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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

> I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming? ... We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah.

Someone is upset and venting. This comment comes across to me as "Ugh we already said the right words. Their distress is so inconvenient to me, why isn't it stopping?"

EDIT: Typically in this community we denote when a comment has been edited to change a critical piece of the message...

I'm detecting very little genuine authentic empathy

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It's already been edited twice. The original message ended with the snarky "we should all be fired, rah rah" thing. They're already on damage control.

Everyone can rant. I think it's fine, at least a lot better than a faked smile.

A fake smile at least tells me they know that a different response would be unprofessional, rather than making the an unprofessional comment and not being self aware enough to realize it until it's pointed out.

Since this is not a professional place I think it's OK. I mean if Casey can rant then he should be able too. Of course I guess it doesn't look good and I'm fine with that.

Sure, this is an informal environment, but Casey is acting as an individual working on an issue in their own time. The MS employee above is acting as a defacto representative of MS whenever they speak about their work in public.

Casey is also responding to unprofessionalism initiated by MS. (Though admittedly the "they started it" defense isn't a great one)

Would you be empathetic to a jerk who keeps insulting you?

I don't get where the big issue is, a guy smugly makes a suggestion, the devs argue with it and point out that his tone isn't helping. The guy turns out to be right, the devs implement his suggestion. They don't have a history of thanking people by name so they make a vague attribution. Guy continues to be hostile against them, dev calls him out and now he's the asshole? Come on.

> They don't have a history of thanking people by name

That's... Not better?

EDIT: Actually, I thought of a way for that to be better, but it still doesn't make anything better here. If MS is used to working with b2b, where a customer comes in with a bug and MS fixes it and pushes the fix out, there it could be reasonable to not give credit; I don't condone it but it does match the culture there. The problem is that this very much does not translate to FOSS and/or public collaboration with individuals, where there very much is a culture of sharing credit.

MS: "In our defense, our reflexive response it to never give other people credit for their ideas, so you can see how it's not really our fault, it's just instinct."

> I'm detecting very little genuine authentic empathy

Welcome to Microsoft!

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