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Comment by snlnspc | Hacker News Reader

This comment thread originally consisted of one single reply by someone who, apparently, was not aware of Rachel by the bay and her wonderful blog. That post concluded that calling a fellow worker a "rando" was toxic, and that they wouldn't want to work with the author.

While I agree with Rachel here at a high level, and have been a dedicated follower of her blog, I completely agreed with that comment. You shouldn't be shipping things in the manner described in this post, and you shouldn't be considering your coworker "some rando" and looking down on them for not having the same schedule as you.

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People are free to project "looking down on" or contempt onto the phrase "some random person" and the (subsequent) use of "rando" but I felt like it communicated precisely what was going on: this is a large organization, and the person is totally unknown to this sysadmin.

Even aside from whether "rando" is contemptuous, the issue isn't that they don't have the same schedule: it's that they are not respecting the company-wide schedule, nor are they respecting fairly obvious norms of professional software development.

I'm a teacher, and I very much believe in educating people rather than putting them down, but jumping on a single phrase/term when there's nothing else to suggest contempt here strikes me as odd. It's especially odd when the entire culture of sysadminship has a reputation of eye-rolling and begrudging wizardry to protect users from themselves.

I think there's a legitimate development culture gap. I've had good friends tell me that, at their company, it's totally acceptable to roll things out on a day's notice and you're expected to help make that happen unless you have something more urgent to do. I doubt that's a functional culture for any but the smallest companies, but that still means there are some places where it'd be unacceptably rude to shove someone off and not help them release their code.

I think this is a fair point, and I cannot disagree with what you've said. But, I must reiterate, the tone of this piece changes dramatically if "some random person" becomes "a junior developer".

As far as the company wide/normal schedule goes, at my previous place of employment, major changes were routinely performed (by me) off hours on a Sunday with only relevant personnel on hand. This was primarily for B2B reasons where the vast majority of our clients were doing mission critical things from Monday to Friday. I don't feel that this was the case in these circumstances, which is why I completely agree with what was really said here, and with your reply was well.

I suppose my personal experience in this industry leads me to believe that small snipes like that uncover much deeper contempt than is revealed on the surface.

Agreed rando might just be shorthand for “anyone in the organisation that’s not responsible for production”.

However there’s often a substitution for a more acceptable phrase when you relay similar information to management.

It’s perfectly acceptable in this context of a BOFH type story, which doesn’t care about the identity of the luser in question.

There’s a specific creative tone to this article that incorporates these expressions. There is narrator persona who has a style of voice. I think you and the other people who are seemingly offended are missing this?

Agreed, those parts of the post seemed highly filled with contempt and even though I can empathize with that, it's not a good look. The description of the author's responses in the company chatroom remind me of highly toxic irc chatrooms where people sitting idle in them forever verbally abuse newcomers or people asking questions from some self righteous angle of superiority instead of engaging in simple discussion.

It's very very off putting and detracts from an otherwise good post. Makes the author sound like someone who simply has nothing but ire for their fellow employees.

> someone who, apparently, was not aware of Rachel by the bay and her wonderful blog.

Is there some other prestige you should know about her apart from her blog?

Having worked with her? I’m sure many current and former colleagues of hers frequent this site.

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