[iovrthoughtthis]

that isn’t really a problem with politics though is it?

it feels like a problem with the discussions participants listening and speaking skills.

if someone immediately jumps to a negative extreme then its likely they feel quite emotionally distressed about the topic. if you notice someone is emotionally charged about a topic (either yourself or a participant) then we should seek to discover the shadow conversation that is being had. what is the true source of the emotional distress.

instead we see it as weakness and press harder.

removing politics won’t solve that.

[bartread]

I don't disagree with you, but I can also see how that could become a huge problem in a workplace.

It can be pretty frustrating when people debate in this fashion about work-related matters. E.g., nowadays I find it particularly tiresome when people frame technical discussions (such as one database platform or front-end technology versus another) in moral terms. It's incredibly unhelpful.

It has the potential to be even more disruptive for non-work matters (though the original "Best names ever" discussion was very much work-related).

Still, whilst I'm not especially critical of the position DHH and JF have taken - though initially I found myself back and forth on it - I do of course wonder if a more nuanced resolution that alienated fewer people (I don't mean on twitter and other social media, which is mostly just noise: I mean at Basecamp) could have been found than something that feels like blanket ban, even though it's not really.

Perhaps they tried - I don't know.

[iovrthoughtthis]

i would love to read an example of a technical discussion framed in moral terms. if you’ve got any off the top of your head, i’d appreciate you commenting them.

i suspect, a lot like becoming conscious of the impact the food we choose to eat has on things external to our local context (climate, animal welfare etc), technology decisions choices could be seen through such a lens.

as Frederic Bastiat wrote, there is “that which is seen and that which is not seen”.

[bartread]

You've honestly never heard a discussion between software developers where people label use of a particularly language, technology or technique X, "wrong", or said something like, "if you're doing Y, you're doing it wrong"? You've never seen the shade people throw at PHP?

Where do you work? Can I join?

More seriously, if you (have nothing better to do than) look through my comment history you'll find a discussion from a few weeks or months back where I chided somebody for saying (I paraphrase), "if you're patching directly in production you're doing it wrong." Granted doing so is far from ideal, and not something I've ever done with any kind of regularity, but occasionally it's the quickest way to resolve an issue whilst you follow proper process with a more involved investigation and fix.

I've found this varies a lot by company I've worked for: it doesn't happen where I work now much at all, but other companies I've worked at many technology choices are either "right" or "wrong". I just don't have the energy or patience for it these days.

[iovrthoughtthis]

ah, i took moral discussion to be code for political discussion, not actually moral (good vs bad) haha.

in that case, yes. people get dogmatic about the strangest things. depending on my level of give-a-fuck i sometimes dive in deeper, “why do you think this is bad?” etc.

sometimes theres a decent learning opp either for me, discovering a new way that something can cause problems or for them, learning to apply some nuance to their beliefs.

[bartread]

Absolutely. I definitely prefer for the discussion to start off dispassionately as opposed to having to drag it there, but I completely agree with you.

[matthewdgreen]

A lot of discussions about the environmental impact of proof-of-work Bitcoin mining would fit the bill.

[bartread]

And that would perhaps be fair, although cryptocurrency discussions range far wider than technical concerns.

And that's quite a long way from what I'm talking about, which are technical discussions that are more day to day concerns for many software developers in the industries and types of application I've worked with (e.g., desktop software tools and web applications/services in sectors such as telecoms, life science, payment processing, retail systems, data analytics).