Excerpts from Ed Leafe's message of 2015-02-17 10:11:01 -0800: > On Feb 17, 2015, at 11:29 AM, Clint Byrum <cl...@fewbar.com> wrote: > > > Shaming a person is a last resort, when that person may not listen to > > reason. It's sometimes necessary to bring shame to a practice, but even > > then, those who are participating are now draped in shame as well and > > will have a hard time saving face. > > Why must pointing out that someone is doing something incorrectly necessarily > "shaming"? Those of us who review code do that all the time; telling someone > that there is a better way to code something is certainly not shaming, since > we all benefit from those suggestions. >
Funny you should bring that up, that may be an entirely new branch of this thread which is how harmful some of our review practices are to overall community harmony. I definitely think there's a small amount of unhealthy shaming in reviews, and a not small amount of non-constructive criticism. Saying "This code is not covered by tests." or "You could make this less complex by using a generator." is constructive criticism that has as little shaming effect as possible without beating around the bush. This is the very definition of _educating_. However, being entirely subjective and attacking stylistic issues (please know that I'm not claiming innocence at all here) does damage to the relationship between coder and review team. Of course, a discussion of style has a place, but I believe that place is in a private conversation, not out in the open where it will almost certainly bring shame to the submitter. > Sure, you can also be a jerk about how you tell someone they can improve, but > that's certainly not the norm in this community. > I agree that the subjective stylistic nit picking comes in a polite way. I think that only softens the blow to someone's ego and still conveys a level of disrespect that will eventually erode the level of trust between the submitter and the project as a whole. So, somewhat ironically, I think the right place to make subjective observations about someone's work is in a private message. Unfortunately, I think humans are quite subjective themselves, and so what might be too harsh and shameful to one ego, might be just the right thing to educate the next. Calibration of one's criticism practices is one of those things I'm sure most of us geeks would like to think we don't have to worry about. However, I think it is worthwhile to consider it before making any critique, especially when one doesn't know the recipient of the critique extremely well. __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev