14 ms·

Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

418 points by derickbailey 14y ago

TeeWEE 14y ago
What is this, I don’t even…
spot 14y ago
useless without pointer to the actual behavior.
- steele 14y ago
  Anonymous examples would help make the point, but outright pointers to the behavior described is not a not too distant cousin of "hah check out this jerk"
  - debacle 14y ago
    When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? If people are acting like assholes, they deserved to be called out.
    - steele 14y ago
      Singling out individuals/incidents would support the author's epistemic authority but would undermine their moral authority on the topic
      - debacle 14y ago
        That's not how the real world works.
        steele 14y ago
        What about my reply is contrary to "how the real world works"? I'm fairly confident that if this article had a link to tangible occurrences two things will occur in "the real world": 1) readers will react to those particular incidents 2) the author of the article will be called a hypocrite
        Symmetry 14y ago
        The point is, moral authority doesn't help at all in changing the behavior of people who aren't on your side already. It's very important with leadership and group cohesion, so not opening yourself up to calls of being a hypocrite is something the leader of an open source project should consider when dealing with jerks in their project. But it isn't particularly useful in effecting change from the outside.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
    - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      >When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? // The point is here that it's assumed that the people making the pull request are attempting to make an honest contribution and the response they're getting is "look at what this jerk is doing". I don't think it's possible to give real life examples without making it possible to find the people involved. Clearly the author isn't wanting to publicly chastise particular leaders; nor would they it seems want to draw attention to particular code that wasn't adopted and led to [over-harsh] dismissal of the contributor's effort.
      - debacle 14y ago
        The author is coming from a point of view that I don't know if anyone else in the OSS world holds, and that the Internet doesn't seem to agree with. Without hard evidence, he's talking out his defecation hole.
        pbhjpbhj 14y ago
        What's your background Debacle? This guy currently contributes to several OS projects http://mutedsolutions.com/about http://mutedsolutions.com/about, https://github.com/derickbailey https://github.com/derickbailey and has apparently been a developer for over 30 years in a range of environments. Whilst I don't find it impossible to imagine that he's made up the problem it seems doubtful on balance - what would he gain? He says he's fallen in to the trap himself of making fun of others [apparently] honest contributions. Yes, that's not an argument but this >Without hard evidence, he's talking out his defecation hole. // is fallacious reasoning. It is not the case that failure to present examples of pathological behaviour means that behaviour is a fiction. If your position is true and indeed he is literally the only person to believe that sometimes OSS leaders have made fun of the code of other [attempted] contributors then it's interesting to speculate why that might be so. One possibility of course is that those who deny it's a problem simply can't see it despite it being there. Also, if we can accept him to be a "leader" then we now know at least one person that he's being critical of ...
    - potatolicious 14y ago
      When the goal is to change behavior as a whole it helps to not point anyone out. If you linked to a Github pull request that demonstrates this behavior, that guy now becomes the eye of the storm, instead of the community where the focus should be. If the author did that, we'd all be talking about how githubuserxyz is such an ass for belittling contributors and how dissimilar we each individually are from githubuserxyz. It doesn't help the conversation - which is one that the community needs to have.
      - debacle 14y ago
        This doesn't seem like an activity that's rampant in the community in any fashion. I personally only recall it happening once, ever, and I've been a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years.
        msbarnett 14y ago
        > This doesn't seem like an activity that's rampant in the community in any fashion. I personally only recall it happening once, ever, and I've been a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years. If a lot of other people are talking about the negative consequences of something you personally haven't experienced, generalizing outwards from your own experiences to conclude that something a lot of other people have experienced doesn't exist is a pretty wrongheaded way to approach life. Maybe you've just been lucky.
        debacle 14y ago
        This is something that one person has said happens, with no evidence, that many other people with equal credentials have said doesn't happen. Without evidence, it's just talk.
        boboblong 14y ago
        > If a lot of other people are talking about the negative consequences of something you personally haven't experienced, generalizing outwards from your own experiences to conclude that something a lot of other people have experienced doesn't exist is a pretty wrongheaded way to approach life. You're wrong. Generalizing from your personal experience and from verifiable facts while paying little attention to vague whining and anonymous accusations (of unnamed alleged perpetrators, no less!) is an excellent way to approach life.
    - kevinh 14y ago
      When Internet witch hunts started ruining the lives of people because they made one bad decision.
Karunamon 14y ago
A part of the hacker mindset ("hacker" as used in the jargon file, and in this site's title) is intolerance of stupidity. Ignorance is one thing, that can be learned away. Stupidity is wasting developer's time by asking questions that are addressed in the documentation or that can be instantly solved with five minutes on Google, or submitting pull requests that go against a published style guide, are plainly wrong or buggy, and so on. I'm going to come right out and say this: Some people should not contribute to a FOSS project. Whether that's because they can't deal with other people or because they're not willing to put in even a modicum of effort to work effectively with other people. If you go up to a group of people who are used to doing things according to procedure X and you blithely ignore it, you really should not be surprised when your efforts are met with derision at best and hostility at worst. While I understand the point the author is trying to make here, and even sympathize to a point, the mindset isn't going to change, nor should it. The bar to entry is a part of what make high quality projects high quality.
- darkarmani 14y ago
  > The bar to entry is a part of what make high quality projects high quality. Maybe the code is of high quality, but they usually end up stale and defunct from lack of contribution.
- hubb 14y ago
  please don't try to excuse rude behaviour by ascribing it to a culture that is defined by curiosity and tinkering. being rude has nothing to do with hacking. if you want to be curt and insult people, then you bear the onus for that.
- steele 14y ago
  FOSS isn't exclusively "hacker culture", and that behavior isn't correlated with high quality. If that is the accepted behavior of the maintainers/contributors, then be 'open' about that too. "If you have questions, RTF(src|wiki|docs|issues|blog|groups) then come join us in #herpderp on freenode where our chamber of @ cloaked elders will determine your fate; aid you, ignore you, berate you, or remove you."
- mion 14y ago
bryanh 14y ago
I've not seen this at all. In my experience, most open source project leaders are very congenial and gracious that you're spending time on their project. I did some poking around and couldn't find any OSS leads that disparaged their contributors. Not sure if the lack of examples was an attempt to not "name and blame" or if there aren't many good ones. OP, to be clear, this isn't merely leads saying "this code/feature/suggestion is inappropriate" to pull requests, but honest malice?
- whatshisface 14y ago
  >I've not seen this at all. Well, there is always everyone's favorite grumpy uncle Linus. :) I think it ends up being 'ok' for him to do it because nobody questions the importance of a kernel being perfect.
  - akkartik 14y ago
    Linus being flame-y is not the same thing at all. He's not telling people to RTFM afaics.
    - npsimons 14y ago
      I was about to say this same thing; Linus is extremely tame by most people's standards, and when he does get snippy, he tends to reserve vitriol mostly for those who should know better. If he does take the time to criticize a "noob", it's not because they are a beginner, it's because their idea is flat out wrong. Take the whole git/C++ email exchange (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643/focus=57918 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...) and notice how Linus didn't get flame-y until the OP did. Or the whole Con Kolivas/Ingo Molnar scheduler debacle: there were perfectly good reasons why Torvalds chose Molnar's implementation over Kolivas's. The truth of the matter is, Linus doesn't really have time to respond to every hare-brained idea that people have for the kernel. Add to that he's been doing this for a while. If you feel maligned, you might want to consider a) Linus is probably right b) if you really want to hack on the kernel, you should know better and c) if you want due consideration from people more busy than you, you should give your idea due consideration yourself. Edit to followup: until you've lurked on LKML for a while, or heard an interview, or, I dunno, maybe actually had a live conversation with Torvalds, you are probably being lead to believe he's an asshole by people with bones to pick with him (eg, people who should know better who he told off). As someone else pointed out farther down thread, how many times have we seen links to a single email/blog post by Torvalds without the context of the person he is responding to?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
debacle 14y ago
I agree with others. This is useless without context - I have never seen this actually happen. "stupid pull request of the day site:twitter.com" returns one result, and it isn't negative in any fashion.
lazyjones 14y ago
I've seen this a couple of times but not after pull requests, but simple (verified even) bug reports or feature requests. Let me quote a recent example from IRC: > XXXXX interesting how the number of new github issues went down since i started ignoring them :) > XXXXX could be coincidence, but i suspect having a few open tickets discourages the more frivolous requests we usually got there" Nice attitude there! After reading several such comments and some diatribe on github (following a bug report), I really had difficulties justifying the use of the software developed by this guy, especially after having been warned about this earlier by a co-worker ("the project is fine, XXXXX is the only problem with it") and not taking it seriously because I thought he was exaggerating (I'm not really into personality cult etc.).
