Comment by plonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plonh | Hacker News Reader

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You think its "phony" when someone shows up at X conference transparently focused of talking about X?

You think its selfish when some knows how we wants to help, and wants to find the people he wants to help?

I feel like I am taking crazy pills, where technical content gets zero attention in a technical project. It sounds to me like the conference are getting taken over by vacationers who want to have a party week (possibly soft-embezzled by expensing an employer) pushing out people who care about the project.

It reminds of when the college resume padders took over the high school math club, and instituted a substantial membership fee to finance a trip to a math competition where they didn't actually compete, and I had to create a new club to gather people for math activities.

I feel like you've already decided that these people who value soft skills are garbage ("soft-embezzled"--please!), but what the hell, I'll feed the troll.

Every technical project--and I think you'll find few people within Debian who'd claim it to be primarily one, it's a social movement with a technical component--is fundamentally an interpersonal enterprise, and face-to-face interaction is exactly that. Positive interactions are the underpinning, in functional communities, of the assumption of good faith and the ability to work with people who do not necessarily agree with you; it is the difference between "ugh, Bob is such a prick and he's wrong" and "I like Bob, we disagree, let's hash this out." You may (think that you do) not need this. Most people do. And most people recognize that they're better off working within a culture of positivity, rather than the bizarre flat "professionalism" you've described in this thread.

Everything, always, is about people. Assuming otherwise leads inevitably to disastrous ends. I think Debian, among others, has done well to harness that truth. We aren't a bunch of meat robots, no matter how hard you assert it.

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