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Comment by intalentive | Hacker News Reader

Kelly’s indignant attitude and commitment to “engineering excellence” suggest a bright future for Zig. It’s good to see the leader of a technical project get angry about mediocrity.

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[..] in a product not people. Insulting people is never a solution.

Sometimes people need to be shocked awake. Reality is harsh, and gentle language doesn't change that.

You’re not mining coal, get real. Either use efficient techniques to make people do the intellectual work necessary to achieve whatever goal you have in mind, or you’re just deluding yourself thinking you’re some kind of “reality expert” while being an asshole, meaning they might still do it, but it would be despite your leadership, not because of it.

Why does intellectual work imply that people doing poor work need to be treated like fragile little birds?

Intellectual work requires a bit of creativity (across all the domains I can think of), abuse, of any kind increases stress, stress decreases creativity, ability to problem solve, and resilience (or the ability to endure the difficulty of solving hard problems).

But even if that wasn't true. There's a significant difference between confronting the harshness of reality. And behaving in a way that makes reality suck more. Every human deserves to be treated with dignity, and a base level of respect.

Suggesting that someone is fragile and weak, because they object to being insulted, or object to the careless and needless stripping of dignity and humanity from people is a wild take.

I dont think porting everything over to React...making the site slower, bloated, & buggier is "creativity".

I agree that people should be treated with dignity...but groupthink & herd mentality often strips people of their humanity.

So the criticism is really about culture & abstract attractors...not the individual people who often act rationally within the context of the system.

I started working on srctree 2 years ago because of how awful github has become. I don't think there's much creativity in this trend line... But the question was; "why is insulting people doing intellectual work bad". Not, "do you think the changes at github are creative", but I do think that the changes require a bit of intellectual work, and that no matter how shitty github has become, it's unreasonable to attack people when unprovoked.

Can you only provide clear and direct feedback on poor work by insulting people?

No but I won’t rule it out for the incorrigible

Ok, but that’s still not effective as a leadership course of action. Calling people names might make you feel like a big man inside, but that’s it, it won’t accomplish anything, that’s only for your personal benefit, not the project, not the product and definitely not the team.

Actually if you completely rule out the possibility of harshness then you are giving license to let yourself be walked over and for standards to drop to zero. It might make you feel like a big enlightened man inside to do so, but the proper application of firmness and pressure is absolutely effective in leadership.

I've spent time in restaurant kitchens around chefs that believed "some people need to be shocked awake".

The people that got yelled at didn't do markedly better after getting yelled at, but they sure had a worse attitude towards their peers and chefs.

None of the chefs I talked to about it had anything better than "that's how it was when I started in kitchens" as actual justification.

The methods for influencing results within an organization exist on a spectrum, and failing to adequately utilize the breadth of that spectrum is always counter-productive.

If you want to measure the language used by the productivity of the desired outcome. I'd encourage you to survey the ratio of comments talking about the problems with github's very broken CI and UX, with how many people expressed an objection to the language and words used in the announcement. Failure to convey ideas with tact and respect, is demonstrably more counter productive.

I assume you'll choose to dismiss those who object as fragile birds... but then you don't really care about the productivity towards the goal then do you? You just want to be ok with being mean because it doesn't bother you.

Why do you consider that a useful metric? Hit dogs holler, after all.

> Why do you consider that a useful metric? Hit dogs holler, after all.

you do...

> The methods for influencing results within an organization exist on a spectrum, and failing to adequately utilize the breadth of that spectrum is always counter-productive.

Or did you have a different expectation for result in mind? The one you thought would be counter-productive without insults.

My assumption was that ark wanted to put support behind codeberg, and encourage others to take a critical look at how bad github has become, and to consider other options. Not rally additional support and defense of github's actions.

I do about what?

I haven’t actually used harsh language with anyone so I’m not sure what your point is. I have been on HN long enough to know that expressions of strong negative emotion are punished here. That says absolutely nothing about the effectiveness of different methods of influence within an organization.

I think if people are rallying to defend GitHub due to some language that ruffled their feathers and not objective technical merit then they have completely lost the plot as engineers.

As far as Andrew’s goals, I think he has been pretty successful within the framework of the attention economy.

I'm talking about the ideas, threads and conversations that are occupying the head space of others.

> then they have completely lost the plot as engineers.

I think most people who would call themselves software engineers have lost the plot of engineering.

That applies equally to those who are blind to the fact that engineering only exists to create stuff for humans. Most engineers are ignorant to the ability to consider the humans they're supposedly build for.

The point is to make shit better, not worse, and not more inhuman.

If you are hitting the dog unprovoked don’t be shocked if it bites you.

It can be true, that a person needs a wake-up call, but it can also be true that the person(s) doing the "shocking" are sadistic, abusive, or psychopaths.

>Insulting people is never a solution.

That can not be absolutely true.

Nothing is absolutely true, but in this case definitely

This news story was read by investors and leadership inside of Microsoft.

That wouldn't have happened if they hadn't derided whatever idiot decision makers thought it was acceptable in the first place.

Derision is legitimate way to change behavior when other avenues fail.

A reasonable person that's acting maliciously can be reasoned to stop their behavior.

An unreasonable person that's acting in good faith cannot be reasoned to stop their behavior because they are stupid.

If after attempts to reason with the unreasonable fail, it is not an insult or ad hominem attack to explain the person is acting stupidly.

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