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0xpgm 3 days ago

How is it unprofessional when it is simply someone giving their honest personal opinion on an issue that involves something that is valuable to them, on their personal blog nonetheless.

Is everyone a walking and talking brand now so that they have to always filter their words, walk on eggshells, hide behind corpo-speak so as to seem 'professional'?

More honest discourse is required in today's world, not less. It seems interactions online are becoming less and less authentic.

ModernMech 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.

There’s a big gap between corpo speak and “stinky manager”. That’s nowhere close to professional writing. And he’s not giving us his personal opinion, Kelley is telling us the conclusion of the “grape vine” - he’s reporting on rumors and gossip, and agreeing with it.

27183 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Why does this person owe you "professional writing" on their personal blog?

em-bee 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

he doesn't owe it, but his writing reflects on him and the project. personal blog or not, the writing shows his personality, and that in turn affects how comfortable i am using a project led by this person. if this was just one of many zig developers then it would not matter as much, but as this is the founder and leader, his personality has a major impact on the project as whole. especially in how it attracts contributors, and how long those contributors will stay around.

27183 3 days ago | parent [-]

Maybe it's just filtering for the right contributors? More isn't always better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ebilgenius 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The kinds of contributors you "filter for" by acting like a petulant manchild on your personal blog are going to ruin your community and then your programming language and then blame you personally for all of it

Ar-Curunir 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, and the kind of contributors you attract with this kind of writing are just assholes

27183 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure if you're intentionally branding an entire language community that way or not but it might be less broadly offensive to tone that down. You could make a similar point by saying something like "I don't like the message he's sending so I won't participate" without labeling anyone who associates with him an "asshole".

Shorn 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> You could make a similar point by saying something like "I don't like the message he's sending so I won't participate"

Sooo.... "be more professional in your writing"?

Why does this person owe you "professional writing" on their personal comment?

27183 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Sooo.... "be more professional in your writing"?

No, just more precise. It seems absurd to brand an entire community as "assholes" based on some disagreement with a blog post by one member. I suspect great GP didn't mean it that way, but it would help to have some clarification.

antonvs 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Why does this person owe you “clarification”?

You’re really just helping to confirm his diagnosis.

2 days ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
ModernMech 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

To be precise, they said “the kind of contributors you attract with this kind of writing are just assholes” not “the community is only assholes” and also not “anyone who associates with him is an asshole". You’re strawmanning.

em-bee 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

the point is that such language attracts people who have a high tolerance for such language. not all of them are going to be assholes, but tolerating assholes is also bad.

newaccountman2 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why do we owe him the withholding of criticism for what he writes on his blog he puts out there on the internet in the hopes that people will take his side/adopt his opinion?

ModernMech 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He doesn't owe me anything. But his community deserve better than this.

27183 2 days ago | parent [-]

If they want better than that the fork button is up and to the right.

ModernMech 2 days ago | parent [-]

I mean you’re not wrong, the only power his community has is to vote with their feet, and that’s what will happen. We’ve seen it before in other languages where the BDFL had an unchecked ego problem. Others brought up Elm and Evan and I agree. We all saw how that turned out.

orangedog 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

He's not operating personally as the leader of a major project.

27183 3 days ago | parent [-]

> He's not operating personally as the leader of a major project.

What? So let me get this straight--if my open source project which I have given away for free becomes "major" (for some definition) then all of a sudden I have to filter my writing through some kind of average acceptableness test? Come on. [edit] It would be one thing if this was published on Zig letterhead, but it was the guy's personal blog...

orangedog 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

You have to if you give a shit about the community you are leading, yes. You're not operating as a private figure in that role, everything you do affects the community and it is blind or selfish to act otherwise.

27183 3 days ago | parent [-]

This is so deeply wrong. This person owes you nothing. You're accusing them of "selfishness" after they've given away thousands of hours of their time... Your entitlement is just breathtaking.

ai_critic 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I dunno man taking 60KUSD a year only to be catty about the donor is a bit entitled as well.

em-bee 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

giving away thousands of hours of work does not entitle you to be abusive to your users and contributors. i am entitled to walk away from your project if i don't like your tone.

deanCommie 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Look, I get where you're coming from, I do.

In the last decade, we've seen rampant abuses and exploitation of open source projects and of maintainers. So much individual good will and generous efforts wasted because of corporate malfeasanse.

AND YET. If you "open source" a project, if you actually invest in BUILDING a community, you then become a PART Of that community - with the benefits and obligations that come with it.

You don't want the obligations? Fine. But then you don't really get to keep participating in the community. And if you act like "This is MY community, I get to do whatever I want", people are free to shrug, and say "maybe i'll go find a different community".

