LWN: Comments on "My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)"

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

duffy — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 16:20:27 +0000

You're telling me computing doesn't involve person-to-person contact?

Damn, you must work on some really crappy projects then.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

stephenjudd — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 05:20:50 +0000

Is it too late for this XKCD cartoon:

http://xkcd.com/322/

It's very apropos.

Community faults

chromatic — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:57:55 +0000

If your submitting to a project and can't get something as trivial as coding style right than you probably deserve to be ridiculed.

No, you don't. Why do you suggest that ridiculing someone trying to help you in good faith is ever a good idea?

I'm one of the first people, when someone starts trying to heap abuse on contributors, to stand up and say "Go away!" but abusing potential contributors who've already made the effort to contribute is unacceptable, even mean.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

njs — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:14:34 +0000

>Unfortunetly I am unable to find that specific data point of 28% women in the proprietary software industry. I do find some general data regarding the employment "Mathematical and Computer Scientists".

Yes, it seems to be from table H-1 on page 177, "Computer and mathematical occupations". Page 180 puts female participation in "Engineering occupations" at 10.9%, lower but still dramatically higher than in FOSS.

>I suspect that those also include people in the Academia.

page 181: "Science and engineering occupations do not include postsecondary teachers." Not that it matters; the same report also states in table H-23, page 247, that the US has only 1030 female PhDs working at universities as "computer and information scientists", as compared to the >400,000 in the 28% number. (Also, why the heck do you care if it includes people in academia, presumably people in academia would be good candidates for FOSS participation too?)

It may include occupations other than computer programmer per se; it's possible the FLOSSPOLs people were a little hasty in calling that 28% the same as programmers per se, and I can't immediately find any way to get a more accurate number other than downloading the full US Census datasets and crunching them myself. However, note that page 180 puts female participation in "Engineering occupations" at 10.9% -- these are non-computer engineers, who I doubt have substantially *more* female participation than computer engineers (and this certainly does not include anything like graphic designers or what-have-you). Note that while lower than 28%, it is still dramatically larger than any numbers anyone gets for FOSS.

>And if you don't have real data, then where is thi data point of 1.5 % from?

I said I didn't have real data on job security. The 1.5% comes from... real data.

>It is from a different research.

Yes -- research performed in the EU, also replicated at Stanford (Stanford found 1.6%): http://www.stanford.edu/group/floss-us/report/FLOSS-US-Re...

If one is worried about bias from surveys (maybe women hate responding to them or something, not that there's any reason to think that), we can also look at the demographics of existing well-defined groups of FOSS developers.

Gentoo developers: "Less than 1% are female" (http://project.repogirl.net/doku.php) (IIRC they have 3, one of whom is transgendered and was male at the time he became a developer?)

Ubuntu seems to be ahead of the game with 2.4% (i.e., 7 total): http://www.eskar.dk/andreas/output/PersonalProfile.HTM

The Google Summer of Code mentors meeting for 2006 had approximately 100 attendees, of which 2 were female.

I'll also note that as far as I know, there are exactly zero women working on any of the FOSS projects I work on, out of some dozens of participants.

The 1-2% finding seems to be very robust.

>I just don't assume in advance that there is something that needs correcting. Is there something that needs correcting? please demonstrate.

Some of us find it pretty obvious without any numbers -- we find the blatant sexism displayed by many of the posters in this forum, for instance, to be a problem all by itself (or if you want numbers, note the in FLOSSPOLS ~75% of women respondents have observed discrimination against women -- though only ~20% of the men have, presumably because there were no women around for them to see being discriminated against). The implicit sexism in the posters who continually find new excuses each time their previous one is knocked down is also rather grating. But I've shown a whole pile of numbers now too, and every piece of data I can find gives percentages that are a factor of 10 lower than any comparable groups I can think of.

Community faults

mjg59 — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:21:17 +0000

Indeed. Some people are excessively easily offended. That doesn't imply that everyone who is offended by something is over-sensitive.

In any case, the same basic argument still stands. Your first interaction with someone may offend them. That gives you a better understanding of where their thresholds are, and you can choose to modify your behaviour to reduce the probability of offending them in future. It may be that the compromises you'd have to make are excessive (if "You're failing to acquire this lock before modifying this data structure, which could lead to unexpected behaviour" ends up offending them, for instance), in which case it's probably better to just tell them that and avoid interacting with them in future.

