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Comment by adrianN

2 days ago

You can express dissatisfaction and anger „naturally“ without calling people losers and monkeys.

> You can express dissatisfaction and anger „naturally“ without calling people losers and monkeys.

I can't speak for others. But if I am screwing up as badly as GitHub is, I'd rather someone calls me a loser and monkey for it. It's like someone splashing ice cold water on my face and showing me the reality. It's going to be very uncomfortable, yes. But I'll learn from it and try not to screw up so badly again. I find this kind of natural outburst refreshing really.

  • Imo there is a big difference between insulting a person's work and insulting a person themself. People can and do mess up colossally without being losers or monkeys.

  • That’s a theoretically admirable attitude if true (I don’t doubt you believe it, and maybe even do it successfully, but often how we react differs from how we think or say we’d react) but definitely not universal. A more common and probable outcome is people clamming up and becoming defensive, actively rejecting the criticism because of how it was delivered.

    Though best case scenario, the people working on these features agree and can point their managers to the post as an example of growing discontent. I doubt it’ll have an effect, though. GitHub is now under the AI division at Microsoft.

I think it's a breath of fresh air. Don't want to be called out like this then stop fucking up.

  • I could try to explain that most jobs are way more nuanced than just 'failing and deserving to be called a monkey' or 'not failing.' Or, I could just call you names for not seeing that, you could call me names back, and we can keep doing this forever.

    • Your argument is lacking nuance, declaring that the criticism being levied here must be a simple binary.

      The specific error they are criticizing is extremely egregious, akin to builder declaring a house without a roof complete. “failing and deserving to be called a monkey” is a criticism being levied against a 0/100 level mistake, not a mere minor mistake as you are claiming.

      While it might be desirable to use less colorful language, it is frankly challenging to express the sheer level of grossly incompetent organizational ineptitude on display here in a reviewed and delivered product actively causing negative customer impact for literal years which is trivially fixed and yet has been ignored.

      Customers of Github should be infuriated that Github gleefully foists such utterly defective software upon them. It is hard to get that across in dispassionate writing.

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  • I'm sure getting called a monkey will stop them from ever making a mistake again.

    • If this was true, teachers and trainers would have the easiest job in the world: just insulting their pupils would stop them from failing an exam, race or whatever again.

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  • Not everyone is that robust. People get hurt over things like that. Not everyone is a wizard who does not give a fuck and does not need to care.

    These are people for God's sake. Empathy!

    • Treating grown up people like little kids is a major problem. If that was a stressor which requires defensive actions such as this one, what are you good for in life?

    •     > These are people for God's sake. Empathy!
      
      

      One man's empathy is another man's hatred.

      From my perspective your take and actions in this thread is itself completely devoid of empathy.

      The reason for colorful language breaking through professionalism is because there is real human emotion behind those words. Real pain and suffering, lost time in the life that will never be regained, an ever widening bald spot from the stress. That type of thing yearns to be expressed in a way that generic corpo speak is by design unable to communicate.

      Your response to these emotions is to simply stick your head in the sand(aka refuse to read the blog post)? Worse yet, even without that context, you are here trying to convince those around you to also stick their heads in the sand?

      To dream up scenarios where theoretical someones in a giant faceless corp might maybe possibly be offended? Instead of trying to listen and understand the person already in front of you who has actually been offended?

      Again everything is a matter of perspective, but from mine your comments severely lack the empathy you supposedly call for.