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Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

Its funny I like Zed. I think its healthy to have someone with his technical insight standing on the outside screaming "You're fucking DOING IT WRONG!".

Most won't pay him heed, but in some way the message gets through. (at least it gets decent distribution)

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Most of Zed's rants don't have much to do with technical insight, and a lot more about silly personality issues and bickering.

I'm disturbed by the thought that screaming profanities is the only way to get a hearing for your ideas, and would like to discourage anything that takes us in that direction.

That's just how corporate culture works. I am more disturbed by sitting in meetings where every 10 seconds I hear "that is great" or "good job" while in reality the product sucks, schedule is unrealistic, salespeople are poorly educated on what we actually do here and half of the engineering team are incompetent idiots and sluggish sales are clearly suggesting that's not my imagination.

I wish I had the luxury of hiring a contractor with nothing to lose, someone like Zed, to just bitch-slap these fake-smile wearing, strictly polite and always politically correct morons who are so full of this mandatory "positive attitude" that saying obvious things out loud had turned into a tabu. They use words like "good", "great" and "outstanding" so often that they lost any useful meaning. This is why you need to be Zed to be heard.

Word like "shit", "fucking", "morons" and "crap" are essential to every healthy business meeting because the world is full of these objects and ignoring them or using some kind of cryptic doublespeak isn't helping anyone.

I have been in enough meetings over the years where you hear all kinds of profanities, and you're right, the key to successful meetings is when people call it like it is. However, antagonism is not necessarily productive. Remember, you need to work with these teams, and even good teams roll our products that may not be good. I don't know the history here in its entirety so speaking generally, while it's good being a naysayer, there is a way to do it constructively. Reading what I have, I don't really see anything constructive here.

I think it's quite possible to keep discourse civilized, and at the same time honest.

> Word like "shit", "fucking", "morons" and "crap"

... are indicative of a limited vocabulary and lack of imagination. Yeah, once in a while they're useful for effect, but if you use them all the time, they lose their power to shock, and you just sound crude and uneducated.

your pusillanimous attitude towards expletives is copulatively ridiculous.

Your riposte would be witty were you to use words not merely for their syllable count, but that actually convey some semblance of coherent meaning. As it is, your attempt at language play is one that brings to mind a concentrated effort to put round pegs into square holes.

While I agree with you that the corporate world is full of doublespeak, the idea that politeness is inherently hypocritical and that swear words are necessary for straight talking is, well, stupid.

Yes, but if your point is that something's hypocritical and bad, it's much easier to say it rudely than it is so say it politely. Zed rants. I think if he were to write more civil-yet-critical posts, it would make for longer, less focused posts. Rudeness applies well in some situations.

My point exactly.

As much as I appreciate your sentiment, I would beg to disagree. It is possible to imply scatological sentiment without resorting to 'swear words' and is occasionally appropriate. Although it requires effort, constructing a sentence or phrase that is more precise on whatever topic is vastly more effective than either "good job" or "god damn fucking shit". The use of either is both lazy and frequently just plain ineffective.

Absolutely, I love it that Zed is putting himself out there and dishing the dirt, but I'm also glad not everyone is doing that. It reminds me a bit of the Howard Stern phenomenon.

That's a superb analogy :) Zed's a great hacker, but he seems to thrive on bitchy rants. He also seems to relish personal grudges, etc. I think it's entertaining and usually read his rants with a smile, though this seems to be his most immature yet.

I would be pleased to see detailed tech insight from zed or anyone else. Using the word "fuck" over and over does not qualify in and of itself.

He's like House.

Except House is actually intelligent.

And funny.

It's somewhat distressing to see that the parent comment has 8 karma points. It suggests that there is a lot of groupthink going on here. What was the purpose of the parent comment, other than to be a "kick in the groin"? Are you seriously suggesting that Zed isn't in the top 1% of humanity in intelligence? And before you point out how many millions of people are still smarter than that, consider how many people are dumber than that. 99% of humanity is a lot of people!

So I don't see why Zed should be called dumb, and I don't see why the parent comment was upvoted. Actually, I think it's perfectly obvious why it was upvoted -- I'm just hoping Hacker News doesn't turn into that.

I am sure Zed is smart. His rants don't sound very enlightening to me, though. I am certainly not made smarter by hearing him opine on how many guys subconsciously want to be filled with his cock.

It's his blog though, I guess he can do what he wants.

This might not be entirely spot-on, but: I think that it's useful to have somebody who's ranting that much about the Ruby team, even if it's not entirely relevant. I mean, he's spent a lot of time actually talking about Ruby (see: his legendary rant), so it's not like he doesn't occasionally to get technical, but at the same time Ruby has a reputation for being very kind and friendly and wonderful, and while some Ruby people are truly wonderful (_why is incredible), it's not some mystical haven for coders, and a lot of the developers whose blogs I read seem to really make it out to be one, and that means that certain large chunks of people conform to each others' thought processes, and that's harmful. Active venting, even when it's not spot-on, encourages people not to entirely conform.

If you haven't read his lengthy rant on Ruby and the community, do it immediately, because I think that having context on Zed makes his writing a bit more worth reading.

I was about to point out that House isn't a real person, but then realized that I have no idea about Zed either. Ahem.

House is the result of a group of very smart english majors (scriptwriters) carefully crafting both sides of an argument.

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