Not everyone is able to accept constructive criticism, and those who aren't are unlikely to make especially useful contributions to the free software world. But that's not the same set of people as the ones who can accept constructive criticism but are put off by hostility. Losing the latter because you don't think we should deal with the former isn't a sensible tradeoff.

Community faults

pizza — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:59:59 +0000

> By and large, people have a choice as to whether they want to be offensive. People have much less choice over whether something is going to upset or offend them.

You left out the third part:

"People also have little control whether something is going to upset or offend someone else"

Some people are very easily offended.

Community faults

peace — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:49:17 +0000

What I'm getting at is this: is Free software going to be able to include the grungy dirty smelly realities of humanity or is it going to require a certain esoteric social etiquette defined largely by the dominant main stream culture, likely all white and docile. Technology was largely driven by social out casts of all flavors. Now that it's main stream are we only going to accept bathed vanilla?

man_ls, I've been responding to several of your posts here, please don't think I'm picking on your handle :). You may be referring to very specific instances of abusive behavior or even a certain class of abuse and I would likely agree that those cases were unfortunate.

I *am* responding more generally to a certain trend of gentrification of the tech ghetto you might say. I don't really have it fully worked out but I do know that geek, hacker and nerd do not mean what they used to.

If you have any foll up thoughts I'd appreciate reading them. I'm going to give this thread a rest, though... I'm sure we'll meet again, muhaha!

Kind Regards

Community faults

alankila — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:52:17 +0000

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.

Community faults

man_ls — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 08:53:34 +0000

Besides, I have seen the conventions here and I think I fit right in.

The conventions I referred to, in case it is not obvious, are called "grammar" and "orthography" (or "spelling"). Some people stick to them more strictly than you do (not me, though).

As long as someone has a point, in the end, thats what matters.

Well said. Contrast this with what you said before about code contributions:

"If your submitting to a project and can't get something as trivial as coding style right than you probably deserve to be ridiculed".

People might paraphrase your latter contribution: "As long as someone has good ideas, in the end, that is what matters. Not everyone is going to fit the code conventions you prefer", and it would still be reasonable. Code is the expression of an idea, just as common language.

What we are requesting is the same level of civility in development mailing lists as on LWN. There is no reason to behave differently.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

NAR — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 08:18:53 +0000

Maybe your numbers are just wrong, maybe you are in a place that is more backwards than the USA (are there such places?); no idea.

I've worked in three different countries, visited workplaces at other three countries, even in Scandinavia which supposed to be very emancipated, still I haven't noticed that 28% percent women. I had three female bosses so far, that's more than the amount of female software developers in the current project I'm working in (~20 developers, 1 female).

Also, though I know saying this is futile: the sexist crack about secretaries was unnecessary and vile.

Unfortunately political correctness sometimes leads to decreasing sense of humour. Anyway, when I was 10 years old and we had a kind of computer class in the school (completely voluntary, at afternoons), I don't seem to remember many girls attending. I don't seem to remember that there were any girls at all, even though the teacher was a female math teacher. I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with the impoliteness of some developers: if it's not biology, then it's a socialization issue at a quite young age.

One more note: I know a couple of people personally, who work in financial jobs. Auditors, controllers, etc. All of them are female. I don't know much about that environment, but I think it's harsher than software development, after all, they work with hard money.

Bye,NAR

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

ekj — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 07:16:28 +0000

Yeah well. I work in a professional software-development company. We're in Norway, where in general female participation in IT is quite a bit higher than in the USA.

We're currently 22 people. 5 are female. Which makes 23%, more or less in the ballpark for professional software-development.

But those 4 women are 2 graphic designers, 1 assistant (manning the telephone, and doing simple menial work, no formal education) 1 woman doing cleaning and 1 programmer.

Which mean that among our *programmers* less than 10% are female.

Our graphic designers are very competent, do excellent work, have a solid education to back them and do a job that would be severly needed in free software too. But it's not a job that would lead them to post on the kernel mailing-list very often, even if they where doing it, which they don't.

When it comes to free software, I see no large difference between the sexes. 3 of our males are heavily into free software as users and have minor contributions, 2 additional have some experience with it. Among the females the percentage is similar, 1 of them knows free software well (though as a user, not a contributor), and 1 other has some experience with it.

A single example doesn't show anything. Just saying, from my POV I *do* see the problem that females are severly under-represented in technical work. But I *DONT* see any evidence whatsoever that free software is worse than proprietary software in this respect.

If anything, the female participation in the LUGs both here in Stavanger and in Bergen is *higher* than that. Not high, but higher than among the technical staff at my worksplace. Perhaps in the LUGs on the order of 20-25%.