- grogenaut 14y ago
  If the project gets big enough you really need to have someone just dealing with the issues. It's super time consuming. I've gotten commit access and cred on several open source projects just by going through the issue log and triaging it. There's a great post I can't find on a good triage process for issues. OSS projects are much more likely to give you access to do tickets than to commit. And on github, you can tag issues to help the maintainers sort the issues.
tinco 14y ago
I've never seen an opensource leader make fun of an honest attempt at contribution. What I have seen is a lot of ignoring and rejecting attempts. Miguel de Icaza had a blog post on this I think. The problem with large opensource projects is that they have a lot to do, and simply don't have time to thoroughly follow up on all the small contributions that are ridden with naieve errors and plain formatting issues. Not to mention the big ones that come with architectural changes without explanations. I think it's unfair to call these charity workers jerks, just because they are trying to make light of a dire situation. Yes it can hurt if your contribution is coldly cast aside, and yes it would be much better if they warmly took you in and taught you in their ways, but if the OSS project leaders don't keep up the constant stream of contributions, improving the project all the time the project will die and all work will have been in vain. On a side note: which project will you be contributing to this christmas? It is charity time after all and a bunch of hem could use a commit or two from your hands :) just be sure to read their code-style documents ;)
- cloverich 14y ago
  > Yes it can hurt if your contribution is coldly cast aside, and yes it would be much better if they warmly took you in and taught you in their ways, but if the OSS project leaders don't keep up the constant stream of contributions, improving the project all the time the project will die and all work will have been in vain. Perhaps I'm being naive, but doesn't fostering relationships with contributors promote more contributions? Or is it considered far too rare that a (somewhat) mentored contributor will continue to contribute?
  - TillE 14y ago
    That's certainly Gina Trapani's philosophy with ThinkUp, and it seems fairly successful. http://smarterware.org/7819/my-codeconf-talk-your-community-is-your-best-feature http://smarterware.org/7819/my-codeconf-talk-your-community-...
  - benmccann 14y ago
    More contributors means more work for the project maintainers since it's more code they have to review, discuss, and commit. Very often the maintainers don't care about bug fixes or enhancements if it's not for something that's impacting their work.
Zelphyr 14y ago
Based on all the "I don't know what you're talking about. I've never seen this." comments I think the author should clarify that its not just the OS project leaders who are guilty of this. The smugness of core developers, and even contributors is worthy of a South Park episode. If you're a young developer, or seasoned for that matter, and the urge to put down the work of someone else tugs at you, consider this; I recently had the pleasure of meeting Steve Bourne, inventor of the Bourne Shell (as in, /bin/sh on every Unix system ever). Here is a guy who was literally sitting next to the guys who invented Unix WHILE THEY INVENTED IT. And all this time later he's surprisingly humble, friendly, and genuinely interested in what other, younger developers are doing. If a guy who has earned the right to be smug several times over treats people with respect, what right do we have to do otherwise?
carlisle_ 14y ago
I have to wonder how many people see Linus Torvald's behavior and think what he does is OK. Linus walks a VERY fine line, and his insults and demeaning comments are usually directed at people who "know better." I have had a few drinks so it's hard to properly articulate what I mean, but maybe somebody else knows what I'm talking about.
- TillE 14y ago
  No, you're right. While I don't think Linus himself is a bully, he does seem to be one of the reasons that jerkitude is not only tolerated, but respected and aspired to in open source / hacker communities.
- freditup 14y ago
  I have Harley Hahn's Unix book (2009 edition I think). In it, he describes some of the reasons Linux grew so quickly. One of them is that "Linus has a pleasing personality... in person or online, Linus pretty much gets along with everyone because he is so easygoing. As he once observed in an interview, 'Unlike Richard Stallman, I really don't have a message.'" This part struck me - as a college student who hasn't been involved in tech culture for that long, all I had heard of Linus is about his brilliance but his harshness and perhaps arrogance. So, assuming my impression and Hahn's are both accurate - what changed? I think that the stress of life gets to us and we start to cut the pleasantries, tact, and niceties that seem to slow us down. We don't mean to be a jerk, but the fast-paced lives we commit ourselves to don't allow time for us to treat others as respectfully as we can. We're blunt because it is easier on us and we don't care about what it does to others.
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    Alternatively, perhaps nothing changed, and the public propaganda about Linus is generated mostly by people who don't interact with him, and flaming about high-level things like driver support is only tangentially related to what it is like to interact with Linus.
  - cbs 14y ago
    So, assuming my impression and Hahn's are both accurate - what changed? Nothing. The only difference is if you're on a mailing list that Linus frequents, or if you're only reading a single post from that list bereft of context because someone sent you a link to the point where Linus puts his foot down. Its like Zed Shaw, he wrote a great introduction to programming book I frequently recommend and even helps random people learn over twitter and email. But post some of his work on HN and you'll find a bunch of people still sore about a single angry rant he wrote a few years ago.
mindcrime 14y ago
I couldn't agree more. I've seen this type of attitude from F/OSS "leaders" over the past couple of decades, and it always galls me to no end. This is why I commit (no pun intended) to try my best to not be like that with any of my projects. Now, to be fair, none of the Fogbeam projects have a lot of outside contributions to date, but every time someone has contacted me, I've tried to respond in a polite, reasonable and appropriate manner. One thing to consider, when interacting with people you don't know, is that you don't know what you're possibly getting. We got a request once, for permission to take our code, make it work with MySql, and use it for some academic research. Now that was already allowed by the license anyway, but I took the time to respond to the guy, and had a few chat/email interactions with him as worked on his project, even though I had no idea who he was, how important the project was, or if anything would ever come of it. A year or so later, I get an email saying "Hey, here's a pre-print of the paper we published, it's being presented at $PRESTIGIOUS_CONFERENCE, and we mention your project in the paper". That turns out to be a nice "feather in the bonnet" for us and helped get the project some visibility it would not have gotten otherwise. Honestly, I don't see any value in being dismissive, insulting or demeaning towards anyone, just because they aren't already an expert in your project.
fijal 14y ago
This completely doesn't ring the bell for me, but maybe Python community that I typically interact with is different. Maybe we're such jerks that we don't even know how much of jerks we're.
saosebastiao 14y ago
The worst behavior I have ever seen comes from a commercial open source project. I know they aren't paying customers...but they are bug finders and bug reporters, user experience testers, and even feature-expanding code contributors. I would be appalled if I employed the guy.
jasonkester 14y ago
This isn't restricted to open source project leaders, or even open source developers. You'll find the same childish elitism in pretty much every field of human endeavor. Programmers certainly do it. Laughing at noobs and being mean to them is pretty much the sole purpose of IRC, unless I'm mistaken. Surfers do it. Climbers do it. I've even seen rocket scientists do it. The interesting thing is watching which members of a given group behave this way. It's not everybody. There's a certain skill range where you find this behavior. Generally it ranges between "reasonably good" and "better than most people I know", and it grows exponentially in that range (though, again, only in people who are given to such behavior). But there it stops. Once you hit a threshold of "better than pretty much everybody in the world, even those who have dedicated their life to this stuff", you don't really see this sort of elitism anymore. I live in the climbing mecca of Fontainebleau, and can watch first hand as 7a boulderers from around the world descend and act like jackasses trying to scootch their butts off the ground on problems that are hard (but not world class) while scowling with superiority at the lowly rabble that might dare touch the holds of their project. It's best to simply wait until they give up before going over and doing the problem. But occasionally you see a guy working an 8a. That's pretty stout by anybody's definition (even at font), but he's not shouting or swearing at it. He's just calmly doing his thing, uninterested in being the center of attention, and more than happy to talk to anybody who walks up without the least hint of snoot. I think you find the computer programming equivalent of that guy from time to time too. He's the "bourne shell" guy that another comment mentions downthread, and he's above the elite. The cool thing is that you don't have to be as good as him to act like him. All you need do is not be a dick.
- bmj 14y ago
  I went through this phase as a climber (fortunately it preceded my career as a programmer, so I learned my lesson), and I've gotten over myself, and realized that no matter what I do, there are scores of people who are better, and more humble. Also I am rather jealous you live in Fountainbleau. Very.
  - DigitalJack 14y ago
    You bring up a point that is interesting to me. Why does it matter to our own humility if there exist people that are better/smarter/abler than we are? It does matter to me, but I feel it shouldn't. Woe to me if I am ever the best at anything, I'm sure I'd be a paragon of intolerance for my lessers. And yet, some of the smartest people I know, people who very well know their own ability, are the among the kindest people I know. On the flipside, I know some "less gifted" people that are equally as kind.
joering2 14y ago
