[HLRoku]

Not to nitpick, but it is perfectly possible to be honest with someone without coming across as hostile. There may be cases where being blunt and honest might be difficult without coming across as rude, but if the default honest behavior is just to come across as hostile and vile there's probably something wrong with the individuals in question.

[joezydeco]

Unfortunately, a lot of these kernel developers have day jobs.

I was recently working with a particular hardware module from a certain company. Their lead technical support person was also helping develop the ARM side of the kernel and merge their drivers into the tree.

The awful technical interactions and pretty much the complete lack of patience and empathy for a customer, made the whole thing a nightmare. Eventually I lobbied, and got, our company to drop them as a vendor and move to a competitor. That one developer created -$1,000,000 in annual revenue for the vendor.

I still don't think they realize what happened.

[meapix]

> I still don't think they realize what happened.

Basically your goal was to punish not to correct?

[joezydeco]

Yes, absolutely.

Since this was the business model this company deemed acceptable, I figured it was completely acceptable to do it in return. When all you receive to your questions is "RTFM, idiot", that's a punishment in my opinion...not a correction. And I'm the one holding the million dollar purchase order in my hand.

I could not (and would not) waste development time trying to reeducate this person into being a better customer support person. That's not my job - it's theirs. Sometimes you need to whack someone on the head with a 2x4 before they get the message.

[danielvf]

It sounds like his goal was to be able to have a helpful support person to call.

(Attempting to correct from the outside, the flaws of vendor bureaucracies seldom goes well.)

[Kristine1975]

I think this is a good example of a rant that doesn't come across as hostile, a response to the question "RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags": http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

[kazinator]

> it is perfectly possible to be honest with someone without coming across as hostile

Yes, it is possible: objectively. However, there exist people with whom you cannot be honest whatsoever without coming across as hostile to them. (Maybe via heaps of sugar-coated language, interspersed with all sorts of reassuring hedges.)

[HLRoku]

I totally get what you mean but that isn't really the issue here. While over-sensitivity is often an honest worry plenty of people have to needlessly worry about when trying to criticize if it isn't sparkled with numerous reassurances, the problem with the examples I've seen are to paraphrase, objectively hostile.