[relix]

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.

[jacquesm]

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.

[relix]

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.

[jacquesm]

> The sales person might not have been prepared.

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.

Food for thought.

[relix]

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.

[jacquesm]

> 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.

It's an over-reaction.

[relix]

> I think these are assumptions. Maybe they did. Or maybe they just powercycled the device and it all came back.

They're possible reasons that could explain the part in the Op's story which you might have missed where the sales person was panicking and yelling in distress. Your argument basically goes "well, they should have been competent enough to be able to deal with it" basically saying it's their own fault and they deserved it.

My point is that this is not a good argument to disregard the feelings of the sales person. One reason is because it's not clear that the incompetence of the sales person is his own fault, and what I'm listing are possible reasons why that might be the case.

But even if it were within the control of the sales person, I'm also of the opinion that his mistake of not being competent enough shouldn't mean his feelings on the situation aren't valid, and that it wasn't somehow a dick move.

All we know is that the sales person was stressed about what the OP did, and that OP did nothing to help him out, and whatever the reason for this stress may be, or whatever consequences that might or might not have happened, by not helping him out, OP was being a jerk.

> OP pulled a prank 20 years ago, which temporarily destabilized a piece of gear. We're now discussing ...

This I agree with, I think we're trying to extract too much context from a very casual retelling, and going in circles anyway.

[dudeman13]

>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.

[jacquesm]

> I mean, "is a hacker" DOES seem like a good predictor for "is a dick" (in my experience at least)

I'm sad that this is the case for you. But to counter your anecdata, the hackers that I know are as a rule quite nice and well behaved.

[jsnell]

Agreed, you should totally tell jacquesm that. He seems to think that it's par for the course for hackers to bully total strangers on the pretext of "showing up a suit". He even seems to think that HN has lost its way and is no longer inhabited by hackers, when it's pointed out what bad manners and lack of empathy such a prank would be.

[lupire]

The pervasive theme of this thread was that "hacking was more more fun in the 80s/90s when we were allowed to be bullies"

[nitrogen]

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.

[strofcon]

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.

... Words are hard.

[nitrogen]

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?

[ryandrake]

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.

[relix]

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.

[nitrogen]

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.

[relix]

Because the what amounts to victim blaming in this thread has lots of similarities to other problems in the tech industry.

Maybe HN is finally maturing.

[futharkshill]

Because of the people continuing to defend this kind of behavior, and blaming the poor sales guy for not being "technical" enough.

[nmstoker]

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.

[tomxor]

>> 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.

[relix]

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.

[tomxor]

> 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.

So i guess we are in agreement :D The sales person was neither wise or rational. They were acting on the emotion of a singular thought, selling shit.