What's most interesting is that "empathetic communication" is generally not prioritized in software development environments, in favor of exactly the kind of polite-but-direct communication the author employs. (In fact, many feel that even politeness is unnecessary or harmful. For instance, Linus Torvalds' and other OSS developers are known and regularly praised for their bluntness.) I've spoken out often on HN about the need for more of this kind of communication, but I don't see a problem with the author's tone here, and I don't see Github as a workplace that's much of an advocate for it.
I think it is possible that there is some sexism here in that I'm not confident a male employee at Github would ever be challenged over failing this communication standard. That is, I think we implicitly expect women to be more empathetic and polite than men are, and get confused when they are not.
Edit: Also, I have never, ever heard of a PIP being used as anything other than a strategy for building a case for firing someone. Does anyone have any counter-examples?
Edit 2: Also also, the author says she had to turn down Github's severance package because it included an NDA, so she could write the article. Gross. [1]
>I think it is possible that there is some sexism here in that I'm not confident a male employee at Github would ever be challenged over failing this communication standard.
What leads you to this conclusion?
Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence.
> Also, I have never, ever heard of a PIP being used as anything other than a strategy for building a case for firing someone.
Agreed on this point, as soon as she had a phone call with manager + HR they had already decided to fire her.
> Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence.
It comes back to that implicit expectation. Something I've been bringing up a lot in this thread as I read the comments throughout it is that whether we consider somebody rude or not seems to depend a lot on a) who they are, and b) whether we agree with them. We are more charitable to people who are more like us and whose ideas we find more correct. We're all human, so that's part of life. However, as an organization, Github can and should do better than that, and I think here that it did not. The sexism here, if it exists, is implicit in the way problems with this person were handled and in the expectations (mostly unwritten, at least at first) about how she'd behave.
>However, as an organization, Github can and should do better than that, and I think here that it did not.
Consider if the situations were reversed. What if some white male engineer was simply being terse in an email to her. Might she attribute it to rudeness, sexism, or transphobia? If the company fired the engineer would you be arguing that she should be a bit more charitable in her interpretations?
It can be very hard to capture the subtleties of spoken word in text form. The onus has pretty much always been on the individual to ensure they are being professional. I definitely think something is fishy here. It may very well be that Github has some serious issues, but the flip side of that coin (and Occam's razor) is that she sent out some rude emails and was fired.
> Consider if the situations were reversed. What if some white male engineer was simply being terse in an email to her. Might she attribute it to rudeness, sexism, or transphobia? If the company fired the engineer would you be arguing that she should be a bit more charitable in her interpretations?
These are good questions, and I don't know the answers. I'd like to tell you how I'd react, but I think given the current context it'd be hard for me to do so without my opinion of this whole thread coloring my answer.
> It can be very hard to capture the subtleties of spoken word in text form. The onus has pretty much always been on the individual to ensure they are being professional. I definitely think something is fishy here. It may very well be that Github has some serious issues, but the flip side of that coin (and Occam's razor) is that she sent out some rude emails and was fired.
What I'll say is this: I can see how her comments could be perceived as rude, or "unempathetic." I cannot see how - especially at Github, a place not known for cultural sensitivity - they were firable. I think there is a double/triple/quadruple standard going on here where people are, without even realizing it, passing their opinions of somebody through ideological blinders. I think this issue may be part of a core problem with Github's culture.
>I can see how her comments could be perceived as rude, or "unempathetic." I cannot see how - especially at Github, a place not known for cultural sensitivity - they were firable.
I agree, I think this is where the "fishy"-ness I spoke of earlier comes in. Giving the benefit of the doubt to Coraline, there is definitely more at play than being rude in a few emails. I just feel uncomfortable jumping from an individual account to broadly concluding an organization is sexist.
I respect that. Personally, I feel that Github has a long enough history of mismanagement and poor culture that sexism and the kinds of issues this post describes aren't difficult to imagine at all.
That was my confusion as well. I think that 99% of the working world would kill for the kind of conditions where mildly harsh words get you fired. Okay, maybe that wasn't the best metaphor there.
What I see in this is a sort of passive transphobia. It's not that anyone harbors any grudge, it's that they harbor no kind feelings. The idea that someone deserves whatever happens to them, for good or ill, is just an excuse to turn a blind eye to any harm that occurs to them. When the best response you get from people is indifference, you're probably not going to have a long and happy life.
I think Coraline has more passion than good judgment, but on the other hand. I'm glad someone is out there to raise these issues and take the resulting flak. I worry about what kind of similar discrimination I'm going to face. If this is what goes on in the enlightened liberal utopias we've all got a tough row to hoe.
It's completely possible for a woman to behave in a sexist way towards another woman. There's an argument about whether one can be sexist against men (or racist against white people, etc.) that has to do with how the terms are defined, but I don't think that applies here.
Yes.
