Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2012/12/14/dear-open-source-project-leader-quit-being-a-jerk/

by derickbailey • 14 years ago

418 179 14 years ago

lostechies.com

TeeWEE• 14 years ago

What is this, I don’t even…

spot• 14 years ago

useless without pointer to the actual behavior.

steele4• 14 years 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"

debacle8• 14 years 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.

Karunamon5• 14 years 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.

steele4• 14 years 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.

mion3• 14 years ago

He's not talking about lowering the bar to entry, he's just saying you don't need to humiliate others when they are just trying to help you.

You could at least dismiss them in a friendly/neutral way. "Sorry, can't accept this: check out procedure X in the docs."

Karunamon5• 14 years ago

Hence the "sympathize" part, but then again, I also sympathize with people who are human and eventually want to start inflicting bodily harm on people who can't be arsed to read the FAQ before A'ing the same Q again.

Part of the "bar to entry" is that mindset. You don't get a pat on the back and warm encouragement for submitting crap code. You get told your code is crap with the expectation you'll improve before wasting the reviewer's time again.

Call me crazy, but I happen to love this environment.

darkarmani• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

shadowfiend3• 14 years ago

There is literally nothing that you gain from being derisive that you can't also gain from being polite. And the tone you set for your community is vastly different.

Derision of stupidity is probably one of the worst characteristics of hacker culture, because “stupidity” tends to be shorthand for “disagreement with my point of view”.

I have trouble making a cogent argument around the derision of stupidity because derision should be self-evidently bad. It should automatically file under “why would I want to do this to my own personality”. Derision and bullying are indistinguishable from each other, and the thought that a group as oft-socially-maligned as hackers (at least until the last 6 years or so) defaults to derision seems more a sign of imitating things we were subjected to than reasoned thought.

“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.”

What does blithely ignore mean? Say this is the first open source project I've ever contributed to, so I don't know what the norms are in terms of where to even look for guidelines. Or I contributed 30 minutes of my time because that's all I had, and I devoted them to this. Or I'm learning to program, and I chose to try to help your project.

I will posit that anyone who is trying to contribute to your project is doing you a kindness. They may be doing it in a poor way, and you are within your rights to point that out. But how you point it out is what we're talking about. You an politely point out that the project doesn't accept pull requests. You can politely point out that tickets can't be opened until there's been a discussion on the mailing list. Etc. You can even be curt.

Derision is not curtness. It is not impatience. It is explicit, intentional putting-down of someone because they aren't as good at something as you are or think they should be. And it is a poison. Unfortunately, if you take it frequently enough, it becomes habit. It becomes second nature. And you stop noticing it's poisonous. And so, unfortunately, it is an oft-enjoyed poison in intellectual circles. It doesn't help anything. It doesn't help you understand the world or other people. It doesn't really save you that much time. It simply makes you feel better about yourself.

Karunamon5• 14 years ago

>Derision of stupidity is probably one of the worst characteristics of hacker culture, because “stupidity” tends to be shorthand for “disagreement with my point of view”.

Then it's not stupidity. That's not what this article (at least that I can see), or my post, was talking about. I was referring specifically to failure to RTFM as the big one, with a side order of bad commits and pull requests.

Ask any tech support monkey at the end of their day what they think about the average person. Then remember that this person is getting paid to do it. How do you think someone who rolls a project as a labor of love feels?

And anyways, if you have an open source project, and it's set up in such a way that commits have to be approved by one person or a group of people, then that one person or group of people are the only people who's point of view matters, at least when it comes to that code in that project. Don't like it? That's what forking is for.

>Derision and bullying are indistinguishable from each other

Disagree. Derision is a society's way of pointing out that you did something you shouldn't have. I have absolutely no problem with mocking stupidity. Stupidity is evil and everything wrong with the world, and should be mocked and driven out mercilessly at every opportunity.

And you'll forgive me for thinking that pointing at a silly pull request and saying "wat" isn't even on the same ballpark as "bullying".

>What does blithely ignore mean?

Okay, as an example: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Introduction

A well defined process and a very good guide to what you should do if you want to help. Ignore means just that, "ignore". If you got a pull request into that system, then you obviously got ahold of that information some way.

>I will posit that anyone who is trying to contribute to your project is doing you a kindness.

But if you're wasting people's time, then that effort is wasted, and having the opposite effect at worst. That time spent dealing with your question which is answered in the docs or telling you why your pull request isn't going to be committed could have been better spent advancing the project. Time is valuable.

adekok• 14 years ago

> There is literally nothing that you gain from being derisive that you can't also gain from being polite.