My favorite comments I will never forget from my ex-CTO: "you are wrong about this, because I say you are wrong." [turned out: he was dead wrong!] "stay home if you want to answer phonecall from your dad." [knowing he is in the hospital] "today you have been all day on the phone." [after talking with dad for 3 min 35 sec] "stop pinging google to check if the net is working." "ping doesn't tell you anything." "I hate those Chrome tabs -- they are affecting my search results." "I'm a CTO - I can be rude." "Don't work here if you have family." "If we succeed with this project [24-months period], we may get million dollars bonus" [perfectly knowing its impossible and simply not true] "I fixed Asia!" -"Cool!" -"What did you do?" -"At 3am? I was with my wife and kids." -"Well, I hope that helped alot in your career." [next day, after he IT-supported Asia at 3am] "You see my desk? Apple, Apple, Apple..." "You are on a McDonalds French Fry Guy schedule, ha!" [after working 14 hours straight from 7am till 9pm] "You work long hours and are not paid for those, because you are upper managment and should be proud of it". [after working 14 hours straight] "Don't ask for that, you are not upper managment!" [when something failed to work and needed to figure the details to troubleshoot] "You are upper managment, you should know this!" [when I didn't know something IT-related] "You won't get the bonus, you are not upper managment!" [bonus question around Christmas time] [email provider down; on the phone with support] "Why are you calling them? chat-support is faster!" [days later, the same issue; on the chat] "Stop wasting time on chat, just grab a phone and call them!" [after 12 hours straight work on 8hr schedule] "I completed the project, I am going home" -"Fine with me, as long as you are Symfony Framework specialist" [next day after staying extra 2 hours to understand basics of Symfony Framework] -"Never mind, we won't use them anyway!" Those were the perks.. there were some better here and there, but honestly I started making notes way too late. But my tech-friends always loved to ask whats new with my CTO. They used to call him "Chief Toilet Officer", because frankly speaking he couldn't do shit right.
- kyberias 14y ago
  Wow! This was really off-topic. Like miles off... miles...
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    However, it seems the jerk problem is not limited to open source.
ynniv 14y ago
I played pull request with a framework recently. There was something that I wanted to do that could only be done if the framework had fully chained a JavaScript function (ie, forwarded all parameters, included "this", and returned the result). It was an easy fix, but it turned out that what appeared to be an omission was intentional due to very specific edge cases in JavaScript that prevented someone from doing something undocumented but maybe useful. A conflict between two users doing things that the framework did not intend seems like a tough decision, one that makes sense to roll with the status quo. Except that from the issues database, I can see that I was not the only person to ask for this change. My pull request was actually proposed 3 or 4 other times, and there were plenty of other people who had found a sort-of-workaround and were shipping code using this workaround. So I sat down and spent a good amount of time investigating the edge cases to figure out what should be done, wrote it all up, linked to the other people who were having problems or working around them, and submitted a new pull request. Again, the results were unsatisfying: closed because they didn't think people should be doing that. Except that they already are doing it in a hackier way. I guess that other lone guy who was doing something really strange but filed his bug report first wins after all. This whimsy is disrespectful, and pushes people to use something else, start their own, or spend time telling the world that you don't know how to play nicely. In the end, maybe that doesn't matter to some maintainers. They had their fame and their fun and they move on.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  How would you avoid this? If a change is made quickly due to because that other lone guy filed his bug report first, then the solution would have been to, well, ignore his report. However, a project which did that might well ignore your report too.
  - ynniv 14y ago
    These are the decisions that build (or do not build) community. The best decision is to look at what is best for the most people, consider as a maintainer where you want the framework to go, and make a careful decision. A cursory glance over someone's suggestion and a dismissal that is ignorant of how the community is working with the project or based on organizational minutia (formatting, variable names, unit tests, etc) erodes other people's interest in making your project a success.
sonabinu 14y ago
Glad that someone is talking about this. There are times when a little encouragement can go a long way. A novice maybe very excited about learning and being belittled at that stage can be deflating. This is especially true of people who come from a totally different field, or are young and enthusiastic about contributing.
tytso 14y ago
The author thinks an open source elite is someone with high visibility in a project that is "well known by tens or hundreds of thousands of people"? That's a pretty low bar. Personally, I'd call someone in that category a wannabe. On the internet, it doesn't take a lot to have that much recognition. I consider people who are "the elite" to be folks like Larry Wall. Or Guido van Rossem. Or someone like Ian Lance Taylor (who has hacked on many things in the GCC/binutils toolchain). Their projects are known by a bit more than a mere "hundreds of thousands of people", and they are definitely not jerks. The reality is if you want to be very successful, especially in a project where all of the contributors are volunteers, you can't be a jerk, because then people won't want to work with you. In the very early days of NetBSD, there were a quite a few people who were quite disagreeable to be around on the core team list. One of them was in my work and social circles, and it's one of the reasons I choose to work on Linux instead of NetBSD. But even NetBSD is known by more than "hundreds of thousands" of people. And that's the key --- yes, being a jerk will probably be a strong negative factor if you want your project to be one of the really top, well-known, successful projects. But you can a jerk and still have a moderately successful OSS project. Because at the end of the day, for better or worse, people will overlook someone being a jerk if they have a good, solid product to offer. This is true outside of the OSS world as well, of course. As far as I'm concerned neither Larry Ellison nor Steve Jobs would win the nicest person of the year award. But their products were sufficiently good that people were willing to overlook their personality traits, and indeed even idolize them as positive examples of leaders in the Tech industry.
zzzeek 14y ago
this blog post has a major omission of any specifics whatsoever. I've never seen this kind of behavior, and I'm having a great urge to say something like, "oh well because PHP/Ruby/etc". But that is all prejudicial. Won't we be given some specifics so that we don't have to guess what famous OSS author actually typed "HAHAHA" at a pull request ?
- msbarnett 14y ago
  It's hard to believe that people "have never seen this behaviour" have spent much time watching the OSS community. Ulrich Dreper, well known OSS contributor and former steward of glibc, was famous for flaming the ever-living shit out of anyone who dared submit a patch that he in any way did not care for. To give but one example, http://www.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2000-08/msg00053.html http://www.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2000-08/msg00053.htm...
  - debacle 14y ago
    That was flaming the ever-living shit out of someone? Seems like he's trying to keep his stdlib clean and efficient.
    - msbarnett 14y ago
      So it's not that you've never seen this behavior in your tenure as " a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years", it's just that you think toxic behavior is acceptable. That's, at least, a more intellectually honest position than your previous claim. There are a lot of ways to reject a patch on the grounds of cleanness and efficiency that don't involve deriding the contributor's work as "BSD crap" that only helps people who "deserve to be punished". Drepper was a monumental asshole, and he deeply hurt the glibc project for years.
      - debacle 14y ago
        Toxic? Really? Lighten up, Francis.
nullc 14y ago
There is an unfortunate flipside to this— people who show up with ALL CAPS demands, proclaiming your incompetence, because of some missing functionality that they believe to be so obvious but can't seem to completely explain on their own. The best way to respond to that is to politely request what you need and then ignore if they won't be helpful. ... but humans don't always respond in the best way: Another possible response is to respond harshly and critically in order to generate a hierarchy: "I am not here to serve you. Your patches may be accepted if it suits my fancy.". Neither extreme of being high and mighty nor of allowing people to simply abuse you is ideal.
codex_irl 14y ago
I've called out more than one "leader / boss" out in meetings / code-reviews for being excessively mean & shaming noobs who are genuinely trying their best & are hungry to learn. Constructive criticism is a great thing, but telling someone they will never work again in this industry because they make a small CSS error on their first ever post-college project is another. I've been fired from one job for standing up in a meeting and calling the boss a self-important asshole & refusing to retract it. Life is too short to let these type of people get you down, we are all just floating on a rock in space & going to die in a few years....what's important: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/14su4p/he_sang_to_her_every_night_before_bed_moments/ http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/14su4p/he_sang_to_her_...
- keithpeter 14y ago
  "I've been fired from one job for standing up in a meeting and calling the boss a self-important asshole & refusing to retract it." Well, yes, that would cause some difficulties and a slightly chilled air around the coffee machine where I work as well. There are ways of communicating the sentiment without making it easy for them to get rid of you...
  - codex_irl 14y ago
    I agree with you, but I did not really want to stay working for that guy anyways - it was no loss. My take on working is that my employer is renting my time & skills to complete a job, they have every right to expect value for their money - but they don't own me, nor can they tell me when I am allowed to take a phone call, go for a lunch break, shout at me or demand that I work extra hours for no extra money. As the wolf says: "I'm here to help - if my help's not appreciated then lotsa luck, gentlemen."
    - keithpeter 14y ago
      Yup, as a teacher I have a huge amount of autonomy. I can work at home (I actually do log into an rdp session, but I don't have to) and schedule the between class work when I wish to. We tend to use mobile phones for personal calls in the UK, just a fashion I suppose. The funny thing is that I end up doing a lot of work on my own time...
Symmetry 14y ago
