[gwilikers]

"It doesn't work" issues are bad for all the reasons described in the article, but the ones that really boggle the mind are the _demands_ people think they can make of maintainers they have zero leverage over.

My favorite in recent history was a developer (who had never made any contributions to the repo, nor even filed the original issue) saying something to the effect of "if this issue is not resolved shortly, we will move our company to use a different software." Talk about threatening the maintainers with a good time.

[dspillett]

Last time I had some free software actively out there, I got that several times.

My response was "So if I follow your demands you'll stick around and maybe demand more, of I tell you to get stuffed you'll go away and bother someone else? In that case: feel free to get stuffed."

Some just went away, I got one "I'll make it so you'll never work in the industry again!", and one started to beg profusely that I implement what he wanted because he would lose his job without it (not sure how that worked, I assume completely made up, didn't care either way).

Of course that was long before current social media outlets made it relatively easy to create a made up shit-storm, I might be a bit more diplomatic (but no less definite) in the same position these days.

[duxup]

It shouldn't, but it amazes me that developers will do this to other developers.

I was talking generally about JavaScript and another dev who likes to surf the web without JS enabled (more power to him) mentioned how in a given case there's no reason to use JS. I mentioned a side project that I felt kinda fit that use case (in a way). This is an entirely a casual project that has no intent to do much other than explore something myself and uses JavaScript, if folks like it, that's cool, it's free.

I got litany of reasons that person would NEVER use my product that sounded a lot like an angry customer rant.

Entirely free service, and I got a rant for it ;)

[bigiain]

> It shouldn't, but it amazes me that developers will do this to other developers.

I suspect your misunderstanding there is some misplaced assumption that "developers" are some sort of tribe who respect and look out for each other.

It's easy to exist in a small "developer tribe" bubble where that's true, but there's a universe full of "unpassionate devs" just scrabbling to get project managers or bosses off their backs, and who'll cut-n-paste from StackOverflow answers and harass open source maintainers just to get their next Jira ticket completed before whatever arbitrary time estimate/deadline has been imposed on them.

[duxup]

I think it is more that I would hope that folks who have an unfair or just not fun thing happen to them, wouldn't do the exact same thing to others in almost identical situation.

Granted years ago I once worked at a call center and a coworker, just after complaining that they just got yelled at by customer for something they didn't do and couldn't change, placed a personal call to a local pizza place, and did the same thing to them.

Bummer to see.

[bigiain]

People are the worst... :sigh:

[pjc50]

It sounds like the dev mentioned was extremely passionate.

[bigiain]

Yeah, there's "passionate about coding", and "passionate about getting out the door at 5pm and not getting fired".

I'm not always sure I wouldn't rather be the second kind...

[bigiain]

> "if this issue is not resolved shortly, we will move our company to use a different software."

No problem, there are other software projects that achieve similar goals to this one such as $ExpensiveOption from Microsoft or $outrageousLicenceClauses from Oracle - perhaps their support services are more in line with your company's expectations? Good luck, have a nice day...

[dane-pgp]

I really respect this way of dealing with unreasonable complaints. I guess the term for this is "killing them with kindness", and it's much more healthy than escalating things with a rant about how "entitled" the complainer is.

Ideally the complainer will see how positive the developer is being and reflect on their own attitude, but even if they don't, it gives a good image to other people who read the messages and sets expectations for how people should behave, so that a project doesn't devolve into toxicity.

[bigiain]

I'm glad you took the face-value interpretation there.

Sarcasm is easy to disguise in pure text communication.

Back in the day when I spent as much time on comp.lang.perl.misc and scarydevilmonastery as I do in HN these days, that sentiment was less ambiguously delivered as "HTH, HAND, FOAD"

[vbtemp]

Most people in most teams are pissed off, their projects are behind, and their software is a mess. No one in a well-functioning, high-morale team would write something like that. In such scenarios, people pursue greedy-like algorithms for any short term reprieve they can get. Coming from a place like that, maybe making a mild threat seems like a good idea at the time.

[bombcar]

Many people use the same methods for commercial software and open source — and think threatening to move their non-existent purchases elsewhere will light a fire under someone.

(It often doesn’t work for either.)

[HomeDeLaPot]

Your 50-person company is not going to move the needle on $BigCo's bottom line if you cancel because $BigSoftware doesn't have such-and-such a feature. And also, where you gonna go? Take a few months and migrate everything to $OtherBigCo, then do it again when you find out their product also isn't perfect and they also won't dedicate a dev team exclusively to you?

[bombcar]

Exactly. It’s like yelling at a cashier - I guess people do it because once in awhile it works.

[bumbada]

You train them. If you let people take advantage of you, they will take advantage of you, of course.

Most of the time is not on purpose. Thinking how something should work (or using it once done) is way easier than doing it(hundreds or thousand times easier actually), so the only person that really knows how much effort something takes is the person doing it.

Because they don't know how much something takes, they don't value it. Specially if it is given for free.

[nibsfive]

I have generally always liked letting customers leave. Ultimatums can easily be two way. If they threaten to quit, I can always fire them :)