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> I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It s

> I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It sounded very familiar. I have several friends and many acquaintances who work at Valve. One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disagreements by silently reverting some of my friend's check-ins. The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly. If you are unhappy, you have little recourse but to express your own power by indirect passive-aggressive means. That's bad enough when it happens in any corporate structure, but here it is almost the only possible course of action. Valve might have been a lot like GitHub if it had hired inexperienced, smart, cocky web programmers in their early twenties. In both cases the companies also boast a level of success that makes it hard for them to evaluate whether elements of their company culture is detrimental to their continued development at this stage of their existence. It's probably hardest for Valve because of the inexhaustible money faucet that is Steam. There is so much squandered potential at that company, which is a weird thing to say considering how much they've done and are still doing. I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management' once these no-management companies realize they have issues that cannot be resolved by hiring supposedly perfect people.

logicchains 13y ago
It really surprises me that somebody can get away with such destructive behaviour as reverting someone else's commits without reasonable cause. What justification is there for not firing on the spot anybody who puts their own personal vendettas over the good of the project?
- buro9 13y ago
  I once quit a senior dev role as the tech architect at the company had veto power on all code and blocked my work because I'd spelled the word dialog the US way, rather than the UK way (dialogue). This was not in a public interface, this was in variable names. Ignoring that every word in programming is in US English: color, gray, program. We were deadlocked for weeks, with him refusing to ship working code that fulfilled the business goals over this single issue. Quitting resolved the deadlock, and I learned afterwards that he really did go through the work and change it all to "dialogue".
  - Allan_Smithee 13y ago
    "Ignoring that every word in programming is in US English: color, gray, program." The parochialism of the wannabe "hacker" (entreprenerd) here used to be cute.
  - logicchains 13y ago
    What did senior management think of this? I can't imagine them taking kindly to the architect delaying shipping for weeks over such a trivial thing.
    - buro9 13y ago
      At the time he was viewed as critical to the project. They indulged him. A very steady stream of very good devs leaving the company occurred because of such invented rules and irrational behaviour. He was a truly great dev, but a fairly insane architect and gatekeeper.
      - logicchains 13y ago
        I wonder if they financial benefit they gained from keeping him around was greater than the financial loss due to continuously losing good devs...
  - Pacabel 13y ago
    Why was it so critical to spell it "dialog", rather than "dialogue", as the higher-ups in the project apparently preferred?
    - buro9 13y ago
      It wasn't, there was no business justification for it at all. He just invented a rule "all names and variables must be in UK English".
      - cunac 13y ago
        did you know about rule before start writing piece of code in question ? If yes, I really don't see how you can say in good faith that it wasn't your mistake to be fixed.
- jessaustin 13y ago
  If Evil Coder sends an email to Noble Coder describing the vendetta-motivated reversions, then sure, something might happen. When would it ever be so obvious, however? If this is done quietly, and Noble happens to work in different parts of the codebase every cycle, she might not even realize the reversions have occurred for a few cycles. Even then, many people would assume there was some fair-minded rationale the first few times. After it is clear that something is going on, Noble can make a stink, but she might also just want to cut her losses and make a lateral move.
  - logicchains 13y ago
    Hmm. I suppose that's a disadvantage of having a less formal code-review process, compared to one in which the reverter would have to specify a reason for each reversion, making it easier to detect spurious reversions.
    - greenrd 13y ago
      You'd think that a site like GitHub would have mandated code review for all commits by now. Especially after that time a few years ago when they managed to accidentally delete all the pull requests in the entire site, or something like that! Wait, they're a ruby shop, they don't even believe in letting the compiler help you avoid making basic mistakes. dons flame-retardant suit
      - couchand 13y ago
        It should be obvious that that's a false equality.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  > It really surprises me that somebody can get away with such destructive behaviour as reverting someone else's commits without reasonable cause. What justification is there for not firing on the spot anybody who puts their own personal vendettas over the good of the project? And yet it happens everywhere. The question is what narratives can be told about it more than what actually happened.
  - acjohnson55 13y ago
