Getting along in the Python community [LWN.net]

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 21, 2018 2:27 UTC (Thu) by haizzus (subscriber, #109109)
In reply to: Getting along in the Python community by pjtait
Parent article: Getting along in the Python community

I concur. I am not a native speaker and I found the original post wasn't that bad. I've seen worse!

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Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 21, 2018 5:44 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (6 responses)

In terms of rudeness this post barely ranked 3 on a scale of 10 where 1 = Laura Ingalls and 10 = POTUS

The Times They Are A-Changin' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ9drv78dCQ

> Cannon echoed that: "if you feel heated, wait it out".

I often write email answers, save them as a draft and delete them the next day. Or trim them down, rephrase and send 20% of them. Writing can be useful even when no one else reads it.

> Canned responses might help blunt the impact in handling some of these kinds of situations, Carol Willing said. If you point someone at a response, rather than responding directly, the mention of the code of conduct may not seem so prominent or unwelcoming.

Canned responses and one-line URLs are great in many, many situations. I use them a lot and they seem to work fine: efficient and not emotional. Yet they don't seem so popular, not sure why.

> But she also said that the original poster had owned up to trying to game the system to get a reaction; to a certain extent, Pozdeev got what he was looking for.

Another similar and typical attempt to get attention is an exaggerated headline on top of an accurate article. Happens even in the best places :-)

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 21, 2018 6:48 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

I often write email answers, save them as a draft and delete them the next day. Or trim them down, rephrase and send 20% of them. Writing can be useful even when no one else reads it.

I too have found this very effective, and not only when I start thinking I am perhaps being abrasive. Even re-considering for half an hour before sending often improves the message.

This is also one reason I hate chat systems. They promote hasty responses.

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 22, 2018 16:15 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (4 responses)

If people can tell your answers are canned, the implication can be that you aren't willing to engage with the addressee as an individual, or that their question/opinion is not worth differentiating from others who have come before.

That might be fair (this might be the 20th time someone has asked what a particular error means), but it's not too shocking that some people don't like that implication.

In a customer context, I might have canned content, but I frame it with non-canned content to say "yeah, we're doing the canned thing, but I did read your thing, and here's why I think this is relevant".

This doesn't mean you should do this, but those are the reasons why it could be worth doing.

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For one-line responses, they can imply brusqueness / curtness. It can sound like the answering party would rather not be answering this and could you stop wasting their time already? Or it can imply disrespect for the persona being responded to more generally.

I don't think this anywhere near universal, especially in technical communities, but it's not a rare perception.

One liners also are prone to leaving a thing much less fully addressed, a partial answer that doesn't really leave all readers clear on what was meant or that the reader really understands the reponse. Consider:

"I found this behavior, and it's a bit strange. Is it intended?"
"Yes."

One line responses can feel a bit like this, seemingly intentionally less than helpful.

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Hopefully the above is informative about the popularity of these choices, and not annoying.

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 24, 2018 1:12 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (3 responses)

> If people can tell your answers are canned,

If the person asking can tell the answer is canned then he or she wouldn't have asked the question in the first place, or at least not that way.

There's often a big gap between "total noobs" who are very grateful to receive *any* kind of information because they don't even have the right keywords to Google versus the experts which obviously do have these keywords, can find anything in a few keystrokes, can lose track of how far ahead they are and too easily misjudge someone asking a dumb question as incapable of homework. Canned answers are perfect for these specific situations (obviously not for every situation).

> the implication can be that you aren't willing to engage with the addressee as an individual,

I understand the concern/fear but I don't think it's warranted in practice.

The only two other alternatives are:
- ignoring the question: obviously even less willingness to engage and more frustration
- longer and then often emotional answer - understandable but not productive emotion

> Or it can imply disrespect for the persona being responded to more generally.

Again that's exactly the misconception which I tried to point at in my previous comment. In not all but many cases (and you can easily tell which) the thing the most desired by the person asking the question after hours of trying and failing to perform some task is ANY attention and clue = infinitely better than none. See parent article.

I've sent countless one-line answers and pointers at work and I never ever saw anyone complaining, often the opposite. I assume most people asking questions in an open-source community do it as part of their day job and while operating in a work environment and mood. Much fewer do it while bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon looking for human interaction. IMHO a good open-source community should be exactly like a good workplace: you can (and you do) make friends but you should never feel like you have to.

> In a customer context,

BTW I wasn't and I am still not considering a customer context, many differences.

> One liners also are prone to leaving a thing much less fully addressed,

Yeah sure you can go too far; not considering that either.

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 25, 2018 9:58 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

It depends very, very strongly on the quality of your canned answer, though.

If your canned answer boils down to "RTFM or GTFO. Docs at https://example.org/docs", then you're going to have a bad experience as a recipient. If your canned answer boils down to "https://example.org/docs/reporting-a-bug has details of the information we need to handle a bug quickly; please get us that information so that we can help you", then the recipient is likely to have a better experience.

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 25, 2018 15:42 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

I found that merely sending a link without any F-word works fine.

Not sure what you mean by "quality"; IMHO as long as your emotion level is low when you write the answer and you pay a fair amount of attention to your choice of words then the length of the answer will - contrary to a common misconception - not make any difference to the recipient's emotions.

Long story short I guess all I'm saying is: in _some cases_ using email for instant messaging is the best option.

In an ideal world people would use IRC or some other instant messaging tool for instant messaging, however neither the world nor IRC are perfect. Of course you could make your one-line answer a two-lines answer by adding a link to IRC :-)

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 25, 2018 15:48 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

It then depends on the quality of your link - if it's a good link with lots of help, then the fact that it's a canned response is a non-issue. If the link basically says (politely or otherwise) "go away, I don't care about you", then it's going to upset people.

E.g. linking people whose e-mail matches your "bug report" filter to something like Mercurial's BugTracker wiki page isn't offensive - there's a lot of information in there on how to get attention, and how to get helpful responses.