I reported a few weeks ago some discrimination that my girlfriend has experienced at a tech team, which is similar to discrimination I have experienced in the Ruby community. The good news is last week, my girlfriend finally had a happy ending to this discrimination problem. The good guys and gals always win in the end! Evil never triumphs permanently!
Assuming you read the previous blog post on the topic, what happened next is the manager who was enabling discrimination against my girlfriend totally lost it and started commanding and controlling every developer on the team, telling them to stop sharing their opinions at meetings and only follow orders from the manager going forward. The manager completely stopped the whole agile Scrum collaborative approach and wanted to turn the team into the worst kind of Waterfallish nightmare in which devs cannot question anything and must only do as the manager says. As part of that, he stopped my girlfriend's retro meetings and was beginning to have her cut out several Scrum practices that help with team collaboration because he wanted to be in charge of everything all of the sudden.
Needless to say, my girlfriend couldn't take that BS anymore, and told the manager point blank that the team is NOT Scrum or Agile anymore, and her title is literally Scrum Master, so she did not want to work on that team anymore. She told the manager she was gonna use her many accumulated vacation days over several years and take a month long vacation.
My girlfriend just got back to her job last week, and after her first day back, she shared with me the big surprises that happened in her absence. Apparently, several members of the team quit (both devs and product people) or became extremely demoralized by the insanity of that manager and his changes that destroyed collaborative Software Development. His team moved so slowly as a result that the directors above him ended up pulling the plug on the project and killing it completely.
Fortunately, my girlfriend got re-assigned to another team that has just had their Scrum Master promoted into a higher level manager, so my girlfriend became the new Scrum Master on that team. And, the good news, my girlfriend told me the new team is amazing! They do even more Agile Software Development than straight up Scrum by augmenting Scrum with Kanban. They are very friendly and nice. And, they have a highly collaborative approach!
I had surprising good news like this happen to me last year after an abusive coworker from another Software Development team got suddenly let go with his entire team because his team failed to deliver and my team inherited his project and finished it in about 2 months despite being completely unfamiliar with its code beforehand. While working at the same company as me, that abusive dev missed all the Montreal.rb Ruby meetups I have organized except one, which he abandoned in the middle of. He never cared to support me, so he was definitely not the kind of dev I'd ever hire in the first place (he was at the company from before my time until he was let go). In fact, some dev at a different company contacted me a few months later to ask me about that abusive dev because he had applied for a job at his company. I ended up giving the full scoop on that abusive dev, which resulted in him getting rejected for that job.
So, the good guys and gals always win! Never give up when you are in a bullying abusive discriminatory situation at your job or elsewhere!!! Bad people always end up paying for it sooner or later.
PS I am disappointed only a few people told me they sympathized with my situation after I posted the original blog post about the discrimination my girlfriend was suffering from. It's like many people in the Ruby community are 100% OK with discrimination/bullying/unnice-behavior nowadays or just they don't care if it's not happening to them! I would say 50% of the devs in the Ruby community today are part of the problem not the solution as either they are too complacent/lazy/cowardly to lend support to people affected by the problem of discrimination or they indirectly benefit from the discrimination because they are unqualified devs that only get ahead by getting some other devs pushed down. Do not be part of the problem through inaction! Speak up against discrimination, bullying, and unethical behavior! Offer sympathy, help, and support! Share your stories! Share triumphs over discrimination and bullying!
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