Community faults

mjg59 — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 04:01:51 +0000

You may not be put off by this sort of thing, but to suggest that others shouldn't be is suggesting that they fit a mold if they want to participate. I see it in a more straightforward manner. By and large, people have a choice as to whether they want to be offensive. People have much less choice over whether something is going to upset or offend them. With no terribly good argument for why the offensive guys are going to be better programmers, I'd prefer that the people with the choice modify their behaviour so the people with less choice get to participate as well.

Of course, if you want to behave in a way that reduces the number of potential developers, feel free. You'll have to convince people as to why the community as a whole will benefit from that, of course.

The best people

peace — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 01:46:30 +0000

Curious that you would choose to lecturer me on the very information I presented you with in my post.

-peace

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

tzafrir — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:35:41 +0000

Unfortunetly I am unable to find that specific data point of 28% women in the proprietary software industry. I do find some general data regarding the employment "Mathematical and Computer Scientists". I suspect that those also include people in the Academia.

And if you don't have real data, then where is thi data point of 1.5 % from?

It is from a different research.

I just don't assume in advance that there is something that needs correcting. Is there something that needs correcting? please demonstrate.

Community faults

drag — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:11:14 +0000

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.

Community faults

peace — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:52:31 +0000

Yet, despite your comments I am not going to flee the site or the community nor am I going to demand you behave any differently. Besides, I have seen the conventions here and I think I fit right in.

I am not arguing *against* civility. But I don't demand it. As long as someone has a point, in the end, thats what matters. Not everyone is going to fit the mold you prefer.

-peace

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

njs — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:36:17 +0000

The 28% number is from the US National Science Foundation; the report is freely available, if you want to track down details of how they counted: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf0...

The same report has many details on diplomas at various level of university, as well; as far as I can tell, in all cases women are far above 10%. Maybe your numbers are just wrong, maybe you are in a place that is more backwards than the USA (are there such places?); no idea.

Also, though I know saying this is futile: the sexist crack about secretaries was unnecessary and vile.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

jzbiciak — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:35:19 +0000

Yeah, I retracted that in a later comment. *sigh*

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

njs — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:14:36 +0000

About the 28%, I've unfortunately never worked in the proprietary software world, so I don't have anecdotes; I have to fall back on data.

As for job security, I have no idea what you're talking about. My experience was, play around with free software some in high school, somewhat more in college, and then when I got my first job -- aged 20-21, with no degree or even relevant classes -- that record let me start at $60k/year, working from home and with no imposed schedule. I'm not the only one to have noticed that free software hacking pays off pretty good.

But I don't have real data here, unfortunately -- of course, neither do you. (Is there even reason to believe that purported job security is a major factor in attracting FOSS hackers, male *or* female?) That's the real point, isn't it? Your post isn't about job security; that's just an excuse you made up so you could stop thinking about whether women are being discriminated against, and go back to the comfortable status quo.

(Note I haven't claimed that women actually *are* discriminated against; but I would like to know one way or the other. You just seem to want to make the question go away. That so many people are popping up in these threads with this goal only makes me more inclined to believe that the discrimination is real.)

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

nix — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 22:16:25 +0000

I hope you're right, I really do: but from later comments from the same
poster this seems not to be the case :(

Neither can I

GreyWizard — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 22:06:45 +0000

Well said!

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

jzbiciak — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:57:50 +0000

It just so happens that men put up with this behavior more than women do.

I meant here that men are more likely to put up with boorish behavior...

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

jzbiciak — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:55:18 +0000

Hmm... I retract an earlier comment I made to someone else. I thought your post was a tongue in cheek attempt at ironic humor.

You really are a jerk.

I guess, if nothing else, your post serves as a perfect example of what the article was talking about.

why would we want to change free software to make it attractive to those who have shown by their actions that they're not interested in participating in it?

It's more accurate to say that the bluster of a few tends to drive away talented, creative people we'd love to work with, but have better things to do than put up with boorish trolls. They'd rather be where their contributions are evaluated on their merit, and conversations are constructive. It just so happens that men put up with this behavior more than women do.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

jzbiciak — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:45:12 +0000

I think your ironic humor detector is broken.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

NAR — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:35:25 +0000

I wonder how did they got that 28% number - in my experience it's around 10%, maybe 15%. Did they count the secretaries (I mean assistants) too? Actually the male:female ratio was around 10% at the university too, so I can't imagine how it would be any better in the industry.

