The chilling effect of your comment should not be underestimated. If this was 'extremely inappropriate behavior' I think I'll forego retelling any of my tradeshow pranks.
There are parts in their description that point to unnecessary cruelty/meaniness.
> When the display did not change, the sales guy yelled at me; "WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!?"
At this point OP could have explained what they did, and explain why what the salesperson tried didn't work, and what should be done to fix it. They did not, instead they:
> So after watching him panic for a moment
Watched him panic, then showed that they could fix it (probably ego tripping), and then to rub it in even further, put it back on and walked away. Depending on the experience or seniority of the sales person this might have caused the sales person problems, a lot of stress, ruined a presentation, and real-life consequences, all of which OP disregarded.
There are pranks, and then there are pranks. This was unnecessarily cruel.
I've been on the receiving side of such pranks in tradeshows, it's part of the interaction. You put up gear for the general public to mess with, you have to calculate this in.
Firato, the annual CAD/CAM show for the metal working industry, The Hannover Messe (which used to be the largest IT show in Europe) the building equipment trade shows. Put enough gear in front of enough people (especially nerds) and pranks will happen.
As far as I can see this was a harmless prank because a powercycle fixed the issue. If he had reprogrammed it to the point that it was bricked for the duration of the trade show that would be a different matter.
I agree that you probably should be prepared to handle such scenarios.
I don't agree that this is a good reason that doing such a prank is harmless. The sales person might not have been prepared. They may have been having a bad day already. They may not be confident that power cycling would have solved the issue and thus may have been extremely stressed out going forward, ruining an (important?) presentation.
Probably I'm reading too much into a casual retelling now, but from what I can read: The fact the sales person was panicking should've been an indicator for OP to help him out. At that point OP should've empathised with the sales person instead of make things worse.
It's not because "Oh you should know how to fix this" may be true, that it's not a dick move to throw a fellow human in distress under the bus.
But: they should have been. If you don't know the gear you are demoing you are a minder, not a sales person.
> They may not be confident that power cycling would have solved the issue and thus may have been extremely stressed out going forward, ruining an (important?) presentation.
Important presentations don't happen at the front of a booth, they happen in the back behind the partition.
> The fact the sales person was panicking should've been an indicator for OP to help him out. At that point OP should've empathised with the sales person instead of make things worse.
Fair enough. But: suits that don't know their stuff have no place on a tradeshow floor.
I recall walking up to a guy at a Tek booth and asking him about their new storage scopes, he proceeded to take the thing apart on the spot and show me what the guts looked like resulting in a very long term relationship. That's the kind of person you want to man a booth displaying spectrum analyzers, not someone who apparently doesn't even know how to program it and what bits get stored in which part of the machine.
> It's not because "Oh you should know how to fix this" may be true, that it's not a dick move to throw a fellow human in distress under the bus.
I think that's exaggerating a bit. Throwing a fellow human being in distress under the bus is a far cry from "I put my name on your device and you will have to powercycle it to get rid of that".
But one conclusion I have from this thread is that Hacker News has lots its way, and that Hackers are not really welcome here anymore. Hackers showing up (empty) suits is about as old as it gets.
You make so many assumptions about the sales person it's as if they're an NPC for you.
I can imagine all kinds of scenarios where what you say is just not true or irrelevant and out of the control of the sales person, yet the harm of the prank still falls upon the sales person.
Maybe the sales person replaced someone who got sick at the last minute. Maybe the sales person's incompetent manager put them there without giving them time to prepare. Maybe the person whose job it was to prepare the sales person was bad at _their_ job, or didn't have sufficient time, etc. Maybe their incompetent manager isn't as forgiving as you are and will fire them because of this incident. Maybe power-cycling the device caused the presenters settings they needed for the presentation to be wiped as well. Maybe this is a junior sales person who hoped for a promotion after this presentation.
> But one conclusion I have from this thread is that Hacker News has lost its way
My conclusion is that a lot of people lack empathy or the imagination to think beyond their own experience. But I guess that's not really surprising in this sector which apparently still lacks a lot of self-reflection around the common social problems associated with it. I'm just happy there's enough people here that do have empathy.
> You make so many assumptions about the sales person it's as if they're an NPC for you.
I just use the bits from the OPs story as a way to place the person on my scale of technical competence.
> Maybe the sales person replaced someone who got sick at the last minute. Maybe the sales person's incompetent manager put them there without giving them time to prepare. Maybe the person whose job it was to prepare the sales person was bad at _their_ job, or didn't have sufficient time, etc. Maybe their incompetent manager isn't as forgiving as you are and will fire them because of this incident. Maybe power-cycling the device caused the presenters settings they needed for the presentation to be wiped as well. Maybe this is a junior sales person who hoped for a promotion after this presentation.
I think these are assumptions. Maybe they did. Or maybe they just powercycled the device and it all came back.
Tradeshows are 'hostile territory', you know this going in. If you've never staffed a booth at a tradeshow then I will forgive you but really, if this is the worst that happened there then they got extremely lucky.
