A highly toxic environment. Cover photo by ATDSPHOTO on Pixabay.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are entirely my own. They do not repres...
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I'm an Angular GDE and I don't understand most of the content of this post. I've seen a lot of very open conversations in the community of GDEs along with the Angular team at Google. GDEs can indeed ask questions to the Angular team and other GDEs. This is happening on a daily basis in Slack, which is where I discovered this article, which has not been censored but is being discussed as a way to improve the community.
I'm not saying that everything is perfect, but I am saying that I have no fear of being an Angular GDE and I don't see any reason to be anything but enthusiastic about being a GDE.
Also, note that GDEs cannot be employed by Google by definition.
Thank you for your feedback, Alain.
When you and other Angular GDEs say something like
I don't think it's helping the problem. You're alienating the GDEs who are scared because of fears mentioned in the article. Because of nasty messages and warnings about having to be careful about what they say or do. Because of being harassed by their peers or reprimanted by authorative figures.
By dismissing the problem and restating that there's no reason for this, you're making your peers question whether they're the problem themselves. If no one else seems to have this problem since everyone says that this is not happening, surely it must be them who are the problem.
You not having gone through it does not mean that it's a non-issue.
I don't know any GDEs who have such fears because all of them are free to express themselves on the Angular Slack channel or elsewhere.
That's what I see as a GDE from the inside. You're telling me that you have a better view from the outside, that's great but I don't see how your post is helping anything. Starting fires has rarely solved any problem.
I would be happy to reach out to the GDEs who are afraid and learn more about that because it is quite the opposite of my experience and the experience of many others. Please contact me in private if you have more information to share.
That's what you're saying. I have accounts of the opposite. More than the examples mentioned in these stories. These are just examples of bigger issues, not one-off issues.
Some people can have legal reason for not speaking about issues like these. Some people may not want to have their issue investigated at this point. Maybe they're just happy to move on after a terrible experience and I don't blame them.
Unfortunately, this changes nothing for the next person joining the Angular team or the Angular GDE program. This is why I'm speaking up on their behalf. To stop this from happening to anyone else.
The first step towards change is realizing and admitting that there's a problem. I see that you're not there yet. I'm trying to convince as many as possible that there are issues both in the Angular team and in the Angular GDE program, in the hope that it can be dealt with.
If you refuse to accept this, I don't know how to make it more clear, but hopefully I can convince someone else who can do something about this by helping to drive the change needed.
I can only accept what I can see and relate to. I have read stuff about the Angular team from former Googlers that I understand and accept because I trust these people. Their posts were truly genuine as they exposed themselves personally.
On the other hand, an outsider to an organization I belong to (the Angular GDEs) telling me that I should see something and that I don't understand, well... I'm questioning their agenda for sure.
I would need more info or proof to change my mind, and I don't see any of that in your post. My email is open if you want to share more.
I can understand your skepticism.
While I appreciate the offer, I will instead refer Angular GDEs facing issues like these to Wassim Chegham who has also offered his help.
Wassim has been a GDE for 5 years. I personally know and trust him. He's my best suggestion if you're looking for a safe space to discuss matters like these. Wassim is also an excellent mediator.
Read Wassim's tweet with this offer.
You do realize that Wassim seems to be as dumbfounded as I am about your post, right?
I would prefer it for himself to express his opinion to me and he did. His tweet followed a conversation between us.
I talked to him and the result still doesn't explain your claims about the GDE community, far from it.
« I can only accept what i see and relate to » you are such an open-minded person, aren’t you
I talked to several other GDEs and none of them understand this article. The GDE community has talked about it openly. If something is completely made up or blown out of proportion, being open-minded means just recognizing that instead of accepting what is presented as facts when that's not the case.
Remember that we humans prefer conflict over anything else. A post like "GDE is crap" will get 10x attention that "GDE is nice". For anyone reading comments, don't feel discouraged, your story won't probably be the same as 3 or 4 (or even 10) loud people on Twitter.
And that is really sad. Getting attention by doing this is a horrible thing to do. But it's also a tactic used by some world leaders nowadays so I can understand that more people are inclined to do so and not even feel bad about it.
I don't care for your pseudo analysis. You're avoiding the discussion that matters and making up statistics for no apparent reason.
