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wokwokwok

Is it bad of me to say I really just don’t care?

If he did the talk. If he did it as a keynote. If someone else is “leaving rust” because of it?

It all seems so fabulously irrelevant, I really struggle to understand why:

1) I should care (I don’t, currently)

2) People are coming out of the woodwork to criticise the rust team / foundation whatever when they’re not involved.

3) Why people having emotions (eg. The person above, who does care) is somehow a bad thing?

4) Any kind of positive out come is going to come of this.

I really struggle to view doing anything else as not hostile to the rust project or having an agenda (“stop rust being woke!!”) which is non technical, and unhelpful.

Rust is great. It’s not perfect. The people who build it are not perfect, the foundation is not perfect.

People are not perfect.

It’s ok.

Call out problematic behaviour, don’t obsess over it.

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From my understanding the Rust team was involved and they sidestepped democratic processes put in place to make sure the Rust foundation doesn't kill itself with unchecked mismanagement essentially.

The point is more that this sort of unilateral decision should never have been possible to make in the first place. It should have been discussed and voted on before the talk was downgraded.

Perhaps that specific incident is inconsequential, sure. I think even the speaker agrees so. But the fact that this lapse in process could happen within the Rust foundation at all is a red flag for other, more language-specific dangers.

How? Everything is done openly on https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs

I mean, I hear you. I understand what you're saying, I just don't understand how you (or others) think this is related to the technical aspects of the language.

Because the same people are involved, and they knowingly sidestepped these exact sorts of processes without care. It might not be important to you, but this seems like a red flag to many.

> Everything is done openly on https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs

But the RFCs are written and reviewed by people. And they need to have the feeling that the work they do isn't useless because the one who actually decides is somebody else who hasn't been involved in the process at all until the very end. It's ok having somebody being able to veto stuff, but this must be known and communicated beforehand - "yes, that's ok for us, but $PERSON has the last word on this so we have to await his approval".

If leadership acts so carelessly with regard to matters concerning a human being in such a shady and disrespecting manner, why would they act less careless with regard to technical matters? Will they just enforce their biased opinion, ignoring valid and generally accepted technical arguments? Rust leadership sounds a bit like the elite leadership of a communist state. I'd prefer an open dictatorship over that.

Notable in this backlash that this happened Friday evening/Saturday morning. So many of whom you’re characterising as the “elite leadership of a communist state” might not have seen this yet. They need to coordinate, build consensus and speak with one voice. I expect that might take a couple of days so they might have a response by Wednesday or so.

Also, my understanding is that the consensus among the committee was to invite and then one person broke that consensus. You’re characterising this as a careful, considered decision made by all of Rust project leadership but that might not be the case at all.

No, I am not presenting this as a careful, considered decision. I was just responding why this incident could possibly also reflect on technical matters (not saying that it actually does). I have no clue what went on exactly. But clearly leadership somehow failed in this incident. Looking forward to hear more about how exactly this has happened.

It’s possible to characterise anything as a leadership failure because the buck stops with them. But I don’t see what they could have done differently other than all being available on weekends to troubleshoot issues like this.

If just one person inside leadership fails, that's also leadership failure. If that's the case, most likely the remaining leadership will distance itself from this soon enough.

I’m less interested in collective blame/punishment and more about “how do we prevent this from reoccurring?”

I’m not seeing any obvious solution. If one member of the leadership team does something stupid on a Friday, it can only be resolved by Tuesday or Wednesday. Folks are going to pick up their pitchforks on Sunday and say that “leadership failed”. Sure. But I don’t see a way around this.

The solution is to pick better leaders. This should never have happened in the first place. Whoever is responsible for this needs to go.

You must be fun at incident review. "The solution is to hire better engineers. Our root cause analysis shows that this should have never happened in the first place. Whoever is responsible for this needs to go."

You’re missing the distinction here between incompetence and malice. One member of leadership acted maliciously; the fact that they were successful indicates that leadership as a whole was missing some controls (formal or otherwise). The latter party is analogous to whichever engineer accidentally brought down prod, whom our post-mortems should not blame—but the former is not.

If some dirtbag got angry about being passed over for a promotion, got offers for a new gig, and then rage-deleted prod at 5pm on their last day, you get to blame that dude at the post-mortem.

I agree with everything you said. I think you meant to write this to the other person. They kept trying to blame the entirety of leadership for a leadership failure and suggests “picking better leaders”.

I, like you, suggested that the process needs to be improved but I’m not sure how.

Ahhhhhh, legit, sorry. I’d read “whoever is responsible for this needs to go” as referring to only the malicious party—but “better leaders” does indeed suggest the GP wants multiple heads to roll.

You read it right the first time. I am just referring to the malicious party. By saying "better leaders" I mean get rid of the malicious part of your leadership. That will result in a better leadership, thus "better leaders". I must admit, maybe I am expressing myself a bit too mathematical here.

If the incident review shows that it is due to sabotage, how would you deal with the responsible person?

And how can what they did – presenting their own decision to other organisations or levels of their own organisation as if it were the legitimate “Leadership” consensus decision – how could that be anything other than a conscious and intentional act on their part, i.e, to use your term, “sabotage”? It's not like it could somehow be an accident, is it? “Oops, I slipped and fell onto my keyboard and these somewhat coherent and grammatically correct e-mails went out”?

Of-fucking-course it was sabotage, and of course they should be fired as all hell.

You should care because this becomes more and more the reputation of the language and as it pushes more and more talented people away the staying power of the language (and its ability to be "great") begins to diminish.

People don't need to be perfect, but if people are going to REPRESENT something (ie the Rust Language) they need to be better than the petty drama that the Rust team has been involved in over the last while.

