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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

#181

Post by Tarential »

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…

I had the opportunity a few years back to work with Jeremy McGrath (many time motocross/supercross world champion) on a commercial shoot he did at our local motocross track. He was modest and pleasant to talk to. He treated me as just another rider, despite the obvious difference in our skill levels.

I also later had a chance to meet Jean Sebastien Roy, a slightly less famous but still top level rider, when he came to do a promotion for KTM. You'd never know from either of them how good they were until you actually saw them ride.

This contrasts heavily with some of the "experts" I ride with every weekend during the summer. I once had a competitor refuse to shake my hand and scoff at my attempts to introduce myself. It is a huge difference in attitude.

By the way, hello HN crowd. I've been a daily reader for several months but never found a topic where I felt I had something useful to post. I hope this has been relevant and useful.

P.S. I ended up beating the guy who wouldn't shake my hand, which gave me a petty feeling of satisfaction. Childish, perhaps, but I'm not perfect.

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

#183

Post by indubitably »

pretoriusB wrote: post #167
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...

Linus is definitely not nice.

He'll say so to your face, too. So at least he's honest about not being nice.

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

#184

Post by marcamillion »

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…

I agree with everything except for the "shining light is Radar" bit.

In my experience, he certainly started off as helpful for me. But perhaps I didn't learn at the pace that he expects, he quickly turned into a power-flexing troll - belittling any question I had.

Left a very bad taste in my mouth, and almost exemplifies everything that is wrong with the community.

That's sad, because as I said...he started off very helpful.

Do I ask a ton of questions? Yes. But if you can't manage that, you shouldn't be the head of a channel designed to help people. It's that simple.

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

#185

Post by boboblong »

shadowfiend wrote: post #67
Karunamon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Derision of stupidity is probably one of the worst characteristics of hacker culture, because “stupidity” tends to be shorthand for “disagreement with my point of view”. Then it's not stupidity. That's not what this article (at least that I can see), or my post, was talking about. I was referring specifically to failure to RTFM as the big one, with a side order of bad commits and pull requests. Ask any tech support…

“Ask any tech support monkey at the end of their day what they think about the average person.” The mistake so many people make is to let someone's lack of knowledge translate into “stupidity”, which is typically defined, and defined by you yourself, as an inherent, unchangeable trait. We toss around the word stupid, but it's got two meanings. One is the one I use with my friends when I talk about something who doesn…

>Once your project is entrenched, you can feel like you have the power to say whatever you want because your community is vast. That's a problem.

How is that a problem? What do you propose we do about it? Should be fine people for saying mean things? I don't follow, sorry.

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

#186

Post by boboblong »

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…

>it's just that you think toxic behavior is acceptable.

You think that calling someone's idea crappy is unacceptable? In what sense of the word? Are you saying that it should be illegal to make fun of someone's ideas?

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

#187

Post by boboblong »

potatolicious wrote: post #34
debacle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? If people are acting like assholes, they deserved to be called out.

When the goal is to change behavior as a whole it helps to not point anyone out. If you linked to a Github pull request that demonstrates this behavior, that guy now becomes the eye of the storm, instead of the community where the focus should be. If the author did that, we'd all be talking about how githubuserxyz is such an ass for belittling contributors and how dissimilar we each individually are from githubuserxy…

>When the goal is to change behavior as a whole it helps to not point anyone out.

Has it ever occurred to you that many people strongly dislike it when others attempt to change their legal, nonviolent behavior? It's nosy, condescending, self-righteous, and creepy.

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

#188

Post by boboblong »

msbarnett wrote: post #108
debacle wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't seem like an activity that's rampant in the community in any fashion. I personally only recall it happening once, ever, and I've been a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years.

> This doesn't seem like an activity that's rampant in the community in any fashion. I personally only recall it happening once, ever, and I've been a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years. If a lot of other people are talking about the negative consequences of something you personally haven't experienced, generalizing outwards from your own experiences to conclude that something a lot of other peo…

> If a lot of other people are talking about the negative consequences of something you personally haven't experienced, generalizing outwards from your own experiences to conclude that something a lot of other people have experienced doesn't exist is a pretty wrongheaded way to approach life.

You're wrong. Generalizing from your personal experience and from verifiable facts while paying little attention to vague whining and anonymous accusations (of unnamed alleged perpetrators, no less!) is an excellent way to approach life.

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

#190

Post by tripzilch »

tripzilch wrote: post #170
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…

Unsure if anyone will still read this, but I had another thought on this matter.

It occurs to me that you actually see highly-skilled jerks quite a lot. They piss and moan and kick and often aren't very successful, even if they're highly skilled.

Even if someone's highly skilled in some area, if they're being a jerk we're going to value that skill lower, anyway. Even though, if you'd stop and think about it, social skills are usually not related to being extremely highly skilled in some other area.

Being successful is usually a matter of luck and/or social skills. If you're extremely highly skilled and successful, you're going to be known as one of the positive examples of highly skilled people in this thread. If you're skilled, but either unlucky and/or a jerk, your skill won't be valued for what it really is capable of (unless, again, you're lucky), and you won't be noticed. Confirmation bias does the rest.

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