You're just being loud, Lars. Your posts are inflammatory rants all over the place. You've made up your mind, though, and your opinion is popular. Enjoy your likes.
Personally, in my conversations with Lars, I've found him to be open to opposing viewpoints and re-calibrating his opinions when presented with evidence.
"I don't care for your pseudo analysis". I also find him to be open to opposing viewpoints. I hope you both get what you want from all this, whatever that is.
I wouldn't characterize your comment as an "opposing viewpoint".
I know only Olivier's story, he was a contractor all the time and he's contract ended. Google decided to not prolong and use internal resources (Pete Bacon Darwin) for i18n. From outside it doesn't look like he was forced to leave
Olivier's story seems like anything but a success. From the way he joined the Angular team (stop working on your open source library, it's more popular than Angular's built-in solution) to how it turned out that the use cases he wanted to support and saw the need for in the community would never ship in Angular itself. These use cases are non-concerns for Google and it ended up virtually killing the most popular free alternative.
While I don't have any personal experience with GDE harassing another GDE, I did experience several occasions where GDE would heavily gossip about another GDE. The fake friendship and artificial positive emotions meanwhile stabbing each other in the back were too much for me to digest at times.
I also felt (some) GDEs were under pressure to boost their own track record (to maintain GDE status) over the actual community needs.
That being said, there are occasional unhealthy situations happening in other communities as well, but I have a feeling Angular is trying to hide it under the carpet more than others.
When I first heard about this program, I thought it odd they tell you about the GDE program but only they select the candidates.
You can ask any GDE or Googler to be nominated for the GDE program. The list of all available GDEs is publicly available and the criteria listed on the GDE program website is exactly what one needs to do to become a GDE. So I don't see how anyone can say it's a "secret society" when a simple web search would give you all the answers.
You're right, it was my first impression. But I was wrong.
How so? I would love to know more.
My thoughts were when I picked up on the "don't call us we'll pick you" and not sure how I picked up on that, I thought to myself that it was too exclusive of a club for me.. I think there was a post here on Dev.to from one of the GDE Team members.
I think it was this post that left a sour note with me. dev.to/stephenfluin/how-to-become-...
Is that any different from the Microsoft MVP program? I believe that all such experts program work on a nomination basis as they don't have the resources to review thousands of candidates.
Probably the same thing.
I think these programs are a bit useless, because I've never once in 30 years had an employer ask are you a MVP or GDE? Or even, are you a Top 5% contributor to Stack Overflow?
They don't want designations, they want solutions to their issues.
That's very true. The other thing is that most GDEs or MVPs don't even need a job because they'd make a lot more on their own than at a regular job.
A Microsoft MVP Award starts with a nomination and then it's all about community contributions over the past year. The process of reviewing contributions over the past year repeats every year.
Even it that is the case, it doesn't make the GDE or MVP programs useless. They should be about contributing to and supporting the technical communities surrounding a company's products. If you think this is useless, that's okay. There are many other ways to benefit from this though.
They are useless from the perspective that no employer ever asks for that type of certification. Besides even you said you don't want to be a GDE. The reasons you gave are inherent in these types of programs.
We need a post like this for every single organization on earth because, guess what, all of them have issues. Too much drama for very trivial stuff.
Luckily, we're not all affected by every single organization on earth. But the whole Angular ecosystem and community are affected by the Angular team management's decisions. The technical issues are one thing that many of us can agree on. Let's put them aside for a moment.
I'm sick to my stomach of learning about people leaving the Angular team with stories of ridicule, emotional abuse, harassment, being yelled at, being belittled and patronized. I feel sorry for Angular GDEs living in fear, afraid to speak up. Afraid for the consequences of making one wrong move in the eyes of whoever's influencing this program. Afraid of being harassed by their peers.
Customer needs can definitely be communicated to the Angular team and they do care. I brought feedback from one of my customers to the Angular team a few months ago and it was addressed with Angular 10.
would you ever consider leaving the angular community and joining vue or react or svelte?
Why not be a member of multiple communities at the same time?
It's the same as saying "you can use only one framework".
I personally use Angular, React (+ Gatsby), Preact, and Svelte. And I see reason to be member of all of these communities. On top of that I like Vue very much.
Thanks for sharing! Most of us devs really just want a pleasant experience from these frameworks. We enjoy coding GDE or !GDE, who doesn't like creating sexy and reactive UIs ??