When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided" • Hacker News Board

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#181

Post by jffry » Fri, May 06, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

lhecker wrote: post #139

Hi! I'm the person who wrote that blog post. If you have any questions whatsoever, please let me know! English is not my native language and "The solution is trivial" was meant sarcastic. The solution isn't trivial at all, nor is it complete, because solving the corner cases is complex. I'd also like to mention ahead of time that DirectWrite/Direct2D is very fast at drawing western (Latin) text without coloring (>200…

> English is not my native language and "The solution is trivial" was meant sarcastic. The solution isn't trivial at all, nor is it complete, because solving the corner cases is complex.

I think it's really difficult to convey sarcasm well in text, and what seems obvious to you as a writer might not come across as sarcasm to readers. I certainly didn't understand that as sarcastic right away.

It might be better to address it directly and in a friendly way, like this:

> Like I did, you might be wondering right now why we don't just create our own, much larger lookup table and wrap it around Direct2D. Well, we can’t just tell Direct2D to use our custom cache [...]

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#182

Post by pyb » Fri, May 06, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

arrogant-ms-dev wrote: post #122

DHowett wrote: post #30

Another day, another Casey post dunking on my team. Hi! This tweet misses the mark only a little bit; in a previous blog post, we apologized[1] pretty frankly to everyone involved in this discussion. I'll admit that we didn't list him by name, but neither did we list the other handful of folks involved. We should have. In turn, Casey rightly did not acknowledge it except to tell his followers that it was not a real a…

Quoted post unavailable.

Some say, in this thread and elsewhere, that this is representative of how many teams at MS work.

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#183

Post by dleslie » Fri, May 06, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

lhecker wrote: post #139

Hi! I'm the person who wrote that blog post. If you have any questions whatsoever, please let me know! English is not my native language and "The solution is trivial" was meant sarcastic. The solution isn't trivial at all, nor is it complete, because solving the corner cases is complex. I'd also like to mention ahead of time that DirectWrite/Direct2D is very fast at drawing western (Latin) text without coloring (>200…

Perhaps worth considering is that sarcasm doesn't transmit easily over text, and certainly not in contexts where it's not expected. If you want to be clear about it, a common convention is to write /s after your sarcastic statement.

It might also help to acknowledge that Casey's feedback and the interaction with them was constructive and instrumental to this improvement being considered and deployed, even if the team ultimately took another approach than the one that Casey suggested.

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#184

Post by vmception » Fri, May 06, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

lhecker wrote: post #139

Hi! I'm the person who wrote that blog post. If you have any questions whatsoever, please let me know! English is not my native language and "The solution is trivial" was meant sarcastic. The solution isn't trivial at all, nor is it complete, because solving the corner cases is complex. I'd also like to mention ahead of time that DirectWrite/Direct2D is very fast at drawing western (Latin) text without coloring (>200…

Just going to add that referring to someone as a community member [of Microsoft] is such a self aggrandizing term for "someone reported it on the project's github issues page"

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#185

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Fri, May 06, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

curiousgal wrote: post #119

warent wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming? ... We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah. Someone is upset and venting. This comment comes across to me as "Ugh we already said the right words. Their distress is so inconvenient to me, why isn't it stopping?" EDIT: Typically in this community we denote when a comment has been edited to change a critical piece…

Would you be empathetic to a jerk who keeps insulting you? I don't get where the big issue is, a guy smugly makes a suggestion, the devs argue with it and point out that his tone isn't helping. The guy turns out to be right, the devs implement his suggestion. They don't have a history of thanking people by name so they make a vague attribution. Guy continues to be hostile against them, dev calls him out and now he's…

> They don't have a history of thanking people by name

That's... Not better?

EDIT: Actually, I thought of a way for that to be better, but it still doesn't make anything better here. If MS is used to working with b2b, where a customer comes in with a bug and MS fixes it and pushes the fix out, there it could be reasonable to not give credit; I don't condone it but it does match the culture there. The problem is that this very much does not translate to FOSS and/or public collaboration with individuals, where there very much is a culture of sharing credit.

