3 ms·
But that's also part of the job. It's certainly unfortunate and unfair, but it's not more unfair for him than any other public figure. That's why a qualified le
by geofft 7y ago
But that's also part of the job. It's certainly unfortunate and unfair, but it's not more unfair for him than any other public figure. That's why a qualified leader needs to be careful with words and so far above reproach that a) it's hard to accidentally mischaracterize what you say b) if someone does, it seems out of character with what you actually believe.
Deliberately making public statements about controversial topics that have nothing to do with your leadership role is certainly your right, but it's a strategically risky move. It's like "defensive driving" - whether or not it's illegal to brake check a driver behind you, it's definitely a bad idea.
RMS and the free software movement would both have been better off if he'd stepped into an internal technical leadership role and found someone else to take on the advocacy / moral leadership / public speaking role. It would have been a better use of his talents (and honestly it might have left fewer GNU maintainers bitter about how he isn't actually writing very much code anymore but still tries to overrule decisions every so often).
- deogeo 7y agoIt's also part of the job of a journalist to not deceive their readers. But I guess we're going to let that slide, and demand public figures speak in such a way that is impossible to misrepresent or take wrongly out of context. Assuming that's even possible...
- geofft 7y ago> But I guess we're going to let that slide, and demand public figures speak in such a way that is impossible to misrepresent or take wrongly out of context. Assuming that's even possible... That is literally the job description, yes. Sure, you will sometimes fail at it. Sure, I will sometimes write bugs in my code. If I deliberately write code without tests and ignore code review and cause problems in production, my employer would be justified in firing me - not because I wrote bugs, everyone writes bugs sometimes, but because I made no effort to avoid them. Similarly, the occasional gaffe is understandable, but using your official work email address to talk at length on irrelevant subjects in ways that are easy to misinterpret is being deliberately irresponsible. You should hold journalists accountable for telling wrong stories, but you should also expect that journalists, too, will get things wrong sometime. The robustness principle indicates that you'll have a better time in practice being careful and precise about what you say than having high expectations about how others interpret it.
- panny 7y agoHeadline news: geofft@HN states, "I deliberately write code without tests and ignore code review and cause problems in production" and goes on to say "my employer would be justified in firing me" - - vice.com
- geofft 7y agoThat's fine, because such a story is implausible to anyone who knows me or has heard of me. Go ahead and publish it. I support your right to free speech. Do you? (Also, my job is technical and not PR, and I have been arguing consistently that both RMS and the free software movement would have been better off if he had made himself a role that was primarily technical and not PR.)
- deogeo 7y ago> Go ahead and publish it. I support your right to free speech. Do you? Even free-speech extremists such as myself and the US Supreme Court don't support libel.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago"But I guess we're going to let that slide": I hope you realize that, with that phrase, you are exactly doing to geofft what you complain about the journalists doing - you're distorting his words to make them say something that they didn't say.