I speak Russian and used to read habr.com a lot, which is a Russian-speaking platform where the community members can post on topics related to software engineering, computers, and tech in general. (As you can notice, habr.com have also been trying to gain an English-speaking readers for some time now.)
So I read or saw multiple articles in Russian from this specific author. Actually, the one linked in this post is a translation. To put it bluntly, while they clearly have a background in software engineering, they are a troll. All their articles seem to have one thing in common: they look to be as controversial as possible on purpose, I don't believe them to be sincere.
And I'll give it to the author, the tactic worked great: their articles usually generated a huge discussion in comments and -- I would guess -- a lot of traffic for the site. Though people seem to got immune to it over time.
And there's probably nothing wrong with writing in a provocative style, but you might want to keep it in mind when reading the post and not take it too literally.
> saw multiple articles in Russian from this specific author. Actually, the one linked in this post is a translation. To put it bluntly, while they clearly have a background in software engineering, they are a troll. All their articles seem to have one thing in common: they look to be as controversial as possible on purpose, I don't believe them to be sincere.
Is "don't be an asshole when it's actually not helping the other person like you told yourself if you look closely" actually controversial enough on that site to be considered a troll?
Honestly, the article comes across to me as someone publicly acknowledging their shortcomings in an attempt to combat them. If that's trolling Russian developers that frequent that site... maybe they deserve to be trolled in that way?
> Is "don't be an asshole when it's actually not helping the other person like you told yourself if you look closely" actually controversial enough on that site to be considered a troll?
In Russia, yes. Like the OP comment author, I'm familiar with both IT cultures, and there's a dramatic differences in the amount of politeness.
I have actually seen people get into a physical fight because of work-related dispute, more than once.
That's interesting; the article did seem like something more common in Russian and other East European cultures. Maybe it's a side effect of intellectualism being more highly valued (a good thing) but then leads to these superiority contests where "good enough" is derided if it is not done in some intellectually interesting way. Which can be a disadvantage in software engineering.
The article is actually really useful; it’s a good example of how to not think of code reviews. If you relate to any of the text except for the last three lines, it means you’re reflecting on and running code reviews wrong.
A code review is an opportunity for the reviewer to learn about someone else’s coding style and improve it when necessary, and the reviewee to learn their flaws and just how other people see their code. Because everyone has their own viewpoint with their own flaws. Not an opportunity for the code reviewer to show that he’s smarter, or the reviewee to be “humiliated” that his code isn’t perfect.
I read your comment, and then the article, and honestly, the article makes a lot of good points.
I had precisely one boss who was an asshole code reviewer - and the worst is that by then I was a far better programmer than he was, because he was crazy.
(Random example of many - he personally adopted a "foveal coding style" which meant that he pressed return at the first possible moment after 40 characters. Yes, 40. To achieve that, he had a whole glossary of local variable names, all starting with the same prefix, that you needed to learn to read his code - slea, sleb, slec, sled, slee, slef, etc. "sle" stood for serialized ledger entry, except that none of these were serialized and most weren't ledger entries...)
Even knowing he was an idiot, these abusive code reviews were surprisingly hard on me, particularly since I got forced to do a lot of stupid things with my name on it.
I started to get panic attacks, and they lasted for years.
I made a girl cry once with a code review when I was being purely formal - "this cannot work", that sort of thing. Maybe she was somewhat oversensitive, _but_ she was definitely overwhelmed by her new job, and it was not productive! It was just a mistake on my part.
So I am "brutal" and incredibly detailed in code reviews _but_ I'm also friendly and chatty and explain how I have also made that error in the past, which I certainly have because I have made a huge number of errors!, and tips on how to avoid these issues in the future, as well as some sort of programming language suggestion if appropriate.
People seem to really like it. I get a lot of kind words. It makes it much more fun if you see this as a collaborative game whose idea is to get the highest group scope than a competition.
(Also, it's the rare code review that I don't catch some actual bug in the code that would lead to wrong results, and if you point it out nicely, people really appreciate not having to debug that later.)
So I read or saw multiple articles in Russian from this specific author. Actually, the one linked in this post is a translation. To put it bluntly, while they clearly have a background in software engineering, they are a troll. All their articles seem to have one thing in common: they look to be as controversial as possible on purpose, I don't believe them to be sincere.
And I'll give it to the author, the tactic worked great: their articles usually generated a huge discussion in comments and -- I would guess -- a lot of traffic for the site. Though people seem to got immune to it over time.
And there's probably nothing wrong with writing in a provocative style, but you might want to keep it in mind when reading the post and not take it too literally.