Comment by this_user

I've lately become a pretty big proponent of gatekeeping. On Reddit I saw a comment that security flaws are simply unavoidable, that they're inevitable because as a web developer they must have 1000 dependencies and cannot verify the security of them all, and that if something goes wrong, there's no way it would be fair to hold them accountable for it. When that kind of mindset has taken root, and it has deeply taken root in the entire Javascript ecosystem, it becomes a real-world security issue that affects millions of people detrimentally. Maybe software development doesn't actually need to be accessible to people who can't write their own IsOdd function.

Another example is that a hobby I loved is now dead to me for lack of gatekeeping; Magic the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast started putting out products that were not for their core playerbase, and when players complained, were told "these products are not for you; but you should accept that because there's no harm in making products for different groups of people". That seems fair enough on its face. Fast forward a couple of years, and Magic's core playerbase has been completely discarded. Now Magic simply whores itself out to third party IPs; this year we'll get or have gotten Final Fantasy, Spiderman, Spongebob Squarepants, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card sets. They've found it more lucrative in the short-term to tap into the millions of fans of other media franchises while ditching the fanbase that had played Magic for 30 years. "This product is not for you" very rapidly became "this game is not for you", which is pretty unpleasant for people who've been playing it for most or all of their lives.

I'm personally failing to see how "welcoming everyone" directly correlates to a company neglecting polish and detail. A cynical read of your comment is that DEI-style programs are lowering standards when, in actuality, the issue most likely lies in poor management and a corporate structure that rewards buzzy work over polished work. I'm not saying that was your implication, by the way; just that "everything's bad because we allowed other people to join" is a slippery slope.

To further your point. In our bodies we have organs which are made up of specific kinds of cells. In some cases diversity of cells seems to come with health benefits (e.g. our guts), but in most cases cause significant health issues. (If you have a bunch of liver cells in your lungs it's probably going to be a problem). Also across the whole body there is an incredible diversity of cells, and they cooperate with mind boggling harmony.

My take away is that diversity at a global level, and in some specific contexts, is a great thing. But diversity in some other specific contexts is entirely destructive and analogous to rot or decomposition.

When we rely on a core societal function (firefighting, accounting, waterworks maintenance, property rights, etc.) the people responsible for maintaining these functions need to maintain in themselves a set of core characteristics (values as patterns of action), and there is room to play outside of those cores, but those cores shouldn't be jeopardized as a tradeoff for diversity and inclusion.

For example, if constructive core values of a railroad system is consistency and reliability, then these shouldnt be diminished in the name of diversity and inclusion, but if diversity and inclusion can be achieved secondarily without a tradeoff (or even to somehow further amplify the core values) then it is constructive. One has to thoughtfully weigh the tradeoffs in each context, and ensure that the most important values in that context to maintain the relevant function are treated as most important. The universe seems to favor pragmatism over ideology, at least in the long run.

So in a company if the core values that make it successful are diluted in exchange for diversity, it's no longer what it was, and it might not be able to do keep doing what it did. That said, it also might have gained something else. One thing diversity tends to offer huge complex systems is stability, especially when its incorporated into other values and not held up singularily.

In other words, my take on diversity (and by extension, inclusion) is that we need a diversity of diversity. Sometimes a lot of diversity is best, and sometimes very little diversity is best.

Your logic could be sound if the lowest rung of the skill ladder was simply inevitable for everyone who is currently there. But that is wrong and, really, makes no sense. Many people are just young and need to be trained. Others were taught bad practices and need to be re-trained. Still others have their priorities wrong, but could do good work if they were given a reason to care about the right things. It also takes time for people to grow and to change and to learn from their mistakes.

If you take a hardline attitude on keeping the gates up, you're just going to end up with a monoculture that stagnates.

Hard agree. Gatekeeping is a good thing. It is how you ensure that people who join a group are actually a good fit for the group. For example, if someone wants to join a D&D group but doesn't like that the game is a dungeon crawl where you just go kick monster ass without a pretense of story, nobody will be served by the group deciding to try to adjust to welcome the new person despite that bad fit. Not only the existing group, but the prospective new member, will be better off if they each go their separate ways and play the type of game each enjoys.

It's good to not exclude people for arbitrary reasons (though even this requires the caveat that one man's "arbitrary" is another man's "important part of our identity"). But we also need to recognize that it's ok for something to not be everyone's cup of tea. There isn't some kind of moral mandate that everything must be maximally welcoming to all. Unfortunately, we don't recognize that in our current culture, and in fact we stigmatize it as "gatekeeping" which is deemed to be toxic. But the culture is wrong about this.

Virtually no one is pushing to welcome people who are not qualified.

This is a huge misunderstanding at best and a malicious re-framing of serious issues within portions of the tech industry at worst.

>This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic.

I do not for the life of me understand your point. Gatekeeping, as its most commonly used, means controlling access to something (be it a resource, information etc) to deliberately and negatively affect others that are not part of a "blessed" group. Its not objective, and certainly is not a practice reliant on merit. Its an artificial constraint applied selectively at the whim of the gatekeeper(s).

>There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.

The first assertion and the second one are not related. Being welcoming to everyone is not the same thing as holding people to different standards. Company culture sets company inertia and how employees are incentivized to behave and what they care about. You can have the most brilliant engineers in the world, like Google most certainly does have its fair share, and as we have seen, with the wrong incentives it doesn't matter. Look at Google's chat offerings, the Google Graveyard, many of their policies becoming hostile to users as time goes on etc.

Yet you can have a company with what you may deem "average quality" but exceeds in its business goals because its oriented its culture to do so. I don't think Mailchimp was ever lauded for its engineering talent like Google has been, for example, but they dominated their marketplace and built a really successful company culture, at least before the Intuit acquisition.

Agree.

I was in a (tech) meetup last week. We meet regularly, we are somewhere between acquaintances and friends. One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".

I believe that does more good than harm, even to the person it is being directed to. It is a nice covenant to have, "we'll call you on your bs whenever you bring it in", that's what a good friend would do. Embracing high standards in a community makes everyone in it better.

The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.

So the problem is actually diversity and not grotesque shareholder and marketing driven development?

Im sceptical. I've never seen what you describe outside of toxic "culture war clickbait videos", what i have seen is nepotism, class privileges and sprint culture pushed by investors - you know the exact opposite of what you describe.

Toxic gatekeeping means sitting on IRC all day just to tell people to read the manual. What you're describing is an, "intervew process."

You’re right. I’ll start: get off hacker news you noob. Nobody wants to hear your Eternal September rants about what you think DEI means.

I don't know, Linus Torvalds was kind of notorious before 2010 for gatekeeping in not-so-constructive ways.

I'm pretty sure this would also render the dot-com bubble the nerds fault?

Let's not go back to how nerd culture used to be regarding diversity... or lack thereof.

I remember when Bill Gates was on magazine covers, viewed as a genius, a wonderful philanthropist, even spoofed in Animaniacs as "Bill Greats."

I guess my point is, "It used to be hard and a liability to be a nerd" was never true, and is nothing but industry cope. The good old days were just smaller, more homogenous, had more mutually-shared good old toxicity and misogyny (to levels that would probably get permabans here within minutes; there's been a lot of collective memory-holing on that), combined with greater idolization of tech billionaires.

Everybody jumped into technology for fat paychecks long before 2010

Sounds like public trading is the problem from your description