samuraiseoul

I recently started to notice a palpable lack of people of color in the workplace. I recently took to writing some tech activism articles and when I looked around for people who could check them and share their lived experiences as marginalized individuals in tech, I found very few. Then I started asking why. I already knew of the systematic oppression that I benefit from as a white person but I didn't truly look at the numbers and how damning they are. I listened to the experiences of BIPOC people that were fed to me, not the ones they were sharing, the real ones. There are people of color in the tech community but I noticed, I had met plenty of developers that were hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, African(but not Black), and Eastern. I am a queer developer and have met other queer developers, even a few women. That said, I NEVER met a Black programmer before last year, not while networking, not while working, not while reading, nowhere. How can we build good products for our communities and societies if we don't let an entire race of people have a vocie in the process? What are we doing? How are we claiming meritocracy when there isn't even an equitable palying field? Have you see and stayed silent in the face of oppression of your friends? Stayed quite to protect the team as a team member is bullied for something outside of their control? Let's brainstorm ways we can be better!

Hello HN friends, frenemies, and everyone in between!

I’m a software engineer who fancies herself as a systems level thinker. I've spent the last couple years thinking about how we might apply systems level thinking and broad engineering techniques from all disciplines, not just software, to daily in-person level big societal issues like justice, ethics, and the engineering of long-term dignity for people within social systems, not just those at the top and middles, but all.

I’ve written up a kind of exploratory “design doc” that asks a lot of questions and attempts to answer them in a cohesive and robust, fault tolerant, and evolving way.

Things like:

* What if we treated dignity of living things the same way we treat uptime, resilience, maintainability?

* What if suffering and despair are treated as bugs, failing test cases, or missing requirements?

* What if the feedback loops, transparency of design and changes, and observability were baked-in and applied to how the system handles injustice and human suffering?

Could we build anti-fragile, renewable, self-healing societal structures that expect conflict, drift, and failure. Ones that are engineered to withstand and correct without collapse, but prepared to dismantle and renew healthily, like a phoenix, not with violence, but with shared vision and tooling that honors both the facts of the injustices and validates the emotions while looking forward?

The idea is currently called Radical Wokeness, which I know may cause an immediate visceral reaction in some. It is explicitly not radical in the idea of extremism, rather in the depth of its vison and hope. It is radical like radical openness or other concepts in mental health are. It is not meant as a political label or even to represent any ideology or side of any political discussion. It fundamentally wants to shift the conversations politicians are having. It believes that politics are a tool by an unjust system to pretend work is being done to repair harms, instead of actually meaningfully doing the work and engineering to solve the real issues. It’s a moral architecture pattern, informed by up to date research on mental health, robust system design, and healthy conflict resolution. It honors both the failures and successes of past systems, while working to incorporate the inherent wisdoms found in many of them, that were unfortunately twisted or decayed to become harmful. It is a system that refuse to make cruelty invisible, and design for care and correction as a core function. To place back into design the implied system requirements for all things that need to be there to serve societies and give dignity to all life.

I’d love feedback in any form. Critiques, pushback, or additions from people who care about systems, complexity, and ethical design. I wrote the article with the idea of explaining what, how, why, and my approach and mindset, as a primer to help people easily find their way into the document and comprehend it.

I want to also expressly admit that I used an LLM to get help making it. I never let it generate things. I only used it to help anaylze and explain and educate me in an attempt to be sure the language is coherent and there are no critical important avenues I accidentally missed. I am not an expert in all or even most fields. This is a best attempt and I'm asking here, to get help from some of the greatest minds the world has to offer, because LLMs are cool and a good tool, but even when using it to be socratic and demanding it back up its suggestions, it is still a flawed tool, limited by its user.

Thank you for reading and I wish nothing but good for all of you!

IDK the gitfluencer moniker makes me think like youtubers always ending the videos begging for likes and subscribes

> If you liked that commit don't forget to merge in that PR and smash that follow button!

A early facebook clone can work well. If you're learning a new frontend tech, reuse the backend from one you did before, or if it's new backend, reuse the frontend from a different one.

I say early facebook cause I feel that doing a login, and feed page, and allowing status updates, friends search and confirmation, and a profile page with photo uploads to be a pretty good intro stack.

That said for a new language I ALWAYS look for a modern koans exercise to do. Some langs have them, some don't.

I like going thrifting and looking for cool things or coming up with something to search for and collect. Recently i'm into collecting uranium glass for instance. It's also gives you some walking around the stores and such. You can even maybe try and play with some weird fashion while there. It helps with exploring some good restaurants also as a lot of thrift shops are in different areas of town and I like to give the stores time to 'refresh' between visits.

I've been fired a few times as a developer and I think your empathy approach is truly wonderful!

