
The Hugging Will Continue Until Morale Improves - DrJokepu
http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-hugging-will-continue-until-morale-improves/
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yummyfajitas
tl;dr; You should adopt a code of conduct as safety theater and you should lie
(by omission, at least) about the fact that they are useless. It's a cheap and
convenient way to manipulate women into feeling safe regardless of whether
they are or are not.

Obviously my mood affiliation differs from Atwood, but can anyone tell me if
I'm missing any important point in his article?

And if I'm not mistaken, this argument seems to apply equally well to banning
Telegram, pornoscanning people getting on airplanes, and similar things. After
all, we want people to feel safer from terrorism, even if they aren't, right?

~~~
Arnt
About the fact that they are useless?

If you're on HN, you've problably seen a lot of open source software and met
people who write that, and you may agree with this assessment: 99% of it is
written by people who would rather extract a wisdom tooth than file a lawsuit.

Yet there's very little violation of the license terms going on. Some, not
much.

IMO Jeff Atwood is right when he says that programmers excel at rules. Make
rules for something, anything, and progammers will largely follow them, and
will quarrel about the rules and any violation when given the slightest
chance.

~~~
yummyfajitas
99% of code is written by people who won't file a lawsuit, most companies
don't want to deal with the 1% chance of getting sued. In any case, Atwood's
argument isn't that the code of conduct will change behavior.

He pretty explicitly says women are like children, and you should just
emotionally manipulate them rather than solving their problems:

 _Even if you do believe these things [that a code of conduct doesn 't improve
safety], why would you say them out loud?_

 _...runs counter to everything I know about empathy...a feeling of safety is,
in fact, what many people are looking for._

 _The quickest way to turn a child 's frustration into a screaming, explosive
tantrum is to try to fix their problem for them. This is such a hard thing for
engineers to wrap their heads around, particularly male engineers, because we
are all about fixing the problems._

It's pretty amazing to see someone with mainstream mood affiliation so openly
admitting this.