As maintainer of a large open source project, this isn't entirely true. I would agree that derision is bad. But being blunt is good. Many people confuse bluntness with rudeness.

There is every benefit to being blunt with stupid people. The people who intentionally and wilfully ignore the documentation, who demand that bugs get fixed NOW, who refuse to follow instructions when they ask questions.

The benefit is that they go away. Rude people are toxic to a community. Stupid, rude people.. doubly so.

My personal approach has evolved over the past ~15 years doing this. I no longer try to educate them. Once they've made it clear they're intentionally stupid, they get told "shape up, or be banned from the mailing list / forum". Many do.

Others reply with hostility, curses, private emails denigrating my mental health, paternity, etc. They get banned permanently.

Banning toxic people is good.

jasonlotito• 14 years ago

Stupidity is defined by wasting time responding to questions with insults and derision.

mindcrime2• 14 years ago

A part of the hacker mindset ("hacker" as used in the jargon file, and in this site's title) is intolerance of stupidity.

I totally disagree with this. Yes, a lot of hackers may have an "intolerance of stupidity" but I don't know of anyone who has the right to define "hacker" who can say that the definition includes that. And never mind the fact that we are ALL "stupid" in some domain or other and we all do stupid things every day.

bryanh• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

akkartik5• 14 years ago

Linus being flame-y is not the same thing at all. He's not telling people to RTFM afaics.

akkartik5• 14 years ago

Yeah, the article is lacking in real examples.

In my experience the leaders of successful projects are nice because of the straightforward selection pressure for projects that don't alienate their users. Sadly it's the followers[1] that are often jerks, and they face no selection pressure (except that they gradually pollute the well for projects they support).

[1] Guys like Karunamon in this thread.

debacle8• 14 years 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.

tinco2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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?

TillE2• 14 years ago

That's certainly Gina Trapani's philosophy with ThinkUp, and it seems fairly successful.

http://smarterware.org/7819/my-codeconf-talk-your-community-...

benmccann• 14 years 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.

dbecker• 14 years ago

Agreed that fostering relationships with contributors promotes more contributions.

But, if someone's first contribution had naive mistakes, and it took more of your time than it saved, I can sympathize with a leader who doesn't try to get similar contributions.

munificent• 14 years ago

It's an investment. The first few patches from a new person will likely require so much hand-holding from the maintainers that it would have taken them less time to just write the patches themselves.

As that new contributor learns the ropes, though, that cost goes does. Eventually they hit break-even where they are adding more value to the project than they cost. But that requires the person to stick around long enough to get there. There's a pretty high chance any new contributor will lose interest and go do something else.

So whenever a maintainer gets a new patch from a new person, it's always an open question as to whether taking it in will ultimately be a win for the project. Unless you can predict the future, you can't tell if that investment will get amortize out and yield something useful.

gav2• 14 years ago

I'm of the opinion that the best thing for large projects is new blood. If large OSS projects rotated people through triage and new contributor on-boarding, e.g. how to make a patch, how to get it approved, and so on, then in the long-run the number of contributors will grow.

ajross2• 14 years ago

But how do you do that without occasionally handing over the maintainership of some important piece of infrastructure to someone who clearly can't handle it? The people at the top of the ladder right now are there because (and sure, there are exceptions) they are (1) very good at it, and (2) willing to do it. And they have employers who have made bets on those two facts. Those employers aren't really interested in someone else taking over when they have someone working now.

I'm sensitive to this, really. I work in an embedded linux world where I end up submitting a bunch of patches to various projects as an "outsider" (often one who is still learning the project in question). And yeah, I get yelled at a lot. And it sucks.

I'd love these people to be nicer too. But honestly I don't see a "process solution" like you propose. We just need to find nicer hard-working ubergeeks. I'm not holding my breath.

eps• 14 years ago

Try Miranda IM ;)

j_baker• 14 years ago

I think it's unfair to call the OSS project leaders "charity workers" and not the contributors. Either way, if OSS project leaders have so little free time, why wouldn't they spend more of it fostering developers into being more productive members of the project? This is what baffles me most about the situation. It's a lose-lose for everyone when a project leader acts like a jerk.

tinco2• 14 years ago

I think it is unfair to call "contributors" charity workers when all they do is cause headaches for the oss project leaders.

The project leader won't be a jerk to you if you make a nice well-tested, style-adhering commit that only addresses a single issue without breaking other code.

Don't think for a second 'occasional contributors' combined efforts even come close to the contribution of even a single project leader.

