Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why you're bending over backwards to excuse it.

It's toxic. He's being nasty. He could say everything he does without the snapping, blowing up at questions, dramatic sighs, 'oh boy's. It's all so incredibly passively aggressive.

And that's actually the worst bit! It's hard to call him out when he's not explicitly calling them 'idiots' or something. It's like it's some kind of plausible deniability of being horrible to people.

But I don't know these people and maybe they're all fine with it. And Wolfram is paying the bills so it's his style if he wants.

View on HN

Rather than admit that the red, undocumented third parameter was a mistake they seemed to make all sorts of rationalizations for why it’s wrong (“It’s new”, “I thought it was fixed”, etc.) rather than just saying “You’re right, that’s a bug. We’re fixing it.” Why were the employees waffling around the fact that it actually is a problem? Calling them out on their justifications and excuses isn’t being toxic or nasty, it’s called being a professional who takes pride in the work they put out to the public.

Either it's a flaw in the engineers (lack of social skills to admit a mistake accurately) or in the working climate (fear of unreasonable repercussion make the engineers defer disclosure of failure). I'm undecided. Eitherway it seemed surprisingly inefficient way of communicating.

I only watched a few minutes but I didn't see anything objectionable. I was getting annoyed at the people he was talking to. It seems to me, you either know what the answer is so state the answer and the evidence, or you don't, so state that you don't know and express your plan to find an answer and return with it.

Once I hurt my back, had to drive for three hours, park far away, hadn't eaten all day, and when I stopped at a restaurant, having hobbled there with my bad back from a distant parking spot, the hostess was absent for ~5 minutes and when she finally showed up she was distracted and talking to other people multiple times while I tried to get an answer to how long the wait would be and if I could get served. So far, I've lived a fairly easy life, and I've always tried to be polite and even keeled - but in that moment of discomfort, tiredness, hunger, and disrespect, I genuinely wanted to be rude to the hostess.

The point of the digression is, I imagine that's what being the CEO is like, only it's not once. It's every day. And the more committed you are, the more hours you subject yourself to this kind of thing. You just want things well documented, bugs fixed, quality high, you want people to answer questions etc. When you've been dealing with this all day for decades - I can see how easy it would be to be a bit impolite.

I guess "toxic" is pretty subjective. Personally, I draw the line at personal insults. You might draw the line a little earlier.

As is “nasty”, “snapping”, “blowing up at”, “dramatic”, and “passive agressive.” Oh, and let’s not forget “horrible.”

Have you ever dealt with bad docs? Seriously!!!

Can you link to a bit you consider toxic and nasty? I went in expecting to hear him sound like he was reading out a Linus Torvalds email but I couldn't find anything like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com