A lack of basic social awareness keeps hacker culture isolated and unapproachable.

It’s (mostly) not bad people, but lots of bad little moments that poisons the well for everyone.

The conversation shown below is a real one, and I’ve shared it not because it is exceptional in any way — it’s very typical and even tame by comparison to what happens daily in programming communities.

I’ve anonymized the names because I don’t want to draw negative attention to a particular person, but instead to analyze a behavior that’s endemic in hacker culture. In other words, it’s the shit we do to each other every day, and that we put up with every day — but it also benefits nobody in the end.

I’ve put all of my personal commentary into annotations, to encourage you to draw your own conclusions before hearing my own perspective on each part of the exchange. Keep in mind that it’s not about good or bad people, but about the way we communicate with one another:

Foo: I wonder what would happen if we took the design ideas behind things like minitest, chruby, etc. and applied them to all Ruby infrastructure

Bar: You mean with poor documentation? Sounds like it’s already there.

Qux: Are you thinking of a particular project with poor docs? minitest and chruby seem well documented.

Bar: Numerous times I’ve got to minitest to look on how to do X and come back with the wrong info.

Foo: Have you submitted patches to fix docs when that happens? If not, well… that’s why docs stay bad.

Bar: How do you submit fixes to documentation you didn’t get good information from?

Foo: You use research from other sources (including the code) or ask for help, then write up what you learned. Maintainers should provide good docs but users often have a better sense of what docs are needed

Bar: Easier to go to the better documented libraries. I have stuff to ship.

Foo: Nothing wrong with that, but complaining on twitter isn’t helping move your projects along either.

Bar: I’m not interested in helping those projects move along? And after 6 years I don’t think they are either.

…

Bar: I’m not trying to downplay minitest, it just seemed like you were holding it in weirdly high regard. And in this case the “simple” minitest and the other seattlerb libraries focused on was the best “simple”.

Neither Foo nor Bar came out of this conversation looking good, and neither probably ended up feeling good, either. On top of that, the conversation itself is mostly devoid of meaningful insights. And for those reasons, it represents a tremendous form of waste.

The lesson I took away from this exchange is that until we can make conversations such as the one above the exception rather than an everyday occurrence, hacker culture will always seem odious to the newcomer, and will stand in the way of any efforts towards inclusiveness and diversity that we could hope for. It would seem that if we can’t solve the “easy problem” of basic social awareness and empathy, that we have no chance of addressing more complex societal problems.

But this problem is perhaps harder than it seems to solve. I think we’ve all been in the shoes of both Foo and Bar at one time or another, often in the span of the same day. Maybe we need to make Derek Sivers’ essay “A real person, a lot like you” a daily reading exercise.