Live data from Hacker News

Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

where.coraline.codes

571–572 of 572 posts

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#571

The experience she relates reminds me a hell of a lot of the way my previous job ended, which amounted to a handful of offended people uninterested in (directly) talking, and (my direct) management largely uninterested in reconciliation / facilitating. All of the problems she relates are with people who are not directly communicating with her, usually after she's directly communicating with them. Whereas, according t…

Similar. I've kinda learned that some people just have a lot of trouble with direct communication - especially from peers or people they don't report to or don't consider authoritative for whatever reason. They'll come up with all sorts of complaints about diction, tone, format, vocabulary, or medium but the reality is they just don't like to communicate that way.

The strategy I use is to qualify and de-personalize everything. This is less persuasive writing, verbose, and slightly annoying but is "safer" if you don't know your audience. "It may be better", "X seems like it could be asked better", "help me understand your thoughts for X over Y", "what if we tried asking X like this? It might have this effect".

This is categorically less efficient communication but is arguably more 'effective' if it means people don't get offended. As it's hard to be effective when people are complaining to their managers.

Re: Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at this, by the guy who invented the word. Maybe it'll change your mind like it did mine. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

That's really interesting! I'm not sure whether this is sufficient to convince me to stop using the term "meritocracy" — the term is already ingrained in popular usage, irrespective of its provenance, and quite nice in that the word conveys the idea behind it relatively well, so I'm not sure whether the baggage associated with it is sufficiently toxic to justify dropping it. As for the idea of meritocracy, at least i…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN