Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
Some things that stood out to me after reading the whole thing:<p>- Other engineers dog-piling on her first few PRs showed that there was a complete lack of trust in her, and perhaps an active distrust in her abilities. I have no comments regarding whether this was deserved or not, but the known facts point to such a reality.<p>- Writing a feature blog post based on a personal perspective and personal past experience is not something a matured corporation can allow. This should not have been a surprise.<p>- Being the most productive engineer is not the goal of a Principal level engineer. I don't believe any software management would expect their Principal engineers to be sitting at the desk cranking out code all day. Influencing large scale initiatives across the org is more of the job expectation. This means building relationships with lots of people, which means less coding and more guidance of other engineers to do the coding.<p>- By that point, the expectation must have been high for what she can contribute on the diversity front. The terse messaging regarding the survey probably didn't help, but I also don't see it as a big deal. It's probably just piling on past issues.<p>- The rest is standard PIP procedure of managing out someone who isn't working out. I would love to say that I know how better to handle a PIP, but I don't.<p>It seems to me that Github expected a much stronger engineer, but feel like they didn't get one and that she was underperforming. Was that the actual reality? I don't know, and I don't feel qualified to pass judgment.<p>Which leads me to my final thought: it does seem like Github might have an empathy problem. My guess is that Coraline had her own set of insecurities about being at Github going into the job, and the first few encounters with the rest of the org put them into overdrive. It's unfortunate that her manager did not deem it productive to learn what her insecurities were and validate her on those fronts, which I believe might have put her back on the right track towards success. Instead, Coraline hunkered down and started cranking out code, and possibly withdrawing from the org around her? Rather than doing her intended job.<p>But, it is a lot to ask for a manager to do all of that, and she was a Principal engineer after all.<p>Getting a job is like getting married, even if things look all good at the ceremony, there's still years of sustained work/relationship-building to come. This one looks like a case of bad matching. In no way as to diminish Coraline's story, I've seen this happen to a lot of different kinds of people from all walks of life.<p>My 2 pennies.