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Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

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Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#121

Post by maratd »

DigitalJack wrote: post #105
bmj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through this phase as a climber (fortunately it preceded my career as a programmer, so I learned my lesson), and I've gotten over myself, and realized that no matter what I do, there are scores of people who are better, and more humble. Also I am rather jealous you live in Fountainbleau. Very.

You bring up a point that is interesting to me. Why does it matter to our own humility if there exist people that are better/smarter/abler than we are? It does matter to me, but I feel it shouldn't. Woe to me if I am ever the best at anything, I'm sure I'd be a paragon of intolerance for my lessers. And yet, some of the smartest people I know, people who very well know their own ability, are the among the kindest peo…

> Why does it matter to our own humility if there exist people that are better/smarter/abler than we are?

They're competition.

On the one hand, you compete against them and how well you do will determine your life path. On the other, if you don't have any competition ... that's an even worse outcome, since you might be moving on a fruitless path in the wrong direction.

> It does matter to me, but I feel it shouldn't.

Well, to be perfectly blunt, that's the definition of insecurity. In other words, you're concerned you might lose the competition in some way or another. Money, social standing, happiness, you name it.

Everybody is secure and insecure in their own ways. For example, just using myself as an example ... I don't care if you're a better coder than me, but it'll bother me if you know more about how a kernel functions and works. I know or at least I think I know, very little about how kernels work. It might be true, it might be untrue, but that's how I feel. Would fixing that really change anything for me? Probably not. It's not directly applicable to my work. Which is why I don't do anything about that, it would be a waste of my time and I don't think I would enjoy it. But it's a "weak spot", so my mind dwells on it. Well, dwells on it is a bit much. Maybe passing thoughts when the subject comes up?

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#122

Post by debacle »

msbarnett wrote: post #110
zzzeek wrote: post #61

this blog post has a major omission of any specifics whatsoever. I've never seen this kind of behavior, and I'm having a great urge to say something like, "oh well because PHP/Ruby/etc". But that is all prejudicial. Won't we be given some specifics so that we don't have to guess what famous OSS author actually typed "HAHAHA" at a pull request ?

It's hard to believe that people "have never seen this behaviour" have spent much time watching the OSS community. Ulrich Dreper, well known OSS contributor and former steward of glibc, was famous for flaming the ever-living shit out of anyone who dared submit a patch that he in any way did not care for. To give but one example, http://www.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2000-08/msg00053.htm...

That was flaming the ever-living shit out of someone? Seems like he's trying to keep his stdlib clean and efficient.

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#123

Post by j_baker »

tinco wrote: post #9

I've never seen an opensource leader make fun of an honest attempt at contribution. What I have seen is a lot of ignoring and rejecting attempts. Miguel de Icaza had a blog post on this I think. The problem with large opensource projects is that they have a lot to do, and simply don't have time to thoroughly follow up on all the small contributions that are ridden with naieve errors and plain formatting issues. Not t…

I think it's unfair to call the OSS project leaders "charity workers" and not the contributors. Either way, if OSS project leaders have so little free time, why wouldn't they spend more of it fostering developers into being more productive members of the project? This is what baffles me most about the situation. It's a lose-lose for everyone when a project leader acts like a jerk.

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#124

Post by msbarnett »

debacle wrote: post #122
msbarnett wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to believe that people "have never seen this behaviour" have spent much time watching the OSS community. Ulrich Dreper, well known OSS contributor and former steward of glibc, was famous for flaming the ever-living shit out of anyone who dared submit a patch that he in any way did not care for. To give but one example, http://www.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2000-08/msg00053.htm...

That was flaming the ever-living shit out of someone? Seems like he's trying to keep his stdlib clean and efficient.

So it's not that you've never seen this behavior in your tenure as " a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years", it's just that you think toxic behavior is acceptable.

That's, at least, a more intellectually honest position than your previous claim.

There are a lot of ways to reject a patch on the grounds of cleanness and efficiency that don't involve deriding the contributor's work as "BSD crap" that only helps people who "deserve to be punished".

Drepper was a monumental asshole, and he deeply hurt the glibc project for years.

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#125

Post by mnicole »

Karunamon wrote: post #104
mnicole wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds more like you love the environment because you feel good shooting people down rather than what's best for the project (and open-source) long-term. This attitude is why more people don't contribute to - and become better at - the process.

Sometimes shooting people down is what's best for the project. You make it sound like those are mutually exclusive.

I completely disagree. There's nothing gained from making someone feel incompetent when they're just volunteering to better themselves, meet like-minded people and work on something they believe in. You will end up surrounding yourself with equally socially inept people if you encourage this behavior in your community.

Be it doing a better job explaining the project and the requirement/skillset minimums, aptitude tests before they even contribute, or having a pre-defined list of responses to bad code (i.e. '294: Doesn't follow x standard, please see FAQ pg. 84'), there are better ways of handling these situations that encourage people to get better without making them feel worse. Just because bullying people has worked in getting the response that you want doesn't make it the right one.