I expect a major driver of this is that people always tend to underestimate how much tacit knowledge they're using and so to assume that people who disagree with them are fundamentally stupid, malicious, or crazy when they're really just coming from a different background. http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_distances/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_dista...
- breck 14y ago
  > people always tend to underestimate how much tacit knowledge they're using I like how you put that. Any thoughts on the best way to respond when someone asks you for something that requires hundreds or thousands of hours of tacit knowledge?
  - Symmetry 14y ago
    "This is something I learned through thousands of hours of working in this area"? I'd hope that being able to point to concrete achievements would help people to make peace with gaps like this, something that isn't necessarily available to a scientist trying to explain evolution to laymen - since the laymen might not even be able to get what the scientist has accomplished. Most achievements in programming seem easier from the outside so this isn't perfect, but it might be a good starting point. The thing is that you should just always be sensitive to the possibility of large inferential distances when you're interacting with people of different opinions. "Don't ascribe to malice what may be due to stupidity. Don't presume stupidity when ignorance is as good an explanation. And try not to be too sure your opponent is the ignorant one until you can prove otherwise." That's very much in descending order of importance, but it's always good to keep the third point in mind if you can.
marcamillion 14y ago
I thought this was exclusive to the Rails community - but it is good to see it's not. I am glad someone is speaking out against it, because it sucks. One of the major reasons people don't learn to be better developers is because of "elite developers" that have come before them that take pride in humiliating them. This article is very on-point. I nearly stopped learning Rails because of the torment from #RubyOnRails on IRC. But then I remembered it is the internet and everybody is probably a dog. I am glad I didn't stop learning - and I am very conscious of this with "noobs" now.
- grogenaut 14y ago
  Every time I've gone to RubyOnRails I've had to fend off supposed experts who are really morons. Like since 2005. I've had the experts tell me, when asking questions about how I might fix an issue with upgrade issues with a big rails plugin (now engine) and rails that "You should just wait and the plugin maintainers will do it eventually". No help on what to try, nothing. It took me throwing down the commit log / website showing me as the maintainer to get them to not be condescending. That channel is terrible. The shining light is Radar. Man that dude is good. Tester and coder on shopify. And effing friendly. Can't say enough about him.
  - JonnieCache 14y ago
    Never, ever go in #rubyonrails. Every time I've ever been in there I get nothing but industrial strength sarcasm from people who don't actually know what they're talking about. Who are these people? Are they socially awkward nerdy types, or are they more the "jock" side of the coin who understand social rules better than most but simply consider themselves above them? My first instinct is to assume they're all 14 years old, because that was what everyone I knew was like when I was 14. Inevitably these people turn out to be in their 30s and have somehow assembled complete lives with jobs and houses and so on. The mind boggles. By the way, #ruby on freenode is very noob friendly, with people going far out of their way to help beginning coders. There's probably a better class of noob in there as compared to #rubyonrails though.
    - 14y ago
tjbiddle 14y ago
There are a lot of other angles we can look at this as well: The user ("I need.."), The cocky contributor ("This is right, accept my pull request!"), The belittled contributor ("I'm not sure.. but let me try.."), The helpful leader ("I can't accept this because it will break xyz.") The douche leader (As the article stated: "LOL!"), and the cocky leader ("No, that's wrong." - And then they realize later it's actually right, but they're attitude made them not look at a worthy contribution in the right light correctly.) The article makes a good point - But there's a lot more we can take out of this, that being that for any community to succeed, it needs to be just that: A community. A place where others help each other grow.
- christkv 14y ago
  Sometimes it's hard because reminding someone who sends you pull request about the projects contributor guidelines sends them off in a huff and even though they pull "might" be good in that it does not break any tests it's hard to know what scenario it's guarding against or if the person is doing something strange in their code. The cocky contributor is usually a bad contributor in my experience and are both energy drains and time sinks. The belittled (or humble) contributor is the one I am that I really appreciate and value as they are willing to enter into a dialog about what needs to be in the pull request to get it in. In the end is all about normal human social decency. Treat people badly and don't be surprised when they treat you as a leper.
kmfrk 14y ago
I don't see this in GitHub projects (so far), but this is the usual experience when asking for help on Stack Overflow or Freenode.
- rquirk 14y ago
  Nor do I. I've had lots of positive results on github, as puller and sender. The barrier to entry on github for sending a pull request is much higher than asking a "send me teh codez" question on Stack Overflow though. It's understandable that the more experienced contributers are burned out there. Rather than replying nastily maybe they should just leave the Eternal September that SO has become.
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    I think the CONTRIBUTING (sic) file in GitHub has also helped to put the onus on the repo owner to explain what is kosher, and what isn't. The idea of a canonical ruleset exists mainly so people don't have to make vague references to "common sense" and such. And I just don't see a lot of bad issues/pull requests out there, but the system still needs a managerial overhaul that scales, though. Better to nip the problem in the bud, before it downright breaks GitHub.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
hnruss 14y ago
From what I've seen, most of the contributors to large projects are one-time contributors who just want to implement their one cool idea for the project. Maintainers who want to encourage those sort of contributions need to do everything they can to lower the barrier of entry to contributing, which includes being positive towards new contributors.
sp332 14y ago
Chances are, mr or mrs open source elite, you have been on the receiving end of this in your life. Exactly, and that's why they do it to others! That may be their default (not consciously-chosen) behavior because it's what they got used to.
- Zelphyr 14y ago
  That seems to be an odd, and ironic flaw in the human mind. We often do to others what was done to us. Sexual abusers are often themselves past victims of sexual abuse.
  - sp332 14y ago
    It's not especially ironic. Two things: when people are left to their own devices, they tend to imitate the people around them. And, people tend to favor themselves to be a good "end result", which reflects favorably on the environment which shaped them. In fact, to oppose the circumstances you came from is to oppose some part of your own nature. So, people tend to favor recreating themselves (because they prefer themselves) by recreating the environment they came from. Edit: just found this example http://penny-arcade.com/2012/11/30 http://penny-arcade.com/2012/11/30
b1daly 14y ago
When I was high school I had the opportunity to work with an aspiring music producer. It was great fun and a formative experience because he had a notably kind and supportive demeanor, coupled with focus. He went on to become a superstar producer and to this day when I run into him he has exactly the same demeanor. This leads me to think some aspects of personality and how we treat others are innate. Jerks can be talented and successful too, and just remain Jerks. It takes all kinds.
Spearchucker 14y ago
That this still happens is sad. I was on the receiving end way back in 2002. I'd just written an RS232 library for the .NET Compact Framework that ended up in the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework Core Reference[1]. It was also referenced by an MSDN article[2], so got a lot of attention. I left a bug in there which broke anything that didn't use default settings. The abuse was astounding. It was the last code written on my own time that I ever published. [1] http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/book.aspx?ID=5960&locale=en-us http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/book.aspx?ID=5960&#3... [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446565.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446565.aspx
jongold 14y ago
Just taking a second to thank you for all your work on Marionette, and your seemingly endless contributions to Backbone/Marionette questions on StackOverflow Derick - I'm nowhere near the level to be contributing to Marionette but your humbleness inspires me to use your code every day :)
joshfraser 14y ago
Open source projects work best when they have a benevolent dictator. You need someone who isn't afraid to say "no" to bad ideas, or else you'll end up with a total clusterfuck. It's just as important not to forget the "benevolent" part. I'll always remember Brad Fitzpatrick telling me "no" to one of my dumb suggestions for PubSubHubbub. He explained his reasoning and took the time to tell me what I needed to fix. He knew he was smarter than me, but he gave me the chance to figure that out on my own instead of pushing me away.
fellars 14y ago
Having used Dericks (the OP) Marionette package and interacted a few times with him, I can attest he practices what he preaches.
grogenaut 14y ago
Lots of sports analogies on here. I'll toss in mine. I've made a habit of trying new things and have gotten over the "you look stupid when you start" part. Skiing, Snowboarding, knitting, sewing, coaching, aussie rules. Everyone's a newb at some point. I have found that I compare myself to other skiiers / boarders a lot. But that is mainly a safety thing so I know if I should follow them down other parts of the mountain. So competitive but for a reason. I think I get more pissy about etiquette and safety, but generally from people who look like they should know better. 16 year old coming into the lift line at high speed, I see you. I'm a large large man, you're gonna get hurt if you hit me and I played college ball, I'm gonna make sure I don't get hit. Soooo... anyway. Unless you're trying to get ranked in real life, you're really just competing against yourself. You're the one who will decide if you have the time to put into whatever to be good enough to compete at a low national level. There are exceptions, but in sports you can use your brain and experience to make up for physical deficiencies. In Cerebral events you can use persistence and experience. And I've tailed off so Fin
boboblong 14y ago
What major open source project is the harshest on newbies? I want to try to contribute to it.

