Community faults

Posted Sep 26, 2007 9:19 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Community faults by esr
Parent article: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

`Total' and `brutal' are quite different. There's no call to be nasty to people merely because you disagree with their ideas, but in some parts of the development community you can expect very harsh flames (we're talking the sorts of things that would lead to people walking out of the room at best and social ostracism at worst if done in RL) merely if you make tiny coding style errors in otherwise entirely acceptable patches.

And that's simply wrong.

Community faults

Posted Sep 27, 2007 0:11 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Exactly.

Brutal honesty is one thing....

But much more typically I see veiled and outright insults, insinuations, belittling, and just other silly pointless crap that is completely devoid of any techincal or informational merit.

Just a bunch of people trying to prop up failing egos.

We are all guitly of getting things personal, but it amazes me how often people don't even realise what they are saying.

One thing to keep in mind that it's VERY possible to be completely and 100% right on a technical point AND still be a completely and total asshole.

In otherwords...

Just because a person is right doesn't mean that person isn't also a prick.