Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?
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As you know, I'm trying to become more aware of my own white male privilege so I can stop being so microagressive all the time.
I learned yesterday from a flurry of tweets by Social Justice Programmer and Twitter Celebrity sarahmei that Agile/XP is a manifestation of white male privilege:
If you follow the dozens of tweets and replies, the logic is sound. Before that, I didn't realize that a software development methodology could be racist and misogynistic, so now I'm now worried that DevOps is in fact, also a manifestation of white male privilege. Is that the case?
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@apapadimoulis are you concerned with craftsmanship?
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@boomzilla of course, actually I threw away all my Craftsman-branded tools last year because they reinforce that only men should be handypersons, which is basically the main reason women are so under-represented in the trades and manual labor
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@apapadimoulis said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
As you know, I'm trying to become more aware of my own white male privilege so I can stop being so microagressive all the time.
I learned yesterday from a flurry of tweets by Social Justice Programmer and Twitter Celebrity sarahmei that Agile/XP is a manifestation of white male privilege:
If you follow the dozens of tweets and replies, the logic is sound. Before that, I didn't realize that a software development methodology could be racist and misogynistic, so now I'm now worried that DevOps is in fact, also a manifestation of white male privilege. Is that the case?
Goddammit! Here I thought I was learning stuff for my career rather than expressing my internal misogyny by being on our new DevOps team.
ETA: That means the black guy and the Asian guy are expressing their internalized racism.
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Perhaps not going straight to "aggressive asshole" when you try to educate would be beneficial to furthering your stated goals?
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@boomzilla Well I'd call her a "dick", but you know that insult just conveys white male privilege up the wazzoo. Ditto that with "jerkoff".
I guess we need to stick with the gender-neutral "asshole".
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@boomzilla Good old "It's not my job to educate you" when challenged on their nonsense
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@hungrier said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Good old "It's not my job to educate you"
In all fairness I agree with her on that.
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@apapadimoulis said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
As you know, I'm trying to become more aware of my own white male privilege so I can stop being so microagressive all the time.
I learned yesterday from a flurry of tweets by Social Justice Programmer and Twitter Celebrity sarahmei that Agile/XP is a manifestation of white male privilege:
If you follow the dozens of tweets and replies, the logic is sound. Before that, I didn't realize that a software development methodology could be racist and misogynistic, so now I'm now worried that DevOps is in fact, also a manifestation of white male privilege. Is that the case?
Stackoverflow is following the trend:
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Wondering why all the agile/XP stuff (like pairing, TDD, etc) doesn’t seem to work for a heterogenous team?
BTW is that even true? Before we get too far in the weeds discussing this.
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@blakeyrat Indeed. And it assumes that it works for a homogeneous team. I would suspect that this sort of thing is orthogonal to heterogeneity. For instance, putting certain similar personality types together can lead to a lot of conflict and acrimony.
She's just harping on her personal hobby horse of grievances.
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@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@blakeyrat Indeed. And it assumes that it works for a homogeneous team. I would suspect that this sort of thing is orthogonal to heterogeneity. For instance, putting certain similar personality types together can lead to a lot of conflict and acrimony.
She's just harping on her personal hobby horse of grievances.
I dislike people who aren't like me just as much as I dislike those like me.
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@blakeyrat it doesn't seem to work ever for anyone, so yes, it's true.
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@boomzilla She then went on to educate people in another thread though:
https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/990968833547497472
Something tells me Twitter might not be the best medium for this discussion... (INB4: Twitter isn't good for any discussion)
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@jbert said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
She then went on to educate people in another thread though:
She should have started with that. However, reading it only confirmed to me that I was correct. That's probably just our relative power dynamic, though.
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@boomzilla Her "explanation" just treats it as established fact anyway, without citing any evidence.
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@blakeyrat It's basically her personal observations which are viewed from the perspective of that one and only hammer that she has.
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@boomzilla It would be nice if people focused more on the "is this true?" than on the "feminism, rite guyz? LOLOLOL".
The first is objective. The second leads to Gamergaters.
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@blakeyrat I don't think there's much there there. She's correct in the sense that some of those methodologies won't work for certain groups of people. But I don't think there's any good way to predict any of that. All that's there is her feminism inanity trying to explain the inexplicable.
