn of time.

When I hire I ask for code samples first and the person's name last. Shit, I'd hire the person based purely on code, put up anywhere on the net, and an anonymous chat, conducted fucking anywhere, and only require their name and social security number when signing the contract.

Shit I'm pissed off now. Some people just can't accept that technology is the ultimate equalizer and instead have to project their white guilt into everything.

If you think the issue is about what Github "cares" about, you missed the point entirely.

The point is that those who have the free time and opportunity to contribute to OSS projects are more likely to be of some means. Given the economic realities of this country, those with some means are statistically speaking far more likely to be white males than anything else (which is confirmed by the data).

The conversation that has been occurring recently is about how having a Github profile is now becoming a de-facto must-have because hiring managers are increasingly seeing it as a shortcut filter.

It's great that you would hire someone based on code put up anywhere on the net, but that's not what people are commenting about. People are saying that Github should not become mandatory, for many reasons, among them because you're limiting your pool of candidates to those with some means.

> People are saying that Github should not become mandatory, for many reasons, among them because you're limiting your pool of candidates to those with some means.

Is that a concern when hiring? Isn't the biggest concern false-positives? Hiring bad people is the worse hiring mistake. The argument around github seems to be that while the true positive rate is very high, there is also a high false negative rate (rejecting qualified people because they aren't on github). From a hiring perspective (purely arguing economics), that is an acceptable trade-off. Your upside is limited by a smaller pool of applicants (that are still qualified), but your downside is greatly smaller.

This is a common misconception about the FOSS economy.

It is not about donation, it is about cooperation and net efficiency, and a good share of open source maintainers and contributors are very well paid to do what they do - they are not hobbyists donating weekends to the cause.

You missed the point. Nobody is projecting white guilt into anything. The author linked to another article that presents some evidence as to why women might be less inclined to contribute to OSS, and have less code that was written outside of the workplace to display to potential employers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740089

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