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Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting

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Re: Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting

#31

Post by scott_s »

deong wrote: post #25
scott_s wrote: post #15

I suppose you need to say up front what the expectations for the meeting are. I give and sit on presentations from other researchers, and I have even come up with a metric to express how many questions there are: MTTI, mean time to interruption. I have been in presentations with an MTTI of 1 minute. A typical presentation has an MTTI of about 5 minutes. A presentation with "few" interruptions has an MTTI of about 15…

I also see and give a lot of academic presentations, and I'm not aware of any venue that encourages someone from the audience to commandeer a talk. "Let's take this offline" is so common as to be a cliche, and if the speaker got flustered enough to get caught up in it, a decent moderator steps and makes that call. There are many reasons for this. One is that it's simply the polite thing to do. Another is that the aud…

You might have missed this sentence: However, what is never acceptable is someone commandeering the presentation and using it to talk about their own thing. Moderators will step in if it starts devolving like that.

Re: Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting

#32

Post by [deleted] »

tmorton wrote: post #8

Wow. A post about etiquette that calls someone out by name, with an insulting headline? Face-to-face is the right channel for this sort of pointed criticism. Failing that, email might work. To pass the lesson along to the larger community, leave the specific names out of it - talk about "a big name in the community" who behaved badly. People who were there will know who you're talking about, but it doesn't become par…

[deleted]

Re: Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting

#33

Post by iamgilesbowkett »

scott_s wrote: post #15

I suppose you need to say up front what the expectations for the meeting are. I give and sit on presentations from other researchers, and I have even come up with a metric to express how many questions there are: MTTI, mean time to interruption. I have been in presentations with an MTTI of 1 minute. A typical presentation has an MTTI of about 5 minutes. A presentation with "few" interruptions has an MTTI of about 15…

"I suppose you need to say up front what the expectations for the meeting are."

no, you absolutely do not. the onus is absolutely on the speaker here.

Re: Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting

#35

Post by xutopia »

vidarh wrote: post #22
xutopia wrote: post #7

Yehuda Katz may not always have the most tact but he's rarely wrong. As another comment pointed out this is not only wrong but dangerously wrong.

What is "this"? The article does not give the context.

The speaker apparently wrote a query with a glaring SQL injection issue (the kind we use as example when explaining injection). I wasn't there but it sounds like Yehuda simply explained that it was wrong and showed how Rails has built-in tools to avoid injection. At least I'm assuming from what I gathered here and on twitter.

Re: Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting

#36

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

A problem with programmers is that we don't always see that being right isn't necessarily justification for any and all corrective action that you might take.

You can be right and do nothing, you can be right and hear the person out before quietly suggesting some alternatives people might want to look at, you can be right and ask their permission to talk a little about the subject.

Sadly some people think that just being right gives you carte blanche but that's rarely true. I don't think anyone is objecting to the existence of discussion or correction here, more the form it took which, if the account is accurate (which it may not be), was right at the "rarely acceptable" end of the spectrum.

Re: Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting

#37

Post by amorphid »

I believe that correcting people in public is rarely effective. In this situation, if I knew a "better" way to do it, correcting the speaker & hijacking the preso is not likely to produce positive results. First, people will focus more on me hijacking the preso than whatever it is I'm trying to say. Second, even if I successfully communicate my "better" idea and save a room full of programmers from a bad habit, I'm not giving them the judgement necessary to avoid the next programming mistake they'll make. Lastly, I have no interest in being right if it means drawing the wrong kind of attention to myself on Hacker News.

It does make a good story though, and it's pretty good PR if you're trying to be infamous :)

Re: Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting

#38

Post by shawnc »

tmorton wrote: post #8

Wow. A post about etiquette that calls someone out by name, with an insulting headline? Face-to-face is the right channel for this sort of pointed criticism. Failing that, email might work. To pass the lesson along to the larger community, leave the specific names out of it - talk about "a big name in the community" who behaved badly. People who were there will know who you're talking about, but it doesn't become par…

I agree with your point about face=to-face or direct communication first. Barring that not accomplishing anything however, I'm not so sure I agree with the last part anymore. I used to, fully. However, after years of watching this 'accepted etiquette' go on and on, i've realized the ones who've done the stupid thing, keep on doing it - with new people none the wiser.

Why not call someone out by name? This person seems that they'd have no problem doing so if it came to that. I'm honestly tired of the wise, polite people keeping their mouths shut because it's rude, while the rude people never stop being idiots.

Re: Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting

#39

Post by gorydetails »

Well, actually, a better title would be "Why you should invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting." A user group meeting is the perfect place for lively conversation and free, unfiltered exchanges of ideas.

Even without knowing any of the context that prompted Yehuda to intervene so forcefully, there's a strong probability, based on his remarkably proficient community involvement, that he was making a good point. Would remaining quiet and letting the speaker present his code to a much larger audience at a conference be better?

What's more important? People feeling good about themselves, or people learning? Not that those options are mutually exclusive, but it makes no sense to sacrifice the latter for the sake of the former.

Re: Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting

#40

Post by grandalf »

At the highest levels, in academia, business, and the arts, the sort of behavior Yehuda exhibited is completely acceptable.

If you respect the discipline/art/science enough, then you value truth over the ego of some lesser being.

People who dislike the conflict in these kinds of interactions are also inclined to dislike conflict on the editorial page, preferring instead bland "objective" writing.

The thing is, nothing is objective and the best way for the audience to view the truth is by observing the conflict and drawing its own conclusion.

And yeah, Yehuda is one of the best programmers most of us would ever sit in a room with... and thus he would find improvements to nearly anyone's code. To view this as a bad thing and to prefer polite ignorance doesn't seem like the best approach.

There may have also been benefits to the presenter's approach (maybe simplicity?) If you look at Yehuda's refactoring of Rails, there is tons of insight but also significantly more abstraction, which in some cases makes things less obvious. So the presenter should have been able to defend his/her approach at least on some basis.

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