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TBH I don't really care what finally makes the cancer that is "agile" uncool and what makes idiot managers switch to push some other kind of idiotic magic bullet regardless of whether it's even applicable or not. I just want it gone already, it's done enough damage. Agile is like communism, it sounds good on paper as long as you don't actually think about it, but then you implement it and suddenly there's no toilet paper anywhere and a hundred million are dead; wheon you point out how it fails horribly all the time and a crowd of idiots come out the bushes and start chanting "that wasn't real agile!". So, yay for crazy bitches on Twatter. Yaaasss kween slay!
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@apapadimoulis said
^^^^
triggered
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@blakeyrat said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@boomzilla It would be nice if people focused more on the "is this true?" than on the "feminism, rite guyz? LOLOLOL".
The first is objective. The second leads to Gamergaters.+1
The first leads to an examination of the tools & processes we take for granted, to either prove or disprove if they work/are effective.
The second should be a reason to Jeff this to the Garbage.
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@blek I don't have a problem with Agile, except it only works with projects that are already pretty established. It's great for maintenance work, but awful for from-scratch work. Unfortunately, I don't know of a better option so I use it anyway.
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@blek said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Agile [...] sounds good on paper as long as you don't actually think about it
a crowd of idiots come out the bushes and start chanting "that wasn't real agile!"
There's nothing wrong with agile until the business process consultants and managers get their hands on it.
To throw around analogies, if you read the Agile manifesto it calls for organizing like a (socialist) democracy or a spec ops team (here's you mission, figure it out), but then managers turn it into communism, monarchism or a strict military hierarchy. Seriously, agile is fine as long as the affected people have a say in changing the process.
If you think killing the term "agile" will help anything then I'm sure some manager will happily go back to calling it the "V-model" or switch to calling it the "salmon process" or whatever some marketeer came up with after they went golfing at some Caribbean resort.
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@blakeyrat It also fails in a spectacular manner when you're doing work that depends on someone else, something you can't do on your own. Like when you're me and work as a technical writer for a living - that involves a lot of talking to developers and figuring out how things they wrote work; I can't test everything by myself. I routinely have to explain to a manager guy why I didn't work on this or that card; the reason is always because the person I need to talk to was busy and couldn't fit that into their own sprint. It's been like this for years, it's retarded, but it's "agile".
I can't work in the devs' sprints either because I work with multiple teams and they're all on different schedules. It's really fun.
Now we wait for someone to tell me we're implementing Agile wrong. Yes, clearly, but I've never seen it implemented in a way that didn't suck balls.
Oooooh wait, I got ninja'd.
@JBert People also say there's nothing wrong with communism until people corrupt it. I'd say that if your ideology/process turns into absolute shit the moment it comes into contact with people, it was shit to begin with.
You're right that they'll just pick some other dumb shit to push with no regard to reality. They have to make constant changes to things that work fine in order to justify their continued employment, so it's inevitable. I just want Agile to die and all the "agile coaches" and "scrum masters" and other leeches to lose their jobs, or at least to have to retrain themselves to sell the shiny turd that replaces Agile..
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@jbert said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
There's nothing wrong with agile until the business process consultants and managers get their hands on it.
Or anyone tries to be super strict about whatever "rules" you've adopted.
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@blek said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
It also fails in a spectacular manner when you're doing work that depends on someone else, something you can't do on your own. Like when you're me and work as a technical writer for a living - that involves a lot of talking to developers and figuring out how things they wrote work; I can't test everything by myself.
That's because you're not suppsed to document anything. Right?
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@boomzilla Now you're thinking Agile!
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@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@jbert said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
There's nothing wrong with agile until the business process consultants and managers get their hands on it.
Or anyone tries to be super strict about whatever "rules" you've adopted.
The moment they say "stop thinking about it and let me do the thinking" is when you should run.
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@boomzilla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
I don't think there's much there there.
I'm having trouble seeing much more than "collaborative processes require collaboration."
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@greybeard As far as I understand the point of the Twitter post in the OP it's that managers require pair programming or TDD but don't give enough leeway to women, junior developers or other people who might be outnumbered in a team to have much say in the process.
So big words like "built-in privilege" aside (they only polarize the audience), she might still be right in complaining. How do you prove that your colleague is always snubbing your ideas when pair programming, and that without being seen as a non-team-player if you would tell this to the boss, standup group or project manager? How do you prove that your style of TDD coding an entire use case into a test rather than separate tests for each different parameter is just as valid if you "TDD expert" vetoes any changes?
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@jbert said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@greybeard As far as I understand the point of the Twitter post in the OP it's that managers require pair programming or TDD but don't give enough leeway to women, junior developers or other people who might be outnumbered in a team to have much say in the process.