Bye,NAR

Community faults

man_ls — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:25:04 +0000

LWN is a site about people writing things that others read. There are published conventions for this activity, just as there are published code conventions for the thousands of software projects out there; but these ones have been available for centuries. I don't think it is enough to say "I am dyslexic" or "I am a foreigner", since you are obviously not trying hard enough and just hiding behind the "dyslexic" label.

And yet most people here are polite enough to ignore such matters, and to keep a civil tone; this makes me quite proud to support it, actually. These people (who have taken the work to learn how to spell) might say "use your brain and RTFLexicon", but they choose to be constructive and listen to you anyway. This attitude would be very useful on some developer lists I have seen.

The best people

man_ls — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:23:29 +0000

No doubt you mean "amateur". Please do not confuse "amateur" as the opposite of "professional", it is not. In French it literally means "lover", as someone who performs an activity out of love (as opposed to "for profit"). During some time in the late 19th century it became a derogatory term, probably when well-intentioned members of the unoccupied classes out of boredom started performing activities formerly in the realm of the professional. E.g. Sherlock Holmes, the original "amateur sleuth", as a prototypical example.

In Free software it is different. Many amateurs keep a very high level of professionalism, enough to embarrass many a paid developer. And (perhaps most importantly) many professionals love their work as much as any amateur.

And Free software is, without a doubt, the domain of the professional. And of the amateur. And of anyone who cares to contribute. LWN publishes summaries for every kernel release, the one for 2.6.23 will be freely available quite soon, if you care to look.

The best people

nix — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:43:59 +0000

Being maximally picky and even more off topic (as a strong Aspergic whose
sister is a psychologist specializing in aspies gives me a bit of clue in
this area), there certainly *is* a reason why software development
attracts Aspergic types more often.

A major characteristic of most, perhaps all Aspergics is fear of change.
In many of us one of the ways this manifests is a sort of
control-freakery: that is, we avoid all change but that which we know will
happen well in advance, and that which we initiate ourselves and thus know
about, because being scared as hell is unpleasant. Computers are
incredibly controllable devices which you can interact with almost like
people except you control them and can model them sensibly (social
modelling of humans in realtime is hopeless, but computers are different).
So we *are* strongly attracted to computing, and within that we *are*
strongly attracted to software development.

But it is perfectly possible to be pleasant to people while being
Aspergic: it takes a lot of effort and a lot of lurking time, but it's
doable. Even if you've got Asperger's, there's no real excuse to be
actively nasty. (Social faux pas are another matter and probably
unavoidable, but apologising generally works to fix things then.)

Actually it's even worse.

pizza — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 18:30:21 +0000

"Only later in life" do guys suddenly get tons of testosterone coursing through their system. Given how much it affects them physically, one would imagine it would have an effect on their psyche as well.

The best people

peace — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:54:24 +0000

FLOSS is an amature's ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amature ) domain and may it never become the domain of the professional because it would be the end of it.

LWN tends to stay away from the sensational unlike some other geek news site that plays to breathless hyperbole and emotion. I bet thats what keeps the discourse at least slightly elevated.

Kind Regards

Community faults

peace — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:37:44 +0000

If LWN was a site about spelling and grammar I would agree. As it is, I am dyslexic you insensitive clod! No, really, I am. My fragile ego has been shattered into many small bits which I will now pathetically pick up shard by shard as I retreat to a more civil oasis somewhere on the Internet. Be happy firefox has a spell checker now or I doubt you'd be able to endure my posts at all.

"Which is more likely to result in a correct version of the patch being posted - ridicule or a polite response with a link to a description of the coding style and a request that the patch be tidied up to conform to that?"

As long as the devs themselves can point to a pedant or a clear coding style in their code base you are deserving of whatever you get. This kind of ridicule would happen quickly and early in order to align contributions. Who has the time to school everyone who needs it. There is a reason for the "F" in RTFM. Use your brain and figure out whats going on and how best you can contribute.

Trying to control how other people should behave to you is self centered.

Kind Regards

Community faults

gdt — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 16:46:54 +0000

...reluctant to submit anything to LKML because of the perception that it'll just result in people calling them incompetent ...

Been there, done that. I updated the Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO and collected bug reports from its readers across two years. I submitted a set of patches to LKML to fix those bugs. I'll never do that again :-)

[And no, my code is not that bad.]

Interestingly, my code to set the TCP congestion control algorithm from Netfilter was also rejected. But this was done after a pleasant discussion and for a good technical reason. I attribute the pleasantness of that encounter to not CC-ing the code to LKML.