The first time I was fired it was entirely 100% my fault. I was a practicing alcoholic at the time(meaning I was still getting smashed by whisky every night) and it affected my performance, as well as my punctuality, energy levels, and concentration. I would show up late, fall asleep in meetings, and not really get much done. There was no surprise for me when I was let go and I had been given several warnings. My boss was my programming mentor all throughout college, and one of my best friends, so I can imagine it was really hard for him. Me and him are still friends and talk everyday though it took a month or so for me to mentally uncouple 'boss' him who fired me and friend him. Either way, he made sure some friends came over and hung out with me after and encouraged me and made sure I knew that if called for a reference that he would give me a good one. He also helped me brush up my resume and such which was a nice gesture. I was in a bad place at the time though and I still kept drinking so it took a long time to find a job, but that's not really here nor there. I would say depending on your level of knowledge of this employee, be sure to try and help him through maybe some external issues if you think he may have a drinking problem or medical issue, go through HR to do it most likely, but do try and give him the benefit of the doubt. I don't think most people enjoy being shitty employees, if they chose that career path there is most likely a reason, and being in the bottom percentile of professionals in their field is most likely not a life goal of theirs.

The second time I was fired was different. I wasn't a great culture fit, but mainly I was a victim of some politics from what I gathered after talking it out with my direct boss. There was a project which was the first I was made the lead of and the reqs kept changing until there were conflicting requirements and I told them as much and that the end product would be defective and could get into an invalid state, but then was ignored, and the project didn't work as they expected. It was a big release and so 'someone had to take responsibility' and it couldn't be my boss as he's the CTO and had all the passwords and more domain knowledge, so I was let go. At least that's what I gathered. Luckily, I had two months notice here and I was already swimming in recruiter offers at the time and had been looking anyways. MY boss told me privately that I was being let go and that the interviews we were doing were for my position and that I'm not supposed to know but he felt me being fired was dumb. When I was let go they told me that they had brought up some issues before in my performance reviews but they had not, but rather mentioned them offhand in company wide meetings that everyone in the company should keep in mind. Things like lunch is EXACTLY one hour and things, sometimes I would take like 1 hour 15 minute ones even though I would also skip lunch multiple times a week. Regardless, never brought up to me one on one. So be sure if you're going to mention improvement things, that you mention them EXPLICITLY to the employee, and also be willing to work with them if possible as they may even feel bad but not know how to bring it up. If they need an hour and fifteen for lunch everyday, and maybe have a good reason, perhaps just don't worry about it. Not saying that is the case, and my reasons weren't really anything besides apathy, but maybe they live a bit far out and have to go home for lunch to give their pet medication at lunch. The other thing that was nice here is they considered if I had family in the area who could help if I got into a pinch between jobs and also gave a small severance. Things like that can really help.

Lastly some other pieces of things are to do it privately, hopefully near some lesser used exit or another. They will be emotional I imagine, and the last thing they want is to describe why they are looking distraught while leaving the building. A walk of shame is just cruel. Offer to let them get their things after hours if they like. Also offer to let them use the computer again at that time and maybe bring an external cd burner and blank cd or supply a memory stick. We all 'know' not to use the work computer for personal things but many do, especially by accident or its the first job or whatever. They may have some documents they saved as pdf's like receipts or something they need off. Or an important account tied to their work email. I think my first job I was an idiot and tied my electric bill to my work email for instance. Allowing them that can be nice. Also perhaps allow them to write a letter or something to some employees that they were friends with that they may want to exchange contact info with to get lunch or something sometime.

As for morale on the team, I think keeping them around is most likely worse though. I mean if you've ever had a coworker who was just horrid and then things improved when they left for a different job, its like that if they are the kind of employee that needs to be fired but you keep them around.

To summarize though. Kindness is key. A person most likely isn't underperforming because they want to, rather some other issue may be at play, even if they can't fix it themselves after being warned. Be sure to give explicit warning, and also to give a good run-time to find a new job if possible. Many people don't have the reserves to be between jobs for long after all, especially people with other issues in their lives. Let them keep their dignity, and also to get their belongings/friends/relationships/digital info with dignity and respect.

If you have questions or something let me know and I'll try to answer them. Good luck and no matter what try not to feel bad if you've really tried to help them. In the end the only person you can truly force change on is yourself. It's not your fault. :)

Also don't just do what code review comments tell you to.

If you disagree, state that and tell them why. Maybe you know something they don't about why you did something the way you did. Maybe they are just wrong. Maybe there's some business requirement you know that they don't or vice versa.

Also the other bit of not making changes just because they tell you to is this, you need to understand why you're making the change. This way you won't make the mistake again and you'll learn. You may stop doing the thing again if they comment it enough times and you internalize it, but that's not understanding, that's pattern recognition and won't help you be a better dev.

Code reviews are a two way street and a great learning opportunity. Use them to your advantage! :D

I'm glad this helped you as well! If you want to, let me know how it goes! If not that's fine too! I hope things look up for you soon! :D

Sending positive vibes!