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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

Funny, I see people getting extra bitter and mean in the last decades or so and call that pathetic. The "fragile" people are the ones who are taking appropriate offense to it.

Anyway there is no possible argument that the meanness of those replies is productive; it would clearly be more useful and direct to omit it and speak clearly about the problems instead of implying the person is an idiot for not understanding their mistakes.

Moreover, why are you "surprised"? Do you live in a some toxic alternate reality where people talk like that regularly? For most people these messages are the only time they'll ever see someone being that mean in a professional context in their lives.

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Can you imagine if there were no consequences for submitting shitty code to the Linux kernel team.

You'd have every first year college student trying to get their name on the mailing list with some crappy commit that adds no value and only takes time away from meaningful work.

Then you've got to hand hold and coddle that person, because you have to be nice to everyone. Yeah that's not gonna scale very well.

I can see going easy on independent developers. But this is Google. One of the biggest licensors of Linux and a closed source competitor. Here they are adding a feature to a repo they need to use, and they're doing it half-assed.

This is a feedback loop. Don't submit shit code to the most important repo in the world. Ain't nobody got time for that. If you do it as a fortune 500 company we will publically shame you.

Some of y'all have never been earnestly told to get your shit together and it shows.

You're in your mid thirties, and still talking like this. Clearly nobody has ever done it to you!

> You're in your mid thirties, and still talking like this.

This constitutes a personal insult (calling him immature for his age), so you aren't walking your talk. In this comment you're going much further than Linus's review being discussed, which doesn't contain any personal insults.

Maybe you think you're giving zelon88 a taste of his medicine like this, but if truly believe that people are obliged to communicate in a corporate-friendly manner you wouldn't be dishing out personal abuse like this to make a point. Overt tit-for-tat abusive communication doesn't fly in a modern psuedo-friendly corporate environment; you have to be more clever about it. In other words, you should lead by example.

> Clearly nobody has ever done it to you!

You really think nobody has ever been curt or even rude with zelon88? That beggars belief. Of course he has been on the receiving end of it; everybody has. Don't waste your time with the "you don't know what it's like" argument, nobody is going to believe that. You're wasting your time and undermining yourself with this tit-for-tat approach.

> In this comment you're going much further than Linus's review being discussed, which doesn't contain any personal insults.

well... no...

I'll repeat what I said elsewhere in this thread. Linus insulted the code, not the person who wrote it. In engineering, conflating criticism of your work with personal criticism of yourself is a sin.

Yeah, you were wrong elsewhere in the thread also. By treating the person who wrote it like shit, he insulted the person who wrote it. Words like "pointless" and "obvious" and "christ" and "illogical" and "worthless" are not emotionally uncharged words. Using those words is about communicating how he thinks the person, not the code, is a moron who needs to feel bad about their work.

If an engineer can't receive criticism of their work without getting their feelings hurt, then other engineers they work with will be inclined to softball criticism of the work to preserve that engineer's feelings. Letting inter-personal considerations get in the way of engineering is a liability to the process. Engineers need to have thick skin and remember that they are not their work.

No insult, just bemusement at what i see - perhaps incorrectly, but where's the fun in being reasonable? - as inattentiveness regarding what in my experience have proven effective communication styles when dealing with disparate people working towards a common goal. And, yes, there's an element of playing to the crowd in my comment, that I'd assumed would be so obvious that it doesn't need breaking down as you have done. But perhaps not.

Outside that sort of situation, of course, do what you like - just as I did.

Somehow you seem to think that "giving a highly-critical code review" requires "being a dick" and you're just wrong. Actually, the not-dick code review is a lot more impactful than the dickish one. The dickish one just makes people want to quit instead of getting better.

I cannot fathom the internal mindset of a person who says "I'm being a dick, which I know is cruel and bad, but it's okay because of <various political and social factors>". The "knowing it's wrong part" wins! That what it means for something to be wrong! It's still wrong if you rationalize it!

And that's before the fact that it's also worse at its actual goals, like preventing bad code and maintaining community and giving valuable feedback.

> Can you imagine if there were no consequences for submitting shitty code to the Linux kernel team.

Why do there need to be consequences? Can't the maintainers simply ignore shitty code?

> You'd have every first year college student trying to get their name on the mailing list with some crappy commit that adds no value and only takes time away from meaningful work.

Trolls could already do this if they want. In fact, getting a rise out of Linus would be a troll's dream. Instead, the team could (should) simply ignore shitty code. Am I missing something?

> Can't the maintainers simply ignore shitty code?

Giving honest feedback is infinitely more useful to any engineer who's skin is thick enough to receive it.

> Anyway there is no possible argument that the meanness of those replies is productive; it would clearly be more useful and direct to omit it and speak clearly about the problems instead of implying the person is an idiot for not understanding their mistakes.

Honestly, code review like that would make me absolutely want to work elsewhere. It is absolutely a "good" way to make plenty of people want to have nothing to do with the project, or the reviewer personally.

Even if someone writes code that is bad, that can still be treated as a learning opportunity, with examples of what might be better, or what to avoid. Neither of those call for exclamations, or adopting a tone that makes it seem like the person has an attitude. If being neutral/professional is somehow difficult, then being terse is also an option that's even easier.

Same, I would quit that job on the spot.

> Funny, I see people getting extra bitter and mean in the last decades or so and call that pathetic. The "fragile" people are the ones who are taking appropriate offense to it.

No, sorry. Businesses bend over backwards to coddle people now. Things were much more straightforward a couple decades ago. You could tell people straight up they were doing a shit job. Now you need to dance around it to avoid upsetting people who are wasting people's time.

There is no equivalence being "being mean and cruel" and "telling people they're doing a shit job". You can always tell someone they're doing a shit job in a non-mean and non-cruel way. In fact it is more effective.

*between

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