Be Kind

:D

Having never heard of this person before, I've done about ten minutes of research into who he is and why (in the words of his own about page) I should care.

I've come up empty. It seems like he's got enough money now that he feels like engaging in some verbal philanthropy. That's fine, but does anyone have any concrete reasons I should prioritize reading his output over others?

That is a tricky case.

It never hurts to be aware of the issue. Beyond that, try to stay within community norms. Every approach will have failure modes. Know and accept which ones are likely with what you are doing, and deal with them when they come.

In some communities this will mean that you are very straightforward and technical. Don't say anything emotional. Always work from facts. If you are misunderstood, note it, apologize for the misunderstanding, and move on.

In other communities it might mean that you actively solicit input from decision makers, and carefully avoid controversial topics.

A variety of approaches will work. But following strategy X in a community that is set up for strategy Y is a recipe for disaster.

Don't know boz, but would probably like him. Hopefully I will bump into him someday.

Somehow, I seem to get along with all of these "raging assholes" that everybody complains about when I meet them. They tend to do interesting stuff, are interesting to talk to, and, generally, aren't attempting to do active harm to you because they're too busy doing stuff.

Of course, if they accidentally do something that harms me or ticks me off, I WILL TELL THEM. Normally, they are the first to apologize and help fix the issue they caused.

I only flip someone into the true asshole category when I tell them what they did to cause me grief, and they don't try to make amends somehow.

I had almost that exact conversation with my boss a few years back (except for the part about almost getting fired). I was completely stunned that people thought I was indifferent to their ideas and bent on finding flaws, because I had actually made an effort not to do that for quite a while before the conversation. It turns out that, at least for me, navigating through people's sensitivities while having a technical discussion and making sure the truth is discovered is extremely difficult.

The effect it had on me was to basically make me clam up, because I decided that pointing out issues that would eventually crop up was not worth the risk of alienating my coworkers. It's hard for me to say whether this was a net positive or negative in terms of overall productivity, because if my shutting up makes the team more cohesive, I can see how finding the problems for themselves would grow their strengths over time. On the other hand, we often make decisions now that I would have questioned before in the process of talking it out (that includes my own decisions often enough because the whole discussion process is chilled). Ultimately, we seem to have a more congenial team (at least on the surface) at the price of having more bugfixes to deal with. Very unclear to me whether I did the right thing, but I can't really think of another way to handle it.

Edit to add:

The other big effect I noticed after learning to let stuff go was that I generally feel a lot less invested in the projects now. Before, I would treat every project I was on like it was my baby, and now I feel much more like I'm just working on somebody else's thing. That's not necessarily a bad thing (my phrasing is poor above, but I'm too tired to fix it at the moment), because it probably more accurately represents the real situation. The sense of detachment does tend to mean that I don't push as hard to go beyond expectations though.