| > My key complaint, you'll note, is that you aren't providing any details of the full situation and those that you are providing are uncharitable takes. You're replying to a post where I just provided more details! Regardless, everything everyone posts here is their opinion, and I'm entitled to mine. You don't have to take my word for it, you can be skeptical, you can think I'm an asshole and a blowhard... that's all fine, and is your prerogative. > I mean, you're being nasty to the dude and your complaint seems to be he isn't a senior dev. Fair enough. Seems like it's not "fair enough", since you seem to take such exception with my point of view. I don't think he's not a senior dev -- or rather, I think he's a fairly senior programmer, but isn't so senior in the sense of how he works with other developers. That's a skillset that unfortunately some people don't learn as quickly as they learn to code. > Don't go with public shaming as a strategy; HN is a big forum forum, the dude isn't here and he's presumably working under his real name. I don't have a "strategy" here; I'm merely responding to the topic in the thread at hand. If you don't find my point of view valuable, fine, downvote it (or flag it, if you think it's particularly egregious), and move on. If you think it's crass of me to air my opinion of someone else on HN, that's fine too, but I'm still permitted to share that opinion if I feel like it. > If you want to be mean because he's done something go ahead. But unless you're going to say he's actually done something bad, I'm going to note you're being mean without a complaint and that is poor form. I don't really see myself as being mean; you claim I haven't said what he's done, and yet you've just replied to a post where I've given more detail into what I believe he did wrong. If you're going to choose to ignore it, or decide it's not "enough" based on whatever rubric you've chosen, then I'm not really sure what to tell you. > > And when someone disagreed with his approach, he'd get testy and push his point of view harder. > I can't pass that by without noting some irony, given the comment it is in context of. > Software devs are known for this. Hah! Fair point. I think the difference here is that he was an outsider, poking into an established project, trying to push his views on others, when those views were not agreed with. And then continued to push them after being told they weren't agreed with. |
Well; yeah. I think what you've said is what you have - you got a bad vibe on the fellow, found him annoying but aren't in a position to back the sense up with anything specific. No actual situations were problematic enough to point at and a code contribution eventually got merged. You're listing a bunch of things where the charitable take is "this sounds pretty normal". The dude wrote a lot of code without talking to the maintainer first; he thought what he was doing was a good idea and the maintainers got a bit exasperated interacting with him. Nothing there justifies the mean comment, I'd suggest most people have done that somewhere at some point. Random unnecessary rewrites is literally how I get to know new codebases, although I usually delete them rather than trying to get them merged but if they were technical improvements I could see myself giving it a shot.
Given your response to a relatively mild dose of feedback on backbiting; I think you probably can figure out why I see the comment as mean. I haven't impugned your motives or questioned your technical competence and you jumped pretty quickly to seeing an "uninformed, holier-than-thou attempt at dressing me down". Maybe this dude is the next Hans Reiser, but even then if you're going to go at some random contributor's reputation it'd be fair to have some specifics. Dates, links and examples that showcase abnormal behaviour to a bar where it needs to be shared.
> ...you can think I'm an asshole and a blowhard...
You might be expecting people to read a bit too much into comments? As far as I know we've exchanged 3; that isn't enough to get a great clear read on someone outside the topic at hand. Let the records record that I'm not seeing obvious personality tells in your comments. We're all in it together.
> If you don't find my point of view valuable, fine, downvote it
Fun fact; I practically don't downvote things. And the last comment I flagged was in 2022. Either something gets ignored or I post a comment. Downvotes are too ambiguous a signal.