Community faults

Community faults

Posted Sep 27, 2007 10:52 UTC (Thu) by alankila (subscriber, #47141)
In reply to: Community faults by mjg59
Parent article: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

The old "tact filter theory" might be worth a rehash in this exponentially ballooning thread.

http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html

You know, I now expect to see some theorizing about which side males' and females' tact filters are on in further posts. :-p

Seriously though, the impression that people are _rude_ in the free software word might be nothing more than simply result of how geeks grew up to communicate. You say it's "waved away as being honest" but what if it really _is_ honest?

On to your point. I remain unconvinced that getting people who can't take flaming to contribute is a good thing. Why? Because I'm not convinced that their contributions are necessarily better than those people's who you drive off. (Some guys like Joel Spolsky are fond of stating things like "good coder is worth 10 bad ones".)

The reason why I think some flame resistance should come for granted is because lots of code is not really an expression of your personality or artistic talents, but is rather grunt work that should flow from understanding the relevant theories and using appropriate tools to work towards your goal.

If you make bad choices and get criticized for them, and your evaluation of the criticism shows that it's relevant, then someone might actually know better than you. (A golden opportunity to learn from a master!) If you find the criticism highly juvenile or irrelevant, then you are in the position to say so, too. Discussions being a public archive means that meritocracy of its sort should run its course and decide who is right.

Of course, valid criticism (maybe "failing to understand a specific aspect of the layering models") also means that you really might not know enough about the system to properly contribute to it. (In other words, accepting the patch to kernel might introduce bugs.) I find this concern strangely valid. I mean, even a trivial bug can serve as a signal that this guy is not careful enough to get even simple stuff right: how could he possibly contribute something of real value?

Not to mention that code isn't everything. The person behind the code matters because future maintenance is likely to fall to him. And how well he interfaces with others matters because others may want to add stuff to his code. These matters are decided by the existing community: you have to integrate to it. If it seems hostile, then remember the tact filter stuff, give others the benefit the doubt and don the flamesuit.

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