So big words like "built-in privilege" aside (they only polarize the audience), she might still be right in complaining. How do you prove that your colleague is always snubbing your ideas when pair programming, and that without being seen as a non-team-player if you would tell this to the boss, standup group or project manager? How do you prove that your style of TDD coding an entire use case into a test rather than separate tests for each different parameter is just as valid if you "TDD expert" vetoes any changes?
Successful people learn to stand up for themselves.
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@blek said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
implementing Agile
This is the problem. Trying to be agile is not.
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@jbert If she had explained it that way, it would have been received much better. Because you make a good point.
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Most of the examples they cite for "being racist" boil down to some guy being a dick, but they can be dicks to other white males too. It's not an issue of race or gender, some people are just dicks to everyone. But when it's to a white male it's just being a dick, and when it's to some other group it's racism or gender bias or whatever.
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@karla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
Successful people learn to stand up for themselves.
That's a nice sentiment. There are also the not-so-small number of people who stood up for themselves and promptly found themselves standing ... outside out of a job.
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@rhywden Sounds like a good opportunity for a lawsuit.
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@magus said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@rhywden Sounds like a good opportunity for a lawsuit.
Depends on how the opposing side goes about it. If they're blatantly obvious then, sure, do your thing. If not... well...
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@lorne-kates said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
The second should be a reason to Jeff this to the Garbage.
I didn't even notice it's not in the garage. I mean, how the hell is this topic not in garage!? It's 100% garage material and no good discussion can possibly spring up from it.
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@magus said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@rhywden Sounds like a good opportunity for a lawsuit.
Exactly, there are remedies
for true discrimination.The bigotry of low expectations is patronizing as hell.
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@karla said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@magus said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@rhywden Sounds like a good opportunity for a lawsuit.
Exactly, there are remedies true discrimination.
The bigotry of low expectations is patronizing as hell.
Again with the oversimplifications.
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@rhywden Maybe you should listen to women who tell you about their problems.
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@magus said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@rhywden Maybe you should listen to women who tell you about their problems.
Nice non-sequitur. But I'm more concerned with the price of a sack of rice in China.
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@magus said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@rhywden Maybe you should listen to women who tell you about their problems.
I have wrongthink...my problems don't matter.
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I've always hated pair-programming. I worked somewhere that experimented with it for a little bit, but I was paired with an arrogant asshole who took the reins and I was left with him just lecturing me and doing all the work. It left me feeling both powerless and a total slacker because I wound up just watching him work.
Thing is, I'm a white male, and even someone who, on average, tends to be a little persuasive and assertive when I know what I'm talking about. I wound up being the beta here because he added the arrogant and argumentative to the mix, and I just can't deal with that.
So, in her long rant regarding Pivotal (which, interestingly, I personally know a mild SJW type who actually works there, imagine that) I can objectively sympathize with the experience. But, like all of these rants, the problem isn't a white male problem. Because, guess what? I guarantee you from how she's presented herself on Twitter that, had she been in a position where she was senior level and I was junior (as I was in the above anecdote), she would have been just as much an asshole to me as the guy I was working with. She has a toxic and argumentative personality that proves her right: She doesn't work well with pair-programming because pair-programming requires everyone to be a good team player who can listen to other people. She's proven that she can't listen to other people. She's just as horrible at it as the people she laments about.
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@magus said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
@rhywden Maybe you should listen to women who tell you about their problems.
It's not about the
nailpair programming!
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@blek the concept of "agile" is a really good idea:
- Smaller Changes
- Sooner
Transforming an organization to become agile it quite difficult, because thinking in "smaller changes" is really hard for the business, and even harder for IT to execute.
I don't really get what "XP/Pair Programming" has to do with "being agile", aside from the fact that both practices are misogynistic and racist.
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@jbert said in Is DevOps also a manifestation of white male privilege?:
managers require pair programming or TDD
Programmers already suck.
I think putting two of them together at the keyboard makes them suck more. Maybe?
Like... are the two characters in Dumb and Dumber better together, or better apart? I feel there's some sort of multiplier of suck, but I haven't studied it enough to know,.
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...I don't hire people who use "craftsmanship" to describe what we do
This is a very good idea.
Using the word craftsmanship to describe proframming is a 100% reliable indicator of someone who is blind to the effects of structural oppression
That's not what makes it a good idea.
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