
Stop Calling People Morons. - karanbhangui
http://www.mahdiyusuf.com/post/22985059826/stop-calling-people-morons
======
tptacek
Crockford didn't call anyone a moron. He called a piece of code stupid.
There's simply no reasonable way to connect the dots from that to Crockford
thinking that the person who wrote the code is mentally deficient. He just
objects strongly to a particular coding style. Leave it alone.

~~~
michaelcampbell
C'mon; short of Skynet code doesn't have the capability of intelligence so
calling code stupid is calling the person that wrote it stupid for having done
it. When one says "this code is stupid", there is absolutely no express nor
implied caveat of "...but of course I totally separate you from it". (I
suppose someone further along the autistic or sociopathic continuum than most
might _genuinely_ make that distinction.)

Of course you are correct in the absolute that Crockford doesn't think the
author has an actual mental deficiency, but that's not what calling someone
stupid means, either.

~~~
tptacek
I reject this analysis entirely.

------
kabdib
A couple years ago our team had a really bad relationship with another team at
work. They were morons. They did everything wrong, and made LOTS of work for
us.

One day I found I was sick of it -- I stopped calling them idiots. I told my
immediate cow-orkers, "I'm tired of calling them shitty names. I'm just not
going to do that any more."

The embarrassing thing that people around me said was, "Good!"

In a few weeks, interesting things began to happen. First, they started
listening to my team and me. With a little guidance they stopped making
decisions that made life tough for everyone. Now they're not doing /great/,
but it's sure a lot better.

There is another team I'm going to tackle next. This one is harder, it's been
entrenched for years, and it's costing us money. But I _have_ to turn things
around, and the easiest thing to start doing is to stop calling people fucking
morons.

Calling someone a moron is the first step down a slippery path, even if you
/know/ they're a moron.

------
neutronicus
Insults in general are perceived, rightly or wrongly, as something that speeds
socialization. It's the "football coach" approach to managing new talent, a
calculated gamble that the stick is more effective than the carrot and that
little of value is lost when someone is pushed away from a community when
they're socialized harshly.

It'll be interesting to see whether kinder, gentler open source communities
start obviously outproducing ones operating on the Torvalds/Drepper model.

~~~
andos
The comparison to a football coach is very accurate, but I think it's unfair
to put Linus Torvalds and Ulrich Drepper in the same bucket.

While Drepper is pure asshole, Linus just uses insults in the same situations
the rest of us would use bold text. I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end
of one such email, of course, but most of his tirades are actually very
constructive.

~~~
neutronicus
I think both of their demeanors have the same cultural lineage. I didn't want
to cherrypick, so I threw Drepper in there, too.

------
13hours
Stop jumping to conclusions. Linus reacted to a troll comment that was later
deleted. Something along the lines of "What, your shit don't stink?". It
deserved the moron reply. Stop jumping to conclusions rather.

~~~
stcredzero
Or, it could be taken as a lesson: Even if you're Linus Torvalds reacting to a
totally moronic comment, it still might not be wise to answer in kind.

~~~
roopeshv
he has no obligation to react to idiotic comments in kind. Would you answer a
troll kindly? If you do, how long would you be willing to do it? Forever? 2
days? 10 comments? If not forever, why not forever? If Linus had the time you
and I had discussing in hn comments, I would guess linux would not be what it
is today.

~~~
buyx
"In kind" does not mean "kindly". It means "in the same way".

~~~
roopeshv
then it makes no sense at all in the prev commenter's comment. i assumed, in
context, what he meant was a kinder response and based my response off of it

~~~
stcredzero
_then it makes no sense at all in the prev commenter's comment._

Actually, it makes sense in context to most native English speakers. "To reply
in kind," is an oft used idiom. In this phrase "kind" is a synonym for type.
It is to say, "to reply in the same way." (Usually in a way which is not kind
in the kindness sense.)

<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/retort>

I would agree, however, that one, "has no obligation to react to idiotic
comments in kind." I hope I've succeeded.

------
kamaal
Its difficult to understand the attitude of people blatantly supporting hubris
and arrogance in this thread.

There is a very big difference between telling 'This is where you are wrong,
you may need to do x and y to correct it' and 'Your work is stupid, and you
are stupid to have worked on it'. Sure you might have achieved something in
life, _what makes you believe somebody else can't?_ Using your fame to make
others look like idiots just to prove your point is never good behavior, no
matter who you are. Your fame is no free pass to ridicule, belittle and abuse
other. Whoever you might be.

Another thing you must never do is humiliate and ridicule other just because
he looks weak at the moment. Never ever ever underestimate any one. That guy
can work his way out of the problem and may be even beat you, while you day
dream how weak he is.

Also when you work hard, win and become famous you must be content and be
happy that your efforts were well rewarded, instead of assuming that somehow
you are special and have godly powers. And nobody can ever reach your level of
fame and success. This is hubris.

------
vasco
Insults drive people who can't handle them away. By experience, those people
will worry about meaningless things and make a fuss about nothing. Insults are
a filter, just deal with it. If you don't like someone because they talk
harshly just don't deal with them, you're free to do as you please.

