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Comment by duped

2 days ago

It's helpful when people are being assholes to point to a document describing how they're being an asshole and to cut it out

In my experience it's the opposite of helpful, because it's actually a lot easier to reach consensus on whether someone's being an asshole than on whether they have violated the code in the document.

  • It’s a very helpful tool for establishing opaque power structures, because it allows those with real power to pretend that they are simply following some legalese document instead of doing as they please.

    The fact that this behavior, which would violate most CoCs ever written, came from the top tells you everything you need to know.

Is it really? In this example, could you not see anything wrong with calling employees losers and monkeys, until someone linked you the CoC?

  • Code of Conduct cannot stop someone from doing something.

    It’s just a document.

    However, in this case, the presence of the code of conduct has made it trivially easy to point out the language as wrong in a way whoever wrote this for Zig cannot refute.

    It’s working exactly as it should.