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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Although unfortunate, your experience doesn't seem to be directly related to the community that Sharp is experiencing problems with. She is talking about working with Linux-the-kernel, not a particular distribution of GNU/Linux. What I mean to say is that "the Linux community" in this case refers to kernel hackers, not to Debian, Ubuntu, or whatever other distro maintainers. There are different attitudes and factions within those larger communities.

I also find a bit of a contradiction between you praising bluntness and honesty while at the same wishing for not being nasty to high school children. It is kind of impossible to have both. I would prefer if people were cautious, not blunt.

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Why would it be impossible to have both?

"Your contribution does not fit our current guidelines. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md and feel free to ask if you have any further questions."

comes across very differently than something aggressive.

You're telling the contributor that his/her work does not conform to the project's standards without being an asshole.

I don't see where the difficulty of treating other human beings with some respect resides.

"Please feel free to ask..." does not sound "blunt" to me. It sounds cautious. It's positive. It gives indication of what to do next. Read this, ask questions. It makes people feel invited to do more. It could be improved a little, with hints of what part to read or how to improve it, but it's adequate.

"Your contribution is inadequate. Try again." That's blunt. For one, it's purely negative. It doesn't say what to do instead, only that something wrong was done. It makes people feel like there's no hope for them to do it right.

How do you say, "Please don't send any more patches" in a way which isn't hostile, and what is the point? Rejection is fundamentally hostile, no matter how you dress it up.

Let's try it:

"I, speaking not only for myself, would be most grateful if, at least for a period of some number of years during which your already considerable skills continue to attain even greater heights of excellence, you might, as kindly as you have done here, bestow the favor of your well-considered patches upon some other open source software project. Should you be so obliging as to accommodate our wishes in this matter, you shall be rewarded with no less than a half pound sack of jelly babies, delivered to your place of residence by overnight courier."

Now that I look at it, though, not bad! Would it kill those kernel developers to use this friendly template?

Hostility is not avoidable in human interactions; the British have off-the-shelf reusable solutions that satisfy everyone involved with reasonable compromise.

Is it really so inscrutably impossible to be nice?

Not to nitpick, but it is perfectly possible to be honest with someone without coming across as hostile. There may be cases where being blunt and honest might be difficult without coming across as rude, but if the default honest behavior is just to come across as hostile and vile there's probably something wrong with the individuals in question.

I think this is a good example of a rant that doesn't come across as hostile, a response to the question "RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags": http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

Unfortunately, a lot of these kernel developers have day jobs.

I was recently working with a particular hardware module from a certain company. Their lead technical support person was also helping develop the ARM side of the kernel and merge their drivers into the tree.

The awful technical interactions and pretty much the complete lack of patience and empathy for a customer, made the whole thing a nightmare. Eventually I lobbied, and got, our company to drop them as a vendor and move to a competitor. That one developer created -$1,000,000 in annual revenue for the vendor.

I still don't think they realize what happened.

> I still don't think they realize what happened.

Basically your goal was to punish not to correct?

It sounds like his goal was to be able to have a helpful support person to call.

(Attempting to correct from the outside, the flaws of vendor bureaucracies seldom goes well.)

Yes, absolutely.

Since this was the business model this company deemed acceptable, I figured it was completely acceptable to do it in return. When all you receive to your questions is "RTFM, idiot", that's a punishment in my opinion...not a correction. And I'm the one holding the million dollar purchase order in my hand.

I could not (and would not) waste development time trying to reeducate this person into being a better customer support person. That's not my job - it's theirs. Sometimes you need to whack someone on the head with a 2x4 before they get the message.

> it is perfectly possible to be honest with someone without coming across as hostile

Yes, it is possible: objectively. However, there exist people with whom you cannot be honest whatsoever without coming across as hostile to them. (Maybe via heaps of sugar-coated language, interspersed with all sorts of reassuring hedges.)

I totally get what you mean but that isn't really the issue here. While over-sensitivity is often an honest worry plenty of people have to needlessly worry about when trying to criticize if it isn't sparkled with numerous reassurances, the problem with the examples I've seen are to paraphrase, objectively hostile.

Honesty and cruelty are in no wise the same.

Precisely.

Sometimes a contribution simply cannot be salvaged, calling the person an idiot has chance going to chase them away resulting in a net loss. "Sorry to make you try this again, here is a more appropriate approach" could result in a usable contribution and possibly future higher-quality contributions from that same person - a net gain.

That line of thought indicates that being nice is the most logical "contributor architecture" choice. Why do we have all these guidelines about how to deal with code, yet none about how to deal with people? It's insane.

Re: the Linux/distro split. It's true, an IRC room for a distro is not the Linux kernel group - however, it's not a vast stretch of the imagination to conclude that they learned that attitude from the kernel group.

True, but I read OC's anecdote as an interpolation of what might occur since distros and kernel communities have similarities. The very first time I got a RTFM response was in one distro IRC channel (which probably was not the same that OC's)

Bluntness and honesty do not have to mean being nasty.

I am excessively honest, to a fault. It makes me fond of the movie line "I am too truthful to be good."

I am also equally fond of a sentiment I read somewhere that "Those who love brutal honestly love brutality more than honesty."

Real honesty reveals the genuine feelings beneath the PC surface. Those feelings can include genuine respect, caring, esteem, etc. It in no way is required to be cruel. If honesty involves nastiness, it tells you something about the person being "honest" in that way.

Granted, it can be hard to tell the difference at first blush, as it certainly isn't PC to be so honest.

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