Disqus - Latest Comments for RaviMohan

Re: Hacker News India Story

Ravi Mohan — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:38:47 -0000

This is Ravi. (as you can see from Disqus log in. See my latest tweet for confimation)

Dear Anonmous, I don't need defending. Prateek has the right to say what he likes about me, especially on *his blog*! . Doesn't bother me at all really.

I do think the "Hacker News India" bit was borderline scam and I stand by that opinion and expressed it on Twitter, HN (Iam "plinkplonk on HN) etc. .

If I can express my opinion why can't Prateek express his opinions? If he thinks I am immature etc etc, that's *perfectly fine*.

As to this specific blog post I find it amusing, as I do the whole "Hacker News India" initiative. I specifically liked the logic of "If the person was actually concerned shouldn’t he have participated in the discussion on HNI itself or the mailing list and offered his side of the argument? " .

Umm. No . If I think you are publicity seeking scamsters I am not going to join you and debate you and give you more publicity. Also notice that my tweet was me talking to one of *my* followers, not to you. But yeah whatever, you (Prateek) captured my beliefs about this whole endeavor accurately. I do think this was an amateursish rip off-y, borderline illegal endeavour.

You (the anon above) have some interesting points about with the "real hackers in India don't go around "communizing" and "you need to earn your reputations" but these are lost in this hamhanded "defense" of me that I didn't ask for and don't need.

Prateek is Prateek and I am me. Neither he nor I are comparing ourselves against each other. I don't have to respect him and he doesn't have to respect me irrespective of who else does or doesn't. (Yes I know Peter and Martin - and a few others - all of which has nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of my opinions)

So please, *please* don't bother coming to my defense. If you still feel compelled to at least don't be anonymous! You just end up looking like an idiot hiding behind anonymity. Say what you want to say but have the courage to put your name to it. Anonymous sniping is useless and counter productive.

Both I and Prateek put our names behind our opinions. Please do the same. Or even better don't post such unhelpful "defense" opinions. If you have points to make , make them directly and openly.

My only problem with "Hacker News India" was with the name/brandoff ripoff and refusal to change "because we aren't charging money", (as if that were a valid defense!!) ignoring the whole copyright/branding issue and leeching off the HN brand to build community till PG explicitly asked you not to.

Now that the name has changed, I have no issues with the site or the initiative (though I personally do think it won't go anywhere and will sputter out in awhile. But I could be wrong (I have been wrong before) . Time will tell. If Prateek builds a vibrant community around this, I'll be the first to congratulate him on his achievement.

Just so we are all clear on where we stand.

Re: Why diversity matter (the meritocracy business)

Ravi Mohan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:02:59 -0000

"Ravi, I really can't follow the structure of your argument."

Here it is . Nutshell version: You have no evidence for your hypothesis that diversity is a good thing for startup teams to strive for, and without that evidence your hypothesis isn't very strong. (If that is not your hypothesis than I don't know what you are talking about).

You say,

"I believe meritocracy is" (a virtue).

Fair enough. But you entangle "merit" (say how well someone codes, or sells or whatever) with diversity (the spread of gender /race/sexuality/whatever) immediately with

"So when a team lacks diversity, that’s a bad sign."

Again ,from your original post

"The companies that make decisions based on merit. execute faster and learn faster than their competitors. For startups (and other innovators), that’s a decisive advantage."

So far so good. But now you say

"I think diversity is an important part of that equation. "

This is just an opinion (aka a hypothesis) which has zero evidence of any kind backing it up *with respect to startups*.

You equate merit with diversity *as an assumption for your argument*. And that is the assumption I am challenging.

Your argument has the (logical) structure IF D THEN Q, where D is "diversity is a part of meritocracy".

And I am saying " Sure IF D then maybe Q but where is the evidence for D?"

In other words where is the evidence that if a team is diverse it writes better code, or generates more leads or raises more funding or even that it understands customers better? You are just *stating* and implying that all (or some of ) these are true.

(P => Q) ! => Q. // => is the implication operator.

((P=> Q) AND P) =>Q.

So much since you asked for the structure of my argument.

If you look at successful software startups and treat them as a sample space, they will show no bias towards gender/race/sexuality based diversity and may even show a bias against such diversity.

Given this disconnect with real world data , what you have isn't a "theory". It is a hypothesis or a belief. There is a difference in how those terms are used in science.

Now a hypothesis isn't a bad thing. You may even be right. But just stating a hypothesis and backing it up with "pop" books like the "Wisdom of Crowds" isn't convincing.

When someone makes a hypothesis it *is* reasonable to ask for data backing it. Which is what I meant by "show us".

You suggest that it helped you at IMVU. Fair enough. But that is hardly scientific (or statistical) evidence. I doubt even sociology builds theories off a single event. For every IMVU there are a dozen startups where the founders were homogenous (in terms of gender, ethnicity etc) and did well. That doesn't mean that you are wrong. It means you have no real data either way and what data does exist points the other way.

Even conceptually I can imagine a diversity-blind meritocracy. And this is the crux of our difference.