~~~
tomp
My thoughts exactly. I'm so annoyed by these _form over content_ discussions.
Look, people, Linus gave us Linux, he's shown he is incredibly selfless
through _his actions_ , and you're judging him for _his words_?!?

~~~
autarch
Words _are_ action. Linus _wrote_ the words, then _posted_ the comment (two
actions write there).

I hate to break it to you, but everything counts.

~~~
tomp
Sure. But some actions have more weight than others. Who is a more moral
person, a nice guy who speeds on the highway, or a murderer who drives by the
limits? Are you gonna judge someone who says he loves women, but kills them
during the night, by his actions or by his words?

~~~
autarch
The "nice guy" who speeds does so in reckless disregard for the fact that his
speeding can easily cause an accident that could kill people (depending on how
fast he's going, obviously). Cars are freaking dangerous.

------
rmATinnovafy
I don't believe anyone is an idiot. For I have seen many people do incredibly
smart things. People who work at fast food restaurants. Security guards. Pizza
delivery drivers.

If you saw [1] Hawkins strolling down in his electric wheelchair you would not
even think they guy is one of the smartest minds to ever challenge the world.

Everyone is capable of amazing things. There are no morons.

[1] Thank you eblade for pointing out that I wrote Dawkins (the biologist),
instead of Hawkins.

~~~
eblade
It's professor Hawking that's wheelchair bound.

~~~
rmATinnovafy
Yes, thank you. I'm always confusing them both.

Also, thank you for not calling me a moron.

------
CodeMage
Articles like this keep reminding me of Billy Connolly's exclamation of "Fuck
political correctness!" Sometimes you should be free to call a spade a spade.

 _Recently I have been seeing leaders in software communities regardless of
being correct or not, basically blowing up on other software developers on the
internet because of something _stupid_ they have done or said._

That's only because you've started paying attention recently and _that_ is
only because you, like so many people (myself included), get your dose of
interesting news from places like Hacker News, instead of participating
directly in, say, kernel development.

Let's face it, it has become trendy to criticize outstanding people with
outstanding accomplishments for being rude. Yeah, okay, I get it: nobody likes
being humiliated. Plus, everyone _has_ been humiliated at some point in their
life and isn't it just incredible how, after all that time, it _still_ smarts
to remember it?

It's easy to jump to conclusions and on the bandwagon, easy and _righteous_ to
join the mob with pitchforks and torches. It's a lot harder to put yourself in
the shoes of "the rude dude" and wonder whether you have all the context you
need in order to judge him or her.

 _REALLY?! Just because you were fortunate to work on something that is widely
used and appreciated does that give you the right to openly belittle people's
efforts and work._

The short answer? Yes. The long answer is a bit more complicated, but since
you and so many others seem to like simplifying things, I thought I would
offer the short answer first.

The long answer is that I've seen that kind of reaction firsthand from people
who have built something incredibly complex from scratch, know it inside out
and get the same well-intentioned but poorly thought-out suggestions all the
freaking time. It doesn't stop there, unfortunately. Those kinds of things
tend to get debated to death, because bikeshedding is so alluring. More often
than not, the person who offered the suggestion in the first place will get
offended when their suggestion gets tossed out summarily, without realizing
that they're far from first to come up with that idea. And some of those who
get offended will react badly and even abusively. So in the end, the guy who
built the damn thing decides that maybe they don't have to take that shit
anymore.

Yeah, I know, Mom and Dad taught me to be polite to everyone and never be rude
and say "please" and "thank you" and two wrongs don't make a right and I
shouldn't sink down to "their" level and all that. You know what? I can't
imagine being as accomplished as Linus or Crockford and turning the other
cheek all the time, not when there are people who will write stuff like "Just
because you were fortunate to work on something that is widely used and
appreciated". Nope, they were not _fortunate_. If you think that's luck, you
should spend your time playing lottery.

And then there's the assumption that every time we see the kind of reaction
Linus is famous for, it's because someone feels entitled to "belittle people's
efforts and work". Never mind that it might be a situation in which no effort
or actual work took place. Never mind that it might have been something truly
dumb and a little research would have revealed it to be a staggeringly bad
idea. Hell, never mind that it could have been a _troll_ and that seeing a
reply for which there is no original message should have indicated to you, as
a reader, that there's a missing piece and that you simply _don't have enough
information_.

No, let's all be self-righteous instead, because -- to paraphrase xkcd --
someone was rude on the Internet.

