On Slack, web standards, and bloody cynicism
Slack announced video chat was unsupported in Firefox. You’ll believe what happened next.
Recently, Slack declared their video chat feature wasn’t supported in Firefox.
Adherence to web standards is, for many people, a deeply-held question of morality. The encroaching Twitterstorm could be seen from shore.
Most respondents made the fair point that companies should put in the extra time to support all browsers wherever possible, and they directed that point to the company as a whole. Fine.
Unacceptably though, some called into question the capability or work ethic of the Slack developers themselves:
This final tweet, and the subsequent argument that I tumbled into, inspired this post because it was particularly nasty, and I’m bored of the cynical attitude it is founded upon.
Look. Let’s begin by agreeing on one simple and uncontroversial fact:
Nobody outside of Slack knows the chain of events leading to, or the reasoning behind, the decision not to support Firefox for their initial release of this feature.
Nobody.
Yet here we have a guy (who works for Mozilla) publicly blacklisting all Slack developers and calling them out as lazy.
Nobody!
Why would anyone jump to this conclusion?
Things that are true
Ultimately, decisions like this are usually made by the business. It has a limited resource (time) that they’ve purchased off their developers.
Time is, I sadly have to explain, an inflexible resource. The practical reality for all businesses is that at any given point they have a specific quantity of it, so in order to get anything done they have to prioritise.
The business asks for a feature. They have some of this “time” and wish the feature to be delivered within a set amount of it. Compromises happen to make it so.
The tough shit of the matter is these compromises do not always align with your moral alignment.
In my experience web developers generally believe in supporting standards, and they generally argue, often quite pedantically, in favour of them.
Lastly, as pioneers of the magic link login system, and builders of a very robust and occasionally delightful app, the developers behind Slack are very good.
What probably happened
So, given the above, it is most probable that this was a business-led decision.
A compromise was probably made with the developers where they delivered the feature in Chrome initially, with the promise to bring it to Firefox if it performed well enough to justify further investment.
They probably disagreed with the decision, and said so, but because they’re reasonable human beings and this was a reasonable compromise, they agreed.
They didn’t chop their fingers off in protest and get themselves fired, as I assume these Twitter soldiers would prefer.
Personally I find it difficult, in the face of this messy but probable conflation of events and opinions, to identify room for cyncism.
Such deeply-held cynicism that you feel like emboldened to attack the character of people, who are actually real and have feelings and probably didn’t do anything wrong, because you assume them to be moral transgressors.
That assumption is based on the most cynical of many possibilities. The developers are lazy. They are incompetent. They are unemployable.
Or even that they’re acting out of malice:
How cynical, to consider that a lack of Firefox support could be sourced from malice? To consider laziness before the probable, dirty amalgamation of the truths I outlined above?
Assume the worst, cynical, bloody cynical.
We have more than enough cynicism in the world, thanks.
:)
As a pallet-cleanser, here’s a response from someone with plenty of experience of life on the other end of this nonsense. The Webpack whipping-boy himself, Sean T. Larkin:
More like this please.
