[0xpgm]

How is it unprofessional when it is simply someone giving their honest personal opinion on an issue that involves something that is valuable to them, on their personal blog nonetheless.

Is everyone a walking and talking brand now so that they have to always filter their words, walk on eggshells, hide behind corpo-speak so as to seem 'professional'?

More honest discourse is required in today's world, not less. It seems interactions online are becoming less and less authentic.

[ModernMech]

> Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.

There’s a big gap between corpo speak and “stinky manager”. That’s nowhere close to professional writing. And he’s not giving us his personal opinion, Kelley is telling us the conclusion of the “grape vine” - he’s reporting on rumors and gossip, and agreeing with it.

[27183]

[flagged]

[em-bee]

he doesn't owe it, but his writing reflects on him and the project. personal blog or not, the writing shows his personality, and that in turn affects how comfortable i am using a project led by this person. if this was just one of many zig developers then it would not matter as much, but as this is the founder and leader, his personality has a major impact on the project as whole. especially in how it attracts contributors, and how long those contributors will stay around.

[27183]

Maybe it's just filtering for the right contributors? More isn't always better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ebilgenius]

The kinds of contributors you "filter for" by acting like a petulant manchild on your personal blog are going to ruin your community and then your programming language and then blame you personally for all of it

[Ar-Curunir]

Yeah, and the kind of contributors you attract with this kind of writing are just assholes

[27183]

I'm not sure if you're intentionally branding an entire language community that way or not but it might be less broadly offensive to tone that down. You could make a similar point by saying something like "I don't like the message he's sending so I won't participate" without labeling anyone who associates with him an "asshole".

[ModernMech]

He doesn't owe me anything. But his community deserve better than this.

[27183]

If they want better than that the fork button is up and to the right.

[ModernMech]

I mean you’re not wrong, the only power his community has is to vote with their feet, and that’s what will happen. We’ve seen it before in other languages where the BDFL had an unchecked ego problem. Others brought up Elm and Evan and I agree. We all saw how that turned out.

[orangedog]

He's not operating personally as the leader of a major project.

[27183]

> He's not operating personally as the leader of a major project.

What? So let me get this straight--if my open source project which I have given away for free becomes "major" (for some definition) then all of a sudden I have to filter my writing through some kind of average acceptableness test? Come on. [edit] It would be one thing if this was published on Zig letterhead, but it was the guy's personal blog...

[orangedog]

You have to if you give a shit about the community you are leading, yes. You're not operating as a private figure in that role, everything you do affects the community and it is blind or selfish to act otherwise.

[27183]

This is so deeply wrong. This person owes you nothing. You're accusing them of "selfishness" after they've given away thousands of hours of their time... Your entitlement is just breathtaking.

[em-bee]

you have to if you want to continue to attract users and contributors. if you don't care about that then feel free.

[smohare]

There are fundamental realities associated to being a public figure or representative. When you are even privately held sentiments or actions reflect upon the larger organization. This reflection isn’t a purely social construct, but itself an acknowledgement of human cognitive flaws and biases that inevitably leak through to decision making.

For example, you don’t want the director of a science outreach organization to privately uptake all manner of pseudoscience, because they cannot be trusted to carry out the organization’s ostensible mission. When these sentiments come to light, said directory is morally obliged to step down.

A personal blog is definitionally public, ergo by extension reflects upon whatever organizations that person is a member of.

I say all this as someone that does not even feel the posted article is particularly incendiary.

[newaccountman2]

Why do we owe him the withholding of criticism for what he writes on his blog he puts out there on the internet in the hopes that people will take his side/adopt his opinion?

[nsagent]

Treat it as a data point and make your own decisions (he does back it up with several sources that indicate a workaholic mentality with that expectation for others). Hiding it ends up perpetuating the behavior unseen.

*Below is an aside that explains why I think it's better to air these things even if it seems like "rumors and gossip."

I know first hand how toxic some people are irl compared to their public persona. There was a professor in my department during my PhD who was known to be a slave driver, but there are no accounts of it outside of the department. We would have to warn incoming students about working with her, though sometimes they wouldn't believe it could be as bad as we said. I spoke with one of her students after she left the lab due to being hospitalized for exhaustion from overwork: the professor contacted her while she was still hospitalized and asked her to complete a task ffs!

[illiac786]

Honest and professional is not the same, to summarize. You can be both, but you definitely can be honest and unprofessional or even childish. Children are very honest for example.

[cheikhcheikh]

Did you actually read it ? "Stinky manager" "alreay writing slop before llm" and nore insults, cmon now...

[frollogaston]

Lack of corpo tone and style is nice. Bun's article on this had some nice technical details, but I got a whiff of salespeople speaking and stopped reading, can't stand it.

The content here is the issue. Bun converted their codebase from Zig to Rust, citing specific technical mismatches of Bun using Zig. The response is that Jarred was rumored to be bad at his job, Jarred was mean to people, and Zig didn't like dealing with Bun anyway because of their sloppy code. Maybe all of this is honest, but it's too convenient.

[neutronicus]

[flagged]

[tel]

It's also a language of distancing from personal experience and honesty.