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#126

Post by bmj »

DigitalJack wrote: post #105
bmj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through this phase as a climber (fortunately it preceded my career as a programmer, so I learned my lesson), and I've gotten over myself, and realized that no matter what I do, there are scores of people who are better, and more humble. Also I am rather jealous you live in Fountainbleau. Very.

You bring up a point that is interesting to me. Why does it matter to our own humility if there exist people that are better/smarter/abler than we are? It does matter to me, but I feel it shouldn't. Woe to me if I am ever the best at anything, I'm sure I'd be a paragon of intolerance for my lessers. And yet, some of the smartest people I know, people who very well know their own ability, are the among the kindest peo…

From my experience as a climber[1], it has to do with my own comfort level, and feeling the need to compare myself to others. When I judged others as n00bs, or weaker than I was, it was done mostly to make myself feel better about myself. I came to conclusions that rather than comparing myself to people who couldn't climb as hard (and being motivated to remain "better" than them), it was more beneficial (both for my motivation and my attitude) to rather compare myself to people better. I had no delusions of being better than these folks, and it helped me understand my own weaknesses. So, humility matters, because I know I likely won't climb 8b without ditching my job. I can push myself, but it's done from the perspective of "wow, I have so much room to improve" rather than "I need to be stronger than all these weaker people."

[1] I am probably an "above average" climber, having done 7c+ problems here in the States.

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#127

Post by nagrom »

jasonkester wrote: post #53

This isn't restricted to open source project leaders, or even open source developers. You'll find the same childish elitism in pretty much every field of human endeavor. Programmers certainly do it. Laughing at noobs and being mean to them is pretty much the sole purpose of IRC, unless I'm mistaken. Surfers do it. Climbers do it. I've even seen rocket scientists do it. The interesting thing is watching which members…

I think it has to do with the level of mastery. At some point, when you become really good at something (almost anything), you realise that a lot of your own knowledge now comes from explaining the basics to people who don't know anything. By forcing yourself to redo the basics, you get fresh insight on a level that someone new to whatever activity simply can't appreciate because they don't have X years experience with which to consider things.

I know that I now love teaching bash shell and C. I know that I am not the most talented shell guru or C programmer, but a lot of my knowledge now comes from answering questions from beginners that I hadn't previously considered (in bash, e.g., how can I tell within a script if the standard input comes from a keyboard or a file, or in C why don't you require the argument to return to be in brackets?) Questions that aren't necessarily hard, but that I hadn't asked when I was learning and now need to figure out the answer to on-the-fly. I now love teaching beginners because there's going to be the chance that they ask a really interesting question and I'm going to learn something myself.

10 years ago I would have hated that, because I wasn't comfortable in admitting what I didn't know - partly because I was still finding out that I didn't know things on a daily basis. Learning has now become a delight, rather than something to be achieved to get to the next thing.

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#128

Post by debacle »

msbarnett wrote: post #124
debacle wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was flaming the ever-living shit out of someone? Seems like he's trying to keep his stdlib clean and efficient.

So it's not that you've never seen this behavior in your tenure as " a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years", it's just that you think toxic behavior is acceptable. That's, at least, a more intellectually honest position than your previous claim. There are a lot of ways to reject a patch on the grounds of cleanness and efficiency that don't involve deriding the contributor's work as "BSD crap" tha…

Toxic? Really?

Lighten up, Francis.

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#129

Post by vorg »

kyllo wrote: post #106
groby_b wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same experience in the dance world. I was privileged enough to be able to train with national and world champions. At the lower end of that scale, people were incredibly full of themselves. Work with somebody who's recognized world wide? She's the nicest person ever. (Even though I clearly wasn't as good as she'd have liked me to be ;) It's inspiring to work with people who don't have anything to prove to y…

Yes, this is because the experts don't feel threatened by noobs. They know they are actually experts, so they don't need to stoop to the level of picking on noobs to make them selves feel like experts. It's the "nervous middle classes" that feel a need to pick on noobs to reassure themselves. PG wrote an article that describes this same phenomenon vis-a-vis nerds and popular kids in school: If I remember correctly, t…

These nervous middle classes who aren't experts in anything more complex than "fizz without the buzz" often rise to project manager status by taking out the existing leaders. These are the "open source project leaders" who engage in backslagging, usually indirectly, e.g. telling their clueless minions that so-and-so represents a threat to revenue and perhaps someone should "earn another stripe for their hacker colors by putting a dent in this problem".

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#130

Post by jacquesm »

joering2 wrote: post #55

My favorite comments I will never forget from my ex-CTO: "you are wrong about this, because I say you are wrong." [turned out: he was dead wrong!] "stay home if you want to answer phonecall from your dad." [knowing he is in the hospital] "today you have been all day on the phone." [after talking with dad for 3 min 35 sec] "stop pinging google to check if the net is working." "ping doesn't tell you anything." "I hate…

Why did you work there for as long as you did? After the first two you could have packed up without any repercussions, and you should have made a little farewell present to the CEO giving him your exact reasons for leaving.
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