We sure need some reminders these days it seems

Edited to add: not a dig at commenter above whatsoever, more just a reflection on our (including my!) ignorance about the history of labor. Bout every little thing that makes working life better in the US came from organized labor forcing it to happen, and most of us have no idea.

Ugh, poor error reporting is such a frustrating time sink.

The hilarious part about your comment is you’re the one over-explaining to me here. I’m super familiar with about every way a man can be characteristically shitty, happen to have witnessed most of it first hand over the years, committed some of the milder stuff before I grew up and learned how to behave, but here you are kindly helping me understand things about men. Interestingly, of all the things I have witnessed, what I don’t really see often is “mansplaining”. What I do see sometimes is a dude earnestly doing his best to offer help and someone else being totally uncharitable about that, like it’s some affront. And never to the dude oddly enough, only in a mocking, condescending way to others behind his back. The reason I see those ugly hidden reactions, incidentally, is because my behavior makes it clear I’m a solid ally of the people making those comments, and they trust me.

So I dunno. Way I see it, there’s a catalog of valid complaints about stereotypical dude behavior. But being super critical about sincere (if clumsy) attempts to support or help someone just always strikes me as deliberately nasty, for fun. But you do you.

Don’t bother with the TV sitcoms, please. “Bumbling idiot father who fucks up even the most trivial things constantly and is roundly shit on by everyone including his own children” is a core, continuous joke behind so many shows. And fuck it, often it’s hilarious, I’m not gonna get bent outta shape about it. Your “see, look how toxic, it’s been on TV forever” feels pretty weak.

Can’t forget the fun flip side too, where some guys who know a lot are unwilling to share, because they (being fuckin cowards) feel it’s necessary to protect their job security by being the only one who knows how to do certain things.

Or! The guys who know how to do things - have decided they hate doing some of those things (usually for good reason in my experience) - and therefore pretend they don’t know how to do them. I kinda sympathize with this one sometimes.

But yeah, “likes to teach” as the toxic trait? Anyone who thinks that is the toxic version of knowledge sharing is kinda just revealing how little time they’ve actually spent around men.

Completely agree! It’s SO much easier to lighten the mood and keep things upbeat and productive in an actual conversation vs. just text-based feedback. For example it makes it easy to throw in self-deprecating anecdotes of your own when discussing mistakes / needed changes, which can really help put juniors at ease. It’s just worlds better in >90% of scenarios.

Completely understand the frustration here. Mistakes happen, even competent people sincerely trying to do a good job can overlook things, etc. But if it’s a pattern of just copying and pasting code without really even trying to understand what it does, that’s a big problem that needs to be addressed. And frankly they should feel embarrassed if it happens more than once or twice.

OTOH, delivering criticism in a way that winds up productive for all involved is difficult at best, and the outcome depends on the junior as much as it does the senior. What good is being right if it ultimately just alienates you from your team? Tough situation for sure, and one of the many reasons it’s so important to hire carefully (which is itself a whole huge can of worms too!).

Can you simply ask them to walk through their submission line by line with you, explaining what it’s doing? If you’ve never asked that before it might come across as a strange request, but if you phrase it well it’s possible this causes them to notice their poor understanding without you ever seeming to point it out.

I was simply pleased by your comment, to see how much you care about helping folks and moving the community forward. Seems like quite a lot of effort to me, far more than I’d be able (willing?) to contribute, and I’m just forever grateful for folks you like you and wanted to say something about it :)

I appreciate the invite. I’m not at a point currently where I can put sincere effort toward much that’s non-essential, but if that changes, Rust is on my short list of targets for ways to spend some spare effort and time.

Welp, YOU’RE frickin cool, kudos!

Just make sure you’re getting some outside feedback on that, I’ve known folks so used to their own “brand” that they just couldn’t tell. Smelled utterly rank and couldn’t be convinced of it.

That’s true and a great example of what my industry needs.

To make an analogy, in the software industry we call 7 different knee-like things “knees”. Not to be confused with the product, Knee, which is also knee-like, but due to its name either pollutes the search results for other knees OR can literally not be searched, and is only a very specific case of knee anyway!

I do plenty of technical writing just documenting software I write, and that’s definitely what has me pining for something a little more prescriptive. Even just reordering some words can suggest different meanings and it’s very difficult to step outside my own understanding of what I’m writing about to see it with “fresh eyes”, how someone else may interpret it.

I have to acknowledge that legalese does meet the criteria! Someone else mentioned that too. It feels very far off from what I had in mind though. Maybe just because I don’t speak it fluently!

I completely agree that Git has some great use cases outside software, and I like the one you suggested. If git is a bidet, random untracked edits (by anyone with access!) to documents are the TP we should have left behind as a society by now.

Yeah that’s fair, and it was clear to me from the jump that it’s an unrealistic desire.

Great to hear, thanks!

Holy shit. My life is a lie?!

Thank you for fighting the good fight.

I wish we had a dialect or subset of English that was intended to be more like computer code, and would be used for precisely specifying things. I have no idea how we’d do such a thing, and it’d never be adopted (and probably it’s been tried!). But trying to write English in a way that can’t be misinterpreted can be a real chore.

My pedantic hill to die on is the word “jealous”. For example:

“I’m going on vacation!” “Ugh, I’m so jealous!”

No, that’s envy. Jealousy is a weird way of behaving about things you already have, it’s not wishing you had what someone else does! Weirdly, explaining this does not cause people to use the correct word. At this point the battle is probably lost and the meaning has officially shifted.

Sweet, thanks.

How often do you find you need to mess with it? I’ve wanted to dabble but I’m super wary of introducing yet one more thing I need to tinker with to keep happy (especially if it’s gonna block the whole house’s internet if it breaks).