Fighting passive aggression should not entirely fall on the victim

Posted Feb 8, 2025 7:07 UTC (Sat) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296)
In reply to: Fighting passive aggression should not entirely fall on the victim by interalia
Parent article: The selfish contributor revisited

> But are those environments really similar to OSS work though? Strangers don't turn up at the shop doing an unprompted change to your heavy machinery or to the vehicle. In the blue collar manual labour work you're talking about, the person is a team member that got explicitly hired by you. Or they're a team member and you're their more senior peer/mentor. And the justification for occasionally shouting in this context is that it can convey urgency and gravity where necessary. If they do something wrong like they're about to screw in the wrong bolt, you might have to urgently prevent or fix their action before the machine goes haywire and explodes.

OSS didn't invent non professional collaboration, though. In the blue collar world, sharing your shop with a buddy or acquaintance based on trust, a demonstrated level of competence and some sort of quid pro quo is absolutely the norm.

And in the OSS world, we're not forced to take patches from random strangers; people demonstrate their competence and trustworthiness over time and we choose who we want to work with based on that.

It's different in the OSS world because there is indeed a higher _expectation_ that we'll try to collaborate and make it work, but fundamentally it's all about trust, and if you can't demonstrate that your work is trustworthy you can't expect to get it in - and the way to become competent, to develop that trust, is to work well with others; listen, learn, own your mistakes and all that. That part's the same anywhere.

> If, despite previous advice, someone repeatedly tries to use the wrong bolt/bad technique in their patch/idea, you can tell them that those patches/ideas won't be considered as long as that error is still there and continues because it's not of sufficient quality. It's a brief but firm one liner that still doesn't require yelling or being passive aggressive.

Yup, and that part works well when there's a clear line of competent authority.

Where you see the real problems and drama occurring is where there isn't a clear line of authority; either the authority figure has too much to do, or you've got a maintainer who's screwing up and unwilling to admit it (lose face) and listen or back down. And since there's never enough true experts, and everyone's human and makes mistakes, those situations happen quite a lot.