For you a non diverse team is (tends to) not meritocratic. I say one has nothing to do with the other. If you showed me two teams, one entirely made of of white men (say) and the other being very diverse and you asked me which was more meritocratic, I would say "I don't know I'll have to look at their code" (or sales records or whatever). And I would make my judgements of that base (code,sales whatever). Color or gender would have *nothing* to do with my evaluation and so I wouldn't be surprised if either team turned out better than the other.

You seem to have a bias towards the diverse team being the better one *on the average* and even go as far as to claim that the first team is probably not meritocratic! You have no evidence for such an assumption , but you hold it anyway and then build on that.

Let us do a thought experiment. After doing a gender blind resume selection, suppose you discover that the the top 20 resumes from the output of this process belong to men(say). Would you *still* believe in "diversity"? or would you shift your focus to "Oh noes there HAS to be diversity in a good team (assumption) . Maybe the process pipeline is broken" And if the pipeline is not broken maybe there is something wrong with education system, Cultural attitudes , Patriarchy ... an endless list of explanations - all because you made an assumption because it "felt right".

In other words, my critique against your argument is that you *start* with the conclusion ("diversity is a good thing/equivalent to meritocracy etc.") and then give some weak arguments (and no data) supporting it.

Ironic given that you are an ardent advocate of validating supposed "insights" with data.

From an HN comment (http://news.ycombinator.com... )

"The lean startup crowd exalts the power of data to overturn shadow beliefs about what is good for the business that more reflect the personal opinions of the people in charge rather than the reality on the ground."

and

"if you're making hiring decisions based on this, you might want to start thinking of process design decisions which place more emphasis on the data and less on shadow beliefs."

Ok now I am done here. (I am "plinkplonk" on HN and I've commented in the discussion ongoing there).

Regards,

Re: Why diversity matter (the meritocracy business)

Ravi Mohan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:33:31 -0000

"I actually find it kind of insulting."

What is political correctness (in my view) is your belief that diversity is some kind of virtue to be striven for and then you structure your arguments advocating that with no supporting data. The Wisdom of Crowds? Please.

I think your argument is weak (or non existent). Your experience is an anecdote. Supporting evidence for "diversity results in a great *development* team is non existent. Hence the "show us". Should be simple enough?

Attacking an argument (as political correctness say) is different from attacking a person. I personally find political advocacy boring.

That said. This is your blog and you have a right to not be insulted (even when such was not intended) by anything said here. I'll stop commenting. Thanks for listening and have a great day.

Re: Why diversity matter (the meritocracy business)

Ravi Mohan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:56:10 -0000

Well if diversity is such a strong indicator of superior teams, that means there is an opportunity out there for the diversity advocates to actually build a company that focuses explicitly on diversity and creates superior technology companies.

To quote -XC from this thread

"Tell you what, you hire a diverse team, I'll hire the best team, which may even be "diverse" and I'll beat your team without working weekends."

Please, accept this challenge and *show* us (vs preaching to us - And I say this as someone who greatly admires Eric's ideas and writing. This is a "preachy" post. ).

If you can harness such an unused and unseen (by your competition) edge to recruit great developers and crush your competition, I'd actively encourage any entrepreneurs reading this to build a "diverse" company. Nothing like success to convince the curmudgeonly cynics.

Due Disclosure: I personally believe the practice of diversity in software veers close to political correctness and I haven't yet seen any of these killer coder minorities kept down from writing good code by Evil White Males (or whoever the "dominant group" is supposed to be), but I acknowledge the possibility and am willing to be convinced otherwise. So let us have some evidence (Most "research" studies supporting
"diversity" is software/Silicon Valley etc start with the conclusion and cherry pick evidence and ideas. I'd like to see a double blind study of Open Source code contributions for example, or just a double blind code review.

I am all for blind code / resume review, wither for interviews or otherwise. A good practice, *as long as* you are willing to accept the conclusions if they go against "diversity" or whatever the political correctness fad du jour is at the time of review.

Re: Knowing.NET - I'm Looking to Hire Freelance Ruby Programmers

Ravi Mohan — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:49:20 -0000

" I've removed the name of the fellow's country, which is one I've always wanted to visit and which I'm sure has many fine developers. It's not relevant, other than to make the point that it's not just one country in Asia where there are freelance developers looking for work and charging significantly less than their American or European counterparts."

Ummm. Argentina is not in Asia. ;-)
(I know that's not what you meant. The second sentence in the quote above is disjointed enough that it can be read that way)

Re: Knowing.NET - I'm Looking to Hire Freelance Ruby Programmers

Ravi Mohan — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:20:49 -0000

I sympathize.
For what it is worth, here in Bangalore, the centre of the Great Outsourcing Tsunami, finding good ruby (or any other language for that) programmers is next to impossible. The good ones all have great jobs and the few good people who consult don't want to deal with the garbage work that is outsourced. About the only way you can find good people is if you already know good programmers in [whatever country you look for] and ask for references.

Re: Oblivious to Obvious (Corp)

Ravi Mohan — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:00:41 -0000

Brilliant !!

Re: Oblivious to Obvious (Corp)

Ravi Mohan — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:00:22 -0000

Brilliant !!