418 points by derickbailey 14y ago

TeeWEE 14y ago

What is this, I don’t even…

spot 14y ago

useless without pointer to the actual behavior.

steele 14y ago
Anonymous examples would help make the point, but outright pointers to the behavior described is not a not too distant cousin of "hah check out this jerk"
- debacle 14y ago
  When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? If people are acting like assholes, they deserved to be called out.
  - steele 14y ago
    Singling out individuals/incidents would support the author's epistemic authority but would undermine their moral authority on the topic
    - debacle 14y ago
      That's not how the real world works.
      - steele 14y ago
        What about my reply is contrary to "how the real world works"? I'm fairly confident that if this article had a link to tangible occurrences two things will occur in "the real world": 1) readers will react to those particular incidents 2) the author of the article will be called a hypocrite
        Symmetry 14y ago
        The point is, moral authority doesn't help at all in changing the behavior of people who aren't on your side already. It's very important with leadership and group cohesion, so not opening yourself up to calls of being a hypocrite is something the leader of an open source project should consider when dealing with jerks in their project. But it isn't particularly useful in effecting change from the outside.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    >When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? // The point is here that it's assumed that the people making the pull request are attempting to make an honest contribution and the response they're getting is "look at what this jerk is doing". I don't think it's possible to give real life examples without making it possible to find the people involved. Clearly the author isn't wanting to publicly chastise particular leaders; nor would they it seems want to draw attention to particular code that wasn't adopted and led to [over-harsh] dismissal of the contributor's effort.
    - debacle 14y ago
      The author is coming from a point of view that I don't know if anyone else in the OSS world holds, and that the Internet doesn't seem to agree with. Without hard evidence, he's talking out his defecation hole.
      - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
        What's your background Debacle? This guy currently contributes to several OS projects http://mutedsolutions.com/about http://mutedsolutions.com/about, https://github.com/derickbailey https://github.com/derickbailey and has apparently been a developer for over 30 years in a range of environments. Whilst I don't find it impossible to imagine that he's made up the problem it seems doubtful on balance - what would he gain? He says he's fallen in to the trap himself of making fun of others [apparently] honest contributions. Yes, that's not an argument but this >Without hard evidence, he's talking out his defecation hole. // is fallacious reasoning. It is not the case that failure to present examples of pathological behaviour means that behaviour is a fiction. If your position is true and indeed he is literally the only person to believe that sometimes OSS leaders have made fun of the code of other [attempted] contributors then it's interesting to speculate why that might be so. One possibility of course is that those who deny it's a problem simply can't see it despite it being there. Also, if we can accept him to be a "leader" then we now know at least one person that he's being critical of ...
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    When the goal is to change behavior as a whole it helps to not point anyone out. If you linked to a Github pull request that demonstrates this behavior, that guy now becomes the eye of the storm, instead of the community where the focus should be. If the author did that, we'd all be talking about how githubuserxyz is such an ass for belittling contributors and how dissimilar we each individually are from githubuserxyz. It doesn't help the conversation - which is one that the community needs to have.
    - debacle 14y ago
      This doesn't seem like an activity that's rampant in the community in any fashion. I personally only recall it happening once, ever, and I've been a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years.
      - msbarnett 14y ago
        > This doesn't seem like an activity that's rampant in the community in any fashion. I personally only recall it happening once, ever, and I've been a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years. If a lot of other people are talking about the negative consequences of something you personally haven't experienced, generalizing outwards from your own experiences to conclude that something a lot of other people have experienced doesn't exist is a pretty wrongheaded way to approach life. Maybe you've just been lucky.
        debacle 14y ago
        This is something that one person has said happens, with no evidence, that many other people with equal credentials have said doesn't happen. Without evidence, it's just talk.
        boboblong 14y ago
        > If a lot of other people are talking about the negative consequences of something you personally haven't experienced, generalizing outwards from your own experiences to conclude that something a lot of other people have experienced doesn't exist is a pretty wrongheaded way to approach life. You're wrong. Generalizing from your personal experience and from verifiable facts while paying little attention to vague whining and anonymous accusations (of unnamed alleged perpetrators, no less!) is an excellent way to approach life.
  - kevinh 14y ago
    When Internet witch hunts started ruining the lives of people because they made one bad decision.

Karunamon 14y ago

A part of the hacker mindset ("hacker" as used in the jargon file, and in this site's title) is intolerance of stupidity. Ignorance is one thing, that can be learned away. Stupidity is wasting developer's time by asking questions that are addressed in the documentation or that can be instantly solved with five minutes on Google, or submitting pull requests that go against a published style guide, are plainly wrong or buggy, and so on. I'm going to come right out and say this: Some people should not contribute to a FOSS project. Whether that's because they can't deal with other people or because they're not willing to put in even a modicum of effort to work effectively with other people. If you go up to a group of people who are used to doing things according to procedure X and you blithely ignore it, you really should not be surprised when your efforts are met with derision at best and hostility at worst. While I understand the point the author is trying to make here, and even sympathize to a point, the mindset isn't going to change, nor should it. The bar to entry is a part of what make high quality projects high quality.

darkarmani 14y ago
> The bar to entry is a part of what make high quality projects high quality. Maybe the code is of high quality, but they usually end up stale and defunct from lack of contribution.
hubb 14y ago
please don't try to excuse rude behaviour by ascribing it to a culture that is defined by curiosity and tinkering. being rude has nothing to do with hacking. if you want to be curt and insult people, then you bear the onus for that.
steele 14y ago
FOSS isn't exclusively "hacker culture", and that behavior isn't correlated with high quality. If that is the accepted behavior of the maintainers/contributors, then be 'open' about that too. "If you have questions, RTF(src|wiki|docs|issues|blog|groups) then come join us in #herpderp on freenode where our chamber of @ cloaked elders will determine your fate; aid you, ignore you, berate you, or remove you."
mion 14y ago

bryanh 14y ago

I've not seen this at all. In my experience, most open source project leaders are very congenial and gracious that you're spending time on their project. I did some poking around and couldn't find any OSS leads that disparaged their contributors. Not sure if the lack of examples was an attempt to not "name and blame" or if there aren't many good ones. OP, to be clear, this isn't merely leads saying "this code/feature/suggestion is inappropriate" to pull requests, but honest malice?

whatshisface 14y ago
>I've not seen this at all. Well, there is always everyone's favorite grumpy uncle Linus. :) I think it ends up being 'ok' for him to do it because nobody questions the importance of a kernel being perfect.
- akkartik 14y ago
  Linus being flame-y is not the same thing at all. He's not telling people to RTFM afaics.
  - npsimons 14y ago
    I was about to say this same thing; Linus is extremely tame by most people's standards, and when he does get snippy, he tends to reserve vitriol mostly for those who should know better. If he does take the time to criticize a "noob", it's not because they are a beginner, it's because their idea is flat out wrong. Take the whole git/C++ email exchange (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643/focus=57918 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...) and notice how Linus didn't get flame-y until the OP did. Or the whole Con Kolivas/Ingo Molnar scheduler debacle: there were perfectly good reasons why Torvalds chose Molnar's implementation over Kolivas's. The truth of the matter is, Linus doesn't really have time to respond to every hare-brained idea that people have for the kernel. Add to that he's been doing this for a while. If you feel maligned, you might want to consider a) Linus is probably right b) if you really want to hack on the kernel, you should know better and c) if you want due consideration from people more busy than you, you should give your idea due consideration yourself. Edit to followup: until you've lurked on LKML for a while, or heard an interview, or, I dunno, maybe actually had a live conversation with Torvalds, you are probably being lead to believe he's an asshole by people with bones to pick with him (eg, people who should know better who he told off). As someone else pointed out farther down thread, how many times have we seen links to a single email/blog post by Torvalds without the context of the person he is responding to?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

debacle 14y ago

I agree with others. This is useless without context - I have never seen this actually happen. "stupid pull request of the day site:twitter.com" returns one result, and it isn't negative in any fashion.

lazyjones 14y ago

I've seen this a couple of times but not after pull requests, but simple (verified even) bug reports or feature requests. Let me quote a recent example from IRC: > XXXXX interesting how the number of new github issues went down since i started ignoring them :) > XXXXX could be coincidence, but i suspect having a few open tickets discourages the more frivolous requests we usually got there" Nice attitude there! After reading several such comments and some diatribe on github (following a bug report), I really had difficulties justifying the use of the software developed by this guy, especially after having been warned about this earlier by a co-worker ("the project is fine, XXXXX is the only problem with it") and not taking it seriously because I thought he was exaggerating (I'm not really into personality cult etc.).

