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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

#131

Post by tlear »

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…

Big part of it is if person is an expert but does things where he IS a noob. I am an expert in some things but I am a noob climber, very average runner

People who feel need to pick on noobs who actually trying to learn are scum. There are noobs that do not want to learn or absorb new things, yeah torture them if you want. but if someone is genuinely working on something and you put them down..

As a noob climber I can see the jerk types, not because they pick on me (I am so horrible that I am not worth the time) but because of how they get people react in two different ways. Some kiss their ass and other just exclude them (silence when they start talking to their peers working on a problem, people need to leave etc)

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

#132

Post by officemonkey »

npsimons wrote: post #111
akkartik wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus being flame-y is not the same thing at all. He's not telling people to RTFM afaics.

I was about to say this same thing; Linus is extremely tame by most people's standards, and when he does get snippy, he tends to reserve vitriol mostly for those who should know better. If he does take the time to criticize a "noob", it's not because they are a beginner, it's because their idea is flat out wrong. Take the whole git/C++ email exchange ( http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643... )…

>if you want due consideration from people more busy than you, you should give your idea due consideration yourself.

I am keeping this quote and will give you proper attribution.

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

#133

Post by keithpeter »

codex_irl wrote: post #119
keithpeter wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I've been fired from one job for standing up in a meeting and calling the boss a self-important asshole & refusing to retract it." Well, yes, that would cause some difficulties and a slightly chilled air around the coffee machine where I work as well. There are ways of communicating the sentiment without making it easy for them to get rid of you...

I agree with you, but I did not really want to stay working for that guy anyways - it was no loss. My take on working is that my employer is renting my time & skills to complete a job, they have every right to expect value for their money - but they don't own me, nor can they tell me when I am allowed to take a phone call, go for a lunch break, shout at me or demand that I work extra hours for no extra money. As the…

Yup, as a teacher I have a huge amount of autonomy. I can work at home (I actually do log into an rdp session, but I don't have to) and schedule the between class work when I wish to. We tend to use mobile phones for personal calls in the UK, just a fashion I suppose.

The funny thing is that I end up doing a lot of work on my own time...

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

#134

Post by [deleted] »

debacle wrote: post #128
msbarnett wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by b1daly »

When I was high school I had the opportunity to work with an aspiring music producer. It was great fun and a formative experience because he had a notably kind and supportive demeanor, coupled with focus. He went on to become a superstar producer and to this day when I run into him he has exactly the same demeanor.

This leads me to think some aspects of personality and how we treat others are innate. Jerks can be talented and successful too, and just remain Jerks. It takes all kinds.

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

#136

Post by detst »

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…

This.

When jasonkester says:

  Generally it ranges between "reasonably good" and "better 
  than most people I know" [...] [b]ut there it stops.
I don't believe it's necessarily true. It has more to do with how they think they are perceived. Look at Kobe Bryant, one of the best basketball players to ever live. I've seen videos where someone will challenge him, "I'll get 2 before you get 10". Kobe takes that as disrespect. This person doesn't realize how good he is. He then goes on to dominate the 1-on-1, aggressively trash talking throughout. Try upsetting a doctor by calling him/her "mister"/"miss" repeatedly.

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

#138

Post by bmelton »

ynniv wrote: post #57

I played pull request with a framework recently. There was something that I wanted to do that could only be done if the framework had fully chained a JavaScript function (ie, forwarded all parameters, included "this", and returned the result). It was an easy fix, but it turned out that what appeared to be an omission was intentional due to very specific edge cases in JavaScript that prevented someone from doing somet…

That sounds exactly like the last pull request I made to jQuery -- I found a bug in my use case that was so easily fixed it seemed like an omission, only to realize that it was deliberate due to some other, older edge case that had been coded around.

I ended up with the same result, however I will say that at least the jQuery team was very polite and respectful and was more than willing to discuss the issue at length, help explain the pros and cons of either scenario, and we were able to end up with a new, third workaround that should work with both edge cases.

Sorry that yours went the other way, but I found it spooky how closely your experience mirrored mine, despite a completely opposite resolution.

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

#140

Post by Spearchucker »

That this still happens is sad.

I was on the receiving end way back in 2002. I'd just written an RS232 library for the .NET Compact Framework that ended up in the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework Core Reference[1]. It was also referenced by an MSDN article[2], so got a lot of attention.

I left a bug in there which broke anything that didn't use default settings. The abuse was astounding. It was the last code written on my own time that I ever published.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/book.aspx?ID=5960&#3...

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446565.aspx

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