This. I have avoided rust so far because I don't like the community around it and the reputation it's building. This type of drama really does effect the ecosystem.

As Rust the technology becomes increasingly important commercially, Rust the community will become more professional one way or another. Large companies want calm and predictable management of their core infrastructure. They have multiple levers, some overt, some less so, for getting it. Rust's leadership will either adopt professional standards of business conduct (as Linus did) or it will be replaced (like W3C was). There's too much riding on Rust now to leave its future up to emotion and chance.

So what can we who use Rust, but don't have those levers of power, do to help accelerate this professionalization?

>It all seems so fabulously irrelevant

Except (in my opinion) it's not, if the set of people responsible for the progress of the technology you(and mabye your company) are going to be using are able to make such terrible decisions, it opens doors for far worse on a scale where you will start to care(take a look at the code of conduct stuff(edit: I meant the trademark stuff); if they went ahead with it, which is very possible if they're willing to sidestep all ideas of democracy, then there would be some notable repercussions).

It means that, like everything that started at Mozilla, Rust will have some uncomfortable growth phase and then mature at some group that may or may not be the original one.

We can expect some mildly bad decisions on the language evolution. But it's very unlikely that this will open a niche for another language to replace Rust.

Only thing I can really see is mabye go/zig gaining more adoption but I don't think we're even close to that point yet, what's worrying is even discussing something like this happening in the first place. Ideally this sort of thing shouldn't even cross our minds.

Go is garbage collected so it’s unsuitable for the domain. Rust isn’t going away, no matter how many social snafus the steerage folks create.

I wish they would lay off the power tripper stuff, but that’s what you get at this level/size. Coming from where it’s coming from, it’s arguably going to be hammering itself out for awhile yet, while the world is already using it just fine… you may see splintered community though

>Why people having emotions (eg. The person above, who does care) is somehow a bad thing?

It's a bit of manipulation as nobody stated that having emotions is bad. Meanwhile, people leveraging unverifiable claims of bad feelings to hurt somebody is apparently ok... unless that somebody is you, of course.

People are literally calling it out. Nobody's obsessing.

It seems to me that OP feels like he is forced out by this behavior. To be forced out of a project you put your heart and soul into over several years, that can hurt.

Also the governance of the project is important if you want to invest in the ecosystem. These are the people who make the decisions for Rust. If you want to rely on Rust, you better trust them to make the right ones, and this here is (ostensibly) a strong example to the contrary.

> I really struggle to understand why: 1) I should care (I don’t, currently)

It’s unprofessional I guess. For the sake of Rust’s future, it should probably get better stewardship. If you agree to let someone speak then you should honour it.

I think being apathetic about it won't solve anything either. An expert leaving a is a big issue as that brings about the underlying rot in the committees way of handling bad or fool hardy behavior from a mob. You maybe should care a little given the flaws it exposes in their processes or lack of managing the human element.

> I think being apathetic about it won't solve anything either.

How so? Me, a random Rust dev, can't ever make any difference in how is the foundation governed.

But, if you are telling us that the Rust leadership will e.g. actively follow this very HN thread and base their policy on it then yeah, then I'd agree with you.

Cause and Effect. You say "Rust is great". Why? Because People who work together effectively created Rust. And people working together have created most of the other things that are great. So if you want Rust, better Rust or more Rusts, then you may want to care whether the Rust organization will continue to work together effectively.

My 0.02 is that we live in a time where we are losing site of communities and focusing on individuals. Your comment appears to be an example of that. Human beings are adaptive and successful in general because they effectively work together. If you want to think about that idea, one of the things I've been pondering is how the Ukrainians have stood up to the vast power arrayed against them?

Or maybe Rust is great because Graydon was (presumably still is) an exceptionally skilled language designer and implementor. An increased focus on individuals makes sense to me because advances in technology give individuals more power, and it makes sense to me to minimize the overhead of coordination by making the most of that power to accomplish greater things with fewer people.

Did Graydon write the Rust analyzer? Did Graydon personally pen all of the documentation (let alone the books and tutorials) that contribute to Rust's usability? Rust is great primarily because it has a community of contributors that all work in various fields of the language to make it what it is. The sheer volume of work that needed to be done to get Rust to where it is today could not be shouldered on the backs of a small collection of skilled individuals; coordination and collaboration is essential for a project like Rust.

You can find countless research papers out there that present a brilliant idea devised and implemented by a skilled individual that ultimately goes nowhere despite its merit. Skilled individuals still need community to expand their work to the scope that will allow the idea to really shine.

(Note this is not meant to minimize Graydon's contributions to Rust's success, but to highlight the general principle that ideas require a community to grow into greatness)

You cared enough to comment on it.

Comments about how someone just doesn’t care about something is the worst kind of comment.

I appreciated the comment, because I feel the same way.

It's called being an empathic human being

Part of empathy is realizing when someone is authentically upset, and telling that apart from when they are being cynically melodramatic.

> I left because when I felt JeanHeyd's pain and disappointment at being mistreated and betrayed, my heart broke. I wept because of the cruelty. But I also wept because I helped create the system that could do this to someone.

This shit does not come off as authentic even a little bit.

You're right, it's not authentic or to be taken at face value. But that doesn't mean that there's not some authentic meaning that's being clearly communicated here. Look beyond the surface message!

No, don't, because it's not good to normalize such manipulative ways of communicating.

I think he’s just calling somebody an asshole.

Keep in mind that the author is on the spectrum, and the way they process emotions might not be the way you process emotions. Different cultures, different thought processes, different feelings.

I'd err on the side of believing people, unless and until they prove themselves to be insincere. Which is very much not the author's reputation, as far as I know.

People can be melodramatic sincerely. There's no reason to look for cynicism here.

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