grogenaut 14y ago
If the project gets big enough you really need to have someone just dealing with the issues. It's super time consuming. I've gotten commit access and cred on several open source projects just by going through the issue log and triaging it. There's a great post I can't find on a good triage process for issues. OSS projects are much more likely to give you access to do tickets than to commit. And on github, you can tag issues to help the maintainers sort the issues.

tinco 14y ago

I've never seen an opensource leader make fun of an honest attempt at contribution. What I have seen is a lot of ignoring and rejecting attempts. Miguel de Icaza had a blog post on this I think. The problem with large opensource projects is that they have a lot to do, and simply don't have time to thoroughly follow up on all the small contributions that are ridden with naieve errors and plain formatting issues. Not to mention the big ones that come with architectural changes without explanations. I think it's unfair to call these charity workers jerks, just because they are trying to make light of a dire situation. Yes it can hurt if your contribution is coldly cast aside, and yes it would be much better if they warmly took you in and taught you in their ways, but if the OSS project leaders don't keep up the constant stream of contributions, improving the project all the time the project will die and all work will have been in vain. On a side note: which project will you be contributing to this christmas? It is charity time after all and a bunch of hem could use a commit or two from your hands :) just be sure to read their code-style documents ;)

cloverich 14y ago
> Yes it can hurt if your contribution is coldly cast aside, and yes it would be much better if they warmly took you in and taught you in their ways, but if the OSS project leaders don't keep up the constant stream of contributions, improving the project all the time the project will die and all work will have been in vain. Perhaps I'm being naive, but doesn't fostering relationships with contributors promote more contributions? Or is it considered far too rare that a (somewhat) mentored contributor will continue to contribute?
- TillE 14y ago
  That's certainly Gina Trapani's philosophy with ThinkUp, and it seems fairly successful. http://smarterware.org/7819/my-codeconf-talk-your-community-is-your-best-feature http://smarterware.org/7819/my-codeconf-talk-your-community-...
- benmccann 14y ago
  More contributors means more work for the project maintainers since it's more code they have to review, discuss, and commit. Very often the maintainers don't care about bug fixes or enhancements if it's not for something that's impacting their work.

Zelphyr 14y ago

Based on all the "I don't know what you're talking about. I've never seen this." comments I think the author should clarify that its not just the OS project leaders who are guilty of this. The smugness of core developers, and even contributors is worthy of a South Park episode. If you're a young developer, or seasoned for that matter, and the urge to put down the work of someone else tugs at you, consider this; I recently had the pleasure of meeting Steve Bourne, inventor of the Bourne Shell (as in, /bin/sh on every Unix system ever). Here is a guy who was literally sitting next to the guys who invented Unix WHILE THEY INVENTED IT. And all this time later he's surprisingly humble, friendly, and genuinely interested in what other, younger developers are doing. If a guy who has earned the right to be smug several times over treats people with respect, what right do we have to do otherwise?

carlisle_ 14y ago

I have to wonder how many people see Linus Torvald's behavior and think what he does is OK. Linus walks a VERY fine line, and his insults and demeaning comments are usually directed at people who "know better." I have had a few drinks so it's hard to properly articulate what I mean, but maybe somebody else knows what I'm talking about.

TillE 14y ago
No, you're right. While I don't think Linus himself is a bully, he does seem to be one of the reasons that jerkitude is not only tolerated, but respected and aspired to in open source / hacker communities.
freditup 14y ago
I have Harley Hahn's Unix book (2009 edition I think). In it, he describes some of the reasons Linux grew so quickly. One of them is that "Linus has a pleasing personality... in person or online, Linus pretty much gets along with everyone because he is so easygoing. As he once observed in an interview, 'Unlike Richard Stallman, I really don't have a message.'" This part struck me - as a college student who hasn't been involved in tech culture for that long, all I had heard of Linus is about his brilliance but his harshness and perhaps arrogance. So, assuming my impression and Hahn's are both accurate - what changed? I think that the stress of life gets to us and we start to cut the pleasantries, tact, and niceties that seem to slow us down. We don't mean to be a jerk, but the fast-paced lives we commit ourselves to don't allow time for us to treat others as respectfully as we can. We're blunt because it is easier on us and we don't care about what it does to others.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  Alternatively, perhaps nothing changed, and the public propaganda about Linus is generated mostly by people who don't interact with him, and flaming about high-level things like driver support is only tangentially related to what it is like to interact with Linus.
- cbs 14y ago
  So, assuming my impression and Hahn's are both accurate - what changed? Nothing. The only difference is if you're on a mailing list that Linus frequents, or if you're only reading a single post from that list bereft of context because someone sent you a link to the point where Linus puts his foot down. Its like Zed Shaw, he wrote a great introduction to programming book I frequently recommend and even helps random people learn over twitter and email. But post some of his work on HN and you'll find a bunch of people still sore about a single angry rant he wrote a few years ago.

mindcrime 14y ago

I couldn't agree more. I've seen this type of attitude from F/OSS "leaders" over the past couple of decades, and it always galls me to no end. This is why I commit (no pun intended) to try my best to not be like that with any of my projects. Now, to be fair, none of the Fogbeam projects have a lot of outside contributions to date, but every time someone has contacted me, I've tried to respond in a polite, reasonable and appropriate manner. One thing to consider, when interacting with people you don't know, is that you don't know what you're possibly getting. We got a request once, for permission to take our code, make it work with MySql, and use it for some academic research. Now that was already allowed by the license anyway, but I took the time to respond to the guy, and had a few chat/email interactions with him as worked on his project, even though I had no idea who he was, how important the project was, or if anything would ever come of it. A year or so later, I get an email saying "Hey, here's a pre-print of the paper we published, it's being presented at $PRESTIGIOUS_CONFERENCE, and we mention your project in the paper". That turns out to be a nice "feather in the bonnet" for us and helped get the project some visibility it would not have gotten otherwise. Honestly, I don't see any value in being dismissive, insulting or demeaning towards anyone, just because they aren't already an expert in your project.

fijal 14y ago

This completely doesn't ring the bell for me, but maybe Python community that I typically interact with is different. Maybe we're such jerks that we don't even know how much of jerks we're.

saosebastiao 14y ago

The worst behavior I have ever seen comes from a commercial open source project. I know they aren't paying customers...but they are bug finders and bug reporters, user experience testers, and even feature-expanding code contributors. I would be appalled if I employed the guy.

jasonkester 14y ago

This isn't restricted to open source project leaders, or even open source developers. You'll find the same childish elitism in pretty much every field of human endeavor. Programmers certainly do it. Laughing at noobs and being mean to them is pretty much the sole purpose of IRC, unless I'm mistaken. Surfers do it. Climbers do it. I've even seen rocket scientists do it. The interesting thing is watching which members of a given group behave this way. It's not everybody. There's a certain skill range where you find this behavior. Generally it ranges between "reasonably good" and "better than most people I know", and it grows exponentially in that range (though, again, only in people who are given to such behavior). But there it stops. Once you hit a threshold of "better than pretty much everybody in the world, even those who have dedicated their life to this stuff", you don't really see this sort of elitism anymore. I live in the climbing mecca of Fontainebleau, and can watch first hand as 7a boulderers from around the world descend and act like jackasses trying to scootch their butts off the ground on problems that are hard (but not world class) while scowling with superiority at the lowly rabble that might dare touch the holds of their project. It's best to simply wait until they give up before going over and doing the problem. But occasionally you see a guy working an 8a. That's pretty stout by anybody's definition (even at font), but he's not shouting or swearing at it. He's just calmly doing his thing, uninterested in being the center of attention, and more than happy to talk to anybody who walks up without the least hint of snoot. I think you find the computer programming equivalent of that guy from time to time too. He's the "bourne shell" guy that another comment mentions downthread, and he's above the elite. The cool thing is that you don't have to be as good as him to act like him. All you need do is not be a dick.

bmj 14y ago
I went through this phase as a climber (fortunately it preceded my career as a programmer, so I learned my lesson), and I've gotten over myself, and realized that no matter what I do, there are scores of people who are better, and more humble. Also I am rather jealous you live in Fountainbleau. Very.
- DigitalJack 14y ago
  You bring up a point that is interesting to me. Why does it matter to our own humility if there exist people that are better/smarter/abler than we are? It does matter to me, but I feel it shouldn't. Woe to me if I am ever the best at anything, I'm sure I'd be a paragon of intolerance for my lessers. And yet, some of the smartest people I know, people who very well know their own ability, are the among the kindest people I know. On the flipside, I know some "less gifted" people that are equally as kind.