I've had people 'test' our systems to see if they could break them. And the fact that they could not was proof that we had done a proper job designing them, which in turn led to interesting conversations and some sales. This is what a tradeshow is for. It's not for people to stand around static displays or recipe style demos without the ability to improvise.
Tradeshows are 'hands on' which is why the gear is exposed in the first place. And some of those hands will be more capable than yours, which is the moment where you make your living as a salesperson.
> My conclusion is that a lot of people lack empathy or the imagination to think beyond their own experience.
No, it's just that the experience factor is a two way street. If you don't have relevant experience then maybe you should not be so quick to judge.
I've seen the OP derided now as a sociopath, as a bad human being overall and whatever else people are slinging at him. You can take it from me as someone who has staffed the booths at tradeshows that on a scale of 1 to 10 this was a 'meh'.
> But I guess that's not really surprising in this sector which apparently still lacks a lot of self-reflection around the common social problems associated with it.
Ah ok, that is what this is about. Well, guess what, it is possible to have a conversation about a tradeshow prank without drawing in the problems of the entire industry.
> I'm just happy there's enough people here that do have empathy.
OP pulled a prank 20 years ago, which temporarily destabilized a piece of gear.
We're now discussing their promotion chances, their ostensibly important presentation on a piece of gear that they have no problem allowing other people to mess with, their chances of getting fired by their incompetent (why would their manager be incompetent) manager, their lack of time to prepare and so on.
>But one conclusion I have from this thread is that Hacker News has lots its way, and that Hackers are not really welcome here anymore
I think you are conflating hackers with lack of empathy/being a dick.
I mean, "is a hacker" DOES seem like a good predictor for "is a dick" (in my experience at least), so you might be right that HN isn't all that fond of hackers nowadays.
This whole thread is a really good example of why not to judge the past by the standards of the present. There were ways of interacting that were just expected. At my first job, if you went on vacation, you expected to return to a pranked office. No way you could get away with barricading someone's office/desk with a mountain of soda cans at most places now.
I've never understood "don't judge the past by today's standards."
If today's standards indicate that someone's past behavior was dick-ish, then the fact that the standards have shifted does NOT imply that the past behavior was somehow "just fine" because... We didn't expect better of each other?
By that logic, abusive racist parentage back in the 50's is unassailable acceptable, because as you say - we're judging it by today's standards.
Acceptability in the past is no indication of an actions morality or ethical... ness.
Unacceptability in the present isn't a reliable indicator either. For example, it is today socially unacceptable for me to be friends with most of my extended family because they are republicans. But that doesn't mean it's right.
Besides, what's with this tendency to escalate way beyond the topic at hand? We're talking about professional pranks and suddenly...racism?
There are likely many totally innocuous things you say/write today that will be taboo in 30 years. Someone will merely have to go back trawling through an Internet archive to dig up all sorts of stuff that shows that you (by 2053's standards) are a horrible, bigoted, evil person.
But that's just not true - according to the OP's own retelling the sales person was in obvious distress due to his actions.
So no, this apparently was not "expected" because otherwise they would also just have had a chuckle and wouldn't have reacted like that. And regardless of whether that means the sales person was in the wrong job or not, the fact that that person was in trouble, and OP did nothing to help, means that OP was being a jerk.
People used to be better at dealing with "obvious distress." Seriously why is this argument worth 80+ comments? I agree with jacquesm -- HN (in this thread) has lost its way.
Glad to hear that are people that get the environment and norms at these kind of events.
Presenting a control freak attitude around public interaction hardly seems like it would win over many customers, so this kind of thing is par for the course and reacting well to the unexpected (including pranks) is part of the skillset.
>> the sales guy yelled at me; "WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!?"
> At this point OP could have explained what they did [...]
The sales guy could also have been less accusative and instead embrace their curiosity as a customer... It was an opportunity to invite the onlookers who were already interested in what the author had coaxed the display into doing to learn more about the machine.
I can imagine a younger version of myself also reacting a bit negatively to such an exclamation after having a harmless investigation of a machine. Unfortunately it tends to be the reaction of ignorant and uninquisitive people.
Or it's a natural immediate reaction of a normal person in distress who wasn't prepared for an outsider to come sabotage their presentation and made them look incompetent in front of an audience while they're already stressed out.
Leave it up to engineers to expect everyone (else) to be the paragon of virtue rational homo sapiens sapiens with all the wisdom and maturity.
> I think I'll forego retelling any of my tradeshow pranks.
A good prank is when the two parties can laugh about it together when it’s done.
If someone is just interfering with another person’s job and then smugly walking away, it’s not really a prank. They’re just being a jerk for the purpose of smug personal satisfaction at the expense of someone else.
That’s the difference. This may have been relatively easily fixed with a power cycle, but having done a lot of long days in tradeshow booths I can empathize with the poor guy in the booth who had to deal with someone deliberately interfering with his job and stressing him out. Obviously it turned out okay, but having attendees deliberately break your live trade show demos for laughs sucks.
> A good prank is when the two parties can laugh about it together when it’s done.
Hm, that's now how I have the definition of a prank in my dictionary. To me it is a practical joke which usually has two required components, a prankster and the person the prank is being played on. Audience optional. To assume that they both have the same sense of humor seems to be a recipe for disappointment.