    I've never been anywhere where this sort of behavior happened. If management can't nip things like that in the bud, they aren't doing their jobs.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      I have seen vendettas handled in crazy ways in a few different places. People figure out what they can get away with.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  At Sun, where there was a structured management chain, there was a time when one of the folks in my group reverted a big chunk of changes I had committed, and I went to our common manager and demanded satisfaction. The response was 'if we left them in he threatened to quit, there isn't anything we can do', and the only conclusion from that statement was that if one of us quit, the manager would rather it were me than this other person. Needless to say it was really annoying.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    And thus "threatening to quit" becomes the way for the crazy dudes to get whatever they want.
    - teacup50 13y ago
      They're not crazy, and it only works if they have more political capital than you do. If I was forced to accept substandard work, and had no other choice but either maintain that bad code, or quit, I'd threaten to quit too.
      - dmur 13y ago
        No, they are crazy. Reverting someone else's changes without explaining why is crazy. No one is telling these people they can't explain their actions. If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker. But just making the change and then threatening to quit... that is most definitely crazy.
        cbsmith 13y ago
        Just want to clarify that my response here is not related to the GitHub story. I have no knowledge of the circumstances that aren't in the story. > No, they are crazy. That may be. > Reverting someone else's changes without explaining why is crazy. Not necessarily. There are times when you are so wrong you aren't even wrong. > If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker. Let's imagine a scenario where they had done this, and yet nothing had corrected the problem. At that point, it would be quite reasonable to revert someone's changes without explaining why, and threatening to quit if one wasn't allowed to.
einhverfr 13y ago
> The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach. If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do. I see nothing wrong with the involvement of founders' wives in the business. > The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly. Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. > In both cases the companies also boast a level of success that makes it hard for them to evaluate whether elements of their company culture is detrimental to their continued development at this stage of their existence. I don't think any company can evaluate that. Culture arises from the grass roots and that means that the floor employees are the ones who ultimately decide company culture. > I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management' once these no-management companies realize they have issues that cannot be resolved by hiring supposedly perfect people. What do you think of WL Gore and Associates?
- ZoF 13y ago
  This post really bothers me somehow. Edit: Figured out why. I don't understand why saying, "people will call me sexist for this" immediately validates your statement as "not intended to be sexist". >"If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach." It's pretty clearly a sexist statement is it not? Am I confused about what makes a statement sexist? Does that entire paragraph not just objectify the wife and establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience? >"If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do." And this one doesn't even really make sense(as in where are you pulling this random ass statement from), not to mention stating it as, "If you are a founder, chances are your spouse does more to build the business than you ever do." feels literally 10x better to me(even if it still sounds false). Even the punctuation in that sentence makes the word man stand out when it could have easily been written without said punctuation.(well without the comma at least :-p ). I realize this is super overly sensitive by the way. I normally wouldn't comment, I had already posted "this post really bothers me somehow" though, and felt an explanation was warranted. Definitely curious if anyone else felt the same. Lastly, I'm a 21 year old white male; the only adversity I've ever faced is being called a ginger, so don't think this is coming from a longstanding feminist, just a human.
scott_s 13y ago
The essay "The Tyranny of Stucturelessness" is an excellent analysis of this problem: http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm
- pron 13y ago
  Wow. Thanks! Submitting this as a story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611
hugs 13y ago
"I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management'..." Easy, just start calling managers "people hackers" and launch a people hacking tips blog next week.
- cgore 13y ago
  I used to think managers were worthless ... And then I had a bad one, and figured out the hard way how much bullshit a good manager insulates his developers from.
- nailer 13y ago
  In corporate environments I use the term 'Outlook resource'
antihero 13y ago
> One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disagreements by silently reverting some of my friend's check-ins. Wow. Just wow. This pisses me off especially, because to make it as a freelancer I've had to work damn hard to develop self-discipline, maturity, and reverse a path of self-destructive behaviour. To see people in senior positions act like complete fucking children irritates me to no end, and I will do everything in my power to stop this when I run a company. Does anyone know, with regards to employment law, whether it's ok to include provisions that allow us to fire or at least demote, for people acting like nasty, immature human beings?

