Comment by mwcampbell
4 years ago
I pity the developer (or maybe manager) at Microsoft who wrote the GitHub comment on which this article's title is based. (And no, I never met him when I was at Microsoft.) If he's in the Seattle area, he's likely not even awake yet, but when he is, I expect he's going to have a bad day. Assuming he's not already sick of the Windows Terminal versus refterm drama, it would be interesting to read his perspective.
As the guy responsible for that comment (and the dev lead for the team! Hi!) I can say it haunts me pretty much weekly. My parenthetical-laden snarky sense of humor, my use of italics to indicate speech-like emphasis and pretty much everything else about that comment has been dissected to parts as small as possible.
In the end, though? Yeah, I was completely wrong. I don’t know much about graphics engineering and I’m glad(^) that we were shown up by somebody who does.
I’ve been working in software for nearly 20 years, and I’m firmly in the “knows enough to be dangerous; doesn’t know everything” category the article is missing. It’s not, as some have characterized in this comment section, because I moved into leadership; rather, it is because there is not a single axis on which to measure all engineers. I’m inexperienced in graphics and text layout, and my critical mistake was not respecting the experience somebody else brought to the table. In other fields, perhaps I fall higher on the experienced/wet-behind-the-ears scale.
(^) I may flatly disagree with his presentation and his group of fans taking every opportunity to slander us, but I’m happy that it’s generally possible for us to improve performance and engineering efficiency using the technique he described. :)
> his group of fans taking every opportunity to slander us
Conversely, I think I went overboard defending you and your team, to the point of making my own over-broad generalization about game devs in another subthread [1]. I'm glad it's practical to get the best of both worlds in this case.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744315
Such is the nature of a flame war. It's also REALLY hard to take thread after thread of discussion about how this thing you built is totally shite, and not try to respond in some way.
It's hard to clearly communicate on the internet "we could do better here, we'd love some help, but you don't need to be an asshole about it". Once casey was set on his warpath, I think it was just too late.
My sympathies to you and the rest of the WT team. I think you’re doing a bang-up job under difficult platform constraints (that most people don’t appreciate), and the amount of vitriol spilled over this one interaction has been really disappointing.
Just remember that there’s a huge number of people who appreciate the work you’re doing to modernize terminal experiences on Windows (nearly 78k GitHub stars!)
yeah, i would be really sad if I was at the receiving end of this.
One guy is not 100% correct one day (because we overworked devs always are?), and the next day someone has written a blog text painting him as a subpar dev and now he is on front page of HN used as an example...
Yea, it's been a generally shit experience. Knowing the sense of humor of the original "PhD" comment, yea, I read that as a light-hearted jest, which was definitely lost in transit. Communicating on the internet is hard. Miscommunications are easy, and this one happened to spiral quickly. It saddens me that this whole incident was used to balkanize the community rather than to work constructively together.
Holy shit you sound annoying and wrong about Everything in this thread