TheZenPsycho• 14 years ago

The Mythical Man Month. When it comes to software, uniformly accepting and mentoring newcomers into a project does not bring uniformly good return- and in many or most cases, will result in NEGATIVE return, that is, a bad developer can cause progress to move backward, making more work for the other developers- both in working around the badness, and in time spent educating the newbie.

lazyjones• 14 years 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.).

grogenaut5• 14 years 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.

Zelphyr2• 14 years 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_• 14 years 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.

TillE2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

slurgfest3• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

rossjudson• 14 years ago

You probably need to have a little fear of god put into you by the reputation of someone like Torvalds, if you're going to take up his time. People who are worried about looking stupid will double and triple-check what they do, and that's a good thing.

I think you have to remember that these guys are operating at scale, and until you've walked in those shoes...

mindcrime2• 14 years 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.

fijal2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

bmj2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

mganon• 14 years ago

> Laughing at noobs and being mean to them is pretty much the sole purpose of IRC, unless I'm mistaken.

hm, what?

pnathan• 14 years ago

> Laughing at noobs and being mean to them is pretty much the sole purpose of IRC, unless I'm mistaken.

You are. In the IRC channels I frequent, the purpose is one of (1) being social, or (2) being helpful. Some channels tolerate wilful ignorance/trolls less than others though.

Of course, there might be other channels with nastier cultures, but the sole purpose of IRC is not to be nasty to noobs.

codewright• 14 years ago

Some IRC channels I'm in are great. (Hi Clojure! Hi Haskell! You guys are really nice!)

Some are like ##C which is a hive of scum and villainy.

Spooky23• 14 years ago

I think that everyone who has ambition hits this at some point. There comes a point in time where your domain knowledge lets you speak or act authoritatively with little or no preparation for most things.

The natural tendency at this point is to think "Yup, I'm a just a smart mofo" and pat yourself on the back. The key to moving up the chain of expertise/etc is to transcend that tendency. Humility is a skill, because you need to be willing to leave your comfort zone and listen to people.

kmfrk4• 14 years ago

Especially in "developed tastes" where you suddenly can't stand "inferior"

* music

* typography

* movies

* food

* wine

* art

* fashion

And so on and so forth. Of course, there is always someone out there who is better than you with better tastes, and people sometimes forget to see this as a humbling fact.

lvh• 14 years ago

That's certainly not the sole purpose of IRC. Perhaps you're frequenting the wrong channels. For example, ##c on freenode is notably caustic.

chris_wot• 14 years ago

Same with #debian.

groby_b• 14 years ago

I had the same experience in the dance world. I was privileged enough to be able to train with national and world champions. At the lower end of that scale, people were incredibly full of themselves.

Work with somebody who's recognized world wide? She's the nicest person ever. (Even though I clearly wasn't as good as she'd have liked me to be ;)

It's inspiring to work with people who don't have anything to prove to you, but have more than enough to show you.

kyllo2• 14 years ago

Yes, this is because the experts don't feel threatened by noobs. They know they are actually experts, so they don't need to stoop to the level of picking on noobs to make them selves feel like experts. It's the "nervous middle classes" that feel a need to pick on noobs to reassure themselves.

PG wrote an article that describes this same phenomenon vis-a-vis nerds and popular kids in school:

If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

thenomad• 14 years ago

It's the same in the martial arts world, too.

The humblest, nicest, friendliest instructor I've ever had - in MMA-style kickboxing, generally a pretty macho area - was the one with multiple world championship belts.

WalterBright2• 14 years ago

I've been in the dance world years ago, and I knew several champions. They were all very nice. I suspect that being nice was a very large component of their success. For example, they were always willing to help out their rivals, cheer them on, etc.

fijal2• 14 years ago

I wonder where do you take your experience from. I do pretty much all of what you described and while yes, there are definitely jerks around, there is no correlation between the level and jerkness. Maybe it's just hard to become "the best" while being a jerk, although I know quite a few world class climbers who are jerks and the best and who are humble dudes and the best.

In fact, we use IRC a lot for PyPy development and I think we're trying to be welcoming to other people, especially the newcomers, but then again, it's a self-judgement.

What I've seen correlation is the age (although there is definitely no rule here either). Typically, while you're being 16 and you climb say 7B, you think you're the best and you look from above towards people who climb 7As. And there are some people climbing 8Bs I know who are as bad as when they were 16.

nagrom• 14 years ago

I think it has to do with the level of mastery. At some point, when you become really good at something (almost anything), you realise that a lot of your own knowledge now comes from explaining the basics to people who don't know anything. By forcing yourself to redo the basics, you get fresh insight on a level that someone new to whatever activity simply can't appreciate because they don't have X years experience with which to consider things.