logicchains 13y ago

It really surprises me that somebody can get away with such destructive behaviour as reverting someone else's commits without reasonable cause. What justification is there for not firing on the spot anybody who puts their own personal vendettas over the good of the project?

buro9 13y ago
I once quit a senior dev role as the tech architect at the company had veto power on all code and blocked my work because I'd spelled the word dialog the US way, rather than the UK way (dialogue). This was not in a public interface, this was in variable names. Ignoring that every word in programming is in US English: color, gray, program. We were deadlocked for weeks, with him refusing to ship working code that fulfilled the business goals over this single issue. Quitting resolved the deadlock, and I learned afterwards that he really did go through the work and change it all to "dialogue".
- Allan_Smithee 13y ago
  "Ignoring that every word in programming is in US English: color, gray, program." The parochialism of the wannabe "hacker" (entreprenerd) here used to be cute.
- logicchains 13y ago
  What did senior management think of this? I can't imagine them taking kindly to the architect delaying shipping for weeks over such a trivial thing.
  - buro9 13y ago
    At the time he was viewed as critical to the project. They indulged him. A very steady stream of very good devs leaving the company occurred because of such invented rules and irrational behaviour. He was a truly great dev, but a fairly insane architect and gatekeeper.
    - logicchains 13y ago
      I wonder if they financial benefit they gained from keeping him around was greater than the financial loss due to continuously losing good devs...
- Pacabel 13y ago
  Why was it so critical to spell it "dialog", rather than "dialogue", as the higher-ups in the project apparently preferred?
  - buro9 13y ago
    It wasn't, there was no business justification for it at all. He just invented a rule "all names and variables must be in UK English".
    - cunac 13y ago
      did you know about rule before start writing piece of code in question ? If yes, I really don't see how you can say in good faith that it wasn't your mistake to be fixed.
jessaustin 13y ago
If Evil Coder sends an email to Noble Coder describing the vendetta-motivated reversions, then sure, something might happen. When would it ever be so obvious, however? If this is done quietly, and Noble happens to work in different parts of the codebase every cycle, she might not even realize the reversions have occurred for a few cycles. Even then, many people would assume there was some fair-minded rationale the first few times. After it is clear that something is going on, Noble can make a stink, but she might also just want to cut her losses and make a lateral move.
- logicchains 13y ago
  Hmm. I suppose that's a disadvantage of having a less formal code-review process, compared to one in which the reverter would have to specify a reason for each reversion, making it easier to detect spurious reversions.
  - greenrd 13y ago
    You'd think that a site like GitHub would have mandated code review for all commits by now. Especially after that time a few years ago when they managed to accidentally delete all the pull requests in the entire site, or something like that! Wait, they're a ruby shop, they don't even believe in letting the compiler help you avoid making basic mistakes. dons flame-retardant suit
    - couchand 13y ago
      It should be obvious that that's a false equality.
einhverfr 13y ago
> It really surprises me that somebody can get away with such destructive behaviour as reverting someone else's commits without reasonable cause. What justification is there for not firing on the spot anybody who puts their own personal vendettas over the good of the project? And yet it happens everywhere. The question is what narratives can be told about it more than what actually happened.
- acjohnson55 13y ago
  I've never been anywhere where this sort of behavior happened. If management can't nip things like that in the bud, they aren't doing their jobs.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    I have seen vendettas handled in crazy ways in a few different places. People figure out what they can get away with.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
At Sun, where there was a structured management chain, there was a time when one of the folks in my group reverted a big chunk of changes I had committed, and I went to our common manager and demanded satisfaction. The response was 'if we left them in he threatened to quit, there isn't anything we can do', and the only conclusion from that statement was that if one of us quit, the manager would rather it were me than this other person. Needless to say it was really annoying.
- danielweber 13y ago
  And thus "threatening to quit" becomes the way for the crazy dudes to get whatever they want.
  - teacup50 13y ago
    They're not crazy, and it only works if they have more political capital than you do. If I was forced to accept substandard work, and had no other choice but either maintain that bad code, or quit, I'd threaten to quit too.
    - dmur 13y ago
      No, they are crazy. Reverting someone else's changes without explaining why is crazy. No one is telling these people they can't explain their actions. If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker. But just making the change and then threatening to quit... that is most definitely crazy.
      - cbsmith 13y ago
        Just want to clarify that my response here is not related to the GitHub story. I have no knowledge of the circumstances that aren't in the story. > No, they are crazy. That may be. > Reverting someone else's changes without explaining why is crazy. Not necessarily. There are times when you are so wrong you aren't even wrong. > If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker. Let's imagine a scenario where they had done this, and yet nothing had corrected the problem. At that point, it would be quite reasonable to revert someone's changes without explaining why, and threatening to quit if one wasn't allowed to.

