Slashdot Mirror
On Firing Open Source Community Members
An anonymous reader writes: As open source started booming, more people joined. Opinionated people. People who listened to the "we welcome everyone!" message and felt that their opinion could be their primary contribution. For some, they felt showing up at the gig gave them the right to dictate what the band played. From a leadership perspective, this was a tough spot to be in. On one hand, you want to foster an open, welcoming, and empowered community. You want that diversity of skills, but you also want value and quality. Low-quality contributors don't bring much other than noise: they are a net drain on resources because other good contributors have to take time away to support them.
In addition to this, those entitled, special-snowflakes who felt they deserved to be listened to would invariably start whining on their blogs about what they considered to be poor decisions. This caused heat in a community, heat causes sweating, sweating causes irritability, and irritability causes more angry blog posts. Critical blog posts were not the problem; un-constructive, critical blog posts were the problem. So what's the best way to foster a welcoming environment while still being able to remove the destructive elements?
In addition to this, those entitled, special-snowflakes who felt they deserved to be listened to would invariably start whining on their blogs about what they considered to be poor decisions. This caused heat in a community, heat causes sweating, sweating causes irritability, and irritability causes more angry blog posts. Critical blog posts were not the problem; un-constructive, critical blog posts were the problem. So what's the best way to foster a welcoming environment while still being able to remove the destructive elements?
Why do these posts always get modded down? Where are these people who actually respect the work of Poettering? This topic is very very much about people like him.
He causes damage, does nothing of quality or value... And then... and THEN, he has the gall to openly criticize the entire freaking OSS community because they don't want him working on their projects and he's all butthurt because the project maintainers speak their mind.
It's unrealistic to simply accept everyone who wants to help. Some cannot be worked with in a positive way.
What makes things difficult, is that the people who are wrong don't know they're wrong.
So you have 2 people who think differently and thinking the other is wrong. Which one is? Who knows! Its easy in hindsight of course.
Why are you blaming people who responded to your invitation for anyone to join? You can't advertise an open bar and then be surprised when a few angry alcoholics show up.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Commits count.
Turning up to a gig doesn't give you the right to dictate what the band plays. But if you turn up to the REHEARSALS for the gig armed with recordings and knowledge of the band's previous performances and sheet music containing instructions on how to correctly play something that the band had previously been fucking up without knowing it, then there's a chance that the squiggles and dots you've written might be performed at the next gig.
If the band chooses to not perform your squiggles and dots then just leave and perform them yourself.
In fairness - if you're actually the one(s) doing much of the work to create something being used by millions of people with minimal compensation - you *are* a pretty special snowflake. *Especially* compared to the asshat who contributes nothing but vitriolic, non-constructive commentary.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Completely agree.
Better yet introduce trial periods and reviews so that everyone understands that membership is not guaranteed and something to be respected/valued and help reduce feelings of self entitlement.
And as much as they are not special snowflakes this problem is not either. I mean if you let in candidates unfiltered into your workplace what exactly do you think will happen?
Be aware that many people are not very good at rating their own abilities or contributions and generally live in a self absorbed bubble which may have a highly variable relationship to the real world. (this can include the hirers/firers.)
Be warned that introducing any system of "hiring and firing" is VERY hard to get right (research says most people are terrible at it) and can be abused.
Also, just because someone is a great team member, it does not automatically follow that they will make great recruitment decisions.
Its tough.
This is just how the human race is. Deal with it or live in a cave, those are your choices.
PS: The cave thing was a joke...they will come find you regardless.
Where are these people who actually respect the work of Poettering?
As a FreeBSD developer, I have a lot of respect for the work Poettering. Every time he releases a new piece of software, we gain a load more users and developers. I can't wait for his next project.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So there was a system required that while running can adapt to different hardware configurations on the fly and automaticly solves the interdependencies for different demons, drivers and configurations.
While that is in principle possible with a set of scripts, it easily becomes un-maintenable, as every new hardware or state to support might need a hands-on on every script that might directly or indirectly affected by it, and you'll soon get runtime errors because a required service is not started, or a service, that is no longer required, is eating resources that long should have been freed. There was a system necessary for each demon and service and driver to report their requirements, and to calculate the new set of required resources and running processes, and to automaticly stop, reconfigure and start the approbriate things.
Yeah, some number of that lower 80% or 50% have the ability to become a top performer. If you cut them off, you kill your training pool. Some percent are also contributing in smaller ways that allow your top performers to concentrate on the parts where they are top performers and let others muddle through the parts they don't like.
It's easy for the "elites" to talk down the regular people and dismiss their contributions, but don't let your shop turn into some sort of uber coder jock circle that's destined to implode.
Cheap storage VM.