I know that I now love teaching bash shell and C. I know that I am not the most talented shell guru or C programmer, but a lot of my knowledge now comes from answering questions from beginners that I hadn't previously considered (in bash, e.g., how can I tell within a script if the standard input comes from a keyboard or a file, or in C why don't you require the argument to return to be in brackets?) Questions that aren't necessarily hard, but that I hadn't asked when I was learning and now need to figure out the answer to on-the-fly. I now love teaching beginners because there's going to be the chance that they ask a really interesting question and I'm going to learn something myself.

10 years ago I would have hated that, because I wasn't comfortable in admitting what I didn't know - partly because I was still finding out that I didn't know things on a daily basis. Learning has now become a delight, rather than something to be achieved to get to the next thing.

pretoriusB2• 14 years ago

>At some point, when you become really good at something (almost anything), you realise that a lot of your own knowledge now comes from explaining the basics to people who don't know anything. By forcing yourself to redo the basics, you get fresh insight on a level that someone new to whatever activity simply can't appreciate because they don't have X years experience with which to consider things.

I'm not sure it works that way. I'm very good at one or two things myself, but I don't really find that any additional knowledge now cames to me from explaining the basics to newcomers.

Rather, it's one of these (depending on the person):

1) when you become really good, you realise how much you still don't know, so you don't find it insulting of hilarious that other people don't know even the basis...

2) people motivated and devoted enough to get really good don't really care for the politics and the elitism anyway. They just care about the subject matter, and have no problem explaining it to a newb (and some love their field so much, you can't get them to STOP explaining it!).

tripzilch4• 14 years ago

Sounds to me you became really good at explaining. And skill in explaining stuff is a much better predictor of not-being-a-jerk than mastery of anything in general.

It's pretty difficult to explain things well and be a jerk at the same time!

(although my pope-hat's off to those that manage to do both ;) )

Tarential• 14 years ago

I had the opportunity a few years back to work with Jeremy McGrath (many time motocross/supercross world champion) on a commercial shoot he did at our local motocross track. He was modest and pleasant to talk to. He treated me as just another rider, despite the obvious difference in our skill levels.

I also later had a chance to meet Jean Sebastien Roy, a slightly less famous but still top level rider, when he came to do a promotion for KTM. You'd never know from either of them how good they were until you actually saw them ride.

This contrasts heavily with some of the "experts" I ride with every weekend during the summer. I once had a competitor refuse to shake my hand and scoff at my attempts to introduce myself. It is a huge difference in attitude.

By the way, hello HN crowd. I've been a daily reader for several months but never found a topic where I felt I had something useful to post. I hope this has been relevant and useful.

P.S. I ended up beating the guy who wouldn't shake my hand, which gave me a petty feeling of satisfaction. Childish, perhaps, but I'm not perfect.

tlear• 14 years ago

Big part of it is if person is an expert but does things where he IS a noob. I am an expert in some things but I am a noob climber, very average runner

People who feel need to pick on noobs who actually trying to learn are scum. There are noobs that do not want to learn or absorb new things, yeah torture them if you want. but if someone is genuinely working on something and you put them down..

As a noob climber I can see the jerk types, not because they pick on me (I am so horrible that I am not worth the time) but because of how they get people react in two different ways. Some kiss their ass and other just exclude them (silence when they start talking to their peers working on a problem, people need to leave etc)

jasonlingx• 14 years ago

I believe more often than not, it is the humility that enables world class masters, not the other way round. Usually when people think they have nothing more to learn, they stop learning...

pretoriusB2• 14 years ago

>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'm not so sure. Consider Linus, Rob Pike, and others...

indubitably• 14 years ago

Linus is definitely not nice.

He'll say so to your face, too. So at least he's honest about not being nice.

tripzilch4• 14 years ago

> 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.

That's what you want to believe. But really what sort of magical transformation do you suppose will happen once you cross that threshold? Why would a personality change?

No, what I think happens is this: A person with sufficiently high skill, better than anyone else and generally known to be, will get sufficient recognition and awe that they don't need to establish their rank in the pecking order. However, take away the recognition, and also a highly skilled person inclined to jerk-behaviour will again start kicking the lower ranks.

Some people are jerks. In some situations jerk-behaviour is more likely to surface than in others. But being extremely good at something does not necessarily improve one's personality. There's a difference between "I don't want to be a jerk" and "I don't need to be a jerk". The former is the better person.

tripzilch4• 14 years ago

Unsure if anyone will still read this, but I had another thought on this matter.