This is everyday life at tradeshows. Seriously. I've had people trying to destroy 100's of thousands of $ for kicks to see if the gear was as solid as we claimed it was. (it was).
As tradeshow pranks come this really does not register.
> at the expense of someone else
That's a prerequisite for a prank, it is quite literally played on someone else by definition, without that it isn't really a prank.
Whether you can see the humor of it or not depends on your personal make-up. People ring the doorbell here occasionally. I have a pretty badly injured right leg. So I go down a couple of flights of stairs to open the door.
Every now and then this includes neighborhood kids who will be in hiding at the end of the driveway. Usually their giggling gives the game away. Needless to say, their sense of humor is different than mine on this subject. That does not mean that I don't think it isn't a successful prank from their perspective, in fact the fact that they know this probably adds to the spice.
But then I think 'they're just kids' and leave it at that.
All the 'holier than thou' and concern trolling in this thread is completely over the top, in real life people pull pranks, some laugh, some don't. But it's not enough to go judge people to the degree that is done here.
I'd like to point out that just because you are tolerant of others pranking you does not mean that someone else (who might potential be fearing for losing his job) may find it funny.
In fact there's a common saying "It's just a prank bro" (1) which is used when people do questionable things as "pranks", almost always causing the other person to get worried. And (un)fun fact, courts have not taken kindly to these "pranks" (2, 3).
Side note, if you are interested you could put up a note with a message saying that you have an injured leg and take longer to come to the door. It might help delivery folks, and may also reduce/stop children from ringing the bell.
I think "extreme" might be a bit much, but i'm much more concerned about the 2nd order chilling effect of calling out people for criticizing rude behaviour, then the original chilling effect on rude behaviour.
You're on a website whose co-founder managed to disable an enormous network of computers with a piece of software, for which he served jail time and was fined.
And as computer related pranks go, this one was pretty mild and required some pretty intimate knowledge of the device. If I had been in that booth I would have engaged the person to see what else they know about it and why.
And what, is it your position that all the actions of hn founders are instrinsically above reproach?
At the very least i would hope we have better morality arguments than simple appeals to authority.
To be clear, i object to the notion that its wrong to criticize/debate the behaviour and ethics of others. I'm not really objecting to the original post about the trade show prank.
> And what, is it your position that all the actions of hn founders are instrinsically above reproach?
That's got to be the mother of all strawmen. No, obviously, I do not.
But in this particular case it is about something that is very much the sort of thing that your average hacker would do given the opportunity. Hacker used in the 'old school' sense of: technically inclined person who likes to tinker with stuff and use it in ways unforeseen by the original creators.
It's what we live for.
> To be clear, i object to the notion that its wrong to criticize/debate the behaviour and ethics of others.
I'm fine with debate. I'm not ok with off the cuff judgments. Essentially the OP simply knew more about the device than the trade show staff (which, unfortunately isn't all that rare), they used the exposed user interface to do the sort of thing that it was supposed to be able to do because that capability was purposefully built in to it.
That they put it to a novel use is what makes it interesting.
> But in this particular case it is about something that is very much the sort of thing that your average hacker would do given the opportunity. Hacker used in the 'old school' sense of: technically inclined person who likes to tinker with stuff and use it in ways unforeseen by the original creators.
Sure. i don't disagree. I think that's rather orthogonal though.
I'm objecting to the notion that we should avoid lines of debate, not because they are wrong, but because they are "chilling". Uncomfortable truths usually are (without neccesarily claiming that this is one).
You really seem to not understand hacker culture, which I guess isn't your fault, maybe it's before your time or something. But there's something special and important about it. That special and important thing is why this place is called "hacker news."
I don't think I can do it justice in this comment, but I do encourage you to try to read about it and understand what this sort of mischief meant to people. You obviously understand something about its downsides, especially from the perspective of the broader culture / "the suits," but I do encourage you to try to understand something about its many virtues.
And now I feel like an idiot, for not knowing that the co-founder was the reason we couldn't turn in our CS60C assignments by the deadline that one time.
Was a great week. I still have a copy of the email that Cliff Stoll sent around, a couple of days later. When the email servers had stopped twitching...
I had no idea either. It’s amazing how little I know about ycombinator after spending hundreds of hours on this site. I know they are somehow involved in venture capital and they employ dang.
"He was the first person to be indicted under this act. In December 1990, he was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050 plus the costs of his supervision. "
It looks like you are correct, gaffe on my part, thanks for the correction.
> When the display did not change, the sales guy yelled at me; "WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!?"
At this point OP could have explained what they did, and explain why what the salesperson tried didn't work, and what should be done to fix it. They did not, instead they:
> So after watching him panic for a moment
Watched him panic, then showed that they could fix it (probably ego tripping), and then to rub it in even further, put it back on and walked away. Depending on the experience or seniority of the sales person this might have caused the sales person problems, a lot of stress, ruined a presentation, and real-life consequences, all of which OP disregarded.
There are pranks, and then there are pranks. This was unnecessarily cruel.