I’m compelled to agree.
I don’t think that Microsoft has an absence of skilled employees.
The issue is that Microsoft’s business is creating profitable software, not excellent software.
These two things aren’t intrinsically incompatible, but at some point in time they diverged from one another.
Basically, Microsoft is much more compelled to invest in more abstract “frameworks” that essentially worm their way into everything, because that’s the move that has the best ratio of low effort to high profit.
Creating individual pieces of awesome software (such as a video game) may yield very high profit, but it’s also extremely costly, and therefore ultimately less efficient than creating frameworks and suchlike.
These days, shoehorning effortless yet profitable frameworks into everything means web3, and pretending that everything (including Google searches) is running on a neural network, so that’s what Microsoft is doing.
(Rephrasing a comment I posted in a different community.)
This. I wish more people understood how tiresome tone policing is. Cultures where every word in an exchange must be chosen with micrometer precision to avoid making anyone feel even the slightest bit uncomfortable or personally attacked feel very alien and ridiculous to me, because that’s not how real people communicate in real life. Real people don’t express frustration (or any strong emotion) in a careful matter-of-fact manner that avoids causing hurt feelings. Real people express frustration by getting angry, using offensive language, calling people names and otherwise violating social codes they would follow in polite conversation. (And if they then later on feel that they went too far in the heat of the moment, they apologize and try to make amends.)
That said, I’m a bit of two minds about the (original) post. I agree 100% with the sentiment that Microsoft/GitHub has rotted from the inside out and that most people who currently work there should feel shame, and I think it’s refreshing to see it expressed so bluntly.
But on the other hand, there’s only really one thing I expect of core members when they speak on behalf of the Zig organization and it’s that they don’t make the lives of Zig users more difficult or make it embarrassing to talk about Zig. Being blunt and honest is great, but posting unnecessarily inflammatory blog posts or getting involved in dumb shit-flinging drama on social media only results in people forming negative associations with Zig and does not help its current users in any way.
I thought the blog post was on point. Yes I think in some way it hits some buzzwords, but I think that in this instance it’s okay. We have seen platforms do the entire embrace, extend, extinguish many times or straight up just making things worse. I think it’s okay to point your criticism towards platform capitalism, even in a public facing blog post. I feel like GitHub to some extend has a lot of value by making it inconvenient to use other platforms. Having a big project switch to codeberg is very cool, as I myself recently have also started hosting my own git. Also I think the criticism of ICE is justified. Like I’m not very well versed in politics or US politics, but I think you calling out specific issues is okay.
Only thing I thought was strange was to call the developers monkeys? Like is that a reference to the infinite monkey theorem? Or was that just a generic insult. I didn’t get what that was supposed to mean.
It’s certain that statistically, they’re going to pick up people with AI copilot, and given that bosses are jumping on board like it’s a mirage.
If we think that AI is going to absorb the code and appropriate it, we become paranoid, because it’s integrated into GitHub.
Open source is free; you can read, integrate, and rewrite it in another form. Whether some people like it or not, that’s the reality.
What I mean is that we need to remain cautious and not listen to all the siren songs.
I assume it was in reference to “code monkey”, a term for someone who writes code professionally but doesn’t really care about programming/software engineering as a craftsmanship.
When code monkey is used with a derogatory tone, it generally implies that the programmer in question writes uninspired, boilerplate code at someone else’s initiative.
About the blog post, I didn’t mind it all that much. Honestly, I felt that the complaints about it (saying that it was unprofessional or childish or whatever) said more about the complainants than it does Andrew. Yes, some may think that professionalism is something we should maintain, but I would argue that there is only so much BS someone can take before they just drop the mask and say fuck it. And I’m of the belief that tone policing is generally bad. The theory is that it helps collaboration; in practice, it makes everybody sound like everybody else, and makes it so you can’t say anything lest you offend some random person who lives 30000 miles from you or something. Tone policing is what a corporation does. It’s what people do when they don’t want to admit wrongdoing, or they want to try to deflect blame, or they want to shift the focus elsewhere. IMO it doesn’t magically eliminate the barriers of collaboration: if someone is difficult to collaborate with, or is a difficult person generally, tone policing isn’t going to change that fact and magically make everyone get along. And I honestly appreciated the bluntness. Tone policing or speech sanitizing always sounds extremely alien to me, because nobody communicates like that. Like, ever. Well, unless your in a courtroom. And if you are, well, you have bigger things to think about.