Which is exactly how I see people reacting to Zig right now. They're seeing that an active member of this community (which, as you said, keeps insisting "he owes them nothing because the community wouldn't exist without them") treats people he doesn't like, and they think "Oof i don't want that to one day be me."

27183 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah I'm not defending the blog post as a great way to build the biggest bestest community. Clearly it isn't. But it's also pretty clear that's not the poster's priority. And that is defensible! They don't owe anyone perfection in community building or any other thing.

If they want to write a maybe slightly unhinged blog post excoriating someone they had an unpleasant time with... that's a choice! It's their choice. I don't think we get to demand a different one. We can agree or disagree with what they said, but we can't demand they say something else.

If you want that kind of power over someone you need to ensnare them in a binding contract. No such contract exists here.

ModernMech 2 days ago | parent [-]

> I'm not defending the blog post as a great way to build the biggest bestest community. Clearly it isn't.

This has been everyone's point the entire time. You agree with everyone here. No one is suggesting a binding contract exists, but a _social_ contract does exist -- and you concede that with the above recognition of how clearly this post violates it.

3 days ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
em-bee 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

you have to if you want to continue to attract users and contributors. if you don't care about that then feel free.

smohare 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There are fundamental realities associated to being a public figure or representative. When you are even privately held sentiments or actions reflect upon the larger organization. This reflection isn’t a purely social construct, but itself an acknowledgement of human cognitive flaws and biases that inevitably leak through to decision making.

For example, you don’t want the director of a science outreach organization to privately uptake all manner of pseudoscience, because they cannot be trusted to carry out the organization’s ostensible mission. When these sentiments come to light, said directory is morally obliged to step down.

A personal blog is definitionally public, ergo by extension reflects upon whatever organizations that person is a member of.

I say all this as someone that does not even feel the posted article is particularly incendiary.

nsagent 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Treat it as a data point and make your own decisions (he does back it up with several sources that indicate a workaholic mentality with that expectation for others). Hiding it ends up perpetuating the behavior unseen.

*Below is an aside that explains why I think it's better to air these things even if it seems like "rumors and gossip."

I know first hand how toxic some people are irl compared to their public persona. There was a professor in my department during my PhD who was known to be a slave driver, but there are no accounts of it outside of the department. We would have to warn incoming students about working with her, though sometimes they wouldn't believe it could be as bad as we said. I spoke with one of her students after she left the lab due to being hospitalized for exhaustion from overwork: the professor contacted her while she was still hospitalized and asked her to complete a task ffs!

illiac786 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Honest and professional is not the same, to summarize. You can be both, but you definitely can be honest and unprofessional or even childish. Children are very honest for example.

neutronicus 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, “corpo-speak” is the language of professionalism.

tel 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's also a language of distancing from personal experience and honesty.

Not saying you're wrong. Professionalism is an important tool for maintaining professional relationships. Lack of professionalism is dangerous to the point where it is reasonable for certain kinds of societies to begin to shun people who don't engage with it.

And, at the same time, a certain amount of emotional honesty can be really important to share, too. And that includes some amount of judgement and criticism.

It sounds like Zig's relationship with Bun is over. While Anthropic/Jason/Bun did not write a personal narrative about the end of that relationship, they absolutely were the initiators and could not have done this in a more aggressive way. It feels to me to be approximately the equivalent of moving out in secret and serving the divorce documents through your lawyer.

newaccountman2 2 days ago | parent [-]

1) If he wants to rant in an emotionally honest way, he can, but other people are free to prefer professionalism and call him out.

2) > It sounds like Zig's relationship with Bun is over. While Anthropic/Jason/Bun did not write a personal narrative about the end of that relationship, they absolutely were the initiators and could not have done this in a more aggressive way. It feels to me to be approximately the equivalent of moving out in secret and serving the divorce documents through your lawyer.

What a bizarre framing of the relationship between a software library and the language it's written in. Why would you even liken it to a marriage lolwtf

swiftcoder 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Nah, corpo-speak is the original slop. The result of too many comms/legal inputs to a conversation.

Professional communication is direct, clear, and ideally courteous (but only to a point).

neutronicus 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

What is managing legal and PR risk if not professional?

swiftcoder 3 days ago | parent [-]

corporate != professional. Plenty of professionals who do not work in those highly risk-averse corporate roles

What's the actual risk here? I guess he could sue Andrew for slander, and then prove in court that his management style doesn't suck, and his code is not slop...

neutronicus 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The risk here is that a deep-pocketed entity elects to forgo funding Zig development because they don’t want to sign up for this level of dirty laundry airing if things go poorly.

reinitctxoffset 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Professionals worry, stay late at the office, and work hard. They care a great deal about the outcome, they care a great deal about the craft, they are fanatical about their responsibilities.

They tend to be willing to increase their accountability faster than their compensation.

They sometimes argue, use profanity, or otherwise communicate emphatically, that is the register of communication when something critical is on the line.

