Subject: Re: cvs 1.11.10 will be imported
To: Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino <itojun@itojun.org>
From: Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@rek.tjls.com>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 12/13/2003 11:54:59
On Sat, Dec 13, 2003 at 04:22:51PM +0900, Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino wrote:
>
> i did not expect to be flamed because of the action i took based on
> the logic above. is my logic above damaged somewhere?
It's "damaged" because it is reasoning in a vacuum, divorced from any
recognition of how your own past behaviour might impact the responses of
others to what you do.
The fact is plain and simple: you have a long history of comitting changes,
including changes that are *not* responses to any urgent security problem,
with extremely short notice, even after other developers have asked you to
not do so. You also have a long history -- including recent actions --
of committing controversial changes over the objections of large numbers of
other developers.
Neither of these two fact mean that you should never commit changes, ever,
on short notice, nor that you should never commit changes, ever, to which
other developers object. However, what they *do* strongly suggest, to me
at least, is that if you actually want to avoid conflict with other
developers, you should consider the history of past problems -- without
assigning "blame" nor casting anyone as a "victim" -- and try to at the
very least minimize conflict by explaining what you are doing and why.
But do you actually want to avoid conflict? I am not so sure. When you
send all-uppercase rants to the mailing lists asking people how they
"DARE" to "BLAME" you, when you characterize any disagreement anyone
has with you as "being flamed instead", and when you write about how
you "can work quicker than anyone else", it seems to me that you're
practically *seeking out* conflict.
What is your actual goal, here? Is it to feel like someone who is
terribly misunderstood, wronged, blamed, actually always right but never
appreciated for it? I can understand the appeal of that in the short
term -- who doesn't like feeling like a misunderstood genius? -- but I
cannot imagine, if a long-term increase in your overall level of happiness
is what you're after, that it is a productive path to follow. If your
actual goal is to experience less pain and more pleasure from your
interactions with others -- whether in the NetBSD project or anywhere
else -- I think that a lot less time spent looking around suspiciously
to see who might be "blaming" you for something and a little more time
spent thinking about how *other people* might see your actions, and how
you could make small changes that might reduce conflict and bad feeling,
might be a much better idea.
Of course you do valuable work; of course it is appreciated. But _how_
you do that work matters, too, because you are interacting with other
human beings, not just code displayed on a cathode-ray tube. If you
give someone a present while making him feel like you just kicked him
in the head, do not be surprised if he reacts with pain, not gratitude.
Thor