~~~
Aqueous
"Nope, they were not fortunate. If you think that's luck, you should spend
your time playing lottery."

Everybody who succeeds is fortunate. They were fortunate to be born into a
well-to-do family(if they were) in, perhaps, a developed country, or at the
very least fortunate not to have starved in an undeveloped one, fortunate to
attend school and be educated, most of all, fortunate enough to be endowed
with a highly intelligent brain that was shaped and molded and cultivated by
the people around them. If you think you did anything alone in your entire
life, you are sorely mistaken.

Nobody succeeds alone. Everybody around you deserves respect because they co-
authored your life

~~~
CodeMage
I was going to take your argument a lot more seriously, but then I came to
this part:

 _fortunate enough to be endowed with a highly intelligent brain_

That's just taking it too far. By that same logic they were fortunate that,
about 2 billion years, certain bacteria and algae began to appear and thus we
have life on Earth today.

 _If you think did anything alone in your entire life, you are sorely
mistaken._

We're all standing on the shoulders of the giants. That doesn't mean we should
spend our time looking down and exclaiming "Wow, these guys sure are tall!" We
should be aware of where we are, grateful that we're there and make the best
of it. And that means look forward and up, not down.

 _Everybody around you deserves respect because they are the co-authors of
your life._

That's where you're wrong. It's true that everything in my life factors into
my personality and my measure of success. That doesn't automatically mean that
everything and everyone around me deserves my respect.

Like it or not, certain levels of respect have to be _earned_. Likewise,
respect can be easily squandered.

~~~
pessimizer
Do we really want to stand on the shoulders of giants looking down, flipping
people off?

~~~
CodeMage
As long as we're having fun with the analogy: Whoever pelts me with mud is
going to be lucky if I just flip them off.

------
RJF
Douglas Crockford wrote "that is insanely stupid code", he did not call anyone
a moron for having written it. "Criticize the code, not the developer"

------
draggnar
this post reminded me a lot of the Dale Carnegie book, How to Win Friends and
Influence People. Calling people morons and having a negative attitude won't
make you many friends.

~~~
slantyyz
> Calling people morons and having a negative attitude won't make you many
> friends.

This only matters if you want or need friends.

While most people do, there are some that don't.

~~~
prophetjohn
It's also not likely to win people to your way of thinking, which is largely
what the book is about.

~~~
slantyyz
The individuals referred to in the OP calling people morons probably aren't
very concerned about that either.

Some might argue that they don't need to be concerned about that.

------
makecheck
While raw communication can be hard to hear, I've found it lets me grow the
most and it is far superior to _no_ communication.

There is nothing quite as motivational as deciding that you're going to prove
naysayers wrong. If they say that what you did sucks, you work really hard to
make them liars. Anger is _good_ for this. Hearing nothing but praise just
keeps you from trying to do better, and sugar-coated problems never seem
severe enough to invest time in.

It's also a clue (albeit one lacking social graces) when people speak strongly
about something: _the topic is important to them_. Don't allow bad language to
keep you from parsing a good point out of an argument; you might not hear that
same argument from anyone else.

------
djt
Create something awesome over years of your own life and have people make
offhand comments with no depth of knowledge and then waste your time arguing
about it. See how you feel then.

------
fennecfoxen
As long as we're ranting about coworkers' and acquaintances' word choices last
week, can we stop calling our political opponents "literally horrible terrible
people" and suggesting that they ought to be disenfranchised and maybe
sterilized? Also, the word "backwards": it just means "someone who doesn't
agree with my preferred narrative of social progress". It's really good at
making you feel good about yourself, and for looking down on people, but it
doesn't actually mean anything.

------
droithomme
I am relieved the author gave specific examples of what he was talking about.
Both cases, in my opinion, seemed to be reasonable responses.

------
readme
Contributing to an open source project is a privilege, not a right. If you
don't like the way someone treats you you are free to fork it and shrug them
off.

As a human being you should be as nice as possible to others. However that
does not mean you have an entitlement to be treated nicely. It is your duty as
an individual to take appropriate action when you perceive injustice.

