5 ms·

The people who don't think this is a big deal are either lacking some empathy or don't understand how conferences work. The equivalent situation is something li

by jxf 3y ago

The people who don't think this is a big deal are either lacking some empathy or don't understand how conferences work. The equivalent situation is something like being warmly invited to a wedding, which you accept. The bride and groom then spend time gushing over how great it is that you'll be there, telling everyone they know, insisting that you book tickets right away. Later, you're told you can only come to the ceremony and not the reception or party. In short, it's hard not to feel like you just got baited and switched, even if the withdrawal is for a good reason. "But you'll still be at the ceremony!" isn't a good argument because that wasn't the original invitation, and because you're putting them in a very uncomfortable position having to decide whether to continue to go or not. For context, I've spoken at over 100 conference events. There are very significant differences in terms of the keynote speakers and regular speakers — generally in compensation, status, time, and prominence, at least for conferences that are larger than community events. Not all of these may not be obvious to attendees, but overall it's a fairly serious snub to pull the rug out from under someone like this.

arp242 3y ago
It's up to you how you deal with stuff like this: you either turn everything in to a big drama or you just accept that these things are a part of life and can happen because the universe is a chaotic place. It's not like they lost their job or something; it's just a 2-day event. If adding some perspective makes me "lacking empathy" then so be it, but I resent the accusation. We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence. I bet that's fun after an honest mistake, miscommunication, or mismatch of expectations. If we want to talk empathy then no is coming off well here.
- jxf 3y ago
  > We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence. You're getting evidence directly from someone who is a senior member of the Rust community and who participated directly in the original decision. Imagine you hear a series of bangs, walk into your living room, and see Alice holding a smoking gun and standing over Bob's bullet-ridden dead body, holding a note saying "I wish Bob was dead". One response is "well, we don't know what Bob did or if Alice actually pulled the trigger". Another response is "um, Alice, can you explain why you seem to have shot Bob?", and if Alice doesn't want to explain anything, you might start to draw inferences. But either way you might not want to hang around Alice until it gets cleared up.
  - arp242 3y ago
    Just being "up close" doesn't mean your perspective is objective truth, or even reasonable. If anything, quite the opposite. The author of this post seems emotionally invested and may very well be ascribing motives to people that simply don't exist, and/or may have a coloured view of events.
  - Veen 3y ago
    It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit, following which they wrote a lament about their broken heart and their copious weeping over the intolerable cruelty of a withdrawn keynote invitation. It might be worth asking for a bit of evidence of their claims, given their penchant for melodramatic overstatement.
    - lordfrito 3y ago
      Perfect summary of what happened here. There's a million stories like this out there. Not sure why I should care about this one. Seems a very immature way of dealing with things. Recent phenomenon or am I just becoming callous in my old age?
    - bigiain 3y ago
      > It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit That’s leaving out the important context that it’s just the latest in a string of senior members in that community who have been disgruntled enough to quit. The entire moderation team quit all at the same time. Since then the leadership team has been “an interim leadership”. Rust governance has been an ongoing shitshow for at least several years. As someone who’s not directly affected since I stay well out of “the community” I’m less concerned about “community drama”, but as someone who makes (and will be held responsible for) long term strategic technical decisions for my company I can’t help but wonder if I want to hitch my company (and my reputation) to a language run by the sort of people who’ve let this drama fester for so long. Is some language feature going to be voted on, implemented, publicised, become a critical dependency in my codebase - only to get rugpulled by some anonymous core team member like this keynote speaker? I mean, probably not, but Rust leadership sure as hell haven’t done anything to earn my trust and seem to actively be working toward eroding it. In ways that I’ve never even had to question to myself about the leadership of Perl or Python, or even Java.
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  On an object level it's not a big deal, but you're not thinking about it with the correct framing. Being invited as a keynote speaker lends you credibility and status. It means you have been acknowledged as someone worthy of giving a keynote. You may not care about this, but other people do. To downgrade someone from a keynote speaker to regular speaker is extremely disrespectful. Especially someone that you invited. It makes it seem like you are toying with this person, and based on JT's account someone on the Rust team was toying with JeanHeyd because they went behind the rest of the team's back to downgrade his talk. It's like giving a child a toy then snatching it back. It's just cruel. Whether it was a mistake or not doesn't change that.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  I mean, they haven’t re-invited him to the event have they? Kind of hard to see how it could be anything like a mistake. Of course you can just not care and let people walk all over you every single time, but that’s not a healthy strategy either.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  > It's not like they lost their job or something; it's just a 2-day event. One wrinkle I haven't seen called out is whether this was a paid speaking event (I assume it was) and if the demotion came with a part cut. If there was a pay cut that pretty shitty IMO, and does get a bit closer to losing ones job.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sanderjd 3y ago
  This goes both ways though? The organizers also turned this into a big drama and could have instead chosen to just chill and accept there was going to be a keynote some of them didn't love.
ghusto 3y ago
> The equivalent situation is something like being warmly invited to a wedding > ... > Later, you're told you can only come to the ceremony and not the reception or party For context, I've spoken at over 100 conference events. Is it though? I can tell you from an audience point of view it almost certainly isn't. Nobody cares very much what "status, time, and prominence" your talk has. Which leads me to ... > There are very significant differences in terms of the keynote speakers and regular speakers — generally in compensation, status, time, and prominence So it's an ego thing? Just give the talk, forego whatever glory you get from it.
- jxf 3y ago
  > So it's an ego thing? It's a respect thing. It costs time and money to produce and give a talk. That very often isn't visible to the audience. It takes weeks of dedicated preparation to deliver a high-quality keynote talk, and people have day jobs and other obligations. If they're going to travel hundreds or thousands of miles and now have to pay for the privilege, they might want to not be treated as disposable. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
  - cookieperson 3y ago
    People often get time off of work or school to be honored with formal talking gigs. IE your boss will let you off the hook to prepare for it because it makes your company/school look good. It'd be pretty embarrassing to have to explain to your boss or your PI that "oops I'm no longer a key note speaker"
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    Why not just make all talks keynotes then. Change the label and everyone gets respect.
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  Man, you really don't understand social dynamics do you? Status, credibility and respect are real and tend to matter a lot. It's not "an ego thing".