I've written a NAT module for Cisco's Skinny protocol for their IP phones. Not sure if I can stand the hassle of submitting it.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

forthy — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 16:40:10 +0000

Differences between the genders on standardized tests tend to be smaller than the difference in height.

Yes, but that suggest we want standard males here. Do we? If we are looking for a top 0.5% rate of a gift that's asymmetrically distributed, you are so far out of the bell curve that small asymmetries at the center mean large asymmetries there. Also, deviation patterns often are different - even when the mean value is close, the standard deviation can be quite different. You often see this on the other end of the curve as well, e.g. take the number of male violent criminals compared to female violent criminals.

What I don't accept is that the testosterone-driven rudeness in this male-dominated world drives out women. How on earth do they get along well in the legal section, or as medics? All I know of this world is that it is male-dominated, very hierarchical, rude as it can get (medics not mobbed by their peers are happy - not mobbed by their boss don't exist), and still the percentage of young lawyers and medics is more than 50% female. This doesn't mean that our rudeness is ok, that it doesn't have an effect, or that we shouldn't change it, it just means there must be more important factors, as well. It could be that writing FOSS is only very indirectly rewarded - you don't immediately get tons of money for it, it just eats tons of time. It's not even sure that you'll get reputation from it, when the majority of the outside world doesn't understand what this is all about. Being a lawyer or a medic is directly rewarded by a big salary.

So if we want to motivate women to come here, we need to ask: Why would a woman do that? What would motivate her to come here? I don't know, all I know is that women typically end up at places and activities I hate (e.g. going shopping for hours and even enjoying it), and the other way round. We males are here because of this itch and scratching issue, and we scratch ourselves (I have that sort of thought even in my mail signature). We have to ask the females who are here if they are here for the same reason, and those females who aren't, if there was be something itching that scratching yourself would help, or if it is more female to approach somebody else for scratching, and therefore, this scratching yourself never will happen.

The best people

man_ls — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:55:20 +0000

The "best FOSS people" mentioned in the article are not necessarily the project leaders. And the Linux kernel is probably not a good example of Free software project, it is too peculiar in many respects.

To me it is related to professionalism. Good professionals in any field tend to be polite while bad ones are often rude, to customers and among themselves. There is no reason why software development should be different, or attract Asperger types any more often. And yet Free software development has a displeasing share of these antisocial behaviors and even people that defend them.

LWN is an excellent example of how developers (and users) can be polite with each other. Discussions here can also be curt and to the point but they are seldom rude. Maybe it is because the comment editor says, "Please try to be polite, respectful, and informative, and to provide a useful subject line", and the editorial style helps set this tone. So it can be done.

Community faults

nix — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:40:46 +0000

That's what I tend to do, but I have to get around to it. :)

(Also I've never really thought of using package maintainers for distros I don't use as upstream-intermediaries; it seems a sort of unjustified imposition on their time. But it's a good idea anyway and I may well do as you suggest.)

Community faults

mjg59 — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:38:05 +0000

To clarify that a bit further - if my response to your comment had been more like "If you're contributing to a disucssion and can't spell something as trivial as 'you're' right then you probably deserve to be ridiculed", then you'd probably think I was something of an asshole. If you got a complaint about every single misspelled word you posted here, you might end up thinking that LWN was sufficiently full of assholes that posting was more effort than it was worth. That wouldn't really benefit anybody.

Community faults

mjg59 — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:23:10 +0000

Which is more likely to result in a correct version of the patch being posted - ridicule or a polite response with a link to a description of the coding style and a request that the patch be tidied up to conform to that?

It's pretty straightforward. Supply constructive criticism, not plain criticism. Tell people what's wrong with their code and show them the resources they'll need to fix it. Act like you want their code, not like you'd be happier if they never submitted anything again. It's basic politeness, not political correctness gone mad.

Actually it's even worse.

flewellyn — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:16:07 +0000

Y'know, it IS even worse; I realized that I forgot to question how you got the idea that women are less assertive or aggressive, in the first place.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

zooko — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:14:36 +0000

Here's yer killfile mechanism:

http://lwn.net/Articles/250334/

Community faults

peace — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:13:47 +0000

If your submitting to a project and can't get something as trivial as coding style right than you probably deserve to be ridiculed. If your so fearful of coding style problems that you can not submit to a project you should probably see a therapist. How hard is it to investigate how a project expects code to be formatted and than just conform your code to that standard. It is really hard to organize a massive project when every one has their own vanity braces.

Kind Regards