4 ms·
Yes. It can be truly exhausting, for all the reasons noted. There's a flip side to providing caveats and walking on egg shells: The culture is terrible at pr
by chrsig 4y ago
Yes. It can be truly exhausting, for all the reasons noted.
There's a flip side to providing caveats and walking on egg shells: The culture is terrible at providing feedback. It's given when not requested, it's usually very very pedantic, or possibly delivered with some degree of irritation.
One thing that I find helps: separate things into objective and subjective categories.
code quality, best language, good design, cleanliness -- examples of subjective measures. They're going to vary by person, background and experience, thought processes, etc. They make for entertaining discussion topics, but not usually productive ones.
These generally are also the areas where people's egos and self worth get wrapped up. No one wants to feel like they're producing unclean code.
I try to focus more on objective things: does it produce the correct result? how much time will it take to on board someone to x y or z? It usually helps keep the discussion productive and helps keep egos at bay.
It's difficult though. People have opinions, and they want you to know about them. and they want those opinions to be facts. And it's most likely something we're all guilty of.
- ducharmdev 4y agoThis really resonates with me; it makes me realize that I've been too caught up in the subjective things you list here, and not focusing enough on what's more objective. This applies to conversations about performance a lot, too - so many debates on performance happen without any benchmarking or attempts to measure.
- rileyphone 4y agoThe only way to explore the subjective is through debate. The objective things are neither actually objective, or the most critical aspects of technology choices. Java was marketed as a silver bullet for portability, which appeared an objective fact to encourage adoption at the time; ultimately, this proved to be a red herring, as many other such promises do. If instead the culture had focused on the more subjective aspects of language choice, I think we would be a lot better off.
- chrsig 4y agoDebate has its place, that doesn't mean everything needs to be debated at all points in time, or that people shouldn't just accept that they disagree on something and move on. > If instead the culture had focused on the more subjective aspects of language choice, I think we would be a lot better off. Maybe? Who's to say what would have happened in some alternate timeline. There's no way to get an actual answer, so there's not much value beyond entertainment in discussion. Perhaps the exercise might provoke thought.
- delian66 4y agoWhy did it prove to be a red herring? I could write a CLI or GUI Java program, that would run on any OS, for which there is a JVM, and that was easier than doing it in C, C++, Delphi or Perl, which were popular at the time. As far as I know, at the time only TCL/TK offered something remotely comparable in portability for GUI apps.