I had to have a manager fire a person because they repeatedly yelled at others on video conferences, etc.
I've seen others performance planned for being complete jerks to others on a repeated basis.
Please remember that no amount of genius should make up for being an asshole.
Some companies don't take this to heart, for sure, but those that actually want a good culture, do.
So yeah, regardless of this case (i don't have enough facts), but i've definitely seen people fired/etc for not being able to communicate empathetically.
I've seen two people fired for being difficult to work with before.
One was very critical of other peoples' work, and would not take criticism well herself. She would make everything very personal. Despite being a junior engineer with limited experience or seniority, she would criticize more senior peoples' work in highly personal ways. Think "how could you be so stupid as to write this garbage" instead of "this is bad code". One day she received constructive criticism from her team lead (one of the nicest guys I've ever met) and instead of accepting it, she dug in and insulted him. He stood his ground and refused to +1 the PR without her change. He escalated it to his manager. She was given a formal warning. A week later she made another personal attack-as-criticism and was fired later that day.
The other was an obsessive perfectionist. He would withhold +1s from PRs until they were perfect. Given that these were PRs on existing systems, this meant in practice that if you modified code in a poorly-written existing file, he would refuse to +1 it until the entire file was rewritten, ground-up, to be high quality. One day, his dragging his heels turned a four hour ticket into a week-long tar pit. This caused an important deadline to slip. The next day he was let go.
----
In both cases they were cool people who I really liked. The first person was one of my closest friends in the office at the time. She was really cool, and while she was kind of abrasive, for the most part it was just like RMS-lite style assholitry. Nothing that out of the ordinary. The second guy, he may have been an obsessive perfectionist but his code was _perfect_. The stuff he wrote was by far the best anybody on our teams did.
But teams are more than the sum of their parts. These people might have been good individually, but their being hard to work with caused the whole team to suffer. So they got fired.
Maybe it's not super fair to them. Maybe they have their baggage or there's a culture shock (She was recent immigrant from China, he from Austria). But at the end of the day we are paid lots and lots of money to do important work, and if people are causing significant obstacles to us getting our jobs done, they're going to lose theirs. That's life
I've noticed in international teams that there can be a culture clash when it comes to communication. People from some countries favor communication that is much more flourished and gentle, while folks from other countries are much more blunt and to the point (not necessarily to be curt, but rather they just get to the point). I've seen this clash also on mailing lists for open source projects that have an active global community.
Also, in academia, there is a similar phenomenon for letters of recommendation that can actually really hurt your chances if you are not familiar with the intricacies. For example, if you are applying for an American position, letters are expected only shower praise upon the applicant. But for European positions, letters are intended to be a straightforward and honest assessment of the applicant--highlighting both the good and the bad (e.g. [0]).
I'm not trying to justify this action by any means. I can just see how it may come about.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. - Cardinal Richelieu (apoc.)
At-will employment, in the United States. You can be PIPped and then fired (the PIP is optional but it's generally used as a way to protect the company from risk) for just about anything not explicitly carved out as an unacceptable under federal or state law.
You can be fired for just about any reason in the United States.
Now, if you're asking whether or not "lack of empathetic communication" is a real thing worth firing somebody over, that depends. Certainly interpersonal abuse is something that can happen and can rise to the level where it becomes a good reason to fire somebody.
In this case, we largely do not see most of the communication that took place. We really only have her word to take that it wasn't that bad or not worth being fired over. We also don't see much in this story about how her behavior affected the people around her. So, I wouldn't draw a conclusion on whether or not the firing over "empathetic communication" is appropriate.
Not saying it's true in this case, but I think that's typically code for "people think you're a jerk". It can really bring down team productivity to have a toxic coworker, especially if management isn't willing to fire them.
I know it would be a thing for any company I worked for. You can't just be an ass to your coworkers for long and expect to stay around. Your team deserves cordiality, you're on the same team. And if not that, at the very least respect.
> PIPs are used to try and demonstrate cause so that collecting benefits is harder.
I mean, I'd agree that someone at some point in time has used a PIP for this reason, but I'd strongly argue that this is wrong.
I'd argue a much more charitable and accurate description of why PIP's are used is to protect the company from a litigious former employee. They are designed to show that they company tried to help the fired employee before they took the final action of letting them go.
... and the reason that they want to do that is so that the person cannot collect benefits, or has a harder time doing so.
Maybe you've worked with better employers than I have, but it's pretty much been an open secret in a few different places I've worked, both inside and outside of tech.
Or, sometimes it's not a PIP, but something similar. Many fast food places have a policy where if you're underperforming, your hours get reduced. If they want to fire you, they don't fire you: they give you one, four-hour shift a week at the slowest possible time of the week. That way, they didn't fire you; you quit, and so you don't get unemployment, etc. If you don't show up for your shift, then you're fired with cause, and so you don't get unemployment, etc.
