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Comment by dpatterbee

2 days ago

Those are not personal criticisms, those are all professional criticisms. There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.

> There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.

Nobody is conflating anything, you're just misinterpreting the same words with different meanings.

A professional criticism can, in fact, be unprofessional, and even a personal attack. These are not mutually exclusive.

> Those are not personal criticisms

You're using "personal" to mean "regarding non-professional matters", whereas others are using "personal" to mean "regarding the individual person themselves".

> those are all professional criticisms

You're using "professional" to mean "regarding the profession" whereas others are using to mean... you know, the opposite of "unprofessional".

  • Yes, professional has two meanings in use here. Professional as in relating to one's profession, and professional as in how one may be expected to behave when carrying out one's profession.

    In my comment I was using the former.

    I'm not really sure what you're on about me "misinterpreting" something. The author of the article claimed to not have personal criticisms, and I was pointing out that there's a standard interpretation of those words that is true.

  • > others are using "personal" to mean "regarding the individual person themselves"

    Following your logic, we cannot critique anyone in particular ever. How absurd!

    > You're using "professional" to mean "regarding the profession" whereas others are using to mean... you know, the opposite of "unprofessional".

    At the end of the day, it is the same thing. Person does what is their job according to common standards.

    Andrew runs a software foundation, and it is his job to make sure that behavior of one of related projects does not disrupt the stream of all donations or bury his project under a pile of slop submissions. Highlighting the technical dysfunctions of the other project is an effective way to show the differences between the two. Do you have a suggestion that would be just as effective, while being more "professional"?

    • I think there's a world of a difference between "you wrote some code and it sucks" to "you wrote some code and it sucks because you have beginner energy and live in a fever dream". The former can be an objective statement without attribution to personal failings, while the latter... not really. If I put the latter as a PR comment to my intern in the morning I would expect a meeting invite from HR by the afternoon at the latest

    • Oh, you can actually. But you have to bring receipts, otherwise it very well could be libel.

"a stinky manager ... Just a total shit show" are examples I would reach for to demonstrate someone is not being professional.

  • I don't know why choice of language is having such sway in determining what you view as professional. Maybe it's just a cultural difference but where I'm from people just use the words they need to to communicate what they're trying to say. If something's a shit show I'd prefer someone just said it rather than dancing around it with corpo-speak.

    • > I don't know why choice of language is having such sway in determining what you view as professional

      This is a blog post: it's purely textual, language is the only thing it uses to convey meaning. The words chosen to do so reflect what the author thinks.

      > where I'm from people just use the words they need to to communicate what they're trying to say

      Yes. What ark is trying to say, via the words he chose, is what's earning him the description of "unprofessional".

      He could say every factual thing in the blog post without being unprofessional, he just chose not to.

      3 replies →

    • As someone from a cultural background that is considered very direct and blunt, I can say that there is a rather fine line between being direct and being an asshole.

      This post devolves into a personal attack one sentence in. There was no reason to go into Jared's life at all to begin with. The entire post doesn't need to exist at all if you're confident that Bun leaving will have zero or even positive impact. Why turn an already negative event of a slop rewrite into drama? It's petty and immature.

      7 replies →

That's true, claims of professional dishonesty is a kind of professional criticism. Shall we begin discussing whether Jarred is the kind of person who makes up fake conversations about Andrew?

As fellow professionals in this field, shall we engage in this very professional debate about Jarred's honesty as a moral human being?