The best computer hackers and other technologists through the years were very often outspoken, plain spoken, and did not suffer fools gladly. In their own way everyone from Djiksta to Jobs to Gabriel to Carmack to Linus to Nagggum to jwz to Hotz, too many to count.

It's the same in law offices, hospitals, and forward operating bases in any military that ever won a war. It's the same on a construction site or in Mission Control in Houston.

This venomous pretense of decorum performed by people who ruthlessly optimize to minimize their accountability while maximizing their compensation subject to no scruples.

That's not being professional that's being a leisure suit con man. It is en vogue at the moment precisely because we are in an extreme low integrity regime.

dom96 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Calling someone’s code “slop” surely isn’t professional nor courteous.

neutronicus 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Nor is polemic against financiers.

grayhatter 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it is.

If I call your code slop, I'm being professional and courteous.

The truth doesn't have a ethical value. Me calling your code slop might feel disrespectful, but it's less disrespectful than trying to pass slop off for your coworkers (or users) to use and deal with.

Lying to someone, and allowing someone who's supposedly your friend to ship slop is more disrespectful. If I wrote shitty code, and my friend didn't stop me, and I find out later he knew it was shitty code... that would be very hard on our friendship.

Unless you meant it's a lie to call it slop code. A lie would be disrespectful, but then again, we both know you didn't say that because it's not a lie.

dom96 a day ago | parent [-]

Calling something "slop" is dismissive, vague and not constructive. That's why it's not professional.

If you want to tell someone their code quality is poor, then you better do so with specific things that is poor so that the person you are telling it to can learn and do better.

grayhatter a day ago | parent [-]

> If you want to tell someone their code quality is poor, then you better do so with specific things that is poor so that the person you are telling it to can learn and do better.

You and I must have had very different interactions with the types of people who happily emit slop. For the people I've met who've suggested slop; they don't care about quality, and it has exclusively been a waste of time trying to explain why quality is important.

Calling someone's work slop, if they're willing to engage, might be disrespectful, I agree! But calling someone code/commit slop when they don't give a shit about the quality of their code (as evidenced by the commits they're willing to put their name on) is simply a description of reality. Willingness to engage is shockingly important. I can't think of a more vague response than answering "I don't know why the code is like that, the LLM did it".

I'd also like to assert: giving out slop to other people is more disrespectful, and less professional (professionals don't suggest low quality options). I'm much rather you try to insult my code, than waste my time trying to trick me into accepting low quality work.

And then, speaking personally. I would feel the most disrespected, if you were willing to call my code slop when speaking privately. But wouldn't call it slop to me, or publicly. It's not disrespectful to have a candid conversation; even if it's uncomfortable because someone has different and strong opinions than I do. I'm a big boy, I'm able to handle the honest evaluation of my work from another person without it being instantly being disrespectful to me, just because they used a word I didn't like.

If they were lying, that would be disrespectful.

dom96 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, the creator of Bun is certainly someone that deserves professionalism.

But even random people you get on GitHub sending you PRs. You shouldn't reject them with "this code is slop". At least say "Cannot accept this. The code quality isn't great" or something to that effect.

But the point is: dismissing real people who are doing real work and spending a lot of effort on something with "that's slop" is very unprofessional.

You are just coming up with scenarios that don't really apply to what happened in this blog post.

grayhatter 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Well, the creator of Bun is certainly someone that deserves professionalism.

I disagree. (Funny that, different people with different values have different perspectives on acceptable behavior?)

> You are just coming up with scenarios that don't really apply to what happened in this blog post.

Counterpoint; I'm actually sharing a perspective because I thought it would be interesting or useful to consider different opinions.

We're all just pattern matching; you see one form of indifference as offensive, I see a completely different set of actions as the root cause for the offense.

We all have our own rules for what follows and breaks the implicit social contract we've each invented independently. These rules are allowed to differ. You feel like someone insulting your code is more disrespectful, I feel like someone wasting my time is more disrespectful. If you'd like to assert I'm wrong, I'm equally happy to assert you're an idiot (in case it's not abundantly obvious, I don't think you're an idiot, this is an example of how I don't care about "insults")

> But the point is: dismissing real people who are doing real work and spending a lot of effort on something with "that's slop" is very unprofessional.

I might agree with parts of this, but fundamentally, LLM produced code does not count as real work. No, reviewing it doesn't count, because 1) it's harder to do right 2) no one does it correctly 3) if reviewing actually took more effort than no one would use LLMs.

melodyogonna 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, I can't think of other people more qualified to know when a Zig code is slop.

cheikhcheikh 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did you actually read it ? "Stinky manager" "alreay writing slop before llm" and nore insults, cmon now...

kamikazechaser 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The wanna cancel Andrew and Zig by extension for hot-takes.