by jxf 3y ago

arp242 3y ago

It's up to you how you deal with stuff like this: you either turn everything in to a big drama or you just accept that these things are a part of life and can happen because the universe is a chaotic place. It's not like they lost their job or something; it's just a 2-day event. If adding some perspective makes me "lacking empathy" then so be it, but I resent the accusation. We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence. I bet that's fun after an honest mistake, miscommunication, or mismatch of expectations. If we want to talk empathy then no is coming off well here.

jxf 3y ago
> We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence. You're getting evidence directly from someone who is a senior member of the Rust community and who participated directly in the original decision. Imagine you hear a series of bangs, walk into your living room, and see Alice holding a smoking gun and standing over Bob's bullet-ridden dead body, holding a note saying "I wish Bob was dead". One response is "well, we don't know what Bob did or if Alice actually pulled the trigger". Another response is "um, Alice, can you explain why you seem to have shot Bob?", and if Alice doesn't want to explain anything, you might start to draw inferences. But either way you might not want to hang around Alice until it gets cleared up.
- arp242 3y ago
  Just being "up close" doesn't mean your perspective is objective truth, or even reasonable. If anything, quite the opposite. The author of this post seems emotionally invested and may very well be ascribing motives to people that simply don't exist, and/or may have a coloured view of events.
- Veen 3y ago
  It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit, following which they wrote a lament about their broken heart and their copious weeping over the intolerable cruelty of a withdrawn keynote invitation. It might be worth asking for a bit of evidence of their claims, given their penchant for melodramatic overstatement.
  - lordfrito 3y ago
    Perfect summary of what happened here. There's a million stories like this out there. Not sure why I should care about this one. Seems a very immature way of dealing with things. Recent phenomenon or am I just becoming callous in my old age?
  - bigiain 3y ago
    > It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit That’s leaving out the important context that it’s just the latest in a string of senior members in that community who have been disgruntled enough to quit. The entire moderation team quit all at the same time. Since then the leadership team has been “an interim leadership”. Rust governance has been an ongoing shitshow for at least several years. As someone who’s not directly affected since I stay well out of “the community” I’m less concerned about “community drama”, but as someone who makes (and will be held responsible for) long term strategic technical decisions for my company I can’t help but wonder if I want to hitch my company (and my reputation) to a language run by the sort of people who’ve let this drama fester for so long. Is some language feature going to be voted on, implemented, publicised, become a critical dependency in my codebase - only to get rugpulled by some anonymous core team member like this keynote speaker? I mean, probably not, but Rust leadership sure as hell haven’t done anything to earn my trust and seem to actively be working toward eroding it. In ways that I’ve never even had to question to myself about the leadership of Perl or Python, or even Java.
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
On an object level it's not a big deal, but you're not thinking about it with the correct framing. Being invited as a keynote speaker lends you credibility and status. It means you have been acknowledged as someone worthy of giving a keynote. You may not care about this, but other people do. To downgrade someone from a keynote speaker to regular speaker is extremely disrespectful. Especially someone that you invited. It makes it seem like you are toying with this person, and based on JT's account someone on the Rust team was toying with JeanHeyd because they went behind the rest of the team's back to downgrade his talk. It's like giving a child a toy then snatching it back. It's just cruel. Whether it was a mistake or not doesn't change that.
Aeolun 3y ago
I mean, they haven’t re-invited him to the event have they? Kind of hard to see how it could be anything like a mistake. Of course you can just not care and let people walk all over you every single time, but that’s not a healthy strategy either.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
> It's not like they lost their job or something; it's just a 2-day event. One wrinkle I haven't seen called out is whether this was a paid speaking event (I assume it was) and if the demotion came with a part cut. If there was a pay cut that pretty shitty IMO, and does get a bit closer to losing ones job.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sanderjd 3y ago
This goes both ways though? The organizers also turned this into a big drama and could have instead chosen to just chill and accept there was going to be a keynote some of them didn't love.

ghusto 3y ago

> The equivalent situation is something like being warmly invited to a wedding > ... > Later, you're told you can only come to the ceremony and not the reception or party For context, I've spoken at over 100 conference events. Is it though? I can tell you from an audience point of view it almost certainly isn't. Nobody cares very much what "status, time, and prominence" your talk has. Which leads me to ... > There are very significant differences in terms of the keynote speakers and regular speakers — generally in compensation, status, time, and prominence So it's an ego thing? Just give the talk, forego whatever glory you get from it.

jxf 3y ago
> So it's an ego thing? It's a respect thing. It costs time and money to produce and give a talk. That very often isn't visible to the audience. It takes weeks of dedicated preparation to deliver a high-quality keynote talk, and people have day jobs and other obligations. If they're going to travel hundreds or thousands of miles and now have to pay for the privilege, they might want to not be treated as disposable. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
- cookieperson 3y ago
  People often get time off of work or school to be honored with formal talking gigs. IE your boss will let you off the hook to prepare for it because it makes your company/school look good. It'd be pretty embarrassing to have to explain to your boss or your PI that "oops I'm no longer a key note speaker"
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  Why not just make all talks keynotes then. Change the label and everyone gets respect.
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
Man, you really don't understand social dynamics do you? Status, credibility and respect are real and tend to matter a lot. It's not "an ego thing".