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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

#161

Post by grogenaut »

lazyjones wrote: post #15

I've seen this a couple of times but not after pull requests, but simple (verified even) bug reports or feature requests. Let me quote a recent example from IRC: > XXXXX interesting how the number of new github issues went down since i started ignoring them :) > XXXXX could be coincidence, but i suspect having a few open tickets discourages the more frivolous requests we usually got there" Nice attitude there! After…

If the project gets big enough you really need to have someone just dealing with the issues. It's super time consuming. I've gotten commit access and cred on several open source projects just by going through the issue log and triaging it. There's a great post I can't find on a good triage process for issues. OSS projects are much more likely to give you access to do tickets than to commit. And on github, you can tag issues to help the maintainers sort the issues.

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

#162

Post by grogenaut »

marcamillion wrote: post #89

I thought this was exclusive to the Rails community - but it is good to see it's not. I am glad someone is speaking out against it, because it sucks. One of the major reasons people don't learn to be better developers is because of "elite developers" that have come before them that take pride in humiliating them. This article is very on-point. I nearly stopped learning Rails because of the torment from #RubyOnRails o…

Every time I've gone to RubyOnRails I've had to fend off supposed experts who are really morons. Like since 2005. I've had the experts tell me, when asking questions about how I might fix an issue with upgrade issues with a big rails plugin (now engine) and rails that "You should just wait and the plugin maintainers will do it eventually". No help on what to try, nothing. It took me throwing down the commit log / website showing me as the maintainer to get them to not be condescending. That channel is terrible. The shining light is Radar. Man that dude is good. Tester and coder on shopify. And effing friendly. Can't say enough about him.

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

#163

Post by smsm42 »

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…

I hope the pay was really excellent, I mean - fabulous. Otherwise I don't see why someone would submit to such treatment. Many companies are constantly looking for good programmers, and I bet you can find one with a non-jerk boss.

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

#164

Post by tinco »

j_baker wrote: post #123
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.

I think it is unfair to call "contributors" charity workers when all they do is cause headaches for the oss project leaders.

The project leader won't be a jerk to you if you make a nice well-tested, style-adhering commit that only addresses a single issue without breaking other code.

Don't think for a second 'occasional contributors' combined efforts even come close to the contribution of even a single project leader.

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

#165

Post by TheZenPsycho »

j_baker wrote: post #123
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.

The Mythical Man Month. When it comes to software, uniformly accepting and mentoring newcomers into a project does not bring uniformly good return- and in many or most cases, will result in NEGATIVE return, that is, a bad developer can cause progress to move backward, making more work for the other developers- both in working around the badness, and in time spent educating the newbie.

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

#166

Post by JonnieCache »

grogenaut wrote: post #162
marcamillion wrote: post #89

I thought this was exclusive to the Rails community - but it is good to see it's not. I am glad someone is speaking out against it, because it sucks. One of the major reasons people don't learn to be better developers is because of "elite developers" that have come before them that take pride in humiliating them. This article is very on-point. I nearly stopped learning Rails because of the torment from #RubyOnRails o…

Every time I've gone to RubyOnRails I've had to fend off supposed experts who are really morons. Like since 2005. I've had the experts tell me, when asking questions about how I might fix an issue with upgrade issues with a big rails plugin (now engine) and rails that "You should just wait and the plugin maintainers will do it eventually". No help on what to try, nothing. It took me throwing down the commit log / web…

Never, ever go in #rubyonrails. Every time I've ever been in there I get nothing but industrial strength sarcasm from people who don't actually know what they're talking about.

Who are these people? Are they socially awkward nerdy types, or are they more the "jock" side of the coin who understand social rules better than most but simply consider themselves above them?

My first instinct is to assume they're all 14 years old, because that was what everyone I knew was like when I was 14. Inevitably these people turn out to be in their 30s and have somehow assembled complete lives with jobs and houses and so on. The mind boggles.

By the way, #ruby on freenode is very noob friendly, with people going far out of their way to help beginning coders. There's probably a better class of noob in there as compared to #rubyonrails though.

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

#167

Post by pretoriusB »

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…

>But there it stops. Once you hit a threshold of "better than pretty much everybody in the world, even those who have dedicated their life to this stuff", you don't really see this sort of elitism anymore.

I'm not so sure. Consider Linus, Rob Pike, and others...

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

#168

Post by pretoriusB »

nagrom wrote: post #127
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 wi…

>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'm not sure it works that way. I'm very good at one or two things myself, but I don't really find that any additional knowledge now cames to me from explaining the basics to newcomers.

Rather, it's one of these (depending on the person):

1) when you become really good, you realise how much you still don't know, so you don't find it insulting of hilarious that other people don't know even the basis...

2) people motivated and devoted enough to get really good don't really care for the politics and the elitism anyway. They just care about the subject matter, and have no problem explaining it to a newb (and some love their field so much, you can't get them to STOP explaining it!).

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

#169

Post by zxcdw »

woah wrote: post #93
codewright wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some IRC channels I'm in are great. (Hi Clojure! Hi Haskell! You guys are really nice!) Some are like ##C which is a hive of scum and villainy.

Just went in ##C-unregistered, and they were quite nice

We're quite nice in ##C. Try ##C++ next time. :)

Although the channels are meant for discussion about standard C/C++, in IRC it seems that many people actually try to master the standards of these languages and use that as a weapon to mock other people. It really feels like that at times. And it's understandable though - a question for which the answer can't be found in the language standard is off-topic. In such environment and "culture" it's inevitable that people start raging after the third "What is the best IDE/I mixed pointers and arrays and why not work they should be the same, no?" question for the day. At some point you just wish to kick these people off the channel the moment they voice their presence.

I can totally see why this would not be a case in a channel related to Haskell or Clojure where talking about anything related to the language is the point, rather than the point being the language standard.

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

#170

Post by tripzilch »

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…

> But there it stops. Once you hit a threshold of "better than pretty much everybody in the world, even those who have dedicated their life to this stuff", you don't really see this sort of elitism anymore.

That's what you want to believe. But really what sort of magical transformation do you suppose will happen once you cross that threshold? Why would a personality change?

No, what I think happens is this: A person with sufficiently high skill, better than anyone else and generally known to be, will get sufficient recognition and awe that they don't need to establish their rank in the pecking order. However, take away the recognition, and also a highly skilled person inclined to jerk-behaviour will again start kicking the lower ranks.

Some people are jerks. In some situations jerk-behaviour is more likely to surface than in others. But being extremely good at something does not necessarily improve one's personality. There's a difference between "I don't want to be a jerk" and "I don't need to be a jerk". The former is the better person.

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