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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

#41

Post by protomyth »

For me, this could go either way. When doing demos to explain a concept (such as metaprogramming) in a straight forward manner, you tend to do things that are easier to do other ways. It would be extremely annoying to have someone say there are easier ways to do that. Your demo isn't showing best practices for a piece of code, but using the code as a stepping stone for the code later.

Local users groups are good places to get decent critiques of your presentation before you take it on the road (bigger conference). The people are generally local and you've seen them before. Smart critiques are good for you and your code. I cannot imagine having audience participation banned at an user group.

The problem here is that and "outsider" came in and basically took apart a presenter brick-by-brick. From the writing of this one side, it seems like the presenter was trying to articulate a concept.

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

#42

Post by roguecoder »

Gods yes. I was at a conference with an older gentleman who interrupted every talk he was at, including the keynote. When he tried it with me I ignored him and kept on talking, because he was rude and out of line. It still wasn't fun, but at least he didn't bother me anymore. We should be encouraging people to give talks so we can hear about new and different things. If you don't like the talk it's easy to leave: if you intimidate the speaker into not presenting all you've done is be a bully.

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

#43

Post by scott_s »

ceol wrote: post #24
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 don't think Katz was merely asking questions. From the article: > Speaker: Talk talk talk talk. Talk talk talk? Demo demo demo. > Katz: Wait, why are you doing it that way? You should be doing it this way. [...] Katz plugged in his own laptop, and proceeded to redo the demo. That's not the behavior of someone who is curious. It's the behavior of someone who thinks they know better. Whether or not they actually do,…

I'm separating "Why are you doing it that way?" from "Move over" because I see them as two separate things. There is also a spectrum of first.

"You should be doing it this way" is on the rude side of what is acceptable in academic circles. That is, people will think you're rude for phrasing it that way, but the content of what you said is legit. A more polite version is "Did you consider doing it this other way? If so, why did you choose your way?"

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

#44

Post by deong »

bad_user wrote: post #12

There are some people going to such meetings that have the habit of contradicting the speaker in the hope of sounding smart. Yehuda Katz has proved that he's smart already and I hope he ain't one of those people. That said, this story doesn't have the right context, ignoring the actual talk and the actual arguments brought by Katz. Maybe the mistakes done by the speaker were too great to be ignored - and this is very…

> Maybe the mistakes done by the speaker were too great to be ignored

Still not appropriate behavior. Ideally, you bring up your point, have a brief discussion, and then, if you still feel the speaker is wrong, you take it offline. You don't have to pretend to agree with him or her -- you can say, "Well, I disagree, but let's talk more about it when you're done."

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

#45

Post by fredoliveira »

bad_user wrote: post #12

There are some people going to such meetings that have the habit of contradicting the speaker in the hope of sounding smart. Yehuda Katz has proved that he's smart already and I hope he ain't one of those people. That said, this story doesn't have the right context, ignoring the actual talk and the actual arguments brought by Katz. Maybe the mistakes done by the speaker were too great to be ignored - and this is very…

Getting criticized in public is like getting criticized in private - you feel bad, you swallow hard and eventually you understand it's for your own good.

Unless, however, it is done this way. You are being basically made fun of in front of an audience. Instead of using constructive criticism and manners to show he had a better way to do things, Yehuda took the bully stance and made the speaker look bad - much worse than he should.

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

#46

Post by kaiuhl »

davidbalbert wrote: post #21

This is a touchy subject. I think this kind of behavior is very counterproductive and we (programmers) seem to do it a lot. It's something that needs to be talked about and fixed. Miguel de Icaza wrote a great blog post about "well-actuallys" a year ago and it's definitely worth reading: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html That being said, it makes me uncomfortable that an article called "Why you shouldn…

I totally agree. What doesn't get mentioned in the OP is just how incorrect the presentation was. If I was a ruby newbie, I'd want someone to stand up and say why the presentation, which was surely being presented as truth, was actually incorrect. In addition, publicly berating Yehuda seems really pointless given his huge contributions to our community.

Let's be nice.

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

#47

Post by latch »

xutopia wrote: post #35
vidarh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are using my comment to base this on, it was just an example of how context matters. I've updated my comment to make it clear that it was an example. Apologies.

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

#48

Post by prezjordan »

gaius wrote: post #9

Dear Ruby "community", no-one cares about your internal bickering. Much as I hate to admit it, Zed Shaw was right.

Zed was right to an extent. I feel if you take the Python and Ruby communities and split them into two groups (superstars and people who think they're superstars), you'll find that Ruby superstars are quite... eccentric while Python superstars are helpful, insightful people.

However, go to #python and ask a question? You'll be treated like a total idiot by a bunch of mediocre programmers who think they're Guido himself.

Every community has its annoying parts, it all depends on the skill level.

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

#50

Post by deong »

scott_s wrote: post #31
deong wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oddly enough, yes, I did. Six lines of text, and I blew right past that one. Sorry about that. :)
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