Posts by kelbag1974

LLVM contributor hits breakpoint, quits citing inclusivity intolerance

I actually believe that positive discrimination does more harm than good. Whilst on paper it looks good to the board or governing body to show that you have a diverse workplace, in reality you can get a situation where people from a minority group are considered by their peers to be nothing more than token faces* and are subtly discriminated against as no matter what your abilities you're only there to 'tick a box'.

In the 90's the token face was a female employed in an engineering capacity, today it's different although I personally pay no attention as we're all the same underneath the labels. What matters (or should do) is whether you can do the job, learn how to do the job and not be a dick whilst doing so.

*personal experience whilst employed by a national rail company in the early 90's as a telecoms apprentice, at 16 I was actually told by another of the engineers that, as a female I shouldn't be there as I was taking up a job that could have been given to a man who needed to support his family, why didn't I just bugger off and work behind a shop counter (sexism wasn't considered to be a hanging offence back then). My response was that I didn't know many 16 year old men who would have taken a low paid apprenticeship to support his kids. But the upshot was,that after 10 years of being considered incapable of the job and begrudged every promotion I got because of my appearance not my ability by my peers I took the redundancy offered despite loving my job.

These days I've been lucky enough to work in organisations that ignore the box ticking exercises and instead employ staff based on ability alone. This method, surprisingly enough, has actually managed to employ people no matter what they look like or get up to in their private lives. In an ex bosses words "if it's legal, between two consenting adults and not shoved in my face who gives a shit? I couldn't care less if you wear a dress or trousers we have a job to do just don't come to work wearing a mankini". Not exactly PC but he was one of the least judgemental people I've known unless you screwed up.

It's nice to be judged on what you can do not what you look like or what your sexual orientation is.

It's not our fault we don't hire black people, says Facebook

As a female who was employed in an overly male dominated Railway engineering apprenticeship (only female in a team of 40 men) I was automatically assumed to have been employed to boost up the diversity ratings and to be thick as pig sh*t or to be sleeping with the manager in order to keep my unfairly awarded position so I know for a fact that diversity ratings actually hurt those from minorities/under-represented sexes.

Fully advocate the 'Employ the best person for the job' attitude, it's down to the education systems to make sure ALL opportunities are available to ALL people regardless of whether they are male, female, both, pink, purple, martian or moomin