It occurs to me that you actually see highly-skilled jerks quite a lot. They piss and moan and kick and often aren't very successful, even if they're highly skilled.

Even if someone's highly skilled in some area, if they're being a jerk we're going to value that skill lower, anyway. Even though, if you'd stop and think about it, social skills are usually not related to being extremely highly skilled in some other area.

Being successful is usually a matter of luck and/or social skills. If you're extremely highly skilled and successful, you're going to be known as one of the positive examples of highly skilled people in this thread. If you're skilled, but either unlucky and/or a jerk, your skill won't be valued for what it really is capable of (unless, again, you're lucky), and you won't be noticed. Confirmation bias does the rest.

WalterBright2• 14 years ago

The leader(s) of an open source project tend to set the tone of that community, and so are responsible for it.

joering2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Wow! This was really off-topic. Like miles off... miles...

slurgfest3• 14 years ago

However, it seems the jerk problem is not limited to open source.

jacquesm• 14 years ago

Why did you work there for as long as you did? After the first two you could have packed up without any repercussions, and you should have made a little farewell present to the CEO giving him your exact reasons for leaving.

smsm42• 14 years ago

I hope the pay was really excellent, I mean - fabulous. Otherwise I don't see why someone would submit to such treatment. Many companies are constantly looking for good programmers, and I bet you can find one with a non-jerk boss.

ynniv2• 14 years 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.

slurgfest3• 14 years 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.

ynniv2• 14 years 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.

bmelton• 14 years ago

That sounds exactly like the last pull request I made to jQuery -- I found a bug in my use case that was so easily fixed it seemed like an omission, only to realize that it was deliberate due to some other, older edge case that had been coded around.

I ended up with the same result, however I will say that at least the jQuery team was very polite and respectful and was more than willing to discuss the issue at length, help explain the pros and cons of either scenario, and we were able to end up with a new, third workaround that should work with both edge cases.

Sorry that yours went the other way, but I found it spooky how closely your experience mirrored mine, despite a completely opposite resolution.

sonabinu• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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 ?

msbarnett3• 14 years 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.htm...

debacle8• 14 years ago

That was flaming the ever-living shit out of someone? Seems like he's trying to keep his stdlib clean and efficient.

jessaustin2• 14 years ago

Surely we can find a better example of this supposedly widespread behavior than this. Reading that whole thread, it's clear that this Christopher guy hasn't even considered issues that are quite important to Ulrich and his collaborators. Then when his failure to consider is pointed out, instead of taking the lesson to heart he doubles down with unconvincing, unrelated arguments. That is "crap", and that's what Ulrich called it.

paulhauggis• 14 years ago

I feel like many leaders of OSS projects never had any power in life and abuse it when they finally get a little bit.

This sort of behavior is childish and I would never be a part of a project with someone like this (or hire anyone with this sort of behavior).

nullc• 14 years 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_irl2• 14 years 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_...

keithpeter2• 14 years 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_irl2• 14 years 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."

outworlder• 14 years ago

On the other hand, that might have been a political statement, specially if he really was an asshole and other people agreed with the assessment.

It wouldn't be surprising if some people left on their own after the incident.

onenine• 14 years ago

I really recommend "The No Asshole Rule" by Robert Sutton. It's not just that life is too short. Working with assholes will literally make your life shorter. Kudos for calling somebody out in an attempt to stop the madness.

Symmetry4• 14 years 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_dista...

breck• 14 years 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?

Symmetry4• 14 years 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.

marcamillion2• 14 years 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.

grogenaut5• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

marcamillion2• 14 years ago

I agree with everything except for the "shining light is Radar" bit.

In my experience, he certainly started off as helpful for me. But perhaps I didn't learn at the pace that he expects, he quickly turned into a power-flexing troll - belittling any question I had.

Left a very bad taste in my mouth, and almost exemplifies everything that is wrong with the community.

That's sad, because as I said...he started off very helpful.

Do I ask a ton of questions? Yes. But if you can't manage that, you shouldn't be the head of a channel designed to help people. It's that simple.

tjbiddle• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

kmfrk4• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

kmfrk4• 14 years 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.

hnruss• 14 years 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.

sp3322• 14 years 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.

Zelphyr2• 14 years 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.

sp3322• 14 years 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

b1daly• 14 years 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• 14 years 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...

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446565.aspx

jongold• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

grogenaut5• 14 years 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

boboblong5• 14 years ago

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

Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

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