The Hating Game
I was at an event the other day with a lot of local front-end developers. The leader of the group was presenting. I was excited. For the past three years, I’ve only been around other fronties at conferences where I’m presenting or at group lunches. That’s a different experience from being in the trenches with them. The chance to hang out with “my people” was too good to miss.
The leader got behind his laptop, turned on the big screen. We clapped and cheered. This was going to be awesome.
Then he started by banging on everything that didn’t conform to His Way of Doing Things: his process, his tools. Everything else was “stupid,” “dumb,” “moronic.”
I got the impression he was hiding his own fear of inadequacy behind a wall of disapproval and smack talk. I know this method. I used to use it myself, when I felt for sure I’d be fired from the team as soon as they realized I’d never used Handlebars.
Then the group started going along with it: jeering, making jokes, mirroring that negativity. The room was roast of Things “We” Don’t Like.
Now, I’m used to smack talk from a fair number of European conferences where public figures joust and argue approaches with a helpful serving of humor and good intentions, on stage or at bars. But this was one-sided: a bunch of developers agreeing with each other or bailing on the conversation because they couldn’t.
It was like someone sucked out all my enthusiasm and wiped the floor with it. My smile faded off my face, and I started shutting down intake not because I was challenged or disagreed, but because his approach was so negative. It was less stressful to read a blog post on the same topic on my laptop and tune everyone out, and I did so.
I forgot that front end development can be this way. I know designers and the design community can be snarky prima donnas at worst (“Oh my gawd, I hate that logo. It’s so stupid.”), and this is the front end development community’s version of that: a bunch of teens in black eyeliner insisting that the tweens shopping at Hot Topic aren’t “Twoo Gawths.”
It’s not pretty.
And it hurts us.
Paul Bakaus recently posted about how Internet Explorer put forth CSS properties for fast zooming and panning with touch. Paul is one of those European speakers/developers who can have strong opinions but discuss them and move on from them without injuring his ego. In his post, he wonders if such a useful feature was never embraced by the web development community because of Internet Explorer’s bad reputation (that is to say, the community loves to commisserate over how much we hate it about as much as we love to crucify Flash developers) or if it was the lack of evangelism and late standardization. I suspect it’s the former, given how the conversation went after I retweeted it (I’m removing the name of the Tweeter for their own face-saving):
@pbakaus, ahhh … thanks @IE for bringing back vendor prefixing on a major platform O_O
Now if this were Safari or Mozilla, would this tweet have happened, or would it have been kept securely in the mind of the tweeter? An example of classic knee-jerk reaction to any mention of Things We Don’t Like: find a reason to criticize it and tear it apart. Prove how much you know. Get a pat on the head from your friends, maybe a gold star from teacher or a cookie from Mom. It’s why Gamer Gate is a tire fire. It’s why Flash developers have all but disappeared from the community, taking their domain knowledge of motion design and optimization with them.
This is unhealthy.
This costs us good things. Good community members. Good people.
We need to remember: just because we have opinions doesn’t mean they’re worth shoving in other people’s faces. Because when we start getting Us vs. Them, we can’t be friends with Them. And sometimes, Them are people we can learn from.
I was never too happy working in house, under and alongside people whose validation comes from belittling others. And I hated myself when I start mirroring that behavior, like that crowd was at that event. It’s human nature to do so. The only way to stop it is to neither initiate it nor engage in it.
I’d rather stand at the front of the class, set a good example, lead from the front by speaking at conferences and preaching love of knowledge, that we are not our tools or our processes: we are what we make. If you ever see me behaving like this, speaking in opinion and smack rather than in fact and appeal, please, call me out on it.
It’s lonely not being on a permanent team, but one day I will have one again. And we won’t be a team of haters.
Originally posted in full at rachelnabors.com/2015/03/13/the-hating-game
