So, for certain categories of problems, I disagree.
There's way too little acknowledgement in our industry of just how much suffering and anguish one or two chucklefucks on a codebase can inflict on their teammates. Using only the matter at hand as an example:
"Rude" is waking somebody up to stand watch over a buggy system because it wasn't written properly and will seize up.
"Rude" is wasting senior developer time on a refactor because the last person who touched the code used system calls and primitives only available on one specific compiler and one specific OS, and now the system has to change.
"Rude" is injuring somebody because your embedded controller is using the wrong sized int for something, because it slipped through code review because somebody decided to use a #define that got changed between architecture upgrades and never fixed it.
"Rude" is wasting a tester's day having them try to hop up and down over the same three feet of virtual space while trying to tap the attack key just right to repro a race-condition bug caused by some permutation of the above. 8. Hours. Of. Hopping.
~
When you write shitty software, you are hurting everyone else who might ever have to interact with it--so, uh, yeah, I get to be rude.
No, you don't. Let me rephrase: I think it would be appreciated here, and for the sake of politeness and basic respect towards others, that you do not get rude. There are a thousands of other ways to write down how you feel about something without being rude, and people will still perfectly understand it. Moreover they are even more likely to pay proper attention to it if you are not rude.
> Moreover they are even more likely to pay proper attention to it if you are not rude.
It's funny how some people don't learn this.
Years of internet commenting has taught me the uselessness of posting in anger, and the value of a well-argued, well-written point. Strong emotions one way or another diminish the authority and impact of what you say.
It's easier said than done, of course: strong emotions are often specifically what lead you to make the effort of commenting.
If "strong emotions" were enough to diminish impact and authority, the ad business would simply be placards of bullet points. Even on HN, well-written and cool posts routinely are ignored or actively downvoted.
In the grand scheme of things, politeness is a good idea--but there are a few places where being nice simply won't get you as far as calling somebody out passionately on their wrongness. Low-level systems programming on large codebases with smart and stubborn and harried people is one of those cases.
There's way too little acknowledgement in our industry of just how much suffering and anguish one or two chucklefucks on a codebase can inflict on their teammates. Using only the matter at hand as an example:
"Rude" is waking somebody up to stand watch over a buggy system because it wasn't written properly and will seize up.
"Rude" is wasting senior developer time on a refactor because the last person who touched the code used system calls and primitives only available on one specific compiler and one specific OS, and now the system has to change.
"Rude" is injuring somebody because your embedded controller is using the wrong sized int for something, because it slipped through code review because somebody decided to use a #define that got changed between architecture upgrades and never fixed it.
"Rude" is wasting a tester's day having them try to hop up and down over the same three feet of virtual space while trying to tap the attack key just right to repro a race-condition bug caused by some permutation of the above. 8. Hours. Of. Hopping.
~
When you write shitty software, you are hurting everyone else who might ever have to interact with it--so, uh, yeah, I get to be rude.