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El Reg has an interesting read on an OSS developers survey:
Most of the negative behaviour is explained as "rudeness", which has been experienced witnessed by 45 per cent of participants and experienced by 16 per cent. GitHub's summary of the survey says really nasty stuff like "sexual advances, stalking, or doxxing are each encountered by less than five per cent of respondents and experienced by less than two per cent (but cumulatively witnessed by 14%, and experienced by three per cent)." Twenty five per cent of women respondents reported experiencing "language or content that makes them feel unwelcome", compared to 15 per cent of men.
This stuff has consequences: 21 per cent of those who see negative behaviour bail from projects they were working on.
Now I take an entirely different conclusion than El Reg on this. To me this says that two or three percent of respondents have valid reason to bitch about bad behavior but a further eighteen or nineteen percent above that simply are not capable of working with other people. Come on, who here has never held a job where someone on staff was a dickhead/bitch but you kept on working anyway? Me, I've not once held a job where there were zero personality conflicts. In my less than humble opinion, part of being an adult is being able to deal professionally or at least civilly with other human beings who do not cater to your every sensitivity.
Maybe I'm just a relic of the past though. Maybe the future really is a bunch of snowflakes crying to $boss to get you fired if you say or do anything they dislike.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:26AM (1 child)
That's only those who remained and continued contributing. But you cannot know how many others deleted their login and password and never went back. Not everyone is willing to take abuse for free; not everyone is happy to see his work of many weeks being ridiculed, stomped upon and thrown into trash (no matter if it really deserves it - it hurts anyway.)
In a business it is generally the manager's (and HR) duty to keep things civil. This generally helps - a misbehaving person is likely to be shown the door because the tensions within a team are unacceptable. Often there is mandatory training on harassment of all kinds. A new employee is often told to stick to business issues only and not discuss anything personal - this makes sense; you never know what an innocent comment may do to someone else, unless you know that person really well (and even then.) An atheist can unwittingly offend a fervent believer, for example. Even a simple disclosure of your political opinion may put you in the "wrong" camp in the eyes of someone else. This is not helping, it is an unnnecessary complication at work. Some people (see Mozilla) even lost their jobs because they engaged in a perfectly legal political activity. Humans are unpredictable creatures, and generally it does not pay to open your heart to a stranger.
Not every manager, not every business is equally good in herding these cats. There are already examples of major failures in this thread. The solution often is the same - you quit. But businesses are financially hurting from high turnover of employees, and eventually the bad manager is replaced (or the business goes down.) There is no hierarchy of managers in an open source project, and nobody is going to give a contributor (or a manager) a lecture. Things stagnate, developers leave, the project dies.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:49AM
Granted, that is the case in a traditional paid career, but volunteering on an OSS project is different. It's not a business arrangement. You have the option to rage-quit any time with minimal effect on one's situation. Nobody expects you to sacrifice every ounce of dignity the way traditional employers sometimes do.
Even though I was only a lowly n00b module tester back in the wild-west kernel 1.0.x...nx days, I it is a testimony to the dedication and great work of the rock star cats in the kernel dev community that Linux survived Linus' sometimes insensitive cat-herding and thrived, flame wars and mucho butthurt notwithstanding. A lot did quit, and more power to them. Volunteer OSS work is a choice, not a job.
Slightly OT but interesting is an article by gregkh on the process: https://opensource.com/article/16/12/yearbook-9-lessons-25-years-linux-kernel-development. [opensource.com]