Geeks and covert insults

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 6:36 PM, Tyler Aviss <tjaviss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> A co-worker passed this one by me. It's a bit dated, but while it is
> initially somewhat amusing, it seems that an "infantile prank" can
> quickly degrade into a rather serious discussion, and then back into a
> rather infantile discussion about whether it's appropriate to issue an
> essentially out-of-phase update for removal.

It would not leave me thinking well of the coder responsible, and the
world is small enough for there to be a likelihood of adverse effects.
 This would give the fellow a good couple strikes against if doing job
search.

Indeed, i'd be generally unkeen on collaboration with such.  A project
with such dysfunction has a problem.

There used to be an essay by some of the red-bean/Subversion devs
about this; they suggested the thought that if there are people that
are problematic to work with, projects shouldn't be going out of their
way to accommodate them.

Life's too short to accept dealing with jerks, and it's worth
considering that if you don't want to work with them, you mayn't be
alone, and this is liable to injure the project's ability to attract
helpful people.

> Looking at this, it makes me again think about what types of things we
> leave as our "legacy" online. In the day and age of blogging, logging,
> and archiving, do we really want to limit our professional reputations
> by having one of our legacies be a piece of code asking somebody to,
> as paraphrased by Leif be "consuming buckets
> of phalli"
>
> Certainly not the type of thing I'd want my future (or current)
> employer to find when looking up code I'd committed, or things I'd
> posted in a forum/newsgroup/etc
>  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454

I saw this a long time ago, and it rang mighty true.

"never post anything you don't want to see on your resume..."
-- Martin Minow <minow-e+AXbWqSrlAAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

There's certainly a difference between disagreeing and being
disagreeable.  As much as the code in that bug report may cause some
giggling, it definitely comes down on the "disagreeable" side!
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