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Comment by Neil44 | Hacker News Reader

Some subreddits are OK like /r/sysadmin. However I find that many communities suffer from a snarky mentality. People who thinik they know everything responding negatively or belittling people who ask questions instead of just answering it. I haven't described it well but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

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> responding negatively or belittling people who ask questions instead of just answering it. I haven't described it well but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

I have seen worse. People who ask questions and you can clearly deduce from the way they ask and describe the problem that they lack understanding of a piece of the puzzle.

Then snarkyadmin answers exactly to the question, with snarks and - in my opinion - waste the poster's time by not mentioning how the piece really works.

There's also a poster who doesn't know there is an additional piece of the puzzle they are not aware of and snarkyadmin answers like poster knows it and then feints surprises and blame poster for wasting everyone's time by not crafting a good enough question.

Saw it this week-end when a poster asked how to configure let's encrypt certificate on his vps and snarkyadmin explained poster should rename his vps hostname and dance with cname and ip when clearly the setup the poster had didn't need that to configure his lets encrypt renewal. But snarkyadmin was kind enough to point to SNI documentation. For a single domain.

On that note, that's one of the reasons I only google IT problems in English. Can't stand the french anymore.

I've always wondered if the difference in tone between French and English that I usually perceive on forums has something to do with French being my mother tongue. Indeed it usually feels like there's more snarkiness when people speak French, and the discussion quickly turns to a battle to know who's the smartest, all the while leaving the criteria of what defines being smart unanswered.

> I've always wondered if the difference in tone between French and English that I usually perceive on forums has something to do with French being my mother tongue. Indeed it usually feels like there's more snarkiness when people speak French

I almost added a paragraph to my post about that because when I replied to the aforementioned thread to help the person with his VPS I thought my first draft was.. a bit too snarky :/.

I don't know if it's because of the way IT people usually write or if it's inherent to the french language. There's is something to be said about the passive voice that is more predominant in english (or so was I told when learning english). Eg: simple vous avez atteint la limite de certificat gratuit, donc oui vous avez fait le bourrin sachant que la limite est de 5 certificats pour un même domaine et par semaine. vs "Il y a une limite de 5 certificats gratuits par semaine pour un même domaine, donc quand le serveur LE en a délivré 5 il n'en donnera plus avant une semaine". It struck me because "vous avez fait le bourrin" implies the person intentionally behaved like a brute when it's likely his retries that triggered the limit and he was missing the information that there was such a limit. I also suppose he was trying to debug if he could even reach LE for renewal. I know I did that too when I first setup traefik automatic renewal :].

For what it's worth I don't feel the same way at all when talking orally with french IT people.

There also might be a 'forum' french culture where being snarky was rewarded. I feel the same vibe on french twitter.

I think that in general it's freeing to be outside of your native language, because you don't understand it well enough to catch all the possible subtexts, the hidden cruelties, the subtle status signals.

Could it be the cuisine? I have yet to eat anything that tastes as it should in France.

I know French cuisine is famous, but eating anything tasty in Paris without being a local is one hell of challenge.

> I know French cuisine is famous, but eating anything tasty in Paris without being a local is one hell of challenge.

I only ate once in a Paris restaurant and 10 minutes after sitting down I had the chef harassing me because the waitress couldn't understand my botched Italian when I tried to order a pizza.

She couldn't understand my Italian because she only spoke French.

But the whole menu was in Italian. I do not speak a word of Italian. So I just tried to read the words aloud with my best efforts.

"Why are you doing that ? What if everyone started ordering things in Italian ?" was shouting the chef when he came back.

I kid you not.

Anyway, that was the worst, I don't remember bad culinary experiences but I tend to stick to stuff I know I will like. I am not french though :].

There's a difference for sure, at least in my perception, but some of that is my own baggage. I'll give an example: I was using Symfony for a project, but found the tone of the Symfony website and tutorials, in the English texts, to be annoying and a little patronizing and a little self-aggrandizing. But one day I heard a youtube video with Symfony founder, and Frenchman, Fabien Potencier speaking. For the first time I understood his genuine enthusiasm. Up to then, I'd been "hearing" it wrong -- same text, different emphasis and intonation. Now when I read the text, I try to imagine M. Potencier saying it aloud, and it sounds almost dear.

Unfortunately most of the IT related subreddits are just people complaining about how stupid users/management are.

Not including /r/homelab.

Including /r/homelab, the just say "bank account" instead of manager and "the wife" instead of user/boss ;-)

But I can fully recommend it, the community is really good.

Yes that too! The stories are relateable but I feel like it should be more widely accepted that dealing with difficult people and situaions is as much part of the job as diagnosing slow servers.

At some point in your career, you will meet the IT person who genuinely enjoys the look of surprise when someone learns something from them, even if they thought it trivial. They will be the person that connects with your dev team, connects with your users, and other non-technical employees, and they will typically get the curse of "give it to the busiest guy in the room if you want it done", unfortunately.

It's our job as good engineers to recognize these people and treat them with the respect we want to be treated with, so they don't become the pissed off IT know it all we have all met already. When you see them wanting to implement a ticketing system because they are too busy all the time, use that ticketing system joyfully and respectfully. They will remember it, and you will stay their friend.

Sometimes you can bring the know it all back down to reality with simply demonstrating through empathy what those stupid users and management are going through. If they're too far gone, they might just be jerks. It, like development, is a stressful field where success gets you more work.

>Some subreddits are OK like /r/sysadmin. However I find that many communities suffer from a snarky mentality. People who thinik they know everything responding negatively or belittling people who ask questions instead of just answering it. I haven't described it well but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

When you put together a bunch of soulless people, it's going to devolve as such. You do have to consider for a second though it's not about negativity or belittling but rather finding the answer.

If I post a thread and ask 'How do you improve performance of threading in python?' You might get a couple people who want to help. You likely won't get the true answer of GIL. Overall the thread will fail.

If you post a thread, 'python threading sucks, doesnt improve performance.' You're going to get 50 people with PHD level answers explaining in depth how you're wrong. You suddenly have your answer.

Yeah, asking honest questions and showing that you did some homework sadly gives you very low engagement and often no answers at all.

Being a bit more clickbaity and outright claiming something wrong does indeed bring out a lot of people out of their abodes.

Reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/

Yep. Sadly people are more prone to correct somebody who said something wrong, than to answer an honest question.

To be honest, r/sysadmin isn't that great. It seems most posts are not about technology but about how they want to quit their jobs. Even though i think sysadmin jobs are pretty good.

r/sysadmin feels like an authentic slice of the population of sysadmins I've met. A lot of those posts I can almost hear in the voice of various sysadmins I've worked with in each snarky, "I hate my job" post.

> However I find that many communities suffer from a snarky mentality

Many sysadmins suffer from a snarky mentality (and I include myself in that)

I think one of the key characteristics of HN that eliminates this to some extent is the focus on discussion and not jokes. This drives real debate, conversation, insights, or support instead of snarky-ness, in-group signaling, or memes.

instead of snarky-ness, in-group signaling

Hugely matter of perspective.

Snarky and priesthood mentality has been an issue from the days of Novell Netware and BBSs. Sadly, it is human nature, and is worse in the technical community.

The various Discords associated with the IT subs are miles ahead in general conversation and overall discourse. Unfortunately its live chat so keeping up with the constant conversation is tough, at least for me it is.

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