Please developers, don’t be dicks.

As the author of a few open source tools, I’ve had my fair share of users seeking help. Emails range from the very useful (bug reports, patches, etc) to the annoying (“can you help guide me through this process”). But never once (that I can remember) have I been a dick (and yes, I’ve wanted to be). It will be tricky to write this without sounding self-righteous, but I hope to make the case that open source developers shouldn’t be dicks in all cases.

We’ve All Been There (WABT)

The first reason to never be a dick is that We’ve All Been There (I’m going to give this the acronym WABT). Even the most voracious and diligent manual readers can suffer from the XY problem. A user comes asking how to do Y, which they think is the solution to X. However, it’s a bad solution to X and they don’t know this. These situations will always lead to frustration: users waste time explaining Y and helpers waste time explaining how to do Y to realize the user wanted X. But this is not the user’s fault; it just takes programming practice to realize Y is not the correct way to do X.

We’ve all had these problems in our early stages as developers. Being a dick in these cases will not help the user grok anything. They’re already frustrated - that’s why they’re asking for your help. Being a dick will cause them to get more frustrated and really not grasp anything. They’re not going to have an “ah ha!” moment when they’re too busy trying to come up with a witty response to your burn on IRC.

PCTM has the same number of letters as RTFM

Please Check The Manual (PCTM) has the same number of letters as Read The Fucking Manual (RTFM). I strongly believe it takes more energy for a developer to be a dick than to be nice. We’ve all had dumb questions that disrupt our workflow, make us angry, etc. But being a dick back does not discourage this behavior. Write some boilerplate text for responding to users’ questions. Make this a FAQ. Then respond, PCTM (Please Check the Manual) and send them the link. If they get needy, tell them open source software doesn’t come with a warranty.

People remember dicks

Someone was once quite rude to me via email (I’ll name him Tom). I had voiced some frustrations with software Tom wrote and he attacked me for these public comments. Now, as an aside, there’s a lot of shitty software out there, and signals about software quality (even noisy signals) are very valuable. Tom on one hand attacked me for saying something negative about his software, and on the other hand asked me to help fix it, emphasizing it was open source software. I agree with this sentiment 100%, however the email was clearly very angry.

I told another developer who I’ll call Jerry about the encounter, and he laughed. Apparently, Tom nagged Jerry about portability issues of Jerry’s software years ago. This is evidence of my first point, WABT. It also shows that developers remember interactions with other developers really well. Since then, I’ve also heard other programmers complaining about interactions with Tom. This is all too bad, as Tom is probably very nice in person and certainly a good programmer.

If you’re a dick, you’re hurting OSS

OSS has seen an explosion in recent years. Biologsts, ecologists, and social scientists that never thought they’d write code are using R to analyze data. Folks frustrated by Windows are installing Ubuntu and asking for help. In the early days of the OSS, usenet, and IRC, it was an acceptable norm to be a dick. Now, it’s not.

OSS benefits from a large user base, but it will have growing pains. Being a dick does not alleviate these pains, it makes them worse. Let’s go back to my story about Tom.

In the second half of Tom’s email (after attacking me), he asked me to help him fix his software. Now, collaboration can be difficult; code style clashes, merges fail, frustration is common. In a small project, you’re really in bed with your collaborators. Now that Tom has sent me the signal he’s nasty in correspondences, do you think I’ll work on this project with him? Hell no. I’d rather fork, fix the problem and encourage others to use my software. Of course this is bad for OSS; consider this passage from Eric S. Raymond’s Jargon File:

Forking is considered a Bad Thing - not merely because it implies a lot of wasted effort in the future, but because forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and acrimony between the successor groups over issues of legitimacy, succession, and design direction. There is serious social pressure against forking.

Tom’s actions guarantee I will avoid working on his projects at all costs. The two other developers, and anyone else we’ve told will too. In the end, the software loses.

Idolize programmers, not their dickishness

Some abrasive programmers are really gifted. Erik Naggum is regarded as the first Usenet flamer. Theo de Raadt forked NetBSD into what became OpenBSD partially because of issues with other developers. Richard Stallman gave an AMA on reddit a year ago and the most popular question (since deleted) was about a young GNU-lover that was nervous about asking RMS a question and accidentally referred to it as “Linux”, not “GNU/Linux” and RMS ripped him in half.

Now, all of these developers have been dickish and are well-known because they are gifted visionaries. I’m not sure why, but other developers admire this dickishness. But don’t idolize their dickishness, idolize their skill. There are also overwhelmingly nice programmers: John McCarthy, Donald Knuth, and Alan Turing to name a few. Admire their skill and their personality.

Being a dick hurts science

There’s been an explosion of open source software utilization in the sciences. My field, bioinformatics, provides an interesting case study. There are bioinformaticians like myself that write software. Users are divided into other programmer types (other bioinformaticians) and biologists (on average, less knowledgeable of programming). All else equal, biologists and bioinformaticians prefer free, open source software to costly proprietary software.

For these reasons, being helpful and nice to scientific users is really important. For biologists, choosing tools is about getting analysis done quickly and easily. Rude bioinformaticians will quickly increase the cost of using OSS tools, which is already high for many biologists who aren’t experienced with Unix tools and programming. Consequently, science could become less open, something neither group wants.