Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

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if you put angry/demanding vs supportive/helpful on a 0-10 scale, things hover in the 6-7 range typically. i think computer programming for whatever reason correlates a lot with a certain kind of impatience that we all have. I have gobs of it. We're all fighting it each day to not piss each other off because when youre in "flow" we all know how it is when whatever OSS project suddenly surprises you.

truth be told I spend my OSS maintenance day being more and more pissed off all day really and a lot of it comes from the desire to recognize when people are either subtly or not-so-subtly asking of you to make sacrifices for them. The person who didn't read the docs, the person who didn't read your "new issue" template asking them to please open a discussion since they likely didn't find a bug, to write clear self-contained demonstration code and to not assume your well defined and documented behavior is a "bug, let me know when this is fixed", the programmers who are asking you to upend your whole project for what they in a very dunning-kruger sense think is a good idea, these are all things that someone can respond to in a patient and friendly manner. Heck anyone that works in the service industry has to have an iron-clad patient and friendly manner with all forms of idiots and jerks, including when it's me. But for me personally, doing the open source thing, and also quite obviously for a lot of other folks doing it, man it's hard to keep the fireballs in check while at the same time giving each of these users a clue that there's something they could be doing to make life easier for the maintainers of the project that they are using for free.

rant over I guess!

> rant over I guess

Richly deserved, brother

> anyone that works in the service industry has to have an iron-clad patient and friendly manner with all forms of idiots and jerks

> giving each of these users a clue that there's something they could be doing to make life easier for the maintainers of the project that they are using for free.

The intersection of these two things is something I've been mulling over lately. In other words, how do we respond to the implicit proposition of "I'm going to pay you $0 and expect the effort and patience of a well-compensated service industry employee"? Putting in the mental energy to deescalate conflicts and be diplomatic with challenging personalities is something I'm willing and able to do... but not for a hobby/unpaid volunteer project!

But then there are many different types of people behind those interactions, including but not limited to:

* Someone who's genuinely a sociopath, or at best an entitled ne'er-do-well who just wants free labor

* Someone in full "socially inept engineer mode," with terse communication that comes across as curt or demanding via text, but are otherwise reasonable if you spend more time talking with them; in their own mind, they're probably just being "direct" or "efficient"

* Someone new to open source etiquette, who doesn't yet know what a good bug report or feature request looks like, but are willing to learn with a little guidance

Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, and all of those cases can have the same effect of being rather draining, at least in the short term. Longer-term, I've had at least a few cases of someone who seemed like an entitled jerk at first blush, but turned out to be a valuable power user who stays engaged with the project and provides useful feedback. Of course power users come with their own challenges, like wanting to cram every feature under the sun into your project without appreciating the long-term maintenance costs. But at least they're more fun to work with!

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