joering2 14y ago

My favorite comments I will never forget from my ex-CTO: "you are wrong about this, because I say you are wrong." [turned out: he was dead wrong!] "stay home if you want to answer phonecall from your dad." [knowing he is in the hospital] "today you have been all day on the phone." [after talking with dad for 3 min 35 sec] "stop pinging google to check if the net is working." "ping doesn't tell you anything." "I hate those Chrome tabs -- they are affecting my search results." "I'm a CTO - I can be rude." "Don't work here if you have family." "If we succeed with this project [24-months period], we may get million dollars bonus" [perfectly knowing its impossible and simply not true] "I fixed Asia!" -"Cool!" -"What did you do?" -"At 3am? I was with my wife and kids." -"Well, I hope that helped alot in your career." [next day, after he IT-supported Asia at 3am] "You see my desk? Apple, Apple, Apple..." "You are on a McDonalds French Fry Guy schedule, ha!" [after working 14 hours straight from 7am till 9pm] "You work long hours and are not paid for those, because you are upper managment and should be proud of it". [after working 14 hours straight] "Don't ask for that, you are not upper managment!" [when something failed to work and needed to figure the details to troubleshoot] "You are upper managment, you should know this!" [when I didn't know something IT-related] "You won't get the bonus, you are not upper managment!" [bonus question around Christmas time] [email provider down; on the phone with support] "Why are you calling them? chat-support is faster!" [days later, the same issue; on the chat] "Stop wasting time on chat, just grab a phone and call them!" [after 12 hours straight work on 8hr schedule] "I completed the project, I am going home" -"Fine with me, as long as you are Symfony Framework specialist" [next day after staying extra 2 hours to understand basics of Symfony Framework] -"Never mind, we won't use them anyway!" Those were the perks.. there were some better here and there, but honestly I started making notes way too late. But my tech-friends always loved to ask whats new with my CTO. They used to call him "Chief Toilet Officer", because frankly speaking he couldn't do shit right.

kyberias 14y ago
Wow! This was really off-topic. Like miles off... miles...
- slurgfest 14y ago
  However, it seems the jerk problem is not limited to open source.

ynniv 14y ago

I played pull request with a framework recently. There was something that I wanted to do that could only be done if the framework had fully chained a JavaScript function (ie, forwarded all parameters, included "this", and returned the result). It was an easy fix, but it turned out that what appeared to be an omission was intentional due to very specific edge cases in JavaScript that prevented someone from doing something undocumented but maybe useful. A conflict between two users doing things that the framework did not intend seems like a tough decision, one that makes sense to roll with the status quo. Except that from the issues database, I can see that I was not the only person to ask for this change. My pull request was actually proposed 3 or 4 other times, and there were plenty of other people who had found a sort-of-workaround and were shipping code using this workaround. So I sat down and spent a good amount of time investigating the edge cases to figure out what should be done, wrote it all up, linked to the other people who were having problems or working around them, and submitted a new pull request. Again, the results were unsatisfying: closed because they didn't think people should be doing that. Except that they already are doing it in a hackier way. I guess that other lone guy who was doing something really strange but filed his bug report first wins after all. This whimsy is disrespectful, and pushes people to use something else, start their own, or spend time telling the world that you don't know how to play nicely. In the end, maybe that doesn't matter to some maintainers. They had their fame and their fun and they move on.

slurgfest 14y ago
How would you avoid this? If a change is made quickly due to because that other lone guy filed his bug report first, then the solution would have been to, well, ignore his report. However, a project which did that might well ignore your report too.
- ynniv 14y ago
  These are the decisions that build (or do not build) community. The best decision is to look at what is best for the most people, consider as a maintainer where you want the framework to go, and make a careful decision. A cursory glance over someone's suggestion and a dismissal that is ignorant of how the community is working with the project or based on organizational minutia (formatting, variable names, unit tests, etc) erodes other people's interest in making your project a success.

sonabinu 14y ago

Glad that someone is talking about this. There are times when a little encouragement can go a long way. A novice maybe very excited about learning and being belittled at that stage can be deflating. This is especially true of people who come from a totally different field, or are young and enthusiastic about contributing.

tytso 14y ago

The author thinks an open source elite is someone with high visibility in a project that is "well known by tens or hundreds of thousands of people"? That's a pretty low bar. Personally, I'd call someone in that category a wannabe. On the internet, it doesn't take a lot to have that much recognition. I consider people who are "the elite" to be folks like Larry Wall. Or Guido van Rossem. Or someone like Ian Lance Taylor (who has hacked on many things in the GCC/binutils toolchain). Their projects are known by a bit more than a mere "hundreds of thousands of people", and they are definitely not jerks. The reality is if you want to be very successful, especially in a project where all of the contributors are volunteers, you can't be a jerk, because then people won't want to work with you. In the very early days of NetBSD, there were a quite a few people who were quite disagreeable to be around on the core team list. One of them was in my work and social circles, and it's one of the reasons I choose to work on Linux instead of NetBSD. But even NetBSD is known by more than "hundreds of thousands" of people. And that's the key --- yes, being a jerk will probably be a strong negative factor if you want your project to be one of the really top, well-known, successful projects. But you can a jerk and still have a moderately successful OSS project. Because at the end of the day, for better or worse, people will overlook someone being a jerk if they have a good, solid product to offer. This is true outside of the OSS world as well, of course. As far as I'm concerned neither Larry Ellison nor Steve Jobs would win the nicest person of the year award. But their products were sufficiently good that people were willing to overlook their personality traits, and indeed even idolize them as positive examples of leaders in the Tech industry.

zzzeek 14y ago

this blog post has a major omission of any specifics whatsoever. I've never seen this kind of behavior, and I'm having a great urge to say something like, "oh well because PHP/Ruby/etc". But that is all prejudicial. Won't we be given some specifics so that we don't have to guess what famous OSS author actually typed "HAHAHA" at a pull request ?

msbarnett 14y ago
It's hard to believe that people "have never seen this behaviour" have spent much time watching the OSS community. Ulrich Dreper, well known OSS contributor and former steward of glibc, was famous for flaming the ever-living shit out of anyone who dared submit a patch that he in any way did not care for. To give but one example, http://www.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2000-08/msg00053.html http://www.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2000-08/msg00053.htm...
- debacle 14y ago
  That was flaming the ever-living shit out of someone? Seems like he's trying to keep his stdlib clean and efficient.
  - msbarnett 14y ago
    So it's not that you've never seen this behavior in your tenure as " a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years", it's just that you think toxic behavior is acceptable. That's, at least, a more intellectually honest position than your previous claim. There are a lot of ways to reject a patch on the grounds of cleanness and efficiency that don't involve deriding the contributor's work as "BSD crap" that only helps people who "deserve to be punished". Drepper was a monumental asshole, and he deeply hurt the glibc project for years.
    - debacle 14y ago
      Toxic? Really? Lighten up, Francis.

nullc 14y ago

There is an unfortunate flipside to this— people who show up with ALL CAPS demands, proclaiming your incompetence, because of some missing functionality that they believe to be so obvious but can't seem to completely explain on their own. The best way to respond to that is to politely request what you need and then ignore if they won't be helpful. ... but humans don't always respond in the best way: Another possible response is to respond harshly and critically in order to generate a hierarchy: "I am not here to serve you. Your patches may be accepted if it suits my fancy.". Neither extreme of being high and mighty nor of allowing people to simply abuse you is ideal.

codex_irl 14y ago

I've called out more than one "leader / boss" out in meetings / code-reviews for being excessively mean & shaming noobs who are genuinely trying their best & are hungry to learn. Constructive criticism is a great thing, but telling someone they will never work again in this industry because they make a small CSS error on their first ever post-college project is another. I've been fired from one job for standing up in a meeting and calling the boss a self-important asshole & refusing to retract it. Life is too short to let these type of people get you down, we are all just floating on a rock in space & going to die in a few years....what's important: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/14su4p/he_sang_to_her_every_night_before_bed_moments/ http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/14su4p/he_sang_to_her_...

keithpeter 14y ago
"I've been fired from one job for standing up in a meeting and calling the boss a self-important asshole & refusing to retract it." Well, yes, that would cause some difficulties and a slightly chilled air around the coffee machine where I work as well. There are ways of communicating the sentiment without making it easy for them to get rid of you...
- codex_irl 14y ago
  I agree with you, but I did not really want to stay working for that guy anyways - it was no loss. My take on working is that my employer is renting my time & skills to complete a job, they have every right to expect value for their money - but they don't own me, nor can they tell me when I am allowed to take a phone call, go for a lunch break, shout at me or demand that I work extra hours for no extra money. As the wolf says: "I'm here to help - if my help's not appreciated then lotsa luck, gentlemen."
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Yup, as a teacher I have a huge amount of autonomy. I can work at home (I actually do log into an rdp session, but I don't have to) and schedule the between class work when I wish to. We tend to use mobile phones for personal calls in the UK, just a fashion I suppose. The funny thing is that I end up doing a lot of work on my own time...

