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> Their review workflow, for instance, is innately structured as a dehumanizing pipeline for delivering soundbites of impersonal criticism that Must Be Attended

> Their review workflow, for instance, is innately structured as a dehumanizing pipeline for delivering soundbites of impersonal criticism that Must Be Attended To. If you have good relationships with your colleagues/contributors, this will be reflected in the review process. If you have a bad relationship, the process will be painful. I don't think this is particularly a technology problem. GitHub also allows "comments" for points which are suggestions, rather than requirements.

pydry 5y ago
One example I was thinking of was a comment where one coworker left a comment that said "why did you do it like this?". The other coworker took offense at the remark. The same comment made in person while doing a code review wouldn't have nearly the same effect because the body language would convey additional meaning (e.g. this is an honest question, I'm not indirectly calling you stupid here). This is often an inherent problem with internet forums which is why people often blow up on them over perceived slights, but there's many ways to mitigate this type of thing, e.g. * low friction means of expressing appreciation * some sort of low friction one-click polite programmed responses (e.g. X doesn't understand this area of the code, could you explain it?) * something monitoring comments and suggesting rewordings
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  * actually adjusting to textual modes of communication? I don’t want this to sound trite or disingenuous, and I especially don’t want to assign blame (unless you know me personally, you probably won’t ever encounter an instance of my intentionally assigning blame to individuals), but short-form, semi-synchronous textual communication is just different, to the point that linguists extend the usual classification of discourse from spoken and written into spoken, written, and “IM-ish” (which turns out to be closer to spoken despite using writing). Not all modes of expression are immediately accessible to everybody (I’m constantly anxious over emails, which is tremendously inconvenient), and we should absolutely try and help people adjust, but to say that the mere requirement of adjusting is evidence of inferiority or evil nature is unfair to things that are just not the same as other things (insert UI/UX example here). This is not to say that there are no evil things, just that this particular argument for evilness is so weak as to be tautologically true for almost any thing at all (when I was a child, they would sell vegetables marked “zero cholesterol”). I mean, “why did [they] do it like this” is one of the most harmless questions to ever exist as far as I can see (provided there’s enough context to figure out what “it” refers to and what “this” specifically is supposed to be surprising, so that it is not disproportionately low-effort or bad-faith obstructive, but that equally applies to spoken interaction). Literally most of my brain-time is devoted to answering questions of this type I ask myself, so when somebody else asks such a question it’s the most unsurprising thing I could imagine. I was similarly baffled when in a recent discussion someone suggested starting a sentence with “I might be wrong, but ...” is perceived as aggressive. How else am I supposed to communicate “I don’t feel competent in this particular area but on general principles I’m fairly sure that ...”, and in what world does warning people of the potential irrelevance of your opinion read as aggressive? I’d be happy if it turned out I’m just not perceiving a subtlety of language (despite using English for most of my life, I am not and will never be a native speaker), but that’s not what people seem to be saying. A cultural disconnect sounds more plausible (cf. “ ’Splain it to me”), but again “people foreign to the culture can feel uncomfortable or misunderstand” is by itself not a sufficient argument for a change of culture, especially if that culture (chat or comment etiquette) is more or less inherent to the environment (short-form semi-synchronous communication). [In case the gentle reader is wondering how this comment could ever count as “short-form communication”: I’m like this in person, too. Sigh.]
  - heurisko 5y ago
    > I was similarly baffled when in a recent discussion someone suggested starting a sentence with “I might be wrong, but ...” is perceived as aggressive. That's a very standard phrase to signal you're not being confrontational. I don't know how they could perceive that as aggressive.
  - pydry 5y ago
    >I mean, “why did [they] do it like this” is one of the most harmless questions to ever exist as far as I can see (provided there’s enough context to figure out what “it” refers to and what “this” specifically is supposed to be surprising, so that it is not disproportionately low-effort or bad-faith obstructive, but that equally applies to spoken interaction). I'm pretty sure I could change the meaning of that sentence wildly using intonation and body language. I could certainly make it an offensive statement intended to undermine the listener. One problem with textual discourse is that people just fill in the body language themselves. Often wrongly. Especially if they let their insecurities fill in the gaps. Which developers with imposter syndrome (i.e. most) will often do. Emojis help fill in this gap somewhat for some kinds of written discourse (e.g. to intonate sarcasm, "only joking", etc) but on a PR i've never really seen them put to good use. I think on a PR it might help if the user gets somewhat railroaded into a set of default replies that precisely convey what would otherwise be unstated feeling, emotiom and intent but I'm not totally sure that's how to fix the problem. It also wouldnt stop wanton dicks from being dicks (not that i think that it's githubs job to fix that). I do know it is a problem though and i dont think it's on githubs radar at all. To be fair it used to be much worse before they had comments and every PR comment got treated as a FIXME.