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#186

Post by micromacrofoot » Fri, May 06, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

DHowett wrote: post #30

Another day, another Casey post dunking on my team. Hi! This tweet misses the mark only a little bit; in a previous blog post, we apologized[1] pretty frankly to everyone involved in this discussion. I'll admit that we didn't list him by name, but neither did we list the other handful of folks involved. We should have. In turn, Casey rightly did not acknowledge it except to tell his followers that it was not a real a…

"I just don't know what else he's asking for here."

ASK HIM

We've created the most incredible communication platform in human history and no one actually talks to each other, everyone just tries to publicly snipe.

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#187

Post by meheleventyone » Fri, May 06, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

user3939382 wrote: post #148

grepfru_it wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Microsoft culture spilling into the real world. There were several times when I pointed out a fix for a flaw or problem we were suffering from and was mocked and told it’s a silly idea that I shouldn’t be wasting time on. Fast forward 1-3 months later and that same person is singing the praises for the same idea someone else “came up with”. Except it was me shopping my idea around. Seeing the tweet and the th…

Cut scene to me explaining my new product to a Google VP (hoping to get funding) who instead made a crappy copy and released it 6 months later. Don't meet your heroes.

This really is every org, even if someone starts lukewarm to an idea it can percolate, get established and then come back out again as a fresh opinion without any malice intended. It’s always fun to get your own ideas back almost verbatim.

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#188

Post by HideousKojima » Fri, May 06, 2022, 2:16 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #170

HideousKojima wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did, they implemented a crazy fast terminal renderer (that still supports advanced features like right-to-left languages in Unicode, etc.) from scratch in about 3,000 lines of code just to prove their point: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm

Why not just create a PR, instead of a from-scratch grandstanding repo? This is a situation where tu quoque really doesn't smell like a logical fallacy. There is a lot of fuss about "being right" over "being helpful."

I'm assuming he thought his PR would be rejected, given their reaction to his initial questions about the issue:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#189

Post by chrisseaton » Fri, May 06, 2022, 2:16 PM UTC

gldnspud wrote: post #172

lhecker wrote: post #139

Hi! I'm the person who wrote that blog post. If you have any questions whatsoever, please let me know! English is not my native language and "The solution is trivial" was meant sarcastic. The solution isn't trivial at all, nor is it complete, because solving the corner cases is complex. I'd also like to mention ahead of time that DirectWrite/Direct2D is very fast at drawing western (Latin) text without coloring (>200…

Perhaps leave sarcasm out of technical blog posts, or add a footnote to indicate sarcasm? I couldn't tell you were being sarcastic and it seems others couldn't as well. I only found out through this comment. Text is the worst medium for sarcasm since sarcasm is often signaled by vocal inflection or body language, neither of which are present in your post.

Baffles me that people think sarcasm is a good way to communicate on the internet. You are begging to be misunderstood, either accidentally, or maliciously.

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#190

Post by kragen » Fri, May 06, 2022, 2:16 PM UTC

DHowett wrote: post #30

Another day, another Casey post dunking on my team. Hi! This tweet misses the mark only a little bit; in a previous blog post, we apologized[1] pretty frankly to everyone involved in this discussion. I'll admit that we didn't list him by name, but neither did we list the other handful of folks involved. We should have. In turn, Casey rightly did not acknowledge it except to tell his followers that it was not a real a…

Have you thought about not managing your team in such a way as to engender hostility from the outside world? It would be a good start to credit people outside the team for their work improving your product, instead of trying to take credit for it yourself.

Writing an "apology" for taking credit for someone else's work, without naming the person who did the work, is just adding insult to injury. Actually making amends would involve giving credit, both in your apology and by adding their name to the top of the original announcement if you can still edit it.