Not saying you're wrong. Professionalism is an important tool for maintaining professional relationships. Lack of professionalism is dangerous to the point where it is reasonable for certain kinds of societies to begin to shun people who don't engage with it.

And, at the same time, a certain amount of emotional honesty can be really important to share, too. And that includes some amount of judgement and criticism.

It sounds like Zig's relationship with Bun is over. While Anthropic/Jason/Bun did not write a personal narrative about the end of that relationship, they absolutely were the initiators and could not have done this in a more aggressive way. It feels to me to be approximately the equivalent of moving out in secret and serving the divorce documents through your lawyer.

[newaccountman2]

1) If he wants to rant in an emotionally honest way, he can, but other people are free to prefer professionalism and call him out.

2) > It sounds like Zig's relationship with Bun is over. While Anthropic/Jason/Bun did not write a personal narrative about the end of that relationship, they absolutely were the initiators and could not have done this in a more aggressive way. It feels to me to be approximately the equivalent of moving out in secret and serving the divorce documents through your lawyer.

What a bizarre framing of the relationship between a software library and the language it's written in. Why would you even liken it to a marriage lolwtf

[swiftcoder]

Nah, corpo-speak is the original slop. The result of too many comms/legal inputs to a conversation.

Professional communication is direct, clear, and ideally courteous (but only to a point).

[neutronicus]

What is managing legal and PR risk if not professional?

[swiftcoder]

corporate != professional. Plenty of professionals who do not work in those highly risk-averse corporate roles

What's the actual risk here? I guess he could sue Andrew for slander, and then prove in court that his management style doesn't suck, and his code is not slop...

[neutronicus]

The risk here is that a deep-pocketed entity elects to forgo funding Zig development because they don’t want to sign up for this level of dirty laundry airing if things go poorly.

[reinitctxoffset]

Professionals worry, stay late at the office, and work hard. They care a great deal about the outcome, they care a great deal about the craft, they are fanatical about their responsibilities.

They tend to be willing to increase their accountability faster than their compensation.

They sometimes argue, use profanity, or otherwise communicate emphatically, that is the register of communication when something critical is on the line.

The best computer hackers and other technologists through the years were very often outspoken, plain spoken, and did not suffer fools gladly. In their own way everyone from Djiksta to Jobs to Gabriel to Carmack to Linus to Nagggum to jwz to Hotz, too many to count.

It's the same in law offices, hospitals, and forward operating bases in any military that ever won a war. It's the same on a construction site or in Mission Control in Houston.

This venomous pretense of decorum performed by people who ruthlessly optimize to minimize their accountability while maximizing their compensation subject to no scruples.

That's not being professional that's being a leisure suit con man. It is en vogue at the moment precisely because we are in an extreme low integrity regime.

[dom96]

Calling someone’s code “slop” surely isn’t professional nor courteous.

[neutronicus]

Nor is polemic against financiers.

[grayhatter]

it is.

If I call your code slop, I'm being professional and courteous.

The truth doesn't have a ethical value. Me calling your code slop might feel disrespectful, but it's less disrespectful than trying to pass slop off for your coworkers (or users) to use and deal with.

Lying to someone, and allowing someone who's supposedly your friend to ship slop is more disrespectful. If I wrote shitty code, and my friend didn't stop me, and I find out later he knew it was shitty code... that would be very hard on our friendship.

Unless you meant it's a lie to call it slop code. A lie would be disrespectful, but then again, we both know you didn't say that because it's not a lie.

[dom96]

Calling something "slop" is dismissive, vague and not constructive. That's why it's not professional.

If you want to tell someone their code quality is poor, then you better do so with specific things that is poor so that the person you are telling it to can learn and do better.

[grayhatter]

> If you want to tell someone their code quality is poor, then you better do so with specific things that is poor so that the person you are telling it to can learn and do better.

You and I must have had very different interactions with the types of people who happily emit slop. For the people I've met who've suggested slop; they don't care about quality, and it has exclusively been a waste of time trying to explain why quality is important.

Calling someone's work slop, if they're willing to engage, might be disrespectful, I agree! But calling someone code/commit slop when they don't give a shit about the quality of their code (as evidenced by the commits they're willing to put their name on) is simply a description of reality. Willingness to engage is shockingly important. I can't think of a more vague response than answering "I don't know why the code is like that, the LLM did it".

I'd also like to assert: giving out slop to other people is more disrespectful, and less professional (professionals don't suggest low quality options). I'm much rather you try to insult my code, than waste my time trying to trick me into accepting low quality work.

And then, speaking personally. I would feel the most disrespected, if you were willing to call my code slop when speaking privately. But wouldn't call it slop to me, or publicly. It's not disrespectful to have a candid conversation; even if it's uncomfortable because someone has different and strong opinions than I do. I'm a big boy, I'm able to handle the honest evaluation of my work from another person without it being instantly being disrespectful to me, just because they used a word I didn't like.

If they were lying, that would be disrespectful.

[melodyogonna]

Well, I can't think of other people more qualified to know when a Zig code is slop.

[kamikazechaser]

The wanna cancel Andrew and Zig by extension for hot-takes.