pydry 5y ago

One example I was thinking of was a comment where one coworker left a comment that said "why did you do it like this?". The other coworker took offense at the remark. The same comment made in person while doing a code review wouldn't have nearly the same effect because the body language would convey additional meaning (e.g. this is an honest question, I'm not indirectly calling you stupid here). This is often an inherent problem with internet forums which is why people often blow up on them over perceived slights, but there's many ways to mitigate this type of thing, e.g. * low friction means of expressing appreciation * some sort of low friction one-click polite programmed responses (e.g. X doesn't understand this area of the code, could you explain it?) * something monitoring comments and suggesting rewordings

mananaysiempre 5y ago
* actually adjusting to textual modes of communication? I don’t want this to sound trite or disingenuous, and I especially don’t want to assign blame (unless you know me personally, you probably won’t ever encounter an instance of my intentionally assigning blame to individuals), but short-form, semi-synchronous textual communication is just different, to the point that linguists extend the usual classification of discourse from spoken and written into spoken, written, and “IM-ish” (which turns out to be closer to spoken despite using writing). Not all modes of expression are immediately accessible to everybody (I’m constantly anxious over emails, which is tremendously inconvenient), and we should absolutely try and help people adjust, but to say that the mere requirement of adjusting is evidence of inferiority or evil nature is unfair to things that are just not the same as other things (insert UI/UX example here). This is not to say that there are no evil things, just that this particular argument for evilness is so weak as to be tautologically true for almost any thing at all (when I was a child, they would sell vegetables marked “zero cholesterol”). I mean, “why did [they] do it like this” is one of the most harmless questions to ever exist as far as I can see (provided there’s enough context to figure out what “it” refers to and what “this” specifically is supposed to be surprising, so that it is not disproportionately low-effort or bad-faith obstructive, but that equally applies to spoken interaction). Literally most of my brain-time is devoted to answering questions of this type I ask myself, so when somebody else asks such a question it’s the most unsurprising thing I could imagine. I was similarly baffled when in a recent discussion someone suggested starting a sentence with “I might be wrong, but ...” is perceived as aggressive. How else am I supposed to communicate “I don’t feel competent in this particular area but on general principles I’m fairly sure that ...”, and in what world does warning people of the potential irrelevance of your opinion read as aggressive? I’d be happy if it turned out I’m just not perceiving a subtlety of language (despite using English for most of my life, I am not and will never be a native speaker), but that’s not what people seem to be saying. A cultural disconnect sounds more plausible (cf. “ ’Splain it to me”), but again “people foreign to the culture can feel uncomfortable or misunderstand” is by itself not a sufficient argument for a change of culture, especially if that culture (chat or comment etiquette) is more or less inherent to the environment (short-form semi-synchronous communication). [In case the gentle reader is wondering how this comment could ever count as “short-form communication”: I’m like this in person, too. Sigh.]
- heurisko 5y ago
  > I was similarly baffled when in a recent discussion someone suggested starting a sentence with “I might be wrong, but ...” is perceived as aggressive. That's a very standard phrase to signal you're not being confrontational. I don't know how they could perceive that as aggressive.
- pydry 5y ago
  >I mean, “why did [they] do it like this” is one of the most harmless questions to ever exist as far as I can see (provided there’s enough context to figure out what “it” refers to and what “this” specifically is supposed to be surprising, so that it is not disproportionately low-effort or bad-faith obstructive, but that equally applies to spoken interaction). I'm pretty sure I could change the meaning of that sentence wildly using intonation and body language. I could certainly make it an offensive statement intended to undermine the listener. One problem with textual discourse is that people just fill in the body language themselves. Often wrongly. Especially if they let their insecurities fill in the gaps. Which developers with imposter syndrome (i.e. most) will often do. Emojis help fill in this gap somewhat for some kinds of written discourse (e.g. to intonate sarcasm, "only joking", etc) but on a PR i've never really seen them put to good use. I think on a PR it might help if the user gets somewhat railroaded into a set of default replies that precisely convey what would otherwise be unstated feeling, emotiom and intent but I'm not totally sure that's how to fix the problem. It also wouldnt stop wanton dicks from being dicks (not that i think that it's githubs job to fix that). I do know it is a problem though and i dont think it's on githubs radar at all. To be fair it used to be much worse before they had comments and every PR comment got treated as a FIXME.