------
Produce
What a moron.

~~~
josscrowcroft
Yeah I actually thought this was pretty funny, I was about to post the same
thing myself. Maybe it's British humour.

~~~
Produce
I'm British too, definitely our humor.

------
rmATinnovafy
Well put.

------
mwsherman
Harder than resisting the urge to call people stupid is resisting the urge to
think of them as stupid.

------
sandis
Stop being so oversensitive.

------
michaelochurch
Linus's persona aside, I think one of the issues with software is that what we
do is intensely structurally cooperative (rather than competitive). What I
mean is that we benefit immensely from other engineers being more competent,
not less.

Why are so many more jobs posted for Java than functional languages? Why do
software engineers get little respect in most organizations? Because the
average programmer just isn't very competent, and those of us who are a lot
better (and over 10 times as effective, if given the right tools and
environment) get held back by the culture the average ones create.

The problem is that most of these mediocre developers aren't "morons". They're
people of reasonable talent who, for whatever reason, did not improve as
programmers but who remained in the industry. We suffer a lot because of them,
but calling them idiots isn't going to make the situation better. It's just
being a dickhead. It'd be much better to actually solve the problem, but
that's a lot harder than calling people stupid.

~~~
bane
To go to an analogy, architecture or civil engineering. Not everybody can be a
Frank Lloyd Wright, and more importantly there are lots more schools, mass
produced suburban houses apartment complexes, highway overpasses and public
restrooms that need to be designed than world class museums.

They don't need to be done with huge flourish or be terribly forward looking.
They just need to be designed and built competently, not fall over and not
have a leaky roof. There's nothing wrong with this state of affairs.
Civilizations are largely built out of boring run-of-the-mill stuff.

Likewise, average developers don't need to build operating systems, or complex
thread schedulers. They need to build the 30 foot boring overpass or utility
box of the software world. And in many ways that's more important.

~~~
michaelochurch
I agree with what you're saying, but there's a crucial difference: in
software, the "boring run-of-the-mill stuff" can be automated. There's an
interesting problem there, even if the application is macroscopically boring.
If someone has a genuinely boring job (as opposed to an ill-matched job, or
possibly a job not worth doing) then that indicates a lack of automation--
perhaps the programmer's fault (he's not skilled or courageous enough to do
it) and possibly a manager's fault (for not budgeting time to do things
properly).

That, I think, is the hardest thing about managing programmers, in which I
include the increasingly important long-term job of managing one's own career.
There are very few macroscopic indicators of what work is actually interesting
(and more importantly, what projects fit which individuals).

If you asked me, at age 19 when I knew very little about software, whether
it'd be more interesting to work on a game or work on an OS or a compiler, I'd
have said the game based on the project's macroscopic attractiveness. Of
course, most experienced programmers would prefer to work on the OS. If you're
trying to hammer some C++ legacy garbage from another project into usefulness,
the fact that it's "for a game" doesn't mean very much.

What I actually find is that there's only a very slight correlation between
macroscopic and day-to-day "interestingness" in work (which is why it's so
hard for managers to tell which projects are interesting). More important is
the work environment-- whether you have the autonomy and creative control to
solve problems in a decent way and make the work interesting.

~~~
bane
I can see your point re: boring solved via automation.

However, there is still a tremendous class of software that can't (or hasn't
yet been) automated e.g. boring enterprise integration mush, or accounting
software, or whatever CRUD app the company needs to meet xyz goal for the
year.

Sure there have been some efforts to automate or semi-automate some of this
but the solutions are often more cumbersome or boring than the original. There
are probably tens of millions or lines of code written for this kind of stuff
every year.

Sure if you look at a high-enough-level most of these look like the same thing
(and thus easy to automate) -- CRUD apps basically. But the truth is that this
just hasn't happened yet because the devil is in the often excruciating
details.

The developers who end up doing this kind of work do critical stuff, it's the
equivalent of building a working sewage system in a growing city, not sexy but
utterly critical. No amount of programmer astronauts are going to keep the
poop flowing away form the population.

[http://boingboing.net/2011/11/08/what-happens-when-you-
flush...](http://boingboing.net/2011/11/08/what-happens-when-you-flush-a-
toilet-in-the-worlds-tallest-building.html)

Still, if anybody could solve that kind of boring software development
(something that can't be done with sewage systems), it'd be a multi-billion
dollar company almost overnight.

------
jstanley
Poor grammar.

------
bitwize
I am NOT! A! MORON! Could a moron do this? Huh? Could a moron PUNCH! YOU!
INTO! THIS! PIT?

