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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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#92

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by droithomme »

arkitaip wrote: post #63
droithomme wrote: post #54

Katz knows what he is talking about, doesn't he? This is like complaining that you were corrected by Feynman at your physics club meeting, no?

Feynman doesn't strike me as the kind of person who would have let his ego do something as obnoxious like this.

There's nothing at all "obnoxious" about a leading practitioner in a field correcting someone at an informal meeting. The people complaining about this seem petty and unappreciative.

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

#95

Post by leeoniya »

it's a tough situation. i think when you are presenting your own work or framework and teaching people how to use something that you have made, these comments are quite rude.

on the other hand if the speaker does not understand a concept which he did not invent and misrepresents it to an audience expecting to learn, it justifies some sort of a response which is not private. if a speaker said 2 + 2 = 7, as an educator or evangelist, it would be irresponsible to let the audience assert this as truth and only report it in private afterwards, when hundreds of people have been mis-informed.

ultimately it's the responsibility of the event organizer and the speaker to ensure that blatantly wrong things are not "taught" and that the presentation is peer reviewed before being given without disclaimers of credibility etc...

i'm not excusing Yehuda's behavior, especially if it was for minor nits and/or involved a speaker's custom architecture rather than general concepts.

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

#96

Post by hkarthik »

It sounds like the speaker was live coding (and struggling) during the presentation when Yehuda started to chime in. I've heard from many speakers that Live Coding is kind of a recipe for disaster, and so many experienced speakers avoid it.

All that aside, I hate linkbait posts like this which could have started useful discussion about speaking etiquette but fail to do so because of being so unnecessarily personal. The author could easily have scrubbed Yehuda's name to make the same point without the mud slingling.

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

#97

Post by bcrescimanno »

Despite agreeing with the general concept that we have a problem as hackers with constantly interrupting and clarifying points, I've flagged this post for the following reasons:

1) It shows a real lack of class to call an individual out by name when you're talking about etiquette. Yes, I realize that the title of the article was meant to be attention grabbing--all the more reason to flag it.

2) There's very little context as to what the actual conversation was about. The implication is that there was really no reason for Yehuda (or anyone) to interrupt. But without the real context, I don't know if it was a person butting in trying to look intelligent or a person trying to avoid people at a user group listening to someone suggesting a dangerous technique that shouldn't be allowed to grow.

3) The premise "Let them speak in public; let them be wrong!" is absolutely faulty and the comparison to the Dale Carnegie story was a total straw man. There is a world of difference between correcting someone in polite, social conversation and correcting someone in the context of a presentation in which the attendees may be seeing the speaker as an authority or expert.

Now I wasn't there, so I'll neither condemn nor condone the way this was approached--but the article itself is little more than a smear against one person and I find it distasteful.

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

#98

Post by pnathan »

iamchrisle wrote: post #81

My name is Chris Le and I was there. Here's what I recall happened: 1. Dude was making a presentation on meta programming. 2. Dude had his laptop plugged in and live coded. 3. Dude seemed to struggle a little. 4. Katz asked him "Why are you doing it this way? Shouldn't you ..." 5. Dude attempted to explain. Possibly tripped up by the question. 6. Group + Katz helped to debug his code and got it working. 7. Katz expla…

Upvoted for being an observer and providing a first-hand report.

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

#99

Post by VeejayRampay »

If he's willing to help and participate, maybe you should sit quiet and listen. He's Yehuda fucking Katz you see...

He's getting some negative press these days, the success of his Kickstarter project seems to have pissed off a few people, heh.

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

#100

Post by umjames »

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 wasn't at the meeting. I could have gone, but decided not to.

The only reason I can find for the OP to explicitly call out Yehuda is so that maybe he'll actually read the article and consider the advice it contains. If the article's intent was to bring attention to this type of behavior, then mission accomplished.

I think the OP wishes she had taken a less passive approach to this when considering the sequence of events in retrospect. Sometimes, it's hard to be "in the moment", and only afterwards do you wish you said/did things differently.

Truthfully, I wish she had said something about this to Yehuda right at the meeting, but after it was all said and done and not in front of everyone. However, I don't know how he would have taken it. I could see the situation getting uglier at that point. Hopefully, he can/will learn from this for the future. No one is beyond criticism. We all have things we could be better at.

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