I was more shocked by the linked issue that wasn’t immediately fixed than the language in the post. The offence didn’t even register to me until I saw some discussions about it…
With that said, I don’t find (“code”) monkey offensive as sometimes that’s the unfortunate reality of making a living in this industry. You’re rarely incentivised to do your best work or to fix bugs, and sometimes circumstances don’t allow you to easily walk away from a paying job. So I tend to point blame at the system not the individuals…
Overall I admire the move to Codeberg and hopefully it inspires other larger projects to do the same
Well, individuals are the ones allowing this. The only way to fix this is by pushing for the change, because the moment for less impactful actions is loooong time gone.
Codeberg is great: projects, issue tracker, wikis, CI/CD, and security keys. Tho I am not sure why the team did not migrate the issues and prs (so commit messages would point to merge sources just like on GH instead of pointing to nowhere due to the counter height migration).
First, excited for the move away from GitHub. Think the reasons for leaving are good; When it comes to software, you never want to be more dependent on the software than the vendor is. You get the feel that Microsoft cares very little for the quality of GitHub and more about using it as a vehicle to push AI, ads and other products.
As for the messaging. I hate to keep drama going, but feel that this is important to say. I love the zig community because it is made up of real people doing real things. Andrew is himself, and I love that when we get Andrew to visit here, it is him. I love that when Loris is here, we get Loris. We don’t have to deal with committees and sub-committees dedicated to Language Outreach, with internecine squabbles about obscure governance policies. We just get real people doing really cool things.
Never have Andrew, Loris or anyone else from ZSF come to me and told me how to run this site, or asked me to make any changes to policies, or tell me how to moderate the forums. I’m going to extend them the reciprocal courtesy. Rock on Andrew!
I completely agree with this. I performed really poorly on this axis. I’m sorry to the Zig community for that. I’ll take my L and get back to working on std.Io and the rest of the roadmap.
first of all, thanks for how much you care about having a good and perfomant language and ecosystem for all of us. Also in my mind it is absolutely important and inspiring that you speak with passion and call out problems, this is exactly what I would expect from a strong leader with a cause!
The only point where things went south in the blog post was attacking the people instead of their outcome. I love attacking and fighting over shitty technical systems but attacking people will almost always burn bridges instead of inviting people to join the war on shitty software. I know you guys know this and hopefully can incorporate this in a review process moving forward.
That you took the blame and also changed the post exactly in that direction is proof of your leadership skills.
I also just wanna say thank you!
Please keep up the great work - with how you and the zig leadership team managed this little “drama” I am now even more proud to be part of this community!
While I didn’t enjoy the wording, I think it’s also somewhat unfair to expect Andrew to be unreasonable when fighting the status quo (of software) but on the other hand sugarcoat his words.
Reminds me of the quote:
“The reasonable person adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person”
Anyway, it made me take out a (small) monthly donation on every.org now, which I meant to do for some time now.
That being said, I feel like a culture of “inoffensive speech” sometimes gets carried forward too far
The way I see it, it is for your own benefit, or the benefit of the message, that you choose to be “tactically polite”. As to not get people to raise their “guards” and become defensive/unreceptive to the message. I do not think many people care about attacking Microsoft or any giant coorporation like that, but slacking off the developers directly does in my opinion, make people less receptive/more defensive. Because on some level they will probably identify with those developers. That is my intuition.
Edit: *Although I guess this way the message probably generated a lot more attention than it otherwise would, so maybe it was the right way to phrase the message*.
I am with zig core team on first variant with mentioned monkeys and with changed one.
I love Zig and its core principles.
I am so very new to Zig (just finished Ziglings), but this is what I want to use when I venture out of my usual Java and JS to gain performance or create compact utilities. (I love JS and Java; and I just added Zig to my favorites)
I moved my donation gladly from GitHub to [every.org](http://every.org) and completely agree with the clock ticking after MS took over github. Even for my repos on GitHub, as none of them are even a bit popular, Github will not miss me.
I am skipping hyprland for a nicer community on niri. I have no problem picking communities that I share more values with.