Symmetry 14y ago

I expect a major driver of this is that people always tend to underestimate how much tacit knowledge they're using and so to assume that people who disagree with them are fundamentally stupid, malicious, or crazy when they're really just coming from a different background. http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_distances/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_dista...

breck 14y ago
> people always tend to underestimate how much tacit knowledge they're using I like how you put that. Any thoughts on the best way to respond when someone asks you for something that requires hundreds or thousands of hours of tacit knowledge?
- Symmetry 14y ago
  "This is something I learned through thousands of hours of working in this area"? I'd hope that being able to point to concrete achievements would help people to make peace with gaps like this, something that isn't necessarily available to a scientist trying to explain evolution to laymen - since the laymen might not even be able to get what the scientist has accomplished. Most achievements in programming seem easier from the outside so this isn't perfect, but it might be a good starting point. The thing is that you should just always be sensitive to the possibility of large inferential distances when you're interacting with people of different opinions. "Don't ascribe to malice what may be due to stupidity. Don't presume stupidity when ignorance is as good an explanation. And try not to be too sure your opponent is the ignorant one until you can prove otherwise." That's very much in descending order of importance, but it's always good to keep the third point in mind if you can.

marcamillion 14y ago

I thought this was exclusive to the Rails community - but it is good to see it's not. I am glad someone is speaking out against it, because it sucks. One of the major reasons people don't learn to be better developers is because of "elite developers" that have come before them that take pride in humiliating them. This article is very on-point. I nearly stopped learning Rails because of the torment from #RubyOnRails on IRC. But then I remembered it is the internet and everybody is probably a dog. I am glad I didn't stop learning - and I am very conscious of this with "noobs" now.

grogenaut 14y ago
Every time I've gone to RubyOnRails I've had to fend off supposed experts who are really morons. Like since 2005. I've had the experts tell me, when asking questions about how I might fix an issue with upgrade issues with a big rails plugin (now engine) and rails that "You should just wait and the plugin maintainers will do it eventually". No help on what to try, nothing. It took me throwing down the commit log / website showing me as the maintainer to get them to not be condescending. That channel is terrible. The shining light is Radar. Man that dude is good. Tester and coder on shopify. And effing friendly. Can't say enough about him.
- JonnieCache 14y ago
  Never, ever go in #rubyonrails. Every time I've ever been in there I get nothing but industrial strength sarcasm from people who don't actually know what they're talking about. Who are these people? Are they socially awkward nerdy types, or are they more the "jock" side of the coin who understand social rules better than most but simply consider themselves above them? My first instinct is to assume they're all 14 years old, because that was what everyone I knew was like when I was 14. Inevitably these people turn out to be in their 30s and have somehow assembled complete lives with jobs and houses and so on. The mind boggles. By the way, #ruby on freenode is very noob friendly, with people going far out of their way to help beginning coders. There's probably a better class of noob in there as compared to #rubyonrails though.
  - 14y ago

tjbiddle 14y ago

There are a lot of other angles we can look at this as well: The user ("I need.."), The cocky contributor ("This is right, accept my pull request!"), The belittled contributor ("I'm not sure.. but let me try.."), The helpful leader ("I can't accept this because it will break xyz.") The douche leader (As the article stated: "LOL!"), and the cocky leader ("No, that's wrong." - And then they realize later it's actually right, but they're attitude made them not look at a worthy contribution in the right light correctly.) The article makes a good point - But there's a lot more we can take out of this, that being that for any community to succeed, it needs to be just that: A community. A place where others help each other grow.

christkv 14y ago
Sometimes it's hard because reminding someone who sends you pull request about the projects contributor guidelines sends them off in a huff and even though they pull "might" be good in that it does not break any tests it's hard to know what scenario it's guarding against or if the person is doing something strange in their code. The cocky contributor is usually a bad contributor in my experience and are both energy drains and time sinks. The belittled (or humble) contributor is the one I am that I really appreciate and value as they are willing to enter into a dialog about what needs to be in the pull request to get it in. In the end is all about normal human social decency. Treat people badly and don't be surprised when they treat you as a leper.

kmfrk 14y ago

I don't see this in GitHub projects (so far), but this is the usual experience when asking for help on Stack Overflow or Freenode.

rquirk 14y ago
Nor do I. I've had lots of positive results on github, as puller and sender. The barrier to entry on github for sending a pull request is much higher than asking a "send me teh codez" question on Stack Overflow though. It's understandable that the more experienced contributers are burned out there. Rather than replying nastily maybe they should just leave the Eternal September that SO has become.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  I think the CONTRIBUTING (sic) file in GitHub has also helped to put the onus on the repo owner to explain what is kosher, and what isn't. The idea of a canonical ruleset exists mainly so people don't have to make vague references to "common sense" and such. And I just don't see a lot of bad issues/pull requests out there, but the system still needs a managerial overhaul that scales, though. Better to nip the problem in the bud, before it downright breaks GitHub.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

hnruss 14y ago

From what I've seen, most of the contributors to large projects are one-time contributors who just want to implement their one cool idea for the project. Maintainers who want to encourage those sort of contributions need to do everything they can to lower the barrier of entry to contributing, which includes being positive towards new contributors.

sp332 14y ago

Chances are, mr or mrs open source elite, you have been on the receiving end of this in your life. Exactly, and that's why they do it to others! That may be their default (not consciously-chosen) behavior because it's what they got used to.

Zelphyr 14y ago
That seems to be an odd, and ironic flaw in the human mind. We often do to others what was done to us. Sexual abusers are often themselves past victims of sexual abuse.
- sp332 14y ago
  It's not especially ironic. Two things: when people are left to their own devices, they tend to imitate the people around them. And, people tend to favor themselves to be a good "end result", which reflects favorably on the environment which shaped them. In fact, to oppose the circumstances you came from is to oppose some part of your own nature. So, people tend to favor recreating themselves (because they prefer themselves) by recreating the environment they came from. Edit: just found this example http://penny-arcade.com/2012/11/30 http://penny-arcade.com/2012/11/30

b1daly 14y ago

When I was high school I had the opportunity to work with an aspiring music producer. It was great fun and a formative experience because he had a notably kind and supportive demeanor, coupled with focus. He went on to become a superstar producer and to this day when I run into him he has exactly the same demeanor. This leads me to think some aspects of personality and how we treat others are innate. Jerks can be talented and successful too, and just remain Jerks. It takes all kinds.

Spearchucker 14y ago

That this still happens is sad. I was on the receiving end way back in 2002. I'd just written an RS232 library for the .NET Compact Framework that ended up in the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework Core Reference[1]. It was also referenced by an MSDN article[2], so got a lot of attention. I left a bug in there which broke anything that didn't use default settings. The abuse was astounding. It was the last code written on my own time that I ever published. [1] http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/book.aspx?ID=5960&locale=en-us http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/book.aspx?ID=5960&#3... [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446565.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446565.aspx

jongold 14y ago

Just taking a second to thank you for all your work on Marionette, and your seemingly endless contributions to Backbone/Marionette questions on StackOverflow Derick - I'm nowhere near the level to be contributing to Marionette but your humbleness inspires me to use your code every day :)

joshfraser 14y ago

Open source projects work best when they have a benevolent dictator. You need someone who isn't afraid to say "no" to bad ideas, or else you'll end up with a total clusterfuck. It's just as important not to forget the "benevolent" part. I'll always remember Brad Fitzpatrick telling me "no" to one of my dumb suggestions for PubSubHubbub. He explained his reasoning and took the time to tell me what I needed to fix. He knew he was smarter than me, but he gave me the chance to figure that out on my own instead of pushing me away.

fellars 14y ago

Having used Dericks (the OP) Marionette package and interacted a few times with him, I can attest he practices what he preaches.

grogenaut 14y ago

Lots of sports analogies on here. I'll toss in mine. I've made a habit of trying new things and have gotten over the "you look stupid when you start" part. Skiing, Snowboarding, knitting, sewing, coaching, aussie rules. Everyone's a newb at some point. I have found that I compare myself to other skiiers / boarders a lot. But that is mainly a safety thing so I know if I should follow them down other parts of the mountain. So competitive but for a reason. I think I get more pissy about etiquette and safety, but generally from people who look like they should know better. 16 year old coming into the lift line at high speed, I see you. I'm a large large man, you're gonna get hurt if you hit me and I played college ball, I'm gonna make sure I don't get hit. Soooo... anyway. Unless you're trying to get ranked in real life, you're really just competing against yourself. You're the one who will decide if you have the time to put into whatever to be good enough to compete at a low national level. There are exceptions, but in sports you can use your brain and experience to make up for physical deficiencies. In Cerebral events you can use persistence and experience. And I've tailed off so Fin

boboblong 14y ago

What major open source project is the harshest on newbies? I want to try to contribute to it.