einhverfr 13y ago

> The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach. If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do. I see nothing wrong with the involvement of founders' wives in the business. > The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly. Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. > In both cases the companies also boast a level of success that makes it hard for them to evaluate whether elements of their company culture is detrimental to their continued development at this stage of their existence. I don't think any company can evaluate that. Culture arises from the grass roots and that means that the floor employees are the ones who ultimately decide company culture. > I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management' once these no-management companies realize they have issues that cannot be resolved by hiring supposedly perfect people. What do you think of WL Gore and Associates?

ZoF 13y ago
This post really bothers me somehow. Edit: Figured out why. I don't understand why saying, "people will call me sexist for this" immediately validates your statement as "not intended to be sexist". >"If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach." It's pretty clearly a sexist statement is it not? Am I confused about what makes a statement sexist? Does that entire paragraph not just objectify the wife and establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience? >"If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do." And this one doesn't even really make sense(as in where are you pulling this random ass statement from), not to mention stating it as, "If you are a founder, chances are your spouse does more to build the business than you ever do." feels literally 10x better to me(even if it still sounds false). Even the punctuation in that sentence makes the word man stand out when it could have easily been written without said punctuation.(well without the comma at least :-p ). I realize this is super overly sensitive by the way. I normally wouldn't comment, I had already posted "this post really bothers me somehow" though, and felt an explanation was warranted. Definitely curious if anyone else felt the same. Lastly, I'm a 21 year old white male; the only adversity I've ever faced is being called a ginger, so don't think this is coming from a longstanding feminist, just a human.

scott_s 13y ago

The essay "The Tyranny of Stucturelessness" is an excellent analysis of this problem: http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm

pron 13y ago
Wow. Thanks! Submitting this as a story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611

hugs 13y ago

"I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management'..." Easy, just start calling managers "people hackers" and launch a people hacking tips blog next week.

cgore 13y ago
I used to think managers were worthless ... And then I had a bad one, and figured out the hard way how much bullshit a good manager insulates his developers from.
nailer 13y ago
In corporate environments I use the term 'Outlook resource'

antihero 13y ago

> One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disagreements by silently reverting some of my friend's check-ins. Wow. Just wow. This pisses me off especially, because to make it as a freelancer I've had to work damn hard to develop self-discipline, maturity, and reverse a path of self-destructive behaviour. To see people in senior positions act like complete fucking children irritates me to no end, and I will do everything in my power to stop this when I run a company. Does anyone know, with regards to employment law, whether it's ok to include provisions that allow us to fire or at least demote, for people acting like nasty, immature human beings?